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.
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