Syllabus #139

We had a maybe not entirely necessary but absolutely deserved snow day on Friday.  After this, we have only one inclement weather day left to use this year before we have to extend the school year, so we have to be strategic with how we deploy this, the last of our Super Mushrooms.  NGL, when the weather finally turns nice and we no longer have a prayer for a snow day, I'm going to miss the audacity of students (and parents, and even teachers, sometimes) openly tweeting at the school district demanding a snow day.

Secret notsecret: No child ever wants a snow day as badly as the teachers do, we (well, most of us) just have the good sense not to @ the school district with these hilarious but wildly inappropriate demands.

No me digas! 

Yo this sauce sounds delicious but can we rename it?  Alabama white sauce sounds sounds like a euphemism for something that belongs in a condom, not on my condiment shelf. 

Margaret Renkl with scathing commentary about the gerrymandering of Nashville's congressional districts.  It's a trash fire and a tragedy.  

Part of this satirical send-up of a day-in-the-life of a librarian are so painfully accurate, and the other parts I just want to throttle the author and shout "First rule of librarian fight club - we don't talk about librarian fight club!" because homeboy is giving up some state secrets there.

This kid!  Nobody told him that isn't how self publishing works, but that hasn't stopped him.  I love it.

This folksy anecdote from Lindsey Graham about running into three of his salt-of-the-earth pickup truck driving constituents at the dump says more about the lack of basic services provided in semi-rural areas of his backwards state than it does about the purported will of the people.  I have suffered the indignity of having to regularly haul my garbage to a remote facility because I lived just slightly outside the city limits (of what could only charitably be called a city and only in South Carolina) and I'm here to tell you that it stinks both figuratively and literally.  And addressing the stat from the article that the vast majority of truck owners have never used the bed to haul anything, I'm sure that's fully accurate for the inexplicable truck owners in urban areas and suburban hellscapes.  But in rural South Carolina, had I the luxury of owning a truck, I would have used the shit out of that truck bed, regularly, as it would have been far preferable to shoving hefties of rotting food scraps and soiled cat litter in the trunk of my Honda on a biweekly basis.  I mean I still would have had to drive 25 minutes each way past rusty, windowless trailers flying that old southern cross, which I always felt was a helpful reminder to keep my gas tank full lest I never break down in their terrifying vicinity.  

Analog Reading:

Finished The Committed by Viet Thanh Nguyen.  It was brutal and violent but also philosophical and had a bit of a twist ending that wasn't exactly satisfying but felt like closure.

Read Velorio  by Xavier Navarro Aquino.  It's a novel about the attempted formation of a utopian community in the center of the island of Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria.  I came for the utopia (which always fails), I stayed for the plentiful sprinkling of Spanish dialogue, I almost gave up because while it was overall less violent than The Committed, the violence and horrific treatment of corpses was happening to and among children.  It also seemed to toe the line between realism and magical realism and the uncanny valley between what I was supposed to take literally vs. not was kind of disturbing to me.

The Every by Dave Eggers.  About 1/5 of the way through this one, and while this one is for sure just as dystopian as Velorio, at least the violence is only psychological, and everything is clean and shiny.  The only maggot-infested corpse here is the concept of privacy and autonomy.