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Interview
When you go for your first interview in years, it might be a semi-stressful event. After all, you’re out of practice.
You haven’t done this for so long you might not prepare properly. You might forget the name of the teaching model the school uses, and on the way to the school, you might have to refresh your memory at a traffic light.
You might have forgotten the stress of wondering if you’re going to be on time: you left with plenty of time, but who knows what delays await you, especially on Southern roads. It could be road work; it could be a traffic jam; it could be awful roads; it could be someone going ten miles under the speed limit.
You might have to schedule the interview just at the tail end of your day, and in an effort to be a little subtle about things, not come to school dressed for the interview but attempt to make the switch on the way. A service station bathroom? Too long. GPS says I only have eight minutes to spare. Traffic lights for the shirt and tie; remote corner of a grocery store parking lot near the school for the pants.
You might have to go to the restroom when you arrive but decide there’s just not the time (even after checking in with the receptionist), and besides, it’s not that urgent.
You might have forgotten that you’re not strictly (or even nearly) wearing dress shoes because you’ve gone all in for zero-drop shoes and don’t own a pair of formal zero-drop shoes, and you realize you probably should have bought some. In the meantime, you try desperately to remember not to cross your foot on your knee.
You might find yourself talking too much and have to tell yourself to shut up. “It shows your passion,” you might justify later. Perhaps your right.
First interview in seventeen years — went alright. We’ll see.
The End of the Streak
I guess it had to end some time: truth be told, I’d been posting random pictures rather than anything of any substance for the majority of the posts lately. A posting streak of 1,875 days is still not shabby.
What did it in? Sickness. Violent, awful, sickness…
Winter in LW
The Change
Today we covered 3.1 — Tybalt kills Mercutio, Romeo kills Tybalt, and the prince banishes Romeo.
“When you get to the third act of a Shakespeare play,” I’d explained to the kids yesterday, “everything changes.”
I’ve always especially enjoyed the lesson we do for 3.1. The kids select various divisions of the scene, read and discuss those divisions, and then prepare a tableaux vivant to summarize it. Kids who get the latter part of the scene quickly call me over to check their understanding.
“Wait, Tybalt is dead? How did that happen?”
“You mean Mercutio is gone? What?!”
My answer to all such inquiries is the same: “When you guys present your tableauxs, you’ll see.”
Time for a Change
I’ve been working at the same school since 2007. The end of this year will mark the seventeenth full school year I’ve taught there. I began in a room at the end of the eighth-grade hall; at the end of my first year, I was moved to the top of the hall, put on another team, and given my first English I class to teach. I’ve been in that room ever since. Sixteen years in the same classroom.
At this point, by my count, there are only four teachers who have taught at that school longer than I. Two are retiring at the end of this year. I would be number three in seniority. I know one of those two teachers is planning on retiring after next year, and so I’d move up to number two.
In a lot of ways, that’s an admirable goal. It’s a rarity in today’s world, though. Changing jobs every few years seems to be the rule and not the exception. Still, I always thought that there was something rewarding about sticking around and mastering a position. And there’s something in me that thinks it might be a real kick to reach that point: no one has taught here longer than I.
But what happens when the requirements of supervisors (in this case, people at the district level) make it difficult to continue teaching in a middle school with a clear conscience? What happens when you start to feel complicit in the systematic over-testing of students? What happens when the amount of stress you feel from jumping through all the hoops the district puts in front of middle school teachers begins to overshadow the joy of the job itself? You pull out your resume, which you haven’t updated in well over a decade, polish it up, write a cover letter, and start applying for jobs at high schools.
No Time or Interest
Spending a good bit of the evening working on another, short-term writing project and then reading about Trump’s latest shenanigans (if only that weren’t an application of the literary device of understatement) leaves me with little time, energy, or interest to write about my day, to share any pictures, to do much of anything other than take a deep breath and spend the last few minutes before my 11:00 bedtime doing anything that doesn’t involve thought…
Yet another cheat to keep a now-thoroughly-compromised streak going.
Health and Exercise
The Boy and I have endeavored once again to get into shape. That’s such a relative thing, I’m not even really sure what that means for the two of us. For him, it means putting on some muscle and losing the last of his baby fat. The pediatrician told us for years not to worry about his baby rolls. He’ll stretch out we were assured. They’ll disappear, and by and large, they have.
For me, that means just maintaining. As I’m getting older, mysterious new ailments appear. Recently, for example, the fingertips of my left hand have started tingling every now and then. It’s usually on my arm is bent, and it usually goes away as soon as I straighten it out: some kind of nerve interruption. I’m not too terribly concerned about it, but I’ll definitely talk to my primary care physician about it when I see him later this year. And of course, I’ll make an appointment sooner if it worsens. I’ve been hoping that perhaps the swimming that I’ve been trying to do would make that better. It seems like there’s just something catching in my elbow that’s making this happen, and I thought that perhaps a bit of increased mobility would stretch things back out and get everything flowing correctly. But I swim, and it persists, and I worry about it a little.
It seems every year, some new little thing crops up. My knees started giving me fits last year, and I really had to stop running altogether because I couldn’t make it more than about a half a mile before everything started hurting. My vision while reading has done the predictable: I have surrendered and bought reading glasses.
All this I suppose is somewhat predictable, and I guess it will only get worse. But I can fight it, and a bit of exercise every day should help. But I’m under the illusion that I’ll ever get back to the shape that I was in 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago.
I do hope I can encourage the Boy to remember that what he’s creating for himself now, the body that he is making, will go away and eventually be replaced by something older slower, less agile. I regret not holding onto my health and fitness that I experience that I had in high school. I regret losing the health and fitness. I developed cycling so much in Poland. It’s gone, and it seems like it will never come back even in the slightest bit.
Sassafras Mountain
Blueberries and Jasmine
Are blueberries and the jasmine on the slope behind them are locked in eternal conflict. The jasmine is the aggressor, continually trying to climb the blueberries, and the blueberries just want to be left alone. Today was the day to intervene. 
Act Now, While Supplies Last!
“One plenary indulgence — remission of all temporal punishment due to sin — per day is a tremendous gift of the Church, but two in one day is an enormously rare exception granted for this Holy Jubilee Year 2025” (Source). That’s two for one! Act now while supplies last!
If you call within twenty minutes, get a free shower squeegee with your order!
And it’s not the Onion.
Tomorrow’s Surprise
Eighth-grade teachers are catering the monthly potluck we have at school.
I’m bringing zupa ogrokowa.
They’re not even ready for this…
MTS on Colbert!
2.0
When Trump was in office the first time, every single morning or evening, I found myself checking the news to see what idiocy Trump had done in the last twelve hours. In Trump 2.0, I find myself wondering hourly.
- Cuts prescription cost-cutting measures
- Threatens to seize the Panama Canal
- Withdraws from the Paris Climate Accord
- Withdraws from the WHO
- Begins deportation process
- Pardons all insurrectionists
- Threatens to seize Greenland
- Expresses hope to make Canada a US State
- Does away with civil rights gains
- “Ends” birthright citizenship
- Threatens Columbia
- Fires inspectors general
- Mass firings of those who opposed in any way
- Freezes foreign aid
- Freezes grants with effects on everything from free lunch programs to housing subsidies, from Medicaid payments to child cancer research
- Offers to buy out federal employees
That’s just what I could remember off the top of my head. It’s virtually an hourly thing.
It’s awful what I’m becoming as a result: I find myself longing for the people who brought him back to power to suffer. I find myself longing to hear stories of MAGA-heads in a panic over the cost of insulin. I find myself longing to hear of MAGA kids having to drop out of college (most likely private Christian colleges) because the loss of grant money makes it impossible to continue. I find myself longing to hear stories of people in the rural South with a yard-full of Trump signs fretting over the lost of SNAP benefits. I want them to hurt. I want them to suffer.
That’s the temptation. I fight it, but it grows.
Evil men bring out the evil in others.
I fear it’s much worse than prescription prices though.
Polska 2011 Revisited
Sledding
Doughnuts
Left Behind IV: Tribulation Force: God’s Presence and Prayer
Two ideas the evangelical Christian community holds in common are that one can be sure of the presence of God and that God answers prayers. Confirmation of God’s presence comes from what evangelicals call the “interior witness of the Holy Spirit.” God’s answers to prayers can be anything from an unexpectedly available parking place to silence, often phrased as “God isn’t ‘not answering’ your prayer; he just said, ‘No.’” In Tribulation Force, the second book in the Left Behind Series, LaHaye and Jenkins create a group prayer scene that demonstrates these two principles fairly succinctly, and the scenes also manage to highlight the logical inconsistencies in these two views.
Evangelicals often claim that they can somehow feel the presence of God. This most often happens during highly emotionally charged events: it’s one of the reasons music plays such a prominent part in evangelical worship, and it’s why the worship leaders conducting that portion of the church service encourage everyone to stand, to put their hands in the air, and to close their eyes. Tied to direct and indirect calls to move away from analytical logical thinking and a decreased level of self-awareness, It creates a physical and emotional unity tied to the music (itself a very emotive medium), and this will create warm positive emotions that believers later attribute to God’s presence.
While four of the Tribulation Force characters meet together for a bible study session, they decide to pray together, on their knees. The first thing one character realizes is “he needed to surrender his will to God” which would involve “giving up the logical, the personal, the tightfisted, closely held stuff.” He later has a “fleeting thought of how ridiculous he must look assailed him, but he quickly pushed it aside.” Thus, logical thinking has disengaged and the character has taken a step back from his normal self-awareness. All he needs is a highly-charged emotional cue, which he gets shortly thereafter:
Bruce had been praying aloud, but he suddenly stopped, and Rayford heard him weeping quietly. A lump formed in his own throat. He missed his family, but he was deeply grateful for Chloe, for his salvation, for these friends.
This reaction in the context of the novel is understandable. These two characters were left behind while Jesus whisked their families off to heaven. They’re already emotionally fragile. It would take little to bring them to tears.
Of course, in the novel, it’s difficult to deny the existence of this god: he has apparently already made several million people disappear, and given their common fervent Christian ideas and the fact that the church (at least the evangelical church in America) has been preaching the coming rapture for decades, it’s difficult to deny from logic to deny the reality of the rapture and thus of the Christian god. But that’s the reality of the novel. The reality to which the authors hold makes the same claims about their god’s presence without the looming piece of evidence the rapture would represent. With or without the rapture, they would contest that the events of this prayer group constitute proof of their god’s existence.
It’s at this point in the prayer that the character Rayford feels sure of his god’s presence:
Rayford lost track of the time, knowing only vaguely that minutes passed with no one saying anything. He had never felt so vividly the presence of God. So this was the feeling of dwelling on holy ground, what Moses must have felt when God told him to remove his shoes. Rayford wished he could sink lower into the carpet, could cut a hole in the floor and hide from the purity and infinite power of God.
In our non-rapture reality, this scenario would also count as evidence of some divine presence. Practitioners would have already given up “the logical, the personal, the tightfisted, closely held stuff” and accepted that “[w]hatever God wanted was what he wanted, even if it made no sense from a human standpoint.” Critical thinking has been disengaged and emotion rises. Everyone experiences the same emotion, and so that’s the “inner witness of the Holy Spirit.” Believers attribute it to their god because their pastors, church leaders, and friends have taught them to do so, and since critical thinking has already been bypassed and because they are looking for evidence of their god’s presence, this serves that role perfectly.
The evangelical view of answered prayer might be a tricky were it not for the fact that believers have a curious view of prayer: any coincidental event occurring within any temporal proximity to the prayer can count as an answer to the prayer. Events happening weeks, months, or even years after the prayer can count, and the petitioner might even have forgotten about the prayer until it is, in her view, answered. So anything counts as an answer to the prayer. But what happens when nothing happens that the believers can classify as an answer? It’s simple: their god did answer the prayer; it just said “No.” Thus answered prayer is a heads-I-win tails-you-lose situation: nothing counts against it, for to count something against it would be to doubt the god of Christianity.
We see this tension in the prayer scene: Rayford, one of the characters who has asked the others to pray about a decision he must make, “wished God would just tell him audibly what to do.” He wants direct, audible help from his god. Of course, he knows that’s not what he’s going to get, but surely his god will answer his prayer somehow.
When the believers are done with their tear-filled prayer session, Buck, another character with an unresolved decision hanging over him, admits that as “wonderful as that prayer time was, I didn’t get any direct leading about what to do.” Rayford admits, “Me either.” A third character, Chloe (Rayford’s daughter and Buck’s love interest), comments:
“You must be the only two.” Bruce glanced at Chloe, and she nodded. “It’s pretty clear to us what you should do. And it’s clear to each of you what the other should do. But no one can make these decisions for you.”
Chloe has been arguing from the beginning how Buck and Rayford should resolve their dilemmas, and her prayer has somehow confirmed this. Her insistence that she was right all along, in turn, serves as an answer to Buck’s and Rayford’s prayer. As they’re leaving, Chloe comments that what they just experienced “was amazing.” We can see, then, that the whole prayer scene consists of little more than self-referential confirmation bias in an emotionally charged environment, yet all the characters attribute this to their god.
Again, in the book, there is substantial evidence for the existence of the evangelical god, which makes mitigates my argument a bit in the context of the novel. However, this scene echoes evangelical prayer sessions happening now.
One final observation about the source of this “inner witness of the Holy Spirit”: when Buck and Chloe are leaving, Buck comments, “I don’t know where I’d be without you people.” People and the emotional support they provide are at the heart of any religious group, an that alone makes evidence for this or that god only secondary. Through their emotional connections and highly emotional services, they themselves are the evidence for their god.
Baking
“I think I’m going to bake something: I haven’t baked anything for work in a long time,” K said after dinner. It seems to me a particularly Polish thing to do: bake something and take it to share with your colleagues. Perhaps it just seems that way because of my proximity to a Polish woman.
Tonight, though, she made muffins for everyone in her department.
What a lovely surprise they’ll have tomorrow morning.
A Response
“What are the general impressions of our President?” someone asked me. My response:
Folks who are firmly entrenched in the Trump cult of personality are thrilled. They worship the man, fly flags with his name on it, put up huge signs in their yards proclaiming their worship of the man. They’re positively giddy.
Folks who voted for him because they thought he’d accomplish this or that are taking a wait and see attitude.
Those of us who saw from the beginning that he was a narcissistic, racist, misogynistic idiot who knows next to nothing, cares about nothing other than himself, and acts and speaks most of the time like a petulant, spoiled child — we pretty much know what to expect, and he’s delivering from day one: His attempt today to override the 14th amendment with an executive order demonstrates he has as little respect for the constitution now as he did in 2021 when he incited an insurrection, and those two facts (among so many others) should provide all the proof anyone not in his cult would need that he is exceptionally unfit to be president.
I left out the fact that he surrounds himself with people who do things like this:
