miley cyrus – Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com

This is at least the second time that a Neal Stephenson book has started off really really cool and then flubbed the landing. I was all ready to write an effusively positive review of this book, which is a near-future novel about climate change and geoengineering, and then it just sort of … ends, with several storylines unresolved and the overall feeling that Stephenson had a page count he was expected to stick to and didn’t feel like going back and cutting anything out so he just ended the book. You may remember my review of Seveneves from several years ago, which is roughly five hundred pages of good, then a massive time skip and another three hundred pages of garbage. This does not do that; there is a brief time skip at one point but it keeps with the same characters afterwards and generally isn’t a huge misstep, even though it scared the hell out of me. But it does this thing where you’re following several characters whose stories knit together and one character whose story doesn’t until the end of the book, when they finally do come together, and they come together in such a ridiculous and unnecessary way that it made me feel like the extra character would probably have been best cut entirely from the book. Don’t get me wrong; it’s a Neal Stephenson book, so there’s a lot of interesting stuff here, but I’m starting to feel like this guy’s move is that he writes books that are chock full of cool stuff and interesting ideas and do not actually knit together into satisfying books. I gave it three stars on Goodreads; I could probably justify four or two depending on my mood.

Also, the novel is horrendously misnamed.

I went with the Termination Shock cover for my post image because the cover of Miley Cyrus’ new live album, Attention, is a close-up of her ass in a thong. Which, like, I don’t disapprove of, exactly, but neither do I need it spread all over my blog, and my normal way of listening to music on my computer involves the album art being visible and I had to turn that off too. I’m not even sure why I bought this, to be honest, it kind of happened without my conscious mind being involved, but I liked it a hell of a lot and I really want Miley to do an album of Janis Joplin covers. Her most recent incarnation seems to be leaning into the raspy, twangy nature of her voice and into rock much more than the pop music she used to do, and I like it a lot. The weirdest thing? The audience interaction is pretty good throughout the album, but the last song is Party in the USA, as you might expect, and the audience acts as if they’ve never heard the song before. It’s really weird.

Anyway, give it a look.

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I am– forgive me for knowing about this, much less bringing it up– kind of really enjoying the Sinead O’Connor/Miley Cyrus thing going on right now. The first one was just interesting in an intellectual sort of “hey, this happened” kind of way; the second one interests me as a writer. I knew Sinead O’Connor was kinda fucked up but I wasn’t aware she had a bitchy side and I certainly wasn’t aware that her bitchy side was awesome. The second letter has this wonderful sort of “Ok, look, we can end this now, but here are my knives if you are foolish” sort of feel to it, as if O’Connor has absorbed Cyrus’ semiliterate trailer trash Twitter response to her initial letter, shrugged, and moved Miley to her mental “destroy” file. The phrase “you have one last chance” doesn’t appear anywhere in the letter, but it should. I really hope there’s a third.

I mean, Christ, the line “You could really do with educating yourself, that is if you’re not too busy getting your tits out to read” is art.

I voted to approve the contract, but I’m not terribly happy about it. Oh, it’s not bad, as they go– we’re getting a small stipend this year basically just for the hell of it and we actually get our first real raise in seven years (two whole percent!) next year, that is assuming we don’t get placed in one of the two lowest evaluation categories. More money is good. I like money, even if 2% after having frozen salaries since 2007 is kind of bullshit. It’s still better than the no-money we’ve been getting on the last several contracts.

The problem is that this round of negotiation really has driven home one important fact for me: That two percent hike got eaten by inflation years ago. We are never really getting a raise again, and by “we” in this case I basically mean all of Indiana’s teachers. I get a yearly pay raise at my fucking minigolf job, people. The way things used to work, we got yearly step increases until you hit sixteen years of experience and after that you’re depending on actual increases to the pay scale (ie, “raises”) for any further increase in salary. What this meant is that if you stuck it out long enough eventually everybody made the same amount– sixteen years is a long time, granted, but it leveled you out sooner or later.

Now? Anyone in my district who makes more money than me right now is going to make more than me forever, and anyone under me– particularly anyone unfortunate enough to have started in the last few years since even step increases became impossible– is going to make less than me forever. There’s no merit pay of any kind that can increase salary– not that I even think that’s a good idea, mind you– and no bonuses for good performance. There’s only the stick; you don’t get any raise of any kind if you end up in the lowest two evaluation categories, but it’s not like you get more money if you get a superior ranking.

It’s unfair in a way that I really, really don’t like. Teaching is already a career with effectively no mobility– a teacher is a teacher is a teacher and while most districts do name team leaders and things like that (a job I’ve held myself on a few occasions) there is no actual salary increase attached to that. As a teacher, I’ll never be anyone’s boss unless I move to administration– which isn’t teaching. There’s literally no way to be promoted. Which means that the fact that there are teachers in my district who not only make ten grand more than me but will make ten grand more than me forever really stick in my craw. Similarly, I’m mentoring a first-year teacher this year; I make fifteen thousand dollars a year or so more than she does and I will make fifteen thousand dollars a year or so more than her forever, until she wises up and realizes that spending her entire life making $32,000 a year is untenable. (She gets a raise to $34,000 in 2014-15; the poor schmucks stuck in the bottom two pay steps get a little bump. But she’ll be stuck there forever.) Once she realizes that she can make better money and have much less stress in her life doing something else, she’ll be gone, and she’ll be replaced by another 22-year-old making the same $34K that she did until she quit.

Note, also, that while teachers making more than base pay will be quitting a lot, or retiring, they will only be being replaced by teachers making base pay. Which means that you travel far enough down the road– and I bet it won’t be more than seven or ten years– and something perilously close to all of us will be stuck at that base pay level. Which people will put up with until they have kids, then they’ll move on to jobs where they’re actually treated like educated professionals, and kiss teaching in a public school district goodbye.

Which is a feature, and not a bug. This is what they want, and this is what state law is written to do.

I fucking hate Indiana.