Tonight was actually a really nice first day back, but in the way of every First Day of School, I have a sore throat; spending all day projecting my voice after over a week of talking 1) normally and 2) much less can be kind of brutal. I also don’t have a ton to talk about, so I’m just going to vaguely wave hello in everyone’s direction and go read a book or something.
(Actually, quick question: anyone familiar with Sentrel Bath Systems? If you are, mind dropping your thoughts on the product into comments?)
This is the second day in a row where I have walked out of my last class of the day so overstimulated I was nearly vibrating, and … gah. This is an absolutely insane thing to complain about but I think my kids like me too much this year; nine of them attached themselves to my desk during sixth hour and I just cannot handle that much sustained attention from teenagers despite over two decades of teaching. Get away from me, all of you.
This is just to say that this week was utterly insane and I’m mentally shot and I’ll try and give you a book review or something tomorrow, but I need to go play Nioh 3 right now because I’m not good for anything else.
I need someone to help me understand how the hell I know about Groundhog Day, and no, the answer isn’t the movie, because that came out when I was 17 and, trust me, everybody knew what Groundhog Day was before the movie came out. It is absolutely unreal to me that this weird little holiday, which by rights ought to be confined to one or two tiny ethnic conclaves in no more than one or two states, is practically a national holiday. It makes no goddamn sense, and what’s weirder is that I live in America, a country where “racism” is the answer to any question starting with the word “why” 90% of the time, and I can’t figure out any way how racism might contribute to me knowing about the day that the terrified river rat lets everyone know what the weather is going to be.
I mean, have you heard of Casimir Pulaski day? The weirdest unexpected day off of my life was due to Casimir Pulaski day. Have you heard of Dyngus Day? Having heard of it for the first time just now, are you at all surprised that Polish people are involved? People talking about Groundhog Day and taking it seriously should be viewed with only slightly less frightened condescension than snake handling, and once the phrase Gobbler’s Knob enters the conversation … Christ.
Anyway, every single other thing I might choose to talk about today is horrible, so I’m leaving you with that.
Many years ago– I have told this story before, but in a previous version of this blog, I think– I had a deeply weird conversation with a second-generation Vietnamese student in one of my classes where I had to convince him that he was Asian. This was long enough ago that you still had to fill out a bunch of bubbles with a pencil in order to take a standardized test, and he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to fill out in the Race category. His first guess was that he was white, since he had been born here. And if the kid was younger I’d make an argument that I could see it; he was not born in Asia, which may in and of itself have short-circuited his brain out of choosing “Asian,” particularly if his parents only ever referred to their family as Vietnamese, which of course would not have been an option on the list.
He was an eighth grader at the time.
At any rate, no, son, fill out Asian, please, and then go home and have a conversation with your parents about whether there is anything else about your identity that they have not mentioned in the last fourteen years.
Today, out of nowhere, I had a student (Puerto Rican, I think) walk up to me during passing period and ask me if I was white. The look I gave her must have answered her question, because before I actually said anything she clarified with the following:
“No, I mean like real white. All white. White-white.”
Just in case you’ve forgotten, this is what I look like:
So … yes. Completely white. All the white. Flat White. Damn near pink, really.
After I finished yesterday’s blog post I browsed around on that hat website for a little while, coveting many of the hats and wondering how many hats is too many hats, when I noticed that the bottom of their main page claims to “find your perfect hat” in less than 60 seconds. Well, hell, I want my perfect hat! They made me give them my email address, but whatever; I just had Safari make one up for me, which is one of my very favorite features of that app, and then jumped into the process.
This was the first question:
… as God is my witness, I have no fucking idea. I need a z-axis. I don’t fit on that scale at all and I have no idea what even the middle point between the Pope (which Pope? The Jesuit current guy or the previous dude, whose shoes were made from baby seals and dyed with the blood of virgins?) and Elton John, and Christ, which Elton John?
I chose a 5. I couldn’t justify any other number. I don’t know what the fuck a five even means here; I thought the pain scale didn’t make any sense but this is so much worse.
At any rate, I didn’t particularly like the three hats they suggested. None of them are my perfect hat. I’m considering going through the test again and answering that question with a 1 and a 10 to see what changes. The really inexplicable part is that I’m pretty certain that neither the Pope nor Elton John would be caught dead in any hats being sold on the site.
The weirdest thing? This image appears elsewhere on the site:
I think four of those people look great and one looks amazingly, uncharacteristically dorky. Guess which one?
Anyway, how many hats can I have? That was a real question.
Have you ever abandoned a long-term hobby? Not, like, because you weren’t physically capable of it any longer for some reason or some external reason, but just realized you weren’t interested in something that you’d been doing for decades and stopped doing it?
