In which none of that worked out

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

Ugh.

I wanted a whole bunch of things to happen today, starting with being able to sleep past 5:45 in the fucking morning, and really nothing that I wanted to happen today went the way I wanted it to. Mind you, nothing terrible happened, although I did initially write “bad” and then edited it, but today was supposed to be a good day on several different levels and it just … wasn’t.

Tonight I’m going to start reading the last book Robert Jordan ever wrote, which may very well also be the last Robert Jordan book I ever read, assuming I don’t go back to his Conan books at some point in the future. I may just blast through the Brandon Sanderson books in September just to be done with The Wheel of Time. I’ve been sticking to one a month, which would have me finish up in November. Then again, there are two million new releases coming out in September, so spending three thousand pages on books that technically aren’t sitting on my TBR might not be the greatest decision I ever made.

First world problems, I know.

Another first

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching2 Comments

After twenty-plus years of teaching, I don’t encounter a ton of circumstances any longer that I’ve never run into before. I had two in two days, though– first, despite being home sick yesterday, it was the first day that I’ve ever received an email from a school nurse with the phrase “cannabinoid hyperemesis” in it. Which, if you’re wondering if I immediately sent thirty text messages demanding that someone tell me what I’d missed … yeah, I sure as hell did. Apparently four of our eighth grade girls– two of them mine, judging from the suspensions today– decided to hit a THC vape on the way to school, because there’s nothing like being high in middle school at 8:15 in the Goddamned morning, and, well, apparently one of them didn’t react very well to it. Chunks were blown.

I don’t know if the hypervomiter was mine or not.

Today I got a series of emails from one of last year’s kids, now a high school freshman, asking for help with her math assignment. This, in and of itself, is not remotely new– my record for helping former students is a college sophomore, a former denizen of a 7th grade homeroom of mine, who reached out to me completely out of the blue in hope that I could help her with her statistics homework. I could, as it turns out.

No, what was new was that she was doing this while she was sitting in math class. Her current math class, in high school, with her high school Algebra 1 teacher. And, to add to the hilarity, I know her math teacher, and I don’t like her very much. I have received emails from way more of last year’s eighth graders than I usually do this early in the year, and several of them have been begging me either to move up to the high school (nope) or take them back (also nope), and every single one who I’ve asked has turned out to have this particular teacher. I don’t know if y’all remember the saga in my previous district of the teacher whose “medical leave” led to me getting stuffed into her classroom and constantly yanked around when she told people she’d be back on a certain date and then didn’t come back, but yeah, she’s back, and she works at the high school now. She still sucks, too.

Anyway, I got her through her assignment, while teaching my own students. Because that’s just how much of a badass I am, that I can teach two different classes in two different buildings at the same time.

Who wants to touch me?

No reason

On By Luther M. SilerIn MusicLeave a comment

Another “I’m sick, no thoughts” night, and I found this, so I’m sharing it:

In which God has terrible aim

On By Luther M. SilerIn life2 Comments

I could have written about Dolly Parton yesterday, but I wasn’t feeling well. I could have written about Tim Curry today, had Dolly not died yesterday. I don’t think I’m quite mentally or emotionally capable of processing the idea that we’ve lost both of them in 24 hours. Writing Jolene, all by itself, should have guaranteed Dolly immortality. Portraying Doctor Frank-N-Furter, all by … I’m going to go with themselves, should have guaranteed Tim Curry immortality, and for both of them I mean literal physical immortality, not the idea that people will still be enjoying their work in a hundred years, assuming we’re not all too busy scrabbling through a postapocalyptic, global warming-scarred wasteland.

They both should have had more time, damn it.

I knew immediately what picture of Curry to use, and had to look around for a moment to find that precise image. Dolly was a little more difficult until I decided to see what was out there of her and her goddaughter Miley Cyrus together, and the moment I saw that one … damn. Look at the love in that kid’s eyes. Yeah, yeah, I know, she’s an actress and a performer, blah blah blah, that’s the most genuine look I’ve ever seen on her face before.

(Because I want to hurt myself, I’m listening to Bowie right now.)

I saw a TikTok earlier from a creator I like quite a lot, and her suggestion was that we just need to cancel the rest of this entire week. Nobody goes to work or does anything. We just all need to be done for a few days, instead of doing what we’re all doing right now, which is falling prey to that human need to see everything in threes and wondering what new horror awaits us tomorrow. I’m still not feeling well, although I’m better than yesterday, and I’m going to bed super early again tonight. I cannot wake up to another disaster tomorrow, and I think if I get another text message from my wife during fourth or fifth hour I’m just going to toss my phone and my watch out the window and not read them. My students noticed when I got the text about Curry today. Do you know how strongly you have to react to something to get eighth graders to notice it? I wasn’t even teaching at the time; I must have made a noise or something, because ten seconds after I got the text I had six kids asking me if I was okay.

I’m not. I’m just not, and I need some time before the Next Fucking Thing happens, God damn it.

Nope. No way. Absolutely not.

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

Walked out of work feeling totally fine, and by the time I got home I had some sort of Sinus Thing going on and an alarming amount of pressure building up behind my left eye. Obviously it must be the last week of August. As I do not have time for this shit on a number of levels, I have shot both nostrils up with Afrin and I am going to bed exceptionally early. I’m going to nuke this thing in its Goddamned infancy and hope I can make it go away quickly.

no words only sleep

On By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

Came home, died in my chair, and then ate some pizza, and now in lieu of an actual post, please accept this picture of my new closet, complete with my clothes and the new motion-detecting lighting I’ve added. I thought for a minute that all my shit wasn’t going to fit, but that’s because I don’t understand how hangers work.

what the hell is this

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

If I look at this very, very carefully, I can pull some correct answers out of it. Like, there’s a 230 next to #1 up there. There’s a B106 next to #7, next to some arcane hieroglyphics of no known purpose. The ones in black pen are my handwriting, obviously. This kid brought this to me with the first four done, asked me if he was doing them right, and the marks on the page resembled no known words in any known language, so I walked him through the very straightforward lesson again and showed him what to do. This is what he turned in.

It is possible that the psychic damage I will take from trying to read this carefully will not be worth it. It is also possible that reading this will teach me spells.

Another thing I ran into with this assignment that I’ve not seen before is kids who absolutely cannot write exponents smaller and in the upper right of the number. As in they don’t have the fine motor skills necessary for it. It’s mind-blowing. We’re going to have to do a lot of written work this year just to get their handwriting to the point where it’s at what we used to think of as a first- or second-grade level. This is, remember, a fourteen-year-old’s work.

Giving these kids devices was the worst mistake the field of education has made during my lifetime. It’s worse than the overemphasis on standardized testing. This is a fucking disaster.

#REVIEW: The Keeper, by Tana French

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

I need someone to have a quiet word with Tana French. And maybe with her publishers. Hell, both.

The Keeper is the third and, supposedly, the final book in the Cal Hooper trilogy. I did a full review of the first book, The Searcher, and a reviewlet of the second, The Hunter. There is something great about this series, y’all, and I refuse to admit that it’s over in a fashion that rarely happens to me with series fiction. I absolutely insist on more books in this series, or at least that French starts a new series where she follows Trey as she moves on from Ardnakelty. It’s not like her Dublin Murder Squad series didn’t already establish a precedent for each book following a side character from the previous one. I love these characters and I love this setting, and God damn it, I’m not ready for or interested in this being over yet.

But let me back up, for the benefit of people who haven’t been reading this site since 2021 and don’t click on links: the Cal Hooper books follow, you guessed it, Cal Hooper, a retired Chicago cop who moves to Ireland on a whim in the first book and buys a fixer-upper in the tiny and fictional town of Ardnakelty. He quickly finds himself more or less adopted by a feral thirteen-year-old girl named Trey, and … well, he’s an ex-cop. It’s a Tana French book. There are shenanigans afoot. By the start of the third book, Cal is engaged to a local woman named Lena, Trey is seventeen and effectively Cal’s foster daughter, and Cal no longer feels like an outsider to Ardnakelty. In fact, the idea of not becoming part of Ardnakelty is a major theme in this book; Lena feels like Cal is growing too comfortable with the more pathological aspects of living in such a small town, and Trey, who was all about escaping Ardnakelty at her earliest possible opportunity at first, is contemplating leaving school for a carpentry apprenticeship and is tentatively exploring a relationship with a girlfriend.

And then a local girl, right around Trey’s age, is found drowned in a river, and the autopsy reveals antifreeze in her stomach, and we’re off to the races again.

Perhaps “off to the races” is the wrong phrase. This book is many things; in a hurry is none of them, and while it’s every bit as compelling a read as the previous two volumes, this one is even more about the three main characters and the culture of Ardnakelty than the first books were, and the plot is really an excuse to dive into their personalities and their relationships. There’s an intentionality about Cal’s relationship with Trey in particular that I, as someone with a couple of pseudo-adoptive kids of my own*, can really recognize and relate to, and Lena comes forward quite a bit more in this book than she has in the past.

Ardnakelty itself is much more of a character in this book than it has been in the past, too, and the way the book uses Rachel Holohan’s death to investigate themes of inheritance and change and destiny is really awesome. I’m not quite ready to call this French’s best book, something I also said about The Searcher, but it’s a tremendous piece of work and it really makes me want to reread the series from the start. If you’ve read the previous books you no doubt already have your eye on this one, but if you haven’t, at this point there’s no reason to wait.

(*) I don’t talk about them often, but I have two former students who call me Dad and mean it, and a handful who have tossed the word around a couple of times.