Chaos Attraction

Air Quality

2018-11-13, 9:29 p.m.

I woke up to find out that they canceled classes at two campuses in the area today. Mine was one of them.

YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW SHOCKING THIS IS, should any oh, East Coasters read this. California does NOT cancel ANYTHING for weather. I don’t just mean “oh, it’s sunny California and you don’t have snow” reasoning, which is true enough, but several years ago there was a storm so bad that the out-of-town employees were told they could use a vacation day. (I still had to come in: I live the closest so I don’t get out of anything.) But they didn’t cancel any classes. I wish they would cancel things for bad storms that are so bad that nobody should be driving in them, but they never do. But seriously, to cancel classes for air quality?!?!?!

I’d like to note that at least one of these (mine, of course) was still open for business anyway while the other totally shut down, and nobody’s closed any of the campuses for smaller children. Nowhere else during the day apparently did this, and we never got any more information beyond the original alert. I found a couple of news articles on it (the LA Times got the scoop first?! Damn) and that was it. I can’t say we were notified about anything else throughout the day about it at all, though. I heard that we were getting calls asking if this was going to happen all week long and if so, should parents take their babies home. Uh, good luck with that. They’re not gonna let us know before say, tomorrow at 6 a.m. most likely, if classes aren’t running again. I highly doubt we’ll be out all week, I’m sure professors were losing their minds as is over the loss of one precious day, and I’d be surprised if this happened again tomorrow here. Meanwhile, our rival campus has already pre-closed for tomorrow. I need to get a job there.

Also, now I feel like an idiot for hiking outside for two hours yesterday and then hanging around outside for a bit after that. I didn’t see too many people outside, but it was a holiday weekend so that didn’t surprise me...Okay, so I didn’t check the weather on days I didn’t have to leave the house early and I’m used to smoky days by now, so I didn’t think it’d be THAT BAD.

Had a meeting with New Boss that went well, she said she wasn’t going to put me on the phones right away again even if they have nobody on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I don’t know when the desk move will happen, I have to wait on a new “everyone can call me” phone again at least. And I’m not allowed to have any decorations there (no way to post anything on the walls, plus "distracting to others," SIGH. I will have a perfectly professional and 100% empty not-even-a-cube-or-desk that doesn’t look like anyone sits there, like everyone’s always wanted. Whee. The easier to get canned when everyone gets mad at me, I guess. Less to pack.

I can’t get excited about a desk move after all of these years of wanting a desk move. That really sucks. There’s only one advantage to moving my desk and too many new disadvantages that come up instead.

They put out some paper face masks, but I cannot walk down a street with those on without my glasses steaming up instantly. So that went well.

Though in other news, I called the city and I did not get any kind of parking ticket! Huzzah! I guess someone just dumped fliers on my car or something.


I was listening to this Moth story about a guy and his daughter's black kitten, "Pawpins" (oh lord, the name). Pawpins broke a leg and had to be kept out of fun for six weeks, and the guy reports that the kitten was so depressed that she was "sleeping in the litter box."

Now DAMN. That is a depression metaphor if there ever was one. Are you so depressed that you'd literally sleep in your own toilet because you really literally don't give a shit any more?

This has a sad ending because the guy gets the bright idea to let Pawpins be an outdoor cat after this, and that ends about as badly as you figured it did. But I think that’s a memorable metaphor there.


I had improv class tonight, AND IT ACTUALLY RAN TONIGHT! I was figuring that between it being in this town and the whole smoke closure thing, it was screwed. But eight people showed up and we had a lot of fun working on character work and later relationship work. We played games, did scenes, did some character telephone-type games, animal acting out, funny walks. At one point we had to do a new character every 15 seconds for 90 seconds and I really got into that one and pulled that out. Huzzah! We also did some Hitchhiker and some two person freeze tag scenes. I liked everyone there and I hope I see them all again. This was really fun.

Updated: yup, everything is back to normal again tomorrow. Sigh.


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