The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
I am, however, having foolishly agreed to help one of my co-workers out by switching schedules with him this week, about to embark on an eight-day stand at work– which will involve no less than five eleven-hour shifts.
Things may be quiet around here for a bit, is what I’m saying, and that’s without counting the paralyzing depression that will be setting in on Friday.
Jerry Holkins over at Penny Arcade wrote this the other day, and it crystallized a couple of things for me:
And… yeah. That’s about right. Not only was 2016 the worst year of my life, even before we take into account anything that took place outside of my immediate household, its nefarious and evil aspects spilled over into the end of 2015 and the end of 2017. At the end of 2015 I had a Health Event, ending up in the hospital twice. I was on medical leave for months and resigned at the beginning of 2016. I figured I’d be employed again within a month. Two, at the most.
It took six. And I haven’t had a weekend off since, and three days a week I work eleven-hour shifts, barely get to see my wife, and effectively don’t get to see my son at all. And my income is, well, we’ll say unstable.
I’ve sold one book (99 cents!) in the last two months and haven’t written a single word of fiction since July.
Oh, and my mother-in-law is in hospice and probably has less than a week to live. It could very well be today.
And that’s before the part where we installed a fascist in the White House, a fact that overshadows every single other bad thing that happened outside of the walls of my home last year and that I have been firmly in a state of I Cannot Even for weeks. I was talking with an old friend about it the other day; it’s really odd to know you’re in a state of denial, to recognize it and not be able to do anything about it.
My job is dependent on the economy being functional. I need to be preparing for Armageddon over here, in what may as well be a completely literal fashion.
Nothing’s getting better this year. Nothing at all. As much as I’d like to endorse that last sentence up there, and I really want to, I don’t know how to protect anyone from what’s coming.
Fuck 2016. Fuck it to death. And by God, by the end of this year I’ll probably be looking back at it with nostalgia.
And now it’s 53 hours and five days. Breakfast this morning was a Snickers bar and half a pot of coffee. I considered adding a couple of cigarettes on top for a truly balanced breakfast but then remembered I don’t smoke.
The whole morning was jitteriness and is this the coffee or do I need a Clonazepam type of nonsense, the afternoon was abject fucking death-boredom, and the evening was frantic Jesus we’re understaffed where were you assholes all day craziness.
What I’m getting at is the review of Rachel Caine’s Ink and Bone that I was gonna write is gonna have to wait until tomorrow. Short version: go read it.
G’night.
In fact, have a fluffy kitten from my Instagram account:
This adorable kitteh has adopted my parents and we’re trying to decide who’s taking him for real. I really really want to except for the part where I already have an elderly cat and an elderly dog and I’m really not sure how kindly either of them will take to a new younger cat. So maybe we won’t make him ours. Or maybe we will. I dunno.
So my middle toe on my right foot is rotting off. I clipped my toenails last Sunday and managed to fuck it up on my middle toe and it bled a little bit. Monday night the sky exploded and my basement filled with water or at least part of it did and I spent who knows how long wading in Ebola water barefoot. Then my toe started changing colors and shit and the doctor I went to see yesterday got to say things to me like “Oh, yeah, you’re gonna lose all the skin there” and “it’s probably not MRSA,” only she spelled MRSA out, like emm-arr-ess-ay, and who the hell does that?
And then she gave me a broad-spectrum antibiotic to take, and explained carefully that there was only a little chance that my penicillin allergy meant that I was also allergic to this drug also, and even if I was well I just had a rash the last time I had penicillin, when I was five, so I probably won’t die if I have something like penicillin today.
On the plus side, I know how to field dress a middle toe now, but I’d rather not know that and still have ten toes and none of them rotting. Instead I have nine good toes and one rotting one and it’s not fun. I walked fifteen thousand steps today, by the way.
Yeah.
Late August, and I’m sick. Whee! Also, I think one of my toes has a rainwater-related bacterial infection.
Good to know that this nonsense continues even absent getting ready for school.
It is not as hot outside as I was expecting it to be today– which is to say, when I look outside nothing is obviously on fire. That said, I have at least one customer out on the golf course at OtherJob right now who I am not entirely certain is going to survive the experience. I’m comfortably ensconced in an air conditioned gameroom that hasn’t had many people breathing in it, so I’m doing fine– but I need to figure out how to get to my car at the end of the day without leaving the game room, which might be a bit tricky.
In other news, despite above-average caffeine consumption for the morning, I’ve been yawning for six solid hours and have formally taken next week off from OtherJob, meaning that my string of five straight six-day, 53-hour weeks is about to finally be snapped. My day off yesterday featured taking my son to day care, grabbing breakfast, doing a competitive shop at a furniture store that I don’t work at (after waiting in the parking lot for 45 minutes because I couldn’t think of anything else to do to kill the time before the place opened) and then coming home and staring at a computer screen for two more hours before taking a three-hour nap. Despite that, everyone in my house was still in bed before nine last night. Needless to say, no fiction was written. Once I leave here I have to go back to the other furniture store for a moment– I was informed that I had managed to miss a critical piece that we need to know the pricing of– and then off to my mom and dad’s for pizza with my brother and new sister-in-law, who I haven’t seen since their wedding. I’m excited about it, but I also kind of wish I could find a way to have pizza and see family from my bed.
And then it will be Saturday, which is my Monday now, and everything will start over again.
In other, entirely unrelated news: did anyone reading this post have a dad like this? One of those “I’ll kill you if you touch my daughter” types? I don’t know why, but I caught myself thinking about this type of guy (note: I do not have a daughter) earlier today, and it occurred to me that the way you treat your daughter’s boyfriends has got to be a reflection of the way you, yourself, treat and/or treated women. I feel like it’s got to say something fucked up about you that you feel the need to go all alpha gorilla and shotgunny when some dipshit teenager comes near your daughter.
(The picture is probably a joke. Almost certainly. But we all know these guys exist. Or maybe they don’t; I dunno, maybe it’s a stereotype that isn’t really real– the father of the only girl I ever really dated in high school was literally on another continent and I met very few dads in between her and the woman I ended up marrying. Needless to say, by that point we were both grown and her dad very clearly understood that he no longer had any say in the matter one way or another.)
Any thoughts on that, anybody?
I have figured out what I want done with my body when I die.
You start with that. Then you wait 20 years, cut the tree down, and use the wood to build a bookshelf.
Does a blog post count as a will? Because I’m completely serious right now.
I have been saying all week that as soon as I spent money or took time setting up my new classroom (especially if I did something like, say, unloading an SUV full of supplies, that would be a pain in the ass to reverse) I would get a phone call from the office informing me that oh, wait, we’re going to need you to be the guidance counselor after all.
I should back up a bit.
It’s only just hit me that I don’t think I’ve talked about this– I’ve been campaigning fairly hard for the guidance counselor position in my building, because it keeps me out of the classroom and lets me do a lot of stuff that I’m good at while simultaneously removing the discipline crap that was my least favorite part of my job last year.
Long story short: I didn’t get it, and I’m not going to get into why, because it involves a lot of complaining about very specific people and no small amount of insinuations of bad faith from individuals I do not work with. I didn’t get it. Good enough. But we still don’t have a guidance counselor– a kind of important job right now, since guidance counselors make the schedules and school starts next Tuesday.
So yeah. I’ve been fairly convinced that I was gonna get a call once I did something irrevocable. I walked past the office on my way out of the building today and waved at my principal, who beckoned me into the office, which was otherwise empty and dark.
Where I discovered that, no, I’m not going to be the guidance counselor (still), but I do get to have a substantial portion of the guidance counselor’s job dumped into my lap tomorrow, and I get to do it anyway.
At last count, I’m packing three different jobs into my current position: I’m going to be teaching, I’m still wrapping up a huge amount of stuff from last year, which won’t be completely off my plate until September 30 and which became a much huger pain in the ass yesterday for reasons that, again, I apologize, but I can’t get into, and now I get to do scheduling.
Go ahead: ask how well I know the scheduling software. I dare you.
