I actually missed a day of iLEARN on Friday, as my wife’s aunt passed away; funerals are genuinely just about the only reason I can see myself taking a standardized testing day (especially a math standardized testing day) off, and, well, it happened. Yesterday and today I was in Chicago at my nephew’s birthday party. I have discovered something about my brother that has changed since he married his wife: if he describes something as a party, I am to take that shit seriously, and assume that it’s not going to be six family members I’ve already met. It’s gonna be twenty people and a bunch of kids and since I officiated his wedding they’re all gonna come up to me and go hey, nice to see you again, how have you been? and because I’m a social coward I’m not going to look any of these epos in the eye and dare them to produce my name.
(Everyone was perfectly nice, to be clear; her family is great, as far as I can tell; my brother married very well. That said I was not prepared for a ton of loud noise and adult mingling.)
Anyway, the point is my ass is tired, and on top of all this there’s some other shit going on where either I am a colossal idiot or my doctors have been seriously misleading me. All of this has eaten up all available headspace that I’ve got at the moment, and I still need to put lesson plans together for tomorrow, and after that I’m going to bed. My own bed. Granted, hearing the phrase “We’ve upgraded you to the presidential suite” Saturday night was pretty cool, but not cool enough that I took any pictures, and my bed is always better than a hotel bed.
So, yeah. I’m home. And I’m tired. How’re you? Anyone want to recommend any low-carb meals by any chance?
Post-Covid, we really don’t go out much any more. Maybe once a month at best. I don’t think anyone’s necessarily worried about catching something from going to dinner at this point, but however fucking many years it’s been since the Goddamned world ended have more or less permanently altered our dining habits. But I was twitching to get out of the house and go do something, and dinner would be easy, so we went to dinner.
The where doesn’t really matter and the details don’t really matter. The place was busier than I’ve ever seen them before– there was a fucking tour bus in a nearby parking lot, and I strongly suspect (though I’m quite confused as to why, for a number of reasons) that the people who had rented that tour bus were in the restaurant.(*) And we got shit service. I spent the entire meal watching the waitress I could see, who was not our waitress, hustling and working her ass off while multiple people either ignored or forgot about simple requests, depending on how charitable you’re being, and by the end of the meal I wanted to tip her.
The thing is, I think of myself as a reasonable person, or at least I like to, and I also think of myself as someone who doesn’t fuck with service workers, which is a rule I won’t break. The problem with that is that when I genuinely do encounter bullshit in public, I’m not great about, like, speaking up for myself. And so I spent the whole fucking meal sitting there and stewing about stupid nonsense like how many motherfuckers do I have to ask before a side of sour cream shows up at my table and, similarly, why is it so fucking hard to get a glass of water in this place?
Like, neither of these things are actually problems. They are minor annoyances at best, but … well, I have been minorly annoyed, apparently, so now I’m venting about it to you.
The best part? I made a comment to my wife as we were waiting (and waiting, and waiting) for her to come pick up the check that I wanted to tip the other waitress, the one who had been working the section my seat was facing and was, again, obviously hustling. This caught my son’s ear and he asked about how tipping worked, which meant that even if I was the kind of guy to short-tip a waitress for bad service, even when I could justify it, I wasn’t about to look like an asshole in front of my kid, so she got 20%.
And then that same kid shut the door in my fucking face as we were walking into the house from the garage, and now I’m mad at everybody, and I’m complaining on the internet.
The end.
(*) Along with, inexplicably, three girls who appeared to be dressed for prom. It’s not prom season– the end of February isn’t anything season– this is not the place you go before prom anyway, and while it’s not as weird as it used to be that there were no guys with them, it was still kinda weird. And since I’m already busy being mad at society for preventing me from unleashing my id in public, I may as well rage against the societal constraint that random strange men don’t get to ask teenage girls why they’re dressed the way that they are, because dammit I wanted to know and why can’t I have everything I want??????
I discovered last night thatthere are some major drawbacks to my CPAP machine; namely, now that I’ve gotten used to the fucking thing I can’t live without it. The power went out last night around 9:00 PM, interrupting a blog post and half a dozen other things because I was not ready for bed at nine. I read for a little while (not a problem, actually, as I generally wear a reading light around my neck and charges last forever) and then tried to go to sleep, only to be met with a dream about not being able to swallow, which … is not the key to a restful night.
And then at about 1:00 in the morning, wham! Every fucking light in the house goes on at once when the power comes back on, including the ones that were off and we accidentally turned on while turning “off” the lights, and including the ones that we didn’t realize were on when the power went out, including every single fucking light in our bedroom for some reason. So I got about four hours out of my CPAP after maybe three hours of massively un-restful sleep and I was a fucking zombie all day as a result.
Every single class today started with me telling my kids that I was half dead and in a tremendously bad mood and that that part was not their fault but how they reacted to it would be, and I got gentler behavior than usual from all but one class. I am still, hours later, a mess, and only a vast amount of work that needed doing has kept me from going to bed early tonight.
Oh, and apparently one of my subs yesterday just, like, passed out in front of the kids. He was back at work today, so I guess he’s okay, but man, everybody wanted to tell me about it. Maybe my room’s cursed? I dunno.
I am bound and determined to get some family time in tonight, so let me just say that if taking over two new classes for which I had to completely rewrite all my curriculum was a bad idea, giving tests to both classes within three days of each other is an insanely bad idea. I have been sitting at my desk writing study guides for an hour and a half. Will they look at them? Probably not.
I remain not in the mood for any of this, where “any of this” can be understood to mean “anything other than sleep,” although apparently I have a job or something that will require me to do some work tonight of some sort or another. I managed to get scammed at a car wash earlier today, discovering that what had been described as a month of car washes for a buck extra than what I was going to spend anyway was actually a monthly subscription to what appears to be their highest tier of car washes. If I hadn’t looked at my receipt I’d have had no damn idea that I’d been signed up for something monthly. I may go back tomorrow and firebomb the place; as it is, my receipt is displayed prominently on my desk so that I remember to cancel this bullshit as soon as it hits their computers. I tried already but they’re claiming the membership doesn’t exist, which I’m choosing to believe is legitimate since it’s literally only a couple of hours old at the moment.
I went the whole weekend without any real social media presence; I didn’t upload anything to the YouTube channel and I didn’t really post here. It floated through my head earlier to just turn everything off, which is a sign of where my head has been at lately. There’s no real worry at the moment about me doing that, but one thing I underestimated about switching jobs is just how much rewriting of absolutely everything I was going to have to do now that I’m at a new district that uses an LMS (Learning Management System) that I’m unfamiliar with. I’m spending more time planning right now than I have had to in years, and it’s meaning hours at the computer after work every day. I shouldn’t have to put this time in next year, or at least not nearly as much of it, but right now it’s hitting me harder than I really thought it was going to. I need to get more efficient about using my prep period at work, which can cut back on some of this, but half the time I’m covering classes during that time so I’d have to do the extra work at home anyway.
This job has added years to my teaching career, I really don’t doubt that, and I’m still enormously better off than I was at the other school, but … God, I’m tired.
I spent the whole day yesterday with my head swimming, and as far as I could tell no other symptoms– just massive, nasty dizziness that I couldn’t find any solution for. I got up around 5:00 this morning to see if it had gone away, and it hadn’t, and given the length of my commute the thought of the drive to work while fighting being tired and dizzy spells seemed … unwise. So I took the day off, slept until about 2:30, and since then I’ve just been, well, staring, mostly.
I’m teaching myself Arabic, finally fulfilling a promise I made to myself when I dropped out of the class a couple of weeks into my freshman year of college. I’ve been using Duolingo fairly religiously and I just bought a “basics” type of textbook, and looking at the image above I can almost parse some letters? Regular Arabic writing is complicated enough for the unskilled Westerner; Arabic calligraphy is a level of insane that I am not yet remotely prepared to deal with. I am aware that English calligraphy is probably harder to decipher than regular English print, but Arabic doesn’t have print, and each letter has three forms depending on where it is in the word, plus the several letters that English has no equivalent for in the first place, so I feel fairly confident in asserting that there is a real difficulty difference here.
I mean, it’s not Russian cursive, which is apparently not a hoax, somehow:
I mean … come the fuck on. I believe Arabic calligraphy is words. I don’t know that I can really convince myself that that shit is legible script to anyone, Russian-speaking or not.
Anyway. Point is, between lesson planning, blogging, eating dinner, learning an extraordinarily difficult foreign language for no Goddamn reason, trying to record a little bit of YouTube video, and, oh, right, interacting with my family, my evenings have been feeling unreasonably stuffed lately, which I think has been a major contributing factor to 1) how brief my posts have been and 2) how late my posts have been, as it’s currently 8:30 PM and I’ve just stopped writing to stare at my phone for ten minutes. I’m not complaining, as I’m still more or less enjoying all these activities and it’s not like Winter Break isn’t right around the corner, but … man.
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