The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
These four Tana French books are a completed trilogy and a standalone novel, and you will never guess which one is the standalone novel, and I want to have a quick sit-down with whatever filthy jackanapes were involved in making cover decisions over at Viking.
I spent my first few hours of the new school year working in my room today; as per previous practice, we don’t actually start getting paid until next week, but if I wait until the days I’m supposed to be there, there’s not going to be anywhere near enough time to get everything done that I need to get done. Adding insult to injury, Open House starts at 1:00 in the Goddamn afternoon on our second day of the three we have before school starts, meaning that the real deadline for when our rooms need to be presentable isn’t even the day the kids come back, it’s a full day and a half before that.
I made two promises to myself at the end of last year, which were that I wasn’t going back into the building before school started, and I wasn’t going to spend a ton of money during the couple of weeks heading into school, and I’ve thoroughly broken both of those promises. (Want to help me out with supplies? My Amazon wish list is here.)
We got emailed a document a few weeks ago about the district’s new expectations regarding classroom decor and classroom furniture. I’m probably not supposed to post the entire thing, but I’m really, really tempted to do so. Needless to say, it bans several things I already have in my classroom, and I’ve already purchased, as in during previous years, specifically for use in my classroom. Shit that I not only have nowhere to put at home, but is too big to fit in my car to take home even if I had somewhere to put it. I’m not joking when I tell you they apparently want me to just throw away hundreds of dollars of shit I’ve bought for my room to make it more comfortable for my students. Hell, I decided I wanted to grab an end table we weren’t using at home (it’s been living in the garage for a couple of months) to put my iPad charging station on, and technically, I can’t even bring that in.
The policy basically boils down to “You are only allowed to use the furniture we give you, and we have no intention whatsoever of furnishing your room appropriately, so suck it.” The teacher chair from the district that I replaced with my $600 SecretLab chair was broken when I got it. Is somebody going to reimburse me for all this shit I already bought, that was perfectly fine in previous years?
Yeah, I know.
I don’t think most people realize just how bare a classroom looks when it literally only has the things in it that the school district paid for. They’ve even gone so far as to ban various kinds of flexible student seating (I don’t have them any more, because the kids popped them, but I’ve had fidget seats in the room before) that are commonly used in IEPs. They’re supposedly going to have the maintenance crew go through the buildings and mark the level we’re supposed to keep our lighting at on the switch plates. The maintenance people come through every single night and set my lights to the maximum before turning them off, a level of harsh overhead lighting that I absolutely cannot tolerate. We aren’t supposed to use staples or thumbtacks to attach things to the walls any more. Our walls are specifically constructed to take staples! They did that on purpose!
(My room didn’t even get fucking vacuumed over the summer, by the way. Everything is exactly where I left it at the end of the school year. I had no reason to put anything away.)
Anyway, my AP walked into my room today to say hello, and I’d moved my couch to a spot where it is clearly visible from the door, the same couch I’m not supposed to have in my room any longer, and she didn’t say a damn word about it. I’m not sure how much of a stink I’m willing to make about this, but I’m absolutely not complying with anything until my boss specifically tells me to, and I’m trying to decide if I’m petty enough for malicious compliance to kick in if that happens.
(The document also bans, believe it or not, cast iron bathtubs from being in classrooms. Specifically. There has to be a story behind this. I want to know what it is.)
That’s not a sticker.
I made multiple attempts to acquire this book through physical retail channels– I’m not sure why, but I really wanted to buy it in person– before noticing it was like 60% off or something like that on Amazon and giving up and ordering it, and it shows up with that … thing on the spine. I’m genuinely considering returning it and just reading it on my Kindle, because that’s going to bother me every single time I look at the book for the rest of time.
Maybe I’ll go to Half Price Books tomorrow and see if they have an earlier edition.
I hate that I have to write this. I hate every fucking second of it.
I don’t have the tools, emotionally or intellectually, to deal with a world where things like video and photography are not, in any way, helpful in determining what is real or not. Combine that with a political apparatus that is primed to lie at every given opportunity regardless of whether lying makes any sense and I exist in a world where a former Speaker of the House just released a photo and a statement to prove he was still alive and I still have legitimately no idea whether he is still alive or not.
Well, okay, that’s not quite true. I have opinions, I suppose. I have no rational basis for those opinions, unfortunately. No actual evidence. Just … fucking vibes, I guess, and I don’t really want to live in a world like that.
So, just in case you’ve been under a rock or you’re reading this in 2032, Mitch McConnell went into the hospital in early June and completely vanished from the public eye. It is July 14, as I’m writing this, and he just resurfaced yesterday (Christ, was that only yesterday??) with a statement and a picture where he is rather conspicuously sitting with a copy of the sports section of yesterday’s Washington Post.
The statement has literally no value at all in determining reality. Statements from politicians are routinely written by staff members and are just as likely to contain lies as anything else they say. It’s genuinely meaningless. It also doesn’t really match up with what we’d already learned, or at least thought we had– weren’t there recordings of the 911 dispatch? Reports that they’d administered CPR to someone on site? Any real explanation of why they waited a month to give the public any information at all about McConnell’s condition other than “he’s fine”? Even if he’s completely telling the truth, and wrote the whole statement, pneumonia in someone that elderly is not trivial. That’s not “doing fine,” and hospital-induced pneumonia tends to be a lot harder to eradicate than other kinds.
(Remember Herman Cain? He was doing fine too, until he was dead.)
No, even if the statement is real, it’s wildly insufficient, and part of the problem is that now I want to know more about where the 911 information came from, because if that was made up, we still have a large problem.
And then there’s the picture.
Now, to be clear, I think a lot of complaints about the picture, most of which have been uttered with the entire chest of the utterer, are bullshit. To wit:
“Why is he in street clothes? Why isn’t he hooked up to an IV?” He literally said in the statement he was in rehab. You get to wear regular clothes in rehab.
“Where’s the fingernail on the middle finger of his right hand?” Probably attached to the third knuckle of his finger, which is curled underneath his hand.
“His wife’s in China!” You sure about that? Show me where you have access to her schedule. I have no idea whether any part of the story about her “fleeing” to China three days after he went into the hospital is true or not, for the record, and I wouldn’t know how to look up any part of it if I wanted to look into it.
“The Washington Post doesn’t even have a sports section any more!” Yes the fuck they do. I genuinely saw someone alleging that, along with several claims that it was from some other date, or a different newspaper.
“The pillow is floating in the air behind him!” You can literally see part of the chair behind the pillow, idiot. Top left corner, level with his mouth.
The one complaint I’ve seen that makes sense to me is that he looks healthier in that picture than he has in months, and honestly I can’t argue with that one. There have also been some people pointing out that his hair looks less white than it has lately, which I also can’t dispute. But one way or another a still photo is not enough to dispel a month of complete absence from the public eye that only ended when another Republican senator died. I’ve seen this guy go to la-la land on camera enough times that as far as I know somebody’s waving a stuffed unicorn around behind the camera and they got a smile out of him. It’s simply not enough evidence, which disgusts me.
And of course, with all that comes tons and tons of different versions of the photo that we know have been faked with varying degrees of obviousness and varying levels of intent. Some of them are clearly people clowning; other people appear to be faking the picture better, like a few that I’ve seen that have added some hallucinating AI text into the newspaper. There’s a whole rant here about how people will yell “IT’S AI” at literally anything nowadays; it’s rapidly becoming a phrase that very well might not mean anything more than “I don’t like that.” There is lots of talk that the photo matches one that his staff released in 2023, just with the newspaper changed, but I’ve not seen any sourcing to that claim, nor could I really believe it if I did.
What’s the solution? In the short term, I want a Goddamned press conference, or at least an interview recorded on video. He doesn’t have to put on a suit and parade out behind a podium. Drop a laptop in front of him and have a few reporters ask him some questions over Zoom, I don’t care. And of course that would be something that could be faked too, so pick a couple of reporters with decent reputations. I don’t need hard-hitting questions. Thirty seconds of the fucker telling us what happened in such a way that makes me think he’s alive and he’s mentally capable of doing his job. A whole lot of people won’t believe it anyway, but I think it’d be good enough for me, and right now this photo isn’t enough.
And we need to put an age cap on Congress, too. Not term limits. An age cap. You shouldn’t be allowed to pass laws that fuck up a future you won’t be alive to see. But that’s a whole different post.
Four days after taking the night off because I was 100 pages from the end of Book One, I’m taking the night off because I am 100 pages from the end of Book Two. I think I’m going to take a little break in between two and three, but not long, and if Jay Kristoff ends this one with the same level of cliffhanger that he did the second Nevernight book, I won’t have any choice in the matter. So we’ll see.
I have, like most of you, spent most of the day playing Schrödinger’s Senators, and finally found an upside to waking up at the ass-crack of dawn every day: several of my friends and family members woke up to a text from me reading “Good morning! Lindsey Graham is dead!”. As of this moment, Mitch McConnell’s office has released a statement that he is, in fact, alive, along with a still picture conspicuously featuring the sports section of a newspaper from today. I am unsatisfied; I’m willing to believe that he is alive (the notion that they literally had his corpse in a cold room waiting for, well, something never really sat well with me) but if I were a Kentuckian I would be raising pure bloody hell demanding 1) an explanation for why the fuck he’s been radio-silent for a month and 2) if not an actual press conference, at least a Zoom group interview or something. I’m not willing to go so far as to say the photo is faked, but a still photo of a (surprisingly healthy-looking) person and a written statement is not a proof of capability. I want to know if there’s still a person in there, damn it.
Tornado sirens tossed us into the basement for about 45 minutes last night, and as a Midwestern dad I was contractually required to go outside the very moment the warning stopped to check it out. I was greeted with this weirdness: a little bit of evidence of rain but nothing currently falling, no wind, and near-constant lightning with very little thunder. A dad more committed to his Midwesternness would have gone out during the storm, but my wife is out of town this week and I’m trying to be good.
I woke up this morning and discovered that summer school wasn’t happening, as apparently there were more widespread power outages east of us. I have spent the day since then gradually sinking into a worse and worse mood for some reason.
Actually, that’s not true, I know exactly why; Earth has its first trillionaire, or at least its first official one (call me when Elon Musk goes on hajj and destabilizes Egypt’s entire economy along the way) and meanwhile literally everything is getting worse for everyone else all the time, with no sign that the pattern is ever going to reverse itself. Every opinion I have about Musk is unprintable, even by my standards. I tried to watch the livestream of Trump’s name being torn off of the Kennedy Center and they had to stop work because of the rain (the remnants of last night’s storm, maybe?) and didn’t get a single letter taken down. That kind of day. I can’t even rant properly, for fuck’s sake.
I need someone to face a consequence for something. Anyone. For anything.
Pfah.
Just tossed a job application off into the void, likely to never be heard from again. It’s a moonshot; there’s a national search taking place and, well, that’s probably enough right there to not stress myself out about it. But fuck it, I’m definitely not gonna get it if I don’t apply, and the hour or so it took to update my resume and dash off a cover letter isn’t exactly a massive time investment. It took longer to find a copy of my resume that wasn’t a .pdf than it did to do the writing.
It was a long day today. We started the final round of ILEARN testing today, so <insert rant here> as you see fit, and then I had an interaction with a student at the end of the day that led to me genuinely wondering why I don’t just slap a motherfucker in the face once in a while. To be clear, I was thinking about doing the job application before that— I’ve been tossing it around for a couple of weeks, in fact— but hearing “I’ve been written up 600 times this year and nothing ever happens to me” definitely was a factor in pulling the trigger.
The number is 24, by the way, not 600, and considering that the kid has been absent for nearly eighty days this year (not counting suspensions) I think it’s fair that she does, in fact, have some experience interfacing with the office. I’ve done a good job letting this shit roll off my back this year; life is going to take care of this kid sooner or later, so it doesn’t have to be my job. I normally try to have a little more compassion with my kids, but this one wasn’t even one of my kids, just some random shithead in the hallway being a shithead, so to hell with her.
Anyway, I promised a book review today, which is going to have to wait until tomorrow, but if it helps any there may be a semi-irate in-progress video game review after that? I dunno, we’ll see.
I was going to write a post about how these special editions of the Nevernight Chronicles went on sale yesterday, and I really want them, because I love those books and I don’t have hardcover copies. The problem is the publishers are overseas and, because my government is run by maniacs and fools, they won’t ship to the US. So I was going to see if I could possibly leverage my worldwide fandom to ship a copy to me if I ordered it and sent it to their house instead of mine.
Only it’s sold out now, in barely over 24 hours.
So I’m gonna go play video games instead, and add one more fucking thing to the incredibly long list of reasons why I hate Donald Trump.