My Current Dilemma, in bullet point form

On June 8, 2015June 8, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Work10 Comments

I do not want to teach any longer.
However, I want to be employed more than I want to not-teach.
However, if I have to teach, I would prefer to be outside my current district.
However, I tried this last summer and it didn’t exactly work out, and I think people can smell burnout on me regardless of how hard I try to conceal it.
However, I’m fully expecting my entire district to go bankrupt next year, and it’s probably better to take a salary hit now then have my paychecks start bouncing in April.
However, that might not happen.
However, it’s entirely possible that it won’t matter because I’ll have killed myself/others by the time April rolls around anyway.

It seems, given those facts, that I might look at jobs outside of education!

I am good at many things.
However, few of those things will be immediately apparent on a résumé, and “trust me, I can handle this” is hardly a winning schpiel at a job interview.
However, letters of recommendation are good!
However, I don’t especially relish the idea of telling my boss I’m going to do my best to bail on him this summer.
However, he’s not an idiot and he knows full well that it’s time for the rats to desert the ship, and he’s likely looking for a job himself.
However, every time I look for other jobs, I’m reminded that I don’t really have any sort of concrete idea of what else I might do, and jobs that my current skill-set clearly qualifies me for frequently don’t meet salary needs.
However, see above regarding salary needs, because again, making $IOU in April is a distinct possibility this year.
The word however is getting old, so we’ll point out here that I actually don’t know what the hell people do to find jobs nowadays. Finding teaching jobs is pretty specific and simple, but when you’re in the situation I’m in (“I want at least $45K a year so that I can keep paying my bills, and don’t much care what I’m doing so long as it’s not teaching or illegal”) the actual search process can be kinda difficult.
LinkedIn appears to be useless, and their dedicated job search app worse than useless. I searched for nonprofit jobs yesterday and received several screens of jobs at Taco Bell. A search for education jobs suggested that I apply for a job as a surgeon for the Army Reserve.
You may recall that a manager at Taco Bell makes considerably more than South Bend will pay a teacher.

I really loathe the adage “Those who can’t do, teach.” I can do. What I’m not sure about is convincing people to hire me for jobs that I’m not immediately and obviously going to be a good fit for. I have to get my foot in the door, and I just don’t know that my résumé is going to do that– and that’s after the important “what the hell am I even applying for?” step happens.

Ugh.

Buy some fuggin’ books. Once I’m independently wealthy I ain’t gotta worry about this nonsense no mo’. 🙂

Let’s see

On June 8, 2015June 8, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

SATURDAY: Wake up, go visit wife’s family, a number of whom are in town for the day. Go from there directly to the high school graduation of the first group of fifth graders I had in South Bend, wearing the same clothes I wore at their 8th grade graduation, a fact that entertains only me as there is no chance any of them will notice. Go from there directly to OtherJob. Proceed to have one of the busiest nights of the year. Don’t get home until after midnight.

SUNDAY: Wake up early. Go to brother’s, who is liquidating his home in preparation to move to Illinois and live with his fiancée. Spend three hours moving furniture, including an antique oak armoire and three old-ass tube televisions that weigh so much that I can’t believe TV was ever even a thing before flat-screen TVs. Go home. I don’t remember the rest of Sunday; it involved a nap and a lot of moaning.

12:30 AM SUNDAY NIGHT: I am jolted out of a sound sleep by what sounds like glass breaking. I stagger around my bedroom with a baseball bat for a moment, thinking rather unreasonably that someone has thrown a brick through our bedroom window. It turns out that the cat has jumped up to a shelf of photographs and knocked the shelf over. Not the pictures on the shelf. The entire fucking shelf.

I never really get back to sleep.

MONDAY: There are three days of school left, and I have ordered tens of thousands of dollars of supplies for next year. I arrive to 25 large, heavy boxes that need to be opened, unpacked, checked in and sorted. Miraculously, no one bothers me all day and I spend the day doing this, including taking care of the extra boxes that arrived today. I send repeated emails to teachers saying things like “I know I emailed you earlier that you had stuff and you should come get it. This is not a reminder. This means that you have more stuff and now you should come get that.”

I don’t speak to students all day. No one even asks me to. There have been two days so far this year where I have felt like the invisible man in the office, and I’m not complaining about that– I need to figure out how I tapped into that power so I can use it more often.

There are two days of school left. 8th grade graduation is tomorrow and after that they go away and aren’t supposed to come back. This ought to lead to an easier day than usual with 25% of the students occupied during the morning and gone after that but who the hell knows; after how easy today was I’m not making any predictions.

It is hot. I want fall back.

The end. Have a music video.

ANNOUNCEMENT: A thing I might mention again soon

On June 7, 2015June 7, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing4 Comments

LUTHER SILER END-OF-THE-SCHOOL-YEAR BOOK SALE!

We’ll be celebrating the end of the school year by putting both of my novels on sale for a few days, assuming I’m still alive and not in jail at that time. Starting at 3:00 PM (roughly; Amazon’s not terribly diligent about punctuality on these matters) on Wednesday, June 10th, which should be right about the time my kids are leaving, and running through midnight Saturday night, we’re doing a Kindle Countdown Deal on both SKYLIGHTS and THE SANCTUM OF THE SPHERE.

Long story short: both books will be ninety-nine of your Americapennies basically all afternoon and evening Wednesday. They’ll go up a dollar roughly every twenty hours after that until the sale ends. More details to follow, but I thought I’d go ahead and announce it now.

BENEVOLENCE ARCHIVES, VOL. 1 remains 99 cents permanently at Amazon, or free at Openbooks.com or Smashwords.

STATION IDENTIFICATION: Infinitefreetime.com

On June 7, 2015June 7, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing2 Comments

Hi! I’m Luther Siler. I’m the author of Skylights, available for $4.95 from Amazon, and The Benevolence Archives. You can download Benevolence Archives Volume 1 for free from Smashwords or OpenBooks.com, and Volume 2, entitled The Sanctum of the Sphere, can be ordered from Amazon here or added to Goodreads shelves here. Both Skylights and Sanctum are available in print as well; the print edition of Sanctum includes BA 1 as a bonus!

This post is a bi-weekly service for new folks who might want to know where else to find me on the Web. Regular folks, if you see the STATION IDENTIFICATION tag, feel free to ignore it.

So here’s where to find Luther Siler:

You can follow me on Twitter, @nfinitefreetime, here or just click the “follow” button on the right side of the page. I am on Twitter pretty frequently; I use it for liveblogging TV, whining about anything that strikes me as whine-worthy, and for short, Facebook-style posts. I generally follow back if I can tell you’re a human being.
My author page on Goodreads is here. I accept any and all friend requests.
I have a Tumblr! I don’t actually know what Tumblr is, because I’m old, but I’ve got one.
My official Author page on Amazon is located here.
Feel free to Like the (sadly underutilized) Luther Siler Facebook page here. It’s mostly used as a reblogger for posts.
And, of course, you’re already at infinitefreetime.com, my blog. You can click here to be taken to a random post.

Thanks for reading!

Shoulda written a post yesterday

On June 6, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

Today I have a lunch with relatives, a high school graduation, and what will certainly be a very busy work shift tonight. So this may be all you get.

Three.

On June 5, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

Three more days of school.

And after that, a whole lot of things need to change.

In which I am disappoint

On June 4, 2015June 4, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Reading7 Comments

Had an annoying experience last night where I had to stop reading a book by an author who I really like because I realized that the book just really wasn’t ever going to start working for me. I’ve read a handful of other books by this guy and enjoyed them tremendously; this particular book was his first voyage into YA, but he kept the darker, grittier, more violent themes from his adult-oriented work precisely intact. I discovered very quickly that I’m not interested in YA where absolutely everything about the world sucks and everyone and everything is terrible.

(I’m not going to name the book. I’m not actually sure why; I just don’t want to. Be aware that it’s not terribly difficult to figure out what I’ve been reading if you visit certain readin’ themed websites, though.)

At any rate, I didn’t like the main character very much, the plot, which centered on bullying, was alternately enraging and weirdly triggering, and and in general everything was just kind of overwritten. It wasn’t enough for the bad guy to be a vicious bully, he had to be a literal skinhead neo-Nazi. We can’t just have a character beaten up, somebody’s gotta put out cigarette butts all over them or try to make them eat dogshit. And then the only-barely-veiled rape threats started, and peace out, thanks, I’ll be back for your next book for grown-ups but I gotta bounce on this one.

I changed the Goodreads rating three times before deciding that even though I hadn’t finished it I was content with a one-star. Ordinarily I won’t review a book I didn’t finish but in this case, especially knowing more bad shit was coming from the synopsis, I don’t feel as bad about it.

As bad. Still a bad taste in my mouth, though. This “not liking work from authors I enjoy” thing can stop now.