Second Day of School

School started for the boys yesterday. 

I'm sorry, let me back up a bit on that: here in the unrelenting hellscape that is the year 2020, school has started for the boys. Donald Trump is still in office, the national (and for that matter local) Republican party is essentially indistinguishable from actual, no-shit Nazis, and the COVID-19 pandemic remains terrifyingly rampant in no small part due the White House's deliberate sabotage of all efforts to contain it. The pandemic has so far claimed a probable 200,000 lives -- and while it hasn't been well or thoroughly reported, it appears to cause long-term or even permanent disabilities in a significant number of cases -- and meanwhile probably a good 27% of the country thinks it's either No Big Deal or an outright hoax.

And in the midst of all this, school has started.

In a striking fit of good sense, I elected to take vacation for the first three days -- Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday -- and to work from home on Monday. This is because Beautiful Wife starts her new semester of teaching on Monday and is just finishing up the grading on her second summer class; I have to be the one to see to it that the boys get into the rhythm of their semester and that they know what they're supposed to be doing and how to do it. 

Apparently I have been amazingly, apocalyptically stressed out about this. I honestly hadn't noticed until yesterday. 

So yesterday morning I woke everybody up and made sure they ate breakfast and took their meds. Then I settled in to get Secondborn into his classroom and... couldn't. For about an hour. We were following the directions, but the page that was supposed to give us the code for his Google Classroom simply wasn't there -- and without access to the classroom, we didn't have the links to get to anything else. 

Fortunately, it was abundantly clear that we weren't the only ones; and fortunately, emailing Secondborn's teacher did eventually yield the code. After that, I was pretty well able to lie back and let him get on with it under other people's direction. (I checked in on Firstborn, but he had the codes he needed and apparently got started on his day with a bare minimum of muss and/or fuss. Things might still have gone wrong and there might still be some things he missed, but it didn't sound like it.) So once I was fairly sure the boys were on their way, I went back and laid down on the bed and slept for about three hours...

...And that was what finally did me in. When I got back up -- because my cell phone kept ringing, thank you so much -- I could barely move. I'd started a load of dishes earlier; now I opened the dishwasher and just stared at them for about half an hour. So... yeah. I'm scheduling a lot of Not Answering My Phone for today and tomorrow, and I'm only glancing at my email to make that nothing has actually caught fire at either work or school. 

The house needs cleaning -- the house seriously needs cleaning -- but I have got to take a moment and get myself back together before I attempt to do anything about that. I was planning to do a lot of reading and maybe even some writing, and depending on how today goes I might even manage that. And somewhere in there, a hot bath is definitely in order. 

And that, as they say, is the news from Lake Woebegone. Or the Castle d'Mock. Whichever.

Am I an adult yet?

Over at Forever in Hell, Personal Failure has asked if anyone out there feels like an adult, or if we're all pretty much faking it.

I'm... ambivalent.

I mean, I have a job, and I've managed to remain employed at the same place for ten years now, so in that sense I think I'm an adult. I'm married (arguably re-married), and we mostly don't get into fights over stupid stuff...

Well, okay, there was that one argument in Target, with "They're golden dreams" on her side, and "Red, Gold, and Green" on my side - she insisted that the lyrics made more sense in her version, but I stayed firm on the point that nevertheless those weren't the words that Boy George had actually written.

But, really, aside from that one incident, we don't fight much and we work together very well; that feels like being an adult.

And then there's being a parent. My parents didn't raise children, exactly. It was more like they raised future adults, and I'm trying to do the same thing with my kids. And that means taking their thoughts, questions, and concerns seriously; it means expecting them to act responsibly, and (within reason) trusting them to make their own decisions.

On the other hand, I'm thrilled to have kids because now I don't look so weird when I buy toys, or watch superhero movies, or play video games. I still write stories about unlikely heroes who discover powerful magic swords and go off to save the world. I was completely undone - like, reduced to helpless sobbing - by the ending of Astro Boy. I remain grievously disappointed that my mutant power still hasn't manifested (at age 38 - clearly I'm just a late bloomer).

So I don't know. I don't think being an adult means what I used to think it meant. It doesn't mean knowing what you're doing all the time. I don't think it means being serious and sober all the time. I don't think it even means being responsible, beyond whatever is strictly necessary. On the other hand, I think it does mean having a good, working idea of what is strictly necessary. I think it means understanding what's important, and worth fighting for/over; and learning to ignore or not worry too much about the things that aren't important or that you can't help/do/fix. I think it means learning that you aren't the only important person in the world.