I do not like you as much as I did in the golden days of yore. When did you become the day for chores and catching up and the tyranny of the urgent? When did you stop being the day for fun and recreation and unstructured schedules, and become the junk drawer of the week?
You were named after the original Time Lord -- not the funny one with the bowtie and the blue box, but Saturn/Kronos, the one with the scythe and the seriously dysfunctional family. That's him in the "World's Best Dad" t-shirt, eating his kids. And let's not even talk about what Freud would have to say about his relationship with his father. My mythology book tells me he retired to Italy and his reign there was called the Golden Age. Sounds like a nice gig to me, but somehow, this archetype for the Grim Reaper does not deliver as billed. And just like the Grim Reaper, Saturday keeps tapping me on the shoulder and telling me it's time to come and do more stuff I'd rather not. The worst of it is, it's all done in the guise of being a "golden day" when I can do what I want. Ha!
That's why I am appointing Saturday as "Randomday" on my blog. Usually I try to craft a blog post that is coherent and well thought out, but Saturdays are not like that. On Saturdays, the blog can eat leftovers, like them or not.
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Dear BlogHer: I marked your emails as "spam." I know I signed up to get them, but that was when I thought you were actually giving useful tips to female bloggers. I was really turned off, but too busy to write, when you sent something in February attacking the Susan G. Komen foundation and praising Planned Parenthood, as if there was no other possible position for any woman to take. Then, a little later, you sent another email, again assuming unanimity among women on the subject of birth control and who should be required to pay for it, and particularly assuming all female bloggers would be opposed to any of the Republican presidential candidates. And, by the way, I would like to reserve to myself the right to use the word "slut" if the occasion demands it, and I believe Rush Limbaugh was perfectly justified in doing so. In your roundup of blog posts on the subject, you missed this one, which I think was the best of the lot.-----
Dear parents of my students: 3rd quarter grades will be coming out very shortly. If your child receives less than an "A" in Latin, be assured that yes, there is a reason for that. I will be happy to discuss the reasons with anyone, preferably informally via email or telephone, but be aware that if you call me at home in the evenings, I may not have my grading information handy and may lapse into generalizations because I am tired. If in my fatigue I happen to use the word "doofus" in describing your child, please also be aware it is a term of affection. The middle school years are populated with doofuses (3rd declension noun meaning a young person with scatterbrained and goof-off tendencies; it is of common gender so it can refer to either boys or girls, although it is usually treated as masculine). Virtually all doofuses grow up to become productive and admired members of society, particularly the ones who work hard in Latin class.
Dear 5th and 6th graders: you recently took the National Latin Exam, Intro version. When you did so, you were required to use a #2 pencil to fill in bubbles with your demographic information and names. For next time, you might wish to review basic principles of how to spell your names and follow directions. When you fill in the "Latin 1" bubble instead of the "Intro" bubble, it means your test will be scored with a different group, messing up that group's statistics as well as your own. If you spell your name wrong on the bubbles, it is not quite as serious (unless you get a perfect score and the NLE people send a personalized congratulation to "NneJackson Suza", which did not happen... this year.) Your Latin teacher will be filling out the certificates, if any, and she knows how you spell your names even if you do not. Doofuses!
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