Royal Flush

Or, Royal Pain in the You Know What

I’m probably not even calmed down enough to be writing this. But I’m going to. I’ve been wanting to write another blog post, as I promised a couple of days ago, and there’s certainly something on my mind at the moment. So I guess I’ll write about it.

About an hour ago, give or take, I went to help Edison finish his business in the bathroom. Things were going fine and dandy until I flushed the toilet, at which point the bowl started to fill with water and make a gurgling, bubbling sound rather than sucking everything down and belching in satisfaction as one would normally expect. It was obvious to me that nothing I had just flushed could be causing the problem, but that wouldn’t have been my first suspicion, anyway. Not lately. Because, after about a two-year hiatus from putting things in the toilet, Edison has started “accidentally” dropping things in there again. And flushing. Two years ago, I found Eddie’s habit rather frustrating. Being that he is almost four-years-old, I now find myself absolutely livid with each new occurrence. Over the last two or three months, we’ve permanently lost a couple of small toys down the toilet. That’s better than, oh I don’t know, a pair of eyeglasses, such as he flushed down the toilet in Atlanta. But as irksome as it has been this time around, tonight was the worst. Not because we lost anything of value, thankfully. No, tonight I am beyond upset because I don’t think I’m going to be able to fix the toilet on my own. I’ve always been able to plunge the toilet enough to get things running smoothly, and sometimes even retrieve whatever was flushed. But tonight, Eddie has flushed a small ball that is basically the perfect size for getting wedged quite tightly, right where you can’t really get to it without just pushing it even further out of reach.

To make matters worse, the toilet water started overflowing, spreading all over the bathroom floor. That’s also something we’ve been fortunate enough to avoid until now. I know this is the kind of thing you eventually laugh at, but right now, the only thing I can imagine bringing a smile to my face is sticking Eddie’s head into the toilet and flushing him a few times. Sigh. Maybe next time.

Ping

I’ve made it through the first major bump in the semester, where papers are coming due in my classes as well as in the class for which I’m a TA. I spent the last couple of weeks grading nearly 60 by and large poorly written papers. I say it every time, but it’s astonishing (and a bit disheartening) to see the writing abilities of undergrads. We’re talking run-on sentences, sentence fragments, blatant confusion of common homophones that should have been mastered by this point in life (e.g. to / too, their / there), and inconsistent, sometimes seemingly random capitalization. Some might argue that the ability to write well is not very important in today’s world, at least for the majority of the population. There is probably some sad truth to that statement, but I think it constitutes a dangerous state of affairs. It means that those who can write well will decrease in number, and the bar for writing well will drop. Eventually, even the best writers will not be all that clear and, I’d say, wisdom will become threatened. But that’s not the point of my writing this. It’s easy to go off on a tangent about the kind of crap I put up with as a TA. I’ll try my hardest to bite my lip and say no more about it for now.

Hmm. Well, crap, I don’t know what to write. I actually did write some crap about feeling busy, but it’s boring and pointless, so I’ve deleted it. I think I just need to write this post in order to get back into the flow of writing something other than comments on horribly written student papers. (Oops! Okay, no more!) I’ll try to get my thoughts (and my act) together and write something worth reading in the next day or so. Thanks for listening, whoever you are!

Drive-Thru Service, Indeed!

You know your city has serious prostitution problems when you see a sign like this…



(See? I knew having a camera in my cell phone would come in handy!)

Now Look Here

If you sincerely care about me and what I do, you should click the below link and read the (fairly brief) news story to which it leads.

Click here if you love me

Unrelated, if keeping drug addicts off of welfare sounds like a good idea to you, as it initially did to me, you should click the following link and read the thought-provoking post by Sarah, whose blog I’ve followed for a few years now. You owe it to yourself to read such a thoughtful—and bravely personal—response. Regardless of where you final judgment falls, Sarah’s post will ensure that you’re not holding your opinion ignorantly.

Click here for Sarah’s post

That is all.