It was eight years and some change ago the last time I posted this song, and it’s crossed my radar again due to an a capella group on TikTok popping up on my For You page. I had honestly completely forgotten it existed, but seeing the TikTok video led to me finding the song on my phone, and that led to finding the video on YouTube, which reminded me just how much I love the video to Andy Grammer’s “Honey I’m Good.” So you get to watch it again. If you’re like me, you’ll watch it a few times.
(Bek and I will hit sixteen years in February, by the way. I’d love to know how many of these couples are still together.)
(Also, my relationship goals couple is the pair in the car who are 26 years in, at 1:47.)
This post has the feel, to me, of something that has the potential to go viral in all the wrong ways, so let me be a hundred percent clear before I get started: Abraham Verghese’s The Covenant of Water isn’t a bad book. It is not a book I especially enjoyed, and now that I’ve finished it I don’t find it especially likely that I’ll ever pick it up again, but that’s on me: literary fiction is not my thing, and this was a rare example of a book that just sort of grabbed me out of nowhere and made me buy it, knowing full well at the time that I was likely to have … well, precisely this reaction to it. It’s 715 pages long and it took me nine days to read, which is a fucking eternity for me, and I wouldn’t have mentioned it at all on the site were it not for the fact that I happened to take a good look at the blurbs on the back cover and, my God, they are completely out of control. I know what blurbs are supposed to do; they are to sell the book, and whatever editor is in charge of such things is likely to choose the most heavily enthusiastic bits out of the entire blurb to highlight. I get all that. But this level of praise is bordering on unhinged, and I think you need to see it.
That’s … really high praise! Really, really high! I don’t think I’ve ever been “overtaken with joy” even once in my entire life, and I’ve never “caught my breath” while reading a book, or at least if I have I don’t remember it. I am genuinely unsure what the hell the third sentence means; it has the feel of something that was translated from some other language, but the author of the blurb is a fellow Hoosier, born in Kokomo and currently teaching at the University of Oklahoma, of all the Godforsaken places on the planet. One assumes, then, that this was not translated, and thus it’s just incomprehensible. Or at least uncomprehended. One of my problems with literary fiction is the lingering feeling, while I’m reading it, that I’m just not smart enough to understand why it’s good. Like, I read genre fiction, and the people who read literary fiction openly look down on us, and we just accept it and move on with our lives; our shit isn’t as Good or as Important as theirs is … for some fucking reason that I’m also too dumb to have ever figured out. To start an entirely unrelated argument here, if I can get over this bullshit with Christians and morality you’d think I’d be able to get over it with literary fiction and intelligence, but apparently not yet. The gaslighting continues unabated.
(Again, not complaining about the book. It’s not a bad book. It’s just very much a Not for Me book. I three-starred it, and I could be convinced to raise that to four, especially since I really felt the book stuck the ending. But I was never going to love this.)
But, okay. She was overtaken with joy from the first page of the book. Again, maybe I just don’t get it! Let’s look at that first page. Surely fair use allows me to pull out 1/715 of the entire book, right? That’s .13%. I’m good:
Be honest: are you overtaken with joy right now?
To me, the most significant thing about this first page is that I genuinely have nothing to say about it. I’ve certainly read first pages and first paragraphs and first sentences that grabbed me by the shorthairs and didn’t let go, and I’ve read first pages that let me know in no uncertain terms that I was in for some godawful bullshit and I should either put the book down or buckle the fuck in. But … this is just a page of writing, to me. It’s certainly not bad writing and I have no complaints; the imagery is nice, but let’s be real, you could lose the paragraph about the bird and no damage would be done. Or would it? Maybe the bird is symbolic or some shit; I have no idea. But one way or another, I don’t feel anything in particular from having read this. I wouldn’t put the book down, but if you handed me just the first page and asked me if I was excited to read the rest, I’d shrug.
You tell me; I’ll believe you: what’s your reaction to this first page? What am I missing here?
The rest of the quotes on the back are not much better, by the way. Let me know if you want to see more.
I tried to come up with something properly alliterative, but “Song Sunday” sounds kinda stupid so to hell with it.
Anyway, I’ve been on a reggae kick lately for the first time in a while, and I’m betting that unless you’re into reggae or you spend a lot of time on TikTok, you’ve probably not heard of Queen Omega, so let’s fix that. This song, Agape Love, is one of my favorites by her. Check it out.
One thing I miss about the YouTube channel is that if I got buried in work and Baldur’s Gate III for a couple of days and forgot the rest of the world existed, at least videos would be showing up to confirm that I was still alive.
Also, I don’t know if I ever announced this, but I’m off damn near everything now. My sole remaining accounts are here, GoodReads, and TikTok. Everything else has been shut down. Technically I suppose I have a Discord account but I only interact with one community and it’s closed, so it doesn’t really count.
Anyway. Did I mention disappearing into video games? Because the PS5 is calling again.
Y’all, I spent all day teaching math. I know, it’s my job; this shouldn’t be surprising, but really: I spent all day today teaching math. To 8th graders. And a handful of 7th graders, but mostly to 8th graders.
And you’re telling me, that after spending the whole day doing that, I have to go back tomorrow and teach Math again? To the same damn kids? Don’t they know math yet? How the hell could they possibly need more math after all the mathing they did today? This is a scam, I tell you. A scam!
Anyway, righteous indignation aside, I’ve managed to get myself planned for tomorrow, and partially for the day after that, in a sort of “give them something they’ll have fun with so I can mostly ignore them” kind of way, since I have a ton of administrative deadlines for various things this week and frankly am going to need some time to work at my desk. Y’know, like a regular person, who doesn’t have seven hours of presentations as part of their job every damn day.
The good news? I’ve said repeatedly that I’m having a great year, and we just got results for our first test of the year back, and … damn. My kids cooked the other 8th grade classes, y’all, not only in overall average but in growth too, and it’s tough to hit both. I haven’t looked at NWEA results yet, because COVID knocked that off my radar and ultimately their results on the first test don’t matter all that much anyway– it just sets a baseline for the winter and spring administrations, and frankly (and cynically) it makes me look better if they don’t do great on the first test anyway, right?
God, it’s nice to come home from work and not have hours of complaining to do.
Local radio managed to really irritate me during the drive in to work this morning. I’m not going to get into the details, because I’ll just get all het up again, but let me just say that there was some major performative piety bullshit going on on the radio channel I listen to this morning, and I just absolutely was not willing to deal with it.
But this story isn’t about that, this is about how weird my brain is, and it’s nonetheless necessary to include here because it establishes that I was fully aware of the date when I arrived at my destination this morning– which was not the school I work at, but another one, because I had an early morning departmental meeting for all the middle school math teachers and it wasn’t at my building.
As I pulled into the parking lot for this other school I got a text from another math teacher at my school, apologizing and saying he was going to be late because of car trouble. I texted him back, still in my car, and let him know that I’d seen the message. “Don’t forget we’re at <other school> today,” I said, and then hit send.
And then I immediately realized something: that it was September 11, not September 18, and that my meeting was in fact not today, but next week. And that, further, I had managed to go through the last several days holding the following two contradictory thoughts in my head: one, that the date of the meeting was the 18th– I am convinced that if you asked me the date of the meeting on Saturday I would have gotten it right. Nonetheless, the second idea that I was holding in my head was that the meeting was today, regardless of the fact that the week between the 11th and the 18th hadn’t happened yet. It was Schrödinger’s meeting, happening simultaneously today and next Monday until I actually arrived at the meeting, at which point the waveform collapsed and I found myself late and at the wrong fucking school at 7:30 in the Goddamn morning on a Monday, not how I intended to start the week.
The punch line: I was not the only teacher on my team to make this mistake. Apparently three of us went to this building, two realizing in the parking lot that they were wrong and the third managing to make it into the building and have conversations with a few people before the fact that she didn’t work there got brought up.
The guy with the car trouble managed to beat me to work.
I am caught up on my grading, and lesson plans are done through Tuesday. This is actually pretty good; any time I’m planned more than a day out is a feat. My goal is to go to work every day this week and to keep my fucking mask on all day tomorrow when I’m around people. I’m bad at this; even after all these years masks can make me panicky, which I recognize as a me problem so I try to power through it anyway, but I do hate the damned things so very much.
That said, in terms of the number of people I actually know who either have the ‘vid right now or are recovering from it, it’s literally the worst it’s been since all of this started. And that’s people who know they have it, because a world where I didn’t bother to take a test is really easy to imagine– as I said, this felt like every beginning-of-the-school-year cold I’ve ever gotten, and my son’s never progressed past a rough throat. But yeah. I’m caught up, and I’m ready for this week, and we’re going to pretend last week never happened, and it’ll all be fine.
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