Rave: Dear cranky old co worker who decided to chuck up a metal cutting table saw blade to a 9in hand held grinder to cut steel tubing with, "I hate safety" was an excellent answer.
Rave: Only 12 days of school left, and only 9 of them are going to involve me teaching anything (the last 3 are final exam days, which are going to consist of either movies, reviews, or tests). Most of my prep is done, which means things will be slightly less stressful for the next three weeks. Hell, my last day? I literally have 1 class, and they take a final exam. That last week is going to be gloriously easy. Rant: Nothing but uncertainty after that. Am I going to go back and work for the school as an aid or para? Maybe sub? Do I go back to the video store? Right now leaning towards being an aide. Shitty pay, but set hours, no late nights working on prep, and it'll be easy to arrange babysitting or child care. Plus it keeps my foot in the door in case of new job openings, which I am told they are working hard at making available because they really like me, despite my clear annoyance with the situation (read: giant vat of shit) they threw me in. Rave: Well, there is 1 certainty. The wife wants me to take the summer off. She wants me home to take care of the kid and so we (by which I mean she, I could care less) can spend as much of the summer as possible in the pool at my parents' house. No matter where I go, she doesn't want me working until after we go on vacation in late July, which means at least a couple of months of being a stay-at-home dad. Can't. Fucking. Wait. Plus, my mother-in-law still wants to take the kid at least 1 day a week. This will be a good day for me to get all the yard work done and get some much relaxation time. If she takes the kid overnight? I'll be up all god damned night playing the shit out of some video games. I love my daughter, but sometimes I really miss my old life. Rave: Since Wednesday night, the wife and I have seen Book of Mormon in Chicago, Star Trek Into Darkness, and Iron Man 3, with the help of a nice day off and a babysitter. Then, Sunday night, I'll be back in Chicago with my brothers and some friends to see the new Jay and Silent Bob cartoon movie. Good weekend. I just don't want to drive into the city again, because... Rant: Fuck Chicago traffic. Seriously, fuck it in its stupid ass. Holy shit. Next time the wife wants to go to the city, we're hiring a driver or taking the train and a taxi (if need be) because fuck that shit. People on crutches were moving faster than us. I know it was especially bad because we were going in on a Wednesday night with a home Blackhawks playoff game, and a home Cubs game, but still... 45 minutes to move 2 miles is fucking crazy. Then the hotel we stayed at had an entrance that was literally a fucking hole in the wall that we drove past the first time, which meant circling the block, which meant another 20 minutes in the car because fuck my life. Seriously, next time? Train. No fucking way I drive again. This is where everyone who lives actually IN Chicago (Parker, I'm looking at you) starts laughing at my dumb ass for ever driving in the city to begin with.
If anyone can answer that, then they're a lot more intelligent than I am. Rant: No that's cool, how could I possibly be offended that you purposefully didn't invite me over last night because my friend and I have a tendency to monopolise each other's time in conversation. It's not like it's not easy for us to see each other any time and that this was a nice convenient opportunity when he and the missus were down to visit in the area. It is inconvenient when the two of us can talk on a level we pretty much can't find with anyone else, so I understand why you had everyone else over but not me, why would that be a bother? We've been close friends for 1\ten years now, so I'm sure distance, work and kids won't get in the way of the next ten, so of course I don't mind going home early and leaving the rest of you guys to catch up. And telling me sure was a great idea...
RAVE: The day is finally upon us! 18 seasons a row that Arsenal have finished above the Spuds. RAVE: Sharks away win, too. Nice. Possibly boring but Spoiler Funny Rave: David Beckham's son Romeo is apparently an Arsenal supporter. Nothing like giving his father's former club (Manchester United) a huge middle finger.
Rant, Rave? My 20 year old zombie cat that looked like Gandalf has finally gone on to the great litterbox in the sky. Well, actually, he's probably going out in the vet's trash tomorrow, but at least they told me they'd cremate him properly. The metaphor still remains. Bittersweet. He was falling apart the last week. He was a mess, I'm glad he's pain free.
Rave: Got lots of good drugs and two days off work. I'll go in to work tomorrow morning, do my exam and come home again.
Rant: I am going to leave all three of my travel companions on a city bus in Bogota. I was really excited for this trip. I love my yearly vacation, but all the joy has already been sucked out of it because I'm dealing with fucking morons. Spoiler Dude traveler was planning on working until early Wednesday morning (our flight leaves Atlanta at 7 AM) and has asked me every question I already explicitly addressed in the email I sent out last week in anticipation of these questions. My sister's boyfriend is in town, so she's done fuck all to prepare for the trip, including not giving me her passport information so that I can file travel plans with the Department of State. My best friend is working doubles tomorrow and Tuesday, and acted surprised that her boss scheduled her on Tuesday night even though she didn't request off, and asked that we get together and pack at 2:30 AM the day of our flight. And now the fuckface reservation staff at our hostel is typing emails to me in all caps, asking me for the same fucking information I already sent them twice. DON'T FUCKING YELL AT ME VIA EMAIL BECAUSE YOU'RE ILLITERATE, YOU FUCKING CUNTFACE. Also, psoriasis on my scalp. And my dear friend's boyfriend, who's also one of my closest friends, was cheating on her until two weeks ago with no one (but his roommate) the wiser, so I spent my Friday night with a very teary friend. I'm thisclose to cutting someone. I fucking hate nearly everyone right now. Rave: The ginger. He keeps me sane-ish, except when we talk about him getting a dog and he lists off a ridiculous amount of criteria. Regardless, the prospect of a blue-eyed ginger army still exists.
RANT: Fucking hell. I specifically told my grandfather that putting my laptop on the bed would not set the house on fire when he brought it up two weeks ago. I put a hardcover book under it and have never had any problems. It's completely fine. I leave the house for two (2) fucking days and he unplugs the charger because he's afraid it will spontaneously combust and "we will be dead." So of course the battery drains to 0%, and now it's damaged and won't hold half its charge. I thought I shut down the thing before I left, but there must have been some background process still running. The kicker? I just bought this fucking battery two months ago.
Rave: Shot some sporting clays this morning. I'm still not anywhere near good (54/100), but I did have my first 10/10 station today. I need to just say fuck it and buy a decent over/under. Rant: I can't do such a thing on a teacher's salary. I'm doing a terrible job of managing my finances as of late. I need to stick to a budget. I'm not hurting financially by any means, but I'm not saving enough to get out of this place. And I'm not doing enough to find a new profession that doesn't compensate you with "Little Johnny Sadsack can now read, so you made the world a better place" bills. Rave: I was a final for the Golden Apple award at my school. I'm not a horrendous teacher after all. Rave: Beer. And more beer. I'm not much of a beer guy, but I had some good stuff today. I forgot how much I like have some decent alcoholic beverages with some good conversation. Rant: I need to do the above more than 3-4 times a year. Seriously. Two work get togethers, and new years with my buddies are the only chances I have had to do the above in the past 9 months. I forget how lonely I am sometimes. Rant: I cannot talk to attractive women to save my life. Dear god. It's embarrassing.
Spoilered for a lot of bullshit. Spoiler Rant: Today, I had tests scheduled in all 3 classes. Every single class on Friday I mentioned it, and more than that, I have the next two days worth of lessons/work written on the board every single day, so the kids know exactly what is coming up. This should not have caught a single kid off guard, they've known about it since (at earliest) Thursday. By the 200th time I heard "wait, we have a test today?" I was ready to fucking hit something. The number of fucks that these kids give at this point in the school year is so minimal it is astonishing. A few of them have earned it. I have a few kids that could literally not show up for the rest of the year and still easily pass with at least a C. I hate this time of year, especially teaching Seniors. They genuinely do not care about anything, at all, whatsoever. What really gets under my skin, though, is... Rant: I have at least 4 kids that are in for seriously rude awakenings when they are taking gov or econ in summer school (or retaking 2nd semester US History their senior year). They genuinely seem to think that passing the class is a given, despite their 30% grade, and the fact that they're literally missing at least 1 day a week, if not more. These kids are going to SHIT themselves when they fail and can't graduate with their friends. I just wish I didn't feel like shit about it. I realize they're bringing it on themselves (to fail my class, you have to actively work against me. The worst part... Rant: One of the kids that is failing is a special ed student. He is the exact kind of kid I worked with as a social worker; I'd have my foot up this kid's ass, constantly, until he got his stuff done. I can't do that as a teacher, so I put my other experience to work: I emailed his teacher of record, his counselor, and his parents. Parents never got back to me, because from what I understand they couldn't care less about the kid. His counselor said she talked to him and she got him back into class (he had ditched my class for a week because he was stressed) and he assured me he'd do the work. His teacher of record? Nothing. Nada. Zip. I've heard literally fucking nothing from the guy. This guy's job is to ensure that the students on his list pass, and he seems to give even less of a shit than the kid I am working with. He has the kid in a resource study hall, but won't give him any of the work I sent. Long story short? 2 of the four members of this kid's support system clearly don't give a fuck. I can push him hard in class, I can set aside time to work with him before and after school, but I can't attend to this kid 24/7. Rant: Is this really what I want to do? Get all hung up and stressed about a bunch of kids that clearly don't give a crap? I know the old adage for teachers is "You can't care more than the kids, it'll kill you," but honestly, there is no physical way to care less than them at this point. Rave: Another special ed teacher I emailed got back to me right away and said she really appreciated the help I was giving her student, and said that she rarely sees other teachers give that kind of help and attention. I really, really needed something like that today. Rave: Booze. Done with this job in 2 weeks. Combination of the two. Fuck.
Rave: It's a boy! My doctor moved the due date up 10 days since he was measuring ahead. That puts me at halfway through the pregnancy on Thursday. Rant: Moving the due date is going to screw up my maternity leave. Instead of being off up to or through Thanksgiving now I'll be going back a few weeks before. Not a big deal at all but annoying nonetheless. (Repeat Cesarean, so we will know the exact date.) Rave: This will be my dad's first grandson. He has three daughters and three granddaughters. He'll be glad not to be quite so outnumbered! This will also be the first grandson on my husband's side to carry on their last name, apparently this is a big deal. Rave: I'm just happy that the baby is looking good and that we aren't having any complications.
RANT: I knew my day was going to take a bit of a nosedive when I received a frantic phone call on my work cell phone that started with "Probie used marijuana over the weekend and we had to kick him out. After he was out in the rain all night, we let him in to sleep in the basement and I seriously don't know what to do." Cue me sighing heavily and saying "Is he there now? All right. I'll be there in a half hour." Probie is in our treatment program for meth. His MO is to start with weed and soon shit spirals completely out of control. It's a goddamn mess. I prepared myself for every scenario when I drove to that house, including one where I prepped for an Adam Lanza scenario with slaughtered parents and a rifle pointed at me when I walked in...but no, thankfully, that did not happen. What did happen was something out of the show Intervention. In the end, I played mediator while they hammered on this kid, stating they were going to kick him out. When I left an hour later, I texted the boyfriend about it followed by "I am a fucking PO with a degree in criminology, not social work! What the hell do I know about addiction and mental illness?!" RAVE: Although I felt like a zero after walking out of that mess, two weeks ago I walked by our conference room without being seen when the treatment group from above was having their weekly meeting. I overheard the counselor ask how they felt about their new PO that just transferred in. One girl said "She's good, she's really good. You can tell she really cares about us and our recovery." Verbal agreement from everyone in the room. It was seriously the highest compliment I could've received - they realize I'm not out to get them and they know I'm trying to help them achieve sobriety. It was a good moment.
Rant/Rave: HEAD EXPLODING On the one hand, it is amazing how supportive and resourceful and helpful my family is. On the other, I tend to agonize over decisions, especially big ones. Adding in variables to my decision makes it exponentially more stressful. So the fact that I have my parents in the city I was born in and with a slightly depressed job market and where I went to college offering us a free house in exchange for managing their rental property, which is down the street from the university, and my oldest sister with a goddamn huge house offering to let us live with them for free win exchange for occasional babysitting and help around the house while el husband goes to school and where the job market is leaps and bounds better but where we'd have to put our possessions in storage and deal with an uncertain school and two dogs that would probably fight.... BLAH! I guess the only way to make this decision easy would be to get a job in one of those cities. It's fucking difficult and time consuming to do everything I'm supposed to for one city, now I need to expand my search to another huge city that I am unfamiliar with. So I guess in summary, if anyone wants to give me a job in Mobile or Houston that'd be lovely, k?
Rant Holy fucking hell. The intense, debilitating pain called Aerosinusitis was too much to bare while landing this morning. My head still hurts. It's the second time in my life I've experienced this bullshit while landing, and I would have done anything to get rid of it. Just imagine all of a sudden the area above your eye feeling like it's going to rupture. You'll feel a sensation like a stuffed up nose, but with a quick escalation and a hot, burning pain. The whole area above your eye has complete control over your sense of focus, and there's fear combined with a sense of urgency that leaves you thinking your eye is going to burst out of your skull. I've been cut, burned, and beaten. Nothing compared to that level of pain.
Rant: That faux-pas with your significant other when you tell her that you never noticed that faint scar across her hip before, then she points out that it's not a scar, its just the imprint of underwear hemline because she was lying on it funny. In my defence she has a bunch of scars (childhood lukemia treatment + C-section) that I never remember where they are or even see them withouth looking for them/wearing my glasses. She claims they make her ugly, but it's like her hair or other bullshit: I don't notice details, just the bigger, shapely picture. And man did her hips and butt fill out nicely with the almost-childbirth, without bending the downstairs plumbing all out of shape. She wasn't really upset at what I said, she just laughed at my idiocy. Really my rant is about not getting sex because stress is killing her mood and she stresses about every fucking little thing. Shit that we have no control over -not now or ever- and really doesn't matter. Relax a little babe. For God's sake, JUST FUCKING LET IT GO, whatever it is, LET IT FUCKING GO. I mean, if she was just withholding it as some sort of method of punishment, I could handle it: I'd find a way to work the system. But no, there's no fucking rhyme and he only reason is her meds and arm implant, if they're reasons at all. She's probably faking because she hates me. Dammit!
Rant Well, that was a shitty phone call. If you'll excuse me, I'm going to go throw up now. Rave? As unbelievably stressed out as I am right now, things could certainly be worse.