In this world, it’s sleeb or be sleeben

Tuesday, August 10th, 2021AD

2 days into the final week at work and I’m exhausted 😮‍💨. I’m running the safety camp this week with a massive ability gap between some of these campers. I don’t mean that some of them are disabled, I mean that some of them are yet too young to read and paired up with 7th graders. I’ve basically got a one-room schoolhouse to run. It’s kinda fun in its own weird way.

Some of these kids have pretty messed up households. I had one kid loudly announce today that her parents are divorced; I quickly changed the subject. We’ve got other kids with parents who appear to emphasize being their child’s friend instead of his or her parent, which makes our job that much more difficult. Other times parents are just plain rude, which (naturally) teaches their kids to be rude too. The worst ones in my opinion is (are) the parent(s) who

• appear to not give a shit
• complain at us via email for running the program the way we do
• sheepishly avoid eye contact at pickup after reading the response to his 📧

He’s a character, but at least that’s less annoying than the ones who come up to you and say

I’ve been going here for fifty years and you need to fufil this bonkers crazy-ass request right now

Or

can my kid swim with a mask on?

(Swimming masked would cause you to drown)

I fell down pretty hard playing dodgeball with the kids today, smacking my elbows and upper arms against the concrete. I didn’t get hit, but man it hurts.

What’s next?

Soon I’ll be taking a 2-week trip. I’ll update my gemlog, but probably not my other internet homesteads on the WWW. I applied for a proper job at a Christian organization near the large research university by me, hopefully I hear back from them. I should send them an email soon, just to check in.

Otherwise once the school year starts up, I’ll be heading to the local high school to do some tutoring. It looks good on a resume, but I really don’t want to make a career out of tutoring.

Pandemic blues

We’re not out of the woods yet. My countrymen have been acting like everything’s going to just “return to normal”, but I highly doubt that that prediction will come true. The “normal” they’re looking for is most likely dead, like open-plan airport terminals after 9/11. I’m not looking forward to a return to lockdown (though compared to the rest of the world it wasn’t a real lockdown).

It’s all going to accelerate from here 🌪🌀📉💸