MOOP!

Wheeeeeeeeee.

I spent basically all of today on a bus, which was DEEPLY NOT OKAY. I mean, it is what it is, but it was just so fucking exhausting to be on a bus for almost three hours longer than I was supposed to be. This is what we do to avoid paying extra money. Or fly.

Ultimately, the New York trip was a Roaring Success! I am very pleased to have gotten out there, to have spent time with mom and Barb and dad and Maia, and to have go seen lovely shows and the like. That being said, I am _extremely happy_ to be back home, curled up in bed, writing my words and watching Jeopardy on Netflix. Just...kinda mindless! I know that tomorrow I go back to the real world and work and stuff (although the seniors are gone, so work is a lot less so).

The other downside of the Bus Ride From Hell was that there was a lot of traffic...and the bus driver was not very good at The Traffic Game. When you're shitty at the traffic game, you make your passengers much more prone to carsickness. So...basically after the first hour, I was vaguely queasy the entire time. It was...yeahhh. This meant I couldn't really do anything to entertain myself --reading books makes it worse, fucking around on the phone makes it worse, traffic is non-conducive to drawing, and I'm not the kind of asshole to talk aloud on the phone while on a bus. So I dozed the entire time, mostly not actually sleeping.

I managed some actually entertaining daydreaming, but then they kept getting dragged into generalized anxiety and totally absurd fantasies about doing stuff like successfully blackmailing Jeff Bezos into donating his fortune to the ACLU or whatever. That is one of the less anxious things I thought about for a while on the bus.

It's _very hard_ to feel comfortable or sane right now, in a world that is falling down around our ears.

Anyways, I'm building up to the last few weeks of school/work, and then it is PINEWOODS!. Well no, then there's a brief visit by Alys and Pinewoods prep. At some point I need to settle down and figure out the rest of my summer --I know it will involve moving throughout August, and I wanna go visit the parents for a bit, but like..is there time to organize anything else in there? Or should I just plan on flopping around as much as possible?

Oh yeah, and also there's an AGM for the Bellsfolx, which I'm not really in charge of in any way...but the boyf is, and there's a certain extent to which I anticipate playing host-spouse.

I dunno. I'm pretty tired and babbly tonight, but that's what happens when you don't _do_ anything all day. I wish I'd had more of a chance to do _anything_ on the bus, even just some mindless gaming, but c'est la vie.

Hope y'all are well!

I am very sick. It's some sort of cold-like thing: very achey, very brain-fogged, mild sore throat, very mild sinus-mucus (but high and headache inducing sinus-ache). Generally exhausted, at a time where I can't really afford it (but isn't that always the case?).

I took a day off of work Thursday, which basically never happens. On the one hand, the whole point of a strong union is to protect worker's rights. I am actively deprogramming myself from my father's insistence that the world is a meritocracy¹, and a lot of that is reminding myself that we live in a world where the boss is an enemy, and yeah it's paranoid, but you also can't ever really let go of that.

Which means that if I'm sick, and I have sick days available, then I should absolutely use them because it's not like I get to keep them forever² if I don't.

But on the other hand...anti-capitalism praxis gets wonky when you're a schoolteacher. First of all, it's nearly as much work to take a day off as it is to not. Oh sure, I don't have to do the actual literal standing up in front of teenagers and teaching...but gods, that's the *easy* part. I can teach an already planned and prepped lesson when I'm so fatiguey that I have to sit and rest after climbing a flight of steps³. I just can't much create good and inspiring lessons for those teens. But in order to take a day off, I have to create sub plans regardless, and trust me, hitting the balance between "relevant practice" and "not busywork" is _hard_. The world would be much easier if we just assumed and accepted that when a teacher was absent, their students wouldn't learn for a day and it's okay.

Also there's the idea of keeping my different classes in sync with each other. I teach three different preps, and it is annoying as hell to have one class be ahead of its fellow. For this reason, the only easy day I can take off in a week is Monday --every other day, I'm losing one (but not the other) of one of my pairs of classes. It's maddening! And absolutely no, you cannot sufficiently cover it with sub work, unless you have a ridiculously well motivated class (hahaha) and even then, you still have to trust the sub not to randomly lose the assignment somehow.

So I was in Friday, despite feeling exhausted and like my brain was wrapped in wool. I just...couldn't bear to let my classes get more out of sync, and at least this way I could throw some supervised practice at them, at the least. I promise you, it's not nobility that keeps me coming in, or some great loyalty to this job⁴, it's just the mind-numbing fact that if I don't come in, I'm only making a quickly increasing amount of work for FutureKat, and fucking up my unit plans for weeks to come. And that, I _really_ can't bear.

~Sor
MOOP!

1: I mostly get along with my da, but wow does this particular thread cause some major eyerolling amongst his millenial-aged children. He's not quite full-republican "bootstraps!" but there's definitely this weird thread sometimes where I just...don't think he remotely remembers what it was like to be poor(er).

2: Actually, maybe I do? I need to find my contract and look this up. I know my personal days get burned, so the fact that I never got around to using the one last year is an Active Bad and I should Feel Bad, but also like...let's be real, I spent most of the end of last school year playing multiple hours a day of Bloons Tower Defense, SOOOO...

3: ...hypothetically. I definitely didn't accidentally scare my other-boss by coming into her room on the fourth floor and immediately putting my head onto the desk because I was so tired or nothin'.

4: Although I do love this particular job more than almost any I've had, and I do feel some sense of loyalty to the place.