Sunday, November 27, 2022

Syllabus #178

Hello, are we tired of eating yet?  I sat down to make a grocery list this morning and was just utterly disgusted with the thought of having to think about food, and cook food, and then put that slop on a plate and transfer it to my mouth and chew it.  If Kroger had a Soylent aisle, I'd push my cart straight to it and be done.  This is not about saying I was 'bad' for indulging in so much rich food for Thanksgiving.  It's not about diet culture, although I hear big butts are out and we all should be doing rails of Ozempic diabetes medicine so we can look like Kate Moss, and like, I'm as tired of squats as the next person, but can we just not do this again?

But no, I just need a breather to renew my palate and my interest in gorging before we do all this shit again in three weeks.  You might be thinking, this all makes you sound like a miserable hag.  And you're not wrong.  You are, in fact, correct.

Ask anyone.  I am the worst.  I nearly caused a riot and ruined Thanksgiving, and had 9 out of the 10 other people in the room screaming at me, so, you know.  

What happened was, we were playing Fishbowl, in which every player gets 3 pieces of paper to write down a Thing.  It can be an object, a place, a well-known person, a familiar saying, a song, etc.  The first round of the game is like taboo, where you can say anything, except the actual words written on the paper, to get your teammates to guess the Thing.  Second round, password - the clue-giver can say only one word.  Third round, charades.  

I was already skating on thin ice from one of my previous submissions, "I was in the pool."  Isn't everyone on the earth familiar with George Costanza's protestation about shrinkage?  I then took things beyond.com because APPARENTLY, 'Kid Rock's Big Ass Honky Tonk and Rock 'n Roll Steakhouse' was TOO SPECIFIC.  I thought it was perfect.  Here's how one might have approached it:

First round:  "It's a horrible place on Broadway in Nashville that is infamous for a guy pulling out his colostomy bag and swinging it around."

Second round:  "Colostomy"

Third round:  *pantomimes removing colostomy bag, swinging it overhead like a lasso*

I rest my case.  I will take no further questions.

This is the only picture I took all week


Okay, I said I don't want to think about food, but this is the exception.  I've never done acid or roasted a chicken, much less eaten one in almost 20 years.  And yet I find myself with a hankerin' for Jia Tolentino's Acid Chicken.  I put the essay collection this came from on hold at the library.  [My First Popsicle:  An anthology of food and feelings, edited by Zosia Mamet, I mean just look at the title of this blog, could there be a more on-brand book for me to want to read?]


Breaking News:  Teaching is hard.  My immediate reaction is to check the byline and feign shock that it wasn't written by Captain Obvious, but also, that's exactly the problem.  It's a given to anyone who works in K-12 education, but most people who aren't teachers think it's a cute little job that ends at 3 pm every day and gives you summers off.  Yea, there are moments where it's cute, and there are times when I do leave at 3:15, but dang, guys, we have kids as young as 4, up to like, 10 year olds who are larger than me, physically assaulting teachers.  Biting, kicking, scratching, pulling hair, throwing objects.  And unless you are specifically trained in safe methods of restraint, you can't even really touch the kid even to hold them away from you.  All this has definitely escalated since March of 2020.  I think the psychological impact on kids has been more of a problem than the learning loss, and if all the trauma dealt with appropriately, and kids felt safe enough to calm down and focus, the learning loss would be a lot easier to address.


ICYMI, petty thievery is in.  


Analog Reading:


The Four Winds improved when I decided to suspend my criticism and just blow along with it.  I was kind of hoping at least one of the winds would be flatulence, but, spoiler alert, none of them were.  By the end, I was very invested in the fate of the characters, and teared up a little over the way things turned out.  


Small Game by Blair Braverman.  A novel about a reality show about wilderness survival.  I'm into it.  Except I need to reread about 10 pages because I popped an edible and got in bed to read, and there's a character named Lenny who I kept conflating with our cat named Lenny, which was very confusing at the time.  Then I fell asleep and dropped my Kindle on my face, and I think my nose advanced the screen a few pages.  All this to say, the closest I will get to wilderness survival is reading about it, and I can apparently barely manage that.

1 comment:

  1. Other than near rioting old farts and one almost wetting herself laughing so hard ...bahaha

    ReplyDelete