Gonads and Strife

Yeah, I had to reference the world's greatest dancing squirrel flash cartoon for a minute there.

Gonads would of course refer to the Sex-Birthday, which took place last Saturday and actually had more to do with the fact that six people were having their birthdays at roughly the same time than with any kind of intercourse or coitus that one could imagine. The Sex-Birthday involved a private room at Stout, many friends of old, and the Quixotic quest to imbibe $1200 worth of liquor in a single evening. Considering that the family outing to Rogue just a few short weeks ago had teetered on the brink of $800 with significantly fewer guests, our work was relatively simple. We also had the participation of varsity-level drunkards like Hubris, BrownSox, Teach, Arsenal, Uber, and Quantum.

The party didn't even begin until 10 PM, which gives you, gentle reader, some idea of the kind of havoc we were all prepared to wreak that night. As per usual, we managed to be at once gentlemanly, drunk, and mildly out of it in a single sitting. Fortunately (unfortunately?) no one managed to make a complete ass of themselves for the entirety of the evening. We were orderly drunkards: quietly downing our liquor, loudly proclaiming our excellence, clumsily hitting on women.

It was after 3 AM by the time I decided to retreat to Queens. Hubris volunteered to journey with me and partake of The Guy on the way home, for old times' sake. I paid for the cab, he paid for The Guy. Now, I haven't eaten a pita from The Guy in many months, but even the depth of my complete drunkenness was not enough to hide the superiority of said pita from my thoroughly saturated taste buds. That pita may have delayed my crawling into bed by another half hour, but damn if it wasn't worth it.

The next morning, I begged to differ. I had to wake up early and get to working. Grades were due the following day and I had two labs and a quiz to enter into my grade book before tabulating final averages and writing evaluative comments. This was the strife. Well, some of it anyway.

Most of the strife erupted today, when the frazzled staff of MVA returned after too short of a time off to exchange student evaluations, meet with parents, and simmer in a slow burn of frustrating tediousness that would eventually prove too much for some. I didn't have my evaluations completed by the time I walked into the school, which was a tactical error on my part. It was 10:30 by the time I finished them and distributed them to the proper advisors. I caught an appropriate amount of flack for my lateness. Our team met up at 1:30 to discuss the unspoken strife that was contributing to a general malaise among the tenth grade teachers. Basically, we weren't happy with each other, and the stress and strain of the end-of-semester schedule was grating on us pretty badly. Our conversation mercifully cleared the air, but it was short-lived. An hour later, parents started showing up and we had to hole up in our respective classrooms, bombarded with parents who talked a big game while doing nothing, or who enabled their children to the point of academic disaster, or who expected us to be able to move heaven and earth to smooth the path of their precious little snowflake.

I didn't get home until 8 PM. I found JimmyLuke and HungarianPhrasebook in the house, which had been vacant except for me and my grade book for the last four days or so. I helped myself to some dinner and booze. Tomorrow, I get to attend a Professional Development seminar that's supposed to last all day and tell me all about the Earth Science Regents Performance Standards. I may need to bring a flask.