Uggghhhhh why are there soooooo manyyyyyyy
Seriously, there are four books on here that have been there since June. That’s not okay. Must read faster.
Month: September 2021
I need some good news
Tell me something positive, y’all. I’m struggling over here.
#Readaroundtheworld: September Update
For visual comparison, here is June’s update.
I was never especially worried about being able to complete this project, but at this point I’m certain I’m going to be able to do it. I currently have, of the 52 Identified US Places that I intend to read books from (all 50 states, Puerto Rico, and DC, and I’ll totally throw Guam in there if I can find a book,) 36 states that I have read books from. For ten more– Florida, Idaho, Kentucky, New Hampshire, Puerto Rico, South Carolina, Vermont, West Virginia, Missouri, and Rhode Island– I physically have the books I’m going to read and just need to actually read them. That leaves six states that I’ve yet to identify an author from: Arkansas, Delaware, Nebraska, Nevada, South Dakota, and Wyoming, and for Nebraska I’ve actually got two possible authors. I own a couple of Alex Kava books already, and Chigozie Obioma looks interesting, but he’s a Nigerian who happens to live in Nebraska, and his books are set in Nigeria. Now, I’ve said many times that everyone should be reading more work from Nigerian authors, but I kind of want the book to be a touch more Nebraska-centered than his work seems to be. I’ll get to him eventually, because interesting, but maybe not for this project. The others? At the moment, no idea, but I feel like I have plenty of time. Feel free to make recommendations.
As far as countries: 37 currently represented, with a few more (without going and looking at my unread shelf: Poland, Kyrgysztan, Argentina, Saudi Arabia, Madagascar, Sri Lanka, Saint Thomas, and North Korea) on the shelf somewhere. I’m going to focus on finishing the states in October, or at least getting as close as I can, and then I’ll keep checking countries off until I get bored with it or literally hit a point where I can’t find anything from any place left on the map without translating it myself.
Next year’s reading project: Read Whatever The Fuck I Want and Don’t Worry About It. I’ve had projects for several years running and I feel like I need a year off.
Yeah, it’s Monday
Not to Garfield it all up in this motherfucker or anything, but I’m disgusted with the current state of the world at the moment and I’m eager to get my Dark Souls run finished over at my stupid video game site, so if it’s okay with everyone I’m going to do that instead of writing a post that would likely just be me trying to figure out how many parts of speech I can use motherfucker in in a single piece of writing.
Work was fine today; this is a Politics Bad Mood, where most of what I want to write would get the FBI looking in my direction, which seems unwise. So I’mma cram my bad feelings deep down inside, not spend any time thinking about how Don Corleone would handle Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema, and kill some fucking monsters with a scythe. I’ll see you all tomorrow.
75 minutes on a Friday
Holy cow, the stock photos you find when you Google “School fights” are totally hilarious.
There’s a lot that isn’t stock photos, of course, but I feel like taking a picture of somebody’s baby about to get their ass beat and putting it on my stupid little website maybe isn’t the move.
Let’s talk about my Friday.
I basically eat school lunch every day. It’s fast, it’s easy, it’s relatively inexpensive– the entree they give the kids costs the teachers $4 and I typically buy two, so $8 a day– and shut up, everything generally tastes just fine. Plus I don’t have to think about it (at all) or go anywhere, and I only get half an hour for lunch so anything that cuts out bullshit from that time is just fine. I walk my kids down to the cafeteria, grab my lunches, precariously balance one atop the other, go back to my room, and eat there, alone and in peace.
(Weird thing about this building: every other school I’ve taught at, the teachers generally eat together somewhere. Not here. Everyone retreats to their rooms. I generally don’t mind the quiet, but it would be nice to have someone to talk to once in a while.)
Friday, 1:00 PM. I have my lunches and am preparing to exit the cafeteria when I happen to glance to my right and see one of my students stand up, lean across the lunch table, and punch another one of my students directly in his jaw. There’s some power behind it, too; the kid’s head snaps back and I can tell he’s hurt. Amazingly, he doesn’t stand up or attempt to retaliate.
Shit.
Without putting my food down, I manage to get the hitter to take his own ass to the office and check with the kid who got punched, who, unsurprisingly, wants to see the nurse. Who isn’t in her office, so I need to find her, still with the kid in tow. I find the puncher trying to leave the office already and usher him back in, explain what happened to the secretaries, and tell them that the security guard also saw it (which is true) and that I’ll get it written up as soon as I find a place to put the hit kid, who for the purposes of the rest of this post I’ll call Hosea.
I find the nurse and get the kid taken care of. He’s in my fifth and sixth hour, which is right after lunch, but at this point I’m assuming I’m not going to see him. I get the office referral written. I have sixteen minutes left in my lunch. I eat. I do not have time to piss.
I get down to the cafeteria to pick my kids up and they start lining up when I perceive a ruckus taking place behind my line. I investigate to discover several of my 8th grade boys holding back another of my 8th grade boys. I look around for the other fighter and can’t find them, but it’s clear this is serious– if they let go of this kid he’s going after someone, I just can’t immediately figure out who it is that he’s mad at. At one point he gets loose and then I get to hold him back for a minute, but mostly these two particular kids have him under control while a bunch of others hoot and holler and generally make asses of themselves. I dismiss my line of kids with a wave and holler at one of the custodians to radio somebody— I don’t give a fuck who, but I need somebody higher on the totem pole than me down here, or at least the security guard, who is in the hallway.
We eventually get the other kid calmed down, and figure out who he’s so pissed at– a student who has, wisely, disappeared from the cafeteria– and I bring the holder-backers up to my classroom so I can write them passes to class, since they’re good and late by now but I figure it was for the right reasons. I discover the principal in my classroom; he heard about the ruckus on the radio but was already on the second floor and so, wisely, realized that I wasn’t going to be up there to cover my class so he sat in until I got back up there.
I like my boss, have I mentioned that?
A class period passes, and during passing period between 5th and 6th Hosea comes back into class. He doesn’t have a pass with him, but it’s not like I didn’t know where he was, and besides, it’s passing period, so I figure the nurse or whoever just held onto him until passing period and sent him up to me. No big deal; I explain what we’re doing. A few minutes later we take a bathroom break (due to the continuing saga of Devious Licks, we’re still on annoyingly modified bathroom policies) and I, as usual, am having to monitor kids in three different places.
I walk into the boys’ bathroom to see Hosea– Hosea, this time– punch an entirely different kid than the one who he had issues with previously, in the face. Hosea has his back to me and the other kid sees me come into the bathroom and witness everything, so once again, magically, I have a kid not fighting back and just letting the adults handle bullshit acts of violence. Which I appreciate; the kid he’s punching was suspended last week for fighting, so this is a minor miracle.
(As an aside, my building is not nearly as violent as this post is making it sound. Today is absolutely an aberration. This situation in the cafeteria is the first time all year I’ve had to put my hands on a kid during a fight or a lead up to one.)
Hosea, of course, denies everything. There’s a whole other post with this kid that I don’t want to get into; needless to say he is 1) one of the most consistent and 2) one of the worst liars I have ever met. He has never done anything wrong in his entire life and he will literally deny anything. The pencil in his hand? Not his. The website on his computer, which is open in front of him? He didn’t go to that website. The water bottle in his hand that he’s taking a drink from? He doesn’t have a water bottle, and he’s not drinking. Frankly, I’m willing to bet that his getting punched in the face by the other kid earlier was completely deserved, as he also lies on the other kids with astonishing regularity(*) and they all hate him. I spend as much time defending them from him as I do him from them, and it’s fucking. exhausting.
Anyway, Hosea didn’t do anything, and he won’t go to the office because he didn’t do anything; he’s not even in the bathroom, much less punching kids in the face, and the rest of them are sort of just standing there because they know good and well I was right there and saw the whole fucking thing. I hand him over to his paraprofessional (he’s also special ed, because of course he is) and get everybody else back in class and within a degree or two of functioning.
Fifteen minutes later, his para brings him back into the classroom, which, no, he punched somebody in the fucking face, I told you that, he doesn’t get to come back in the room. I glance at the clock and there’s about ten minutes left in class. I spend a brief moment contemplating whether this bullshit is worth it– a quick glance at the kid he hit shows that the dude doesn’t appear to care that Hosea is back in the room– and then, suddenly, the principal is back in my room again.
“Have you seen Hosea?”
“Yeah, I did, he’s right there. Did you see the referral already?”
“What referral?”
I’m confused at this point, because there’s no point in the principal being in my room to collect this kid if he doesn’t know the kid did anything, at which point I find out that Hosea wasn’t supposed to leave the office in the first place. He tries to play the “I’m not going downstairs” move with the boss for all of two seconds and I’m pretty sure the boss leans over and tells him that his ass is going to be in the office in the next five minutes whether the rest of him is attached to it or not(**) and he makes the decision to go. And I give the fuck up on class for the rest of the fucking day, because Jesus, this is enough bullshit for one Friday.
(*) AN EXAMPLE: Hosea is also in my advisory, and the kids eat breakfast during advisory. In homeroom on this same Friday, moments after the bell rang, I walked in and was informed by Hosea that a group of other students threw an apple at his head. The other kids immediately begin vocally denying that this has happened. I am by the door, and glance in the trash can; no apple. There is one (1) apple in front of one of the students he’s accusing; it is in pristine shape, with not a mark on it, which is not something you would expect from an apple that had been thrown at someone’s head. Nor is there any sign that an apple– an object with a lot of water inside of it that tends to splat when thrown at a hard surface– has bounced off of 1) Hosea’s head; 2) the whiteboard behind him; 3) the wall below the whiteboard; 4) the floor. I ask Hosea where the apple they threw is. He doesn’t know. I look around. No apple. He’s lying through his fucking teeth, for no clear reason at all. This happens every single day, except for the part where because Hosea is such an asshole to the other kids all the time, sometimes he’s telling the truth, because they do actually both 1) pick on him unprovoked sometimes and 2) frequently respond to his provocations. For example, it’s not at all beneath him to see the kid’s apple sitting in front of him and claim that the apple was thrown at him so that the other kid would pick up the apple and throw it at him.
(**) Probably not his exact words.
#REVIEW: Black Water Sister, by Zen Cho
I have four or five of Zen Cho’s books by now, and I’m pretty certain I’ve only talked about one of them on here, her Sorcerer to the Crown, which came out way back in 2015, before the world went to hell. I’m not in the mood to bury the lede here, so I’ll put this right up front: this is my favorite of her books, and by a pretty substantial margin. Black Water Sister tells the story of Jess, an American in her early twenties born to immigrant Malaysian parents, who moves back to Malaysia with her family at the beginning of the book, with a Harvard degree under her belt but no real plan on what to do with her life.
Then her grandmother’s spirit moves into her body, and she learns all sorts of things about Malaysian religion and Malaysian gods, and she has to protect a temple from a local gangster who also happens to be the fifth-richest guy in Malaysia, while fighting with her long-distance girlfriend and pointedly not starting a relationship with the only person her age she talks to throughout the entire book, who is a guy and would be a romantic interest in any other book.
And, yeah, it turns out her grandmother is … maybe a little malevolent? Just a titch? A little wee bit? It throws some curveballs you’re probably not expecting.
That’s not why I liked the book, though. This one is a great example of a Book I Liked For the Writing, although I have fewer problems with the story than I usually do with books I enjoy in that particular fashion. The interesting thing here is that this book reads as far more personal to Cho than her previous work– she is, herself, a young Malaysian woman, and while she’s writing a character younger than her I have to assume that some of Cho’s own experiences have made it into the book. If nothing else, the way she writes Malaysian dialogue is just fantastic. Don’t know any Malaysian? Too bad, she’s going to throw some words and phrases out there and if you can’t intuit them from context you’re out of luck. That said, the dialogue in this book is almost entirely at least translated into Manglish if not explicitly written that way; most of the time the Malaysian characters are speaking English to Jess, and the deeper I got into the book the more sidetracked and fascinated I got by how the creole actually works. Malaysian uses a lot of emphatic particles that English doesn’t use, for starters– lots of ending sentences with “lah” and “ah” and “meh” and other syllables like that, and while I never quite pulled together exactly what was going on (and the damn Internet has been no help) the name system they’re using is interesting as hell too. I loved listening to these characters in a way that I haven’t in a long time; I have lots of writers I like whose dialogue I’m big fans of, but this is the first time I can think of where the author’s representation of speech in a culture I was unfamiliar with was so interesting.
(Also, and this is a minor detail, but some of Jess’ relatives are Christians, and it’s fascinating to see the way that Malaysians apparently treat Christianity as an item on a buffet of religions, to be sampled as needed. Conversion to Christianity is pondered at one point in the book as a way to get another god (no shit) to leave them alone, and they treat it about as seriously as I might ponder picking up a new pair of shoes upon discovering that my current ones hurt my feet. It’s like “Oh, we could do that,” and that’s it.)
I can’t attribute reading this one to #readaroundtheworld, as Cho is not only an author I’ve been following for a while but isn’t even the first Malaysian I’ve read this year– that honor went to Cassandra Khaw’s All-Consuming World, and I think Khaw has another book coming out in a month or so, so I’ll have read at least three books by Malaysians this year. But it definitely pairs nicely with the project, and this is exactly the type of book I was looking to read more of for the project. My one complaint? This may not be something that bothers you, but Jess is a bit of an asshole, and not always in a good way. She’s got a filthy mouth in a way that feels jarring compared to everyone else (Jess, as the only American-born, first-language English character in the book, talks significantly differently from every other character) and the couple of times she tells her grandmother to fuck off are … kind of a trip. She also does a bit too much lying in the book for my tastes; she’s lying to her parents about being gay, among other things, and while she’s got a long-distance girlfriend she’s also lying to her through most of the book, as her girlfriend is described as too rational to want to hear Jess complaining about things like being possessed by local deities and gangsters trying to kill her. It means a lot of the book’s energy is devoted to Jess keeping secrets from everyone around her, and keeping track of who knows what, and it can be kind of wearying, to be perfectly honest. But as weak spots in a book go, a young MC acting like a selfish young person isn’t necessarily the worst fault the book could have. I enjoyed this one quite a lot. I think you will too.
Dagnabbit
I actually have a story for you, but I appear to have fallen down some sort of rabbit hole this evening and almost forgot about y’all again, and it’s past 9:00 already. So I’m just going to tell you I have scheduled my Covid booster and a flu shot for tomorrow– that’s not the story– and I am planning on being sick for the rest of the weekend. Exciting!
I swear this story is true
Or: how not to speak around middle school students.
I was walking down to the office to drop off some paperwork when I saw one of the new teachers in the building having a conversation with one of her students in the hallway. Because this is relevant to the story, I will reveal that she is a relatively new teacher– second or third-year, I think– and is of an appropriate age for that, so early/mid twenties or so. Seeing her reminded me that I’ve been meaning to email her about a mutual student we have for a couple of days and I keep forgetting to do it, so I thought I’d take a moment and just talk to her in person.
By the time I got to her room, she and the student were back inside, so I just stood in the doorway until she noticed me and asked a question, using these precise words, which would prove to be her undoing: “Could I borrow you for a sec?”
You might possibly already see where this is going. To her credit, she realized mid-sentence that she was in the midst of making a terrible mistake and just … powered through it like a damn champion, not breaking stride or stammering and joining me in the hallway, where we exchanged a glance that said we will never speak of this again, other than when I run to the rest of the math team and tell them, then tell the entire internet tonight, and somehow only a small number of her seventh-grade (thank God she didn’t have any of my 8th graders in the room) class seems to have noticed.
Because the exact words that she inadvertently chose to respond to my question, in perhaps the single most awkward exchange I have ever had with a young woman in my life, were “For you, Mr. Siler, I have all the secs you need.”
Say it out loud, if you need to.
I have a silly job.
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