Syllabus #193

What a week.  What an absolute hero's journey this week has been.  A real life odyssey.  I spent several days at work without heat.  Have you ever tried to sit still at a desk and type things with your fingers when it's 53 degrees inside?   I'm glad I didn't dry clean and store my down parka over spring break, because it was part of my daily 'fit Monday through Wednesday.  

Thursday was one of those delightful 11 hour days, and Friday I had the distinct privilege of being reminded that my actual job is unimportant enough that I can be pulled away from it to fill in for someone else's more important job.  Teacher shortage is real, people.  Do you have a few college credits and a pulse?  Please sign up to sub.  If you're nice, kids will draw pictures of you surrounded by hearts and tell you you're the best teacher ever, and if you make it through the day without any children crying, bleeding, or barfing, you will feel like you just beat the final boss in Super Mario World.  

No braggies, but I totally saved Princess Peach on Friday.

Saturday, we recreated.  We were curious about the hype around Leiper's Fork.  It was cute but underwhelming.  The real show-stopper of the day was a kitty cat quinceañera:

Feliz cumpleaños, Meows

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Gee, Millennials are really going through it these days, aren't we?  I don't care for the term Middle Aged.  Since so much of our generation is predicated on straddling the line of pre-internet versus post-internet culture, why not a technology-themed descriptor?  We're on 60% battery.  We've used up half our extra lives.  We're downloading at Napster speed in a Spotify world.  Miss me with your Middle Aged BS, please.  Middle Aged ladies wear puffy-painted crewneck sweatshirts, have bad perms, and drive minivans.   Middle Aged men wear Hawaiian shirts on the weekends and have combovers stand around the grill talking about their back pain.  Millennial women on 60% battery are still wearing crop tops and figuring out how to keep houseplants alive.  Millennial men on 55% battery (let's face it, they're gonna die first) wear joggers and chug beers after a workout.  We. Are. Not. Middle. Aged.

What about passive aggressive income, though?  I feel like I'd be good at generating that.  

See, I'm not rude or weird for needing to leave a party after an hour, it's just my interaction style.  

Analog Reading:

Finished South to America by Imani Perry.  It was interesting and important, but I kept feeling like parts of it were going over my head.

Finished The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka.  It was short and weird and sad, and I enjoyed it.  

Reading Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin.  It's excellent so far.  It reads like a Behind the Music style profile, but of video game designers.  Yet it's not really about the video games, it's about their creative process and their intense, complicated friendship.

Syllabus #192

Spring Break, an Inventory:

1 head cold, recovered

1 trip to dentist (no cavities!)

1 trip to eye doctor (no cataracts!...for now)

1 haircut (first one since August 2021)

3 trips to Lowe's

1 trip to Sherwin Williams

20+ hours invested in painting downstairs (buying supplies, choosing a paint color, removing art from walls, removing switchplate covers, moving furniture, cutting in around ceilings and molding and baseboards, rolling, touching up, cleaning up, vacuuming, mopping, replacing artwork and switchplate covers

1 tax return prepared (procrastinating the pain of actually filing and letting the IRS take my money)

3 toilets scrubbed

4 loads of wash fully executed, folded, and put away

Damn, I'm tired just listing all of this crap.  I say it every year, but Carson Daly really did us Millennials dirty, making us think that Spring Break was all boobies and body shots and fun in the sun.  Granted, I'm the cruise director here, and I have only myself to blame.  It's like whenever I have multiple consecutive days off, I feel like I have to justify my existence by doing every chore on the face of the earth.  My inner monologue is everyone's meanest restaurant boss, and every time I sit down to read, she's in my face sneering, "if you have time to lean, you have time to clean!"  Like, chill out, Linda, the Russian bus boys are in the shed getting shithoused on the dregs of customers' beer, why don't you go deal with that and let me have this moment.

Yea, 9 foot ceilings and elaborate moldings around numerous windows are cool and all,
until you need to paint around it

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Can we just not with these filters?  It's creepy and demeaning.  You are not a product, don't enage in falsely advertising yourself.  

I'm a huge sucker for Marimekko designs.  Fortunately for my bank account, I don't actually need any of the items created for this Marimekko/Ikea collab.

Ah, one can dream.

The biggest takeaway from this Paris Hilton interview is that she is the GOAT of prank calls.  I guess that's what hotel heiress money gets you - a phone that you use exclusively for making prank calls.  My days of prank calling waned with the death of the Yellow Pages and the advent of caller ID, but man those were some good times while they lasted.

Analog Reading:

Still tootling down the road with Imani Perry in South to America.  It's a slow read, in part because it's not exactly for me and thus there are bits that I have to pause and try to understand, but it's an important book.

Picked up Julie Otsuka's The Swimmers and it is so compelling and so strange.  It's a short book (some might consider it a novella, Stephen King might consider it a chapter...), so I'll probably finish it later today.

Syllabus #191

I think I speak for every teacher in the land when I say We Are Tired.  In my district, we just made it to Spring Break, but I feel like if the school year is a marathon, we've just collapsed at an aid station around mile 19.5.  Our shoes are untied, we have blisters on our baby toes, and we've shit our pants, but gosh darnit we're going to chug some Gatorade and keep limping towards the finish line come next Monday.

In my personal case, I am now going to enjoy Spring Break by blowing rails my nose incessantly because I have had no heat in my workplace for the last 2 weeks and now I am sick.  SPRING BREAK WOO SHOW ME YOUR TITTIESSSUES.  

Speaking of Spring Break, the New York Times so graciously invited even more people to come woo all over my daily existence with a Nashville edition of their 36 Hours column.  If I may, I would propose that 36 hours in Nashville looks a little something like this:

5 PM Friday - Your Uber from the airport drops you and your girlfriends in front of your Airbnb, a curiously angular black box with a roof deck that towers over the modest houses surrounding it.  You figure the bars on all the neighbors' windows are just a Southern aesthetic.  

6 PM - Your Airbnb claimed to be walkable to downtown, but you don't see any sidewalks.  You start hoofing it anyway.  You arrive on Broadway 90 minutes later, sweaty and disheveled, with painful blisters from your newly purchased cowboy boots.  One member of your party is missing; she fell into a massive pothole and you didn't hear her cries for help over the roar of a passing freight train.

8 PM - You're waiting in line for the bathroom at Kid Rock's Big Ass Honky Tonk n' Rock n' Roll Steakhouse to wash something brown off your white jeans.  You can't tell what it is, but you know it came from a plastic bag that a guy was swinging on the dance floor.  

9 PM - A friendly stranger wearing a Thin Blue Line t-shirt buys you and your friends a round of drinks.

7 PM Saturday - You and your friends wake up in a motel room at Apple Annie's Inn on Dickerson Pike.  Your phones and wallets are gone but you all seem otherwise unharmed.

4 AM Sunday - You waited 9 hours for police to arrive so you could file reports.  You are escorted back to your Airbnb to collect your belongings, but they have also been stolen.  

5 AM - You shuffle through BNA security in your stained white jeans and now-thoroughly-broken-in cowboy boots, presenting your police report as provisional identification.  As soon as you get home and cancel your stolen credit cards and change your clothes and get a new ID and get a new phone, you are totally going to post to your Insta stories about the amazing time you had in #Nashvegas.

The NY Times Daily newsletter devoted a whole issue to the importance of unions!

Have you ever seen a human being closer to completely stroking out than this sweaty, beet-faced man who is being made to squeal like a piggy?

Analog Reading:

Finally put Rabbit and all the other miserable Angstroms to Rest.  What an ending.  I had somewhat misremembered it since I first read the Rabbit tetralogy 15 or more years ago.  For some reason I was picturing him behind the wheel of his Toyota at the very end, driving off into the sunset both literally and metaphorically, but that was very much not the case.

Read the fabulous Aubrey Gordon's illuminating You Just Need to Lose Weight an 19 Other Myths About Fat People.  It was very thoroughly researched and made me consider some perspectives I had never thought about before.

Now reading Imani Perry's South to America.  I have high hopes, but it's too early for me to form any kind of opinion.

Syllabus #190

I know we live in the south, but I never expected to be literally gone with the wind.  And yet I nearly was.  

Friday was So Unbelievably Frigging Windy.  Ultimately, we were lucky.  No property damage, no downed trees.  We just had a bunch of trash blow into our backyard from the crackhouse across the alley, but that happens on a weekly basis anyway, there was just more of it this time.  However, our power did go out for a full 24 hours, which was not ideal.  It came on for a tantalizing 5 minutes after about hour 22, and then died again.  At hour 23.75, we went out to buy some ice to unload perishables from the fridge into a cooler.  The actual minute we pulled up at home, we saw the backyard light come on.  I'm not saying I conjured the restoration of power for my entire neighborhood, but I'm not not saying that, either.

How the Finns are dealing with war in their backyard.

Imagine being so dumb that you actually don't know you're dumb.  But...am I?  Am I a big dumdum and I just think I'm smart because I'm too stupid to perceive my own idiocy?

This salad has me salivating.  Saladvating?

Analog Reading:

Lingering over the last hundred and fifty pages of Rabbit at Rest, because I'm not quite ready to bid adieu to this delightfully dysfunctional family.  Also I have no idea what to read next, because I'm waiting on a few holds to become available from the library.