- It is
7:307:45 pm … - I took a five hour nap this afternoon …
- I have just now managed to put on socks and comfy sweat pants despite having spent the entire day uncomfortably cold …
- And site traffic has been garbage for the last few days for some reason so no one is going to see this anyway …
- I am going to declare the day a wash, decide that I am decompressing from work, and go to bed early without any real thought of accomplishing things today.
Tag: spring break
#REVIEW: Galileo’s Daughter, by Dava Sobel
I’m trying to decide which overused sentence I should start this post with, and I can’t make a decision.
Because unfortunately, while I haven’t read this book before, I feel like I’ve written this post before. Dava Sobel’s excellent Galileo’s Daughter is a biography of a genius, and, well, I think you probably already know if you want to read a really good biography of Galileo. The title makes it sound like a thousand different literary fiction novels– there are so many The So-and-So’s Daughter novels out there that I’m surprised that there isn’t a parody of them with that exact title– but no, this book is at least a third or so about Suor Maria Celeste, Galileo’s oldest daughter, through the prism of the surprisingly large corpus of letters we have from her to him. Suor Maria was a cloistered nun, and her letters, or at least the translation of the letters in this book, show her to be a woman of lively intellect and wit, and starting each chapter with an excerpt of one of her letters was an inspired choice.
But ultimately this is a book about Galileo– a book called Suor Maria Celeste’s Father would not have sold many copies– and, well, Galileo was Goddamned fascinating, so if the author is of even middling talent writing a good book about him should not be especially difficult, and as it turns out Dava Sobel possesses far more than the typical allotted share of talent. So maybe this isn’t as comprehensive a review as I might have thought I was going to write when I sat down, but I assume the You Should Read This is still coming through at sufficient volume for you to hear it. Because you should.
Most of us have some sort of memories of Spring Break, although I suspect for most people they involve parties, or beaches, or some form of public drunkenness. For me, on the other hand, my strongest memory of Spring Break, one I reminisce about every time my own break rolls around, involves going to see a movie on the first night of a Spring Break in grad school with a good friend of mine who is a professor at Oxford now. We had to stand outside to wait for tickets in a driving, wet, utterly bullshit snowstorm in downtown Chicago, and Bill stepped out of line for a moment, threw his arms over his head, yelled “SPRING BREAK!” at the top of his lungs, and rejoined the line without another word.
I may not have partied enough as a young man, is what I’m saying here. And I openly laughed at anyone who asked me what I was “doing” for my break. I’m going to be sitting in a damn chair reading a book, that’s what I’m going to be doing. And it will be glorious.
In which it is still somehow not Friday
… you have to be kidding, right? This week has to be over. It HAS to be.
In theory, at least, tomorrow should be easy; today’s second round of unit tests went way better than Tuesday’s did, and a lot of the kids are chomping at the bit to retake the tests they did poorly on. A bunch of them won’t be there on account of it’s the last day before Spring Break, and a bunch more won’t be there because there’s a behavior/grades reward party thing for the 3rd quarter for the last couple of hours of the day and they can’t go, so they’re just going to stay home. Classes will be about half an hour long. I can put up with anybody for half an hour.
But holy shit, this week. I may take a brain pill tomorrow morning just to limit my emotional volatility; it seems unlikely that I’m gonna get punched in the fucking face again tomorrow but if it does happen again I can’t promise I won’t seriously injure the kid involved.
One way or another, I’m about nineteen and a half hours away from Spring Break. So long as I don’t die, I should be okay. We’ll see.
Two more days
I know I’ve been a broken record this week, but holy God, am I tired. It is utter madness that this week has been six weeks long and yet somehow it is still only Wednesday. Like … I just … what?
We have been doing the exact same type of assignment all week, and the sameness of that combined with the fact that, yes, still, I’m teaching the exact same lesson to all of my classes means that the week has taken on this insane Groundhog’s Day flavor, which is no doubt contributing to the fact that Monday through Wednesday have taken nineteen years. I’m also doing this thing where I’m coming up with good ideas for posts during the day then sitting down at my desk in the evenings and just … staring. I do remember a couple– I need to talk more about the new desk and I want to review Ocean’s Echo by Everina Maxwell, which I really enjoyed, but I’m too knackered to do either of those things right now. So instead I’m just gonna complain for a couple of paragraphs and then go sit in a room with my wife and son for a while.
Two more. I can do this.
In which being stupid works out
I cannot calendar. I don’t know if you can calendar, and I feel like I used to be able to calendar to some degree of accuracy or another, but I have lost the ability. I don’t know how long things take, I don’t know how long ago things happened, and it is generally impossible for me to keep track of such minor details as holidays, birthdays and dates that my son might have off of school that I don’t, where we need to provide some sort of child care for him, since it turns out that you really can’t just drop them off at school on days off.
And! For once! This deficiency has finally worked out for me, as I discovered today that April 1, which is not this Friday but is instead next Friday, and was previously thought of as the last day of school before Spring Break, is an asynchronous e-learning day. Did I know this? I did not. It’s even the day after Parent-Teacher conferences, so our district did something sensible and I didn’t even notice!
What that means is that this morning I thought I had to survive ten school days until Spring Break, and now, magically, I have survived one day and I only need to survive for eight more! Because days with no students do not count.
Woohoo!
Interior crocodile alligator
(If you don’t understand the post title, don’t worry about it and don’t ask.)
(Also, fun WordPress fact: if you change the size of an image, it will not display as centered once you publish even if it is resized and centered in the editor.)
Just a couple of things right now, mostly so that I can say I actually posted today, now that it’s nine PM: First, I left the house for the third time since all hell broke loose, and had both my wife and my son with me, since we were dropping food off for both of our dads and the boy hasn’t seen either of them in too long. We talked about when the last time the three of us had been in the car together on the way up to my stepfather’s, and determined that it was very likely in February. The trip home from Chicago on our anniversary, specifically. Insane.
I beat Nioh 2 yesterday, which somehow took ninety hours— I am a completist, and wanted to do everything— despite making progress at a pretty damn solid clip. I’m tossing around writing a full review despite having raved about it in a few posts already; suffice it to say it’s a spectacular fucking game; better than the original, I think, which was a game that I absolutely loved. I have been gaming since the Atari 2600 and I think we are reaching the point where the PS4 is my favorite game console I’ve ever owned.
Tomorrow is the last day of Spring Break, which is going to be weird, since I’m still not actually going back to work in any meaningful fashion. I’m going to try and get all of next week’s lessons set up by the end of the day so I can sort of set it and forget it; we’ll see how well that works. Anybody have suggestions on how to teach stats to 8th graders remotely? Because right now … yeah, it’s gonna be kind of challenging.
I am also going to try and get something up on Patreon tomorrow. Stop laughing, goddammit.
9:07 PM, Sunday April 12th: 555,398 confirmed infections; 22,023 American deaths.
A brief thought concerning corporal punishment
I basically forgot to blog today. I’ve done an astonishingly good job avoiding the Internet across the board beyond what was necessary to get my last little bit of grading done before Spring Break– yeah, I’m on Spring Break, somehow– and other than the couple of hours it took to do that I’ve basically either had my nose in a book or been sitting in front of the PS4. Not a bad way to spend a Saturday where I can’t leave the house, mind you, but I seriously just had a sort of “internet? what?” moment a bit ago.
We have decided to watch the entire Fast and Furious series while I am home, by the way. Right now we’re about 20 minutes into the first one and literally every object on the screen looks like it was filmed separately on a greenscreen. I don’t understand why this movie looks so terrible. I may end up having to livetweet a few of these, we’ll see.
Anyway.
Something occurred to me tonight as we were putting the boy to bed, and this is going to be one of those lead-ins where the lead-in is longer than the actual point of the post– but I swat my kid on the ass as a joke all the time, right? I’ve never spanked him, literally never laid a finger on him in anger, and neither has my wife. But I swat the kid on the ass as a joke all the time, particularly as I’m putting him to bed. Most nights end with a hug and a swat on the ass. And tonight, for no particular reason, I swatted him a little harder than usual, to the point where I noticed it. Did he? No. Not at all. He squealed like he usually does– it’s part of the game, basically– but if he had any idea that I’d swatted him any harder than I usually do he didn’t react to it.
Now, again, I’ve never spanked him and never hit him with the intent to hurt him. Not once. And the thought that floated through my head and triggered this piece is that if I did decide I was going to spank my kid, with the intent of it being painful and in some way theoretically modifying and/or punishing his behavior, I would have to hit him harder than I have ever hit anyone before. Which, okay, isn’t saying a lot, as while I’ve broken up dozens of fights over the years I haven’t been in one since fourth grade– but …
Yeah. I’m not doing that to my son.
That’s all.
On temporary and uncharacteristic bursts of optimism
I was entertained– this is genuine, I’m not trying to be passive-aggressive here– at how little attention my post about Sekiro got the other day. Clearly there isn’t a huge audience around here for wild technical musings about video games unless I’m complaining (complaining always gets attention). That said, we’re invoking the My Blog My Rules Goddammit covenant here, because my ass beat Genichiro Ashina earlier today, a feat that somehow only twenty-five percent of the players of this game have managed in the nine days since it came out, and I am damned proud of myself. So: booyah, motherfuckers.
ALSO! I have put new stuff on my Patreon twice in the last few days after ignoring it (and pausing charges to my Patrons; I don’t take your money if I don’t give you anything in return) for a couple of months. There have been two first chapters of old, abandoned projects put up– neither of those ever got finished, but if people like what they see in those first chapters, maybe I’ll revisit them. Remember, $2 a month gets you a whole book. We like books, right?
Today’s the first day of Spring Break, and while we don’t have any real plans for the week I have high hopes that I’ll get something done for the two conventions I’ll be going to this April– a new banner, at least, since the old ones are getting a little raggedy(*). I have been completely dry as far as writing fiction goes for all of 2019, basically, and dammit I’m gonna fix that this week. We’re gonna get something creative accomplished up in here if it kills me. And it’s not gonna kill me.
This is gonna be a big week, dammit. Big.
(*) ConGlomeration in Louisville, April 19-21, and LaffyCon in Lafayette on April 27 and 28. Are you near either of them? Come see me! I actually have some free tickets for LaffyCon, if anyone’s nearby and wants ’em.
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