It’s 5:15 AM

On July 12, 2016July 12, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Work1 Comment

…I’m awake, fuck it. Not quite the 3:00 in the morning blues, but it’ll have to be close enough.

I am pretty sure that I have been sweating for 20 straight hours, guys. Yesterday was a bit of a scorcher– I say “a bit” because 1) by historical standards it actually wasn’t really all that bad and 2) it’s going to be worse today, but the first thing I did when I got to work yesterday morning was help to unload an eighteen-wheeler full of furniture. At the time I commented that it wasn’t actually that bad of a truck, and it wasn’t– mostly big, square boxes that aren’t difficult to balance on a dolly and very few sofas, which are impossible to balance right and are the bane of my existence. What I wasn’t aware of was that for the next eleven hours of my work shift, constituting nearly 18000 steps and nearly eleven miles of walking, I was not ever going to actually stop sweating at any point. Which may have accounted at least partially for my poor performance as a salesman yesterday, come to think of it. I went through eight refills of the liter-sized water bottle I keep with me and never stopped feeling dehydrated.

I have blisters on my feet. I have to do it all over again today.

Then I got home from work, said good night to my son, ate some dinner, watched PREACHER, and went to bed. See anything missing? For some reason, I declared myself too tired to take a shower, which was some seriously poor decision making right there. Why am I typing on my blog and not in the shower right now, since I’m awake? Well, my wife leaves for work way before I do and I’m letting her do her morning ablutions before I rinse the filth off my disgusting meat-shell. I can smell myself, guys, and when I woke up this morning from a mild nightmare and had to get out of bed because I could hear a sound I couldn’t identify in the house, I came back to what was basically a pool of sweat in my fucking bed that I couldn’t make myself lie back down in.

The pillow is still awesome, though.

I will get used to this schedule, where I have three really long days to balance out two of what are basically half-days and two days off. I’m not there yet, but I will be; I’m not worried about it. But I’m wearing tennis shoes to work today, and when I get off from my half day tomorrow I am driving directly to the New Balance store in Granger, handing my credit card to the first salesperson who talks to me, and telling her that money is no object (how much can shoes possibly cost?) and to put something black on my feet that will make them feel like they are surrounded by love and honey and magic all day long. Because my current dress shoes do not fit that qualification. At all.

You think my bed’s dry yet? Technically I don’t have to be up for another hour.

EDIT: just in case, for some reason, anyone doubts me: last night’s sleep and yesterday’s steps. Today is going to be rough.

Best-laid plans and all that

On July 5, 2016July 5, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized4 Comments

I was thinking about writing some sort of retrospective, possibly quite maudlin post about turning 40 when I got home from work today.

That was before walking seventeen thousand steps during my 11-hour shift.

(NOTE: That is not a complaint. I love it.)

Instead, I’m gonna read a book and go to bed early. Maudlin will have to wait.

Love y’all. G’night.

How to be an Asshole Without Even Really Trying

On March 16, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy5 Comments

…okay, I know I said I wouldn’t be around much today, but I want to write this down before I forget about it and it won’t take long.

On my list of things to do today was an eye doctor appointment to get fitted with contact lenses so that I can see while I’m swimming. I’ve worn contacts before; I tend to flip back and forth between contacts and glasses every couple of years or so. I left with a pair of sample contacts in my prescription and, after thinking about it for a bit, decided to go for a swim.

Why did I think about it? Because the thought you don’t have a replacement pair, so if you lose a lens in the damn pool you’re going to feel pretty stupid rolled through my head, and I almost decided to give my eyes a couple of days to get re-used to the lenses before swimming.

But I didn’t!

As I was swimming, getting reasonably close to my number of goal laps for the day, I noticed a youngish black kid standing rather nervously at the shallow end of the pool. There was one open lane and one person in each of the other three, and he was being kind of weirdly fidgety about getting in. I stood down at the shallow end and gasped for air for a minute or two, waiting to see if he wanted to share my lane, and then swam down to the far end.

As I got down to the far end and turned around, he climbed into the pool, using the ladder, in my lane.

And right about there, at that exact second, I adjusted my goggles and knocked a lens out of place. It wasn’t out of my eye, but it was seriously not in position any longer, and it wasn’t comfortable at all. I fiddled with it for a second, realized my chlorine-soaked hands weren’t doing me any good, and bailed. From the deep end.

Leaving my towel and flip-flops at the other end.

And, as it was starting to hurt, didn’t quite run– the floor’s too slippery for that– but made for the men’s locker room at as high a rate of speed as being half-blind and in bare feet could allow.

It took two or three minutes in the bathroom, maybe, to get the lens back in place, at which point I thought fuck it, I was pretty close to the number of laps I was going to do anyway, and I think I’ve pushed my luck enough. I went back into the pool area, grabbed my flip-flops and my towel, and went off to the hot tub. Meanwhile, this kid’s swimming– not in my lane, notably, but sharing the one next to where I was.

It wasn’t until I was in the shower a few minutes after that that I realized that, as far as he could tell, the fat white guy had practically jumped out of the pool and fled as soon as the black teenager had gotten in. Fled so quickly, in fact, that I’d forgotten to take my shit with me and had had to go back and get it.

So, yeah, that could have gone better.

(Note that I’m fully aware that I am not the center of this kid’s universe and that he probably barely even noticed I was there. But if he did? Shit. It ain’t like I can track him down and apologize. “Hey, that thing I did, that you might not have even noticed and looked really racist if you did? Contact lens. I swear. Wanna go share the pool so I can prove it?”)

Free life advice

On March 14, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

Never join a gym on the same day you change your antidepressants. Because the bullshit from the med change will make you not want to/not able to go to the gym, and that will make everything worse.

Especially when the Monday after the med change/gym joinination is the goddamn Daylight Saving switch, and everyone in the universe wants to crawl back into bed regardless of what chemicals they’ve been putting in their bodies lately.

Hitting the reset button on everything once I get back from C2E2. Until then, I’m not worrying about it.

Some bullet-pointed nonsense

On March 8, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

A few things for y’all:

My teaching memoir Searching for Malumba: Why Teaching is Terrible… and Why we Do It Anyway is gonna be free for the next couple days. Go grab a copy.
I am not, I think, going to the pool today. I felt great last night until around bedtime, when every muscle in my body realized at once that they’d been used. I’m still achy as hell from the waist up, and lifting my arms above my head is kinda dicey. We’ll do every other day until we don’t feel like we have to. Should take a week or two.
Note that that last point should not be taken as complaining. This is good pain. I earned it and I intend to enjoy it, I just don’t want to go make it worse.
I expect Hillary to win big in Mississippi today and somewhat less big in Michigan. I’ve said this before; Sanders’ campaign is over, he just hasn’t realized it yet. Saying things like “White people don’t know what it’s like to be poor” at debates really isn’t going to help him very much.
Next week, we have Ohio, Florida and Illinois all on the same day, and Hillary will win all three. Sanders’ people are still pretending that the calendar gets better for him after March 22. They are right, but the contest will be decided for all but the most deluded of his fans by then. His big wins this weekend (three of four states!) closed the delegate gap between him and Clinton by one percent. It’s over.
I’ll repeat this again, too: I’d like him to keep pushing her to the left, so I won’t be bothered too much if he refuses to admit how math works, although it’ll probably get on my nerves from time to time.
One way or another the Republican race will continue to be an embarrassing clusterfuck.
I may have to start doing Walking Dead recaps again after yesterday’s episode. I’m beginning to think it’s possible that they’re just going to kill the entire damn cast at the end of this season and then just let Fear take over the timeslot for good.
It’s gorgeous and wonderful and warm outside for the second day in a row, so I fully expect fourteen inches of snow by Saturday.
C2E2 is coming!!! Who’s gonna come see me at booth 228 in Chicago????

Fat Man III: The DeFatManification

On March 7, 2016March 7, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy6 Comments

So all last year I worked at a job where I was too fucking lazy to bring my lunch to work 95% of the time and so I spent a shitload of time eating fast food every week. Then I got sick in September or October or whatever and I’ve basically been sitting on my ass at home for the last five months.

I have lost substantial amounts of weight twice in my life. In grad school I got down from 240 to 200 pounds through a combination of diet and exercise. The exercise? Swimming. I love to fucking swim. I don’t even care that it’s exercise. So I will do it. Daily, if necessary.

A couple of years ago I dropped from 260 to 220 through, almost exclusively, diet. Why no exercise? No pool.

I weighed three hundred and four fucking pounds when I got on the scale this morning.

I have been laboring under the mistaken notion that South Bend lacked an adequate lap pool. There are two that I am aware of in town: one is at the YMCA and another is at a local neighborhood rec center called the Kroc Center. Both have, to put it mildly, hours for lap swimming ranging from inconvenient to “why the fuck are you even bothering?”

Last Thursday I discovered the existence of a heretofore unknown third pool at a facility that has been here for the entire time I have lived in South Bend but which was previously somehow hidden from me.

I am deeply angry that this place has been out there being all perfect for my needs and this is the first that I’ve heard about it.

Their lap pool is open the entire time the facility is open and, at least for my hours of activity, the facility may as well be 24 hour. On Friday I took a tour of the gym. This morning, after a meeting with my doctor (believe it or not, this place waives the enrollment fee and drastically drops the monthly rate if you can get your doctor to claim there’s a medical reason you need exercise. I’m very very fat! I need exercise!) I signed up. And I went swimming. I made it 10 laps in a 25-meter pool; at my most fit I could do a mile without stopping. I then spent ten minutes in a hot tub and went home.

I’m done with this bullshit now. I’m so fat, at this point, that buttoning my pants can get me out of breath, because I have stupidly short arms and the way I have to shunt my gut out of the way to deal with my pants actually compresses my lungs. There is a chair in my house that I occasionally avoid sitting in because getting out of it again can be so obnoxious. I have other stories, some more embarrassing; I think you get the idea.

I’m done with this bullshit now. I turn 40 in a few months. I can either get control of my shit again or I can be dead by 45. Those are my fucking choices.

Enough.

Blogwankery, etc.

On November 16, 2013November 16, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking, idiocy2 Comments

photo-2 First things first: These text messages? Just happened. To me. And that’s how I reacted. Like a goddamn adult with a soul. I want karma points, universe.

Second thing second: My Fitbit just emailed me (it does that) to congratulate me on climbing ten flights of stairs today. It helpfully added that that was a hundred feet up.

Actual number of stairs climbed: 0. I did, however, mow the lawn– which gets me wondering about what it’s actually doing when it “counts stairs.”

Third thing third: I should apparently write about my grandmother more often, because today set records in 1) Likes on posts, 2) Follows (twenty, which means that the number of followers this blog has increased by 10% in a single day) 3) visitors and 4) overall page views. I’m fully aware that this all means exactly nothing but I have to confess that I’m a tiny bit disappointed that I didn’t also set a record in number of countries I had page views from, which is another metric I enjoy wasting time paying attention to.

Whee!

what is this i don’t even

On November 4, 2013November 4, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

Sitting on the couch in the living room right now, watching Hank Azaria do his impressions of Grover and Cookie Monster and Elmo, and really really hoping that as the Jimmy Johns in my belly digests it’s going to take some of the stress away. I don’t know how likely that’s going to be.

Things that happened today, or in the last few days: (this will format poorly. I will fix it later when I’m on a computer.)

It seems like about a third of my kids are suspended right now for one reason or another. At least one, a kid with a seriously nasty past who was pulling As for most of last quarter, has gone from being a student in pretty good standing to up for expulsion in something like two weeks, for two rapid-fire instances of theft (an iPad from another student and then some food from the cafeteria) and then beating the hell out of the kid who snitched on him for the cafeteria theft and then cussing the assistant principal out when he got busted for it. Note that each of these incidents took place on the day he returned from the previous suspension. He was only at my school because he got expelled from another school last year; it seems highly unlikely that I’ll be seeing him again.
A full-scale meltdown from one of my BEST kids (I don’t know what “BEST” stands for and somehow in seven years in this district have never learned; it basically means crazy kids and criminals, and should not be taken to refer to anything positive) involving having to be physically restrained by somebody about four times his size in the hallway and then causing no manner of destruction on his way down the hall– for, apparently, the second time in a row. This happened prior to my class; I don’t know exactly what triggered it.
I’m getting another new BEST kid in that same class tomorrow; apparently the two I have aren’t enough and someone downtown figured that if the first kid was getting expelled I deserved another disaster behavior student in that room. Occasionally these kids aren’t actually that bad and I can’t figure out why they’re in the program; this kid is coming to me after being kicked out of another school so I don’t have high hopes.
Meanwhile, my favorite student is moving to Arizona on Friday and another top-tenner is transferring to another school, also on Friday.
No less than four three-day ISS suspensions for girl drama related stuff; I’ll give you three guesses who might have been involved in that and the first two don’t count. If you said the blowjob-denier from a couple of weeks ago, give yourself a cookie.
The two Kids Who Are Suspended All the Fucking Time are both suspended again; note that these two kids aren’t the kids mentioned above. One of the two has still not made it through a single week of school (this is week… eleven?) without at the very least a day of ISS and for most weeks there has been out-of-school suspensions involved. Apparently he grabbed somebody’s tits in ISS. His mother continues to insist he’s a misunderstood angel. This also happened on Friday while I was out. I’m not sure what happened with the other one.
I wrote up one of my Algebra kids this morning for a situation that he could have ended at any of half-a-dozen points up until the point where I lost patience with his bullshit and wrote him up. There were something like six or seven other kids involved; all of the rest of them saw the wisdom of managing to go a few minutes in the morning without being idiots until they were no longer under my direct supervision. This one… did not. He spent the day in ISS; I found out from the assistant principal that afternoon that she’d been subject to a long harangue from his father about how all I ever do is pick on the kid and it was my fault he was written up. This student, by the way, is only in my Algebra class because we’re trying to keep him out of trouble; I am overstuffing my Honors class to keep this kid away from the shitheads he hangs out with who would otherwise keep him in trouble even more than he is. I made the point to him, and I’m happy to make the point to his father, that if he wants to transfer to a school where he will be allowed to hit anyone he wants, no one will stop him. If his father is foolish enough to pull this move with me instead of with my AP I’m going to take his damn fool head off.
(One of these things is not like the others, one of these things is not the same) I bought a Fitbit Force. I’m wearing it right now. Thus far it entertains me but I’m not convinced of its utility in the long run (which is shitty, because it was expensive) and you should expect a longer review after a couple of days.
OH RIGHT: Fleas. Everywhere. Mutant apocalypse indomitable indestructible fucking fleas, because I’m a fucking peasant in a hut in the English countryside circa 1658 and not a middle-class twenty-first century American in a goddamn six-figure house.
That line came before I added the video.
I just found a recipe for egg drop soup. I didn’t know I wanted egg drop soup. I’m startled at how happy this makes me.