Summertime, I guess

On May 30, 2025 By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

Is that an AI photo? Or just edited to amplify the sundog a little bit?

Anyway, yeah, I guess I’m on summer vacation. I spent most of the day asleep– and sleeping hard, too, which probably shouldn’t surprise me but does anyway– and when I was awake I was mostly feeling like I was taking the day off for slightly illegitimate reasons, like I’d called in sick on a state testing day so I could go to the beach or something like that. Yesterday was as emotionally rough as I expected it to be– I can’t remember the last time I had this many kids crying at the end of the day, and I absolutely can’t remember ever struggling to keep my own shit straight, but I damn near lost it as the buses were pulling away. My favorite kid this year has a relative who works at the school, and I said something along the line of “Saying goodbye to <kid> was hard,” and somehow that was where my voice cracked. He, of course, immediately began vigorously making fun of me and I told him I’d deny anything he told her to my deathbed.

True fact, by the way: I genuinely cannot remember whether I just finished year 21 or 22. I think it was 22, but I would need to count to be sure and I haven’t taken the time yet. Granted, I honest-to-God forgot how old I was once, so this isn’t entirely out of character, but the thought that I’ve been teaching for so long that I no longer remember how long I’ve been teaching is kind of alarming.

I’ve got a couple of book reviews to throw at you, but I might be out of town tomorrow and it’s the end of the month anyway, so we’ll see what happened. My niece’s birthday party is supposed to be tomorrow but I just got a text that she and her older brother both have diarrhea, so who the hell knows what’s going on. Maybe I’ll double-post tomorrow, we’ll see.

In which I alter society to fit my whims

On December 18, 2013December 18, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy7 Comments

On the one hand, anyone good enough at staying alive to have a 9 in any but the last digit of their age really doesn’t deserve to have me blowing shit at them. On the other hand, holy shit dudes Bob Barker is scary as hell all the sudden.

I do not actually want to live to 90– given the wild variety of aches and pains and various iniquities and inabilities that being merely 37 has inflicted upon me, I literally cannot understand how anyone over 50 is even alive. But if I do make it to 90, I’d like to think that I would terrify small children. Way to be, Bob. I’ll spay something for you.

I don’t normally link to Slate, but when I do, I do it twice in a week. This article is not typical Slate Contrarianism like the last time, it’s something far more inexplicable: apparently some study has determined that 1 in 200 pregnant women claim that they are virgins. A British medical journal– well, actually, it’s apparently called The British Medical Journal (I would have thought there’d be more than one)– apparently spent fourteen years tracking the lives of some 8,000 post-adolescent girls. During that time, just over five thousand reported a pregnancy. Of those five thousand, 45 managed to achieve pregnancy without achieving sex. While I don’t know if the survey tracked creative use of turkey basters or artificial insemination, the authors (or at least Amanda Marcotte, who wrote the article) have thus concluded that those 45 young women believe themselves to have given virgin birth. This line from the study is wonderful:

While more virgins gave birth to boys (59.8%) or may have learnt they were pregnant during Advent, these trends did not reach statistical significance.

That, right there, is quality snark, kids.

Let’s talk about virginity, just for a second, if you don’t mind. And you don’t mind, do you?

Virginity is fucking stupid.

Don’t misunderstand me: I’m not claiming that being a person who has not had sex is stupid. That’s fine with me. Glory in yo’ spunk, as BB King might say. Or, y’know, glory in being eight years old. Whatever. I don’t care if you have sex or not. You’d probably like it, if you tried, but I haven’t ever had a whiskey sour and people say good things about those too.

What’s fucking stupid is that we have a word for people who haven’t had sex, and that, worse, we perceive this state of non-fucking-ness as a thing that is lost when either your penis enters a vagina or your vagina is entered by a penis or whatever other definition you’ve constructed in your head to determine whether your sex “counts” or “doesn’t count,” which no doubt is determined mostly by how interested you are in disappointing your mother. And baby Jesus. Who hates sex, apparently.

Think about this: there is no other thing, in the English language or any other that I’m aware of, where we have a word for someone who has not done something but no word for someone who has. I’ve never killed anyone. There’s no word for me. I kill someone, I become a murderer. I’ve never lived in Paris. No word. Once I do? I become a Parisian.

What do you call someone who has had sex? Well, okay, fucker, but that’s not actually what anyone means when they say that, although maybe they should, because that word really isn’t versatile enough. Sexer? Nope. That’s someone who can tell whether a chicken is a boy or a girl. Which, by the way, is fascinating.

(Click the link do it do it DO IT YOU WILL LEARN THINGS)

(Then imagine what you might find if you GIS “chick sexers,” and then find out for yourself.)

The hell was I talking about?

Oh, right. Virgins.

(cough)

Here’s the point: these young women, if they even exist and aren’t some sort of bizarre statistical anomaly in this survey, are in need of something very badly (no NOT THAT JESUS SHUT UP YOU PERVERT): comprehensive goddamn sex education. They’ve clearly not been getting it (SHUT UP) and they need it (QUIET) and they need it now (OKAY FINE YOU WIN I GIVE UP). No one should be so pig-ignorant about how their body works that they think they got pregnant in a swimming pool or from a toilet seat, and if we’re in a world where we hope that people are lying because the alternative is scarier, we’ve still got a problem.

Here’s what we should call people who haven’t had sex: people. Here’s what we should call people who have had sex: older people. This entire concept that there’s purity of some vague metaphysical sort attached to a state of non-sexytimes is destructive and stupid and as a culture we should squash it dead right the hell now. Virginity is stupid, and no one should be one. Death to useless concepts!

(It’s been a long day. This is the best I can do.)

(True fact about me: my last blog was something like the #4 Google result for years if you for some godforsaken what-the-hell-is-wrong-with-you reason chose to search for the phrase “duck cock.” The duck penis, also, is fascinating.)

In which I need a time machine

On June 30, 2013June 30, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn Cooking, TeachingLeave a comment

I need, need for it to be about four hours in the future, y’all. Four hours in the future (hell, maybe three by now, I dunno) is when I get to eat my dinner, and I’ve spent most of the last two days wanting to eat today’s dinner. And some cole slaw. And maybe some chips and French Onion dip.

And maybe six hours of treadmill/exercise bike time after that.

Mmmmm giant slab of piiiiiiiig.

Been tossing around ideas for ways to make more money lately, and I think I may have to see if I can work with a homebound kid next year. This would mean that in addition to my regular classroom duties I’d spend two hours a day after school working with one kid, someone who for some reason (generally, behavioral) has been deemed unable to attend school with everyone else and thus has to receive his education in an alternate setting.

It’s going to be a lot of work, but my brother did it last year and it’s really good money for the extra work. Whether it’s enough to make it worth it will no doubt depend on the kid I end up with. Even the worst-behaved student is often easier to deal with in a one-on-one setting where they don’t have anyone to show off for, so hopefully that’ll work out decently. If not, these types of things are generally relatively short-term, four to six weeks at a time with one student. I can put up with anything for a month and a half, right? He said?

I dunno. I’m turning 37 next week, which means I will officially be in my Late Thirties, and it’s kind of messing with my head a little bit. Generally I haven’t been too affected by my birthdays; I was happy to turn both 30 and 35, but 37… yikes. I made a lot of bad decisions about money in my twenties (some more justifiable than others) that I have spent most of my thirties trying to undo. I had a solid plan at one point to be free of credit card debt by my fortieth birthday; it’s not as on track right now as it was at the beginning of 2013 because everything in my house keeps exploding and my son had to have tubes put in his ears and my car and blah blah blah life intervenes in your plans, but I’m not too far off, especially if I manage to find a way to bring in some extra funds.

“Write a book!” my brain tells me.

“Shut the fuck up, brain,” the rest of me tells my brain.

Anyway, a homebound kid is more realistic. I’d basically never be home from school before 5:30, and I’d have to shift some things at Other Job around once it kicked in, and it’s entirely possible it’ll make me crazy, but it’s better than being broke, right?

…right?