I had one of the worst days of my career today, I think, and absolutely the worst single day of the year; I had gone the entire school year without breaking up a fight and today I had to prevent one, break up another, and then put up with some absolutely fucking unhinged and immature behavior from parents that very much should have gotten them arrested and trespassed and somehow resulted in neither thing happening. Then tonight was the literal last band concert I ever have to go to, which I was far too exhausted to properly appreciate, and during which I had to put up with even more shit parenting from what appeared to be two different families in the row in front of us who were bound and determined to ignore their feral-assed children.
I have had more than enough, I really don’t want to go to work tomorrow, I don’t know how I’m going to interact with the kid whose parents showed their asses (“I never realized you were the adult in the house” is probably something I shouldn’t say) and I still have a statement to write about all of that in which I am not allowed to cuss or impugn the parenting, intelligence or sanity of the other individuals involved.
Christ, I have never hated a year as much as I hate 2026.
My son will be attending the same high school that both my wife and I graduated from, and he had an appointment with his counselor tonight to get his freshman schedule set up. I wasn’t really sure if all three of us needed to go, but we all went anyway, and we spent a little bit of time after the meeting wandering around the building.
My head is still kind of swimming. There has been an immense amount of renovation in the — God — thirty-two years since I graduated, which means that fully half of what I remember literally isn’t there anymore and if it’s still there everything around it is different. There were occasional flashes of “Yes, I remember this hallway” or “Yes, I remember this stairwell,” but nothing seemed to connect to anything else the way I remember any more. I’m not even completely sure I went there any longer.
Also, my son is about to be in high school and I graduated from high school thirty-two years ago, and I’ll be over here, in the corner, crumbling into dust for the rest of the night.
That is more literal and less insulting a statement than it might seem. I am about to turn fifty this summer and I spend a positively unhealthy proportion of my income on comic books and Legos. I spend so much money on Legos that I am noticing that the technically-proper singular (it’s “Lego,” not “Legos,” believe it or not) is starting to sneak into my vocabulary; I am not someone who can accuse anyone of being too old for anything they enjoy except under circumstances of the most rank hypocrisy.
No, what I mean is I was born a couple of years too early for Pokémon to be a part of my youth. This is the real dividing line between Gen X and the Millennials, people; if Pokémon was a part of your childhood or late adolescence, or your friends’ childhood or late adolescence, you’re a Millennial. If it wasn’t, you’re either a Gen Xer or a girl, and we all know girls don’t count.
(That was a joke, shut up.)
My son has been into Pokémon since he was three or four. He has absorbed all of this shit entirely on his own, because his mother and I don’t know a damn thing about it. And he has only just now, at the ripe old age of fourteen, decided that he wants to learn how to play the game. And he is putting together a “deck,” which is a thing you use for card games, apparently, and he and I spent two hours at a soon-to-be-going-out-of-business card and game store today searching through thousands and thousands of bulk Pokémon cards in hopes of finding the exact cards he wanted.
We were, all told, more successful than I might have guessed going in. That thing up there, or at least one of them, is a Toxel, and goal #1 was to find a Toxel card. We found a few different ones and he just kept adding goals as we continued to sort through huge boxes of cards; I kept one eye out for the stuff he was looking for (any “dragon” types, any cards in Japanese, just for the hell of it, fairy types, and a half-dozen or so specific Poképeople) and another out for anything with a ridiculous enough name that I wanted to buy it. We were spending $20 for all the cards we could fit into a specific box, and that was hundreds of cards, so I really could grab any card I found momentarily interesting without worrying about whether it was any good or he was going to reject it. He announced that he wants me to play with him; normally my son expressing a wish to spend time with me under any circumstances is a great thing; that said, I’ve managed to avoid getting into CCGs for all this time for a reason– I know how my brain works and these shits can get expensive when you’re not taking advantage of a store closing.
He said something about wanting to learn Magic: The Gathering the other day, too, and I told him he was allowed to play it as soon as he got a job and could buy the cards himself. I will happily give him a car on the day he gets his driver’s license; I draw the line at Magic cards.
The punch line is he’d rather have the cards.
I’m not sure if that makes me a winner as a parent or not.
The boy wasn’t feeling well today, so we both got to stay home since my wife is out of town until Friday morning(*), and … blech. I tend to spend all day gaslighting myself when I’m home because I’m sick, and when I am absolutely not sick at all and home anyway the feeling is powerful indeed. Like, I’m union; I get family sick days and frankly no one gets to challenge me on my sick days one way or another anyway. But I’ve spent all day being twitchy and nervous for no goddamn reason at all.
I, uh, don’t really have anything other than that. Today didn’t suck nearly as hard as the rest of the week has but that’s not exactly a difficult bar to clear. Hopefully I can get through tomorrow without any illnesses, car accidents or people getting shot. We’ll see.
(*) Because my schedule means I leave before he gets out of bed, and because my wife has a job where she can work from home effectively any time she wants at the drop of a hat, she is nearly always the one who stays home. Not because hurr durr sick kid is Mom’s job.
Sometimes you stay home from work because you feel like hell, which means you have to push your Algebra final back a day. But then your son also has an Algebra final on Wednesday, so you end up having to prepare an 8th grader for an Algebra final anyway.
I was gonna blog tonight but instead I took my kid to get a weirdly-scheduled evening MRI (he’s fine, don’t worry) and now that I’m back home all I want to do is sleep.
