Syllabus #216

Every year, when the South goes back to school at the beginning of August and every teacher I know in the Northeast is just hitting peak summer break, I'm absolutely ill with envy.  Now that it's Labor Day weekend, and schools up north are just bracing to rip off that summer bandaid, I feel, not quite schadenfreude, but something like the wise older sibling who can look back on say, puberty, and tell the younger sibling how much it's going to royally suck at first, but you'll survive.  It's going to get ugly, but it'll eventually get better.  Maybe.  Probably not.  Honestly, the best is probably behind you, but it was fun while it lasted, right?

 

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A Cuban enclave in Kentucky?  Who knew?  Might be a reason to visit Louisville, actually.  

Permission to smoothie, if you do it right.  It doesn't have to be an undercover milkshake.

Martha, Martha, Martha.  I'd be more concerned about wtf particles and microbes were bound up in that glacier ice than whether it's tone deaf regarding climate change to pluck a lil' ice cube straight from the ocean. 

In praise of laze.

This book sounds good!  If my list of pending holds from the library were an actual stack on my nightstand, you might soon find me on an episode of Hoarders.

Analog Reading:

I finished Colm Toibin's Brooklyn.  It was a good book, but I hated the ending, not for how it was written but for how realistically unsatisfying it was.  The main character had these flashes of agency, but mostly just let other people determine her fate, until she was left in a position of having to choose between two equally terrible options.  Sometimes it bes like that, but we don't have to like it, either.

Had kind of a stalled week of reading with Patrick deWitt's The Sisters Brothers.  I'm not enjoying it as much as I did The Librarianist.  It's not terrible, but the chapters are very short and kind of choppy feeling, and it makes it hard to get really absorbed in the story.  I have also fallen asleep within about 2 pages every night, so it's taking much longer to read than it should.