Tag: family

Go ahead, ask her

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching2 Comments

I returned to work today, although I was unable to tough it out and go to conferences. It became clear after a couple of class periods that all I was going to be capable of doing was preventing any of them from killing themselves or each other, and a twelve-hour day simply wasn’t happening today. It’s 8:30 PM as I’m writing this, and I feel more fully human than I have in a week, although I still haven’t managed to eat a real meal. Lunch was half a package of saltines, a banana, and a couple of cups of applesauce. Dinner was some mashed potatoes and a couple of pretzel sticks.

I am hoping to eat a salad for lunch tomorrow without paying for it. We shall see.

I had one of the more bizarre conversations/arguments with a student today that I’ve had in a while; I don’t remember exactly what got us on the topic, but two of my fifth hour girls had come back to my desk and the topic of my son came up. One of them appeared completely bewildered by the topic, and even more bewildered by the notion that I might be 50 and have a fifteen-year-old.

“He’s adopted, though, right?”

Uh … no. He’s mine.

“But was he … born?“

I swear that’s what she asked, and that got her a weird look from both of us.

Yes? My son was born. I was there. Watched it happen, at least sort of. They put you behind the curtain when there’s a c-section, but there wasn’t a baby one minute and then there was a huge hole in my wife and a baby, so I kinda made some assumptions? Plus the whole pregnancy thing that ended right away.

“But … you’re gay.”

It is worth making clear here that this child had not one trace of doubt in that statement. None. It was apparently more logical to her that I had somehow conjured my own son than that I was a heterosexual married to a woman.

“I promise you I’m not. Married to a woman and everything.”

“You told us you were gay!”

At this point her friend literally shakes her head as if she can’t quite believe what she’s looking at and is trying to clear the cobwebs. It was kind of hilarious.

“He never said that.”
“I never said that.”

“Yes you did! You’re gay!”

“He has a wife,” the other one hisses at her, clearly mortified.

At this point I produced my phone (did I mention I decided not to order the Duo? I didn’t order a Duo.) and showed her a family picture. I swear she was no more than a moment or two from telling me my son’s graduation picture was AI.

Now, here’s the thing: I am certain a nontrivial portion of my students assume I’m gay. The room isn’t exactly full of pride flags, nothing like it was at my previous school, but they’re there, and they all know I run the school’s LGBTQ club, and I come down hard on homophobia in my room. And, and this is my fault, and I should probably fix it, there aren’t any family photos prominently displayed anywhere, so a casual observer of my room couldn’t be faulted for jumping to a conclusion. I make it real clear to the Gem Club kids that I’m cishet because I don’t want them feeling like I’ve misrepresented myself, but I genuinely don’t care what the rest of them think– and I think the fact that I don’t make a big deal out of it when kids do ask if I’m gay doesn’t help. I’ve never had a kid ask with any sort of hateful or disgusted feelings attached to the question, and a lot of the time they’ll apologize beforehand. I always tell them the same thing, more or less– yes, I’m straight, but I’m not bothered by the idea that they thought otherwise at first. I will be okay. So will they.

This is, however, the first time that someone has argued with me about it.

#REVIEW: The Radiant Dark, by Alexandra Oliva

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

I have reached a point where I am getting a truly absurd number of books every month through book box services of one stripe or another, and every time I think I’m going to get my shit together and cull one or two of them, I discover a book like The Radiant Dark, which was not on my radar in any way before it showed up and caught my interest via, in this case, my Aardvark box. Alexandra Oliva has written a couple of other books before this, but she’s new to me, and anything that can consistently feed me new authors that I like is going to continue to get my attention and my money.

The Radiant Dark is part alternate history, part science fiction, and part family saga; it starts in 1980, and at first I thought I had managed to pick up what feels like the third or fourth book in the last month or so featuring a struggling young mother with a baby and a useless husband. And, well, it is that, for a little while, but it doesn’t stay that way for long. Very early in, President Carter announces that a signal emanating from a specific region of outer space has been conclusively proven to have intelligent alien origins, from an unknown exoplanet approximately eleven light-years away. And because of the distances involved, any message that gets sent back is going to take eleven years for the aliens to receive, and 22 years minimum for Earth to receive any sort of response. The book isn’t solely concerned with the communications, of course, but there have to be time skips to keep it from being a thousand pages long. Oliva also has a defter hand with her characters than you might think at the beginning of the book, and the relationship between Carol, her son Michael, and her daughter Rosanna (called Ro for most of the book) is the emotional center of the book. Carol’s husband quickly becomes her ex-husband, but he’s a complex character in his own right, and while it seems clear who the hero and who the goat is early on, it gets muddled up nicely in the fashion of most dysfunctional families pretty quickly. Ro in particular has a very strained relationship with her mother, and she will eventually become a mother on her own. I genuinely feel like even if they hadn’t had the first contact/science fiction side of this book, it would be well worth reading just because of the way it explores the family dynamics.

Ro turns out to be a world-class astronomer, and is one of the first people to decipher the second message the aliens send us, 22 years after the original beacon. She is snatched out of her Ph.D program by a world-renowned scientist who wants to use the knowledge the aliens have sent us to start looking for other potentially habitable planets and, possibly, other intelligent life– although the aliens make it clear that all they have been able to find so far is us. She presents it as a generational effort, something that she doesn’t plan to survive to see the fruits of. By the time the book ends in the 2030s, humanity has colonized the Moon and sent people to Mars, so obviously there’s some divergence from our own history, as you well might expect.

I was not expecting to enjoy this nearly as much as I did, and this is the rare book that I will recommend because I find the characters so compelling. I like good character work, of course, but it’s rarely at the forefront of my reasons for liking a book, especially one so suited to my interests as a first-contact science fiction novel. But I think it’s best to read this as a family saga with a side dish of sci-fi rather than the other way around; if you go into this solely as a sci-fi person, I think you’ll come out disappointed. It’s not much of a spoiler to say that the aliens do show up eventually, but don’t read the book waiting for that reveal. That’s not the book Oliva wanted to write. Go in with your expectations calibrated appropriately, though, and you’ll end up with a read that I think stands a pretty good chance of showing up on my end of the year list. Check it out.

How does this happen

On By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting1 Comment

That absurdly tall, gloriously-haired kid on the right there— who is the same kid as this kid— graduated from 8th grade today. Which means that he is somehow a high school student now. Sooner than you might think, as he’s taking summer school classes right away and they start in a bit over a week.

That fat bastard on the left is going to be fifty in a month. He is somehow still alive.

I am feeling my mortality a bit more than usual this week, if you haven’t figured that out.

And my god have I been writing on this site for a long time.

Second verse, same as the first

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

Today has been more or less identical to yesterday, except with an hour or so of school stuff thrown in, the last hour of school stuff I’ll have to do on my own time for 2025-26. Thursday is my last day at work, and Friday is the last day of the school year– yes, I’m missing the last day of school for the first time in my career (forgive me if I’ve mentioned this; I don’t think I have, but who knows) because my son’s 8th grade graduation is right smack in the middle of the day. Ordinarily I look down my nose a bit at the concept of 8th grade graduations, but as he’s been at this same school for eleven years, I figure I’ll allow it, especially since it’s not as if I have any actual choice in the matter.

Hm. That looks familiar; I bet I have talked about this at some point.

Oh well.

I’ll follow my usual pattern for the next few days; the kids are getting lists of missing assignments tomorrow, and they can choose to use their time wisely or not depending on 1) whether they, personally, are wise or not and 2) whether they are pleased with their current grade. A bunch of them will have nothing to do! Some of them will do missing work that will have no effect on their grade, only because they want all the points. A somewhat larger number will do no work over the next few days because failure is fine now and they know nothing will happen to them.

As a society, we really need to bring back being ashamed of being stupid. People should know when they are stupid, and they should feel bad about it, all the time, until they do something about it. But whatever; I’m not succumbing to negativity this week, God damn it, no matter how reasonable it might be. I’m going to live through tomorrow one way or another, use Wednesday and Thursday to tear my room down, and then walk out of the door with a spring in my step Thursday afternoon. At some point during that time I’ll write lesson plans for my sub– unbelievably, I have a sub right now for the last day– that will basically say “no blood, no foul, and if there is blood, make sure it’s not your fault.” I’ll leave them a stack of various things the kids can color or draw on and a small stack of pencils and remind them to simply send away any child that displeases them because the office will be sending everyone home as fast as they possibly can. And if it goes poorly? Oh well.

Then I have a week of trainings and such, and … maybe I’m teaching summer school after that? Or maybe I’m leaving somebody in the lurch at the last second? Probably the first thing; I’d like to think I’m not that big of a jerk, but there are some blinking alarm lights about this summer program. Surely the pay will make it all worth it, right? Surely.

Anyway, I have a Wheel of Time book to finish, so I’m going to go do that. Go have a cheeseburger or something.

That’s enough for now

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy3 Comments

Slept amazingly well last night. Then went and had breakfast with The Cousins again, and it turns out that, somehow unbeknownst to me until today, one of them and her husband are astonishingly rich (like, Eames chair in the living room where the dogs can sit on it rich) and they also cook up a damn good brunch. And this isn’t quite a “rich” thing, as the object in question is less than $20, but I tried to put butter on a piece of sourdough bread and their butter dish called me poor. I have never tried to put butter on something, been shown the place where the butter was, and still been unable to find the butter. Not once in almost fifty years. Until today.

I have melted into my chair since we got home, I just had Frosted Mini-Wheats for dinner, and I am now girding my loins for the third-to-last week of school. This will involve going to bed early and not much else.

Well, that was lovely

On By Luther M. SilerIn life3 Comments

The bride is the eldest daughter of my wife’s favorite cousin, and she and her sister are easily my favorites among my wife’s side of the family (who, for the record, are all perfectly fine people; I’ve gotten very lucky with my in-laws) but I was unfortunately unsuccessful in my attempts to encourage either chicanery or shenanigans. She’s marrying into a family that is substantially more religious than anyone on our side, and I am the least religious of our side by a significant margin, so I was at least hoping for some entertainment or at least horror stories out of that, but it didn’t happen– the church was lovely, the reception was gorgeous, the pastor seemed to be a perfectly fine fellow, and I really didn’t feel like the experience as a whole was any more Jesusy than any other wedding I’ve been to, so all good there as well. The wedding was even short! Twenty minutes, in and out.

That said, they put out a Bible next to the guest book, and asked everyone to pick their favorite verse and sign next to it, and … well … never ask an atheist with graduate degrees in Hebrew Bible to pick his favorite Bible verse.

(She will think this is hilarious. I mentioned to her at one point that I had briefly considered flipping her and her mother off as they officially walked into the church– we sat in the back and were the first people she saw when they walked in, and she and I locked eyes for a moment– and she laughed and told me I should have done it.)

They also did a neat thing where they put a card on each of the tables at the reception and asked the guests to give them advice, with each card to be read on the anniversary corresponding to the table number. Ours was table 7, so they will read our card on their 7th anniversary. I did not write that I hope they enjoyed my funeral, which was my first thought, since there is no way 2035 is even a real year.(*)

At any rate, we are back in our hotel room right now, a room which somehow is sporting four queen-sized beds for the three of us, and in accordance with prophecy and our most ancient and revered familial traditions, none of us have spoken a word since we got back. I’m going to read for a while and go to bed, since there’s a family breakfast in the morning and I will need to restore needed energy for further socialization.

(*) Not only is it not a real year, it’s not seven years from now. Shut up, I’m tired.

Fair warning

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

Coming home and dying on Fridays seems to have been a thing lately, and indeed, that’s what I did tonight, and we are going to be at a wedding out of town tomorrow night, so don’t expect much more than a hotel picture unless I can con the bride into something vaguely compromising. Luckily, I don’t have a lot of planning to do for Monday, because I suspect once we get back on Sunday all three of us are going to collapse into separate rooms and not speak again for a while.

Still no!

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

The Task remains incomplete, mostly because we devoted the evening to getting other tasks completed, among which: purchasing new glasses for the boy and I (I am about to, for the first time since I was a child, transition to plastic frames) and a new graduation suit for the boy. Didn’t get home until 8, and I have been diligently pecking away but it’s not done yet. Maybe we’ll double-post tomorrow, we’ll see.