Chapter 323

Sleeping nearly ten hours felt pretty good. My day went by normally, I had a double with the twelfth-graders, and then it was their PE class and one girl from another class, with whom I partnered last year for the badminton tournament, invited me to go play and practice for this year’s tourney. The other students were either sitting around doing nothing, or lining up for an exam of sorts, where they had to jump rope for a minute straight and then hit a volleyball as many times as possible without dropping it. Weird.

I had lunch at home, some zucchini spaghetti that hit the spot, one of my favorite pasta recipes to make now. I went outside with the dog, and then went through my afternoon. In the last period, I headed to the library, where a mini-parents’ meeting was about to take place. Five eleventh-graders from Crazy Class were there with their mothers, and they rotated from one table to another to talk with the various subject teachers. Some of the students had fucked up hard on the mid-term exam and their mamas weren’t pleased at all. I made them talk rather than just spit a bunch of platitudes myself, like by asking “Well what do you think about your performance? And how can you improve?”

So with that happening, I was home a bit later than usual, but I felt like it was fairly productive. I sat on the couch and looked for something to do, I watched a few YouTube videos about Clown World and politics and then put on an episode of High Maintenance, a TV series about a marijuana dealer in Brooklyn. I stumbled upon that show when it was a tiny, low-budget webseries, since then it’s been picked up by HBO but kept its underground spirit. I like the unpredictability, originality, cinematography and anthology format, but I feel uncomfortable at times with how it glorifies pretty damn sad and degenerate urban lifestyles. Characters are nearly always unhealthy, living in tiny pods, childless, working in all sorts of useless artsy or corporate jobs, and self-medicating with weed with various results. That episode was centered around a particularly shitty woman: she’s working at a radio station, she tries to use a very personal story involving her parents’ divorce, they refuse, and then she records an argument she has with her boyfriend against his will and plays it to all her coworkers. The argument itself is fucked up, she regurgitates a bunch of half-chewed feminist talking points about how her mom was basically a slave to her dad, but she can focus on her “career” because the boyfriend has such little ambition that he doesn’t get in her way. Naturally, no matter how much of a pussy-whipped nü-male he is, he takes umbrage at that, but somehow he’s the one who apologizes at the end. Toxic.

I considered going out to the bar but ended up just going to bed early, playing a bit of GTA and reading Apocalypse Bébé. I like things to be quiet.