The end of the school year is nigh, and it feels like a year's worth of events have been saved up for the next two weeks. With Lil' S2 it's the worst because his school is so noncommunicative. Like, he'll tell me on a Thursday evening that he needs $80 in cash by tomorrow morning for a field trip, and I'm like, What? I haven't heard of this? And then I start panicking a little bit, thinking I dropped the ball on something. That is, until my phone starts pinging with a hundred messages from the parents' WhatsApp group, and everybody is asking what the deal with the field trip is and why hasn't anybody heard of it. Inevitably, somebody will post a screenshot from a Class Dojo message from a random teacher's aide, but almost nobody saw it, because Class Dojo sends you roughly 50 alerts a day and 45 of them are trying to get you to upgrade to the paid version.
I'm sure that just about every parent complains about their kid's school to some degree, but Lil' S2's has been plagued by some serious dysfunction, like to the point that the principal resigned earlier this week, perhaps to avoid being fired. I won't get into the details, in part because I don't feel completely informed on them--I mean, nobody is, that's a huge part of the problem--but I've been especially tuned out to it all. We've got a month left, and then that's it--we're done with elementary school for good. I'm just trying to coast to the finish line, and once we get there: not my monkeys, not my circus.
Although, I will say one thing on the matter because it's kinda funny. There was a parents-only Zoom meeting a few weeks ago to discuss the state of the school and the current leadership. I didn't attend, but apparently a "parent" named "Patrick" did, and in the chat, "he" was stridently defending the administration and arguing with parents who were expressing misgivings. Given my quote marks, you can probably see where this is going. Patrick was not, in fact, a school parent, but rather its assistant principal. Her name isn't Patrick*, and apparently she isn't very good at covering her tracks on the internet (also, all the parents know each other, and they were like, Who is this Patrick person we've never heard of?). She was immediately put on leave after this came to light, and I will be shocked if she's back at the school next year.
*This was not actually her fake name. I'm using a pseudonym for a pseudonym.
So, like I said, we're just trying to ride out the next few weeks, and also like I said, there's a lot to ride out. Over the past three days we had a talent show, two sleepovers, a birthday party, two baseball practices, a baseball game, and today we have volunteering, an exhibition project, and a flag football game, and that's just Lil' S2. With his brother, you can toss in two D&D sessions*, a sleepover, cookie baking for some reason, a programming internship, and a friend's dance recital. It's too much. I mean, it's literally too much, so we had to make cuts. We said no to Saturday night sleepovers (actually Lil' S1 preemptively said no to his friend because he knew he had a lot to do, while Lil' S2 was very grumpy about it), and we skipped all the baseball stuff.
*In which no D&D is actually played. They used to play, but they stopped for some reason, and now they just hang out, but everybody still calls it D&D.
Speaking of baseball, there's a good chance Lil' S2's career in the sport is over. It's the playoffs right now, and the team isn't very good (1-10 record), so if they lose, which is likely, they're out, and that's the season. He says he doesn't want to play again in the fall, and if he doesn't play in the fall, he's not going to be good enough to play in the Spring when he would age into a higher league. He's actually been improving a bit, and if he practiced, like at all, he could be half-decent, but he shows little interest in practice. So, I don't feel bad about him not going to the game today. He's not one of the better players on the team, so we're not letting anybody down by missing it. In flag football, he's currently our only quarterback (our other one broke his finger and is out for the season), and we're trying to repeat as league champion, so it would be a big deal if he had to miss a playoff game. In baseball, it might even be better for the team if he doesn't go, as then his spot in the batting order will get skipped, and, even though he's been improving, he still usually makes an out. I don't think his coach was too broken up about it when he saw we RSVP'd "no".
To completely shift topics, I randomly watched Fargo the other night, and it's so damn good. I hadn't seen it since it came out 30 years ago, so I'd forgotten a lot of it. I wish they still made movies like this*--no CGI, no superheros, no talking animated animals, just a great script, great performances, and a runtime under 100 minutes. That last one is key. Everything is just too damn long now. I thought about watching Marty Supreme instead but it's two and a half hours--for a ping-pong movie? Why? I mean, I haven't seen it yet, but still I ask, why?
*One thing to consider is that I think a lot of would-be movies are now turned into prestige TV shows, and a lot of them are really good, so that's cool. But still, I wish these great shows were being created in addition to great films, instead of in place of them.
Alright, times up. Until next time...
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