The last couple of weeks, as you’re well aware, I’ve been renovating my bathroom. It’s been exhausting. All home renovation is exhausting; I’m not trying to claim uniqueness, but it’s been a goddamn tiring couple of weeks.
I went back to school today. You may remember this picture:
Every single one of those boxes, including the ones offscreen and the large pile of 60-some-odd smaller ones you can see in the distance just to the upper-right of the center of the image, has been dealt with. I know where every box but three belongs; considering there’s a couple hundred of them that’s not a bad day. I don’t think I’m going in tomorrow because administration is going to be at a meeting all day and I’m going to need a crapton of help to deal with this:
That shit ain’t a one-man job, that’s an assembly line waiting to happen, especially since I need to take over the library to distribute everything. Honestly, if I can get three or four people as backup it won’t be nearly as bad as it looks.
He said.
Now, the fun thing is, about twelve of those boxes in that top picture are for me, since I went ahead and ordered myself some supplies (note: legal, encouraged) with the remaining money that we had to burn through at the end of the year. I have to admit it: sorting through math manipulatives today, I missed teaching just a little bit, just for a little while.
Then I remembered that the lion’s share of leftover boxes are going to be used for the Cardboard Challenge at the beginning of the school year and that feeling went away, because holy shit do I want nothing to do with the Cardboard Challenge, along with any number of other things about working at a school that are not actual teaching.
It would be nice if someone from one of the jobs I applied for over the summer would call me back. Or at least it would be nice to log into one of the application sites and see that someone else had been hired. Because right now it feels like I just tossed those resumes and cover letters into a furnace and pretended that I was submitting them.
SATURDAY: Wake up, go visit wife’s family, a number of whom are in town for the day. Go from there directly to the high school graduation of the first group of fifth graders I had in South Bend, wearing the same clothes I wore at their 8th grade graduation, a fact that entertains only me as there is no chance any of them will notice. Go from there directly to OtherJob. Proceed to have one of the busiest nights of the year. Don’t get home until after midnight.
SUNDAY: Wake up early. Go to brother’s, who is liquidating his home in preparation to move to Illinois and live with his fiancée. Spend three hours moving furniture, including an antique oak armoire and three old-ass tube televisions that weigh so much that I can’t believe TV was ever even a thing before flat-screen TVs. Go home. I don’t remember the rest of Sunday; it involved a nap and a lot of moaning.
12:30 AM SUNDAY NIGHT: I am jolted out of a sound sleep by what sounds like glass breaking. I stagger around my bedroom with a baseball bat for a moment, thinking rather unreasonably that someone has thrown a brick through our bedroom window. It turns out that the cat has jumped up to a shelf of photographs and knocked the shelf over. Not the pictures on the shelf. The entire fucking shelf.
I never really get back to sleep.
MONDAY: There are three days of school left, and I have ordered tens of thousands of dollars of supplies for next year. I arrive to 25 large, heavy boxes that need to be opened, unpacked, checked in and sorted. Miraculously, no one bothers me all day and I spend the day doing this, including taking care of the extra boxes that arrived today. I send repeated emails to teachers saying things like “I know I emailed you earlier that you had stuff and you should come get it. This is not a reminder. This means that you have more stuff and now you should come get that.”
I don’t speak to students all day. No one even asks me to. There have been two days so far this year where I have felt like the invisible man in the office, and I’m not complaining about that– I need to figure out how I tapped into that power so I can use it more often.
There are two days of school left. 8th grade graduation is tomorrow and after that they go away and aren’t supposed to come back. This ought to lead to an easier day than usual with 25% of the students occupied during the morning and gone after that but who the hell knows; after how easy today was I’m not making any predictions.
I spent the morning mired in anger and violence and depression and ignorance and assholery and neglect and death. And that’s not actually hyperbole, although for obvious reasons I’m not getting into the details.
I spent the afternoon building and flying robot radio-controlled sharks, and then teaching 7th and 8th graders how to fly robot radio-controlled sharks.
And then some other stuff happened that I can’t really talk about yet.
And then I had sushi for dinner.
I was in bed at nine last night; tonight may be earlier.
I enjoy this sign quite a bit: “There are cameras in the parking lot, but we’re not watching them, so do whatever you want.” The misspelling of “management” is just the icing on the cake.
Why the hell would you put that second sentence on the sign, unless you wanted people to think that they could get away with shit? Somebody help me out here.
I am tired as hell right now; tired to the point where I’m writing this paragraph probably fifteen minutes after finishing the second one. I’ve basically been staring off into space for most of the time in between. The boy fell asleep quickly enough at the hotel last night (and he had a blast at the reception, in the way young kids do) but I’m finding that I really can’t sleep without a fan on me, which I didn’t have, and we had to leave a light on for him, meaning the room was too bright for me, so whine arrgh gargle blargh etc.
(Five more minutes of staring)
Okay, maybe not. I’m just going to post this one picture, which was a stealth shot of the second coolest guy at the wedding. I’ll tell stories either tomorrow or later tonight when my brain is back on; right now I ain’t got it.
(Okay. Actually, I was principal designee again, the day both began and ended with parents fruitlessly yapping about lawsuits, and I got not one single second of my actual own work done by the end of the day. Not one second today did I spend doing my job. I am exhausted, I’m wearing jeans tomorrow, and in bed by 9:00 is a distinct possibility.)
…and today was a ridiculously long day and somehow even though it was a half day for me (for the second half of the day!) I ended up back at the office at three for a meeting and didn’t get out of the meeting (“half hour, I swear,” my boss says) until almost five and by the time I got home I was so damn tired and misanthropic that I cancelled on meeting a few friends for delicious Mexican food because jesus I don’t need Mexican I need sleep and the book isn’t selling for shit (I suspect there is some literal form of purchasable shit that is selling better than my books) and it’s too cold in this house and since when do I think cold is a problem and “Grapefruit Diet” is kind of a crappy Weird Al song and why is that running through my head and I’ve been having weird dreams and having trouble getting up in the mornings for like four days straight which is really weird because generally I don’t remember my dreams at all and all I want to do is go to bed or maybe kill some orcs for a few hours but my wife is probably going to want the TV because as I established yesterday I watch approximately ten thousand hours of television a week somehow and at least tomorrow is payday because oh god I want to die.
Blargh.
(Oh: I was just told that I was nominated for one of those blog awards. The guy said I run an “amazing blog.” Which is an awesome and kind thing for someone to say to me and after this post all I can think of is joke’s on you, Jack. I’m going to bed.)
Yesterday was an insanely long and exhausting day. I found out I was going to be the principal for the day when I woke up and checked my email at six o’clock in the morning, then seriously considered deliberately breaking a leg so that I wouldn’t have to go in.
After work, I went to my in-laws’ place, we had my FIL’s birthday dinner, then I borrowed his van, drove to our house (on the other side of town), put half a bed into it, drove to my parents’ house, dropped it off, drove back, picked up the other half of the bed, drove back to my parents’ house, dropped that off, then went back to my in-laws’ place, gave my FIL his van back, then drove all the way back to my own house. 9:00 PM by the time I finally actually got home.
My wife, who I had warned not to ask me about my day around her parents, was finally allowed to ask me about my day.
I asked her to be absolutely sure that she wanted to know.
She said she did.
And I ranted for an hour and a half.
I would very badly like to share this story with you, but I suspect it would be a 5000-word post, and I’m not sure how well I can nutshell it. Plus, I’m at OtherJob, and while it’s cold and rainy I feel like I ought to at least make a pretense at actually working.
And, God, is this going to take a long time to type out. It’ll be hilarious if I do it right– because it didn’t happen to you— but I don’t know that I have the stamina right now, because today wasn’t exactly short either.
I enjoy this sign quite a bit: “There are cameras in the parking lot, but we’re not watching them, so do whatever you want.” The misspelling of “management” is just the icing on the cake.
