Tag: complaining

A BRAND-NEW complaint about young people!

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, TeachingLeave a comment

We are all familiar with the common Old gripe about how Kids These Days can’t read analog clocks. This is a true thing about young people, but I genuinely have a hard time caring about it too much. Reading analog clocks is a skill that is easy to pick up when it becomes necessary and it is kind of hard to imagine how one’s life might genuinely be impacted by an inability to read one. Also, if you really want to make these people sputter, ask them if they can use a slide rule or an abacus, because Kids These Days can’t read clocks for exactly the same reason that most old people can’t use slide rules or abaci any longer.

That said, I have a complaint about young people and telling time, and I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen anyone else griping about it anywhere, so I demand credit when this becomes the new big complaint about The Yoots. Who are an entirely distinct group of humans from The Roots, despite what my autocorrect might think.

Kids these days have an almost frightening inability to deal with chronal inconsistency.

Perhaps I should explain.

Anyone who grew up in a world with analog clocks and analog watches and VCRs and anything that had to have its time set manually got used to the idea that we were never 100% sure what time it was, and it didn’t really matter. You might have ten different clocks or watches in your house and even assuming your VCR or your microwave wasn’t flashing 12:00 all the time, those ten clocks were probably displaying at least three or four different times. Even worse, sometimes we set clocks a few minutes fast on purpose! I only recently broke myself of the habit of setting the clock in my car ahead a few minutes, because never once did it actually help me get somewhere on time, which was supposed to be the whole point of doing such a thing.

Maybe it was 10:02. Maybe it was 10:03 or 10:01, or maybe it was 10:05! It really didn’t matter. Unless you were trying to catch a TV show at a specific time, being off by a minute or two was just never a big deal. Remember how sometimes in movies or TV shows they’d have a moment where they made a big deal about synchronizing watches? When was the last time you saw someone do that?

My son will occasionally ask me what time it is. I will look at my watch and, in the manner of an Old, I will probably round a little bit rather than provide him the precise time. Woe betide me if he happens to glance at a clock and notice I was wrong. It’s the same thing if I’m telling him how long he has to do something. “You’ve got ten minutes.” If I approach him again at minute nine, we have a problem.

Now, you might think that’s just my kid? Nah. I put up a new digital clock in my classroom this year, which previously, in the manner of most school classrooms, only had an analog clock above the door, which, remember, a lot of them can’t read. If that clock is one minute off from the time their iPads tell them it is– which is the same time their watches tell them, which is the same time their phones tell them, and there’s not even an iPhone/Android divide here because they all pull the Actual Time from the same place– I start hearing about it. And they cannot comprehend why I am not constantly adjusting the clock in my classroom to precisely synchronize with the bell schedule or the Real Time on their devices. I, an Old, don’t give a shit about a clock being a minute off. My students, Youngs one and all, absolutely cannot handle the ambiguity. It’s not just one kid and it’s not just one class. It happens all the time. I’m at the point where I’m going to set the thing an hour off just to see if any of them die from it.

These kids have Known the Time for their entire lives. They have always had constant access to a device that hooks up to the One True Time, a molecular clock in, I dunno, I assume Switzerland or some shit like that, and every device they have agrees on what time it is, always. And they cannot find a way to live like we lived. And it’s hilarious.

Someone solved the math question I posted yesterday, and I was pleasantly surprised with the percentage of my students who noticed on their own that I’d put the answers to today’s assignment on the board. I did end up working a couple of them out for students, just to prove that I was asking them something that they knew how to do, even if it was a pain in the ass. Here, with only a couple of shortcuts that I assume any adult mathematician can handle, is the full solution to the equation. Please forgive my crappy handwriting, especially the way all the Vs look like check marks and that really sloppy 5 in the first line:

Today has been garbage

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, video games2 Comments

One of those lingering bad mood, stressed out, all for no particular reason sorts of days. I feel like I left work on Friday feeling like I had a bunch of stuff I wanted to do this weekend, and right now I can’t remember a bit of it. Making things worse, I finally got around to starting Tails of Iron 2 on the PS5 after really enjoying the original game and so far I am not having any fun. I remember the first one being difficult as hell but I don’t remember losing every single fight three or four times before I got through it, so either I’ve gotten worse at video games, this game is a lot harder, or shit’s gotten wildly unfair, which might be what I’m leaning towards.

Anyway, arglebargle whine complain whine cry. Tell me about something fun you did recently.

In which I am irate, vagueposting

On By Luther M. SilerIn ParentingLeave a comment

I am, for only the second time since he has started going there, irritated with my son’s school. And, like, really irritated this time, not mildly irritated like the time he got in trouble over some bullshit that felt like the teacher’s fault in preschool. Sending-strongly-worded-emails irritated. How dare you make me disappoint my kid irritated.

And I don’t really want to get into details, especially since it’s 8:26 already and I’m showing signs of doomscrolling on top of everything else and I would really like to get away from my computer and go sit in a room with my kid with a book in my hand. I’m not gonna bitch about my kid’s school online, even in the mostly-anonymous format the blog affords me. But I really don’t need any external stressors right now because I know how my brain works and I’m likely to lash out at some poor fool who doesn’t deserve it because of unrelated stress, and I’m also irritated with my school for entirely unrelated reasons, and just … fuck.

My Boomer moment

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

My wife and I went to Best Buy last night– I tell you, date night has gotten really lazy lately– not because we particularly needed anything from there but because they’d sent me an email that I hadn’t used my card in a long enough time that they were going to close it out soon if I didn’t use it again. I don’t have any particular need for anything from them right now, but that card has come in handy plenty of times and there’s no reason to take a credit score hit in six months if we decide we need a dryer or a new TV or something. She wanted a new paper shredder, which we weren’t sure if they even carried, and I went in just intending to find literally anything I wanted, buy it on the card, leave, and immediately pay the card back off.(*)

This should have been easy.

I considered a few random things and then Bek found paper shredders and we decided to just grab one of those and call it a day. And we walked to the front of the store, where the registers have been for as long as this store has been there … and there were no registers.

We eventually noticed two signs hanging from the ceiling that said “Checkout,” both located in the middle of the fucking store, like we were in a fucking department store or something. One had no employees anywhere near it. The second just appeared to be a sign dangling randomly from the ceiling, with nothing at all to indicate where one might make a purchase. No kiosk, no computer, no self-checkout, nothing. And, again, in the middle of the fucking store. Why? Why the fuck is checkout in the middle of the store and not up by the doors?

The customer service desk was still there, clearly labeled for returns and Geek Squad and online pickup and such, but no signs for purchases, and the couple of employees behind that counter looked straight at me, a customer, clearly carrying a rather unwieldy box with the intent of purchasing, and didn’t, like, wave me over, or point me at where to go, or anything like that. We probably walked around, again, carrying merchandise, for five minutes, unable to figure out where to buy something in a fucking retail store that only exists to sell things, and at that point I decided I’d had enough, left the paper shredder on a random shelf and walked the fuck out of the store. On the way home we stopped at Target and bought a different paper shredder.

And, I gotta tell you, I didn’t believe any of this was happening while it was happening and I only barely believe it happened now. If it had just been me on the trip I’d just assume I was some variety of idiot and not worry about it. But my wife was with me, and she couldn’t figure out how the hell to give someone money in exchange for goods either, and that tells me I’m not fucking crazy. That said, I’ve been scouring the internet since then trying to find other people complaining about this and I can’t find any– there are tons of complaints about their website having issues but no one else saying I went into the story to make a purchase and couldn’t find the registers, which just … God, that just sounds insane. Selling things is the only reason the store exists. This cannot possibly have just happened. This isn’t an “I couldn’t find someone to unlock the case” situation. I had the thing I wanted in my hands and could not find a place to get someone to sell it to me.

What the fuck, Best Buy.

(*) The punch line to this fucking ridiculous story is that after hitting Publish on this post, I went and looked for the email, wondering what the deadline was and also trying to decide if I wanted to still keep the card (surely I can just order something online without drama, right? A PS5 gift card?) or just let it go … and I can’t find the email. My personal email is through Gmail. I have never deleted an email. So maybe I am completely nuts.

Anxiety disorder, or just stupid?

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

Mental health is so much fun. There is nothing like being midway through a three-day weekend and finding yourself paralyzed and indecisive about what you should be doing, not because you’re overwhelmed with work, but because you haven’t finished Sandman yet even though every second you’ve watched of it has been amazing, and She-Hulk is probably one of your favorite comic book characters of all time and she’s sitting on your desk staring at you and wondering why you don’t love her enough and haven’t watched even a single second of her show yet, and oh by the way you have a Lord of the Rings tattoo on your leg and there is no work of human literature up to and including the Bible that has had more of an impact on your life than LOTR did and oh that new show started this week and have you watched that yet no you have not. How the hell am I eighteen hours behind on TV?

It is just amazing to be freaking out because you are so behind on things and what you are “behind on” is fucking television. Also I haven’t showered yet today, I’m halfway through like fifteen genuinely minor tasks that would take probably two minutes each to accomplish, and I need to write a blog post and record an episode or two of Raji: An Ancient Epic because like an idiot I found a way to make video games into an unpaid job.

An example of those minor tasks: there is a box behind me, maybe five feet away. That box is full of action figures and crap that I took off of my desk because I decided it was starting to look super cluttered and I only wanted it to look a little cluttered. I took a bunch of stuff off, put it in the box, and then put the box behind me, intending to move it into the closet in this room. We are talking about opening a closet door and moving the box ten feet. It might not even be that far.

The box has been sitting there for at least a week and a half.

There are three credit cards sitting on my desk that have been here for months. They need to be moved into my safe. The safe is locked and on a shelf down the hall. Months.

I’m really psyched about tomorrow. Why? Because I plan to spend all day at my computer getting shit done for work that didn’t get done before school started, so now that we’re about to start Week Four I probably ought to, like, get some vocabulary words up on the wall. Tomorrow at this time I expect to be happy at the amount of stuff I got done during the day, including a truly impressive pile of grading.

But that box? It’s still gonna be there.

75 minutes on a Friday

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching2 Comments

Holy cow, the stock photos you find when you Google “School fights” are totally hilarious.

There’s a lot that isn’t stock photos, of course, but I feel like taking a picture of somebody’s baby about to get their ass beat and putting it on my stupid little website maybe isn’t the move.

Let’s talk about my Friday.

I basically eat school lunch every day. It’s fast, it’s easy, it’s relatively inexpensive– the entree they give the kids costs the teachers $4 and I typically buy two, so $8 a day– and shut up, everything generally tastes just fine. Plus I don’t have to think about it (at all) or go anywhere, and I only get half an hour for lunch so anything that cuts out bullshit from that time is just fine. I walk my kids down to the cafeteria, grab my lunches, precariously balance one atop the other, go back to my room, and eat there, alone and in peace.

(Weird thing about this building: every other school I’ve taught at, the teachers generally eat together somewhere. Not here. Everyone retreats to their rooms. I generally don’t mind the quiet, but it would be nice to have someone to talk to once in a while.)

Friday, 1:00 PM. I have my lunches and am preparing to exit the cafeteria when I happen to glance to my right and see one of my students stand up, lean across the lunch table, and punch another one of my students directly in his jaw. There’s some power behind it, too; the kid’s head snaps back and I can tell he’s hurt. Amazingly, he doesn’t stand up or attempt to retaliate.

Shit.

Without putting my food down, I manage to get the hitter to take his own ass to the office and check with the kid who got punched, who, unsurprisingly, wants to see the nurse. Who isn’t in her office, so I need to find her, still with the kid in tow. I find the puncher trying to leave the office already and usher him back in, explain what happened to the secretaries, and tell them that the security guard also saw it (which is true) and that I’ll get it written up as soon as I find a place to put the hit kid, who for the purposes of the rest of this post I’ll call Hosea.

I find the nurse and get the kid taken care of. He’s in my fifth and sixth hour, which is right after lunch, but at this point I’m assuming I’m not going to see him. I get the office referral written. I have sixteen minutes left in my lunch. I eat. I do not have time to piss.

I get down to the cafeteria to pick my kids up and they start lining up when I perceive a ruckus taking place behind my line. I investigate to discover several of my 8th grade boys holding back another of my 8th grade boys. I look around for the other fighter and can’t find them, but it’s clear this is serious– if they let go of this kid he’s going after someone, I just can’t immediately figure out who it is that he’s mad at. At one point he gets loose and then I get to hold him back for a minute, but mostly these two particular kids have him under control while a bunch of others hoot and holler and generally make asses of themselves. I dismiss my line of kids with a wave and holler at one of the custodians to radio somebody— I don’t give a fuck who, but I need somebody higher on the totem pole than me down here, or at least the security guard, who is in the hallway.

We eventually get the other kid calmed down, and figure out who he’s so pissed at– a student who has, wisely, disappeared from the cafeteria– and I bring the holder-backers up to my classroom so I can write them passes to class, since they’re good and late by now but I figure it was for the right reasons. I discover the principal in my classroom; he heard about the ruckus on the radio but was already on the second floor and so, wisely, realized that I wasn’t going to be up there to cover my class so he sat in until I got back up there.

I like my boss, have I mentioned that?

A class period passes, and during passing period between 5th and 6th Hosea comes back into class. He doesn’t have a pass with him, but it’s not like I didn’t know where he was, and besides, it’s passing period, so I figure the nurse or whoever just held onto him until passing period and sent him up to me. No big deal; I explain what we’re doing. A few minutes later we take a bathroom break (due to the continuing saga of Devious Licks, we’re still on annoyingly modified bathroom policies) and I, as usual, am having to monitor kids in three different places.

I walk into the boys’ bathroom to see Hosea– Hosea, this time– punch an entirely different kid than the one who he had issues with previously, in the face. Hosea has his back to me and the other kid sees me come into the bathroom and witness everything, so once again, magically, I have a kid not fighting back and just letting the adults handle bullshit acts of violence. Which I appreciate; the kid he’s punching was suspended last week for fighting, so this is a minor miracle.

(As an aside, my building is not nearly as violent as this post is making it sound. Today is absolutely an aberration. This situation in the cafeteria is the first time all year I’ve had to put my hands on a kid during a fight or a lead up to one.)

Hosea, of course, denies everything. There’s a whole other post with this kid that I don’t want to get into; needless to say he is 1) one of the most consistent and 2) one of the worst liars I have ever met. He has never done anything wrong in his entire life and he will literally deny anything. The pencil in his hand? Not his. The website on his computer, which is open in front of him? He didn’t go to that website. The water bottle in his hand that he’s taking a drink from? He doesn’t have a water bottle, and he’s not drinking. Frankly, I’m willing to bet that his getting punched in the face by the other kid earlier was completely deserved, as he also lies on the other kids with astonishing regularity(*) and they all hate him. I spend as much time defending them from him as I do him from them, and it’s fucking. exhausting.

Anyway, Hosea didn’t do anything, and he won’t go to the office because he didn’t do anything; he’s not even in the bathroom, much less punching kids in the face, and the rest of them are sort of just standing there because they know good and well I was right there and saw the whole fucking thing. I hand him over to his paraprofessional (he’s also special ed, because of course he is) and get everybody else back in class and within a degree or two of functioning.

Fifteen minutes later, his para brings him back into the classroom, which, no, he punched somebody in the fucking face, I told you that, he doesn’t get to come back in the room. I glance at the clock and there’s about ten minutes left in class. I spend a brief moment contemplating whether this bullshit is worth it– a quick glance at the kid he hit shows that the dude doesn’t appear to care that Hosea is back in the room– and then, suddenly, the principal is back in my room again.

“Have you seen Hosea?”

“Yeah, I did, he’s right there. Did you see the referral already?”

“What referral?”

I’m confused at this point, because there’s no point in the principal being in my room to collect this kid if he doesn’t know the kid did anything, at which point I find out that Hosea wasn’t supposed to leave the office in the first place. He tries to play the “I’m not going downstairs” move with the boss for all of two seconds and I’m pretty sure the boss leans over and tells him that his ass is going to be in the office in the next five minutes whether the rest of him is attached to it or not(**) and he makes the decision to go. And I give the fuck up on class for the rest of the fucking day, because Jesus, this is enough bullshit for one Friday.

(*) AN EXAMPLE: Hosea is also in my advisory, and the kids eat breakfast during advisory. In homeroom on this same Friday, moments after the bell rang, I walked in and was informed by Hosea that a group of other students threw an apple at his head. The other kids immediately begin vocally denying that this has happened. I am by the door, and glance in the trash can; no apple. There is one (1) apple in front of one of the students he’s accusing; it is in pristine shape, with not a mark on it, which is not something you would expect from an apple that had been thrown at someone’s head. Nor is there any sign that an apple– an object with a lot of water inside of it that tends to splat when thrown at a hard surface– has bounced off of 1) Hosea’s head; 2) the whiteboard behind him; 3) the wall below the whiteboard; 4) the floor. I ask Hosea where the apple they threw is. He doesn’t know. I look around. No apple. He’s lying through his fucking teeth, for no clear reason at all. This happens every single day, except for the part where because Hosea is such an asshole to the other kids all the time, sometimes he’s telling the truth, because they do actually both 1) pick on him unprovoked sometimes and 2) frequently respond to his provocations. For example, it’s not at all beneath him to see the kid’s apple sitting in front of him and claim that the apple was thrown at him so that the other kid would pick up the apple and throw it at him.

(**) Probably not his exact words.

Wednesday morning braindump

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Reading5 Comments

This is, rather emphatically, not a review of this book, as it’s eight hundred damn pages long, I’m not quite 1/4 of the way through it, and I have no plans to abandon it at all. This will be spoiler-free, for the most part, and even if I do spoil something, like I said, I’m early enough in the book that it barely counts.

I discovered Sarah Maas had a new series out when I found it at Target, of all places, several weeks ago; buying a book from Target would prove to be only the first of several deeply weird things about this book. First of all, take a look at that cover: what’s the name of the book? If you said Crescent City, you’d be wrong, as that’s the name of the series, currently planned as a trilogy but who knows. The name of the book is House of Earth and Blood, following the modern trend of naming books Noun of Noun and Other Noun. Seriously, look around, there are dozens of them. I feel like somebody needs to have a word with whoever did the cover layout, as that’s … weird.

Second, I’m having some serious issues with wrapping my head around the worldbuilding she’s doing here. For all practical intents and purposes, House of Earth and Blood is set in the modern world, except not: this book is clearly (?) not set on Earth, although people have cell phones and order out for pizza and days of the week are called Tuesday and months are called April, and the main character works in an art gallery, except so far literally none of the main characters are fully human. So it’s sort of urban fantasy-ish, except that it’s not set in the Real World, which is how every other example of UF I’ve ever read works, but even though it’s not set on Earth there is this deeply bizarre mishmash of real, ancient human cultures all over the place: the titular House of Earth and Blood is one of the four Houses of … Midgard, and a group called the Vanir is a thing, and there is slavery in the book, and people who are enslaved have SPQM tattooed on them, which stands for Senatus Populusque Midgard, which might hit you kind of funny if you know anything about Rome.

There’s a character named Maximus Tertian, and there are also angels, most of whose names end in -iel, as you’d expect from angelic names derived from Hebrew, and there was an angelic rebellion at one point, because of course there was, and meanwhile the main character is named Bryce Quinlan. It’s all very schizophrenic and oh did I mention that despite all this the book is shaping up to be a police procedural/murder mystery? Because it is.

My ultimate opinion on this book is really going to depend on whether this ends up feeling like it all makes sense together or is just very very lazy. I really enjoyed Maas’ Throne of Glass series, so she has a ton of goodwill built up, and I’m entirely willing to believe that there is a plan for this, but right now the whiplash is really getting to me.

I probably shouldn’t even talk about this, and I’ve been resisting talking about this, because I feel like there’s no way to do it without coming across as vaguely creepy, but it’s still on my mind two days later and there’s a reason the word “braindump” is in the name of this piece. So let’s get mad at TikTok for a couple of minutes. (TikTok? Tik Tok? How do I not know if it’s one word or two yet?)

I ran into this random video on my For You page a couple of days ago. An older white lady, very very angry, ranting into the camera, which usually isn’t how TT goes for a couple of different reasons. Anyway, she was bitching about how “you” need to stop looking at “her video,” because “she” is “only fourteen” (clearly not referring to herself) and how TT is “promoting child porn” and people should stop going to look at “the video.”

First of all, this is probably a kid doing some sort of booty dance in a tank top, which is about half of TikTok at any given moment. The notion that there’s actual child porn on the site feels … somewhat unlikely. But if you think there is child porn on the site, what the hell are you doing posting a ranty video at people to stop looking at it, with no indication whatsofuckingever of what the hell it is we’re supposed to stop looking at? Like, what am I supposed to do with this information, white lady? You’re very upset about some video, and you don’t want me to look at it, which, okay, fine, but that’s literally all the identifying information you put in your video? That there’s something Out There Somewhere that is so bad you’re literally calling it child pornography, so maybe throw out a user name or something so that the rest of us can block or report it? Because it’s not like the For You page gives us a choice of what we’re looking at, right?

…and this is why I’ve resisted posting this, of course, because tell us the username so we can block and report is functionally exactly the same as tell us the username so that all the dirty old men can go look at the child porn, and now everyone looking at your stupid little video with even a trace of common sense is stuck in this weird limbo between I would like to help you get rid of the terrible thing and I am not a fucking degenerate, and you can’t do one without setting yourself up to be accused of the other, and one more time why the hell did you decide to post this? Because, again, functionally speaking, what you just posted is I don’t like someone else’s video but I’m not telling you who or which one, but I’m really REALLY mad about it.

Subtweeting on fucking Tiktok, and fuck it I’m just going to spell it differently every time I use it in this post, shouldn’t be a thing. And now I’ve posted about the stupid thing, and I can stop thinking about it.

Anyway. I’m done now.

9:18 AM, Wednesday May 13: 1,370,016 confirmed cases and 82,389 Americans dead.

On sharing a moment

On By Luther M. SilerIn life, MusicLeave a comment

It has been a succession of rough days. Several weeks of them at this point. I’m exhausted and crabby.

A complete stranger asked me how my day was going earlier today. And without thinking about it, I shrugged and said “I didn’t have to use my AK,” which is something I’ve literally never said out loud to anyone. Because why the hell would I?

And she got it, thank God, and she laughed, and somehow her reaction improved my day quite a bit.

I note that I used that phrase very different from the way Mr. Cube uses it; to him not using his AK is the capstone of an already good day; for me it meant “at least I didn’t have to kill anybody today,” which was pretty much the least I could expect from a typical Wednesday.