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We are a week into virtual school and it is going … okay, I guess.

Riley is completely self-sufficient and while he doesn’t TRY particularly hard to be a good student he gets by quite well on minimal effort (at least so far, he’s now in high school honors classes which I assume will eventually require him to break an academic sweat now and then). He basically disappears entirely for hours at a time, emerges to complain about Zoom, and he’s done for the day.

Dylan is having a harder go of it, which is par for the course with him and school in non-pandemic times, but the all-computer all-the-time vibe is not remotely ideal for the way he’s wired. Riley has always been a kid who can happily watch screens nonstop while Dylan has always been more active, we’ve never had to hammer him about screen time because he’s got a limited capacity for it. So now this kid who struggles with attention span issues/needs physical environment changes to stay engaged/loses focus and gets headaches from screens/learns best from high-energy teachers is slogging through online assignments and videos (all via a baffling new learning platform) while his butt is essentially superglued in front of an outdated school-issued iPad for hours at a time and it is of course all a Big Fat Bucket of Suck.

Well. Who among us is not feeling the Big Fat Bucket of Suck vibes, right? Nearly everything sucks right now and it’s sucked for months and there’s no end to the suck, THE SUCK IS ENDLESS, which is also my new Pornhub channel but surprise, it’s about vacuum lines.

In other sucky news one of my favorite trees in our backyard just fell right the hell over during a blustery afternoon this week:

No damage except to the tree itself, but it felt, like, classic 2020.

Yesterday evening the smoke seemed to clear out quite a bit here in Eugene and I was so incredibly relieved, we kept talking about how rough it’s been and whew thank goodness at least THIS particular 2020 bullshit is over, and then I woke up this morning and it’s baaaaaaaack. (Sky gods: NEVER CELEBRATE TOO EARLY.)

A friend in California described living with this smoke so perfectly: It feels oppressive and surreal in a season that already felt oppressive and surreal. Our family is lucky (at least so far) in that the air quality hasn’t brought on migraines, breathing issues, or anything like that, but it’s just flat-out upsetting — dark weird light, no sunshine, a constant acrid stench of burn. Like all the doom and anxiety floating around in our brains has somehow been made physical.

The kids’ first day of school got pushed back a week, and I suspect it may be further delayed since the poor air has impacted the district’s ability to hand out devices. There are still a number of kids who haven’t been able to pick up their iPads/laptops, plus who knows how many don’t even have an actual house at this point if they were in an evac zone.

I have yet to really get into the weeds with this whole virtual school business, but it sure seems like it’s going to be … fraught. Just the process of getting signed up with Canvas and linking a student/parent account was A Whole Fricking Thing, and now that I’ve finally seen Dylan’s middle school schedule – which involves three entirely different schedules each week depending on whether it’s Day A, Day B, or Day C — I just can’t imagine how it’s not going to constantly feel confusing as hell, on top of being such a tragic overall alternative to in-person learning.

To be clear, I’m glad we were not faced with the choice of going in-person or not; I fully support the school district’s decision to start the year virtually. Still, it is hard not to mourn all the losses that brings, particularly the kids continuing to be so isolated from old friends, with essentially no opportunities to make new ones. Riley is super bummed to be starting high school this way, and even Dylan, who is not exactly Mr. Hooray for Academia, says he’d “give anything” to be in his 7th grade classes for real.

Well. What a mess. I feel like I have been saying that since March: oh, what a mess, what a terrible mess it all is. Inadequate words for a year that seems like it will never, ever end.

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