Yesterday was profoundly discouraging. The kids’ first day of their respective semesters, L’s went well enough (other than a few driving & parking hiccups), but P’s art class was a disaster. At least, that was her takeaway. Her professor reminds her of an overweening yet incompetent teacher she had in high school; she hates the dingy, claustrophobic building in which the studio’s located (all the way over on the opposite side of campus); and she despises her first assignment. After the very challenging experience of her first college-level art class last semester, all hopes for a change in trajectory seem very distant. To her credit, after she got home and had a chance to process, she did confess that her revulsion at the class may have been partially due to…physical factors. And we reviewed the syllabus together, and the subsequent assignments look more palatable than her first.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Still, if she had a choice, she’d be attending a four-year art school, somewhere up north and\/or cold and snowy, a reasonable distance away from her family, but not far enough to make it impractical to request their help on short notice. And the truth is, I’d love be able to make that happen for her\u2014and it may yet work out\u2014but the resources will always be a challenge. That’s the major obstacle to her being able to attend AppState in Boone; the fact that I simply can’t afford out-of-state tuition, and the idea of living in situ<\/em> for a year and working just doesn’t appeal to her. Fortunately, by the end of the evening, D and I seemed to be on the same page about at least trying<\/em> to effect a change in situation for her\u2014without making promises we may not be able to keep\u2014with the caveat that she needs to have a Plan B and Plan C, etc, and not put all her emotional eggs in one basket. It’s a tough line to help her walk; on the one hand, there are times to simply buckle down and make the best of a bad situation, but on the other hand, no one wants to waste time and money on a sub-optimal education.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Another point of discouragement is how gung-ho and supportive D is of the absolutely shocking governmental and law enforcement situation taking place in our country at the moment. Our deranged, despicable president has assembled his very own secret police force right under our noses, and she’s cheering them on, blind to every single history lesson, or the humanity of those in the crosshairs. Truth be told, it’s not her support of them in and of itself that bothers me (I’ve long since ceased to care about her political leanings), but she represents a type, those “strength”-worshiping, myopic MAGA degenerates, especially the ones who try to slap a “nuanced” intellectual veneer on their loyalties and try to cosplay some kind of independence from the all-in, whatever-Trump-wants cultists. We’re so far beyond that point, and have been for some time. I can’t, and won’t, give him credit for anything, and my respect for D has dropped even lower than it was before. I don’t spend a lot of energy on it, but I do try to at least serve a voice from the other side in her life (one that she’s clearly not hearing) when I have the opportunity, but really, I have better things to do with my time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Yesterday was profoundly discouraging. The kids’ first day of their respective semesters, L’s went well enough (other than a few driving & parking hiccups), but P’s art class was a disaster. At least, that was her takeaway. Her professor reminds her of an overweening yet incompetent teacher she had in high school; she hates the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3370"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3370"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3370\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3372,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3370\/revisions\/3372"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3370"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3370"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3370"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}