The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
The first sentence of this post was going to refer to “nameless dread” initially, but nah, work starts on Monday and I know perfectly well what the name of this dread is, along with its home phone number, address and probably the motherfucker’s social security number if I look through my files.
One way or another I’ve been in a mood all day and I’m taking tonight off. Go be nice to somebody.
I have felt like hell for something like five Saturdays in a row, and today featured yet another five-hour afternoon nap. Currently trying to figure out if I have a stomachache and shouldn’t eat or if I’m hungry; I feel like evolution should have found a way to make these two things more distinct by now.
One way or another I’ll see y’all tomorrow.
I slept like absolute shit last night and I’ve been alternating between nauseous, dizzy and chills (?!?) all day. God, the second day after Mounjaro sucks.
At any rate, I’ve got nothing for you today, so feel free to talk amongst yourselves.
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?
I have accomplished nothing this weekend, which has been spent mostly reading books I wasn’t really enjoying and lazing about and moaning.
On the plus side, I expect to find out that I have a new nephew sometime tomorrow. So that’s all good.
(They won’t let me post pictures, so I’ll have to find one of a similar newborn. Y’all won’t know the difference.)
Does anyone else just … not wanna? Like, today has been a weird day, and I am not in the mood for a single damn thing, up to and including getting ready for school tomorrow (remember Wednesday is a day with no synchronous teaching for me right now, meaning that I literally had all day to get a lesson pulled together and I haven’t) or getting ready for any of these parent phone calls I’m scheduled to make from 6:00 to 7:00 this evening.
Technically parent/teacher conferences are tomorrow night, but I’m scheduling phone calls in 10 minute increments, and my two and a half hours filled up almost immediately, so I opened up another dozen or so slots today. I talked to four parents between 3:30 and 4:30 and was generally a gibbering, incoherent mess for most of it; I have lost my ability to talk on the phone, apparently, and on top of that I kept going glassy-eyed and not here right now in between calls and kept being a minute or two late.
I slept well last night, too. I’m just a damn mess today.
The last few days have been characterized mostly by pointless ennui and waiting around for things that didn’t happen. We had a Plumbing Incident occur on New Year’s Eve, which is the perfect day for such things to happen, and while the Incident itself hasn’t really affected my life all that much tomorrow will mark the third (and, hopefully, final) day that I’ve spent sitting around waiting for a plumber to come out to my house, charge me an arm and a leg, and hopefully this time actually fix my problem.
Which will involve digging a hole in my back yard. For a while yesterday it looked like the problem was going to require a backhoe to fix. We think we’ve dodged that particular bullet, but I’m at the point where I’m mostly just thoroughly tired of this and just want it all to go away so I can stop thinking about it. My wife went back to work yesterday and I think I might be jealous. I spent all day on Twitter today, leaving the house only to go get the cat from the vet after my wife dropped her off for shots this morning. It was supposed to be Plumber Day 3, but they called at 8 and rescheduled for tomorrow. The boy is perfectly content to spend the entire day fucking around on the iPad, so if I don’t man up and find some non-iPad activities for us to do, that’s what’s going to be happening. There has been precious little energy lately for good parenting, unfortunately.
I dunno. This is a proof-of-life post, I suppose; the music challenge posts are all written and will continue apace but I thought I’d make sure y’all knew I was still out there regardless.
Feel free to skip this one. I mostly wrote it already anyway.
So my problem in life right now is that I really really need to find a new job but I am also a lazy human and I have a job, and searching for jobs is hard so I don’t wanna. I’ve caught myself thinking several times lately that being back in the classroom next year wouldn’t be so bad. I can allow myself to think things like this only so long as I’m able to pretend that “teaching” actually involves helping kids to know things, which is the smallest and frankly one of the least important parts of the job.
Have a story: Today I bought coffee on my way to work. I drank the coffee when I arrived at work. Approximately half an hour later, I had to poop, so I did.
That story is going to be impossible if I’m teaching next year, because teaching is a job where grown adults with Master’s degrees can’t go to the bathroom when they need to.
Here’s a story: Today someone else was sick and it didn’t affect how I did my job at all.
Only that story’s pretty close to impossible too, because the district’s policy for substitute teachers is so stupid and destructive that no one wants to sub anymore (and it’s a terrible job even under better conditions; we all know this) and so frequently if your partner teacher is sick you just have to shrug and have 65 kids in your room all day. And if you kill any of them it’s your fault.
I cannot and I will not.
Here’s a story: I had a Sunday.
I’ll never have a Sunday again if I go back to teaching. Sunday’s Grading Day.
I’m no more than three or four days away from being done with work until August or so. I need the break if for no better reason than Starlight is pushing on my skullbones trying to get out and I need a couple of weeks to get it started. And I gotta take this “new job” shit seriously and start looking. Because this ish ain’t gonna drop in my lap.
Sigh.
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