I'm annoying but I plan to change that (WN30)

First up, a small update to my week notes format: I’m going to try to include a cover image with each post as a further homage to Never Hungover Again (from which I shamelessly stole the design of my site). I’d like to make it a random picture from the week. I’m hoping this will encourage me to take more pictures, perhaps even using the fancy camera that I paid several hundred dollars for and never touch. I took this week’s picture in the bathroom of a winery (omitted snapchat caption: “wasn’t considering it but thanks for the heads up i guess”).

Doing

I taught my first college class! It went far better than I anticipated; by about half an hour in, I fell into my natural teacher mode and it was smooth sailing from there. I’m excited to work with the kids¹ and see how I do throughout the semester. I still have deep-seated imposter syndrome about teaching (adjunct lecturing) the course on a macro-level, but the day-by-day is at least seeming more feasible.

For context, the college I’m teaching (adjunct lecturing²) at is my alma mater. I transferred there as a junior from community college, and this course is the first one I took there — with a professor who went on to become a mentor and a personal friend. She scared the shit out of me then (she still does) because she is so good at what she does, so experienced, and (seemingly) effortlessly incredible as a teacher. The idea that I have to, in some way, fill her shoes — teach her class, in the same room I took it, nine years later — is absolutely terrifying. Who am I to tell these kids how to teach?? I have very lovely friends who have talked me up and assured me that I’ll do a great job, but I think I’ll never be able to shake the feeling that I’m not doing what she would have (or not doing as good as her). Of course that’s ridiculous and I need to be my own person, and it is within this contradiction that I must exist.

I’ve been to my classroom a few times this week getting some of the bigger projects done. I’ll have time to put on finishing touches on the teacher conference days next week, but I’d rather cut open 96 tennis balls at a relaxed pace than rush to do it the day before kids show up.

Site-wise, I’m continuing to backport content from an old blog. This week I’ve added…

• An Empty Promise to Blog More (06-30-2023)
• Here’s What I was Listening to in 2020 (12-30-2020)
• Women in a Sea of Men: The Representation of Women in The Curse of the Black Pearl (09-28-2016)
• Here’s What I Was Listening to in 2015 (01-07-2016)
• Star Wars Has a Problem with Women and We’re Going to Fix It Together (12-14-2015)

Reading

Watching

Playing

I played some more of Baldur’s Gate 3. I finally decided to install some mods so that I can just finish the game. I’m using Cheaters Spell Scroll to basically pass all of my dice checks and then something to increase my carry capacity. Nothing game-breaking necessarily since I was already save-scumming every roll — instead, hopefully, I’m just saving myself time. It took a while to figure out how to make the mods work,³ mostly because the developer of the (good, but esoteric and inscrutable) mod manager has no publicly accessible documentation or help; it’s all in a fucking Discord server.⁴

Anyway, I’m focusing not so much on exploring Baldur’s Gate the city naturally and rather just mainlining toward my quest markers on the map. I believe I’ve wrapped up Gale’s quest as far as I can until much later in the game — why I chose to start with his, I’m not sure. Proximity, I guess. I did however encounter a friend of Karlach’s (with Karlach in the party), who asked if Karlach and I were an item. Karlach responded with something along the lines of “gross.” Salt in the wound etc.

Listening

I did a lot of podcast listening this week! Cleaning and organizing my classroom has been a good opportunity for it because it’s mostly mindless labor. I’ve been digging through Into the Aether’s Kingdom Hearts episodes (Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep | Bonus and I Norted Myself) plus the Song Exploder episode on “Miasma Sky.”

I’ve been listening to a lot of Pure Particles by The Bug Club. It has some of my favorite songs of theirs (“If My Mother Thinks I’m Happy,” “Pure Particles,” and “A Love Song,” primarily). I haven’t been quite as enthused with their more recent releases — Very Human Features was good, and I didn’t really care about On the Intricate Inner Workings of the System⁵ — but Pure Particles through Rare Birds is such an incredible run of quality.

As part of my mission to upgrade the low quality MP3s I have on my music server, I ordered and ripped a few CDs this week: Johnny Flynn’s A Larum, Mirah’s C’mon Miracle, and Freelance Whales’s Weathervanes. I was really only looking for A Larum specifically, but the seller on discogs had a shipping minimum. The others were on my list and the seller happened to have them available. It’s a little funny — I was listening to these albums all at a specific point in my life (specifically C’mon Miracle and Weathervanes when I was horrifically depressed in my late teens; Johnny Flynn was a bit earlier).

That nostalgia (if you can call it that — is there a nostalgia that’s for bad memories?⁶) brought me back to Pullhair Rubeye by Avey Tare & Kría Brekkan, an odd album that was released in reverse. The reversed version (so the normal one) of “Lay Lay Off, Faselam” is an all-timer for me; I was listening to it a lot in 2012. Releasing the album in reverse was, apparently, a controversial move, but I like it both ways — and I finally took the time to actually reverse it myself.⁷

Then I listened to Don’t Let Them Begin by Trust Fund because I had “We’ll Both Apologize” stuck in my head (🎶 I’m alone in the house and I’m freaking myself out again, I’m clapping my hands and spinning my arms around 🎶). It’s good.