Blog Credo

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Thursday, February 16, 2012

That Time Of Year (Kvetch Me If You Can)


I should be in a pretty good mood.

I just got completely caught up with my grading until Tuesday when I start to get my Great Depression papers in.  And while those papers are often depressing (ha!) I don't have to deal with them until next week.  I don't have a Comp Gov evaluation to grade for two weeks.

The GOP is committing slo-motion suicide by leaning more and more towards a dickish God botherer who thinks women shouldn't work and people should only have sex like the Duggars.  In goes the penis, out pops a baby.  Even if Romney survives Santorum, he is hopelessly wounding himself for the general election.  I guess I could worry about the Democrats taking back the House, but it's too far out to even look at that.

This has been the warmest winter I've been through since I left Los Angeles.  I've lost 13 pounds since my bloated body ballooned up around New Years and I'm starting to feel something like physically fit, but older.

So why do I feel like my fuse is 10mm long?  Why is everything on my last nerve?

I've been wrestling since the Carter Administration and this is the worst, most frustrating season I've been a part of.  But as an assistant coach, frustration is just part of the gig, and we've had our fair share of mediocre seasons in the past decade.

Thing One is sick and cranky and that's never a good thing.  We have three different activities this weekend, too, with soccer, wrestling and the pinewood derby.

I think in the end, it's the overwhelmingly relentless nature of life at this time of year.  Last weekend, I spent about 12 hours at the league wrestling tournament.  Sunday, I had to attend church to read and because the Bishop came.  Being a Bishop, his sermon was close to useless to me.  I then spent much of the rest of the day grading.  I had no weekend of my own, and while I had Monday afternoon off, I spent that time getting a crown put on and making my Valentine's dinner for Most Wonderful Wife.

Now I look ahead to another weekend that isn't a weekend.  A day off on Monday where we will take the Things to look at a school that we can't afford to send them to, then it's off to the chaos of Thing Two's birthday party and we wrap up the "off day" with a wrestling feed.

In three weeks we will be on spring vacation.  But that seems an eternity from now.

Winter in boarding school is always a death march in February.  Only, for some reason, this year I'm less Walking Dead than Rage Monkey.

Speaking of which, Chuck Klosterman once wrote that zombies are simply a metaphor for the relentlessness of modern life.  Individually zombies/daily problems are not a big deal.  It is the crushing mass of them that destroys you.

If so, I'm becoming Shane, not Rick.  And who wants to be Shane?

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