As a matter of business, I’m going to tweak how these week notes work starting with the next one (the first of 2026). Instead of incrementing numbers (this is week-notes/043/), I’m going to number them based on the week of the year (so next week will be week-notes/2026/W1/). This will affect no one but me. It does mean I need to be more regimented in doing these every week, but I’ve been consistent for the last few months and I enjoy the habit.
I don’t have a ton to say this week — it was mostly a slog to get to Friday. The last week before break is always brutal as a teacher, but now we have two weeks off that I sorely need. On Saturday, I went to see a local production of The Nutcracker; I don’t think ballet is my thing, but my friend’s daughter was in it and I think it meant a lot that I showed up. I also previously had only seen Barbie in the Nutcracker so perhaps I helped myself grow culturally, too.
I think I’m in the midst of a depression different from any I’ve experienced before. I have known for a while now that I experience seasonal depression, but it’s always been low-level and manageable; I’ve had depressive episodes in my life, but I’ve insisted that they have always been situational (i.e. I was in high school and depressed; I graduated and was no longer depressed). This one is a combination of the depression I know and something new: I’m steady in my moods and able to function on a day-to-day basis, but there’s this enduring ennui that I can’t shake. It’s all job-related — disappointment about not transferring has left me disengaged from the work I’m left with. My heart was ready for a change and, now that it’s off the table, my heart just isn’t in anything. I’m hoping our upcoming holiday break will let me recenter and recover, but the thing about depression is that it makes it hard to be optimistic that things will get better.
Since last year, this blog has been running on Hugo. For a while, I used a repository on GitHub that would build and deploy to GitHub Pages. Microsoft is currently targeted by the BDS campaign, which is enough of a reason to minimize or outright eliminate my use of their services (even free ones). GitHub also has a contract with ICE and has whole-heartedly embraced AI, which means anything — including my shitty code and nonsensical ramblings — on their platform is fed to Copilot. Suffice to say, there are a number of reasons to move away from it.
This week was absolutely overwhelming. I don’t want to get into the details here to protect myself professionally, but I’m no longer switching to teaching high school in the January. It is still my long-term desire to teach older kids, but circumstances changed around the opening that I was going to fill. I spent most of the week ping-ponging between emails and phone calls, and I think I averaged something like three hours of sleep each night. I am still sorting through my (mixed) feelings, but mostly, I’m just tired.