Closed sign swinging in the window of a liquor store
You’ve got to love 88.3, the radio station that I’m listening to right now: one second they’re playing Meat Loaf, “Let Me Sleep on It”, with the famous play-by-play backdrop, which then insanely bursts into Huey Lewis and the News. Is someone messing with my mind? That does not seem far from plausibility. The Meat Loaf track you really just have to love, though. What may appear ostensibly as some completely obnoxious puritanical rant is actually, on further inspection, a horribly sinister attempt at “getting some” by saying what needs to be said. And then hilariously "wishing for the end of time" once certain promises are made, and the getting has been got. Pretty complex stuff at work there, you have to admit.

The first day of work, which also coincides with the nicest day of this spring. That is something, really: it has rained for what seems like a week, and now this, when I have to be sitting indoors, with not even a window to look out of. What my current employment scenario involves is sitting before a computer and scoring 4th grade essay exams, as part of some completely futile testing concern for the state of Massachusetts. We have been told at the outset that these exams do not figure into the students’ grades, and as you creep up into the higher grade levels, you see the complete lack of caring, little doodles and elaborate explainations of how you, the scorer, are a total “jack-off.” It’s pretty demoralizing.

Today’s questions is all about salmon, and how they’ve been displaced in the Sacramento River, in Asia. Years of pollution has sent the fish from their homes, and now they are attempting to reintroduce the salmon population to the dirty river. The scoring criteria is so low that most students receive at least some kind of score point for saying basically anything. But then, inexplicably, there are always those students who feel the urge to totally ignore the actual question, offering you instead some random digression which has nothing to do with anything, some kids foraying into the far off territory of exactly how much they like fish. That’s kind of nice, though, too, when you get an imaginative reply. Sometimes it’s as though they just cannot resist the urge, when the gears of imagination whirr up, and it’s not entirely their fault that they feel so totally compelled to tell you how cute salmon are. The days are long, and you these types of distractions. I hear a co-worker say, contemplating the clock today, “It feels like 20 minutes, and only 3 have gone by.” And it’s rough like that. I have to admit, though, I feel some vague amount of relief about this job, for ten more minutes. The carefully conscripted rationale for existing, which just does not present in the righteous declarations of, I didn’t nothing today. I have something now, an excuse.

The correct answer for the question, it turns out, is that the salmon will make it back up stream, and successfully integrate back into the river ecosystem. It’s not a hard concept to grasp, and it’s all pretty obvious. The student doesn’t have to say that, but that’s what they’re getting at. It seems like kind of weird plight, but there are probably worse ones. This is what I do all day. This is how I will be spending my time for the next few weeks. Think of me tomorrow, where I'll be wishing for the end of time.