The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
The richest man in the world can buy a social network relied upon by millions of people and reduce it to a flaming wreck in two weeks for the lulz, but if you publicly express the entirely reasonable hope that he dies broke, this happens:
LOL, fuck Elon Musk. The awesome thing is that this will auto-post to Twitter and the image will show up anyway.
I decided tonight that I need to have admin access to my brain.
I mean, that’s not a new thought by any means, but it struck me particularly hard tonight. There are certain things that I know about that I really don’t feel like I need to know about, and I would like to be able to identify unnecessary information that’s stuck in my skullmeats and simply cleanly excise it, and if there was a way to prevent myself from relearning that information in the future– perhaps some sort of memory mute button– that would be great too.
There exists a man who intentionally wishes to be known as Yung Gravy, and I had to retype Yung four fucking times to convince WordPress that yes, that was the word I wanted, which really only adds more pain to this process. He is, supposedly, a musician; I am aware of one of his songs and I do not like it. This is his song:
I’m not watching this video. You can’t make me.
Anyway. Mr. Gravy presumably has fans; you may be one of them. That’s fine! He can have fans. You can be one of them. I just don’t need this man in my brain, and I would like to remove him. You may have my memories of him, if you’d like. That’s fine.
It gets worse. Would you like to know why I am aware of the existence of Yung Gravy? Because it’s not because of his music. No, the rabbit hole goes deeper than that, and I don’t want any of it.
I know Yung Gravy exists because, somehow, I found out that he was dating Addison Rae’s mother.
(Do you know who Addison Rae is? If you don’t, I suggest you stop reading now. This knowledge will not improve your life.)
I do not want to know that Yung Gravy is dating Addison Rae’s mother. I don’t particularly want to know about Addison Rae, although she’s not all that offensive– she’s just pretty and kinda vacuous, and … whatever, right? But I definitely don’t want to know about Addison Rae’s mother, who is far too old to be dating anyone with “Yung” in his name. She has also managed to be the famewhore in the family despite giving birth to someone who dances and prances around in a bikini for her millions of TikTok fans. Addison Rae’s mother is odious in a large number of ways, I do not like her, I definitely do not want her or her stupid Karen haircut in my brain, and while she is exactly the type of person who would divorce her husband and latch onto a third-rate rap artist with a stupid fucking name in hopes it would get her a couple of extra clicks beyond what she’s already siphoning off from her only-four-years-younger-than-her-boyfriend daughter, I don’t need to know about any of those people. At all.
So now I’ve made you aware of all of this, unless you had the good sense to stop reading this post before now– and who would blame you?– and it doesn’t help. All I’ve done is spread the infection, I haven’t cured it. Because you, as one of my readers, are a person possessed of both intellect and rarefied taste, and you don’t need this shit either. So help me. Let’s all go back to grad school and become brain doctors and figure this shit out together. Because after I get rid of Yung Gravy, I need to tear out the Kardashians and Kanye West, and that’s going to require a bit more work.
I have spent some time actively resisting trying to write this, but fuck it, I’m pissed and if I can’t complain on my own Goddamned blog I can’t complain anywhere.
I have only very recently and very reluctantly become a Taylor Swift fan. To this day I don’t know why the hell I downloaded folklore, it was a completely random decision, but for some reason I loved it, and then when Evermore dropped a few months later I bought that too, and then I found out that she was re-releasing her old albums basically just as a giant screw-you to her previous producer, and to hell with it, that’s punk as fuck, and so now I’ve got Taylor’s Versions of Red and Fearless on my hard drive too.
Also, to make it clear, I don’t stream. I still buy music. I’m not gonna stop. Just take that as a given and roll with it.
Anyway, she announced Midnights, and fuck it– I actually preordered the Goddamn thing, and do you see my mistake yet? Are you keyed into Taylor Swift’s shenanigans enough to know where the rest of this post is going? Because three fucking hours after this album I pre-ordered became available for download, before I had even woken up to listen to it, she released a new “3 AM” version of it with seven additional tracks.
There is no way to pay the $3 difference between the cost of Midnights and 3 AM to get the extra tracks. Since I pre-ordered two months ago, I can’t get a refund on the original version and download the new one. My only option is to pay $1.29 for each individual song, which means paying $21.02 for an album that I could get for $14.99 if I hadn’t pre-ordered the album.
This is a shitty, shitty thing to do to your fans, lady. You’re a multifuckingmillionaire and you’re trying to bilk my ass out of nine bucks. And I have nine bucks! Daddy can do this. All day, every day. No problem.
But you best believe I’m stealing those seven songs anyway.
Shit.
I’ve been writing angry emails since I got home. There is a planned sick-out happening tomorrow that I have made it clear I’m not endorsing or participating in, we had to cancel a field trip today because there is no one to chaperone it, and we not only lost another teacher on Monday but we’ve had at least three leave mid-day and go home in the last two days. The building secretary wasn’t in the office at the end of the day either and I’m trying not to panic about that.
Also generated this document based on a secret meeting of the teacher leadership team this morning. There is supposedly a Big Meeting tomorrow morning with the principal– it is not going to go well– and this is what we’ve come up with to present:
Members of the TLT team met Wednesday morning to discuss the behavior and staff morale issues that we have been having lately. As a team we make the following recommendations:
- That our highest staffing priority right now should be someone to cover ISS, even if that means pulling someone from downtown or a member of the administrative team, and at least one if not two social workers, possibly also pulled from other buildings with less severe needs and on a temporary basis.
- That we determine if any of our most disruptive, disrespectful or violent students are from outside (school’s) district, and promptly return those students to their home buildings.
- That swearing at a teacher be treated as a suspendable offense.
- That a parent conference be required for any suspended student prior to being allowed to return to class.
- That any student referred to the office on a disciplinary matter spend at least the remainder of that class period in ISS and not be returned to the teacher’s classroom.
- That the uniform policy either be enforced or abandoned.
- That the “four level ones” policy in the Shared Rights and Responsibilities document be abandoned, as well as any other language impeding our ability to keep our classrooms and building under control, until such time as the building is under control. The only thing this is teaching students is that there are no consequences for their actions.
We’ll see how any of this goes. I’m not kidding about getting punched in the head; I broke up a fight and it led to me taking a couple of wild shots to the head as the kid I was holding back tried to get to the other kid. Saw the nurse, got my bleeding hand bandaged up (didn’t even feel that happen) and filed a police report. Then got an email from the dean of students that that kid’s dad was insisting that we all provide her work for the next five days by the end of the day tomorrow.
You can probably imagine how well that went over. I haven’t had a prep period in over a week because I’ve been covering classes and I’ll be fucked dead by Asmodeus before I try to pull together five days of lessons for the kid who started the fight. Fuck you and fuck her, Dad.
I’m back on the job market; fuck this.
Here’s the thing, y’all: I actually have too much shit to talk about, and the weight of it is breaking my brain. I have legitimately been spending time every day for the last week or so trying to fix American politics, and Lord, the rage-filled rant I could be posting today after the (entirely stuff we already knew but it’s nice to see it testified to in public) January 6th committee hearing. And I came in here an hour ago with no other intent than to sit down and write, one way or another, a barn-burner of a post, and instead I’m listening to Counting Crows, picking at my fingers, and burning zero barns.
In fact, I stared into space for most of an entire song after writing that paragraph.
I’m tired, and I’ve earned it; I’ve gotten an immense amount of shit done around the house in the last few days, with still a couple of big projects left to go before my wife gets home on Saturday. I’m planning on mostly taking tomorrow off from the list because I have a morning of teacher training to get through about our new Math curriculum, so I will either be coming home energized and excited about a new school year or demoralized and disgusted and ready to start job hunting again. I figure it’s 50/50.
Maybe it’ll give me something to write about. We’ll see.
My wife is in Boston for work until next Saturday, so I am entirely responsible for keeping our pets and son alive until she returns, which sounds like it ought to be a lot of work but I think I can probably handle it. I’ve got about a page and a half of stuff I intend to get accomplished before she gets back, and despite spending several hours with an extra fifth-grader in the house this afternoon I managed to cross several items off of my list. Most of them were what a motivational speaker might call “quick wins,” but fuck it, they still count. I have a couple of Projects in mind for tomorrow, so we’ll see how we do.
I think tomorrow I’ll write the Obi-Wan review; I meant to do it today but the day got away from me and all the sudden it was 8:00, which is sort of the unofficial “Goddammit get something on the screen” deadline for blog posts around here, and the review is going to demand at least a little more thought than I think I’m ready for at the moment. I am also considering a Manifesto of sorts; a What Do We Do Now type of thing that no one will listen to and will never come true. And it’s all going to come down to vote, you morons anyway. I’ve blocked, conservatively, dozens of idiots today, and there will likely be more tomorrow as I continue to lose even the vaguest vestiges of patience with what are either young progressives without a single stitch of sense about how things actually work or, perhaps more likely, Russian bots.
That said, I can’t really blame The Youngs, at least not exclusively; I put this on Twitter already, but this little bit of Fucking Nonsense From People that Should Know Better showed up in my text messages yesterday, and, uh, I wasn’t in the mood:
Probably shoulda just typed STOP, as Kati-from-the-DSCC never responded and likely also wasn’t actually a person, but whatever. A fucking petition. No, I’m not signing a petition. Petitions are for twelve-year-olds. Nothing that mattered has ever been changed by a Goddamned petition.
(Prove me wrong, if you can; I’m pretty sure I’m right here, but if you know of a counter-example, I’d genuinely love to hear it.)
So, yeah, everything still sucks and I still hate it here, but at least for the time being I’m no longer, like, actively marinating in hatred. Progress? Sure.
I’m pretty certain that any attempt at bloggery tonight would end up with the FBI knocking on my door, and I’m oh so very much not in the mood for that, so I’m just going to spend the rest of my evening trying to figure out how to convince my entire family to get the fuck out of this nightmare shithole of a country instead. Have a better evening than I’m planning on having.
There is a post coming about this week, one that isn’t a movie review, a picture of a bookshelf, or a single sentence, but I just don’t have the emotional energy for it right now. I have to write lesson plans for tomorrow and I think I’d rather throw myself off a bridge; dealing with that and a blog post is simply too goddamn much. I’ll come out of the hole in the ground I’ve dug myself sooner or later but it’s not gonna be tonight.
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