misanthrope jottings

  As he pulls his Crosstrek up to the office parking lot, he places his car into park.     He catches a snippet of NPR. “According to the largest study of its kind, prompting calls to discourage screen time and increase physical activity…”   He recalls a memory from his time as a teacher, an iteration of his previous careers. He stored it for times like these.   He was engaged in talking about something normal with Kristen, a senior involved with one of his extracurricular activities. He found talking to the female students notably more enjoyable, mainly because of how normal the conversations were. The male students tend to be more stilted in their ability to engage socially, sprinkling their own interactions with nut taps or smirks.   In the corner of his field of vision, he sees one of his male English Lit kids make a bee line straight to the teacher desk.     So, is chapter 11 of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter on the test?   No hello, no gr...

  He finds himself settling into a routine after his trip to Phoenix. His sleep is off. What’s odd is that he in fact slept according to his EST schedule while in Arizona, but only found the night upon arrival back to Pennsylvania that his sleep was thrown off. He found that he slept in the next night, but found himself full of energy the next. This begat a cycle, where he felt good one day, but then felt exhausted, almost delayed by a day. He would sleep more one day but then still felt tired due to the lack of the sleep the night prior. Once in high school, during his junior summer where he had nothing at all to do, he found himself sleeping in an hour more each day, only to stay up an hour later. He later will take college classes at Wilkes through his high school senior year, where he learns of the French scientist Michel Siffre who lived in a cave for 63 days. He found his body’s circadian rhythm was around 25 hours, and that with sunlight cues our bodies reset around the 24 h...

  The move to a new place requires the establishment of several places. He will need the best of the following: pizza, cocktail, wings, library, book store, coffeeshop.     Several websites will rank the pizza parlors in your location. He finds monetary incentives intertwined with local bias, but he scours the reviews for the content. Any without explanation he discards. He focuses on the 1 stars to look for particular gripes. He ignores any circumstantial complaints, such as bad service for that night, misheard order or misplaced item, all of which he will give the local store the benefit of the doubt. With most things, he will have the list of places in the back of his mind and as he travels around, should he find himself both in the area and in the right mindset or appetite, he will then undertake a review.     Bart’s was listed often as the second or third best pizza.     He enters the parlor. The sign reads “no phone conversations in store” in bol...