Aurora Dimitre's Books and Rambling

 

 

 So I'm trying to cut caffeine. It was getting pretty bad at the end of the school year, like, two-Mountain-Dew-Rise-Energy-Drinks-a-day bad, and so I decided to just cut cold turkey. This has not been entirely cold turkey; sometimes the withdrawal's a little too rough in the 'caffeine headache' variety and so I have like, a Coke, which is only like 30mg of caffeine, far cry from the 180mg-a-can energy drinks. Today I have had none. I told myself if I could at least make it an hour longer than yesterday... and now I've already brushed my teeth and so I don't want to drink pop.  I've cut caffeine before. I used to be a big coffee drinker; I had a Keurig through college that I had a lot of fun with. Right now I have a coffeepot that I feel like I should replace with an electric kettle because we only use it for the hot water now. I have pretty much lost my taste for coffee. I can still enjoy stuff like mochas and whatnot, but straight coffee is not my deal any...

 

 So, the school year is over. I've already posted about this on Instagram, but I have set a few goals for myself over the summer. Some of them are fairly self-explanatory; actually, most of them are pretty self-explanatory, but I figured I would explain them anyway.  Move Steven and I are planning on moving thirty miles down the interstate to be closer to the school we will both be teaching at come fall. We cut the commute in more than half. This is looking good--we're going to go and look at an apartment tomorrow. G'N'R Tattoo  I had my students vote on what tattoo I should get over the summer, giving them three options, and they decided I needed a Guns'n'Roses tattoo, so sometime this summer I've gotta make that happen. I didn't get any tattoos last summer, with COVID and all, so I'm excited to get back in that chair.  PTK Test This is for my certification.  English Test This is also for my certification.  Read 100 books I've read... two, so fa...

 

 

 

 Last year, I read War and Peace . It took roughly seven thousand years to read. No. Not seven thousand. Just... an entire month. The entire month of February last year was spent trying to power my way through War and Peace , and this month, when I drew the lot of The Great Short Works of Leo Tolstoy (granted, a whopping half the size of W&P at 750 pages), I was dreading it. Honestly--I knew that it was going to take me another roughly seven thousand years. Well, okay--thirty five hundred years, because it's half the size. But since these are novellas, it's actually been easier, because--after each novella, I just read a different book. That way I still feel productive in my reading but I'm also getting through my Tolstoy and, honestly, bonus--it's a lot easier to read Tolstoy when I get to pause and read something else every fifty pages or so.  I'm not saying that Tolstoy's bad, because he's not. Dude had mad chops, and dude also really understood huma...

 

 

 It is windy.  I live in North Dakota. It is always windy. We have a very flat land and a very minimal amount of trees, so the wind just goes and goes and goes and goes. I feel like the town I live in is cursed, like a Silent Hill sort of thing (I've only seen the movie) because going out the fog was so dense and coming back in there was a solid wall of dust blowing across the road. I didn't know what it was coming up on it (dust did cross my mind, but it didn't make sense ).  Being in the middle of a Dust Wall is very similar to being in little-visibility-snowy-weather, or fog, or something like that, except for everything is brown. It was also raining, because it rained on and off and everything was fucking weird driving back, and so my wipers were going like crazy. It had to have been at least a quarter mile of straight dust.  Then we came out into the sun and it was weirder, almost.  Very windy--when I left gusts were at 29, when I turned north they were goi...

 

 School is just about over. We've got thirteen school days left (counting finals!), and then we are free, free, free. Next year (assuming I actually end up getting certified), I will have a better handle on what I'm doing, more money per paycheck and overall, and, if I'm lucky, copies of Life After Death to teach to my American Lit class.  I'm not saying that this year was all bad. It wasn't. I genuinely like a majority of the kids, and of course I don't hate children, because they're children and still changing. I think I've made some good relationships with some of the kids and I'll be sad if Steven gets a job far, far away because there are a lot of these kids that I will miss.  Also there's the fact that probably I'd never teach anyone other than my current school, because I was not built for teaching, probably. I don't know. I know a lot about English and literature and history and books and writing but man... I dunno. I dunno! Eithe...