The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
Sometimes you stay home from work because you feel like hell, which means you have to push your Algebra final back a day. But then your son also has an Algebra final on Wednesday, so you end up having to prepare an 8th grader for an Algebra final anyway.
It doesn’t happen often, but it happens.
I have never seen “The Wolf of Wall Street”. And yet, somehow, this is one of my favorite scenes in all of film, and I have most of it memorized. And it is damn near entirely due to Rob Reiner’s performance. My understanding is that most of the sequence was improvised, and Reiner is utterly breaking everyone in the room. The only one who can keep up with him is Jonah Hill, who is obviously cracking– you will never convince me that the laughing is acting– and the needling he’s directing towards Reiner just keeps winding him up more and more. DiCaprio is trying his damnedest to play the straight man in the scene, and he can’t hold it together either. I love every second of this scene, and I love it in a way that made me love Rob Reiner as an actor.
I don’t talk about it much, and I haven’t watched it in quite some time, but Stand by Me was one of my favorite movies as a kid. I was 10 when it came out, just a bit younger than the characters and a touch younger still than the actors playing them, but I’m willing to believe if I put it on right now I could still do a significant amount of the dialogue along with the movie.
The line “Suck my fat one, you cheap dime-store hood” (and River’s underrated “Whoever toldja you had a fat one, Lachance?” a few moments later) is going to be stuck in my head until I die. I’ve probably seen the film a couple dozen times.
And then there’s The Princess Bride, a movie that I have seen even more times than I’ve seen Stand by Me, an absolutely fucking immortal movie.(*)
I wish it was more common to realize the effect that a stranger has had on your life before they pass away, particularly when someone passes away in as tragic and hideous a way as Rob and Michele Reiner did. I’m generally not especially pressed by the idea of meeting celebrities (although I did meet Mandy Patinkin once, speaking of Princess Bride, and yes, I made him say The Line) but damn, the chance to tell Rob Reiner thank you is an opportunity I’m deeply saddened to have missed.
May his memory be a blessing.
(*) There is talk about doing a remake of this movie, which I thought was a horrendous idea until today, when I suddenly realized how to do it right: you must cast Fred Savage in the role of the parent reading the book, and he’s reading it to his own son or daughter(**) as they’re home sick, and you make it very clear that Savage is playing the same character as an adult. This neatly provides for new casting as well as any updates or changes the new director might decide to make to the story– it’s someone new hearing it, and we’re seeing their imagination and their interpretation, not Savage’s.
(**) Not to be too gender essentialist about it, but I kind of love the idea of a girl rolling her eyes at the fight scenes the same way The Grandson does at the kissing.
From the “First World Problems” department: another two-hour delay tomorrow, because of cold, apparently; I do not have time for thirty-minute class periods when my Algebra kids have a final on Wednesday. Can we wait until Thursday or Friday for further weather-related drama, please? Or even after that? Because once winter break hits I genuinely don’t feel any need at all to leave my house for two weeks.
Maybe I’ll just refuse to let my third hour in the room and tell everyone I’m keeping my Algebra kids for an extra class period. I’m sure that’ll fly.
I finished Shadows Upon Time, the seventh and final book of Christopher Ruocchio’s Sun Eater series, about half an hour ago, and I’ve been going back and forth on whether to review either the book itself or the entire series, or whether I should post about something else tonight and let the book marinate for a little bit before posting it. The draft that I had started in my head was probably going to start with the sentence I’m surprised that Christopher Ruocchio resisted the urge to have Hadrian Marlowe crucified. Marlowe, the POV character of the series, is executed by hanging at the end; this isn’t a spoiler, as I’m pretty sure it’s revealed in the literal first page of Empire of Silence, the first book of the series, and if it’s not the first page it’s absolutely in the first chapter. But before then, he’s stabbed in the side and one of his very last spoken lines of dialogue is “It is finished.”
And then I downloaded the cover, because I needed that, and I really looked at it, and for fuck’s sake, dude:
For some reason, it’s the position of his legs that really gets to me.
Anyway, when Marlowe isn’t being Jesus, he’s Obi-Wan Kenobi. This is a quote:
“You’ll never be rid of me,” I said, “even if I do truly die this day. You’ll fear my ghost in every shadow, every whisper. I will be with you, Alexander — all the days of your life.”
I might be being a little unfair, as this makes the book, and by extension the entire series, really feel like hackwork, and it’s not. In fact, I kind of want to do a reread now that the whole thing is out. When Ruocchio is at the top of his game, he’s remarkable; when he’s not … you get that, and any given book in the series can whipsaw back and forth more than once between those two extremes of quality. Ultimately, after really disliking Empire of Silence the first time I read it, I’m glad that I decided to go back and give the series another chance and honestly I think it probably deserves more attention than it’s gotten over the years.
I dunno. There may still be a review coming, as I really don’t feel like this is one, but guys, it’s okay to be subtle when you’re comparing your main character to Jesus. At least a little bit.
Got home from work.
Made a pot of coffee.
Drank a large cup of coffee from my Rasta Lion mug, which is my favorite.
Immediately fell asleep in my chair.
I am not kidding when I say I am immune to caffeine.
The following sentences will seem contradictory, I think, but they are both true:
I am having the best/easiest/most fun year of teaching I have had in a very long time, and it may be that this is the clear winner in terms of my entire career by the time the end of May rolls around; and
I do not remember ever being as consistently exhausted as I have been for the last month or so. It’s 8:15. I’m going to bed. I’m regularly going to bed around 9:00 lately, and no amount of caffeine cuts through anything; I’m completely immune to the stuff by now.
That’s all I’ve got right now. I’m gonna go die.
To be clear, that’s not one of our buses, although we did have a day earlier this week where every single bus was at least ten minutes late to school. It’s gross outside right now– I had to make a quick run to Target that couldn’t be put off until tomorrow, and while the roads weren’t bad, the parking lot was a bloody nightmare and I’m moderately surprised I’m still alive.
I told a class earlier this week that we should have a regular week of school because I wasn’t aware of any bad weather in the near future, so naturally we got a “We are carefully monitoring the weather and will make an announcement about a delay or cancellation as soon as feasible” email tonight. I explicitly do not want a delay or a cancellation between now and next Wednesday; we have shit to do. Which probably makes a delay tomorrow inevitable, unfortunately.
Anyway, how is it possible that after 20-some-odd years as a teacher and a few longer than that “in education” I still don’t really have any idea how school districts decide whether or not to cancel or delay school? The message I got mentions “closely monitoring the weather, along with sidewalk conditions, side streets, and bus stop access,” which … okay, that makes sense, but how? By who? That decision’s gonna be made at 5:00 in the morning. What network is the superintendent (I assume? Transportation’s surely involved, but that’s not something that’s going to be delegated, is it?) tapping into at 4:30 AM to figure out if school needs to be delayed in time for people to actually have time to react to the decision?
I would be completely unsurprised to discover that the decision was just based on vibes, on some sleepy-ass Lord High Muckety-Muck waking up and padding out to his driveway and making a call based on that, and there’s also definitely some domino theory going on, at least around here– if more than two of the three or four biggest districts close, everybody’s going down in rapid succession.
I think I’ll ask my boss tomorrow for some more details. They sure as hell aren’t asking the teachers.
(Also, I’d like for districts to implement a formal policy on days like this, that if we get an email at 7:30 the night before that we’ll have a decision “as soon as possible,” that we are also officially notified by the crack of dawn if we are not changing the schedule. It keeps me from checking my phone eighteen thousand times in the morning as I’m deciding whether I should get dressed for work. If you know we aren’t cancelling, say that.)
My son has been patiently working away at the Path of Pain since I got home from work, four hours ago. The person who put the video above together is some sort of divine creature; I never even attempted this feat when I was playing Hollow Knight, and if I had I would have invented twelve new swear words and killed one of the cats by about the halfway mark.
This kid hasn’t let a single swear word or even really a single sound of frustration pass his lips the whole time. No controller tossing. No muttering under his breath. Just persistence and patience.
I don’t know where the hell he got it from. Sure as hell not me.
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