December 16, 2021

I'm on day three of my end of year vacation which has me off for all but two days till the end of the year. Day one was spent watching anime and horror movies with my brother and sister in law and eating junk food. Day two was spent on a very long and tedious cleaning/organizing spree to clear out one room. That was equal parts tedious and emotionally fraught. The whole experience had a lot of self-recrimination and by the end decision fatigue mixed in with just trying to sort stuff. These are the kind of negative mental spirals that I make a policy of avoiding whenever I can. It's not a policy that I've had a great deal of success implementing but I maintain it all the same. Day three has been spent reading. There was some other stuff but it was mostly reading. I would have like to do more with it but I'm not too broken up about it. The Man who was Thursday was a weird book that got even weirder at the end. G. K. Chesterton is a master of the odd, farcical, and ironic plot and I don't know if I liked it but it kept me engaged.

I've got this weird anxiety about my time off, like I'm going to screw it up. It was a lot worse yesterday than it is today; which is ridiculous given that yesterday was actually very productive personally. I think I'm use to falling into the rut of watching Youtube videos until I want to kill myself, finding something slightly better for all of forty minutes, and somehow ending up back on Youtube. I'm committed to not ending up in this pattern and so far I've been mostly successful but this is complicated by the fact that I actually do want to watch some videos. It's a trap and I know it's a trap and I'm still going to do it. I have the same relationship with E2 except that I know to stop reading when I'm out of votes which is a really nice feature.

Just a random grumbling, but I felt like grumbling.

This afternoon all the first grade students -- a bit over 100 kids -- were lined up and marched to the gym, sat down, and given a brief lecture on how America is the best country, freedom is the best thing, and freedom comes from (the Christian) God. They were then led in a brief prayer, and sent back to class.

This minor feat of inserting a prayer session into the public school was accomplished by having the Kiwanis donate a book on the Statue of Liberty to every single student in the first grade, and the Kiwanis foolishly picking some slightly senile old geezer to do the presentation. He didn't know what to do, but he knows that God is his Savior. I suspect he does not know how many non-christian children we have in our first grade classes, and he's probably just dumb, not evil.

I'm curious what would happen if the local Mosc tried to buy a 15 minute introduction to Allah with a box of children's books -- but not very curious. This is the American South, so there'd be a spurt of grumpy parents complaining, some nasty Facebook posts, and some performative moral outrage, and then that'd be that. What I'm really curious about is if they are getting any of that from the Kiwanis presentation. I have pretty much insulated myself from that sort of drama, so I may never know.

I do know we will absolutely never get an A/B trial of such a thing, because no one is stupid enough to try an Introduction to Allah assembly; you have to be a locally hegemonic cultural institution to try this sort of nonsense. Seriously, people, don't try to convert other people's babies.

But, also, the upshot of this is that it doesn't really matter. Trying to lead 100 six-year-olds in anything is an iffy proposition, and the speaker also didn't really understand how the microphone worked. He half mumbled and half blared his prayer into the void, was roundly ignored, and even God felt slightly embarrassed by the whole thing. But the kids didn't notice.