102318 I missed morning sesh today because I was counting on millie’s clamorings upstairs to wake me up as usual but they didn’t. I have a virtual squadron of problems right now preventing me from focusing and concentrating. Focusing and concentrating. We say those words so often these days. What do they even mean? I have my back. I have chapped lips. I have work stuff that I’m not diving into yet even though I know what to do. A chime just went off on the bed next to me: the phone. The bed next to me. My left hand hurts. The sunlight is streaming in thru the window to my left. It illuminates galaxies of dust. COffee. The dishwasher noise, how it rumbles like a yellow cat through the dry woods. Typinator not working because 1Password enabled secure typing mode. The board in my lap because I can’t get the keyboard angle right. The Heinlein paperback holding up the front edge of the keyboard because the only keyboard I can type on for long periods of time is the Apple one--not the new Apple ones with their murderously brain-dead arrow key shapes, but the older one. The in between one. The one from the few years where they had everything right, before they decided to ruin it again because Jony Ive is a prattling nancy-boy. Ooooh, *design!* Yeah whatever. Well, almost everything right. The way it angles down to the front is the only thing wrong with it. So I stick a Heinlein paperback under there to level it out. *Between Planets.* Would that be considered his juvenilia? Well I read it when I was in my 20’s so I guess that checks out. But then the corners wobble, because the paperback’s not tall (or in this orientation wide) enough. So I’m like OK I gotta make something to tape under there that’s just the right size. Fold up a piece of styrofoam that came in a laptop sleeve from Amazon. It’s too bouncy. It doesn’t work. Back to the paperback for now--but now at least I have something I could spend a half an hour on, thereby putting off work for a little bit longer. No! I will not do it! I will not be the guy in Bartleby’s office, with the bits and chips, forever trying to get his desk just the exact right height! I will instead get the fuck out of here, go to a cafe or something, and make the groups for my AVID kids based on their survey answers. The ones who didn’t answer the survey DING. Megan sends a text. The ones who didn’t answer the survey Can’t I just put this computer one hundred percent always in do not disturb mode? That actually does seem like time well spent. What I learned from reading a New Yorker article this morning was that writing is funnier if you use mainly nouns to balance your sentences on, and come right to the point. Humor, the dryer the better, it’s like an aged ham. The ones who didn’t answer the survey, I’ll check and see if they didn’t answer the other one either, and then I’ll send them a *special email.* You idiot. If the problem is that they’re not responding to emails, how are you going to fix that by sending more emails? Put that in your notes for the AVID conference and smoke it. Ugh. AVID. Ugh. My paycheck seems to depend on my not seeing that this elective is either a waste of time or too goddamned hard and I don’t want to do it. I got to go back through the wailing moaning notes I made for myself the other day, today I got to go back through those that is, and decide how much of it I want to share. How I want to frame it. That’s what’s so goddamned exhausting about job-related communication. You gotta always balance the truth with the paycheck. Sometimes, actually, that’s pretty easy. For me I’d say it’s actually, amazingly enough, usually pretty easy. Because I have integrity and I am FUCKING LUCKY enough to work in a workplace where I get pretty good support and I get pretty much left alone to make professional decisions and for the most part, enough, not of course 100% but like Dan Savage says there is no 100%, my professional sort of way of looking at the world, my pedagogical philosophy lines up closely enough with my bosses that they pretty much let me be me. So that’s cool and worth protecting. But then does that mean I have to lie and say I still really believe in this AVID shit? I don’t even want to do the elective anymore. I just want to work the best principles from it into my other classes, and I want everyone else to do that too. But if running the elective is essential to my full time status--see where I’m going with this? Do I gotta be one of those people that knows they’re doing some BULLSHIT but can’t or won’t do anything about it because of the paycheck? I guess we’ll see. First, I gotta answer some texts and shit because it’s always something. Can’t concentrate. Can’t focus. What does that even mean? For the answer, go back to 1994, the first time you got your own computer that was graphically fascinating enough to draw you in. For the answer, go back to 1989, the first time you got your own credit card and felt that rush of power when you took your friends out to dinner and slapped down the plastic while everyone was grinning broadly. For the answer, go back back, go back back, go back back, go back. Where was I again?