AwkwardSD

Four days before I begin my fifth year as a teacher, I go back-to-school shopping for some new, fifth-year teacher clothes. Jessica and I drive to JCPenney at Fashion Valley Mall. The good mall. The fancy mall. I’ve never been good at buying clothes. 41 years old, and I still don’t really know how to dress myself. Hence, JCPenney. I always feel feral at the end of Teacher Summer (aka Dirtbag Summer).

We leave Salt Lake City around 5 p.m. and drive south on State Route 6. There used to not be rush hour in Utah, but now there is, and Ryen takes us down Route 6 to avoid traffic on the Interstate. He also wants to show me the west desert, the west dez. In the years since I’ve moved away, he’s explored so much of the state, knows all the small towns, can talk about different counties. I’ve forgotten almost everything.

There was a huge fight at school this week. The last few weeks of the school year are often fraught with tension. Kids are tired; teachers are tired. Holes form in the social order. Classroom management feels like fixing leaks with chewing gum. “Just keep it together,” I plead with students, daily. I’m not really sure what the fight was about, but students have told me it was Haitians vs. Somalis, two large populations at my school.

Welcome to “Is This Band Good?”, a semi-regular feature where I, with the help of a knowledgeable and accomplished co-writer, try to determine — quantitatively — if certain bands are actually good. Check out past entries on Cake, Soul Coughing, B-52s, Ben Folds Five, They Might Be Giants, late ‘00s indie darlings, Social Distortion, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Korn, Oingo Boingo, Hole, and Primus. Talk ill of Sublime in these parts — Southern California — and you might find yourself in deep trouble.

I’m looking for joy. Something with weight. Something like a blanket. I’m sick of cynicism and irony. I hate that the state of the world has conditioned us to self-flagellate if we feel anything except despair or anger. Internet University has taught us that expressing happiness or personal fortune is a red flag. I want to lust for life again. Give me something that makes me feel alive. If ignorance is bliss, I’m ready to get willfully dumber. I think it’s working. Weed helps.

Last Wednesday, I had a teaching day that made me want to hang it all up. The kids in fourth period would not shut up. I was in front of the room, trying to introduce persuasive language, and there were like three different conversations , one of which was happening across the room. After my who-knows-how-many attempt to bring attention back, I gave up. ā€œIā€™m done,ā€ I said, and sat down.

People are posting pictures from 2016. While it’s refreshing to see people posting actual photos instead reposts, it’s also depressing to see just how much better things seemed back then. Even the mere fact that we felt more comfortable posting in earnest back then is an indicator of how much things have changed. I look at those 2016 posts and the first thing I think is: there’s no going back to that. We are a vastly different country than we were 10 years ago.

It’s been over three years since I was at a New Years Eve party and coerced a bunch of people to watch The Mask, and with a champagne-pickled brain had the idea: What if I wrote the novelization of this movie? Trouble was/is, I’ve never read a movie novelization before. Not really sure what one entails. So I just started writing about what I saw on the screen, second-by-second, throwing in commentary when I can. I don’t think that’s what a novelization is.

I like January. October through December always feels like a heightened reality, where Halloween feeds into elections that feed into the holidays—all culminating in the hysterics of NYE. But January feels like a breather, a return to form. The Christmas decorations go back in the boxes, the families go home, the desperate need to quantify your accomplishments from the previous year dissipates.

Despite what the subhead says, 2025 is the first year where I consciously thought: hmm, maybe I’m not as in-tune with pop culture as I thought. Perhaps that’s been the case for a long while and everyone has been too polite to tell me. Whatever the case, I’m getting older and I’m losing my edge. At one point, I felt like an authority on these kinds of things, but now I feel like I don’t watch or listen or read widely enough to be knowledgeable on the State of Art in 2025.