Category: Politics

SHOTS SHOTS SHOTS SHOT SHOT SHOTS

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics, Teaching2 Comments

I’m not going to bullshit around about this: I am giving explicit credit for what happened today to the Biden administration. This would not have happened had we not removed That Man from the White House in November. This is mostly going to be a post where I’m complaining! But spoiler alert: at the end of it I get a Covid shot.

On March 2nd– two days ago– the Biden administration issued a formal directive that all states were to begin prioritizing getting Covid vaccines to teachers. Many states already had teachers classed as essential workers and were already vaccinating us. Indiana? Nah, not so much. I will not stop saying this until it stops being true: Indiana doesn’t give a shit about education, and definitely doesn’t give a shit about teachers. The state wants us young, cheap and disposable and frankly I think it would be just fine with them if a few of the more highly-paid among us died to this thing before the vaccines went out.

Who the merry hell knows how long I’d have had to wait if not for that.

So yesterday I had, as I mentioned, a fairly busy and productive day, and somehow made it through the entire day of work without even once glancing at Facebook. If I had, I might have learned that somehow a nearby Meijer pharmacy was having a pretty major teacher vaccine clinic, one that they had notified every local school district about– and that our district had not told us about. A few teachers from my district found out anyway, because it’s not like we don’t know each other, but by the time I found out about it, the shots were gone. To add insult to injury, I’d also signed up for alerts from Meijer when vaccine was available– and Meijer knew I was a teacher. But I’d heard nothing. None of my friends had told me anything either, which had me good and pissed at the time but if you’re reading this don’t worry about it, I’m over it.

I spent a good chunk of last night fucking around on various state and federal websites trying to figure out where the hell I could find myself a shot, feeling not unlike the way I did when trying to track down a PS5, right down to one website that would let me schedule a first shot at one location but then immediately insisted that I also schedule the second shot, but then it wouldn’t let me actually do that. Anywhere.

Right around 8:00 PM, we found out that my district was doing their own vaccine clinic today, during the school day, and asking the principals to provide flexibility as their teachers … uh, left work in the middle of the day or whenever to go get their shots. On, effectively, no notice whatsoever. Now, I’d gotten lucky here, because I’m already at home, so I didn’t have to worry about anyone covering me who wasn’t going to be doing it already. But there’s my son to be thinking about, and we had to scramble a bit to make sure my wife would be able to be home while I was off getting my shot.

(How little notice was there in putting this together? I heard tell that one of the local high schools basically gave up, herded all of their students into the auditorium and told all of their teachers to get gone and get back as quickly as possible. We don’t ever have students on Wednesdays and next Friday is a teacher record day. This was absolutely a panicked reaction to whoever dropped the ball in forgetting to tell us about the clinic yesterday, which was … also during the Goddamned school day.)

I got there half an hour before the place was supposed to be open, and had a shot in my arm and was leaving two minutes after the place was supposed to have opened. So once I got there, everything was moving super smoothly and quickly. I was, I dunno, maybe the 10th person to get my shot? And they’re going to do the exact same thing again in three weeks for the second shot, which means that in three weeks and one day every teacher in South Bend will call in sick, because the side effects will be hitting us all of us at once. Which’ll be fun.

Speaking of: I got the Pfizer vaccine (apparently part of this is that these vaccines were federally purchased, meaning that what the Biden team actually did with this directive was told the states that they were gonna decide what to do with their vaccines, and the states could pound sand if they didn’t like it) and so far my arm kinda hurts (not a big deal) and I took a real short nap this afternoon, which could have been ordinary Thursday Tired and could in theory have been Vaccine Fatigue. Nothing that actually counts as being remotely debilitating, though.

Funny what a difference it makes, when we elect people who believe that government is capable of actually accomplishing things.

Anyway, it’s running through your head so you may as well enjoy the song:

What was the reason???

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics1 Comment

It’s not just that this smarmy, slimy little weasel is a liar, it’s that he’s so unbelievably bad at it. I liked politicians more when they went to at least a little trouble to make sure their lies were a tiny bit credible, but this motherfucker just says whatever the hell comes to mind, and he lies like a middle schooler whose mother caught him with his pants around his ankles and porn on his monitor. It’s all panic and trying to hide your dick, any shred of reasonable thought out the window, and little man, we’ve seen that before and we’re not any more impressed by it now than we ever were.

In case you haven’t been following the news today (or you’re me, looking at this post in a year,) Texas is currently going through absolute hell. The entire state is covered in snow and in a deep freeze and huge power outages, caused by the state’s inefficient, out-of-date and unregulated power grid, have led to people literally freezing to death in their homes. In, again, Texas.

And this motherfucker didn’t think it would be a problem if he and his family fucked off to Cancun for a week in the middle of all this shit, rather than, I dunno, trying to do something to help. I mean, he’s a Senator, even though no one can figure out why. Senators have some influence in how governments allocate money, I’ve heard. But nah. Off to fucking Cancun, where they sure as fucking hell don’t want Ted Cruz around right now.

Oh, and the pandemic hasn’t gone anywhere, either, and he’s already had coronavirus once so you’d think he would know better, but nah.

And do you know what he did when he got caught? He tried to blame the entire thing on his daughters, who are ten and twelve years old, claiming that they’d asked him to take a trip to Mexico and, well, we definitely let sixth-graders decide to make us take international trips in the middle of multiple overlapping enormous crises, right? That’s a thing people do. He also lied about whether his house had power, and the real bullshit here is that I know that he lied but I don’t know what the truth is, because in the last 24 hours he’s both claimed that he had power and that he didn’t.

The real bullshit of all this is nobody would have thought twice had he gotten his family out of town, so long as they stayed in the States. It literally wouldn’t even have registered. But nah; we’ve gotta fuck off to Mexico, and then pretend it was a spur-of-the-moment decision, and blame it on our minor children, because that doesn’t make it look like all of your possessions need to be confiscated and redistributed to better people, and then we’ve got to pretend that returning after less than a day was the plan all along, ignoring that people can figure out that you bought a new ticket this morning. It’s all painful, stupid, obvious lying, and lying about something that could have been completely avoidable had they just stayed in America.

He’s gotta go. I don’t care if he gets recalled, or if he resigns, or if someone carefully places him in a glass jar and puts that glass jar on a shelf somewhere for eternity, or if he’s simply allowed to slither back into the ocean from whence he came. But I can’t hear anything else about this spineless little traitor ever again. I’m tired of him and he needs to go the fuck away, so that his family can abandon him and he can die alone in a cheap motel room in a couple of years. Fucking enough.

Rush Limbaugh is dead. Good.

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics2 Comments

I remember the day I figured out I was a liberal.

Well, okay, that’s not quite accurate. I remember the feeling of figuring out I was a liberal. And it was a deeply strange thing to figure out about oneself at the time, because everything I knew about “liberals” was that they were terrible. I’m fairly certain I made it to high school if not further before I ever heard that word used in anything other than a derogatory sense, and the idea that liberals were some unspecified sort of awful was literally all I knew about them before figuring out that I was one. And my family was not conservative! I’m farther to the left than either of my parents, I think, although my mother was getting more radicalized by the hour during That Person’s administration, but I definitely did not grow up in an environment where being “liberal” was demonized. No, I have wider society to blame for that.

And, specifically, I lay a healthy share of it at Rush Limbaugh’s feet. George H.W. Bush, too, mind you; Limbaugh’s far from alone in that regard. And frankly the timeline for this realization was probably right around Bush I’s inauguration and hell if I remember when I heard Limbaugh’s name for the first time, but it was probably right around then. And he and a whole bunch of other people were spreading the idea that me and other people who thought like me were traitors. Morons. Evil.

Well, now he’s dead and I’m not. Fuck him.

I don’t believe in Hell but I’m willing to make the occasional exception, and I absolutely refuse to feel even slightly bad about dancing on this human shitstain’s grave. We should not feel bad about being happy when absolutely terrible people die, and Rush Limbaugh for all of his lengthy and wealthy life has absolutely nothing remotely positive to show for it. He’s never helped a single person in his entire miserable life; he’s done nothing but spread hate and misery and pain for his entire existence. I remember him comparing Chelsea Clinton, four years younger than me, to the family dog. I remember the little segment where he’d read the names of people– ordinary fucking regular people who he’d never met and never did anything to him– who died from AIDS and celebrating their deaths on his show. I remember the racism and the sexism and the pure, unfiltered assholery that was this man’s entire personality and has come to become, in the years since, the entire political philosophy of his entire political party. If I were to pick two figures from the eighties and nineties who were responsible for the fascist cesspool the Republican Party has become, they would be Rush and Newt Gingrich, and you can be damn sure that when Gingrich goes I’ll have something to say about that too.

(Fun fact: my senior year of high school I won Future Rush Limbaugh, an award that was given to one male and one female student. She won the award because she was a conservative. I won because I was fat, outspoken, and political. I did not contest the award.)

He was talented, there’s no doubt about that. He could have done good things with his life. He could have helped people. He didn’t. He chose what he became, and he chose to stay what he was, and he chose to continue being what he was every day of his wasted life. Fuck him, and may his type never grace our airwaves ever again. May his name be forgotten.

In which that was fun

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics1 Comment

I dunno if you’ve been following this GameStop thing or not.

I decided to start fucking around with the stock market a couple of weeks ago, partially out of boredom and partially because I actually do have a small amount of discretionary income right now and who knows it’s not impossible that I’ll live long enough to consider retirement. Don’t misunderstand me; I’m not dumb enough to believe that dropping $25 a week into stocks is going to magically make me rich or anything, but getting my feet wet and gaining a basic understanding of how this shit works seemed like a good idea.

And … well. Then the GameStop thing happened. Well, is still happening, technically. I think. An explanation, if you haven’t been following this: Reddit discovered that a particular hedge fund held (don’t ask me how this is possible, it’s on the long list of things I don’t understand) more short sales in GameStop than there were actual shares available for the company. A short sale is when you borrow a stock at a certain price, sell them at that price, wait for the price to drop, then buy them and return the shares you bought to the entity you borrowed the shares you sold from. Since you bought them at a lower price than you sold them at, you make money. If this seems somewhat counterintuitive and also a little unethical to be making money off of some other company doing poorly, that means you understand the process correctly.

So Reddit started buying up shares of GameStop. Lots and lots of shares of GameStop. To the point where it was trading at like $4 a share earlier this year and earlier today was up to $500 a share. In the process they blew up that hedge fund, which apparently has gone bankrupt, so it’s good news for everyone.

I went ahead and got in for $100 when the stock was at around $270. This morning when I woke up and it was damn near $500, so if I’d sold instantly I’d have made about seventy bucks. (To be clear, other people have made millions in the last few days.)

I did not sell instantly, and by the time I got out of the shower this morning the app that nearly all of these folks have been using to buy up the stock had decided that they were not only not going to allow further buying of GameStop stock, they even disabled looking it up, making it impossible to do anything but sell. In the course of a ten-minute shower, the value of the stock plummeted nearly a hundred and fifty dollars a share. As of right now, according to the Stocks app on my computer, it’s down to $132.

There’s been lots of dark muttering lately about how what the Redditors did (and those of us who aren’t Redditors but heard about it) should be illegal, because … reasons, and I’m unclear as to what those are, since this is literally some folks on a message board who decided to act as a group. I have heard no dark muttering about how what Robinhood, the app in question, did ought to be illegal, and I feel like arbitrarily deciding it’s okay for them to cause small investors to lose money is okay while small investors causing big hedge funds to blow up is … well, sadly typical is probably how I think that feels, actually.

One way or another, I’ve closed everything out with that app. I ended up breaking about even on GameStop, selling at the wrong time to make money but the right time to avoid losing any, and ended up making maybe $15 over the course of those two weeks. I feel like– and this is no surprise– unless I want to make this a Big Hobby, I’m almost certainly better off putting more money into the withdrawals my job already takes and ignoring that money, because I was spending way too much time watching the rich folks feelings charts tick up and down over the last few weeks. I haven’t been stressing about it, but it’s occupied more of my attention than I need it to.

I will enjoy watching those same Redditors burn Robinhood to the ground over the next few weeks, though.

In which I fight evil

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Politics2 Comments

It was a good day. It was a stressful day– I was fully expecting someone to die somewhere because of the inauguration, and I may have more thoughts on it later. But it appears that everything went off without any violence, and the right-wing goon squad seems to have dried up and blown away without the Asshole encouraging them on Twitter. Hopefully it will stay that way.

I had a Thing happen, though, unrelated to the inauguration, and if you don’t mind I’m just going to embed a bunch of Tweets because I’d tell the story the same way here anyway.

(These appear to have embedded obnoxiously, which I apologize for, but hopefully a single click will take you straight to Twitter, where you can read these and view the images in native format.)

https://twitter.com/nfinitefreetime/status/1352039314776068098
https://twitter.com/nfinitefreetime/status/1352039563313745920
https://twitter.com/nfinitefreetime/status/1352039843921080320
https://twitter.com/nfinitefreetime/status/1352040282443939840
https://twitter.com/nfinitefreetime/status/1352040572509368322
https://twitter.com/nfinitefreetime/status/1352040810578120711
https://twitter.com/nfinitefreetime/status/1352041885825642498
https://twitter.com/nfinitefreetime/status/1352042001672396803

What particularly annoys me about this is that when I’m daydreaming about winning the lottery, the specific way in which I fantasize about being ultra-rich is that I want to set up a charitable foundation, and part of the way I want to use the funds for my charitable foundation is by flitting around the Internet and randomly and anonymously completely fulfilling people who post GoFundMes and various and sundry other “I’m getting evicted, please send me money” types of things. And I can imagine a world where I might actually just do a Twitter search for “credit card debt,” and then ask for Venmo addresses so I can send folks money. So I decided to take this seriously until it proved to be a scam (which was what I expected) or I somehow got $3K from the money fairy on Joe Biden’s Inauguration Day, which trust me, was about to be taken as an omen.

Instead, hopefully I got to ruin a scammer’s day. I mean, probably not, but I hope at least BoA zaps that account and Twitter bans Annette. Either way, all in a day’s work, I guess.

The South Bend Fraternal Order of Police, Lodge #36, is a Bunch of Racist Pigs: Update

On By Luther M. SilerIn PoliticsLeave a comment

They’ve not only deleted my comments (perfectly polite, and I should have screenshotted them) from their double-down post, which explains why it’s nothing but praise in there, but they’ve since added a post about how qualified immunity, which is how they get away with murdering unarmed black people all the time, is actually just fine.

So, yeah, no benefit of the doubt remains. As far as I’m concerned it no longer matters if the image was put in on purpose, and I think it probably was. Because anyone with even a little shred of conscience would have removed it by now.

Police unions should be outlawed.

All cops are bastards.

Fuck the South Bend FOP.

(Original post here.)

In which I am reliably informed both parties are the same

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics2 Comments

There is a thing that I’ve been saying lately, which is that whenever Republicans get into the White House they tend to staff the various federal departments with people whose entire lives have existed in contrary to the mission of that department. Betsy DeVos, who has worked to destroy public education for her entire life, became Secretary of Education, for example. Oil execs get put in charge of the environment. Even in cases where a Republican might actually be an acceptable public servant in one role– I have no reason to believe Ben Carson would have been a terrible Surgeon General, for example– they get put into roles that do not actually match their skill sets, like HUD.

I’ve asked several times for the Internet to provide me with even a single example of a Democrat putting, say, a lifelong pacifist in charge of the Defense Department or something similar, and never once have they come through for me. But hey! Biden’s entire Cabinet is, like, right there! And, granted, none of them have been officially confirmed yet, and so it’s entirely possible some things might change, but let’s take a quick look (a quick look; I don’t have all day) at these folks and see if any of them appear to be painfully unsuited for office:

NAME: Anthony Blinken
POSITION: Secretary of State
RELEVANT EXPERIENCE: Looks like he’s been deputy Secretary of State, Deputy NSA Advisor, and Biden’s own NSA advisor. He passes.

NAME: Janet Yellen
POSITION: Secretary of the Treasury
RELEVANT EXPERIENCE: Chair of the Federal Reserve, Vice Chair of the Federal Reserve, Member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. Pass!

NAME: Lloyd Austin
POSITION: Secretary of Defense
RELEVANT EXPERIENCE: Retired four-star general, former CENTCOM commander. Pass.

NAME: Merrick Garland
POSITION: Attorney General
RELEVANT EXPERIENCE: I don’t even need to look this one up: experienced lawdog, former Supreme Court nominee, the guy who sent Timothy McVeigh to jail. Pass.

NAME: Deb Haaland
POSITION: Secretary of the Interior
RELEVANT EXPERIENCE: Elected official, Vice-Chair of the Committee on National Resources while in the House. I don’t really know what the Secretary of the Interior does but this sounds good.

NAME: Tom Vilsack
POSITION: Secretary of Agriculture
RELEVANT EXPERIENCE: I assume anyone from Iowa can do this job. Next!

NAME: Gina Raimondo
POSITION: Secretary of Commerce
RELEVANT EXPERIENCE: Governor of Rhode Island, General Treasurer of Rhode Island, and according to Wikipedia a former venture capitalist. Has a degree from Harvard in economics. Pass!

NAME: Marty Walsh
POSITION: Secretary of Labor
RELEVANT EXPERIENCE: Former Mayor of Boston and member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives. Former union president, former head of the Boston Building Trades. Pass.

NAME: Xavier Becerra
POSITION: Secretary of Health and Human Services
RELEVANT EXPERIENCE: Previous AG of California, former House representative. Econ degree from Stanford. I admit I don’t see anything that screams HHS to me but I’m not a hundred percent what would.

Are we starting to see a trend here? But these are just the topline folks, let’s keep going. Surely we’ll find an anarchist or a pacifist or a felon or something in here somewhere.

NAME: Marcia Fudge
POSITION: Secretary of Housing and Urban Development
RELEVANT EXPERIENCE: Another “solid public servant” sort of nomination; Fudge was in the House and is a former mayor. She was born and raised in Cleveland and appears to still live there– the city she was mayor of is an East Side suburb– so I’m going to go out on a limb and assume some competence with urban issues.

NAME: Pete Buttigieg
POSITION: Secretary of Transportation
RELEVANT EXPERIENCE: Used to be my mayor. Once nearly got killed by an inattentive driver while jaywalking. Uh … rearranged a lot of streets downtown while mayor in a way that actually did really improve downtown? (Important note: there are no longer any one-way streets downtown, which means the scenario I describe in that link is no longer possible.) I dunno, he’ll do fine, and he’s not, like, opposed to the concept of transportation or something like that.

NAME: Jennifer Granholm
POSITION: Secretary of Energy
RELEVANT EXPERIENCE: Former Attorney General and Governor of Michigan; again, I admit there’s nothing in her bio that screams “Secretary of Energy,” but she hasn’t spent her entire career trying to shut down power plants and force us to go back to fire or anything like that. Wikipedia notes that her nomination was “received favourably among major energy experts,” and spelled “favourably” exactly like that. Does not appear to be a slave of the oil industry or anything like that, either.

NAME: Miguel Cardona
POSITION: Secretary of Education
RELEVANT EXPERIENCE: First SecEd nominee in two administrations who I didn’t think was literally Satan (remember, I think Obama was shit on education too,) so he has to be a step up. Literally anyone would be a step up over DeVos.

NAME: Denis McDonough
POSITION: Secretary of Veterans Affairs
RELEVANT EXPERIENCE: White House Chief of Staff, Deputy NSA, graduated from Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service. Curiously, does not appear to be an actual military veteran. That’s kind of shaky, but the rest of his resume is solid.

NAME: Alejandro Mayorkas
POSITION: Secretary of Homeland Security
RELEVANT EXPERIENCE: Former Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security, so … yep. We’re good here.

NAME: Ron Klain
POSITION: Chief of Staff
RELEVANT EXPERIENCE: The Chief of Staff is a Cabinet member? Sure, fine, he can have whoever he wants here.

NAME: Michael Regan
POSITION: EPA Administrator
RELEVANT EXPERIENCE: Secretary of the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, worked for the EPA during the Bush and Clinton administrations, regional director for the Environmental Defense fund. Note that his predecessor in this role was a coal lobbyist. He passes.

NAME: Neera Tanden
POSITION: Office of Management and Budget Director
RELEVANT EXPERIENCE: Neera’s been all over the place, and appears to be an asshole of the My Kind of Asshole variety, but has experience at the Center for American Progress, helped to draft Obamacare, and was Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama’s policy director during their presidential runs. All good.

NAME: Katherine Tai
POSITION: U.S. Trade Representative
RELEVANT EXPERIENCE: She’s the chief trade counsel for the House Ways and Means committee, so this is another “I’m not sure what you do, but yeah, that sounds good” nominee.

NAME: Isabel Guzman
POSITION: Small Business Administrator
RELEVANT EXPERIENCE: Appears to have previously had basically this exact job for the state of California, which is, what, a third of the US economy? She’ll do fine.

NAME: Avril Haines
POSITION: National Intelligence Director
RELEVANT EXPERIENCE: Deputy NSA under Obama, former Deputy Director of the CIA. All good.

NAME: Linda Thomas-Greenfield
POSITION: UN Ambassador
RELEVANT EXPERIENCE: I kind of assume anybody can be an ambassador, because it tends to be a “donated a lot of money and wants patronage now” sort of job, but she was the assistant SoS for African Affairs and the Director General of the foreign service, and has been an ambassador to Liberia, so again, yeah, sounds great.

NAME: Cecilia Rouse
POSITION: Chair of Council of Economic Advisers
RELEVANT EXPERIENCE: I mean … she’s an economist? Dean of the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs? She’s fucking FIVE YEARS YOUNGER THAN ME?? Christ.

NAME: John Kerry
POSITION: Special Presidential Envoy for Climate
RELEVANT EXPERIENCE: I mean, he was Secretary of State. John’s gotta have some kind of job, that ketchup money isn’t gonna last forever.

NAME: Eric Lander
POSITION: Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy
RELEVANT EXPERIENCE: I said on Twitter the other day, and I wasn’t joking, that the first Republican nominee to this office would be an illiterate Pentecostal preacher. This is a new Cabinet-level position created by Biden, and the guy he’s tapped for the job is a mathematician and geneticist and somehow is a professor at MIT and Harvard at the same God damned time and yeah I think he’ll do just fine.

So, what was the worst I was able to find? A few people with reasonably solid resumes whose experience didn’t seem precisely suited to the position they were nominated for based on a cursory Wikipedia search. A whole lot of people with lots of experience that is directly related to the position they were nominated for. And Pete Buttigieg. Who will do just fine, I’m sure; I’m kidding. Now, I’m not claiming these are all good people, or that they’ll all be good at their jobs; some of them may not actually take their offices, some won’t last long, one or two will end up getting fired; hell, one or two may end up getting indicted, who knows. But there’s no one on this list where you look at them and immediately know that their actual job is to sabotage the department they’ve been nominated to head and keep it from doing anyone else any good.

Funny how that works.

That time of year again

On By Luther M. SilerIn PoliticsLeave a comment

…It’s Dear God White People Shut Up day!

https://twitter.com/nfinitefreetime/status/1351218058094915585

I talk about this every year, and I do it to remind my fellow white people: Martin Luther King would have been to the left of every major politician you can name, and next year I need to mute his name on MLK Day because I get so unbelievably tired of (mostly) conservative politicians deliberately erasing everything about what the man thought in favor of a toddler’s conception of Jesus; ie, the Nicest Man Who Ever Lived, who never made anyone uncomfortable in any way and how dare you suggest any such thing. White people hated him when he was killed (by, uh, a white guy; not an accident) and the simple fact is if he were still alive and kicking most of us– most of the white men, at least– would hate him today too. There are politicians who praised him today who this month have voted to disenfranchise Black voters. It is proof of the nonexistence of life after death that this man, having spent most of said afterlife talking to Malcolm X and watching white people continue the Same Exact Shit, has not risen from his grave to slap his name out of the mouths of all sorts of people.

This is another one of those days where it is made perfectly clear to me (not that I ever doubted it) that I cannot possibly understand the Black experience in this country, because I am driven to snarling incoherent rage several times a week by white nonsense and I do not understand why Black people aren’t killing us all the time. I would understand it.

One minor little detail about that tweet that at least entertained me if not generating a minor amount of actual pride, much like a puppy that has received a single pat on the head: the head of the Afro-American Studies department at Howard University retweeted it. I’m not sure I should be as geeked by that as I am, but whatever. I’ll take my joys where I can get them this year.

(Also, the rest of the speech quoted in the tweet is here; I hadn’t read it before today and it’s well worth reading.)

I got a lot done today, and one of the things on that list was putting together lesson plans for tomorrow and the day after. My plans for Inauguation Day? Nothing. I expect to be a jittery wreck for most of the day even if it goes smoothly, and while none of my students really seem especially into politics or The News I suspect a handful of them are worried about it as well. So fuck it. I gave them a day off on Wednesday, which is typically a day with no in-person instruction anyway, because of “district training” that somehow never involves middle school math teachers. I also cancelled the 8th grade team meeting, and flat-out admitted in the email that I was doing it because I didn’t expect to be in any shape to take it seriously.

So far, nobody’s come after me. I don’t expect that to change, but we’ll see what happens.