Unread Shelf: March 31, 2024

Yeah, okay, that looks like a lot, and I’ve broken my vow by ordering both volumes of Shōgun, but have you seen … my other unread books?

I made significant progress this month, I swear I did, but hell if it looks like it.

Break up with this dude

Never change, Busuu.

New hotness alert

Mental note: it takes four hours to buy a car.

This is the second time that one of us has bought a new car and we have been so starving afterwards that the only possible response was to get to the nearest fast food restaurant as fast as possible, thus the official New Car pics being taken in the parking lot of a fucking Taco Bell. My wife had her car totaled for her a couple of weeks ago (no injuries, thus my lack of mentioning it here) and after some intensive research decided on a 2024 Honda CRV hybrid, with many bells and whistles and lots of exciting features we’ll forget about and rediscover a couple of years down the road. It’s pretty. I didn’t spend a lot of time in it other than the test drive, so we’ll have to schedule a road trip somewhere soon. I was never a huge fan of the Honda Fit that just got wrecked, so while my wife’s car isn’t really a huge thing in my life– it’s her car– it’s nice to think that I’ll fit in it properly if I ever have to drive it.

But anyway. I have survived to Spring Break, and I even survived getting picked up from work and spending four hours buying a car and then filling myself with Taco Bell, but I’m pretty sure I’m going to be dead in an hour, so I’m going to bounce. My brother and his family are going to be here tomorrow, apparently, so a smart person would start doing at least some light cleaning right now.

I never said I was smart.

In which it is still somehow not Friday

… you have to be kidding, right? This week has to be over. It HAS to be.

In theory, at least, tomorrow should be easy; today’s second round of unit tests went way better than Tuesday’s did, and a lot of the kids are chomping at the bit to retake the tests they did poorly on. A bunch of them won’t be there on account of it’s the last day before Spring Break, and a bunch more won’t be there because there’s a behavior/grades reward party thing for the 3rd quarter for the last couple of hours of the day and they can’t go, so they’re just going to stay home. Classes will be about half an hour long. I can put up with anybody for half an hour.

But holy shit, this week. I may take a brain pill tomorrow morning just to limit my emotional volatility; it seems unlikely that I’m gonna get punched in the fucking face again tomorrow but if it does happen again I can’t promise I won’t seriously injure the kid involved.

One way or another, I’m about nineteen and a half hours away from Spring Break. So long as I don’t die, I should be okay. We’ll see.

Well, that’s better

Joe Lieberman died today, so it’s already kind of a heavy lift to make today a bad day when that’s the main headline, but school didn’t go poorly either, although I’m going to wait until tomorrow to make any judgments about whether my new method of test prep worked at all. They appeared to know things about transformations at the end of the day, but we all know the evidence of your eyes can be tricksy.

Oh, and I sent my wife a text begging her to prevent me from falling asleep on the couch at 6:47 and then when I woke up at 8:04 I sent another text that just said “LOL,” because I don’t think Christ and an army of horny angels could have kept me from falling asleep on the couch today. And now I’m here, writing a blog post, and hopefully within half an hour or so I’ll be asleep again, so there’s Wednesday done and dusted, I suppose.

Choose your own post

You tell me what the worst part of my day was:

Was it the fact that once again my classes shit the bed on a test, extending my unbroken record of my classes literally having the worst performance for 8th grade math students in the entire fucking district?

Was it the fact that I had to report multiple allegations of a student having a gun, touching off all sorts of searches and a police investigation that ultimately resulted in no gun being found and a determination that the kid’s friends were just fucking with him because they felt like it?

Or was it getting punched in the fucking face, screwing up my glasses, while breaking up a fight, a fight that got started started when the kid who punched me literally attacked the wrong fucking person, someone who didn’t even know who the fuck she was, and ended with said kid being hauled off to jail in handcuffs?

Because either way I got home from work and had two more fucking hours of work to do in my office.

I tried, I swear

I’ve sat down three times tonight, intending to write something, and it hasn’t worked. Brain melty. Students test tomorrow. Four days until Spring Break.

I’m verklempt

Forced Taught the boy to shave tonight, and his shitty little 12-year-old rat mustache is no more. He is disappointed. I have never identified more closely with my own father, who I recall having precisely the same conversation with me when he forced taught me to shave at about the same age. Also, I’ve reminded myself why I abhor disposable razors, which are even worse for a novice shaver, since he didn’t really know how to hold the razor and thus did less shaving than just shoving shaving cream around on his face.

I did not die yesterday, and in fact the boy’s team did quite well, and he managed a third place (of 23) in one of his events. The team, which is loaded with sixth graders (6-8 are eligible), did not qualify for nationals, but given that 2/3 of them had never competed before (and, oh, also, I don’t want to go to nationals) I’m pretty proud of him. That said, we got up at six and didn’t get home until about 10:30, so it was a long day, and I think all three of us feel somewhat robbed of our weekends.

Therefore: video games, of course.