Tag: retail therapy

I managed to not kill anyone today

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

Believe it or not, this post is not about my students.

(It was a long day, but by “late April in a middle school during a week where we took two 150-minute standardized tests” standards, it was fine.)

I went to Barnes & Noble after work, feeling the need for some retail therapy– it was payday, after all, and after discovering that pay-per-teaching-hour for that summer school gig I was talking about yesterday was a fucking astounding $94.20, I went ahead and applied(*)– and so I drove to the mall, since that’s where our Barnes & Noble is. You can’t see it in that picture, but the entrance to the lot is just past the bottom-right of that picture, and I hope I can explain this coherently: the lanes to enter the lot split off, and there’s a yield sign, but not a stop sign, for people entering the lot. There is a little triangular raised divider in between the lanes to turn left, toward B&N, and right, toward … I dunno, I never turn right.

A car in front of me pulled toward the right, stopped, and let two people out, who immediately walked in front of my car without so much as glancing back over their shoulders. To be clear, that’s not a crosswalk and there are not supposed to be people there– but if they are, they should be fucking looking for cars. If I hadn’t been paying attention, I’d have hit at least one of them.

Anyway, I bought some books. I didn’t mean to, to be honest, but it happened anyway.

And on the way home the same fucking thing happened again, where a couple– an adult and an older teenager this time, one of them walking a bike– just blithely crossed the road in front of me, ignoring the fact that oncoming traffic had a green light and without so much as glancing in my direction. This would absolutely have led to deaths if I hadn’t been paying attention. The other one would have been a hard bump at worst, since there’s no way to drive fast into that parking lot– broken bones, maybe, but it would have taken some extra bad luck on top of all the stupid for anyone to die. This? If I’d glanced down at the wrong moment I’d have plowed into them at 35 miles an hour. And, again, it’s not like they saw me coming and dared me to hit them. Not even a glance at the direction of oncoming traffic, either time.

I’m not leaving the house for the rest of the weekend.

(*) $6500 for 23 days with students, including half an hour of prep, half an hour of breakfast, and three hours of actual instruction, which is the only part I’m counting. The first week of June is all trainings and onboarding.

In which this isn’t fair

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Politics2 Comments

It is an unbelievably perfect demonstration of how fucking perverse all of existence is right now that, literally less than ten minutes after telling my wife that I was getting (hah!) stir-crazy and wanted to go out and impulse-buy something, I went outside and checked the mail and found a brand-new Goddamned Best Buy card waiting for me. The card currently carries no balance at all; I typically use it only for large purchases (really, the only reason I ever enter a Best Buy nowadays) and the last thing I bought was my desktop, which is a 2017 model. I could use a new laptop, as the battery on the old one is starting to go, or I could make the smarter choice and just replace the damn battery. Similarly, for the first time since my initial upgrade I’ve cast an eye at the new Apple Watch, but there’s just no good reason to do that either. In either case it would be spending money just to spend money, and I’m trying to be smarter about that crap nowadays.

(I do expect to have to shell out the money for the laptop battery pretty soon, which will be a couple hundred bucks. But the thing is … six? seven? years old and there’s no speed issues at all, and if I bought a new one it would be north of two grand. The only problem is the battery, and since I don’t go anywhere I can keep it plugged in most of the time. I even still have my work laptop at home in case of emergencies.)

(Checks to see if BB has PS5s available)

(They do not)

In general, the election has failed to improve my mood. Other than the presidency, which is all over but the shouting at this point, I went from “it looks like I’ve lost every other race I care about” the other day to “I have lost every other race I care about” today. The School Board race was especially heinous; not only did the plagiarizer not lose her seat to the crank, but the other district seat up for reelection, another person who voted to return, also won, and the teachers lost their best advocate on the Board in favor of an imperious ass who I am not at all looking forward to having to deal with, ever. My personal interactions with her when she was with the district were never good, plenty of people have much worse stories than I do, and her husband was fired for incompetence.

And yet, because this is South Bend and we hate education here, she actually got the most votes of any of the At-Large candidates. So. Dandy.

But yeah: I’ve been waiting for that moment when it feels like the weight falls off my shoulders, and apparently Biden at least theoretically clinching the Presidency hasn’t done it yet. In theory the rest of the networks (particularly the AP) getting the fuck in line and making the call might help, but I don’t think I’m going to be able to relax until the fucker is hauled out of the White House by his hairpiece, preferably to be tossed directly into jail to die alone in a deep pit. Apparently the AP is waiting for Biden’s margin to exceed half a point before they call Pennsylvania; I’m not sure what the holdup is otherwise. Either way, I thought I was going to feel better about all this by now.