The Syllabus

This is the writing equivalent of the teacher who spends the entire week screening a feature length film that is only tangentially related to the curriculum because she spent all of her planning periods for the past month weeping in her car.  I think that only happens in TV and movie depictions of our broken education system, but you get the picture. 

Here's some stuff that has occupied my attention recently, for better or for worse:

This guy!  He puts to shame the plans I once had to write a will requiring that my remains be cremated and used to antique my enemies.

You know I love a good podcast, and this one surpasses my wildest dreams:
Gay Future.  The premise is entirely fictional, which I did not immediately accept.  For a hot minute I was frantically Googling and searching Amazon, desperately wanting it to be true that in 2002, Mike Pence wrote, if not published, a YA novel set in a "dystopian" near future where everyone is gay and Clay Aiken is President.  You know what they say, one man's dystopia is another man's utopia.

This girl clearly has no functional knowledge of basic zoology.  It's common knowledge that jaguars are very protective of their digital privacy.

Microneedling!  Can you handle it?  I'm not so secretly a glutton for experimentation with skincare.  I admittedly had grotesque skin for years and I'm emotionally and physically scarred from it.  I will try anything that promises noticeable results for less-than-outrageous sums of money.  Y'all.  I'd microneedle my brain if I thought it would help with the emotional scars, but instead, I'll pay $25 for some knock-off Amazon product if there's a possibility it will make my face look a little less like a squirrel chewed on it.  I've used my roller three times so far, and I swear it's working.  It's not painful at all (says the person who has thrice had a large swath of her back tattooed, twice in color, and almost fell asleep every time) and by the next morning, all the redness is gone and you look normal and refreshed.

Duolingo - I'm making a modest effort to recall whatever Spanish I learned in high school and build on it.  We went to Madrid for Christmas this year, and we were mostly able to function, to the extent that people appreciated that we were trying but could instantly tell that their English was better than our remedial Spanish and met us more than halfway.  Now we want to do a language school in Ecuador this summer.  Why?  Mostly for funsies, but also because retiring outside the US is looking more and more appealing with each passing day.  And with no kids to worry about, retiring early and teaching English abroad could be a sweet gig. 

I don't know how I progressed from a morbid yet juvenile comment about having the executor of my will throw my cremains in the face of an unspecified enemy to a serious rumination about my retirement prospects, but I've clearly grown as a person of the course of this post.