Pre-vacation jitters

Anticipation of vacation -> consternation

In college, I always felt like vacations came at exactly the right time. When classes and activities and socializing felt like they were reaching a fever pitch and I needed a break, voila: the end of the semester. Maybe the breaks fell at the exact right time, or maybe I adapted my expectations knowing the schedule. I still always appreciated them.

It’s the same with school vacation now. No spring break in March because Massachusetts turns President’s Day and Patriots Day into February and April vacations. All it costs us is a week of summer vacation! But I’ll always take more vacation, and two weeks does wonders to break up the second half of the year. They still appear just when we need it most.

For the kids, the weeks leading up to break are often among the most challenging. A week at home isn’t great for everybody, and week without school means no escape, no friends, no school-provided breakfast and lunch, no snacks along the way. Don’t you remember what we learned during the quarantine? Other just struggle with the disruption of their usual schedule. And the stress of a few magnifies the stress of the many, and before you know it, things get out of hand.

Last week was a thing. Every grade had its challenges, some had crises, and all I could think was that we still weren’t even at the dreaded week before vacation. Hopefully it will be more like The Soprano where the penultimate episode has the big surprises and the season finale is more enh. I a craving a a steaming plate of enh.

The Urban Blah

Back in 2009-11 I collaborated with the brilliant Lovisa to make a webcomic that failed to become syndicated across the globe. I am pro-recycling.

I love that coconuts have become a super-food because it’s an ingredient that improves anything it’s added to. I haven’t opened a proper coconut in some time, but thickly shredded coconut flakes are a staple, a charter ingredient in overnight oats. I even went through a phase of snacking on packaged coconut meat. Sometimes I’d grab an almond and some chocolate chips and have an elemental Almond Joy. Go, coconut!

And hey, Lovisa has a substack, you should subscribe!

Jam of the Week

I watched the first two seasons os Stath Lets Flats during the during the quarantine, so I somehow missed season 3. I recently tore through it because MAN is it funny. Written by and starring Jamie Demetriou, the bad teeth guy in Fleabag, the whole cast is outstanding, including his real-life sister, who plays Nadja on the stellar What We Do in the Shadows. But it’s Stath who steals the show any time he opens his impossible mouth, taking cringe in a new direction. His impenetrable accent, bizarre speaking style, and hilariously klutzy physical comedy mean a crazily high percentage of things he says and does make me laugh. Available on HBO Max or wherever you steal media.

My Back Pages

I started a blog Oct 31, 2003 and the entirety of my first entry went like this:

I just blogged all over my shirt.

I thought the word “blog” was funny. The awesome wife’s was called There’s a Blog in My Throat, so clearly we all though it was a word was worth playing with. I called mine Certainly Not Procrastination but quickly changed it to Surgical Strikes. Like a quick military operation, or my rapid supermarket trips for one or two items, my blog strategy was Get in, get out, quick surgical strikes. I called it Blog Tapas, sort of a one-man Twitter.

Some selections from my first month of blogging. From Nov 4, “of capital importance”:

capitalization? i’ve eschewed it online for some reason. should i continue here? makes things seem more off the cuff and conversational when they’re de-capped. But more formal and premeditated when capitalized. Punctuation will be enforced regardless. i guess stellar punctuation is wasted on no-caps. Okay, capitals when I remember. I’ll train myself, something Pavlovian. 

Big decisions in the early blogging here. Don’t you feel special to be witnessing the evolution? Or will this be a creationist blog? See? More decisions.

My dictionary doesn’t have the word “decapitalize,” so I’ll preserve my blog for when the Oxford English Dictionary comes a-knocking. From Nov 18, “Oh God please no”:

The first month I moved to L.A., I came home to find one of my roommates playing video games in the living room, an empty pizza box nearby.

“Man,” I said. “Those Doritos smell really strong.”

“I’ve got some bad new for you buddy,” he replied. “Those are my feet.”

It was the beginning of not the best living situation of my life.

This is a guy who used to get out of the shower and still smell. Also he was kind of a jerk, so the other roommates and I quickly found a new place. From Nov 20, “ABCD”:

I once spell-checked a document and the computer flagged “Superfly,” wondering if I actually meant “Superbly.” It was a good day.

That might have happened years earlier, I was clearly mining past experiences for backlogged ideas. Although this was indeed a moment worth remembering. From Nov. 23, “The worst and best”:

I’ve been digging up old cassette tapes and I found the worst thing I’ve ever heard, which is Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck singing Beatles songs (post-Mel Blanc; he might have pulled it off). It’s not so bad it’s good; it’s so bad it’s bad. Luckily, the closing track is the Road Runner performing “The Long and Winding Road” — sound effects of a chase over the instrumental, and a perfectly timed “MEEP MEEP.” The proverbial lonely little petunia in an onion patch.

I thought I came across this as a freebie from a record store, but given that it came out in 1995, I fear I may have spent my own money. But “Long and Winding Road,” is indeed outstanding absurdism.

Finally, from Nov 24, “Curt Schilling,” reacting to his free agent signing by the Red Sox:

Pedro, Schilling, and Derek Lowe? A combination like that would just make it even more crippling when the Red Sox fail. As if it gets any more crushing than this year.

My sixth graders were born into a world where the Red Sox had won the World Series twice in the past ten years. They won it twice more again in their lifetimes. It’s not easy to convey how different it was in November 2003 when it was 85 years since the last Red Sox championship and a month after the devastation of Aaron Boone. Being pessimistic about the 2004 campaign was what being a Red Sox fan was all about. It’s fun living in Title Town, but I was better at being disgruntled.