The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
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 listened to “Fuck Dying” by Ice Cube four times on the way home from work tonight. This is actually a good thing and indicates a certain amount of nah, world, you can’t touch me tonight.
It’s been a week of short-ass posts, I know, but there’s a lot going on tomorrow, assuming I’m able to keep my momentum up.
In the meantime, and not for the first time:
I absolutely had to listen to this tonight on the way home, but it really isn’t indicative of my day. Nonetheless:
Have some music.
Today was the following: 1) A Friday; 2) Valentine’s Day; 3) A dress-down day; 4) a full moon; 5) the day before a three-day weekend. Today had no right to be anything other than a god damn disaster. And yet it was the second of two uncommonly good days. A few highlights of the last 48 hours and a few other random things that I feel like talking about:
Three day weekend, so I’m planning on spending tomorrow alternately grading and writing; expect a thousand blog posts and hopefully a few thousand words of fiction, which you probably won’t see here.
How’re y’all?
It actually wasn’t a bad day at all; I just really wanted to use that picture. I have officially survived the first day back without, really, anything of note to gripe about; anytime I get through a day with no disciplinary intervention more serious than having to swap a couple of seats, it was a good day.
Sadly, I had to watch my third and fourth hour class pull their “We’re brainless!” move, which is absolutely my favorite thing as a teacher; we got through the first class period okay and then I just-about-literally watched their brains leak out of their headholes as we moved from basic geometry (areas of circles, triangles, rectangles, parallelograms, and trapezoids) to composite shapes. Composite shapes are, just for example, an arrow or “house” shape, where there’s a triangle sitting on top of a square or rectangle, or an L shape composed of two rectangles. The idea, basically, is that the kids take basic planar geometry and extend it by recognizing simpler shapes inside of a complex one and know to add them together, or sometimes subtract out a shape that is designated as a “hole,” along with sometimes having to reason out what the length of an initially unknown side is.
My kids– especially my special ed ones– are generally not very good at this, and they’re sure as hell not going to be good at it on the first day back from winter break, and they’re surer as hell not going to be good at it when the first day back from winter break is the first day I cover the material. But third and fourth hour, particularly, were playing the Moron Game, where we pretend that we don’t understand shit that we literally just did three minutes ago, and where we can’t find an answer that is on the board and I’m pointing at, because we don’t want to think and we think if we filibuster long enough the teacher will give up and call on someone else.
This strategy never, ever, ever works on me– believe it or not, after twelve goddamn years of working with recalcitrant middle schoolers I can tell the difference between a kid who legitimately doesn’t understand what I’m talking about and a kid who is being lazy. It’s a real good way to get my dander up if dander is what you’re looking for, though; the good news is that they pulled it during the ten minutes before lunch and managed to pull their shit together before they came back into my room. So, yeah. If tomorrow is as good as today I’ll call the week a win, I think.
Sidenote: On the “more good news” front: You can imagine that demolishing my bathroom created a lot of garbage last week, and there was more than a bit of negotiation with the city over how said garbage was to be packaged and hauled away from my house, negotiations that got a bit more complicated once the blizzard destroyed the ability of streets & san to actually get around to everyone in a timely fashion. There are a lot of things about my town that I’m not terribly fond of, but I’m happy to report that other than one board with a bunch of nails in it that I was thinking about keeping for zombie duty in case of TEOTWAWKI every last scrap of drywall and tile disappeared from my driveway this morning. Yay!
I believe I’ve survived.
Ahhhhhhhh.
I keep almost writing a music post and then not doing it; I’d like to pretend that I don’t know why, but the simple fact is that I don’t have the vaguest idea how to write music reviews. Despite that, I still write music reviews from time to time; they’re just bad music reviews. When I read them, I never have any idea what the hell the writer is talking about and half the time I feel like I’m reading word salad. I also can’t begin a music review without that disclaimer– I can review movies and books and food and other things coherently, but I always feel like I ought to begin any piece about music with an apology.
I’ve downloaded four new albums in the last couple of months. I even bought one of the four on CD as a backup copy– yeah, the physical version is the backup now. They are: Pearl Jam’s Lightning Bolt, Eminem’s The Marshall Mathers LP 2, Latyrx’s The Second Album, and… uh… speaking of things I always apologize for, avrillavigne’snewCDwhichsheselftitledsoit’scalledAvrilLavigneSHUTUPDON’TJUDGEME.
*Cough.*
Yeah. I have all seven of her albums (and I live in a world where Avril Lavigne has seven albums, Jesus, what the hell?) and I have felt dirty while buying each and every one of them. I don’t care, fuck you; I’m gonna keep buying them until she’s old. Ha!
The really scary part is that her new album may be my favorite of hers, or at least it’s the perfect antidote to spending several days trying to listen to Eminem’s new… thing. It’s thoroughly poppy and fun, even the bits where she brings in in Marilyn Manson and tries to be all… I don’t know, not cute, which Christ you can’t have a Marilyn Manson cameo on an album with a song called Hello Kitty where you spend most of it yapping in Japanese. Or something, hell, that might not be Japanese, I really have no idea. But fuck it, it’s fun, that’s the point. There’s a song on it called “Bitchin’ Summer” and the damn album was released in November. Gimme a break.
Eminem’s new album is not any fun, and in fact is probably the most relentlessly angry thing he’s ever released. There are still bits where he blows away any other rapper working today with his lyrical skills, but… God, the thing is so damn long and so damn pissed off that I just can’t deal with it. I’m sticking with my initial assessment, which is that it’s exactly like some horrifying hybrid of mid-197os The Who and Pink Floyd released something and decided to call it a concept rap opera, which kind of feels like I’m making shit up and sticking words together but I swear that it makes sense in my head. Also: that’s not a recommendation, in case you’re not sure. The thing is interesting in the sense that it’s so consistently unlistenable, and it’s not unlistenable because it’s bad, it’s unlistenable because Eminem made a conscious decision as an artist to make an album that no one anywhere could ever be happy while listening to, but without releasing an awesome piss-off-fuck-the-world album like, say, Rage Against the Machine or Ice Cube or the fucking Ramones used to be so good at. Which is an achievement of sorts. But I don’t want to listen to the damn thing ever again.
The new Latyrx is… well, Latyrx, which is always a recommendation. It’s deeply weird and experimental too, but in a much better way. I don’t have a whole lot to say about it right now because honestly I haven’t digested this album yet; the time I’ve spent trying to wrap my head around Eminem’s bullshit has taken away from The Second Album‘s richly deserved braincycles.
And you should already own the new Pearl Jam album because it’s a fucking Pearl Jam album and Pearl Jam is the greatest band on Earth. This one’s kind of weird too, though; it’s their first album with a title track, which I kinda think ought to be significant even though I can’t quite elucidate how, and there are a bunch of tracks that don’t really sound like Pearl Jam (Let the Records Play and Getaway and maybe a couple of others); the band’s clearly still pushing themselves. It’s not my favorite album by them (Vitalogy) but it’s got some great tracks on it– Sirens, Yellow Moon, Future Days, and Mind Your Manners, even though MYM took a while to grow on me. I need to memorize more of it so I can sing along; I can’t ever finalize my opinion of a Pearl Jam album until I can sing along with at least half of it.
There’s a reason I’m not talking about work much today, by the way. Maybe tomorrow.
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