Syllabus #134

This is going to be my last dispatch for 2021.  School's out for the winter.  See you in '22.  It's been a real one.  Everyone in attendance today gets an A, tell your friends who slept in this morning they're getting a D, and not that kind of D.  The bad kind.  I mean, depending on what you're into.  I don't know your life.

Speaking of the D, that is some active ass yeast up in this dough

Yea I think I need to either move, build an underground bunker, or get a prescription for Xanax.  Or all three, just to cover my bases. 

It's 2:34 PM somewhere.  Nobody asked me, because I would have been a killjoy.  You do you, boo, but for me it's acceptable to start drinking after actual 5:00 and you gotta lay down a good carb base beforehand, or else you can forget about seeing me in a human state for the next 3 days of my life.

Yea dawg, you can probably eat for a year on $60 worth of food from Winco.  I don't miss being that broke but I do miss eating simple food on the cheap, and scooping oats and beans out of those bulk bins was sensory heaven.

I would say this is a load of horseshit but that might get me banned.  Also I just said it.  So there.  Banning books is a load of steaming horseshit.  Don't even get me started, we'll be here all day.

I fully support this.  Life is relentless.  If I could have a 420/365 advent calendar with a little 5mg mint or a pot brownie behind every door, I might look forward to tomorrow just a little bit.  Are Snoop and Martha reading this?  New business venture for you.

Ugh.  No.  Why. 

Analog Reading:

Topics of Conversation by Miranda Popkey.  Oooh boy did I not like this narrator.  Or the author's prose style.  The narrator kept interrupting herself mid-sentence to clarify what she was saying, and she was SO UNSYMPATHETIC.  At once self-important and self-loathing.  Pick a lane, sweetie.  Or you know what, just put it in park, because you're embarrassing yourself.

Syllabus #133

What day is it?  Is it Sunday?  Who even knows anymore?  Not only is it almost 2022 and I still feel like I haven't processed all of 2020 and 2021, but like, I stayed up all night Friday until about 4:30 am on Saturday morning, riding out wave after wave of tornado watches, severe thunderstorm warnings, and tornado warnings that came too close for comfort.  

Again, here I am with survivor's guilt, like we didn't even have any sticks to pick up in the yard, but elsewhere in the county people had downed trees, property damage, and power outages.  And then just an hour north in Kentucky, devastation on a level I can't comprehend.  So I'm like whiney whine whine, I paced around all night, fully dressed and wearing a bike helmet, shaking and frantically refreshing the @nashseverewx twitter feed.  My house is still standing, we are unharmed, the cats have forgiven me for shoving them in their carriers and locking them in a closet in the middle of the night, but now I'm tired.  Woe is me.  

On the plus side, I finally figured out how to work the Red Cross emergency weather radio my grandmom gave me like 10 years ago, and boy are those alerts startling enough to pierce your very soul.

I legit thought this was going to be my last meal

How many of these have you read?  I like year-end best books lists because I can catch up on titles I may have missed, while usually feeling smug about how many I've read already.   I've only read four of these, though, so I should flop down off my high horse and hie thyself to the nearest public library.

Aren't negronis over?  In the sense that they had their moment and now people who order them are basic?  Like the PSL of the cocktail world?  I always feel like a farce when I order one, because they are delicious but I thought they already had their cultural zeitgeist moment and were now uncool again?  Also, miss me with that croffle, the turducken of breakfast pastries I don't enjoy separately and certainly wouldn't enjoy in their portmanteaued Frankenstein state.

I admit, as a card-carrying, certified Old, I clicked on this article about the Birds Aren't Real movement,  ready to tickle my sense of smug condescension.  But what this dude is doing is actually pretty rad and I respect it.  I had no idea.  

This is horrific 

Analog Reading:

Finished Last Picture Show by Larry McMurtry.  It was a fast and amusing read, though I'm not sure how it holds up as an artifact of a time when people were openly racist and homophobic and ableist.  Also, how common is bestiality in rural areas, really?  

Finished Piranesi by Susanna Clarke.  It was an abrupt transition in prose style from McMurtry's very literal, concrete, simple prose to something that was at first so very abstract and also British.  About 10 pages in, I had the thought that I was reading words, all of which I understood, but none of which made a goddamn bit of sense in the order they landed on those pages.  Then things started to fall into place, by design, as the narrator's predicament is revealed to himself, and, by extension, us.

Still pecking away at A Carnival of Snackery.  I am following Sarah Silverman's mantra and making it a treat, lest I gorge myself on it all at once and find myself naked and strung out, chasing that David Sedaris dragon.

Syllabus #132

I'm just trying to stay alive until winter break.  

It's Always Sunny has been on for 15 seasons?  Wild.

I never got 'the bride is a woman and the groom is a hedgehog' but I've had some really strange, dark ones on Duolingo.  Also, today is day 997 of my streak, so how 'bout that?

Analog Reading:

Finished Jonathan Franzen's Crossroads.  Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed it.  The characters were fully fleshed out and deliciously despisable, each in their own way and to varying degrees.  I wasn't fully satisfied with the ending, but endings are tricky, and I guess the point of this one in particular was to suggest the beginning of a new chapter?

Now reading The Last Picture Show by Larry McMurtry.  It's amusing and he's very deft at building a world full of sensory details and idiosyncratic characters.  Andy read it and recommended it to me, and I commented to him on how funny it was that the character's boss at the butane delivery company's last name is Fartley.  He hadn't even noticed.  HOW DO YOU NOT NOTICE A NAME LIKE FARTLEY?