Dan Ford may have slightly too much influence over my life decisions for someone I’ve never met, but those five words more or less talked me out of Adventures with Bitcoin, and realizing that this weekend is a Lego Insiders weekend and that they have a model of the HMS Endurance coming at the end of the month sealed the deal; I’m not destroying the environment and I get (sorta) free Legos? Yeah, fuck money get Legos.
I think that’s the phrase, at least.
MEANWHILE! Kendrick Lamar has a new album out! He didn’t tell anyone it was coming before he released it. I’m listening to it right now and it might be his best album yet. I never really vibed with Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers, so it’s good to see a return to form.
Let’s see. What else? I feel like something happened at work today that I really want to talk about, but hell if I can remember what it is. I decided today that I have what I’m calling a Shitty White Boy problem with my sixth hour, but that’s not the story.
… Goddammit, it’s gone. I’m gonna go play Veilguard and if I remember what the hell I wanted to talk about I’ll come back.
A couple of months ago, more or less on a whim, I started sinking $50 a week into Bitcoin.
Yeah, I know. Stay with me here.
You are not reading that incorrectly.
That is up nearly five percent today, nearly twelve percent this week, and nearly fifty percent in a month. Those are fucking insane numbers. Ridiculous numbers. Stupid numbers. “That can’t be right” numbers.
I have actually invested $342.16. My personal actual rate of return over the last seven weeks or so is 40.9%. I assume there would be some transaction fees or something and taxes to set aside once I sell, but that’s ludicrous.
I am seriously and genuinely considering getting a zero-APR advance from one of my credit cards to sink into Bitcoin for a month, at which point I’ll sell off whatever the advance was, pay it off, and let the profits coast for a little longer. I’m not talking about an enormous amount of money, relatively speaking; nothing that would bankrupt me or even put me into real trouble if the market crashes, and one way or another I probably want out of this (or do I?) before Trump takes office and wrecks the economy. But 40% of, say, $5000 is two thousand dollars in a month. Even if the rate of return drops by half that’s still a thousand dollars for doing nothing. When I started thinking about this a week or so ago, the one-month number was around thirty percent.
There’s got to be a correction of some sort coming soon, right? Nothing stays on this high of a trajectory for long, and Bitcoin is proof positive that money (and the investment market) is nearly entirely fake anyway. But … shit.
Am I gonna end up $2,000,000 in debt in two years, and this is the post that led to my downfall?
Somebody tell my wife about this post so she can forbid me to invest in this stupid, imaginary product, please.
Today featured either yet another bout of Mounjaro-related massive intestinal distress or yet another panic attack, and one way or another I have now missed six days of work in November. That is too many days of work.
I told my principal and my assistant principal today that I was going to be instantly writing up any student who I heard say the word “fuck” tomorrow, and that they should expect fifty or sixty referrals by the end of the day.
Many years ago– I have told this story before, but in a previous version of this blog, I think– I had a deeply weird conversation with a second-generation Vietnamese student in one of my classes where I had to convince him that he was Asian. This was long enough ago that you still had to fill out a bunch of bubbles with a pencil in order to take a standardized test, and he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to fill out in the Race category. His first guess was that he was white, since he had been born here. And if the kid was younger I’d make an argument that I could see it; he was not born in Asia, which may in and of itself have short-circuited his brain out of choosing “Asian,” particularly if his parents only ever referred to their family as Vietnamese, which of course would not have been an option on the list.
He was an eighth grader at the time.
At any rate, no, son, fill out Asian, please, and then go home and have a conversation with your parents about whether there is anything else about your identity that they have not mentioned in the last fourteen years.
Today, out of nowhere, I had a student (Puerto Rican, I think) walk up to me during passing period and ask me if I was white. The look I gave her must have answered her question, because before I actually said anything she clarified with the following:
“No, I mean like real white. All white. White-white.”
Just in case you’ve forgotten, this is what I look like:
So … yes. Completely white. All the white. Flat White. Damn near pink, really.
My sole accomplishment this weekend, if you want to grant it that status, was taking this spinning bookshelf out of its box (fresh from the TikTok shop!) and putting it together, which means that I now have this little spot for all of my YA books, or at least I have this little spot for all the YA books I have right now, because I’m going to outgrow it in about five more books. It’s pretty and colorful, though, and the fact that every book on there but one is exactly the same size grants it a really pleasing symmetry. I’ve said this before; there is a difference between being a reader and a book collector, and I am very much both of those things.
That’s about all I did. I’m about halfway through R.R. Virdi’s The Doors of Midnight, which is 800 pages long so it’s taking me a while, but I took one pill on Friday night because I was having trouble sleeping and it knocked me on my ass for a day and a half. So there’s not much else of note worth talking about at the moment.
This happened Friday at work, so I can’t count it as an achievement, but I’ve got all of my classes planned out through December 4th, an event so rare that, statistically speaking, it didn’t actually happen. Any number of things can upset my plan (which is why I’m never planned out this far ahead; it’s mostly pointless) but we’re in a sort of autopilot-type unit right now, where C has to follow B which has to follow A, and the only real changes that could happen is delays either due to school closings, further sickness, or my kids just not getting something, and then really all I have to do is back everything up a day, which is no big deal. There are seven instructional days until Thanksgiving; I have no plans for Thanksgiving and we likely won’t make any either, since Bek’s family is the weekend before Thanksgiving and my family is the weekend after Thanksgiving. So that weekend will probably be filled with Lego, reading and video games and not so much massive amounts of food. But I have to survive that long first. We’ll see.
Well, it’s official; I can’t have nice things, even when the nice things aren’t very nice.
Pictured above: the only punch Mike Tyson actually threw in that entire Goddamned fight. I’m a writer, y’all, even if I’ve more or less given up on books, and I could have written ten thousand different versions of that fight and not one of them would involve both corners begging their fighters to get more aggressive with the other person, and not one of them would have involved a fight where Mike Tyson barely threw a fucking punch the entire time. I swear he went entire rounds without throwing any punches.
I’m not a conspiracy theorist and I’m not going to genuinely suggest that that fight was fixed, but I will say that it sure looked like neither guy was super interested in actually winning it. I thought Paul looked genuinely scared in the first round, when Tyson actually did come out aggressively and hit him a couple of times, but after the second … nothing. Tyson turtled up and chewed on his gloves, and what the hell was the deal with that, and Paul danced around and occasionally threw a few punches. As shaky as Tyson’s legs looked, I can’t believe there wasn’t at least one knockdown at some point. Neither of them looked like they were fighting to win, and the crowd was noticeably pissed at the end of the fight.
I’m back to my “never ever care about sports for any reason” viewpoint, in case anyone was wondering. It’s just never worth it. Thank God I only spent time and not money on this.
(Not true. I could have made that money back. I’ll never get the time back. I will always have to remember staying up way too late for this terrible, boring, anticlimactic fight.)
I don’t like Mike Tyson. Mike Tyson is a rapist. I don’t like rapists.
Like a whole lot of people who generally don’t care about sports in general or boxing in particular, I’m planning on at least attempting to watch the Tyson/Paul fight tonight. Why attempting? Because who the fuck knows when the thing is going to start, and Tyson in his prime kind of specialized in blink-and-you’ll-miss-it-sorry-that-guy’s-dead-now fights that you could miss by going to the bathroom at the wrong time. I don’t really want to watch the entire undercard, which could be a couple of hours, so I’ll mostly be relying on the Internet to give me an idea when the actual main event itself is going to start.
I am, I admit, more than a little conflicted about it, and I’m mostly writing this post as a way of thinking out loud rather than making a unified and coherent argument. Generally when I find out someone I was previously a fan of has turned out to be any of many different varieties of sex pest, that guy is removed from my consciousness as thoroughly as I can. Neil Gaiman, Warren Ellis, and Bill Cosby, to pick two fairly recent examples and one not so recent, are all dead to me. To hell with all three of them. I don’t vote for politicians who are sex pests and in fact default whenever possible to voting for women precisely so that I don’t do it accidentally.
It is entirely possible that this entire post, and a lot of the “thinking” that I’ve been doing about it over the last few months, is about me searching for a way to justify watching this fight. To find a way that oh, this one doesn’t count. And maybe that’s all that’s going on. I’m not sure that that has to be a problem, to be honest! We already had a Netflix account; any tiny percentage of however much my wife spends a month on Netflix has already been earmarked to Tyson without my approval or consultation. I think I might be having a different conversation were this a pay-per-view type of event or something that Netflix was demanding a surcharge for. I am not a fan of Tyson’s; recognizing that he is either the best boxer or the second-best boxer who ever lived depending on how you feel about Muhammad Ali (Tyson has said multiple times that Ali would win if they were both in their prime) is merely stating a fact and not a fan’s opinion. Other than playing hours upon hours of Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! as a kid I’ve never engaged in any particular “fan” activities toward the guy. I don’t think he’s a good guy, and I don’t want to be like him, and I don’t want my kid to look up to him or want to be like him or think he’s a good guy.
What I want is to watch him beat the piss out of Jake Paul, a loathsome human being, and someone who is a loathsome human being now, as opposed to a rapist who went to jail for his crime, served his time, and for the most part has kept his nose clean since then, and who has definitely not been accused of any further sexual misconduct since leaving jail.
Just because I want to see him punch Jake Paul’s nose around to the back of his head doesn’t mean that I want to take part in literally anything else that he does. And, you must admit, Mike Tyson is kind of uniquely qualified to be the guy who punches Jake Paul’s jaw clean off of his fucking smarmy face. There is no one else who it would be more satisfying to watch do that. It is possibly true that this is because I can’t name any other boxers!(*) But still.
But Tyson also hasn’t done the kinds of things that we want perpetrators of sexual violence to do in order to obtain “redemption,” whatever exactly that thing is. There’s been no attempt, to my knowledge, of any attempt at restitution, or an apology, or even admission of guilt. And there may have been more than one victim, which wouldn’t be surprising at all. There’s also his whole relationship with Robin Givens, which (I don’t think?) involved sexual violence but certainly was abusive.
But again: did his time, has stayed out of trouble since then, and I’m not directly supporting him by watching this fight, and I think he sucks as a person, and and and and and I’m not sure any of it really matters because I so badly want to see Jake Paul beaten until he’s two-dimensional so maybe I’m just letting my standards slip this one time because these are kind of unique circumstances, I’m not perfect either, goddammit, and my wife’s watching it with me and she’s even a whole-ass woman! So there!
I’m gonna be so pissed if Paul wins.
(And, not that I’m the first person to say this, but I feel like it’s worth repeating: while he’s definitely going to make an asston of money with this fight, it’s not the best career move for Jake Paul, if we’re willing to call his boxing a “career.” If it’s a fair fight, he’s going to get the shit beaten out of him, and if he wins, half the audience (including me) will be screaming that the fight’s fixed and the other half will not be impressed because Tyson is nearly fucking 60 and the young strong guy is supposed to win a fight with a guy who is nearly sixty years old.)
(*) Okay, I can, and some of them might even still be alive, but none of them are as mean as Tyson. Watching George Foreman turn this guy into hamburger and then grill him up would simply not be as much fun, I’m sorry. Foreman is nice. Relatively speaking.
Anyway. Are you watching? Are you also morally conflicted about it, or at least pretending to be on the Internet so you can go do what you wanted to do in the first place?
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