Category: idiocy

I managed to not kill anyone today

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

Believe it or not, this post is not about my students.

(It was a long day, but by “late April in a middle school during a week where we took two 150-minute standardized tests” standards, it was fine.)

I went to Barnes & Noble after work, feeling the need for some retail therapy– it was payday, after all, and after discovering that pay-per-teaching-hour for that summer school gig I was talking about yesterday was a fucking astounding $94.20, I went ahead and applied(*)– and so I drove to the mall, since that’s where our Barnes & Noble is. You can’t see it in that picture, but the entrance to the lot is just past the bottom-right of that picture, and I hope I can explain this coherently: the lanes to enter the lot split off, and there’s a yield sign, but not a stop sign, for people entering the lot. There is a little triangular raised divider in between the lanes to turn left, toward B&N, and right, toward … I dunno, I never turn right.

A car in front of me pulled toward the right, stopped, and let two people out, who immediately walked in front of my car without so much as glancing back over their shoulders. To be clear, that’s not a crosswalk and there are not supposed to be people there– but if they are, they should be fucking looking for cars. If I hadn’t been paying attention, I’d have hit at least one of them.

Anyway, I bought some books. I didn’t mean to, to be honest, but it happened anyway.

And on the way home the same fucking thing happened again, where a couple– an adult and an older teenager this time, one of them walking a bike– just blithely crossed the road in front of me, ignoring the fact that oncoming traffic had a green light and without so much as glancing in my direction. This would absolutely have led to deaths if I hadn’t been paying attention. The other one would have been a hard bump at worst, since there’s no way to drive fast into that parking lot– broken bones, maybe, but it would have taken some extra bad luck on top of all the stupid for anyone to die. This? If I’d glanced down at the wrong moment I’d have plowed into them at 35 miles an hour. And, again, it’s not like they saw me coming and dared me to hit them. Not even a glance at the direction of oncoming traffic, either time.

I’m not leaving the house for the rest of the weekend.

(*) $6500 for 23 days with students, including half an hour of prep, half an hour of breakfast, and three hours of actual instruction, which is the only part I’m counting. The first week of June is all trainings and onboarding.

Fail!

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

I had a plan to present you with the third book review of the last three days tonight, but … um … it turns out I haven’t finished the book! I mean, it’s the fourth book in the series, and I liked the first three, and I’ve liked the first 250 of its 340-some-odd pages, so I could probably guess where my opinions are gonna go, but that seems kind of unfair. So I’m gonna go read, and y’all just hang out for a while. If you want, go buy the first three books in the series so that maybe you can be caught up by tomorrow.

I mean, do that anyway. They’re good.

Back later.

I need an intervention

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, ReadingLeave a comment

Three Billy bookcases from Ikea showed up on my front porch today.(*) I’m not sure at the moment where the third is going. My wife said she had “bookshelf fatigue” a bit ago when I called her into the bedroom to ask for opinions. I don’t blame her; I have Me Fatigue, which is a close variant. I have Entirely Too Much Shit, and I keep acquiring more shit, and I looked at those filled bookshelves (which won’t look like that forever, as they’re going to be organized better sooner or later) and started musing about how my house burning down might solve some of my problems.

Not all of the books in the picture are mine, for the record. But enough of them are, and when you widen the scope to the whole house, I’m not exactly a hoarder, because I’m too organized for that, but Jesus, I have a damn problem.

Also, I need a second Spring Break where all I do is read. Like, 24/7, without breaking for food, bathroom, or sleep. Either that or I need All the Writers to take, like, a year off. I understand that writing is how they feed themselves but if everybody could just take a little hit on behalf of my mental health and the success of my marriage I’d appreciate it.

(*) Initial review is that at their price point they are excellent bookcases, which is basically what everyone I’ve ever heard mention them has said. We’ll see how well they hold up; that shelf on the far left is effectively made of cardboard and probably ought to go as soon as possible, so what might happen is I get rid of it, slide the other tall one down and stick the third Billy in between it and the two that are already on the wall. We’ll see.

In which that could have gone better

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, TeachingLeave a comment

I had my second observation today, the one that technically didn’t count: the head of math instruction for the district, who mostly just wanted to sit in on my Algebra class and see how things went.

Ha.

I can say without the slightest fear of contradiction that I have never had an observation, official or otherwise, go more poorly than that did. Holy shit, y’all. The kids were fine— this was one hundred percent not their fault in any way. But we just loaded math error on top of math error, and for some fucking reason every single problem I put in the assignment (graphing quadratics) put a negative sign in front of x squared, and basic arithmetic betrayed me, and by the end of it I’d managed to fuck it up so many times and in so many different ways that I stopped everyone, told them to all turn their assignment in for full credit, and that tomorrow we were going to try over again. The lesson was a complete disaster after the first ten minutes, which went fairly well, but for some reason -x2 completely shortcut the usual rules of order of operations in everyone’s brains— if it had been -3x2 I would have remembered (and so would they) to square the number first and then multiply it by negative 3, but the absence of an actual number meant that for some reason we were all trying to square negative x, which, of course, is always positive, and …

… fuck.

The thing is, this happens, and my observer knew that (and he fell down the same damn rabbit hole we did) and wasn’t pissy or upset with me at all, and in fact I think the way I dissected what had gone wrong in front of him actually impressed him a little bit. I told him he had to come back on Wednesday for the quadratic theorem, though, and I’m bound and determined that that one, we’re going to do right, Goddammit.

Halfway there

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, ReadingLeave a comment

I finished Robert Jordan’s A Crown of Swords today, Book Seven of the Wheel of Time, which means I have finished eight of these dreadful books (there’s a prequel, technically book zero) and am either halfway through the series or over halfway depending on how you’re counting. I only have four of the actual Jordan books left and then the trilogy written by Brandon Sanderson. I am also about to enter what fans of the series refer to as “the slog,” which means that a book series that will regularly go five hundred pages without a single speck of advancement in the plot is going to get slower.

Seriously, Crown of Swords is eight hundred and fifty pages long and maybe three or four actual events happen in the book– someone dies abruptly in the prologue, someone else dies abruptly and more or less off-screen in the last chapter, someone fake-dies (I don’t believe it for a tiny shred of a second) a few chapters before the end, and some of the characters find something they’ve been supposedly looking for for like three books. They’ve been looking for it for so long that I’ve forgotten what it’s supposed to be for, and when they find it, it’s also off-screen. A character literally walks out of a room with a bundle wrapped in cloth and announces “Here’s the thing! We’ve got it!”

Oh, and two other characters, whose relationship has never made sense for a single second, get married. Off-screen.

I am going to finish this damned series this year, but I have always been reading it out of spite, and nothing has changed. The physical books still make me happy every time I walk past them, though. I have no regrets.

Too tired to type

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Teaching1 Comment

I had one of the worst days of my career today, I think, and absolutely the worst single day of the year; I had gone the entire school year without breaking up a fight and today I had to prevent one, break up another, and then put up with some absolutely fucking unhinged and immature behavior from parents that very much should have gotten them arrested and trespassed and somehow resulted in neither thing happening. Then tonight was the literal last band concert I ever have to go to, which I was far too exhausted to properly appreciate, and during which I had to put up with even more shit parenting from what appeared to be two different families in the row in front of us who were bound and determined to ignore their feral-assed children.

I have had more than enough, I really don’t want to go to work tomorrow, I don’t know how I’m going to interact with the kid whose parents showed their asses (“I never realized you were the adult in the house” is probably something I shouldn’t say) and I still have a statement to write about all of that in which I am not allowed to cuss or impugn the parenting, intelligence or sanity of the other individuals involved.

Christ, I have never hated a year as much as I hate 2026.

This is a test post

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

I may have fixed the issue on my laptop in the stupidest way imaginable.

It appears that deactivating every single plugin on my site is allowing me to post on the new laptop.

It is allowed as a mental exercise for the reader why changing something at the site end that does not live on this laptop allows me to post on this laptop, but everything works fine on my desktop, which has the same system software, the same network, and the same applications.

I’m going to go to bed and read.

Oh what the hell

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, idiocyLeave a comment

Got a spiffy new laptop.

Was gonna use the spiffy new laptop to write a post.

New post wasn’t going to be about the spiffy new laptop, it was going to be about getting sick twice in two different ways at work today.

Spiffy new laptop won’t load the WordPress new post screen. Everything else works fine!

Guess why I bought the spiffy new laptop?

Anyway, I’m writing this on my phone and it is possible that there will be a ragesplosion soon, so y’all can look forward to that, because this makes no sense at all.