Was gonna use the spiffy new laptop to write a post.
New post wasn’t going to be about the spiffy new laptop, it was going to be about getting sick twice in two different ways at work today.
Spiffy new laptop won’t load the WordPress new post screen. Everything else works fine!
Guess why I bought the spiffy new laptop?
Anyway, I’m writing this on my phone and it is possible that there will be a ragesplosion soon, so y’all can look forward to that, because this makes no sense at all.
I can put off deciding what to have for dinner for as long as I want, but it’s just going to be dinner time again tomorrow and I’ll have to do it again.
I got home from work at a decent hour, having left almost precisely as early as contractual obligations allowed, then sat in a chair and did not move for two and a half hours. Dinner was two bowls of Frosted Mini-Wheats.
I’m, uh, gonna go play video games now, these three sentences having represented the apotheosis of my intellectual abilities at the moment.
I have made this observation in three different places so far, which is almost certainly more than it deserves: the most impressive thing about the Big Arch I had for lunch today is that it looks exactly like every picture of the Big Arch that McDonald’s has been using to advertise it. If you eat at restaurants at all you know how ridiculously uncommon that is. The review: pretty damn tasty, almost too big, although I could still taste it three hours later and I suspect my breath may still slightly smell of onions.
This week was utter madness.
Two different two-hour fog delays, which led to me talking for five hours straight on Thursday, as everything I had planned for that day had to be compressed into two hours less class time, meaning I did nothing but lecture the entire day. This is not a thing I do. I was so tired when I got home I forgot to take my Mounjaro shot, which has been a regular Thursday thing for at least a year now. Today they took the test I was doing the guided notes for yesterday; I still have two classes to grade, but early indications are that the bed appears to not have been shit in. Monday and Tuesday were it’s getting warm and there’s a full moon behaviors and Wednesday was an e-learning day and tons of meetings.
Y’all, I am exhausted. And all of this is before we get to the bit where the fucking world set itself on fire more than once in the last couple of weeks– have I even used the word “Iran” on this blog yet? How long ago was the first attack? It could have been anything from yesterday to a month ago at this point; I’m so fried I can’t even tell. The second-dumbest guy in the Senate is apparently getting promoted? Gas prices have shot up by a dollar a gallon since I filled the tank on Monday.
Oh, and while I’ve generally tried not to talk too much about some of the medical issues my son has been having, for probably-obvious reasons, I cannot pass up mentioning that he was prescribed a nasal spray this week for migraines that are somehow in his abdomen, and no part of me is capable of dealing with the fact that that sentence represents something real and is not word salad.
So naturally tomorrow we’re going to tear down a wall in the bedroom. Wish me luck.
I considered not posting tonight; after all, if I’m going to lose one significant streak, I may as well lose more than one, but here I am nonetheless. I’ve already disappointed myself, surely I can’t follow that up by disappointing my adoring public.
Shut up, yes you are. And yes you do.
I am … superstitious isn’t the right word, but I can’t for the life of me figure out what it is– in exactly one way: I’m fully convinced that full moons fuck kids up. To wit, as I was leaving work today, someone mentioned that tomorrow was the full moon, and suddenly the utter fucking ridiculousness of my day just clicked. Like, oh, of course there’s a full moon. You were in that classroom. You saw those kids. And that’s the thing; when I walk into my day entirely unaware of the phase of the moon, experience the psychotic behavior from my lovely lil’ dipshits, and then find out that’s what was going on? That’s evidence, dammit. I shouted one room into twenty minutes of complete silence today. I’ve had such a good year that these kids have barely heard me raise my voice at all, so when I do lose my temper it gets a real reaction.
There are days where I simply can’t make this shit any simpler, and today was one of them. “See this number? See this number? Divide them shits. Make sure this one’s on top.” That was it. Calculating scale factors just isn’t that hard. And my third hour in particular made it abundantly clear that every second of my instruction had literally just passed through their heads like a neutrino through aerogel, leaving not a fucking trace of a mark behind. There’s only so many times I can be asked questions which I have literally just answered before I lose my shit, and asking a room full of fourteen-year-olds what three divided by one was and getting “one” and “four” as answers– this is not a fucking joke, it really happened– was the last straw.
I don’t give a damn if your parents tell you to go to school. You’re clearly already used to being a disappointment; what’s one more thing? If this is all the effort I’m going to get out of y’all, you can go. The office is down the hall. I’m not even going to write you up. Just fuck off. Go home, go to hell, I don’t care which. You aren’t entitled to my fucking oxygen if you’re not going to be a student.
I have spent far too much of today arguing with deeply stupid people on social media, and my God, y’all, the literacy crisis is real. The literacy crisis is real and I am not very bright, but I am stupid in a different way from, for example, someone willing to argue that there are only white people in the town I live in, or someone who wants to argue about what a legal disclaimer means but clearly hasn’t actually read the Goddamned thing. I am stupid because I am unable to simply block these fools and move on with my life, or better yet, avoid activities that cause me to be exposed to them in the first place.
In my defense, at least one of them started it.
Like, there weren’t even any opinions involved today. Text can be interpreted, sure, but phrases like “in perpetuity,” “throughout the world,” and “for any reason” have a fairly plain meaning, and demographic data exists. I sometimes like to pretend I still live in a world where at least semi-objective reality exists, and I’m too old to adapt to a post-truth existence.
The internet was a colossal mistake, is what I’m saying here, along with virtually every single other thing that has happened to society since, oh, Ronald Reagan. I use the words “everything is going to get worse all the time forever” fairly frequently, but I don’t really believe it, because the depth of dumb out there keeps managing to surprise me.
I am not watching the Super Bowl, in accordance with my standard practice, and I am not watching the halftime show either. I watched Kendrick’s show live last year, after spending far too long fucking with streaming platforms, and I just don’t care about Bad Bunny enough to fuck around with it this year. I admit that I’m curious whether anyone at NBC or whoever the hell is broadcasting the thing is smart enough to know to bleep “chinga la migra,” but I assume anything interesting that happens is going to be all over TikTok tomorrow so I’m not going to worry about it.
My wife is going to be out of town all week, so I’m on solo Dad duty, which isn’t much of a problem except for the number of tasks it adds to my mornings. My son’s schedule and mine differ enough that he’s generally not even out of bed when I leave for work, and while we have someone picking him up to take him to school my wife generally handles the three hours of reminders and gradually-sterner pokes in the ribs it takes to drag his eighth-grade ass out of bed, not to mention things like lunch-packing and such. He’s going to have to get up earlier so that I can make sure he’s conscious and vertical before his ride shows up, and I’m going to have to get up earlier to make sure everything is ready on time.
I also have to remember to pick him up on the way home from school, also not normally my job. Luckily we live close enough that the one day I slip into autopilot and drive home, I can turn around and go to pick him up and just pretend that I got tied up at work and couldn’t leave right away. Nobody has to know, right?
Anyway, my wife’s train— yes, train— leaves at midnight, so I’ve got some time to kill before I drop her off at the station. What’s that, Nioh 3? Yes, Daddy will be there soon.
I need someone to help me understand how the hell I know about Groundhog Day, and no, the answer isn’t the movie, because that came out when I was 17 and, trust me, everybody knew what Groundhog Day was before the movie came out. It is absolutely unreal to me that this weird little holiday, which by rights ought to be confined to one or two tiny ethnic conclaves in no more than one or two states, is practically a national holiday. It makes no goddamn sense, and what’s weirder is that I live in America, a country where “racism” is the answer to any question starting with the word “why” 90% of the time, and I can’t figure out any way how racism might contribute to me knowing about the day that the terrified river rat lets everyone know what the weather is going to be.
I mean, have you heard of Casimir Pulaski day? The weirdest unexpected day off of my life was due to Casimir Pulaski day. Have you heard of Dyngus Day? Having heard of it for the first time just now, are you at all surprised that Polish people are involved? People talking about Groundhog Day and taking it seriously should be viewed with only slightly less frightened condescension than snake handling, and once the phrase Gobbler’s Knob enters the conversation … Christ.
Anyway, every single other thing I might choose to talk about today is horrible, so I’m leaving you with that.
I’ve talked about this a couple of times— hell, I’ve been blogging on this site since 2013, I’ve talked about everything a couple of times— but I very badly want for there to be something that I am a snob about. Specifically, something food or drink related. The problem is, most of the snobbish foods and drinks are things I don’t actually like. I don’t drink alcohol, which means I can’t be a wine snob(*) or a whiskey snob. I don’t smoke, which rules out cigars. And, man, I have tried to be a snob about coffee. I bought a burr grinder and a French press and everything. My palate, frustratingly, is shit. I cannot tell the difference between fresh-ground beans and preground; I was prepared to let the French press take over my entire personality and I stopped using it after a week or two. It tasted the exact same except with more steps, and the process of making the coffee didn’t feel special enough for the extra steps to be anything other than a waste of time. I’ve tried fancier coffees to no avail. I drink my coffee black and that’s pretty much all I’ve got. I understand what people mean when they say Starbucks tastes burned, but I don’t go to Starbucks anyway so that little rebellion isn’t worth much. I am sad to report it, but I will never be a coffee snob. I can’t even properly look down my nose at people who don’t drink it black. Hazelnut coffee creamer is delicious.
A few weeks ago it occurred to me that I was an adult with a job, and as such I could purchase an electric kettle if I so desired. I initially bought it thinking it might make the French press easier, but I quickly realized that it also meant I could finally start drinking hot tea.
I should back up a bit. I didn’t start drinking coffee until I was around 40, when I decided I was going to get over my weird lifetime paranoia about pouring hot liquids into my mouth and forced myself to drink coffee until I liked it. Despite having been a fan of iced tea for literally my entire life, my newfound affection for coffee never generalized to tea. Why? I have no damn clue. It genuinely didn’t occur to me that I could start drinking hot tea until after I bought the electric kettle.
And …
guys.
Do you know what a tea sachet is? They’re little pyramid-shaped bags of tea. They look like this:
They generally contain a higher grade of tea than teabags do; having looked into it, my impression is that teabags are full of the tea equivalent of seeds and stems and that sachets contain, y’know, bits of actual leaves in them. They’re a bit more expensive but not tremendously so, and they steep exactly the same way you might steep a teabag. I’m pretty sure the word is pronounced sashay, but I’ve been calling them satchets because while I want to be snobbish that doesn’t mean I’m about to lower myself to pronouncing French correctly.
Anyway, I can actually taste the difference between tea brewed from a sachet and tea brewed from regular teabags. I can’t do a perfectly controlled experiment, but I have some Earl Grey teabags and some Earl Grey sachets and the sachets are definitely stronger and more flavorful than the teabags are.(**) And yes, every single time I make myself Earl Grey tea, I hear this in my head:
Anyway. This is a long post just to say that once I run through the supply of teabags I’ve purchased (Bonus fact: “sachet” isn’t a euphemism for sexual assault! Also good.) I plan to stop buying teabags altogether. I’m waiting to run out of something before I move on to, to continue the Star Trek references, the final frontier, and start experimenting with actual loose tea.
That’ll really make me fancy.
(*) One of the least fun nights of my entire life was the night my friends dragged me to a wine bar in Wrigleyville. I’m completely used to being the sober guy at the bar. Being surrounded by people daintily sniffing and swishing glasses of wine nearly ended me, especially since I’d been forced to dress up for the occasion. I damn near left and went to a movie by myself.
(**) I am currently drinking some of this, which tastes good and smells absolutely divine. Also, and randomly, I’ve discovered I don’t like chai, or at least the kind of chai I bought, which contains black pepper, a spice that should never be in a drink.
