"Oh, that's what you meant" dept.

Usually, BBC news is pretty good about giving me the info I need. But this link here kind of threw me. I mean, I can guess that it's explaining where in the UK suffers from the highest levels of child poverty.

But honestly, my first thought was that it was some sort of travel guide, like, where to go to find the best child poverty, or the most picturesque children with smudgy faces, no shoes, and brave, hopeful smiles.

Is there something wrong with me for thinking that, or is is something wrong with where and how I live for not making that idea immediately implausible?

Small losses, somehow.

Tonight, a Saturday night, I find myself trying to clean up the room, which is not tidy, and clear up my desk, which is a mess, so that I might have enough space to prepare lesson plans for work on Monday. I don't know if I will have time to do either of those things tomorrow, since I have plans for the day with my wife.

Ordinarily, I like to think that the days of the week are irrelevant to me. Someone's lord may have rested on one day or another, but I try to do what I will when I will. There was a time when I taught lessons on Sunday night and drank gin on Monday mornings. I went on a trip with no plan, and found myself in Osaka, in a residential neighborhood full of middle-aged women touts, trying to lure in a fool in for a Thursday morning's romp on a hot summer day. As it turned out, all I really had come to Osaka for was an okonomiyaki, so I walked on, until I found a zoo, and a Ferris wheel, and a restaurant beneath the train tracks. The okonomiyaki was delicious, and the owner posed for photos, holding his special spatula high and smiling.

But something about spending this Saturday night on cleaning and preparation for work feels like a loss, like a defeat.

It feels like I'm allowing something important to get away from me, and without the right sort of compensation.

Once more, unto the breach, dear friends...

Tomorrow is the first day of classes of the fall semester. Not only have I been (theoretically) rehired for another semester, but I've been given three separate classes to teach, which will be something like 25 hours of classroom time per week.

Too much work? I reckon so. So I'm going to make this choice consciously, with full awareness of what I'm letting myself in for. They want a full-on teaching schedule, that calls for a full-on teacher. I seem to recall having the best hallucinatory visions when I was jittery with exhaustion and fueled by coffee, Snickers bars and bemusement at the antics of my students anyway.

Goddamn it, saddle up! There's educating to do!

Back to basics: traditional entertainment and bargain hunting

The British Tory party (the rough ideological analog of the US Republican Party) is going to have a conference in the city of Birmingham this month. And as a part of the city's attempts to turn a profit from the visiting Tories, they've distributed a coupon book to the visiting delegates, complete with discounted entry to The Rocket Club, a place people can go to watch ("Sir, do NOT touch the dancers!") nekkid ladies dancing on stage or sometimes on customers' laps.

I don't usually count on the Evening Standard for news, but this time they really came through for me with valuable, timely, hard-hitting journalism.

And just in case you were wondering what else Birmingham has going on, it is the home of the world's first Complaints Choir. Yep, homegrown culture.

Life imitates stoopid funny art, sorta...

Okay, just about enough time has passed so that I can consider the following without wincing:

I got publicly betrothed this summer, and in an unpleasantly accurate twist of fate, the run-up to my event was eerily paralleled in the comic strip Achewood. For example, thoughts about dresses, vows, fears about the future, gift registry, fears about the ceremony, catering, the madness inducing lead-up to the day, and the interaction of the guests on the day itself.

Am I R. B. Kazenzakis? Not by any stretch of the imagination. A friend summed up my childhood, noting "you grew up with the Huxtables." Sure, there were fewer adorable children, no well-meaning neighbors, and much, much more swearing, but he's not far off. However, that didn't stop me from worrying that the caterer was going to fuck everything up at the last minute, that the ringbearer was going to wet his pants, or that I was going to preview the rest of my life through a haze of misunderstood advice from well-meaning strangers and reach a technically correct but functionally wrong conclusion.