Category Short Stuff

Responding to Comments

Dusty Leave a comment

I got these two comments on an earlier post on this blog. I intended, when I started this blog, to respond to all comments; therefore, gentlemen, Mr. W.W.W. Gurkancelic Dot-com [Note: I have to write it that way or the browser automatically makes it a hot link, and I am not going to drive this schmuck’s traffic]  and Mr. What does t.b.h. mean out, I will endeavor to give you the same courtesy.

W.W.W. Gurkancelic Dot-com

This will make gossips less credible and hence of less interest to others.
Or, Amy, a supervisor, may hold meetings without co-workers
even though the workers are available and vital to the success of the company.
Gossip magazines revenue s signature, whereas the truth was that
it was a crime that he hadn.
Gossip gives us information on how to better interact with other people.
Online gossip girl 6 évad Control freaks feel that there is only one way to do things and that’s
theirs. Your probably wondering why I created this article.

Well, I am in favor of making gossips less credible and hence – fancy word, there, “hence” – less interesting to others; but I am certainly not going to click on your link to see what exactly will do this. I also don’t think that being incredible will make gossips less interesting. Seems like the less credible the gossip, the more enjoyable people find it. Ever read the Weekly World News?

And I have to say (though it seems like you’re spreading rumors about Supervisor Amy), I think holding a meeting without coworkers sounds genius. I did it earlier this year, and it was wonderful: my coworkers, who also didn’t want to be in the meeting, all stopped by my classroom and said, “Are we having a meeting?” I said, “Do you have anything for the agenda?” They replied in the negative, and I said, “Good meeting.” And away they went. When the supervisor (Mine isn’t named Amy) showed, I said that we had had a quick meeting already, and nobody had any particular concerns. It worked: the supervisor nodded and went away, his unholy thirst for meetings and networking sated, for the moment. (I had to further propitiate the beast with minutes for the “meeting,” which read a lot like the above: Short meeting, no concerns. BACK TO THE MIDDLE MANAGEMENT HELL FROM WHENCE YOU CAME, DEMON!) But it is nice of you to recognize that the workers are vital to the success of the company. Any chance of a raise? What’s that? Something about revenue and a signature? Hey, thanks – is that a – oh. The check’s in the mail, I see. Just a rumor, right? Yeah, that is a crime.

Okay – but now you’re saying that gossip gives us information? Useful information? On how to interact? I have to say, you’re not making that gossip seem less credible, here. Oh – Gossip GIRL gives better information, I got it. Gossip Girl 6? The 6th season? Never watched any of them, honestly; not my kind of thing. I prefer Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Or the Simpsons.

Your right about control freaks. (And damn my word program — and browser — for not recognizing that mistake.) But I am not, in fact, wondering why you created this article.

Thanks for the comment.

What does t.b.h. mean out

In saying that, He was referring to the feast of the Marriage Supper of the Lamb as discussed
above. It is salutary to accept one’s losses, but there comes a
time when one must reaffirm what remains and even begin to explore previously untapped potentials.
Meaning of tbh?
Moreover, the modems may not be usable (as often is the case) with other operating systems
or other Windows versions, because the drivers are simply not available.
When you are tired and complain about your job – think
of the unemployed, the disabled, and those who wish they had your job.

So I looked up the Marriage Supper of the Lamb to which you refer, and I have to be honest: it’s a little creepy. But it’s creepy in kind of a spectacular way. Here’s why: it’s a reference to Revelations, which includes a verse saying that Jesus Christ, risen in the End Times, will take a bride. The interpretation I read explained that this was metaphoric, that the bride is not a literal bride, but rather the Church. And those who have been reborn and taken Christ as their savior will become the bride of Christ. Which is weird, because it makes me picture a Moonie-like mass wedding; and it is spectacular, because that is unmistakably and unapologetically gay. Just picture all the beer-bellied bearded suspendered workbooted intolerant redneck Christians you know: the ones who pray, in earnest, for a winning football team; guys who would beat their sons to death if those sons came out; picture them in white dresses and veils, holding bouquets and looking starry-eyed up at the bearded Christ smiling down on them at the altar. That is fab-u-lous.

I agree: it is healthy to accept that which cannot be changed. I am moving that way with Bernie Sanders’s campaign for the nomination, which it is now looking like he really won’t win, and not because of the media, but because of votes. But I am willing and able to reaffirm what remains: Hillary Clinton. No, she is not everything I hoped she would be; like her husband she is beholden to moneyed interests, and I fear will not help us fix out longterm financial problems. But she has managed to push back Bernie Sanders; that means she will not have much trouble with Donald Trump. And that makes me very happy. I also believe there is additional potential there which, if tapped, could help solve some of our other problems, like wage equality. I also think that Barack Obama’s presidency helped to reveal some of the hidden racism that still seethes in this country, bringing it to the surface and, hopefully, helping us thereby to heal; perhaps President Hillary Clinton could do the same with the deep sexism that still infects us.

Oh – and speaking of accepting one’s losses, I think it’s time to throw away that modem. Of course you can’t find drivers for it: who the hell uses modems any more? How many baud you got on that thing, big fella? Get yourself a nice wifi router and a cable connection in your house, and call it good. Come into the modern age.

Ahhh, now you’re speaking my language. I am tired and complaining about my job pretty much every day. My job is hard. It is exhausting, and often frustrating. Of course it makes me tired. It doesn’t help, either, that I worry about doing it well, which sometimes keeps me up at night; last night it was because I got pissed at one of my classes yesterday because one of them walked in and before I could even talk about what we were going to do that day, before I could even start class, he says, “Can we just do nothing today?” That drives me nuts. Because why am I the one who has to come up with the motivation to do work? I get paid either way, and I can find a new job. These frigging kids are the ones who are building their futures – or not. And they want to take the one hour of the day that could be dedicated to improving their English skills, and just sleep, instead? Bite me.

But you’re right. I am employed. It is fortunate, because I came very close to ruining my own career. And I am both lucky and healthy enough to have avoided disability. I should be thankful for what I have, and for what I have the opportunity to do with my remaining time in this life. Well, not thankful, because I don’t think there’s anyone to thank for what I have; because I don’t actually believe in God, nor do I want to marry him. I don’t think beards are attractive. Plus I feel like he’d be preachy. Like if you blew off your cleaning, left dirty dishes in the sink, he wouldn’t say anything, he’d just sigh and shake his head and look sad. I would hate that. So passive-aggressive. So not thankful for my good fortune, but – pleased with it. Sure. I can do that. Hey – thanks. Really. I appreciate the reminder.

And t.b.h. means “to be honest.” Like this: don’t fucking spam my blog again. It’s an asshole move.

Out.

Targeted Marketing

Dusty 4 Comments

Going through my local grocery store checkout line. It’s a good store: Sprouts is the name of the chain; local and organic food are the specialties (in theory — I am suspicious of their prices, which seem lower than one would expect from a sort of organic food market. But I know that the brands they carry are good brands.), the location is very convenient for us, directly between work and home; the staff are polite and friendly and efficient. Only very rare problems with things being out of stock, and their produce is generally top-notch.

And so, it seems, is their demographic-specific marketing. Because while they clearly cater to the new age/hippie/free spirit subset of their larger mainly liberal consumer base, they are in Arizona, after all, which is a damned conservative place. So as we were going through the line, on one side — the left side — was this adult coloring book:

Pagan Coloring Book

“Activates the creative process of your imagination.”

 

And on the other side — the right side — was this one:

Jesus Coloring Book

 

Now I just need to find the aisle that has the atheist/Cthulhu coloring books. “Coloring Cthulhu activates the healing powers of your madness!”

I’m that cow.

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Toni and I drive past a herd of cattle every morning when she takes me to work. We like to discuss what the cows are up to, and what they’re thinking. Toni is always amazed that they haven’t figured out body heat: because in the brutal summer heat, they all go stand under the shade trees on the edge of their pasture — but they all pack together, side by side, in the shade; we have no doubt that their shade is not in any way cooler than the sunshine. Nonetheless, every hot day: “Come on, everybody! Crowd in. Room for a few more if we squeeze. Man, is it hot! Well, at least we have shade!”

Toni and I like to make our own fun.

So this morning’s conversation went like this.

Dusty: I bet the cows discuss philosophical things while they’re grazing. I know if I was a cow, I’d do that all the time. I’d be like, “Hey, you guys ever wonder where the grass comes from?”

Toni: (Speaking for the other cows): “It grows out of the ground.”

Dusty (Speaking for the Wondering Cow): “Yeah, but where was it before that?”

Toni: I bet they’d avoid you. “Oh, no — here he comes again. Everybody turn the other way.”

Dusty The Wondering Cow: “Hey! You guys! You guys! You know what I was just wondering?”

Toni: You’d annoy them all, thinking too many weird things and asking too many questions. “Why? Why? Why?” You’d bug the crap out of the other cows.

Dusty: (After a lengthy pause) I’m like that now.

And then, silence.

I’m that cow.

Again? Really?

Dusty Leave a comment

So I had insomnia last night, again. I woke up about 3am and couldn’t get back to sleep: I was too busy fretting about my teaching. (It didn’t help that I had an annoying earworm, the chorus of Five Finger Death Punch’s “Jekyll and Hyde,” repeating in my mind the whole time. But the main thing was the fretting.) Am I teaching fast enough? Am I teaching right enough? Am I teaching hard enough?

It is a constant worry. Not just for me, I’m sure, but for most teachers. It’s why the Standards movement has gained so much ground among teachers, even though logically, standards have very little to offer teachers other than more work and less individual freedom. Because teaching is a profession with an enormous amount of uncertainty. The goals are uncertain – am I teaching my students reading and writing? Critical thinking? Good citizenship? Obedience and conformity? – and the measurements are uncertain – do I want them to get high grades, or high standardized test scores? Or do I want them to feel self-confident and happy? – and the future of one’s employment is the most uncertain of all: because not only does it rest on the vagaries of school population and school funding, but it also rests on those same uncertain, everchanging goals and measurements. Teaching is like walking through a fog bank on the edge of a cliff and trying to shoot a bullseye with a bow and arrow. And I don’t mean a target: I mean the actual eye of an actual bull, that is moving somewhere through the fog, and may be trying to knock you off the cliff – especially if you shoot him with the arrow.

But here’s the thing: everything about teaching is uncertain, except for this: teachers are important, and good teachers are doubly so; and I think, after sixteen years, it is certain that I am a good teacher. I think I can know that, even if I don’t know anything else for sure. I have always been able to work well with my students, and even when the curriculum has been drastically changed, I have generally been able to adapt to the new stuff and still get good results. I am slow, both in covering material and in keeping up with paperwork; and I am a bit of a maverick, in that I tend to push for my own choices of material and my own goals rather than the ones preferred by my administrators; but our goals are generally pretty congruent, because I always have the students’ best interests in mind. It’s one of the things that makes me a good teacher. And I have had former students, and their parents, come back to me and tell me that my class was their best class, that it was one of the things they looked forward to in their school day; they have said that they learned a lot from me; they have said that I changed the way they thought, or they read, or they wrote. Bull’s eye.

Unfortunately, my confidence in myself doesn’t actually translate to a lack of worry. Partly because I am a worrier by nature, and partly because I am surrounded by a whole world of people telling me to do something differently. “You’re teaching THAT?! Don’t teach that – teach this!” “You’re teaching that THAT way?!? Don’t teach that way – teach this way. And also this way. And kind of this way, too. And make sure you have clear lesson, unit, and semester plans, all prepared in advance and shared to a Google document with everyone else who wants to read them and laugh behind their hands at you.” “Make sure they get high test scores. But not on that test – that’s the old test. Use this test. And also, keep the parents happy – which means make sure they get high grades, since that’s what pleases parents.””Oh – and check for dress code violations, and make sure they aren’t fooling around in the supply closet.” I tell myself all the time that all I need to do is my best; but it never feels like enough. At least I think that. Particularly when I wake up at 3am. It all makes it very difficult: to teach, and also to sleep.

But finally, I got back to sleep. And I had a dream. In the dream, I was making my wife drive me to school early so that I could donate a pile of art books that we didn’t want any more, that I thought my students might enjoy or be able to use. And when I got there (In standard dream fashion, it was raining Biblically, and the school was something like an old haunted Victorian, and I actually had a suite of my own – and needed to take a shower before class started – and the principal I talked to was the one from Oregon before I moved here in 2014), before I went inside, a sleepy student – it was still dark, before sunrise, plus the rain – asked if she could lie down in the back of the car, and because she was obviously tired and cold, I let her, over my wife’s irritated objections. I went inside with my art book donation, and there found that I had a new assignment: now all of my classes were going to be taught outside. (Apparently in the middle of a deluge. Hey, why not? They can learn about water conservation and climate change. And hypothermia.) Starting that morning. I objected to this, even threatening to quit, but my administrator asked me to slow down, in the middle of my outraged temper tantrum, and explain why I wasn’t willing to make this change; and in thinking about it, I realized that I was teaching things that all related pretty well to being outside – Thoreau’s Walden and Frost’s Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening and the like. And I threw up my hands and said, “Fine. Fine, I’ll do it. But can I please have a moment to myself before there are students in my face?” My administrator left, and I burst into tears.

Then I woke up. And in the shower, I realized: there I was, donating my possessions, my time, my car, my wife’s patience, to my students, and my school was still screwing around with me for no good reason – and I was still doing what they asked. I do everything that is asked of me, and I do it as well as I possibly can, which is generally pretty well. And I do what is really required: I try to do what is best for my students.

Even my subconscious is tired of me worrying about this crap.

Mmm… Marshmallow Pie!

Dusty 1 Comment

Let me start by saying: I work at a very good school. I complain about it, and I criticize it for its flaws; but it is a very good school, with excellent staff and lovely students, overall.

But the people there? They’re people. And sometimes we people say and do some goofy things.

Tonight we had an open house, because we’re a charter school in a market full of them, and so we compete for students. Our open houses include a presentation from our principal, a PowerPoint that shows a variety of nice things about the school which he explains. It’s a lot of information , some of it interesting; but the best part, at least for me, is listening to the amusing things our principal says: because English is his second language.

Tonight’s best line: “We take all students at all levels; we don’t just take the cream of the pie.”

 

This past Tuesday, two of my students came into my room during my prep period; they were carrying styrofoam bowls and spoons. “Mr. Humphrey? This … isn’t good.” The other one chimes in: “Yeah. I thought this would be great, but … It’s really making me feel bad.”

These — Honors students, in advanced classes, might I note — had made themselves a bowl of nothing  but the marshmallows from Lucky Charms. In milk.

image

Yeah. Definitely not the cream of the pie.

Book Memories

Dusty 1 Comment

I’ve always been proud of my memory. I remember as a kid I found the word “eidetic,”and didn’t quite understand that it was the same thing as “photographic,” so I began using it to describe my memory. It’s not eidetic, actually, because the word describes the ability to recall visual images with remarkable vividness after only a short time of exposure, and my visual memory is awful. But I can remember trivia like nobody’s business. It never takes me more than two days to memorize all of my students’ names, for instance, and I can rattle off half of the rules of D&D with no trouble.

In the last few years, however, I’ve lost that pride in my memory. Partly because as I’ve grown older it has become less sharp, less capacious; I forget stuff now. My wife used to call me her Port-a-Mem, because she could tell me to remember something and I would; now I need to write stuff down. But the larger reason is that I can’t seem to recall my own childhood very well. I have a friend who has almost perfect recall of anything that happened in our childhood, and I don’t have any recollection of half the things he talks about the two of us doing in our elementary school years. I have to struggle to remember my teachers, or any of the lessons I learned in school. Holiday memories, meals or presents or specific events; I have very few. I remember we went to the Christmas Revels every year, but I don’t remember them. I remember going to First Night in Boston, both with my family and with my friends, but all I remember is those frigging plastic trumpets, the same ones that made such a noise at the World Cup a few years ago. I read about authors who use their childhood as a treasure trove – or maybe a mine shaft is a better analogy – from which they draw ideas for prose or poetry, but I feel like I don’t have that. It feels like a disadvantage, like a vital element of being a writer that I lack. I know this isn’t unusual, either for people in general or for writers in specific – we ain’t all Marcel Proust, who wrote seven volumes starting from the memory of a cookie – but it makes me a little sad that I have a good memory that used to be a great memory: only not for myself. My own life is, while sometimes clear and picture-perfect, mostly a blur.

But then this morning I realized something. It may be that the reason why I don’t have a very good memory for my own life is because my memory is already full: of the lives of other people. I remember books.

Maybe it’s not unusual, maybe there’s nothing special about my memory of books, but I remember them quite well. My wife has, on several occasions, bought a book that sounds interesting, started reading it, and then discovered that she has read it before; I never do that. I can always pick out the books I’ve read before. I remember the books I teach, too; far better than I remember the students I taught them to. I haven’t taught John Knowles’s insipid novel A Separate Peace in ten or twelve years; but I still remember that it’s in the fourth chapter when the narrator throws Finny out of the diving tree; and it’s chapter ten when Leper Lepellier goes crazy. I remember some of the details about the daily life of Ivan Denisovich, and the cloned generations of Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, even though I only taught those books once apiece.

I remember that the book where I found the word “eidetic” was Piers Anthony’s Bio of a Space Tyrant. And I remember almost everything about that whole series. Hope Hubris was the guy with the eidetic memory. What a terrible name. I thought it was so clever at the time.

So I’m thinking now that somewhere along the line I made the choice: I was going to remember what I read. I have wanted to be a writer since about the 4th grade, so that may be about where I decided; that was when my family read Sherlock Holmes and Edgar Allan Poe together, one of my fonder – and clearer – memories of childhood. I also read Tolkien and a whole lot of books by Anthony around that time; this is why I write fantasy and science fiction and horror, I would think. (Horror also because at age 13 I discovered Stephen King, and I have never stopped reading his books.) So perhaps I dedicated some of the memory that would otherwise have captured my own life to the retention of the fictional lives I read about.

Now I just have to decide if that’s good or bad.

Bullsh*t Award

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And the Bullsh*t Award for this week (Non-Trump Category) goes to: the following Quickwrite response from one of my students (A Quickwrite is like a single short answer question; should be about a paragraph, and show both thought and evidence in the answer.)

Subject: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail”

Question: How do specific words and phrases contribute to the impact of King’s opening?

Answer: The more specific the words the more serious he sounds. The opening of a letter I think is the most important part of the letter. Its [sic] what makes people know if you are serious or playing. So the specific words and phrases he uses make him seem real & serious about what he is talking about.

Ladies and Gentlemen: My Wife.

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My wife picks me up from work every day. Yesterday, on the way home, I was telling her about an unfortunate consequence of one of my examples in class.

I gave one of my classes a Voice Lesson (If any teachers read this blog, I highly recommend this book for close reading/literary analysis practice — it’s here on Amazon.) which gives them a quotation and asks them a series of questions about it, and then has them imitate it in some way. Today’s quotation was:

Whenever he was so fortunate as to have him near him a hare that had been kept too long, or a meat pie made with rancid butter, he gorged himself with such violence that his veins swelled, and the moisture broke out on his forehead.
– Thomas Babington Macaulay, “Samuel Johnson”

The students then had to write an original sentence describing someone with disgusting eating habits, using at least three vivid details. Now, I answer all of these myself; but I don’t want to point the finger at anyone else and call them disgusting. So I described my own disgusting eating habits.

You see, when I was in high school, I ate, as many teens do, really appalling amounts of junk food. I picked three of the worst examples, and — even though I never combined these in real life — I put them all into one sentence. The three eating habits were: once I brought a can of Betty Crocker frosting to school for lunch, which I ate with a tiny spoon intended for stirring espresso; I used to eat beef jerky that came in an eight-foot rope form (With the unimaginative product name of “8-Foot Beef Rope.” Picture a coiled Slim Jim. And yes: I did try to make a lariat out of it. Didn’t work.); and as I was not picky about my throat-searing, stomach-churning soda consumption, I used to drink Caffeine-Free Diet Coke at room temperature, from two-liter bottles.

I told my students about this. And two of them, in a classic example of Why Mr. Humphrey Doesn’t Talk About The Stupid Crap That He Did In His Youth, decided that they would eat the same thing, and do it within a time limit — half an hour was what they were bandying about during class. This, apparently, was to be called The Humphrey Challenge.

I told this to Toni as she was driving me home. I said to her what I said to them: I do not want my name associated with this. I do not endorse these eating habits, particularly not all at once. This is not the thing I want named after me.

Toni said, her tone completely deadpan: “Everyone’s gotta have a legacy.”

I don’t think she even noticed the death glare I gave her for the following thirty seconds. If she did, it didn’t have any effect.

 

And then today: today on the way home I told her about the question I got today, which certainly ranks at the top of the list of Most Awkward Questions I’ve ever been asked by a high school student. One of my freshmen, who admittedly lives a very sheltered life — she made “Eeewww!” noises and faces throughout Romeo and Juliet, and left the room whenever Mercutio started making pornographic jokes — came in to my room today before the class started, and in a conversational tone she asked — in all sincerity — “Mr. Humphrey, what’s a boner?”

My first thought was, “How do I answer this?” My second thought was, “Don’t answer this.” I went with option two, telling the young lady she didn’t want to know. She was suspicious she was being played, but several other students — who are less innocent — agreed with me.

So Toni and I were talking about this, and she asked, “So that isn’t part of your curriculum, then?”

I said, “No, we don’t have a boner standard.” Though I admit I haven’t read all of the Common Core.

Giggling furiously, she managed to get out, “How about a rubric?”

Death stare one day, peals of laughter the next. She always keeps me guessing, and usually laughing.

Welcome To The Sims Update

Dusty 1 Comment

The Sims Update

I don’t know about you people: but I still play The Sims. In fact, I still play The Sims 2. We have The Sims 4, but only on the laptop; the desktop only has Sims 2. We don’t have Sims 3 at all. Because Sims 3 sucked.

A couple of years ago, I read an article about unusual topics for college application essays; the one that spoke to me most clearly was a young woman who had applied to college and used The Sims to explain herself to the admissions officers: because you see, she had been playing the same game of The Sims for four years, and she had carried her Sims through twenty-seven generations.

That blew my mind. Just imagine that: if the average Sim takes 30 years to reproduce (If you’ve never played the Sims, they generally take one full day, 24 hours, of Sim time to be equivalent to a year of life; you have three days as an infant, then four as a toddler, then eight as a child, ten as a teenager, and 28 as an adult before you become a senior; how long you live as a senior is dependent on how happy and fulfilling your life has been up to that point. So yeah, about 30 Sim days before they can reproduce), 27 generations is coming up on a millennium of Sims. A Simillennium. I’ve never even played my Sims through three generations — though that’s usually because I kill them.

I’m something of an afficionado of Sim murder. Simicide.

But I was inspired. I was going to start a new game of Sims, I decided; and this time, I wasn’t going to do what I usually do, and make up the wackiest Sim I could think of — wasn’t going to make a pirate who lived in a house shaped like a ship, wasn’t going to make a family of Cthulhu worshipers, or mafiosos, or a sweatshop where imprisoned Sims paint pictures all day for their abusive and tyrannical overlord. This time I was going to play the Sim families that came in the pre-generated neighborhood, play them straight, and see if I could run them through many generations.

So I’ve been working on that. It’s hard, honestly: because there are a lot of families, and I can only play for a little while each day. I’m afraid the whole endeavor is now doomed, because this desktop, as it nears a decade of life, is breaking down; and I don’t know what will happen to my Sims when the computer dies. Will I re-install this game, now over a decade old, onto my new desktop? Will the neighborhood be saved with the files from this computer, and transferred onto the new one? Or will their universe collapse into oblivion, and I will need to start over again? Will I be willing to start over again, or will I just play more Diablo III?

Plus my penchant for strange Sims has proven inescapable: already in this neighborhood I’m planning my next serial Sim killer. I already have a witch in a lesbian relationship with a vampire. Another witch, this one evil, who seduced her sister’s husband and bore him a child. A trailer trash gold-digger who married an old man for his money.

Here’s the thing: I love The Sims because it invites story-telling. You can create a whole new person, and for me, that’s an opportunity to build a character with a backstory, and then run that person through conflict and resolution, conflict and resolution. And I love story-telling. It’s kind of what I do.

So here’s the new plan. I’m going to post updates on my Sims on this here blog. Not every week — I know not everyone finds The Sims as interesting as I do. But whenever I have something particularly interesting and wacky happen, I’ll tell you all about it. That way, even if the game ends when the computer does, at least I’ll have gotten something out of it. I’ll have told some stories. Hopefully they’ll be good ones.

Here’s the first story, though it’s actually corollary to The Sims. This morning, when I was floating this idea, of occasional Sims updates on the blog, past my wife, we were out walking our dog. And she was skeptical at first, questioning whether this would be terribly boring — because I generally play every day, for a little while, and the thought of daily updates was enervating: “I got my Sim a promotion today! Now he’s ninth level in the Medical career!” No no no, I told her. I would post less frequently, and just about the amusing and strange things that my Sims do.

“Like, ‘Today I got my swingers to impregnate each others’ wives!'” I said. Loudly.

And just then, a man out speed-walking for exercise walked past us, and heard just that last statement, without context. That was the strangest look I’ve received in a long time.

I think now that my Sims are strange because they take after me.

Magic Bus

Dusty 1 Comment

Here, the background music first:

 

Okay, so when I was young, I wanted to own my own bus. I had this great idea: I was going to buy an old tour bus, take out all of the seats — maybe leave a row or two up front, for passengers — and fill the rest with custom furniture, specifically hammocks and beanbags and TVs and video game consoles.

Then I owned a home, and found out what a pain in the rear it is to convert or customize or upgrade anything. I also found that I have no knowledge of, nor interest in, automotive repair or mechanics. So I let this fantasy go, along with being an astronaut and out-selling Stephen King.

But then I saw this beauty parked in my neighborhood. And now I want a bus again.

IMG_0192IMG_0188 IMG_0189 IMG_0190 IMG_0191

Coffee Day (Hail the 42! Hail the Blessed Beverage!) is coming up next week, on February 11. I hope to have a story written by then, about driving this bus, with its beautiful restored retro style, and its utterly cool coffee theme, down to Belize to find the perfect coffee bean. But if I don’t get it done — at least I have this bus indelibly imprinted in my imagination.

And I choose to think there are hammocks inside. And beanbags in front of the flatscreen TVs and the Playstations.