I had a twelve hour day today and I’m exhausted, so this is gonna be a quick hit, but I just saw an article that called REM “arguably the biggest band in the world” for “about five years” in the nineties.
I call bullshit. They were big, certainly, and those years were definitely the band’s biggest years, but the biggest band in the world? Not in any version of the nineties where U2 existed, and I’m pretty sure I could come up with a few other examples if I spent some time thinking about it.
I got an email yesterday that I had some paperwork to do for one of my students. The paperwork was some sort of screening or intake form for an … I’m gonna say organization that I wasn’t familiar with, and so I looked them up, because typically when I get paperwork to do for a kid it’s from one of a very small number of sources.
It was for a residential facility, out of state, that more or less takes kids whose parents can’t take care of them. So not quite an orphanage, but … not not an orphanage, because it certainly didn’t scan hospital or any sort of inpatient facility. It was “you suck at raising your kids, so give us a shot.”
Uh-oh.
I emailed the counselor back asking for more details, to which she responded that she really didn’t know any more than I did, and the kid hasn’t been to school yet this week. And the kid, charitably, is a mess. He’s not a behavioral problem, but he’s got a host of intellectual disabilities and really doesn’t belong in a mainstream classroom setting. He’s not going to screw around or cause trouble in class, but he’s not going to do any work, it’s not clear at all that he can read, he absolutely can’t do any grade-level math, and most of the time his reaction when asked to do anything at all is to stare at you silently until you go away. He will not turn anything in. He will not take notes or do anything remotely academic. He doesn’t even really screw around on his iPad, which he won’t carry with him and will just leave behind if someone gives it to him. If left alone, he will sit and stare at the wall until the bell rings, then wander off vaguely in the direction of his next class, which he will arrive at … eventually.
This is where I admit I wasn’t previously 100% familiar with his IEP. He’s always been in a co-taught classroom, and given his complete refusal/inability to engage with the academic process … man, I don’t have a single class with under 30 kids. He is well beyond the point where I can remediate him and I cannot provide him with the help he needs. I’m fully aware of what a problem that is, believe me, but at some point the kid needs to be his parent’s problem, and … well. He gets his various and sundry accommodations but there’s not much I can do with will not do any work whatsoever. I don’t think he’s passed a class since fourth or fifth grade.
But I needed some information from the IEP, so I read through the whole thing rather than just looking at the goals (yeah, right) and the accommodations. Filled in his test scores (1% percentile in language arts and math, something like three years running) and then started reading through the more detailed parts.
So, uh, they suspect that the reason that he has his intellectual disabilities is that when he was born his lungs were full of meconium, and his heart stopped for a while while they were trying to deal with that, and they’re sure he incurred brain damage of some sort in the meantime.
Do you know what meconium is? It’s baby’s first poop. Don’t click on that link. The kid has brain damage because he inhaled a couple of lungfuls of his own fetal shit while in the womb and was born unable to breathe. And now he’s in my math class, where I teach linear equations and Pythagoras and shit, and somehow he’s expected to be on grade level, and I’m judged by whether I can get him there.
Go ahead, try and count the number of ways that’s fucked up. I’m not going anywhere.
I don’t have a ton to say about Dawnshard, the second of the two-so-far novellas in the Stormlight Archives. It’s a fun little story and gives a lot of screen time to Lopen, one of my favorite characters, although it introduces yet another set of adversaries and uses the word “Cosmere” too much. I’m finding that I don’t have a ton of patience for BrandySandy’s desire to knit each and every one of his books together into the same universe, particularly since the most obvious transfer so far has been the sword from Warbreaker and that was my least favorite of his books. I’m sure I’ve missed other bits here and there; it’s been forever since I read any of the Mistborn books and I don’t think I ever finished the second trilogy, but … blech. There’s no reason for it to be here and much like Lift and her constant use of the word “awesome,” It really doesn’t fit the tone of the rest of the series. Hell, it didn’t fit the tone of its own book, if I remember right, although I may not.
I made it 450 pages into Oathbringer when it first came out back in 2017. I was pissed when I decided I had to DNF it– but it had taken me a rather astonishing twelve days to make it those 450 pages (for comparison’s sake, on this reread, during a week where I was working, I finished the entire 1240-page thing in a week) and not only was I not having any fun with it I was finding myself slowly convinced that the book was on the side of the bad guys, and I wasn’t in the right headspace for it one way or another.
Well.
Oathbringer is boring as hell for 900 pages.
I mean, that’s really all there is to it. I can’t recommend reading this book to anyone. I can’t tell anybody to endure nine fucking hundred pages of wheel-spinning and navel-gazing and characters that desperately need to invent antidepressants and irrelevant subplots that could be excised in their entirety without affecting the overall structure of the book. It is exactly the type of bloat that so frequently settles into this type of megaseries, especially when the author has already proven themselves to be someone who could shit on a series of napkins, bind them between two covers, and sell a million copies. Sanderson’s untouchable, and I mean that as a compliment. He doesn’t need to write good books anymore. He can do whatever he wants.
I do not feel bad about abandoning this book on the first pass. I damn near didn’t make it on the second.
And, if anything, the most frustrating thing about this miserable slog of a novel is that the last, oh, 300 pages of the book are some of the most exciting shit he’s ever written. Somewhere toward the end of Part Four or the beginning of Part Five, this motherfucker steps on the gas and he absolutely does not let off until the book is done.
Which meant I was really Goddamned irritated when one of my fucking cats jumped on my chest while I was reading– not in itself a surprising event– and, with about 80 pages left, pissed on my fucking book.
It was a splat, not, like, a full-blast stream, and she somehow managed to not get a single drop on me or on the chair I was sitting in, but my cat fucking pissed on my book while I was reading the fucking thing and I somehow did not immediately kill her or throw her outside in retaliation.
And then, upon discovering Amazon can’t get me another hardcover copy for a couple of weeks and the only other new bookstore in town didn’t have any copies, I had to fucking finish the book after doing everything I could to, more or less unsuccessfully, soak everything up and banish the cat piss smell from my book.
The cat? Seems to be fine. I would immediately suspect a UTI, right? But I’ve had cats get UTIs in the past, and it generally involves lots of little pee accidents and a general feeling that maybe they’re struggling when they do pee, and this little asshole seems completely fine. We’re keeping an eye on her, obviously, and they were all due for vet appointments anyway, but right now I’m assuming this is some deeply weird and unexpected bit of shitheadery and not a sign of something more alarming.
This marks the second pet I’ve had that has ruined one or more of my books by pissing on them, but Hector at least did it while they were on the shelf and close to the floor and not in my Goddamned hands.
I’m about to let this streak go, but I kind of want to hit a year first and then walk away on purpose? One way or another, today has been an utterly wasted day; I got up at a decent time but have more or less just been staring since 8:30 this morning. I managed to get in the shower before noon which is usually a sign (for a weekend, I mean) that a decent day is coming, but … yeah. I’ve been staring for ten hours and I may actually just say fuck it and go to bed once I hit Publish. I don’t know if I’m sick or depressed or lazy or some combination of all three but apparently humanity is too much to expect from me today.
… not that I want to write another crappy post, but I just woke up from a nap and now I’m going to bed. It wasn’t a bad week by most measures but God does it feel like it was a long one.
Everyone in my house but me was sick for all or part of Winter Break, and I spent the whole break wondering where my suddenly robust immune system had come from and loudly speculating that I would be sick as a dog during the first week back to school.
Guess who threw up five minutes after waking up this morning?
I slept all day and I’m more or less feeling human right now, and honestly at this point I have so few sick days left that even if I wake up and puke tomorrow morning again I’m gonna just put a mask on and go to work. Fuck it, it’ll give me an excuse to tell the kids to stay away from me. But I’ve got four days left for the next four and a half months, and that really doesn’t feel like enough for some reason. I can’t use two of them in January.
Anyway, I’m gonna take a shower and go to bed early.
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