I refuse to confirm whether I have four new books coming in the next few days.
Month: August 2023
Something coherent
I was in bed before 9:00 last night, and probably dead to the world before 10:00, and as a result spent the day feeling much more human. I even got home still feeling human, which is a definite improvement over the last several days. We’ll see how long it lasts; I have plans to play Armored Core VI after finishing this blog post and hopefully once I start I’ll be able to tear myself away after a reasonable amount of time.
A brief (very brief) tale about today, one of those sorts of stories where the lead-in takes way longer than the actual story. I have talked, in this space and many others, about how Kids These Days don’t give a damn any longer about shit we, meaning The Olds, used to think of as private. I had a kid straight-up introduce themselves to me last year with “Hi, I’m <name,> I’m an asexual lesbian.” Like, that was the first sentence. Shit, I’m straight and there was no way that I would have actually admitted I liked girls to a teacher when I was in middle school. The Internet is fond of school bathroom discourse, and one of the frequent arguments of people who think we should let kids go use the bathroom at any time and for any reason(*) is that Girls have Periods and how dare you prevent her from doing whatever her teenage menstrual cycle might be demanding at any given moment just because she’s so embarrassed to admit it’s happening.
It is to laugh, because teenage girls do not give one single shit any longer about telling anyone and anyone who might have even the slightest claim to such information that they are on their periods. And while I’ve been teaching middle school long enough to have amassed a fair-sized stash of stories involving menstrual nonsense in some way or another, today was the first time a student looked me in the eye and volunteered, entirely unsolicited, that she needed to go to the bathroom so that she could change her underwear. The answer was going to be yes. It wasn’t even going to be “can you wait a few minutes?” Straight-up yes. And I got to find that out about her anyway.
As a reminder, this kid has known me for twelve days.
Teenagers are a lot of things, but they are absolutely not shy any longer.
(*) We will not be engaging in this discourse in this space at this time; suffice it to say that these people are Wrong.
More early-in-the-school-year whining
I managed to hurt myself in my sleep last night, which at my age should be no surprise; I spent the whole day feeling like I stuck a walnut-sized rock directly under my neck and just slept on it all night. I’ve been sluggish and my neck has been bugging me all day and I’m just not in the mood at the moment, especially since I just now remembered that I still have to put pretest data into the math team’s form for such things– which was the “I feel like I’m forgetting something” problem from yesterday. So I’m going to get that done and then I’m going to bed and I don’t care what time it is.
I’ll try and write something coherent tomorrow.
Today really got away from me
I’m not Sundaying— I swear I’m really not– but man, I feel like I really let the day get away from me today. I was feeling great at about 12:30– I had about 75% of my grading done for the weekend, although no actual planning yet, and I felt like that left me in really good shape to get everything else I needed to do done. Then, somehow, lunch took two fucking hours, and while I’m intellectually certain I had to be doing other things than eating a couple of veggie burgers and some chips between 12:30 and 2:30 I will be damned if I can remember what any of those things might have been.
My son has a D&D group every Sunday from 4:00 to 6:00. As he is not the most social kid on the planet (he is great around people– better than he thinks he is, really– but in general would always prefer to be at home playing games, which I can hardly fault him for) I like to encourage anything that gets him out of the house and interacting with other human beings. That said, the absolutely lovely people who host this gaggle of sixth-graders several weekends a month live a million miles away, and it’s three hours out of every Sunday for my wife and I as well since returning home between dropping him off and picking him back up is stupid. Anyway, by the time I got out of the shower (that’s correct, I ate lunch before showering) it was time to go, and then I had to finish the grading and the planning, and oh right I owe the Internet a blog post, and now it’s 8:04 and I cannot shake the feeling that I’ve forgotten something important that I had planned to do today.
I mean, the lawn didn’t get mowed, but I didn’t want to mow the lawn, so whatever.
Oh, and I lost half an hour to trying to buy a Roblox gift card with the generic Visa gift card that he got for his birthday this weekend, and that type of fuckery generally makes me want to punch things.
The good news is that there’s no reason– he said— why this shouldn’t be a relatively easy week at work, and last week was dandy. The early in the year exhaustion ought to be starting to abate this week too. So for the most part, things are looking up, at least until I realize I forgot to pay the mortgage or whatever it was. Looking forward to that.
Blech
Is boredom a symptom of depression? I mean, it can be, right? I don’t think I’m clinically depressed because I’m too functional for too much of the time, but these brief twelve-hour funks where I don’t want to do anything could stop anytime and I’d be fine with it.
#REVIEW: Legends & Lattes, by Travis Baldree
I feel like, especially in the last couple of years, I say things like this a lot around here: if you look at this book cover you will immediately know most of what you might need to determine whether you should read this book, and your determination will very likely be one hundred percent correct. You should absolutely judge this book by its cover. That’s it. That’s the book. There’s a big barbarian-lookin’ orc chick (you’d be forgiven if you chose some other humanoid species; I thought she was an ogre at first) and something vaguely demonoid (a succubus, as it turns out) and they’re running a coffee shop. The only real question might be whether this is a full-blown fantasy world that happens to have coffee shops in it or if it’s some sort of urban fantasy thing, and, well, it’s full-blown fantasy, albeit in a world where coffee is mostly unknown.
You already know if you want to read this. If you want to read this, you and I can be friends. If you don’t want to read this you should read it anyway, because it’s fucking delightful, a word I have been using a lot to describe books lately. I asked BlueSky if I could get away with calling it “delicious,” and apparently I have decided I can since I’m doing it again here. The characters are wonderful– the being responsible for the pastries is a particularly inspired choice– and the plot is pleasantly low-stakes and predictable in a way that is somehow warm and comfortable and, dare I say it, cozy, as I know that “low-stakes and predictable” is not a phrase often associated with praise. You will make one wildly incorrect prediction and you will be happy to be wrong. The rest of it? Not so much. I have already preordered the sequel, due out in November.
That’s really it. This book got nominated for the Best Novel Hugo, and while I can’t name any of the other nominees off the top of my head I feel like it would be a perfectly acceptable choice and I’d be happy if it won. It will make you happy as well. You should read it.
Not tonight
I had a really good day at work today– this is certainly my best start to the school year in, well, years, and to be completely honest I wouldn’t be able to tell you what specific years might have started off more strongly. That said, it’s going to be 100 degrees for the next two days, another one of my former students died recently and I just found out last night, and if I don’t get a decent night’s sleep tonight I’m going to end up driving off the side of the road on the way to my awesome job tomorrow. So we’re going to make this a little mini update and go read on the couch for a while.
Also, for those of you who were concerned, I’ve gotten some balls rolling regarding the kid from yesterday.
In which I am still able to be surprised
I’ve been teaching for 20 years, or, at least, this is year 20. In that time, I have seen a lot of ridiculous shit. Put two or three experienced teachers in a room together and encourage them to tell stories and it can go on for hours, and that’s before I give the other person a chance to talk.
Something happened in my classroom today that has never happened– not only in my career, but I’m pretty sure in my entire school experience, even as a student.
Think back to when you were in school. Remember when that kid puked? Of course you do. You may not remember a single other thing about that kid other than that one time that they puked, but you absolutely remember that one time that kid puked. Everyone has at least one of these stories, and some of us, in theory at least, have to be the kid who puked. But everyone remembers somebody.
I had a kid tell me earlier today that he wasn’t feeling well. I asked him if he needed the nurse and he said no, but asked if he could go to the bathroom. I gave him a pass and sent him on his way. He was back in a reasonable amount of time and I checked in on him when he came back and he said he was feeling better. I chalked it up to temporary intestinal distress and forgot all about it.
During my prep period I happened to throw something away in the trash can next to my desk and discovered, rather disconcertingly, that there was an enormous pool of puke in the bottom of my trash can. We’ll skip the part where I tracked the sick kid down and insisted he see the nurse; it’s not important or especially interesting, other than when he told me he hadn’t asked to go because he didn’t want to get sent home, which … maybe raises a red flag or two? I’m gonna keep a close eye. No, this isn’t that story.
The story is that during this kid’s class period I have not only 20-some-odd other kids, but there are two adults in the room, and this kid managed to vomit into a trash can and absolutely fucking no one noticed. I didn’t hear it. I didn’t see it. I didn’t smell it. Neither did anyone else, because 8th graders are absolutely biologically incapable of ignoring puke, as you might well expect them to be. And this isn’t, like, he threw up in his mouth and then just spat it out or something minor like that. He had to have lost most of the contents of his stomach into this trash can. There had to have been heaving. Horking, if you will. And he did it completely invisibly.
I’d be impressed if I wasn’t so horrified.
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