The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
My wife and I have been married to each other for fifteen years as of today. Or maybe tomorrow. We got married on Leap Day.
Anyway, this is still way too many books, especially since I know good and damn well I’m ordering all three sequels to the book I’m reading as soon as I finish it.
My computer is kind of being an asshole and I’m tired and kind of buried in free-floating aggravation, so … I dunno, tell me about the last good new music you heard.
Depending on how you count, since we were actually married on February 29, my wife and I will celebrate fifteen years of marriage … sometime this week. Or at least we should. We have no ideas, and no presents have been purchased. I tried to float the idea of going to Chicago and having dinner at Alinea and she was having none of it. That’s as good as I got. Right now I have Friday off, but I’m planning on playing Wo Long: Hidden Dynasty all freakin’ day. And the way I know I picked the right lady is she doesn’t mind.
That said, if y’all have any great ideas about what we could do with ourselves on either Tuesday or Wednesday night, feel free to air ’em out. Neither of us have any better ideas, after all.
Sent the following text to my wife:
Post-Covid, we really don’t go out much any more. Maybe once a month at best. I don’t think anyone’s necessarily worried about catching something from going to dinner at this point, but however fucking many years it’s been since the Goddamned world ended have more or less permanently altered our dining habits. But I was twitching to get out of the house and go do something, and dinner would be easy, so we went to dinner.
The where doesn’t really matter and the details don’t really matter. The place was busier than I’ve ever seen them before– there was a fucking tour bus in a nearby parking lot, and I strongly suspect (though I’m quite confused as to why, for a number of reasons) that the people who had rented that tour bus were in the restaurant.(*) And we got shit service. I spent the entire meal watching the waitress I could see, who was not our waitress, hustling and working her ass off while multiple people either ignored or forgot about simple requests, depending on how charitable you’re being, and by the end of the meal I wanted to tip her.
The thing is, I think of myself as a reasonable person, or at least I like to, and I also think of myself as someone who doesn’t fuck with service workers, which is a rule I won’t break. The problem with that is that when I genuinely do encounter bullshit in public, I’m not great about, like, speaking up for myself. And so I spent the whole fucking meal sitting there and stewing about stupid nonsense like how many motherfuckers do I have to ask before a side of sour cream shows up at my table and, similarly, why is it so fucking hard to get a glass of water in this place?
Like, neither of these things are actually problems. They are minor annoyances at best, but … well, I have been minorly annoyed, apparently, so now I’m venting about it to you.
The best part? I made a comment to my wife as we were waiting (and waiting, and waiting) for her to come pick up the check that I wanted to tip the other waitress, the one who had been working the section my seat was facing and was, again, obviously hustling. This caught my son’s ear and he asked about how tipping worked, which meant that even if I was the kind of guy to short-tip a waitress for bad service, even when I could justify it, I wasn’t about to look like an asshole in front of my kid, so she got 20%.
And then that same kid shut the door in my fucking face as we were walking into the house from the garage, and now I’m mad at everybody, and I’m complaining on the internet.
The end.
(*) Along with, inexplicably, three girls who appeared to be dressed for prom. It’s not prom season– the end of February isn’t anything season– this is not the place you go before prom anyway, and while it’s not as weird as it used to be that there were no guys with them, it was still kinda weird. And since I’m already busy being mad at society for preventing me from unleashing my id in public, I may as well rage against the societal constraint that random strange men don’t get to ask teenage girls why they’re dressed the way that they are, because dammit I wanted to know and why can’t I have everything I want??????
I discovered last night that there are some major drawbacks to my CPAP machine; namely, now that I’ve gotten used to the fucking thing I can’t live without it. The power went out last night around 9:00 PM, interrupting a blog post and half a dozen other things because I was not ready for bed at nine. I read for a little while (not a problem, actually, as I generally wear a reading light around my neck and charges last forever) and then tried to go to sleep, only to be met with a dream about not being able to swallow, which … is not the key to a restful night.
And then at about 1:00 in the morning, wham! Every fucking light in the house goes on at once when the power comes back on, including the ones that were off and we accidentally turned on while turning “off” the lights, and including the ones that we didn’t realize were on when the power went out, including every single fucking light in our bedroom for some reason. So I got about four hours out of my CPAP after maybe three hours of massively un-restful sleep and I was a fucking zombie all day as a result.
Every single class today started with me telling my kids that I was half dead and in a tremendously bad mood and that that part was not their fault but how they reacted to it would be, and I got gentler behavior than usual from all but one class. I am still, hours later, a mess, and only a vast amount of work that needed doing has kept me from going to bed early tonight.
Oh, and apparently one of my subs yesterday just, like, passed out in front of the kids. He was back at work today, so I guess he’s okay, but man, everybody wanted to tell me about it. Maybe my room’s cursed? I dunno.
I was finishing up a blog post and then the power went out. And it’s not like it saved on my phone. Whee?
I think at this point it’s safe to say that I have rid myself of Twitter. The blog is still cross posting there and I check in once a day but I’m not posting there any longer.
What, do you think, will it take to be quit of TikTok?
Lots to do today: some recording, some putting-together of furniture, moving around other furniture, some minor bits of shopping, every item of clothing I own has been washed in the last couple of days and needs to be put away, four days of lesson planning (lucky for me, I got caught up on my grading before leaving work on Friday,) a loose plan for the weeks between now and ILEARN because I feel like as soon as I actually internalize when ILEARN is it’s going to start causing panic attacks and I need my numbers to look good so I probably ought to start getting ready, and whatever the hell else it occurs to me to do to procrastinate about starting all of that. Also eating, showering, and the various other tasks necessary to keep my shambling mass vertical and non-odoriferous.
Also I think I’ve decided it might be time to redo the look of the site. I like this one a lot but I’ve been using it for a couple of years at least and it’s time to freshen things up a bit.
What are you doing with your Presidents’ Day? (Probably nothing, I realize this. It’s a dumb holiday.)
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