Today was not a good day. For one thing, I'm still unhappy about those exams from yesterday and wondering what I need to do better to get the students up to speed - do I just drop everything and go all the way back to a topic I covered a month ago? And if we don't complete the syllabus, so be it? And what do I do if the people who NEED to get up to speed on that topic are absent? (As several of them often are?)
I just feel...ineffectual. Like nothing I can do is making things any better.
I had to run out this afternoon to get stuff for the alternate ALTERNATE lab I am doing: it is too wet and the lake is too high for the field lab I originally scheduled. And it's too cold for the soil-invertebrate lab. Okay, fine, I have an antiherbivore compounds lab I can do indoors, except it takes crickets. (And Friday would be the ideal "score the results" day, but we don't have class on Friday: maybe that should have been an omen to me).
So anyway. We FINALLY have a departmental supplies credit card again, after three years (during the bad budget years) of us buying anything "perishable" out of our own pockets (I bought $30 worth of crickets once; after that, I used simulated organisms - beads - for that particular lab. But you can't do an antiherbivore compounds lab with beads)
So anyway. I got the credit card and went out to the fairly new PetSense (which is like the Bootleg Stuff version of PetSmart, I think). Got the crickets bagged up. (Edited for clarity: the worker bagged them up and YES I had told her about the tax exempt card first and she did not indicate it was a problem before she bagged the crickets) I told the worker - apparently the only person present - when I walked in that I had a university credit card that was tax exempt and I had the exemption number.
She said nothing until I reiterated that before paying.
Then she said, "uhhhh....I don't know how to do this."
Years and years ago, the old pet store here charged me tax on crickets, I didn't catch it, and I had to go BACK and undo it and it was a nightmare. So I stood firm.
"This is the tax exempt number."
She said "But only VA tax exempt numbers are valid" (VA? Like Veteran's Administration? Or what?)
I said, no, public schools and churches also have numbers.
She said, "You'll have to come back tomorrow, the manager will be here then."
"I can't do that tomorrow. I am in class all day and the lab I need these for is tomorrow."
I called my secretary. She talked to the person. The person got her to fax the tax exempt stuff. Still no go. No manager was on site. She called him at home: "Only VA numbers are valid."
This is patent BS. Churches have numbers, there are reseller numbers, schools have numbers. Just because only VA individuals (whatever that is) have done tax-exempt with them doesn't mean they're the ONLY ones.
So I was faced with a dilemma: cave, and pay out of my own pocket, or walk out of there with no crickets, cancel lab again and, (in my mind) look like a terrible lazy idiot slacker to my students and someone who doesn't care enough for them to have enough graded labs?
I asked her what they cost.
"$12.25"
Oh hell. I dug a $20 out of my wallet. So I'm a bit poorer but at least I have the satisfaction of feeling like I've done everything I can to fulfill my teaching duties.
I've e-mailed - or rather, used the web contact form, there is no e-mail- for the company and my secretary called them (they did not pick up, which tells me they are probably a Business In Trouble - their head office is apparently in Arizona). She also called the state Tax office to complain but said she didn't get anyone who knew what was going on so, whatever.
I'm out $12.25 (there is no mechanism for us getting refunded money we spend like that) but at least I have a lab for tomorrow. But I have a headache and I am upset and unhappy.
And yes, PetSense will be getting exactly zero business from me in the future. I will not be doing cricket-using labs in the future, or if I plan one, it will be at a time when I have the luxury of an hour to go to Sherman to the PetSmart or PetCo.
And at wal-mart - getting the lettuce and a couple other supplies needed - well, at least the checker knew what she was doing but just my luck, I (a) got behind someone whose debit card was not working (he tried five times and then defaulted to a credit card that did work) and (b) Literally every traffic light (four) between wal-mart and campus turned red AS I CAME UP ON IT.
And I had not one but two people pull that "game of chicken" thing at a side street - where they have a stop sign and I am the Cross Traffic [that] Does Not Stop, but they inch up and partway out, trying to scare me into stopping and letting them out first, even though they don't have the right of way and my stopping suddenly might lead to an accident.
They're so [stinking] special; I wish I were special.
Days like this I wonder what supernatural creature I have pissed off.
(And yeah. I feel very sad and overlooked and not-special and like literally nobody gives a crap about me. Intellectually I know that's not true, but emotionally I am feeling kind of beat-up by life right now)
I still need to do the next homeworks for my intro class; let's see how badly the online interface for that is fouled up this afternoon.
Edited to add, a string of Tweets, because I sometimes hate wasting what I think are insights on a more-ephemeral medium than a blog:
Some jerk (I used a less-gentle acronym on Twitter) on the news talking about "hitting back twice as hard" to opponents politically and I am all OH YES LET'S JUST PLAY KILKENNEY CATS UNTIL THERE"S NOTHING LEFT OF HUMANITY BUT A FEW SCRAPS OF FUR AND A TAIL.
(Said jerk is probably Michael Avenetti (sp?) but I don't know him on sight)
The Kilkenny Cats poem, which I seem to remember my grandmother reciting to me when I was a kid:
There once were two cats of Kilkenny,
Each thought there was one cat too many,
So they fought and they fit,
And they scratched and they bit,
Till, excepting their nails
And the tips of their tails,
Instead of two cats, there weren’t any.
There's also a Wikipedia entry. They call the cats "tenacious fighters," but I see it more as a mutually-assured destruction thing: when you are willing to give up your own life to kill/harm your opponent.
I dunno. As someone raised to be gentle and kind and to give people the benefit of the doubt and "give no one back evil for evil," these are hard and confusing times to be alive. And by contrast, the way I was raised: Galatians 5:14-15: "For the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” If you bite and devour each other, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other."
So I don't know. I feel like the foundations of....my personality, even....are being shaken by how a lot of people are acting now. And yes, I still feel the way I was raised was the "right" way, that it is better to act out of love of the other than out of hatred, still...I wonder, will I wind up a victim if I keep doing that? How do I protect myself? Or maybe that's the answer, to be a sacrificial lamb in this bad old world and hope that The Good Place really does exist, and that I wind up going there?
I don't know. It seems like I've had the awfulness people can get up to smashed hard in my face in a regular basis and I am very tired of it and would very much like to be a hermit for a while.
***
My blanket cave will have plenty of unicorns. Cony, the Japanese (Amuse brand plush) unicorn I ordered like six weeks ago, came today. (I'm not complaining - she came all the way from Japan so of course it takes a while).
She is super soft. Her horn is gold cloth! She heals my heart a little today:
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