Well, it seems that my resolve yesterday to get back to our regular schedule waivered, before breaking down completely. Yours portly has been exceptionally busy lately—March and April are always difficult, but this February was also quite brutal—and what little creative energy I have has been laser-focused on composing.
I also haven’t really watched any flicks worth reviewing. To be clear, I have reviewed plenty of bad movies. Lately, though, nothing has leapt out at me as worth hammering out 600-1000 words. Maybe Ponty will finally write that rebuttal to my award-winning, trenchant, insightful, powerful, persuasive review of Donnie Darko (1999).
So I thought I’d cast back to an old post about eating a steak alone on a Monday night while using my cellphone to write a blog post. I wrote the post on the eve of the annual South Carolina Independent School Association (SCISA) Music Festival, which is one of the marquee events of our music program. It’s a huge and chaotic undertaking, but super fun, and I love seeing my students get ready to perform.
I’m pretty on-the-ball this year, but that on-the-ballitude accounts, in part, for my poor posting—I’ve been working ahead on school and Music Festival stuff.
There probably won’t be any steak tonight, but there might be Thursday after I get back from the Festival.
Regardless, here’s 9 March 2020’s “Memorable Monday II: Monday Steakhouse Blues“:
Almost exactly a year ago today, I wrote a brief post from my cellphone at a Western Sizzlin’ in Florence, South Carolina. At the time, I was incredibly stressed out, due to a combination of factors: the end-of-quarter dash to grade papers, the looming Music Festival, and a home without Internet.
Here it is a year later and the seventy posts of a year ago seem minuscule. I also find myself in a similar state of frantic scrambling. This year, my Internet is working—thank goodness!—but we’re in the midst of our once-every-five-years reaccreditation visit. It’s the culmination of eighteen-months of work, and the administration is hyper-vigilant (and extremely on edge) about us presenting the best, most Potemkin Village-esque version of the school.
I’m also preparing kids for the aforementioned Music Festival—which should now be done—and working on buying curtains for our stage. Yikes! And, in an object lesson of how we never learn our lessons, I’m struggling under a mountain of papers for third quarter report cards. Ay caramba!
As such, today’s post is a reblog, a look back at one year ago. I probably won’t eat steak tonight, but I did eat a fourteen-ounce, $35 blackened ribeye on the school’s dime last night, so that’s something.
Here is 2019’s “Monday Steakhouse Blues“:
I’m writing today’s post on my phone at one of the few surviving Western Sizzlin’ steakhouses in America. Yep, it’s been that kind of day.
Yesterday’s post marked the 70th consecutive daily post on this blog. That means I’ve posted at least one post a day for ten weeks.
I don’t have much to say today. I’m taking a group of roughly forty student-musicians to a “Solo and Ensemble”-style music festival tomorrow, and today report card grades were due. Without Internet at the house, everything had to get done today in a compressed time.
As such, the only interesting thing I’ve had a chance to hear about today was Tucker Carlson saying a bunch of controversial, awesome stuff on a radio show a decade ago—and, instead of kowtowing to the Left, he invited folks to debate him on his show: https://www.breitbart.com/the-media/2019/03/11/tucker-carlson-refuses-to-apologize-over-media-matters-compilation-of-shock-jock-call-ins/
More to come tomorrow and Wednesday. I couldn’t blow a 70-day streak.
Happy Monday!
–TPP