And my brother gave me a book he wanted me to read while we were in Michigan. Sigh.
Month: July 2022
Don’t panic
A little more finger-crossing on Monday and Tuesday would be appreciated.
We have made it to Michigan successfully, and I am in the presence of more relatives than I’ve seen in the same place in quite a while.
No, I mean it, I’m fine
I’m going to be out of town for the next three days. I will probably still post anyway because that’s who I am, and the channel already has videos posted through Monday, and I am an immense ball of stress right now, so I’m going to go shoot robots with arrows again. Video game violence will keep me from the real thing, right?
(In addition to everything else, I’m on my shit about Marvel and Star Wars fans again, thus the desire for violence. I don’t hate y’all, specifically, but I hate y’all collectively.)
I’m OK
My last post, or perhaps a combination of the last several, appears to have unintentionally set several of you to worrying about me. I’m fine, I promise, or at least I’m as close to fine as I’ve been at any other point during the last few years. I’m “fine” by post-2016 standards, whatever that means.
And, honestly, there was no good reason to be secretive about what I needed luck for other than pure superstition, so: despite having made the decision to stay at my current school back in early June, now that we’ve got a principal and assistant principal named, along with a couple of articles in the local paper about recent school board meetings, I have become fully convinced that the district has entirely given up on our school and that we are being set up to continue to fail. I do not know my new principal very well but what I have witnessed thus far has not been good, and while I haven’t even met the new AP yet he has “pushover” tattooed on his forehead. We have a new dean of students as well. None of the three have any experience in their jobs. Our principal has never been a principal and has never been a middle school administrator at all; our new AP has never been an administrator, and our new Dean has not only never held that job she’s never worked in a middle school.
Oh, and I found out that literally two 8th graders passed the math ILEARN. Two. One point five percent. I don’t know which two. I suspect I can guess on at least one of them, but I don’t have names yet. So, I dunno, probably I suck at my job or something.
Anyway. Long story short, based on all that, despite my promise in May, I’ve applied for a few jobs at another district and if I get a chance I’m splitting.. One particular school has four jobs open and I’m qualified for three of them. I formally applied for two of the three (I really don’t want to be a Language Arts teacher despite technically being certified for it) and sent the principal an email with my resume attached as well. I was hoping, what with school starting in 2 1/2 weeks, that I’d hear from the principal yesterday or today; that has not happened.
I can think of a hundred thousand reasons why no one has called me yet; I am, nonetheless, assuming that I am blacklisted for some reason. At this point I have been applying for jobs since March and have not received a single call-back from anything other than a couple of purely lateral moves within the same organization. It’s not like these folks have access to my current test scores or anything, but … fuck, people, school starts August 17. I’m perfectly fucking willing and ready to move over to your building. What the fuck are you waiting for?
Hm. This post may not have done quite the job I wanted in reassuring people that I’m all right.
Cross your fingers for me
Or light a candle, or talk to Jesus, or whatever it is you do. I’m not going to say why and honestly I feel like I’ll know whether I got any supernatural assistance within a day or two. Just help me out if you get a minute, OK? Thanks.
(No, this is not lottery related, although I suppose it could be.)
Ooh, that’s an easy one
My friends’ lives are all falling apart, and if you read this and think I might be talking about you, rest assured that I probably am, but also be aware that I’m talking about at least three other people in addition to you. So guess what I plan to spend tonight thinking about?
I do not remember the last time I legitimately binged a season of a show. And I wasn’t even all that excited about this until seeing the trailer. But it looks like they’ve gotten everything absolutely right. I’mma just black out August 5 on my calendar, I think.
In which I am on druuuuuuuuugs
I currently have prescriptions for two brain drugs. One, Effexor, is my daily anti-anxiety drug. I’m on 150 mg; I started at 75 and eventually decided that upping my dosage a bit was warranted. I used to have a secondary script for … shit I can never remember the name, but some secondary drug that I only took when I absolutely couldn’t get my brain to shut down, generally when I was trying to get to sleep. My new doctor didn’t love the secondary prescription because apparently long-term use of that type of drug can be Bad, and while I was only taking an occasional and small dose (12 pills would last me a couple of months, easy) I generally am not the type to continue taking medication that my doctor doesn’t recommend even if some other doctor did recommend it.
Anyway, long story short, she switched me to something else the last time I went in, and I gave up and went and took one when I found myself, at 1:00 in the morning, having to research larger outdoor pools on my phone because I needed to know right now how much they cost and what sizes they were available in. That was after ordering a new pillow on Amazon at midnight, apparently, which I didn’t even remember I’d done until seeing the email in the morning. But yeah: random panic about pool prices in the middle of the fucking night is very much a “take a brain pill” moment, so I did, and I think the next time I talk to her I’m going to suggest going back to the old stuff, because I have been a pile of sludge all day today. I took my son to camp at 12:30, came home intending to hop in the shower and get some stuff done, and instead I sat in a chair and stared for over an hour. I’m significantly more human now but the first six or seven hours of being technically awake were a mess today, and not in a good way. Like, I wasn’t high, I just … didn’t want to move. I managed to get to sleep, at least, so the pill did what it was supposed to, but as it stands this isn’t something I can take during the week, which cuts its usefulness to me by a pretty significant degree.
Meanwhile, Day 3 of live-streaming Stray happens in … oh, about half an hour, over at lutherplaysgames.com, so come hang out with us:
#REVIEW: The Doors of Eden, by Adrian Tchaikovsky
The headline to this post is a lie; this is not going to be a review, not even by my standards. This is just, like, me waving this thick-ass paperback around and squeeing at people. I love Adrian “Spiders” Tchaikovsky a hell of a lot, and he approaches if not exceeds Brandon Sanderson levels of prolific, so there is an awful lot of him out there to read, only I don’t feel like I talk about him in this space all that often.
The reason for that is simple: his books are batshit insane, from start to finish, all of them, and it makes him kind of hard to write about, because when you try to describe what happened in a Tchaikovsky book the tendency is to wave your hands around and, like, make gurgling noises and say “trust me” an awful lot. I actually fooled myself on this one; it actually starts off in the real world, and for the first hundred pages or so you could be fooled into thinking it was either a book about cryptids or a murder mystery, and while I enjoy both of those kinds of books they would end up feeling awfully pedestrian coming from Tchaikovsky.
Yeah, by the end of the book there are sentient, human-sized rats in plague doctor costumes, a computer the size of a planet made entirely from ice, giant spacefaring trilobites that communicate via manipulating piles of centipedes into an approximation of a human face, technologically advanced Neanderthals, and something like a dozen timelines all collapsing into each other including a part where you get section one of chapter seventeen something like eight times in a row only it makes sense and it’s cool, and oh okay it’s a fucking Adrian Tchaikovsky book after all.
Note that, despite looking like a perfect match to Children of Time and Children of Ruin, this book is not connected with those books in any way that I was able to figure out. I’ve got it on the shelf next to them because it looks like Volume 3 of a trilogy, but it’s not. And, looking on Google to see if I can find an image of the three books next to each other, I just discovered that there actually is a third book from that series coming in November, called Children of Memory, and I’ve already got another book by him in a different series on my unread shelf, meaning that by the end of the year it’s not unreasonable to believe I’ll have read four Adrian Tchaikovsky books, which will probably easily top 2000 pages between the four of them. He’s also got a (completed) seven-book fantasy series out there that I haven’t even touched yet, and he also writes three hundred novellas every year.
Christ, dude. I love you, but … slow the fuck down.
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