Syllabus #250

I love cats as much as any human possibly can (more than any human probably should) and yet this chills me to my core.  Scholastic, you've gone too far.

Every line of work has a particularly bad season.  Accountants dread tax season.  Retail workers dread the holiday season.  Restaurant workers loathe Valentine's Day.  For school librarians, our personal hell is Book Fair.  

All those memes about the magic childhood memories of the book fair straight up give me hives.  Making children give me money for books, when I am normally in the business of giving them books for free.99 feels so very wrong.  It's like if you were a police officer teaching the DARE program and then for one week out of the school year, you said, ok kids, now I'm here to sell you some meth.

Aside from the overall principle of the thing, the book fair is just an unrelenting hellscape.  Inevitably, children will cry.  They will cry when whatever highly specific Minecraft diary of the moment sells out before they can buy one.  They will cry when they have $30 and it's not enough to buy all 25 things they absolutely have to acquire.  They will cry when they have $0.13 and can't buy any of the 25 things they also require in order to live.  

Children do not understand how to handle money, conceptually or with regard to socially acceptable behaviors.  They will extract sweaty, crumpled bills from inside a shoe.  They will produce cigarette-scented sandwich baggies full of assorted, fuzz-covered coins.  They will steal money from their classmates to buy that frigging spy pen that works for approximately 19 seconds and then dries out.  They will spend the money that was supposed to go on their lunch account to buy the gem mining kit, and then cry when I won't let them return it with all the gems missing.  They will steal their little sister's field trip money to buy a poster, and then cry when I won't let them return it after they folded it in quarters and used it as an umbrella to walk home in the rain.  They will complain about the price of books, as if I am personally persecuting them by charging $14.99 (plus tax!  Don't forget about sales tax!) for the new hardcover Dog Man.  They will try to haggle, as if we are in a medieval bazaar and not a 21st century corporate-sponsored school fundraiser.

Book Fair's only redeeming value is that it makes me appreciate the more pedestrian indignities I face on a typical school day.

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Read banned books.

I'm not even going to read this article about Australia's "cat problem" because I know they don't mean "we don't have enough cats and it's a problem because we are sad."  I don't want to know how they are reducing their cat population.  All I need to know is that I'm never going to Australia, so you can throw that shrimp on your barbie and smoke it, ozzies. 

Analog Reading:

Finished reading Percival Everett's James, a reimagining of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from Jim's perspective.  It takes some kind of virtuosity to successfully pull off this type of alternate perspective novel.  Sometimes it comes off as merely interesting, as in The Wide Sargasso Sea  by Jean Rhys (the backstory for the crazy wife in the attic from Jane Eyre) and sometimes it is borderline unreadable, as in The Wind Done Gone by Alice Randall.  (I don't know if that was user error on my part, but I had a hard time following that one.)  I'm going to declare this one a victory for Everett.  It preserves the wit and the appreciation for the absurdity of circumstances you find in Twain's original, but the depth of humanity and the richness of Jim's interior life make this version, to me, superior.

Just started reading Kristin Hannah's The Women.  It's too early to have an informed opinion, but I'm enjoying it so far.

Syllabus #249

I just realized there are only 24 school days left before summer break.  More like the summer break that shall not be, because I'm a schmuck who signed on to do summer school, but at least it's not a full-time gig, and the expectations are slightly scaled back.  But anyway.  Only 24 more days!  I am baffled as to how it could already be late April, and also horrified by the mountain of tasks that I must summit before May 24th.  Every year it feels like frigging Everest, and I worry I'm going to run out of oxygen and they'll find my frozen, gnarled corpse buried in a crevasse a generation from now.

This anthropomorphized strawberry and a pint of his more normal-looking friends cost me NINE GD dollars at the farmer's market.  It was one of those situations where the price wasn't marked and the woman at the booth had already rung up the purchase before I learned the price, which was about 300% more than what I was expecting but I was too embarrassed to tell her I changed my mind.  The strawberries are good but not great, and every time I eat one I picture two quarters falling out of my pocket and it's really ruining the experience for me.

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Today's links are brought to you by 1800NOPE.com

I feel like I need to invest in a beekeeper suit for the emergence of this cicada brood.  I'm not emotionally prepared for what's about to happen. 

If I was working any kind of retail and someone tried to rob me using a snake, I'd be so grateful it wasn't a firearm I'd give them all the cash in the register, and then I'd dig out my own wallet so I could give him a tip.  I think maybe the judge needs to go easy on this guy, is all I'm saying. 

Analog Reading:

I'm about to finish Tommy Orange's The Wandering Stars.  It's really very good, but I have gotten so in the habit of reading plot-driven Stephen King books that it was a process to shift into this slower, more prose-oriented, character-driven novel.  Also, the first section that was written in like, 2nd person omniscient perspective, speaking to the ancestors, was a little hard for me to get into.  

Next, I have a hard decision to make.  I have The Shining, The Women, and James cued up on my Kindle, locked down in airplane mode so I can take my sweet time with these library loans.  Which one will it be?  Stay tuned.

Syllabus #248

We really had ourselves a time this weekend.  We made big plans to be real humans who do things in the world, and boy did we execute.  We went to the zoo!  

If you want to be literal about it, we drove to the zoo.  Twice!  The misleading magic of Apple Maps took us to a back exit that let out into an obscure office park, so we pivoted technologies.  Google Maps led us faithfully to the actual entrance, from whence we made a slow, scenic crawl towards a parking lot.  

Along the way, a helpful sign hinted that we would need to present our pre-ordered, timed-entry tickets when entering the zoo.  A more helpful sign would have been placed out on the road, before an uninformed, spontaneous zoo-visitor is locked into a one-way traffic pattern from which there is no escape.  Sounds like the real endangered species here is spontaneity itself.  

In a way, I feel like the 20 minutes we spent trying to extricate ourselves from the zoo parking lot were more impactful than spending $60 to look at caged animals.  It was much more immersive.  We were the caged animals.

The small cat exhibit is always open

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Full disclosure, I haven't read any of these articles yet, but they have piqued my interest:

Why is OJ's Bronco in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee?  I have been to that museum!  I also saw Ted Bundy's Beetle.

The people behind all those NYTimes games.  I have a bone to pick with whoever is responsible for some of the more ludicrous categories from Connections.  The mental gymnastics required to come up with the commonality between some of these words is absurd.  Like going from point A to point F and assuming your audience will have the same train of thought to connect points B-E in between.  That's not connections, that's telepathy.  And don't even get me started on the day the entire puzzle was emojis.

I need to rewatch the Seinfeld series finale and then go back and rewatch the Curb finale.  Andy insists that the entire Curb series was just a spite series, 25 years in the making, to exact revenge for the Seinfeld finale.

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 Analog Reading:

Holly was over too soon.  Part of me is holding out hope that maybe she'll show up in another Stephen King book someday.

Finally got started on The Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange.  I am enjoying it so far, but it's a conscious effort to slow down and relax into the slower pace of this story, and to appreciate the prose.  It's a big shift after reading a Stephen King book that keeps you turning pages and almost skimming over parts because it's the action more than the prose that is important.

Syllabus #247

Are the kids ok?

Monday was April Fool's Day.  My butthole clenched when I realized the ominous date fell on a weekday.  I was sure I'd be having kids tell me it's snowing and try to sneak whoopee cushions onto my chair all. day. long.  AFD is right up there with Halloween, Easter, and Valentine's Day as days you do not want to be caught dead in a school zone.  It's the only non-candy-centric holiday to crack the top of the list.

You know what happened?  

Absolutely nothing.

No snakes in a can.  No handshake buzzers.  No whoopee cushions.  No shocking tall tales or attempts to trick and humiliate.  No prank phone calls.  No saran wrap over the toilet seat.  No vaseline on the door handle.  No bucket of water balanced precariously on the top of a door left slightly ajar.  No Ex-lax in the teacher's coffee.  

The youth have lost their edge.

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Was there a teenage girl alive in 1999 who didn't want to be exactly like Kat Stratford from 10 Things I Hate About You?  Abrasive icon.

I can't think of any earthly reason why I would go to Kansas City, MO, except to go to this immersive children's book museum.  However, I lowkey might be too scared to enter the Goodnight Moon exhibit.  And god forbid if there was a Polar Express exhibit.  I've still never made it all the way through that book.  Stephen King might be demented, but Chris Van Allsburg is a freak.

Larry David is having a moment.  It's only a matter of time before we're walking around with WWLDD? bracelets.  

Analog Reading:

Finished Ann Patchett's State of Wonder.  It started out a little slow for me, but once I was hooked, I was ensnared with the compressive force of an anaconda.  This was quite different from any of her other books I've read.  It gives echoes of Heart of Darkness and is a lot more tense and adventurous than her usual fare.  The overall gist is that a woman who works at a pharmaceutical company is dispatched to the Brazilian jungle to track down an elusive researcher who is supposedly developing a fertility drug on her company's dime.  The book was published in 2011, and it reads so differently today than it may have before Roe v. Wade was struck down.  The story hinted at a lot of interesting implications about women's reproductive choices, and the ending left a possibly horrifying outcome unexplored.  I can't help but wonder (or wish) if there was more to the story that Patchett wanted to explore, and chose not to for narrative expediency or other editorial reasons.  

Now reading Stephen King's Holly.  When I opened this book on my Kindle, I thought to myself, ahh, surely there are a good 600+ pages here for me to say goodbye to one of my favorite characters in recent memory.  Imagine my dismay and despair when I saw that this book clocks in at a mere 463 pages.  What gives??