Well, over except for the grading; my students have to hand in their big final papers (and one is late on several assignments; I remonstrated with them to get it into me ASAP. This is someone with an "extra time" accommodation, which technically only applies to exams, but still. Their major professor tells me this is an ongoing problem, well, I told the professor that if they don't get the missing assignments in they WILL earn a C, which is not-passing in a graduate class (and of course that means I have to make the class available for them again in the future, even if they're the only one)
As is typical now at he end of a semester, I don't feel excited or triumphant; I feel kind of sad and drained. Maybe I'm a little burnt out? But I have to keep going.
I do need to go in the rest of this week - grading, and I need to plan out research. (I have the final paper from one student already, this is a very diligent student). Saturday I have graduation. I am contemplating if (a) it ends early enough (not too far past 10 am) and (b) the weather is okay (not over 100 degrees), I might consider going to Whitesboro. (Or maybe I save that for some time in the following week?)
And at some point I have to figure out Canvas for the fall, and write my syllabi. (It never stops).
***
And twitter is dying, part 435: apparently the owner of the site - he who shall remain nameless - is doing some kind of either long-con with trying to make it an "everything site" (banking? I would not trust enough quarters necessary to wash a load of sheets at the laundromat to him) or it's just his current brain-emission that he thinks is clever.
The site may be dying for real.
It makes me sad. Yes, yes, I know: the cool kids hate it, the cool kids are on Mastodon or Discord but Discord doesn't work for me (not asynchronous) and I am lost in the crowds at Mastodon and few people respond to me when I post, and when I was first there there was a lot of "ew, NEWBS" discourse and things like "don't post food without issuing a content warning! DON'T YOU KNOW SOME PEOPLE ARE TRIGGERED BY PICTURES OF FOOD?" and it just really kind of turned me off, like "okay fine this is the Trekkie table in the lunchroom and they don't want the likes of me"
And yeah. It is very much like finding a table in the lunchroom which I was never good at and I either ate alone, or finally, partway through seventh grade, another table called me over and seemed to welcome me - a girl with spina bifida, another girl, and someone who, in retrospect, was probably autistic. They weren't exactly friends, at least not at the start, but hey tolerated me, so I ate there.
Though I would like to be somewhere where I am more than merely tolerated.
But anyway: I had a lot of friends there, a lot of people I "talked" to regularly. I've found some of them on other platforms; some I may lose forever, and I really can't check four or five different platforms regularly to keep up with people.
So far Bluesky is okay but they do lean more into the raunchy humor than I'm fully comfortable with, and I've had to mute one or two people who I followed early on but who got to be too much, even for me (and I feel bad about that). I've also done some judicious blocking of non mutuals, but I am never super comfortable with that because people can apparently see (I don't want to know who, if anyone, has, and why)
It's frustrating though to realize how as an adult, two things are true:
- the cliquishness, "slam books," and other interpersonal nonsense middle school girls get up to is still in full bloom
- The bullies and jerks that the adults claimed you wouldn't have to worry about any more when you were an adult often turn out to be the guys running things.
I've said before, I was pretty good at being a kid and even a tween (I was thinking today of the good things of summers of my 7 to 12 age-span: Garfield comic strip books, and the library book club, and going out with friends to try to catch frogs in the local creek, and having a little pocket money on a day when "The Land of Make Believe" had Smurfs in stock, and stickers...) and I'm halfway decent some of the time at being an adult, but I was lousy at being a teenager. And I didn't always do so great, even at younger ages, with my peers in school - the aforementioned "slam books" and similar.
It's hard being human. I remember crying to my mother that I wished I had friends who just liked me for ME, who didn't want me to be different than I was (kids at school telling me that what I liked was "dumb and babyish," or that I was weird, or that I was "too much," things like that). Maybe there's someone like that, maybe there isn't. But it's just hard finding your "group" some times.
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