Tag: death

In which I am tired

On By Luther M. SilerIn Work3 Comments

The last couple of weeks, as you’re well aware, I’ve been renovating my bathroom.  It’s been exhausting.  All home renovation is exhausting; I’m not trying to claim uniqueness, but it’s been a goddamn tiring couple of weeks.

I went back to school today.  You may remember this picture:

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Every single one of those boxes, including the ones offscreen and the large pile of 60-some-odd smaller ones you can see in the distance just to the upper-right of the center of the image, has been dealt with.  I know where every box but three belongs; considering there’s a couple hundred of them that’s not a bad day.  I don’t think I’m going in tomorrow because administration is going to be at a meeting all day and I’m going to need a crapton of help to deal with this:

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That shit ain’t a one-man job, that’s an assembly line waiting to happen, especially since I need to take over the library to distribute everything.  Honestly, if I can get three or four people as backup it won’t be nearly as bad as it looks.

He said.

Now, the fun thing is, about twelve of those boxes in that top picture are for me, since I went ahead and ordered myself some supplies (note: legal, encouraged) with the remaining money that we had to burn through at the end of the year.  I have to admit it: sorting through math manipulatives today, I missed teaching just a little bit, just for a little while.

Then I remembered that the lion’s share of leftover boxes are going to be used for the Cardboard Challenge at the beginning of the school year and that feeling went away, because holy shit do I want nothing to do with the Cardboard Challenge, along with any number of other things about working at a school that are not actual teaching.

It would be nice if someone from one of the jobs I applied for over the summer would call me back.  Or at least it would be nice to log into one of the application sites and see that someone else had been hired.  Because right now it feels like I just tossed those resumes and cover letters into a furnace and pretended that I was submitting them.

Sigh.

I’M MELLLLTIIIIINNGGGGG and also on fire

On By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized4 Comments

Im-Melting-Feel-DesainStatistically speaking, it almost has to be happening somewhere: despite the fact that the rest of the world is slowly roasting, the temperature trend in the Great Lakes region has been distinctly cooler than usual for the last several years.  Our last two summers have been unusually mild, rarely even getting into the 90s, and our last two or three winters have been brutally cold.  It is July 18; to my knowledge we have not had a day even hit the upper 80s as a high yet, and the words “heat index” have not found reason to escape my lips thus far.  There haven’t even been that many days yet that have escaped the seventies.  I haven’t worn shorts more than once all summer.

It’s been glorious.

It will be over 100 degrees today between 1:00 and 7:00, and I have to work at OtherJob, which means I’ll be outside for at least two or three of those hours.  And it’s not like 98 degrees is gonna be much better; it’ll probably be 10:00 before the temperature descends into remotely livable territory.  And that’s not “Man, it’s been a hot summer” 100 degrees, it’s a twenty degree jump from what we’ve been used to.

Give my wife like a week to get used to the idea after I die, and then y’all can come over and divvy up my books.

In which my loins are girded

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching6 Comments

20130816-163401.jpgI am not just the building designee tomorrow, I am literally the only administrative team member in the building.  Everyone else will be in Houston at a conference, a conference I specifically exempted myself from attending because I have no interest in Texas.

I will be posting Sven at the office door.  You have to get past him to get to me; if you get to me, I will suspend you and then task one of the secretaries to call your parents so that I don’t have to.  If you are not someone I can legally suspend, I will probably do the paperwork to suspend you anyway.

If at 3:30 PM tomorrow I am not in jail, the day was a success.

It’s going to be a very, very long day

On By Luther M. SilerIn MusicLeave a comment

Have some music.

The best part of waking up

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy2 Comments

exhausted_zpsa4303e7bI’ve been a little preoccupied with dying lately, right?  You can understand why if you’ve read my post about last week.  I spend a patch of my drive in to work on a highway, a highway well known to be treacherous in bad weather by basically everyone who lives around here, and as I was pulling on to said highway this morning it floated through my head that there were no less than three places on my way into work where my chances of getting killed in a car accident were going to spike.

My highway cruising speed in my current car is around 60 MPH, which is slower than most of the cars on that road are going to be going.  It’s not me, it’s the car; when I rented a car for the Nashville trip I was driving faster.  In this particular car, for whatever reason, I have to think about it if I want to drive faster than about 60.

I’m on my way in and the idiots on the radio start blathering about some study some yahoo did to determine how much Santa Claus ought to make.  They’ve decided it’s around $137,000 a year, and the idiots are going on about how they’ve combined yearly salaries for a whole bunch of things– shipping, delivery, receiving, manufacturing, blah blah blah.

For whatever reason, this sets off a chain of thoughts in my head where I’m musing on how much difficult work in this country is compensated shittily because we don’t value the people who do it.  I’ve said this before, and it’s true: people who make minimum wage in this country work harder than I do.  I’ve had minimum-wage jobs.  They are much harder than jobs that make much more.  What they aren’t is more valued.

But anyway.  This post isn’t actually about politics.  What this post is about is that I looked down at one point during this brain-rant and discovered I was going eighty miles an hour.

Make that four places where my chances of dying were going to spike on my way in to work.

I’m safe at my desk now; hopefully that’s the last dumb thing I’ll do today.

Weird Al Yankovic’s “Grapefruit Diet” is running through my head…

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy9 Comments

…and today was a ridiculously long day and somehow even though it was a half day for me (for the second half of the day!) I ended up back at the office at three for a meeting and didn’t get out of the meeting (“half hour, I swear,” my boss says) until almost five and by the time I got home I was so damn tired and misanthropic that I cancelled on meeting a few friends for delicious Mexican food because jesus I don’t need Mexican I need sleep and the book isn’t selling for shit (I suspect there is some literal form of purchasable shit that is selling better than my books) and it’s too cold in this house and since when do I think cold is a problem and “Grapefruit Diet” is kind of a crappy Weird Al song and why is that running through my head and I’ve been having weird dreams and having trouble getting up in the mornings for like four days straight which is really weird because generally I don’t remember my dreams at all and all I want to do is go to bed or maybe kill some orcs for a few hours but my wife is probably going to want the TV because as I established yesterday I watch approximately ten thousand hours of television a week somehow and at least tomorrow is payday because oh god I want to die.

Blargh.

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(Oh: I was just told that I was nominated for one of those blog awards.  The guy said I run an “amazing blog.”  Which is an awesome and kind thing for someone to say to me and after this post all I can think of is joke’s on you, Jack.  I’m going to bed.)

 

Today

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

Getting the bathroom tile done if it kills me.

Getting the query letter for PITCH WARS written if it kills me.

Getting the house cleaned if it kills me.

Obviously, this will be my last post ever and I’ll miss all of you.  Do what you want with my body.

My Robin Williams story

On By Luther M. SilerIn movies, Television7 Comments

mork_and_mindy_s3I flat-out didn’t believe the news when I heard it, for the record.  The Internet has killed Robin Williams more times than I can count over the past few years, at least once by suicide; the idea that the story might be right seemed incomprehensible, and I found out fast enough that any available confirmations were coming from places that I wouldn’t take seriously on their best day.

I was born in 1976.  This means that Mork and Mindy was airing when I was practically larval; I don’t know if the show had any real life in syndication/reruns back then, but the episode I’m about to talk about came out when I was four.  These are thirty year old memories, here; it’s kind of ridiculous that this story has stuck with me for this long.

I liked the show.  Appealing to the sense of humor of a four-year-old isn’t terribly complicated, but Mork and Mindy managed it.  Until (and I’ve looked this detail up; my memories aren’t that specific) the first episodes– an hour long premiere and a “part two”– of the third season, where– and I may be the only human being alive who can write these words and mean them– Mork and Mindy scared the overloving shit out of me.  

You probably don’t remember– in those two episodes, the boss dudes on Ork decided that Mork was getting too human, and sent (amazingly, I remembered this title correctly) the Ancient Elder to Earth to straighten him out.

I don’t remember what they said about the Ancient Elder, other than he was, well… old.  I do remember that I was terrified at what he was going to look like.  I remember hiding my damn eyes when the egg floated into their apartment.  Since it was a two-parter, I’m gonna guess the actual reveal that the Ancient Elder was, like, ten appeared in the second episode, and I feel like part of the reason this is so burned into my head 34 years later is that I spent the entire week in between the two episodes intermittently freaking out about it.

And then he was ten, and not actually ancient, because that’s how Mork and Mindy rolled, you dumbass little kid, and I can still remember feeling stupid about that, too.

Most of the Robin Williams stories you’re going to read over the next couple of days are not going to involve pants-shitting terror, I think.  What can I say; I like to be different.

Oh.  And I’ll have every word this dude said memorized until I die, too: