Tonight’s the big budget meeting for Manteca Unified School District, where they try to figure out how to keep the schools going while Sacramento legislators diddle on state spending and scream at each other. We’re going. It’s probably going to be a zoo – a lot of teachers, a lot of parents, and there’s sure to be a lot of animosity.
Stay tuned. You’ll get the whole story.
Facebook is insidious.
See, here’s how it works. It starts when a friend tells you about his or her recent experience with Facebook: they just created a page last week, and out of the blue was contacted by someone they went to high school with in 1987. And they’re way weirded out by it, but strangely intrigued then to see who else is out there. And they get sucked in. Finally, out of curiosity or pique or just plain boredom, you ask your friend, is it worth my time to create a Facebook page?
Probably not, they say. So you shrug and let it go.
But then they go on some more about the recent Facebook contact from a college friend, the most likely to succeed kid, who turns out to have dropped out of college in 1991 to become a sidewalk balloon animal artist in San Francisco.
You create a page and figure, what the hell, it takes two minutes and probably won’t amount to anything, but we’ll see what there is to see.
As they say, the first hit is always free.
Two months later, you’ve bookmarked your Facebook page as your browser’s home page. By this point you’ve come into contact with at least a half dozen people you went to school with, marvelling every day at the discrepancies between the memories in your head, the photos as they actually were at the time, and the people they became. It’s like a freakin’ high school reunion, only without the cover charge, airline fare and bad music. You scour the network for the Facebook pages of absolutely positively every single person you’ve ever met. You send friend invites left and right.
Somewhere along the line, you discover Facebook applications. At first, it’s just stupid stuff. Send your friend an email drink! What 80’s movie are you? That sort of thing. But sooner or later you get to the better ones, the games, and then it’s all over: you never have to leave Facebook again.
You become obsessed with your Pathwords score.
You spend your evenings marauding with grenade launchers, raiding fellow players for small fortunes in Mob Wars.
The PS3 collects dust. Your pets keep pointing to the empty food bowl in desperation.
And so it eventually comes down to this: friends of friends posting on your wall, you posting back, begging and coercing each other to join your respective Mobs, running across the girl that you had a killer crush on in the 11th grade who apparently grew up to be a complete ditz, chatting with the high school acquaintance that wouldn’t give you the time of day in 1989 but seems to think you were best friends, spending almost as much time with Facebook mail than with regular email, using Facebook IM more than regular IM, using Facebook more than you’re using the phone, posting photos, looking through your friends’ photos, commenting on their photos because they commented on yours and what the hell my GOD your hair looked so bizarre in 1989 what the HELL were you thinking, yeah I know it was a hot style in 1989 and yeah I thought so at the time and did you see what this guy does for a living have you read his blog there’s a comment there to comment on and he asked people on his Wall go to read his blog and comment on it and..
*HEAD EXPLODES*
Robert Frost was wrong. It’s neither fire nor ice. In online social networking shall the end visit upon us all.
After a long morning of back-and-forth emails, I’m assured that almost all of my outstanding client money is going into the mail today.
Sigh. I hate having to do this hardass collection stuff.
Long week. Long, tense, stressful, on edge week full of fear and loathing. Please let it be over.
The good news is that the business did great in November. The bad news is that virtually all of those invoices, due at the end of December, remain unpaid. So this week I’ve been playing the hardass with my clients, reminding them that the holidays are over and that, well, it’s be kinda cool if they could – oh, I dunno – like pay their bills and stuff. At this writing, I have assurances that the big check is going out today and that the runner-up at least has been approved, if not actually cut and out the door yet.
Kristi’s situation is pretty much what it was earlier this week. She passed a handful of her fails, and has spent the week flying under the radar, barely leaving her classroom, waiting for inevitable call or email summoning her to the dark room with the metal chair and bare swinging light bulb.
It hasn’t happened. She hasn’t heard a word about the OMG-WTF-EMERGENCY-OMG that caused her to spend her entire holiday break obsessively worrying about losing her job.
We think the entire issue may have fallen off the radar, a small crisis quickly overwhelmed by a much bigger one: the California state budget fiasco. I don’t plan to get into the politics here on R&K – it’s enough to say that Sacramento better get its act together and fast. Else, the state runs out of money in February, and then all sorts of hilarity follow. There’s a lot – a LOT – of frantic discussion right now over how to keep the schools open without state funds, should the budget deadlock continue. So we’re thinking that right now, 17 failing students aren’t the highest priority.
It’s not all worry and uncertainty here. We’re at the start of Q1 for me, which tends to be (by far) my busiest and most profitable time of the year; I have several regular clients and work coming in. Kristi teaches a core subject mandated by Federal law – thank you, George W. Bush – and she’s respected and well liked by her peers. We’re both healthy and somewhat financially solvent. For the time being, we’re holding it together.
Oh – and the bookshelves are done, waiting now only for a truck to drive them over to the house.
We’re having an unplugged night tonight. We both desperately need it.
NEWS: – There’s a new Members Only item, involving good friends of ours and some exciting news that we can finally talk about. If you’re already registered at R&K, log in and find out all about it! (And if you haven’t registered yet, why haven’t you?)
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