Month: September 2021

A story I don’t know that isn’t mine to tell

On By Luther M. SilerIn life, Parenting1 Comment

Many years ago I had this young man in my classes, we’ll call him Johnny, which isn’t his name. Johnny was in an all-boys’ class, the only one I’ve ever taught, and a group that, in general, drove me insane, because temperamentally I am not very well suited to teaching large groups of boys. I had him in 6th grade. He was a pretty good kid, as it went, but he was prone to getting dragged into shit if shit was nearby to get dragged into. I have described this type of student to parents before as a “kindling kid”– he’s not going to do anything on his own, but if there’s fire, he’ll burn.

Anyway, I was describing his behavior to his mother at parent teacher conferences once, and she was reacting quite a bit more strongly than I really felt like she ought to have, and at one point she looked at him and hissed something at him that I actually had to have her repeat to make sure I’d heard it correctly.

“Quarterbacks don’t act like this,” she’d said. And I was immediately of two minds; the first being of course they do, and the second being why are you laying that on your twelve-year-old right now? And let me get to the moral of the story before I tell the rest of it: parents, can we not set our kids up to peak in high school, please, and can we absolutely definitely not set them up so that if they aren’t the star QB they don’t feel like their lives are over before they’ve had a chance to start?

This is the part where I start making stuff up, by the way, because I really don’t have any evidence for any of what I’m about to say, but I’m going to say it anyway because it’s on my mind.

Anyway, this kid randomly popped into my head this weekend– I found a random little gift that he’d given me in the course of cleaning up, and it had his name on it, and this story came to mind. And I did a little bit of research. Johnny did play football in high school, but didn’t play quarterback, and frankly while he was on the team he doesn’t appear to have played much at all– I was able to look through the box scores of his senior year, because America’s obsession with high school football is genuinely creepy, and I couldn’t find any evidence that he’d contributed to the team in any meaningful way. I didn’t look at every game or anything like that, but it was pretty clear that, at the least, this kid wasn’t the star player.

And then I found a picture of him, from what would have been his sophomore year of college if he’d gone, posted by a local Painters and Allied Trades union. The tone of the caption is celebratory; they’re honoring their newest member. And I honestly can’t believe that they chose this picture to post, because the kid looks like his life is literally crumbling down around his eyes. Johnny grew up getting his head pumped full of stories about how he was going to be the star quarterback, and then he was going to go on to college and then probably the NFL and be a famous football player, and instead he’s 20 with no degree, no sports career, and joining the painter’s union.

This isn’t to say that I look down on these people; I don’t, and as a union member myself I consider the trades unions members to be brothers and sisters. I don’t look down on anybody who works for a living. But Johnny very clearly got raised to believe that there was one way his life was going to go, and it didn’t, and I know I’m reading a lot into it and I haven’t seen the kid in years but the look on his face in this picture is just fucking heartbreaking.

And maybe Labor Day isn’t the best day to post this, either. But fuck it, I’ve been thinking about him all weekend, and I hate it how quickly young kids are willing to cling to sports as what’s going to make them rich and famous when the truest thing I can say to any of them is no, it’s not. You’re not going to be in the NBA or the NFL or really anything else. You might play in high school, but I can count the number of college athletes I’ve taught over the years on one hand. This isn’t any more realistic as a life goal than “I’m going to win the lottery” is.

We’ve gotta stop doing this to our kids.

Meet Gideon

On By Luther M. SilerIn life11 Comments

She’s been seen by a vet and more or less given a clean bill of health; she’s had an upset tummy for basically the whole time we’ve had her, so she’s got an antibiotic and they gave her a dewormer just for safety’s sake, but she’s negative for All the Scary Things and otherwise seems to be doing fine, so we’ve been slowly and carefully introducing her to the other cats this weekend. Jonesy appears to be fine with her so long as she’s not trying to eat his tail, which is about 60% of the time, and Sushi … well, Sushi is going to take a little bit longer to adjust, I think. 🙂

Why Gideon? It was my wife’s idea, providing a pleasing symmetry since I named Jonesy and the boy named Sushi; she’s named after the Gideon in Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon the Ninth. The name is perhaps a bit overly grand at this point in her life (although “Giddykitty” and “Giddygirl” both roll off the tongue quite nicely) but I think she’ll grow into it. Reasons it works:

  • I feel like her Halloween colors insist on a spooky name. Gideon is a necromancer. Check.
  • Gideon is also a redhead. Check.
  • Gideon spends the entirety of her book wearing skull face paint. That prominent blaze on her face doesn’t really resemble a skull at all, but I feel like connecting a cat with prominent facial markings and a character who wears face paint works. Check.

In other news, my memory is clearly going and I’ll be a shell of a man in a couple of years. I have nearly a thousand books on my Goodreads “read” shelf, which I’ve only been maintaining since 2016, so estimating that I own in the neighborhood of 2500-3000 or so books is probably not an exaggeration. I need you to understand that I’m also not exaggerating when I tell you I can find most of them in no time at all. Like, I know what books I have and I know where they are. This is not something I screw up.

It was pointed out to me recently that Brandon Sanderson is from Utah, which is a state that I don’t have an author from yet. I used to be a big fan of Sanderson’s, but at some point I grew weary of him, and I haven’t read any of his books in forever, but I figured since the guy writes 20 books a year finding something new wouldn’t be that hard. The boy wanted to go to Barnes and Noble today, so I figured I’d just grab something. I even had a book in mind; he wrote a sequel trilogy to his Mistborn series some time ago and I never read it just because it came out after I’d entered my Over Sanderson period.

(To be clear, I don’t have anything really negative to say about the guy; I don’t have any evidence that he’s, like, a bad person or anything, but his books started getting really samey after a while and I bailed on him after noticing the serious problem with white savior complex that his Stormlight Archives series had. It’s not like a personal vendetta or anything.)

Anyway, I found the first book of the second Mistborn series, called The Alloy of Law, and grabbed a Jorge Luis Borges book (Argentina!) along with it for shits and giggles.

On the way out of the store, my wife says “Don’t you have that one already?” to me.

“No,” I said, “I never picked up the second series.” And then I proceeded to torture myself about it the entire way home. Whereupon I found out that I did have the damn thing already, and not even in a different edition that would have given me an excuse. I hadn’t finished the series, but I had started it. And, y’all, I don’t make that mistake, and I’m vastly irritated with myself.

I mean, I know it’s a solvable problem, because I just go back and swap it for another book, but … shit.

Uh-oh

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

So two days ago I wrote a blog post and forgot to hit “post,” thus ruining a consistent streak that had lasted for about 2/3 of a year.

Today, it’s 8:43, and I find that I haven’t spent a single second thinking about blogging all day.

In my defense it is Labor Day weekend and I am not supposed to be doing the thinkystuff.

I will write a real blog post tomorrow, with paragraphs and everything, I promise.

Oops

On By Luther M. SilerIn BlogwankingLeave a comment

I don’t actually think that having posted 269 days in a row on this site without interruption is much in the way of achievements, but I must admit that having that streak interrupted because I wrote an “I am too tired to post” post and then forgot to hit publish and didn’t notice until the next day is kind of annoying.

Ah well. We begin again, I suppose.

I am too tired to brain

On By Luther M. SilerIn Photography3 Comments

…which is sort of turning into a theme for Thursdays, I think. IN lieu of a post, please accept this picture of a kitten.

Monthly reads: August 2021

On By Luther M. SilerIn Photography, ReadingLeave a comment

It will surprise no one to learn that the Book of the Month is Fonda Lee’s Jade Legacy, but if I limit myself to books that are actually available to the general public, I’ll go with Vita Nostra.