Whatta revoltin’ development

Luther M. Siler

Let’s navel-gaze about our social media for a bit, shall we?

The kids discovered my Discord server today. What, you didn’t know I had a Discord server? There’s a reason for that! I never use it. I set it up, and I spend a decent amount of time on an Internet writer friend’s server, but mine just kind of existed because it could. They found it anyway. We had an e-learning day today, with the kids at home and the teachers in the building, and happened to glance at Discord on my lunch break to discover dozens of students, most of my Honors kids, merrily chatting it up in my server, secure in the knowledge that I hadn’t found them yet because they knew I was at work, the little bastards.

A number of things happened very fast– first, renaming the server to remove the word “Siler,” then putting my own name on a list of blocked words– or, rather, making my name the entire list of blocked words– and then rapidly introducing a set of Official Rules that hadn’t been there before because there hadn’t been people there before. Technically the kids aren’t really doing anything wrong, especially once I introduced the Thou Shalt Not Use Each Other’s Last Names and Thou Shalt Not Post Selfies, For Thou Art Minors rules, and now I mostly need to find out if I’m going to get fired if the district finds out about it.

Which strikes me– I’ve never seen any sort of district social media policy, nor was I asked to sign one when I got hired. I actually thought that was a pretty common thing for school districts nowadays, but if we have one I don’t know about it. I’ll have to ask the boss tomorrow. I’ve told the kids they’re on probation– any shenanigans, tomfoolery or other synonyms for nonsense and I’ll either ban everybody or just shut the server down, which, again, I wasn’t using anyway. On the other hand, so long as they’re behaving, it’s a public server and they’re members of the public, so … whatever? I don’t even know who, specifically, 2/3 of them are. I dunno. We’ll see.

This is further evidence of how careful I need to be to keep my social media cleanly split between accounts that use the word “Siler”– the blog, Twitter, and Mastodon, although I’m not using Mastodon a ton just yet– and the ones that just call me Luther, which would be TikTok, Discord (now, at least, as they didn’t appear to notice when I renamed the server) and YouTube. I very much am not interested in them finding my blog or my Twitter, in particular, although I think if any of them had taken it into their heads to Google “Luther Siler,” they’d have done it by now and I’d have heard about it. So I think I’ve dodged that particular bullet, at least for the moment, and if I make it through tomorrow I think I’m in the clear, since we’re on another damn e-learning day and I fully expect them to spend the whole day on my Discord again. Hopefully by next week they’ll lose interest and I won’t have to worry about it one way or another. We’ll see.

In which he doesn’t like it

Luther M. Siler2 Comments

Does anyone else out there have, or did you at one point have, a kid that just wouldn’t fucking eat?

I’m not talking about picky eating. This is not a situation where the kid will only eat French fries and chicken nuggets or some shit like that. This is “it is 4:15 PM and my son has not had a meal yet today, because he’s refused every offer of food I’ve made and has not gotten any for himself, and it’s probably the fifteenth time out of the last twenty days that that’s happened.”

Once dinner rolls around, he will eat three or four bites of something and then proclaim himself full. And he’s not filling up on junk food, either; I literally just handed him a bowl of chips to get him to get some kind of calories inside him, and he handed it back to me.

He is not underweight and he is growing like a weed; at nine years old, he is alarmingly close to my wife’s height already. But … shit, if child protective services were to show up at my house and start interrogating my son about how much he eats, I’d end up in jail, and I would understand why. It’s like he lives on air. I don’t have the slightest idea why he’s not incapacitated by hunger right now, but he’s not. He’s completely fine.

Someone, please, explain this to me, or at least reassure me that eventually it’s going to stop.

Blecccccccchhhhhhhhhh

Luther M. Siler1 Comment

middle-finger-poster-flag-6185-pI’m pretty much only posting because the thought of going three days without putting anything on the site gives me hives.  I don’t really have a ton to talk about, or at least I don’t have a ton of stuff I want to talk about.  I’ve spent most of the last couple of days wanting to punch the internet in the face because the internet is stupid and the people on the internet are stupid.  I’ve been protecting my sanity by unfollowing a ton of both-sidesers lately regardless of whether I think they’re generally entertaining when they’re not being both-sidesers.  I don’t have the patience for it any fucking longer, sorry.

On TV just now, Gordon Ramsay pronounced “guacamole” as “wocka-moll,” and now I want to punch him too because British or not that’s just not right.

Anyway.  An example: The world’s gotten stupid enough that I came very close to wading into a parenting argument on Twitter earlier today.  I won’t link to anything because I was too disgusted to make it through the video, but there’s a video floating around of a little kid cutting up in a restaurant.  He’s, I dunno, five, and he’s telling everyone to go fuck themselves and calling his mother and grandmother bitches and apparently at a few points he’s actually yelling Crip slogans.  There are motherfuckers who are sincerely suggesting that what this kid needs is more violence in his life because apparently Mom and Grandma don’t beat him enough.  How fucked up do you have to be to watch a kid that obviously damaged by violence and suggest that beatings are the way to help him?

I just can’t with any of it right now, sorry.

Milestones

Luther M. Siler1 Comment

IMG_5665

The boy is in kindergarten, y’all.  Or at least he will be, once summer vacation is over.

Whoa.

In which daddery is exhausting

Luther M. Siler

KK6nJcE.jpgSo, my kid.  Three days a week I work from nine in the morning until eight at night, meaning that I really only see him when I’m getting him up and ready for school in the morning (which is all hustle, hustle, hustle, especially since in all honesty I’m not great at getting myself up on time) and for a few minutes at night before he goes to bed.  My wife has given up on getting him to sleep before I get home so his bedtime has been adjusted so that I can see him and give him his daily allotment of hugs before he goes to sleep.

My son is fond of rituals.  He is also fond of complicating things.  To wit, each night he chooses several (as many as he can get away with) of the following hugs.  Understand that this is probably an incomplete list, as I’m tired:

  • JUMP HUG: He jumps three times.  On the third jump, I catch him and lift him high enough to touch the ceiling, then hug him on the way down.
  • CRASH HUG:  He runs toward me on his bed, but doesn’t jump toward me.  I’m just expected to grab him before he falls off the bed and hug him.  He generally tries to do this head down, battering-ram style, and about half the time he manages to hurt me.
  • CRUSH HUG: He lays prone on his bed.  I’m supposed to lean over him and hug him.  He insists that I’m crushing him as this happens.  Occasionally this also involves attempting to eat his ears, nose, or chin.
  • DROP HUG:  I pick him up and give him a bunch of kisses on his forehead and cheeks, then abruptly drop him onto his bed without warning him first.
  • TICKLE HUG: Like the drop hug at first, only I only drop his upper body, holding onto his legs, then tickle him.
  • REVERSE TICKLE HUG:  Like the tickle hug, only I make sure he’s facefirst on the bed so I can tickle his back instead of his stomach.
  • NORMAL HUG:  As one might expect.  I insist on one of these each night.
  • BOOMERANG HUG:  Starts off like a crash hug, only I swing him around several times back and forth before putting him down.
  • BATARANG HUG:  Differs from a boomerang hug in a way that only he understands.  Sometimes I get it right and sometimes he informs me that I just gave him a boomerang hug and I have to do it over.  I think he’s fucking with me, honestly.

Lately he has been attempting to add “moves” to the bedtime ritual, which are a result of him reading Teen Titans GO!: Burger Versus Burrito too many fucking times.  What that means is that I’m supposed to yell “Sleepy Smash!” or “Bedtime Bounce!” or “Nighttime Knockdown!” or whateverthefuck and try and put him to bed or tuck him in or whatever.  It’s exhausting, especially since he wants me to come up with new “moves” all the time, and I’m not that damn creative at 9:00 in the damn evening after an 11-hour shift, and I’m trying to nip this one in the bud before it becomes any more of a monster than it is.

It may be time to start reading Go the Fuck to Sleep to him at night.  We have a copy around here somewhere, after all.