Dammit Seriously.

That seems to be my mantra at the moment. Or is it Damnit. Go look here. Because I am that ubergeek who googled it and then tried to decide whether ubergeek should be one word or two or hyphenated.

I got an email yesterday about a fiber show coming up and I also got my new issue of Fiber Art Now, which is an intriguing magazine…not as highbrow as the Surface Design Association magazine, but not as crafty as Quilting Arts is. I find I barely read these any more…I TRY to…really I do, usually while cooking, but sitting and reading short articles seems to work better with an electronic device these days than with a pile of pages.

Anyway, the email and the magazine sent me down a rabbit hole of shows coming up and possible entries and due dates and size requirements, so girlchild cooked dinner (late! she walked in and asked if I was planning on cooking any time soon…oops) while I bounced around websites trying to figure out if it was worth entering. I don’t mind being invited to enter a show, but when entry fees are exorbitant for a short show? That seems crazy…maybe I’m reading it wrong. I did manage to find some other shows that sounded interesting though, and I almost got excited about art for a moment there. Until I realized how late it was and that I had grades to input and my computer was being a slow-ass beast, which is another thing I need to deal with this summer, along with EVERYTHING ELSE IN THE FUCKING WORLD.

It does not look good for relaxation and mai tais by the pool. Like I ever do that. The to-do list is miles long. Plus I started reading a book about blended learning (the new code word in education) and realizing I need to get my entire curriculum onto Google Drive and Docs by the end of the summer, which is not a small task, and I won’t get paid for that, by the way, you idiot politicians who think we’re in it for the money, but I will do it ANYWAY, because it’s best for the kids, so maybe you should give me a raise, and then in a year or two’s time, I will also MAKE UP new curriculum all by myself when the science standards switch and we don’t get new textbooks until never. So. Yeah. This job. Sometimes…sometimes it’s the best thing around and exciting (it really is kind of exciting to be getting everything online and making things collaborative in a way I can track, instead of trying to figure out who wrote what, when the overachievers did the whole project while the other kid picked his nose for three days), but sometimes it is a huge drain on your brain.

In the middle of all this thinking and reading and stuff, I realized that my phone had disappeared some important notes from the Notes app (this was in the middle of riding the stationary bike), so then I had to try and find those, which meant restarting and installing a backup, which took forever (see note about screwed-up computer…you know, sometimes it’s just easier to buy a new one than figure out what the fuck is the matter with the old one, but that’s not an option, so figure it out we will). Plus the boychild was in here analyzing his yearbook at 11:45 at night (really, we are both night owls…I told him how I used to read under the covers until mom would come yell at me…he should be glad I’m his mom), which really was about analyzing his high-school career, because the twit is graduating in less than a week. GRADUATING. Fuck. And then moving out and never really coming back.

So not where I wanted to be right now. I’m a fucking mess these days really. I have spent the last two days showing one of the pregnancy videos to my students, and post-birth, I always tear up when I see someone give birth, but it’s usually OK, very controllable, because prior to a year ago, I wasn’t a CRIER. I really wasn’t. Barely ever. So I had picked the video with like 3 births in a row, and I almost lost it yesterday…over and over again…because I saw 15 births yesterday and I am not as in control of my crying tendencies as I used to be. It was a real struggle holding it together. By lunch (6 births down), I wanted to huddle in the bathroom and sob. It’s OK…today we move on to STDs. No crying there.

I know my head’s a mess, and I was hoping to MAKE art yesterday, but by the time the technology was all fixed and boychild was back in bed, it was almost 1 in the morning. My sleep app tells me I’ve averaged 4.5 hours of sleep a night this week. Um. Not good. But I’m wired at night, totally awake (unlike in the afternoon meetings). So that’s not conducive to lying down and sleeping. I try it and then my brain ransacks the emotional storage area and I end up crying myself to sleep because the SUMMER sounds overwhelming. My vacation time (vacation, ha!) sounds like it’s going to kick my ass. I’m crawling into bed on June 20 and pulling the covers over my head. Wake me up in 2017. OK, maybe I’ll get up to deal with the girlchild’s graduation.

Then this morning, the computer wants to tell me about the updates it’s installed. You don’t understand, you asshole…I don’t fucking CARE what you installed…are you working better than you were last night? Because that was a clusterfuck. The grading program was writing line by line and I just had to sit there WAITING for it to process to the alphabetical letter that I needed it to get to, and I don’t know whether it was internet or the grade server or my computer. I don’t CARE…it took forever. Just knock it off.

I’ve decided Clash of Clans (which I really do play sort of half-heartedly and then the boychild yells at me for even playing it) is a metaphor for life. I wake up every morning and my shield went down overnight and some total stranger attacked me and somehow I won. Because my defenses are OK (they aren’t really), but somehow I won without doing anything. But if I go out and attack anything, first of all, I suck at attacking…I just deploy everyone AT ONCE (GO! KILL! DESTROY!) with absolutely no strategy except to get them all running on the screen at once, little cartoon goblins and archers and barbarians (what are they all doing hanging out together anyway?), and then I get creamed. Because I suck at attacking. I go to sleep though and all this stuff happens and I wake up and I have more trophies. It feels kinda empty. So maybe entering shows will help…unless I get rejected from all of them and then that will be worse. Or maybe I won’t care. Who knows.

Yeah, I know. It’s a stupid game. I’m OK with that. I need something that doesn’t mean much, that isn’t that important, that I can do while waiting for the stupid grade program to respond.

I wish I could say that tonight will be better, and maybe it will…but it’s looking kind of fraught.

I was sitting at the union meeting last night (did I mention I didn’t even get home until almost 6 because of the union meeting?) and they had brought us ice cream, because it’s the last meeting of the year, but it was chocolate and sugar, so I’m allergic to the first, and I’m diabetic, so lots of the latter is not a good plan, and the woman next to me asks why I don’t have any ice cream, so I tell her those two things, and she says she’s diabetic too, which I didn’t know, and never would have guessed, because she had already eaten her ice cream and she always has a giant soda everywhere she goes. And I’m thinking, well, maybe it’s sugar free? But seriously? I do everything right, I lose all the weight, I exercise, I watch my diet, and I get stuck with symptoms that are worse than before, way worse, and there she is…poster child for bad diabetics, making me look bad. Dammit. Seriously.

I love this picture in the yearbook…

Yup. Those are my two. Boychild says they didn’t ask him about the words at all, and I guess if “closest of friends” includes yelling “Calm your asshole!” at the other one in the morning (that’s what I heard just before they left), then yeah, they might be. Certainly, the last part is true, and is why we will have to get a new monitor with a webcam so she can Skype him for math and science next year, because AP Physics is beyond me and Calculus makes my brain explode. Seriously, there are no spare brain cells for that stuff any more. Damn. I’m going to miss them. Seriously. I’m a mess.