I am more or less taking tonight off, but I thought I’d let everyone know that my student from yesterday was back in class today and all appears to be well.
Today kinda sucked
Trigger warning: suicide.
Spoiler alert: everybody is OK.
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In which I’ve wasted the weekend
Welp.
Friday night I took an Emergency Brain Pill. I wasn’t necessarily having a mental health emergency or anything really close to it, but I basically use these pills when I can’t get my brain to shut off and let me sleep, and what with the God-tier sleep apnea I apparently also have, and having survived my first week in the new building, I figured I was owed a decent night’s sleep. The pill kicked my ass, rendering me a useless, sluggish mess all day Saturday and requiring a three-hour nap in the middle of the afternoon. Then today my son had his Lego Robotics competition, which somehow went from 8:15 in the morning to 4:30 in the afternoon, and by the end of it the boy was so bored he was in tears.
I have … some issues with how this competition was organized. Nothing I can really yell at anybody about, because there’s only one competition, and they didn’t place high enough to advance to the state-level competition in December, but from what I can tell most of the people involved are okay with that. Regardless, we got home around five and all of us died. I had grading planned for tonight, and fuck that. They can wait a little longer, they’ll be okay.
Sometime in the next couple of days I need to do a book review– the short version is that Nghi Vo’s The Chosen and the Beautiful is magnificent– and think out loud a bit about how grading needs to work in my new building. But this is all I’ve got for tonight, I think.
Woohoo, and advice to the Democrats
Today went exactly as I thought it would, as opposed to how I feared it would. Everybody, from the building principal to the security guards to the kids, seemed really nice, and there don’t seem to be any shouty people in my hallway yet, and other than some casual profanity in the hallway I didn’t even see any misbehavior. Learning the LMS system the new district uses is going to crack my skull open, and right now I kind of hate it, and I talked all day so my throat feels like somebody ran an electric mixer in it for a couple of minutes, but other than that? No complaints.
I had a whole bit here about the Speaker of the House but having written half of it, I’ve decided it’s dumb and I need to learn more before I put anything dumb where people can read it. So … yeah. My advice to the Democrats is to listen to people who are smarter than me.
Anxiety Dump 2
It’s absolutely wonderful, this feeling that your brain is betraying you. I know how tomorrow is going to go. It’s going to be fine. I might have a minor technical hiccup or two, possibly involving a photocopier or the ancient projector in my classroom or the fact that I haven’t touched a Windows device in, probably, literal decades. That’s the worst that’s going to happen. The kids are going to be fine. It’s going to be honeymoon time and beyond that I took some time today to go through my kids’ discipline records and something like 75% of them have no referrals at all, and my worst kids have maybe one a week, with a lot of those being something called “refusal to identify self,” which … well, I’m actually going to ask them tomorrow or Tuesday how it is that I have kids who have no referrals other than five or six refusals to identify themselves, because that doesn’t make any sense to me– if I’m mad at a kid for refusing to identify him- or herself, I feel like there’s probably something else going on that I could have put on that referral? Something that maybe trumps the refusal to identify?
I dunno. At the moment it’s a minor mystery.
And nonetheless, despite the fact that I have changed schools many times, despite the fact that I have had nineteen first days of school and this will be the twentieth and I can do these things in my sleep, I am crawling out of my skin with anxiety right now. Like, I’m getting physical manifestations of it. I’m sweatier than I ought to be and jumpy as fuck. I’d take a brain pill except that the newer emergency pills have a bad habit of turning me into a slug the day after I take them (they are listed for “up to four times a day” on the bottle, and I cannot imagine what the fuck would happen if I took four of them in a day) and I cannot be a slug tomorrow.
I’m also being deeply stupid about having to get to work earlier than normal. I generally got to my previous school at 8:30; I have to be at this one at 7:30. That’s an hour earlier, and I don’t have to drop my son off. So I get up an hour earlier. This isn’t complicated. I’ve already changed my alarm and everything. And yet, bullshit abounds regardless. It’s just before 8:00 right now and I’m genuinely concerned that I should be starting to get ready to bed.
Just shut up, brain, I’m tired of you. I know it’s been a stressful week and realistically it’s about to be another one, but Christ, enough. We know how to do this. It’s going to be fine.
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