Month: September 2021

May as well tell everyone

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching4 Comments

I came as close as I’ve come in my adult life to shitting myself in public today.

Yeah, buckle up, buttercup, it’s gonna be one of those kinds of posts.

Y’all have been here a while: what do you think is my least favorite thing about teaching? Is it paperwork? Lesson planning? Grading? Discipline? Dealing with students who don’t want to be there and don’t intend to allow anyone else to get an education but still manifestly refuse to stay the fuck home like they ought to?

Nah. It’s the fact that I can’t go take a shit when I need to.

Every so often someone will get pissy (no pun intended) with me about the idea that kids need permission from teachers to go to the bathroom. Without wading into that conversation too deeply, I write a lot of bathroom passes during the day, and basically my only rule about it is that it’s not happening if 1) I’m actively teaching, 2) You seem to be more interested in fucking around in the halls than taking a piss, or 3) I can’t actually think of a third reason but these things don’t work well in binaries. Even then, I’m likely to let you go anyway if you look like you really need to go.

But what about girls and their peeeeeeerioooooods, the nonsense-speakers shriek.

I can assure you that after eighteen years of teaching girls at or around the age of menarche I have encountered every period-related problem that it is possible for a male teacher to encounter and I’ve got the shit covered. Your kid still can’t get up and go to the bathroom whenever they want, because inevitably the exact same people who think their precious babies should be able to leave my room whenever the mood strikes them also would be excessively angry if they ever attempted to collect their child from school and the teacher’s response was “I have no idea where this kid is.”

Anyway.

The point is, as restrictive or liberal as any teacher might be about their personal bathroom policies, a simple fact remains: while at least in theory we can let a kid out to go use the bathroom whenever we want, unless we happen to have another adult in the room with us, which is much rarer than it should be, we can never go use the bathroom, because we can’t leave our students alone. And I’mma be blunt here: I don’t drink coffee in the morning any longer because coffee has certain specific effects on me that I don’t have time for in the morning, and if I don’t have an adult in the room with me during 5th and 6th hour, which are the two class periods after lunch, there is going to be a problem, because I can’t make it an hour and a Goddamn half after lunch without a bathroom break.

I normally have a paraprofessional in the room with me, but the science teacher was out today and he was covering her class. Her practice is generally to bring her whole class out for the last couple minutes of the period for– you guessed it– a bathroom break, and I was so close to a disaster that I walked out into the hallway and told him he was just going to have to find a way to watch that room (it’s next door) and mine for the next couple of minutes and bolted for the bathroom.

The boys’ bathroom is directly across the hall from my room. And I have proven today that I will not use the kids’ bathroom under any circumstances, because if I didn’t use it today, I’m never using it.

There are two adult bathrooms that I am legally able to use on my floor. Both have one toilet. If the one I’d gone to had been occupied, I’d have been fucked.

I will spare you the details. Let’s just say that the tolerances were milliseconds and centimeters, respectively, and that I didn’t have to clean anything up afterwards that I don’t normally have to clean up.

And that is my least favorite thing about teaching.

LOUD

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

Today wasn’t a bad day, at least not by any reasonable standard– I grabbed a Pumpkin Spice Latte on the way home from work, because fuck it, and Bob Enyart died of Covid, so it at least ended well, but … God, they were just loud today, all day, and there was just a bit too damn much Monday in my Monday today, if I can get away with saying something that fucking trite. I’m tired as hell and staring off into space– this paragraph took at least half an hour to write– and all I want to do is curl up with the kitten and read.

Or, like, play Dark Souls or something. I dunno. We’ll see.

Some realizations

On By Luther M. SilerIn life2 Comments
  • First, that it is 7:30 PM, and I probably ought to blog today;
  • Second, that I am officially closer to retirement than I am to college, even assuming I wait to 65 to retire;
  • Third, that my student loans are due to be paid off four years prior to said 65th birthday, which should be a crime;
  • Fourth, that even if the notion of living another 20 years much less teaching for that long is difficult to wrap my head around, I probably ought to take this retirement thing seriously since I have, y’know, a wife and child in the mix now.

In case you can’t tell, I met with a retirement … dude, of some sort, at work on Friday, and several mortality-confronty sorts of things were discussed, and then this weekend I managed to keep my shit together long enough to dig through the folder that I throw anything even vaguely investment-related into and find not one but two different investment-related accounts that appear to no longer be receiving active contributions; I did some strategic scanning and sent them off to The Dude with a note attached that basically said I don’t know any of the money words, please help and we will see if anything happens. I have never really believed in retirement, to be honest; not in the sense that I don’t want to eventually quit working– I want to quit working now— but in the sense that I suspect any money I “invest” in my “future” will be stolen or siphoned off somehow before I’m able to actually benefit from any of it.

Today also included mowing, putting all my laundered clothes away like a big boy, finishing a book, starting another one, getting my grading done, writing a number of important emails, and a couple of videos recorded for The YouTubes. All in all, not bad for a Sunday.

#REVIEW: The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu, by Tom Lin

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

This will be a straightforward review, I think, as this really is one of those books where once I describe the premise you’re going to know right away whether you want to read it, and you will very likely be right: The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu is about a Chinese cowboy (I have seen the word “assassin” used to describe him, but that’s not precisely correct, at least the way I define assassin) in the antebellum Old West; the book takes place mostly in Nevada and California, neither of which are states yet. It’s a revenge story; Ming Tsu has some men he needs to kill, who have wronged him, and … honestly, if you feel like you know how the book is going to go from those few sentences, you’re probably right. There’s a slight supernatural turn that you might not expect; Tsu spends most of the book in the company of a prophet who can predict the future along with a handful of other miraculous individuals with unusual abilities, but the supernatural doesn’t really play as strong a role as you might think.

This is not a surprising book, and while it definitely gets some points for originality because of its Chinese main character– not exactly a common thing in Westerns– you’re going to have a pretty good idea how it’s going to go. No, this is a good book not because it’s breaking new ground but because it does what it does really really well, so if you’re the person who thinks you’re going to enjoy a book about a Chinese cowboy on a revenge-based murder spree, you’re not going to do much better than this book.

Not my longest book piece, I know, but sometimes they don’t have to be.

#REVIEW: Nightbitch, by Rachel Yoder

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews3 Comments

I bought Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch for one reason and one reason only: the author is from Iowa. I mean, I had the idea that I would like it, but I don’t even remember where I discovered the book. As I get closer to the end of this current reading project, I’m getting to states where I made it to September without accidentally reading a book from there, so my standards are dropping somewhat for what I’ll order.

That sounds like I’m about to start panning the book. I’m not; I actually put it on my shortlist for my best books of the year list, but … I do not know what to say about this one. See that quote on the cover describing the book as a “feral, unholy marriage of Tillie Olsen and Kafka”? After reading about a third of the book, and before I noticed that quote, I described the book to my wife as the book Kafka would write if he had been a suburban Midwestern housewife. By the end of the book, I’d actually ordered a new copy of Metamorphosis, which I’m going to read after the book I’m reading now. I don’t actually know Tillie Olsen’s name, so I can’t comment on that part, but this is a deeply weird book, and it’ll be interesting to see where my opinion of it ends up shaking out after a couple of months to marinate on it.

The story: the main character is a mother of a toddler, I believe around two years old. She used to be an artist but since having her baby has ceased to make art. Her husband is an engineer who travels for work and he is away most of the time, so she’s at home with the child, who she must clothe, feed, entertain, and worst of all, put to bed every night.

She hates it.

And then she turns into a dog.

This is not a joke.

The character is never actually named. She is The Mother for the first third of the book or so, and after the transformation she thinks of herself as Nightbitch for the rest of the book. It sounds like a superhero name; it’s not. She turns into a dog, abandons her child for a while, runs roughshod across her neighborhood, taking great joy in taking a “colossal shit” in her neighbor’s yard, and kills a couple of things. Then she goes back home and eventually reverts to her human self … at least mostly.

Nightbitch’s doggy nature continues to assert itself in odd ways throughout the rest of the book, particularly when she convinces her son to “play doggy” as well, and does things like feeding him small bits of raw meat and finally solving the bedtime problem by convincing him to sleep in a kennel, which actually comes off as more reasonable than you might suspect just given that description. And while it might sound like there are bits of levity in there, and there are, from time to time, this is really a book about rage and feeling trapped, and there are moments of genuinely shocking violence sprinkled throughout the text.

And the thing is, I can’t tell if the book is horrifying or just insufferable, and it’s entirely possible that it’s both. Like, this woman really is convinced she lives the worst of all available lives, and … well, I’ve had a toddler, although I will grant that I never had to be alone with him for a week at a time much less every week, but I have to feel like there are worse ways to live than being trapped with a toddler and feeling unsatisfied in your career. Maybe that makes me a bad feminist, I’m not sure. But if I had to compare it to a book other than Metamorphosis, it would be The Catcher in the Rye, which might immediately clue some of you in as to why people might find the book insufferable. The tone of the writing even evokes (quite possibly intentionally) Holden Caulfield’s disaffected, alienated tone, to the point where when I read a paragraph to my wife she asked if it had been written in English or if I was reading it in translation. I dunno; I’m inclined to think the book is a bit of a triumph, but I need to sit with it a while and maybe talk it over with some other people who have read it. Maybe you should be one of those people? Let me know if you read it.

Yes I know this is pointless

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics1 Comment

I posted this the other day, intending for it to be a shitpost:

https://twitter.com/nfinitefreetime/status/1432731944215789568?s=20

And something interesting has happened: I can’t stop thinking about it, and on top of that I’ve started thinking about the connection between UBI and veteran homelessness. I did get a suggestion in comments that I alter the criteria from “one year” to simply “honorable discharge,” which I’m not necessarily upset about and makes pretty good sense.

But here’s the thing: is there a pathway to getting progressive ideas in place for everyone by applying them to the military first? America loves its soldiers, or at least likes to pretend that it loves its soldiers; the fact that veteran homelessness is such a big problem in the first place is a sign that we don’t live up to our ideals here any more than we do anywhere else, but that’s a whole different post. All the same, I’m imagining a situation where a politician runs for office with a major plank of her campaign being to end homelessness among veterans. And what, pray tell, is the mechanism for this plan? A solid UBI and guaranteed housing.

(Side note: You may recall, accurately, that I despise Andrew Yang; one of the reasons I do so is that he seemed entirely unaware that the people who needed his $12,000 the most would see their money immediately gobbled up by their landlords. UBI without some sort of control over the housing market makes no sense at all.)

Don’t get too caught up in the details right now; this is entirely hypothetical and I don’t plan to run for office anyway. But let’s play a game here: if said politician was able to push into law a plan where honorable service in the military earned you a livable wage and a place to live for the rest of your life– so that there was no way for a veteran to end up homeless short of deciding to do so– is there also a hypothetical world where a few years down the road that logic gets extended to, say, service professions, like cops and firefighters and teachers and whoever, and then maybe later on gets extended to everyone if it works?

There’s a ton of room, obviously, to quibble around the details of The Plan, and how guaranteed housing would work, and of course there’s tons of room for such a thing to be done poorly, because this is the world, and I get that. I’m just wondering about the strategy of it all, and I’m trying to imagine the reactions of people who would want a UBI but who would also prefer no further money gets spent on the military at all. Would it be worth even trying such a thing, counting on American lip service to venerating their military to carry the plan through? (Who’s going to be the politician arguing that veterans should be homeless? Good luck.)

Is the existence of the VA and the lack of universal healthcare a guarantee already that this is a pipe dream?

I dunno. But I’m thinking about it.

REPOST: #REVIEW: The All-Consuming World, by Cassandra Khaw

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews1 Comment

Author’s Note: I got an early copy of this book, and I wrote this back in April. The book is out this week after a slight release date slip; I got my copy today, so I’m reposting the review.

First, the obligatory “My God, LOOK AT THAT COVER” moment.  Go ahead, take a few, they’re free.

DISCLAIMER! Cassandra Khaw’s new novel The All-Consuming World does not actually come out until August 21. I found out that copies of this and her other upcoming book were available through Netgalley the other day and jumped, immediately, and got lucky, and then rearranged my reading schedule so I could get to it as quickly as I could. I have read three previous works by Cass Khaw, including her Hammers on Bone, which was #3 on my Top 10 list for 2016. I think that The All-Consuming World is her first novel; it’s definitely the first novel-length work of hers that I’ve read. 

I’ll not bury the lede: my favorite thing about Cassandra Khaw is not her characters or her stories, but her writing. Of all the writers I currently consider myself a fan of, and there are dozens of them, she is the one whose writing abilities I would most like to completely absorb and use for my own dastardly purposes. Her writing is gritty and visceral and verbose in a way that is perfect for either Lovecraftian body horror or what we used to call cyberpunk, and All-Consuming World has elements of both, and my God was this book a joy to read. 

Now, that’s kind of a problem as a reviewer, because it’s highly unlikely that I’m going to dislike anything Khaw writes because what she’s writing about is almost irrelevant to me. I’d read a recipe book cover-to-cover if Cass Khaw wrote it. But precisely because she is so stylized an author, I can easily imagine my opposite as a reader out there; I’ll read anything she writes because of how much I like her writing, but there are going to be people out there who are going to bounce off of her style, hard. Toss in the legitimate body horror elements (one character keeps a gun in her ribcage for part of the story) and the fact that the word “fuck” is at least a quarter of one particular character’s dialogue and this becomes a “not for everybody” book. But for me? My god, smear it on my face.

Right, the plot. As if that matters. Here’s the blurb, it’s as good as anything:

A diverse team of broken, diminished former criminals get back together to solve the mystery of their last, disastrous mission and to rescue a missing and much-changed comrade… but they’re not the only ones in pursuit of the secret at the heart of the planet Dimmuborgir. The highly-evolved AI of the universe have their own agenda and will do whatever it takes to keep humans from ever controlling the universe again. This band of dangerous women, half-clone and half-machine, must battle their own traumas and a universe of sapient ageships who want them dead, in order to settle their affairs once and for all. 

And, like, okay, that’s what it’s about, I guess? But this book is more about how it tells its story than the story it tells. The description leaves out that all of the members of the team are at least nominally women (one of them is nonbinary in a way that is either immensely sloppy or really interesting, because I could not figure out what the deal with … that person’s pronouns was at any point in the story*) and most of them are immortal and several of them die during the book and that’s not a spoiler because it’s also not a problem. I think Maya alone goes down at least three times. I think one of them is technically dead for the entire book? Maybe two? No more than two characters are dead for the entire book.

There’s a lot going on here, is what I’m saying.  Pre-order this book and read it immediately when it comes out. If you like good things you will like it.

*The character is sometimes he and sometimes she, and will bounce back and forth between both sometimes in a single paragraph, and I either missed the explanation or just couldn’t figure out what the rules were.

Sky go boom

On By Luther M. SilerIn life6 Comments

Nothing too terrifying at the moment, but the FutureTrack has that bleb in the corner moving northeast and toward us, and after about 6:45 has us under red or orange for most of the evening. So I’m tossing up a quick note now because if I don’t the power is guaranteed to go out.

WordPress is showing signs of “improving” their editor again, too, so not only will the power go out but this is not going to look right somehow. I’m also psyched about that.

… and, 20 minutes of staring at the screen later, apparently not much happened today. I continue to be pleased with how the school year is going, so it’s absolutely time to rearrange everything again and see if I can wreck it all.

More later. I can’t tell if that’s a tornado siren going off or if someone is using a leaf blower during a rainstorm for some reason, and I feel like I ought to go find out.