|  I live right by the St. Joseph river, right, the river that takes a pronounced southward turn when it wends through this area, thus providing South Bend with the most boring reason for a town's name ever. This can occasionally be neat; I swear it keeps the heat down a bit during the summer, for example, and occasionally there are deer and gophers and other woodland fowl for the dogs to chase and bark too much at.
I was driving home from work the other day and, stopped at a red light just before the turn lane onto the street-that-turns-onto-my street, spotted something in the road. Turtle! Turtles, sadly, should not be in the road. This caused a moment of consternation-- obviously I don't want to hit the poor damned thing, and I'm not really too keen on letting anyone else hit it either, but the street I was on was kinda busy and either blocking traffic or dodging into it for the purposes of turtle-rescuing didn't seem like a wise decision. Luckily, a moment later I noticed a couple of Good Samaritans who, having performed the exact same mental calculus as me a few moments earlier, had pulled their car over up ahead and come back to take care of the turtle. "Nice people," I thought to myself, feeling rather glad that I didn't have to even consider doing their job for them. Now, you think you know how this story's going to go, right? One of them picked up the turtle and deposited it in the grass pointed toward the river, right, or took it home for a pet (or, hell, dinner, I don't know; this is fucking Indiana after all) or some shit like that, right? I was rather surprised when Lady #1 of the pair, the one I'll refer to as Probably Mom, hopped into the street in front of me... and fucking kicked the turtle. Like, she wound up kickball-style and just booted the thing, which flipped over a few times and managed to get all of a foot closer to the curb. So she kicked it again, with similarly ineffectual results. At this point, apparently she decided it was okay to try to pick it up. Probably Daughter, who was my age, more or less, was doing what I can only describe as the hugely fat adult version of the Potty Dance on the curb. So she tried to pick it up, and... missed? I don't know, but the attempt didn't actually lead to the turtle leaving the ground. Now, keep in mind that we're not exactly talking about a leatherback here. The damn thing was maybe six or eight inches long, so how she tried to pick it up and failed I don't know. Daughter continued to potty dance as mom tried again, this time succeeding in picking the turtle off the ground, at which point she walked over to the curb and set it back down, pointed toward the river. ... No, of course she didn't. Instead, she freaking hurled it toward the river, probably a good fifteen feet down a bluff and who knows how far away from her horizontally. I have to say, this is a definition of Helping Nature's Creatures that I am simply not familiar with. What the hell kind of person has enough empathy to pull over to the side of the road to rescue a turtle, but not enough fucking sense that their definition of "helping" includes kicking it twice and then throwing it down a hill? The fucking turtle was probably better off with the cars. Sigh.
ISTEP testing started today, again, the third test administration of the year, meaning that absolutely no one fucking cares anymore. A number of the (at least) sixth- and seventh-grade teachers, myself among them, managed to spectacularly fuck up the administration of the first test, too, reading the wrong directions to the kids for the first session because the test booklets are not put together in a clear fashion. The funny thing is that I (and everyone else who screwed up in this fashion) am so used to ISTEPs being a clusterfuck that the fact that the directions were obviously wrong for the test only registered as "Great, the state fucked this all up again" and not "I made a mistake." I only figured out what I'd done wrong (turns out there are two tests, both mathematics assessments, labeled "session one" in the teacher's instruction manual, and the only way one might notice that one was reading the wrong one is if one notices something printed along the side of the page, far away from what you're actually reading) with about fifteen minutes left in the first session-- which was good, because the kids were actually supposed to have about twelve more minutes to do the test than I'd initially told them they were getting. I hope everybody else caught it. I know I wasn't the only one who made that mistake in my building, so multiply that by a Whole Fucking Lot of other schools and you can bet that a whole bunch of kids got shorted some testing time they were supposed to have today. God, I hate these fucking things.
I will be very impressed with you if you can tell me why I chose that picture, and no, the answer is not "Christina Ricci's tits from back when she was hot." |
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