I dunno what the headline means either, but a new Atmosphere album just came out and I’m listening to it and that lyric from “Neptune” stood out for some reason(*). I have been playing Silksong for several hours, hating most of it, and I still stand by my thorough review from the other day. The game’s fucking masochistic; it’s not fun-hard, it’s bang your head against the wall until the pain stops hard, and I can’t explain why I’m still playing the fucking thing. I’m not relaxed when I’m playing, I’m stressed out and angry, and that’s … not only kind of shockingly immature for a motherfucker who is going to be fifty in less than a year, it’s also not really a good use for leisure time? Like, there are other things I could be doing. There are even any number of other unpleasant things I could be doing that would at least result in, say, the house being cleaner or some sort of shit like that.
It is possible that I spend too much of my leisure time doing things that actively make me unhappy. I should find a therapist and have a conversation about that.
(*) Also don’t know why the album is called “Jestures,” but I’m on my first listen so it might become apparent eventually. There’s no title track.
So, um, these showed up today. They are hand-numbered, 41/199. When I die, my wife can sell them to pay for my funeral. They will make me happy every time I walk past my bookshelves for the rest of my life.
Have I read the books yet? Nope. Although now I kind of have to. We’ll make it a summer project.
Teachers complain a lot, right? The understatement of the decade, surely. Like, read the site for five minutes. Teachers complain a lot. But one thing I feel like doesn’t get discussed enough is how emotionally fucked up the end of the school year can be, and now that I’m down to the last three days I’m starting to really have to stare that in the face. This has, on the balance, not been a bad year– there have certainly been moments, there always are, but in the main it’s been a pretty good year. Top half, let’s say.
Some years aren’t all that bad– last year comes to mind. But this year there are a good half dozen kids who I really, really like, who I’ve grown pretty close to over the course of the year … and I get to see them three more times and that’s it. They’re gone. And because I teach 8th grade, it’s worse, because they’re not just no longer in my class, they’re gone entirely. Like, maybe I’ll see them when they do their grad walk in four years, but that barely counts? And even if they do stay in touch, and some of them do, of course, it’s not like this is the kind of relationship where I can drag somebody out to lunch or go see a movie or some shit like that. Like, not even in a “that’s kinda weird” sorta way! A “people are going to assume terrible crimes are happening!” sort of way!
I don’t want to commit crimes! I just think your kid is cool and I would like to keep them in my life after seeing them nearly every fucking day for a year.
Next Thursday is going to really suck, is what I’m saying.
Related, but not really: I had a parent email me about a concern over the final, which in and of itself is just fine, but in the middle of the message she threw in “as you know, he tried taking his life a little over a month ago,” and NO THE MERRY FUCK I DID NOT, MA’AM. I thought for a minute she had mentioned it and I had forgotten, somehow, and looked through every previous email I’ve gotten from her, and … NOPE. There very much was no message about it.
And, like, how do you respond to that? Do I just pretend she told me? I ended up not directly addressing it one way or another and answering the substance of the email, which feels … weirdly flippant, somehow? I feel like I’m yadda-yaddaing a suicide attempt, but I also really don’t want to correct her on it. I may contact our social worker and see if he knew about it, but that potentially opens up an entire different can of worms if he didn’t.
…that’s how it works, right? I’m still sick, by any reasonable standard, although I think the fever has gone away– it helps if you don’t take your temperature!– and the Weird Ear Thing has gotten better enough that I didn’t actually go back into urgent care this morning. I’ve started my antibiotics, finally, although this is still probably a virus.
One way or another, Goddammit, I’m going to work tomorrow, and I’m gonna make some kids know some math whether they like it or not, because I’m tired of this, and if there’s one thing America has taught me over the last eight years it’s that the best way to fix being sick is to pretend you’re not sick any more and then bad things never, ever happen as a result. So Goddammit, that’s the plan.
(I may still go back to urgent care if this ear thing isn’t fully fixed tomorrow. I’m hoping that the antibiotics take it out as a side effect, since it really doesn’t seem to be wax-related. We’ll see.)
Nothing but unwise ideas and shit I shouldn’t write down in my head tonight, so I’m gonna sign off early and play Veilguard. Last teaching day of 2024 tomorrow; the rest of the week is basically babysitting.
I woke up this morning fully intending to go to work and was immediately hit with a wave of nausea so potent that I had to lie back down again before I fell down. If anything, I’ve felt sicker today than I did yesterday, and everyone in the house stayed home from work/school today. My wife suspects food poisoning as all four of us had Burger King on Sunday night; I’m a little skeptical as we didn’t all eat the same thing, but whatever it is, I’m fucking tired of it, and while I’ll still maintain that the symptoms (and the timing) are overlapping pretty damn well with panic attacks, those aren’t contagious.
I am going to work tomorrow if I’m not in the hospital. If I have to throw up out the window of the car on the way there, so fucking be it. I’ve already missed five days out of the last two weeks and I refuse to miss any more between now and Christmas, damn it.
I don’t think I’m recovered from the election yet, and I think yesterday’s illness may have been more along the lines of a panic attack than an actual illness. I have been edgy and stressed the fuck out all day long, to the point where I haven’t been able to read because I can’t focus on anything enough to do it.
I genuinely don’t know how I’m going to make it through another four years of this. I really don’t.
(Hits “publish,” opens BlueSky, discovers Trump has apparently named a Fox News host as Secretary of Defense.)
I need all of you to know something very important: never once in my life, nay, never once in the entire history of the human race, have the Democrats lost a Presidential election the day after I got a Platinum trophy in a PS5 game. It hasn’t happened once.
That is as optimistic as I intend to get. I was burned hard by 2016, as many of you were, and I’m refusing to hope, like, at all right now. I intend to go into tomorrow night being surprised by even the slightest scrap of good news. I can’t afford hope right now. I just can’t.
Minerva Grey asked me this in comments yesterday:
I am curious and a bit afraid to ask because I don’t want to run the risk of being talked into it, but how is watching election returns not detrimental to mental health? It strikes me as doomscolling and hopescrolling combined, and the likelihood of a definitive answer in the wee hours of Wednesday morning (at least on the U.S. east coast) seems highly unlikely.
First, let me be as clear as I can that, while I will be either on my couch or at my desk tomorrow, likely scrolling and reloading on my phone, my iPad, and a laptop simultaneously while watching one or more cable stations, that is because I am insane, in a way entirely different from my actual diagnosed mental illness. I mainline the news during elections, presidential and midterm. I have been like this since I was a teenager, and at 48 I’m not interested in swapping out those particular stripes. I will likely be up very late tomorrow night, and when I finally go to bed it will only be so I can go to sleep and open the news right the hell back up. For me, not throwing myself into as many news sources as I possibly can during that time is what’s going to drive me crazy. I can’t ignore an event of this magnitude. If you can, and if that will help you get through the next 48 hours, I enthusiastically recommend you turn absolutely everything off and do whatever you need to do. I took personal days tomorrow and Wednesday because I know myself and I don’t need to be around my students while I’m stressing this hard. But not watching everything as it comes in is not going to help me.
And while I really don’t want to make any predictions, I actually do think we’re going to have an answer tomorrow night, if not perhaps in the wee hours of the morning, or at the very least we’re going to have some results that point rather conclusively at one answer rather than another. I think when I do go to bed I will have a pretty strong idea of who the winner is going to be, and while there will absolutely be all sorts of litigation afterward, I don’t think it’s going to go much of anywhere.
Of course, I know nothing about politics, and I am wrong all the time, so you don’t need to pay too much attention to that last paragraph, and if we lose via court shenanigans the thing that happens next, where I kill God and leave his body on the steps of the Supreme Court, has absolutely nothing to do with me having made a prediction that some heavenly being, I’m not specifying which one, decided to make cataclysmically wrong, probably out of pure spite.
(I’m taking some refuge in the fact that Joe Biden is President right now, and I’m reminded of something Andrew Jackson once said about another Chief Justice named John: “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.”)
I have done a good job of avoiding both doomscrolling and hopescrolling, because both of them are dangerous to my mental health. I have my lesson plans ready for tomorrow; I am off Tuesday and Wednesday, because no one deserves me, and hopefully the world is still here on Thursday for me to return to work, but I make no Goddamned guarantees, and if I am still a lunatic, I will stay home for a third day in a row.
I have been working on Platinuming Black Myth Wukong all day today and once I am done with that I have a lot of housecleaning, a bunch of books and Dragon Age: Veilguard on deck. I have plenty to keep me from thinking until it’s time to inject cable news into my veins for 24 hours straight on Tuesday night.
