Category: life

In which no one is watching

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

Tonight is one of those nights where I can pretty much get away with saying anything I want, because the whole world is distracted, in this case by the Taylor Bowl. I am, in accordance with my ancient traditions, not watching, but if you are I hope you’re enjoying it. I don’t much care who wins, although a Chiefs win will make me a tiny bit happier if only because it will make certain very bad people angry, and I like it when those people don’t get what they want. If you want the 49ers to win because you are a 49ers fan, or because you hate the Chiefs for some pre-Taylor-Swift reason, I have no beef with you.

Frankly, the fact that I can name both the teams playing makes this the Super Bowl that I’ve paid the most attention to in a long, long time. The unfortunate part is that on this Day of No One Paying Attention, I don’t have anything tremendously compelling, much less controversial, that I want to talk about. 

Anyway, I’ve got a heavy teaching load tomorrow, as both my Algebra kids and my regular 8th graders are starting a new unit, so I expect to be half-dead when I get home from school tomorrow. The good news is that, compared to systems of equations, slope, and graphing linear equations, which is what we’ve been occupying most of our time with since November, Pythagoras and basic factoring are absolute cake, which means that my job ought to get a little less stressful and their grades ought to come up. I’ve got about an inch of papers to go through sitting next to me and I suspect I’m not going to touch it tonight. This wasn’t much of a weekend– it wasn’t bad, by any means, but I really didn’t do much with it– but if I make it through the next four days, I get a four-day weekend. I don’t want to miss any more days in February so hopefully everything will go nice and smoothly. We’ll see.

Oh, so you wanna fight now

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

Busuu threw this at me just now, out of nowhere:

There were another couple of sentences beyond this, but you get the idea. This induced panic at first– I am nowhere near being able to translate any of this shit, but after a second what I realized is that this is actually a drill at parsing individual words out of a sentence. The underlined ones– for some reason Paul didn’t have one in his last sentence– were blank, and I was given five or six options for the word the person said to choose from. I managed to 100% it, then did it again when I decided I was going to make a blog post out of it, so … yay me.

Also, this is much bigger than the screen of my actual phone, and Christ, I’m going to need to start doing this on my iPad or something just to be able to read the letters. This font is a bitch.

I spent the rest of the evening writing practice tests for tomorrow. My day is set for the next couple of days of school, then easy intro to Pythagoras on Wednesday and Thursday. This should be an easy week. He said. 

A tentative endorsement

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

I asked a few days ago if anyone had any recommendations for language-learning apps, and while I didn’t actually receive any (you bastards) I did manage to find an app called Busuu all on my own. I’ve been going back and forth between it and Duolingo all week, and while I’m only five days in, I already like it a lot more than Duolingo, if only because 1) it’s explicitly teaching me how the alphabet works, or at least trying, and 2) in the bits in between talking about different sets of letters, it’s approaching language-learning in a way that makes a lot more sense to me than Duolingo’s style, which is … idiosyncratic.

(What do I mean by “idiosyncratic”? Duolingo did not tell me how to say hello to someone and ask them their name in half a year of study. It did, however, tell me how to comparatively rank my feelings about my lion vs. my neighbor’s lion.)

The other cool thing Busuu does, beyond, y’know, teaching things in a reasonable order, is that it allows you to record yourself speaking or writing short sentences and then builds a social media site on top of that, where you can listen to people trying to say sentences in English and help them out, or vice versa. I’m not completely sold on this, especially since the last time I really interacted with it it told me to “describe myself or someone else,” a feat completely beyond my abilities, and then wouldn’t let me move on without entering something. I wrote “I don’t know how to do this” in the box, and have received a handful of corrections entirely in Arabic, which, of course, I can’t read, nor do I actually know how to type Arabic letters on my phone in the first place. (And, to be clear, they wanted Latin transliterations, so “Marhaba, asmi Luther,” not مرحبا، اسمي لوثر )

Also, I’m most of the way through a seven-day trial period, and the premium version is a year for $84. Which I’m willing to pay, don’t get me wrong, but is probably too steep for quite a lot of people. And the font is too Goddamn small, but that’s true of damn near every Arabic app I’ve ever encountered. I need Arabic to be about twice as big as Latin letters to be comprehensible. That size in that little bit of Arabic up there? Too fucking small.

Anyway, despite all that, early signs are definitely positive on this one. I’ll report back once I get further in and let you know if my feelings change.

Back on my bullshit

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

I’ve jumped back into Duolingo again, trying to regain what little Arabic I had learned on the first run, and … man, the way this software works just isn’t going to do it for me. I know how to learn from books, but software still eludes me; has anyone out there actually had any luck learning a language (use whatever definition you want for “learning”) using software of any kind, whether desktop or phone app or whatever? Particularly when the language in question was written in something other than Latin script? Let me know.

I would post, but …

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

I’ve been on my office working on school shit since finishing dinner, and now that I’m done with school shit, I’m going to go sit quietly in the same room with my son for an hour, during which time neither of us will speak to the other one.

Ah, togetherness.

In which I’m alive, I think

On By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

We had frozen pizza and garlic knots for dinner on Tuesday night. I wasn’t terribly hungry and didn’t eat a whole lot, at least by my standards. Around 10:00 PM we went to bed, with a two-hour delay already called for Wednesday, and I commented to my wife that I actually felt more full at 10:00 than I had after dinner. And that was an accurate description of how I felt– I wasn’t in pain, particularly; I just felt like I had overeaten. A lot. And it had been a good three hours since I’d had any food, and I hadn’t had a ton of food to begin with.

I, uh, don’t remember a whole lot in between that and waking up around 9:30 this morning? I mean, I clearly managed to call in sick a couple of times and do lesson plans and such, but I was probably asleep for 80% of Wednesday and I mean asleep asleep, not just, like, tossing and turning. I just got out of the shower, the first I’ve had since Tuesday morning, and I’m pretty sure my humanity is fully restored at this point, but holy shit the last couple of days have been unpleasant, and the amount of material that has come out of my body in that time has been genuinely unnatural.

So. Yeah. This was supposed to be a four-day week, then a day got cancelled, then I called off sick, and I guess I’ll go in to work tomorrow? I was supposed to ironman my way through January and not take any days off and it looks like I’ve blown that, but … yeah, I suspect toughing it out and going to work would not have been a good idea.

So what’d I miss?

As little as possible

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

Today’s activities included:

  • Far Cry 5;
  • Reading King: A Life, the newest biography of Dr. King, which is real interesting so far (I’m 100 pages in, which more or less covers his life up until marrying Coretta.)
  • Dassit.

Tomorrow will feature clearing the driveway of snow and Lego, hopefully in that order.

On last year and next year

On By Luther M. SilerIn life3 Comments

I went back and looked at the post I wrote at the end of 2022, and while I was willing to admit that 2022 had been a good year, I was clearly feeling pretty gun-shy about the idea. The notion that after the utter carnage that 2016 through 2021 had been, an actual good year had finally happened really seemed to beggar belief. I can’t justify any such hesitation about 2023; last year was a good year by nearly all personal metrics other than my own health, and even that wasn’t all that bad. In a lot of ways, I really don’t have anything to complain about, and I’m tantalizingly close to a major, major milestone in my life, one that ten years ago I didn’t think was ever going to happen: assuming no disasters occur (hah!), I am on track to be completely debt-free other than my house by the end of this school year. That’s entirely due to trends that started in 2022 and accelerated in 2023.

(I just took a few minutes to look, and I was officially diagnosed with sleep apnea in November of 2022, so that’s not 2023’s fault. I can’t even get mad at 2023 about that.)

Here’s the thing, though: 2024 fucking terrifies me. Like, bone-deep. Like, I don’t know how you diagnose someone with anxiety when the world is actually like this terrified. Why? Notice how I said “personal metric” up there? By that I mean, like, my life, my health, my family, my job, my finances. That sort of stuff. That’s all good right now, although I know how fast shit can change. Anything other than that? Fucked. Fucked. This was the hottest year in the history of humanity and nothing’s going to change. I have brought a child into this bullshit and he has to somehow survive for several decades after I’m gone while the world is busy being on fire. Israel is committing genocide in plain fucking sight of the entire world and no one is doing anything about it and there is literally nothing I can do to change anything about it. There’s a fucking presidential election this year. The state legislature is about to go back into session and who the fuck only knows what sort of bullshit they’re going to put on us this year.

(The pronoun bill? Sorta fizzled. Everybody just sort of mutually decided that we weren’t going to pay any attention to it, and nothing happened. I violate the pronoun law a hundred times a day and nothing is going to happen to me.).

I genuinely don’t know how I’m going to survive ten fucking months until the election. And the level of panic that sets in any time I try to seriously contemplate what I should do if things don’t go our way is indescribable. 

So. Yeah. Last year was the last good year. Even if we win 400 electoral votes this fall I still have to make it to November before that happens. I just don’t see anything coming this year that I can look forward to, other than that whole “no debt” thing, which isn’t going to work out for me all that well when I have to sell everything and move to Canada on no notice. Or, y’know, not, since the fascists taking over could pretty much result in anything. Who the fuck knows.

Also, so far it’s been 2024 for two days, and I was woozy and sickish all day yesterday– I have never been hung over even once in my entire life, but based on how people have described it to me, I may as well have been– and last night I managed to throw out my back in my sleep because I’m 47 and that shit can happen now. So, yeah, fuck this year.

Anybody have the number for a good therapist? Maybe that’s where all my money can go.