The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
Just spent an hour outside, in full costume, in 35 degree weather and a driving, visibility-limiting snowstorm, because I rock Halloween just that hard.
An inch of snow fell on my front yard while I was waiting for trick-or-treaters. I gave every kid who came by a full candy bar and told them to just take a handful out of the bowl of candy. Because Jesus what is happening out here.
Regular programming should resume tomorrow.
You may remember this cat from such hits as “nearly dying and costing me a thousand fucking dollars last year,” and “Bad housekeeping/good geography” back in September. I am going to punch him in in his stupid cat face once per day until I get tired of having to catch him to punch him in his stupid cat face once per day.
Allow me to set the scene: it is roughly 6:55 AM. I am already running several minutes late as I exit the shower, to discover my wife getting dressed and the boy playing on the bed. I discover that I have no socks. My wife tells me that there are some socks in the laundry room, so I, barefoot but otherwise dressed, head off to the laundry room to acquire them. Important detail about my house: due to weird architecture and a persistently stuck door that I haven’t done anything about yet, our laundry room is literally the farthest point in the house from our bedroom, but shares a wall with it– meaning that if you’re in there you can generally hear anything going on in the bedroom.
I am looking around for my socks when I suddenly hear two things, which both start at once: my wife, yelling “Oh God!” over and over, and my son, screaming his fucking head off.
I race to my room at top speed, still barefoot. My son is still screaming, his face is purple, he’s holding his hand at a very wrong-looking angle, and my wife… well, I’m not really sure what the hell she’s doing. She appears to be chasing something.
My first thought, of course, is that the boy has fallen off the bed and broken his wrist.
Luckily for everyone involved, I quickly determine that no, that’s not what has happened. I determine this because there is puke fucking everywhere, and I’m only barely exaggerating when I say that. Apparently Shithead here was laying in his accustomed spot on my wife’s pillow when he started horking. My wife tried to shoo him off the bed, and succeeded in doing so– except the little bastard started projectile vomiting in mid-shoo, leaving a foot-wide trail of cat vomit all over the following things:
Kashmir is tiny. There is more puke than there is cat. I am not at all sure why this is even biologically possible.
This is why the boy is purpled and screeching; he’s got cat vomit on his hand, which is in less of a “this is broken” awkward angle and more of an “I want this to fall off of my body” sort of angle.
So I get the boy cleaned up, we pull the linens off the bed, I clean off my nightstand and my phone, and I text my boss to let him know that I’m going to be late, and that he’ll greatly enjoy my reason when I get there to tell him about it. Meanwhile, the boy has clearly decided that his three-year-old brain can’t quite process what has just happened, and spends the rest of the time I’m home asking a near-constant stream of clarifying questions:
Why the hell do we have pets again?
Oh, the punchline: ask me when I bought my pillows.
Go ahead. Ask.
And then guess the answer.
If you said “two days ago,” you get to punch the cat too.
Little bastard.
Here are the rules of Raking Leaves. Well, the Rule of Raking Leaves, because there’s really only the one rule: you are responsible for the leaves in your yard, period. The location of the tree does not matter, because leaves blow. We raked leaves last Saturday. There were leaves in my yard from oak trees, and I don’t even know where the nearest oak tree is. Nevertheless, because I am a Good Neighbor, and because the two trees in the front yard I share with my immediate neighbor (in the sense that they but up against each other with no fence as a divider; it’s one big chunk of grass) are both in my lawn, I did my best to blow as many of “his” leaves as I could into our pile. The majority of them fell off of my tree. I use an electric leaf blower, and if you had looked right after we did it you could pretty neatly delineate exactly how far my cord let me get into his yard, because those areas were bare of leaves.
My neighbor’s wife and son are outside right now, blowing leaves. They (or, rather, she, because their son is in a different part of the yard) are blowing the leaves not to the foot of the lawn, where the city can pick them up, but into my yard. Where the wind is just gonna blow them right the fuck back into their lawn. And I’m, like, right here, in my living room, and I can see her doing it, because the tree is right outside my living room window. Plus the city came by and sucked up leaves today, so they won’t be here for at least a week and this is a pointless endeavor right now anyway because there are literally probably still a million leaves on that tree that haven’t fallen yet.
I do not understand people.
Fascinating thing (note: not really) happened this morning; I got up and went to work, feeling fine other than being a little later than I wanted to be. Got hit with a mild coughing fit while walking to my classroom and talking with another teacher and commiserated with him about how the coughing was just bad enough to be annoying but not enough of a deal that I’d bother seeing a doctor or missing work because of it. Both of us joked about how it would be better if it was.
Twenty minutes later, I let my co-teacher handle Success while I went to the men’s room. Where I, more or less completely without warning, got sick and threw up. Which: fun! So now I’m home, having spent most of the morning and early afternoon sleeping and occasionally reading something. I’m in that lovely place– I think I’ve discussed it here before– where I’m sick for approximately two minutes out of every hour but during that hour I feel like absolute hell.
So yeah. That’s my day so far. Managing Twitter is about as complicated as my life has gotten. I probably ought to think about going back to work tomorrow; then again, I was fine with going to work this morning and look at what happened. Stupid body.
A friend of mine turned forty on Tuesday. This is (I think) the first time this has happened, which is kinda weird. I have friends who are forty or older, but this is the first example I can think of of a friend turning forty who was not yet forty when we started associating with each other.*
It makes me feel terribly old by proxy. I’m not 40 yet, but I can sure as hell see it from here, and not in a Sarah-Palin-and-Russia sort of way, but an “across the goddamn street on a bright and sunny day” sort of way.
(Related, short anecdote: I got into an argument with my brother a couple of weeks about how old he was. I was wrong– not because I didn’t remember how old he was, but because I didn’t remember how old I was and I therefore did the math to arrive at his age incorrectly. This is a true fucking story, I swear to God. I was off by a solid year, and I think I’d managed to spend a couple of months thinking I was 38 rather than it being a one-time brainfart.)
Anyway. Speaking of me being ancient, let’s talk about my latest life decision. I’m sitting in it right now. There’s a picture of it right there. I have decided that the best move to make with my current life is to become an Old Man with a Recliner. It is not literally “my” chair in the sense that I lay sole claim to it, but I’m starting to believe that it’s mine anyway. My wife called it “Daddy’s Chair” to my son almost the very second he noticed it. I’ve never owned a recliner before, but our couch is developing issues and we needed at least one new place for people to sit in the living room anyway, so I figured I may as well go Full Lazy. Very soon I will start demanding that dinner be on the table when I get home and possibly learning how to snore. Because that is what Old Men with Recliners do, right? Sure.
I turned my phone on during my prep period (I got a prep today!) to discover that there was a two minute old voicemail from the delivery guys that they were sitting in my driveway wondering where the hell I was. “Where I was” was at work, since the damn chair was supposed to be delivered on Saturday. How do I know this? Because I have a full time damn job, and my wife has a full time job, and why the hell would I schedule a delivery on Thursday during ISTEP week when I know damn well neither of us are going to be home? I didn’t, that’s how, and I didn’t get the phone call yesterday to tell me when the delivery was supposed to be like they said I would either, because if I had than I would have rescheduled with those people.
I called the guy right back and was in the early stages of “this is not what was supposed to happen and frankly I’m pretty pissed about it even though I know it’s not specifically your fault” when I realized that I was having the conversation in an empty classroom because I didn’t have any students. At which point I abruptly reversed direction and asked the guys if they minded waiting ten more minutes and raced home. I sat in my chair for about a minute and a half before heading back to work and nearly fell asleep during that minute and a half. That comfortable.
Further updates on my inevitable transformation to Recliner Guy will surely be posted as they happen, unless becoming Recliner Guy makes me too lazy to write any more.
(*) I’ll give it ten minutes until someone pops up on Facebook to point out how terribly wrong I am.
Man, I can’t even imagine what kind of crazy shit it must have brought on ten thousand years ago to look up in the sky and see this happening:
I’ve eliminated one possible reason for The Surge: it hit me this afternoon (in the midst of teaching an algebra lesson and, to wit, being observed in same by my assistant principal) that it was possible that I was in the midst of a wave of spammery. Not the case; Akismet has only caught a handful of spam comments in the last couple of days. At any rate, it’s not quite 4:30 and I’m about to catch yesterday’s traffic. I already have more uniques than I’ve ever had in a single day, for the second day in a row. Still no clue where everyone’s coming from.
Anyway. Let’s tell a DC story; I teased this with a sentence earlier but I figure you maybe deserve the entire story. One of the problems with my career is that I am occasionally forced to act as somewhat less than a decent person because I am a teacher. (At this point I spend twenty minutes digging through my archives to look for a post about a couple of kids finding me at a gas station and demanding a ride home; I can’t find it.) (EDIT: Aha!)
This is one of those stories.
For the first time, the hotel we stayed at on the DC trip had a pool, and a pool with reasonably late hours so that the kids stood a good chance of being able to swim both nights we were staying there. They had a couple of hours during the first night, as a matter of fact. The chaperones just went downstairs and chilled next to the pool while the kids splashed and threw each other around, occasionally reprimanding stupid behavior (true, hilarious fact: after one transgression, one of my chaperones– who is our gym teacher– actually made one of the kids get out of the pool and do push-ups.) but mostly just watching. By the time the pool closed most of them (and the chaperones) had gone back to their rooms and it was just down to me and a couple of kids. Now, the hotel has a rule– which they had been informed of– that denizens of the pool need to be wearing shirts while wandering around in the hotel. One of my girls, while getting out of the pool, discovered that one of her roommates had absconded with both a) her shirt and b) her room key. Neither of these are really big problems, mind you; I had her drape her towel over her shoulders (large towel, slim girl; no biggie) and I had extra copies of all the keys in my room.
We knocked on their door first; nobody home. Well, fine, I’ll go get my key and let you in. I turned and left, not really expecting her to follow me; I didn’t even actually notice she’d tagged along until I had my room unlocked and was halfway in. At which point it hit me that the hotel hallway camera was about to record my ass taking a half-naked soaking wet fourteen-year-old girl into my hotel room.
I’m still not sure whether making her stay in the hallway counts as an etiquette breach– I suspect it was a bit of an asshole move– but… yeah. No, we’re not letting that video get taken, even just for a few seconds, even if leaving you in the hallway to drip while I go inside and figure out where I tossed the envelope full of room keys seems kinda rude. And thus the sentence, which, delightfully, cracked her up once I said it. And then the keys were located and she was let into her room and all was well again.
(Had a similar moment on the way home where several kids tried to get me to add them as friends on Snapchat. Uh, guys? Snapchat is for sending nekkid selfies. Ain’t no damn way I’m adding you on no Snapchat. Sorry.)
Ah, teaching.
Lemme tell you an uncomfortable story. I don’t particularly like this story but it’s relevant so I’m gonna.
It is, oh, probably late 1998 sometime. I’m in my first quarter as a grad student at the University of Chicago. There are a lot of things I was good at in college; going to parties was never really one of them. It is odd, therefore, that I am at a party right now, and furthermore a party full of people who I only barely know, as our program has only just started, and– wonder among wonders– I am having fun. Quite a bit of fun, as it turns out, as several other people at the party have turned out to be huge fans of late eighties and nineties-era hiphop, and it is blaring on the stereo as our story begins. I am sitting next to another guy who has also just started at U of C and is loosely in the same Divinity school program I am; I haven’t talked to him in many years, but I suspect he is either a college professor or a stylite now.
(EDIT: Looked him up. College professor.)
We are having a grand old time. Pimpin’ ain’t easy by Big Daddy Kane comes on the rotation. We both have the song memorized. We are rapping. There is nothing better than Divinity School students rapping, by the way.
Do you happen to know this song? You may know where I’m headed right now. I need to emphasize this: we are being loud. It’s a loud party, mind you, but we’re on our third or fourth song in a row at this point and whoever is choosing the music is clearly egging us along.
We hit this verse:
I see trim and I bag it, take it home and rag it
The Big Daddy law is anti-faggot
There was not actually a needle scratch at that time, and the party did not actually come to a screeching, silent halt. That said, the beat drops away for the words “anti-faggot,” so they’re especially pronounced and hard to miss. But the two of us stopped, as what we had just said hit both of us at the same time, just in time for the next few lines of the song:
That means no homosexuality;
What’s in my pants’ll make you see reality
And if you wanna see a smooth black Casanova — BEND OVAH!
“My God, that’s terrible,” one of us said. I think it was me.
That was fifteen years ago (Jesus!) and I’m still more than a little ashamed of it.
Relevant: the hostess of the party was the first out lesbian (first “out” person of any gender, actually) who I’d ever called a friend*. I’m going to say this now without any idea of whether it’s actually true, but it was my perception at the time: IU had had a decent-sized gay community, but there was an unofficial “gay dorm” at IU and while I had known a couple of gay people through class I didn’t hang out with any of them. Alicia and I were talking about working-class lesbian bars during our first conversation, so the atmosphere was a trifle different at U of C.
(* 24 HOURS LATER EDIT: this is not true; I had at least one good friend who identified as gay in college. I had forgotten because the last I checked she was dating a guy. But in college she was definitely at least mostly into girls.)
Also relevant: I’m pretty sure it was her music collection we were listening to. There’s a small chance she’ll read this, as we’re Facebook friends; she can correct me if she wants. I don’t remember paying any particular social penalty for what happened– I’m pretty sure she and the other guy are still friends, and no one appeared to get mad at us. But it stuck with me anyway.
Here’s what got me thinking about this story, and yes, I’m using Scalzi to generate a post again. I’ve talked several times around here about where my personal lines are on what sorts of entertainment and what sorts of businesses I’ll support with my money. But John’s focus on what “problematic” (his word) artifacts you have enjoyed got me thinking. This isn’t about refusing to see Mel Gibson movies or eat at Chick-Fil-A; it’s about stuff that I know is fucked up and I like anyway. I can’t really listen to Big Daddy Kane anymore because the subject matter gets to me. But I can’t stop myself from rapping along if, say, something comes up on random play– and I should point out that It’s a Big Daddy Thing and Long Live the Kane remain on my hard drive, along with no doubt any amount of other problematic rap songs, a lot of which don’t have “It was 1989!” to excuse them any longer.
I dunno. I don’t play them around other people and I won’t be letting my son listen to them. I don’t– well, not often– deliberately choose to listen to them. But it ain’t like it would be difficult to hit delete and I haven’t done that yet either.
The last time I read The Lord of the Rings I did it with a particular eye toward looking for racism. I know that Tolkien catches a lot of abuse for the racism in his books and having read them a thousand times I find it overblown. One of my other favorite authors, on the other hand, is H. P. Lovecraft, who was undeniably a big ole’ racist and I love his stories anyway. Then again, they’re both dead, and they’ve both been dead a long time; long enough that if I’d used extra Os in the first long there nobody would criticize me for it. Does that excuse them? Does it excuse me?
I dunno. I hope so?
(Also: While a lot of the music I was listening to in late elementary and middle school and high school and since then was horrifyingly homophobic and sexist, I feel compelled to point out that I was eating up the anti-white/Afrocentric stuff just as much as everything else. Professor Griff got a lot of rotation from me back then, along with X-Clan and a few others. So I didn’t necessarily shy away from stuff that was critiquing me. I don’t know what that says about me or if it’s relevant but I may as well throw it in. I would not be the person I am today if I hadn’t started listening to Boogie Down Productions in fifth grade. Hiphop, for whatever it’s worth, is baked into my soul in a lot of ways. That includes both the good stuff and the bad.)
(Also also: the most recent example of liking problematic things? True Detective, clearly, which was, to put it charitably, unkind to its female characters and utterly dismissive toward people of color. I recognize these things, will not argue with people who disliked the show because of them, and loved the show regardless. Which is an expression of my own privilege, granted. I’m recognizing it, admit it, and… don’t really know what to do about it, if indeed I even need to.)
So, I’M AWAKE, universe, and yanked out of a sound sleep because I swear the waking parts of my brain just went to war against the non-waking parts of my brain and hit the “abort” key on sleep for the night.
The dream started like this: my wife and I were in Chicago, alone with one of my students, a kid who I won’t detail at all other than to say he’s a pain in the ass and a lot of the time I don’t like him very much. Actually, I’ll say this, too: I don’t dislike him enough that he’s generally on my mind when I’m outside of work, so it’s deeply weird that he’s showing up in a dream.
Anyway, we were on the train, headed somewhere to have lunch. I get off the train and I discover that I’ve lost the two of them. The neighborhood we’re in looks sorta like the nicer/more commercial parts of Milwaukee Avenue, if you’re a Chicagoan and that means anything. I know where we’re supposed to meet but can’t remember the name of the place. I look around, getting rather frantic about the whole thing, then call my wife, who is standing in the doorway of the place– it’s across the street from me– waving me over. It’s called the Indian Tea Room, a fact that I remember instantly as soon as she tells me where she is. Note that to the best of my knowledge no such place exists in Chicago or anywhere else.
I enter the place to discover that the bottom floor is a long, ridiculously narrow store, and that I’ve lost my wife again. There is a table of bangles and Indian-style jewelry and good luck charms by the door, card tables full of random junk lining one wall, the sales counter along the other wall, and a high, narrow table covered with comic book short boxes running down the middle of the place. The aisles are too narrow for me to walk through in a normal fashion; my shoulders are too wide– so I have to turn my body to get through, and push past a couple of people who are shopping. The comic books are all labeled by title and I’ve not heard of any of them, but I remember feeling weird that none of them were Indian comic books.
The entrance to the restaurant is in the back; it’s on the second floor. So I have to push past everyone. I climb up to the second floor and discover it’s a big square room. Now, the following two things contradict each other, but: dream. First of all, everything is black and white, and the furniture in the place is like what you might expect from an old music store, except that there’s not anything at all on any of the racks and there are a few beds scattered around. Also, every single object in the room is prominently labeled. Like, the racks have a big card on them that says “RACK” and the beds say “BED” and the floor says “FLOOR” every few feet.
This is the contradictory part: I can see all of this, but it’s pitch black in the room. My wife and my student are sitting on one of the beds. Note that, again, dream-logic; this was perfectly normal. When you go to a restaurant what you do is you sit on the bed in the dark until someone brings you food.
Anyway, we sat on the bed for a few minutes until a server came upstairs and flipped the lights on. She was startled to see us and made some comment about three people sitting on the bed in the dark, at which point it went from being perfectly normal to totally shameful. My wife and my student were ready to order already, but I didn’t know where the menu was, so I wasn’t ready. It turns out the menu is on the wall by the stairs, so I go over and look at it.
It’s completely incomprehensible. I mean, I can tell you thinking about it that most of the stuff on it was typical Indian fare; rice and lamb and various vegetarian dishes and a few other things, but in the dream it was impossible. Another customer came upstairs with a thick notebook and began carefully explaining to another server what she wanted; it wasn’t on the menu at all but apparently you could just bring your own recipes to this place if you want.
I stared at the menu for maybe twenty minutes of dream-time, getting more and more frustrated with myself for not being able to pick anything, then gave up and went back to my wife. The bed had transformed into a regular restaurant table with a white tablecloth on it; the only splashes of color in the room were the food. They’d ordered already, and gotten their food, and there was a big pot of rice and some meatball thingies sizzling in oil.
I got very, very angry. I remember snatching one of the meatballs out of the pot with my bare hands, wondering for a brief second why I wasn’t burned, and throwing it down on the table, while screaming and cursing about, of all things, the bad service at the restaurant. At which point the part of my brain that doesn’t like being mad at my wife made me wake up.
I’d say “Fuck this, I’m going back to bed,” but bed is where this happened, so apparently I need to find something to do.
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