I made it through my first real day of teaching six straight classes plus advisory with no breaks, and while I’ve definitely had better days, I’ve also had way way worse. Today’s real problem was a persistent brain fog that I couldn’t snap out of; I kept getting kids’ names slightly wrong and I couldn’t hear a Goddamn thing to save my life, plus a lot of sitting down at my computer with a specific task in mind and then immediately forgetting the specific task. Now, these things happen to me at home all the Goddamn time, but normally the amount of focus I have to keep up at work keeps them from happening there. Not so damn much today, apparently. All that said, I got through the day, and I’ll get through the next four. There’s a contract ratification meeting tomorrow evening, and I’ve heard rumors that it’s going to make everyone happy, so hopefully that’ll be all true.

The boy had a drama class presentation thing after school today. It was fine, although I feel like the teacher for his drama classes (it’s an actual class and not a club) maybe has a slightly more, uh, grandiose idea of what her position is than I might in the same situation, and there’s some inherent silliness to watching 12-year-olds reciting memorized speeches no matter what, but if those speeches are supposed to be especially profound or tear-jerking or, well, dramatic, the silliness is going to be intensified and not the other way around. He got to use his saxophone to literally play some of the kids off stage, and I think that was his favorite part of the evening, honestly. I had a weirdly strong moment of damn, he’s growing up too fast at one point during his monologue, but I fought it off as quickly as I could because the last thing I need to do is make this lady think she’s doing a good job by getting all maudlin while my kid’s up there giving his speech.

Off to bed. I finally started Adrian Tchaikovsky’s magnum opus, a ten-book series called Shadows of the Apt, and … well, I’m not surprised that it’s going well and I’m racing through the first book. I ordered the next two today. We’ll see how long it takes me to read all six or seven thousand pages of it. By then he’ll probably have released another three trilogies. I will never get caught up to this dude’s productivity, I swear.