tempest

 i'm still in shock. whatever else happened today was entirely overshadowed by mr smear terrorizing the household from the moment he finished school until 11.15pm.

he took an hour and a half to get home, which is a thing he's been doing for a while, and it's now clear that he's doing it in an attempt to get out of homework.

he had actual homework to do today (technically yesterday, but he claimed to have forgotten what it was), due tomorrow, and after three hours of him FAing i told him - with gd's support for the very first time, which indicates just how over his behavior she finally is - that he wasn't eating dinner or going to bed until the homework was done.

lessons learned this evening: he really doesn't give a shit until there's a threat of violence, or violence. punishment doesn't bother him. and in addition to that, he has zero respect for anybody, least of all himself.

here's the weirdest part of it all, though: the evening was a complete nightmare, but any time that he did decide to focus and do what we demanded of him - actually try to answer the questions - the mood shifted completely as he understood the material and what was expected of him. even when he needed my help, our interactions were calm and positive, as if nothing horrific had taken place minutes earlier.

in my estimation, the actual time spent doing homework was probably between half an hour to an hour.

but the other six hours of "homework time"? just sheer bloody-mindedness and insanity.

and then gd made him dinner, and he brushed his teeth, and he went to bed peacefully as if it was just an ordinary night.

...

the early morning was alright, minus a bad vibe over something dumb on his way out, and i left on time for my new employer's end-of-year event, wearing my jacket, my new waterproof shoes and carrying my umbrella.

on the way to the light rail station, i traversed massive pools of water that even my shoes couldn't protect me from entirely. i arrived in petach tikva in serious rain, with quite a walk to the event. but i made it, everything was fine.

the event was a tad awkward as i'm the new guy and haven't yet fully onboarded, but i met a lot of nice and interesting people and mostly had a good time.

the food was good, too - even if i had to wait a considerable amount of time for the vegan plates to come out - and i was very pleased to discover that the brewery is vleishik so the only milks the barista served were plant-based alternatives :)

i left with my new co-worker who i know from two jobs back, and less than a minute after we left the building we got slammed with a sudden, heavy downpour and heavy gusts of wind. that lasted about a minute, and then everything calmed back down.

we walked to and boarded the light rail, and got to tel aviv pretty quickly. unfortunately, we discovered once we arrived that neither of us had validated tickets. that wasn't a problem for me - i just generated one from the app - but he had an issue with his rav-kav and had to ask for assistance, which resulted in him being fined. i advised him to appeal the fine - it's really unfair, neither of us saw anything on the platform that might have helped (not a machine, not a sign) - but he's so stressed about the time cost of fighting it that i ended up telling him to just let it go...

...

i finished reading the complete ballad of halo jones today. it's brilliant. with all the mr smear shenanigans, though, i didn't have much time for any of the stuff i'd meant to do :/

and now it's very late, and i'm starting to fall asleep.