Tag: idiocy

Two quick stories

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, life, TeachingLeave a comment

I went to work today! I still feel like butt.

QUICK STORY 1 of 2: I walked to Bree! Sort of. Every so often an ad for this app called The Conqueror will scroll across some social media or another, and I finally decided to bite and try the first Lord of the Rings challenge they offer. The idea isn’t super complicated: walk 145 miles, over whatever time frame you personally desire. You get access to an app that helps you keep track of your walking and after 145 miles they send you a medal that says you walked from the Shire to Bree. There’s a little miniature ring inside that envelope on the back of the medal. There are several more of these, of varying lengths; the next one takes me to Rivendell, and eventually all the way to Mordor itself. There’s also one that lets you follow Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas’ road instead, or you can do all of them. I just signed up for the one at first, because there’s a cost to it and I wanted to make sure the medal felt like it wasn’t a piece of junk, and it’s not. It’s a decent little display piece, and it’ll look even cooler with seven friends on it. So: off to Rivendell!

QUICK STORY 2 of 2: I had my first real referral of the year today, for something I’ve never written a kid up for before: starting a fire in class! With a lighter he’d managed to kludge together by stripping some wires on a vape! I would be impressed with his ingenuity if it wasn’t being used in the pursuit of such sheer stupidity. He rolled up a piece of paper into what looked like a joint and lit that, so it wasn’t a big fire, but as it turns out that’s not an especially salient detail when you set a fire in a school. Even small ones are a problem! You’re not supposed to do that.

NOT A STORY BUT I’M INCLUDING IT! I’m reading this book right now, and this is easily the prettiest author signature I’ve ever seen:

I really want to see the fountain pen she used. That had to be a fountain pen.

Scammers make no sense at all

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, lifeLeave a comment

I always have the weird urge to fuck with people whenever I get a wrong number text message, and this was waiting for me when I got out of the shower earlier today. I almost responded with the literally true “No, I just got out of the shower” to that first message, and then decided I wasn’t in the mood to troll a stranger and just played it straight, expecting either no response or a quick apology and then radio silence. Instead, I got this interaction, which just gets weirder with every message.

Why did you send Emma a selfie of you already at the gym?

Why did you ask me to confirm I wasn’t Emma, when I’d already told you twice? Was there a chance that I was going to turn out to be wrong, and realize I had been Emma all along?

What’s the deal with “work” coming through as “wr ok” both times? And “numbver” twice?

And I made sure to include the timestamps on the rest of the messages, because the timing was so weird. There’s an hour between “How should I address you?” and “You haven’t answered my question,” and then another 40 minutes between that and Emma showing up, nearly two hours after the original message. Nothing about this interaction feels normal at all, which makes me feel like it has to be a prelude to a scam, but this is not the first time that I’ve felt like I was on the path to being scammed by someone and, bewilderingly, never actually got to the part where the scamming happened.

(Follow-up to that story: I did eventually get a response from the real editor on LinkedIn confirming that no, that message was not from her, and I got a whole different message from a different scammer a few weeks later which I replied to with total credulity, hoping something fun would happen. No response to that one either.)

Anyway, I dunno. Maybe Mia’s older than she looks and English isn’t her first language and she’s maybe friendlier than she ought to be and that’s why everything feels so off, but I kept waiting for the part where she hits me up for $500 for a picture of her tits or something, and instead it just sorta trailed off. If anybody has a good idea about what the hell was going on here, or wants to try to convince me that this was a normal interaction that I’m reading too much into, feel free.

I wanna be sedated

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

I have been in a miserable, hateful mood all day today, I forgot my coffee this morning before leaving for work, and I had a dream last night that has knocked me so thoroughly out of sorts that I’m genuinely starting to think I need to look into a therapist. I have been a fucking mess for the entire day, to the point where one of my third hour kids noticed. The last time I tried talking to a therapist was quite a while ago and didn’t really do me any good, but there’s probably more than one out there, right? Maybe I’ll try one of the others.

On frugality

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, life1 Comment

Just got back from an impromptu date night with my wife, which ended up, as I suspect many middle-aged date nights have, at Costco.

(Trigger warning: mild bragging, or at least a failure of humility)

The first thing you see when you walk into a Costco, of course, is the giant TVs. None of us really watch television, to be honest, and what TV is watched is generally done on a tablet; the TVs that are in the house are there for video games. But we glanced at the $2000 98″ set at the door and, as happens sometimes when encountering high-end electronics, I took a minute to reflect on how much better off we are now than when we got married.

“I could impulse-buy that TV,” I said. “Right now. Absolutely nothing bad would happen. We wouldn’t have to cancel anything or even cut back on anything. Just, fuck it, and buy a $2000 TV.” She laughed, we did not impulse-buy a $2000 TV, and we kept on walking. And, like, okay, there was no chance that we were buying a TV, but if we did, the actual problem with it would be where to put it, and not the cost.

Less than a minute later we walked past the saddest man in the world, some poor bastard who was trying to sell whole-house generators to random Costco people walking by. He greeted me, I said no as politely as I could, and then my wife surprised both of us by stopping and asking him what the basement price was to acquire such a thing. The hilarious thing was that it was completely obvious that no one had asked him anything during the time that he was there, as he took way too long to come up with an answer, which was ten thousand dollars, and then went straight into complaining about how two years ago it would have been five thousand dollars, and it was crazy how expensive his product that he was trying to sell us had gotten.

After we were done talking to him, my wife reminded me that we do, in fact, talk about having a generator installed every time our power goes out, which generally happens about once a year. So, okay. Ten grand, if we wanted to do that. Put that in the back pocket for now, though.

A few minutes later we were in the produce aisle, and I discovered they sold organic dates. The last time I had dates of any variety was in Israel, nearly thirty years ago. I would like to eat a date, I thought to myself, trying to ignore the fact that because we were in Costco the only real option would be to buy many dates and not just the one or two that would probably satisfy me, and then looked at the cost. $10, basically, for, I dunno, a couple of pounds of dates.

And I, the same dude who had just discussed impulse-buying a 98″ TV and had just had a serious conversation about a $10,000 home generator system (likely more than that, because remember, $10K was this guy’s floor,) almost put them back because the notion of spending $10 on dates was more than I was willing to do.

We bought the container. I look forward to throwing 95% of them out in a week or so. Or maybe longer. Hell, I have no idea what the shelf-life of organic dates might be.

Well, that was no fun

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

In accordance with prophecy, the parents of Little Billy Who Only Just Wanted To Play Football were already in the office when I got to work this morning. LB did not play last night, but as his grades are now fixed he can play the last two games of the season … which is exactly what would have happened had they pulled none of their bullshit at all. IEP talk was shut down quickly and forcefully by the head of the special education department, who pointed out that a student failing a class is not, in fact, automatically a violation of an IEP. Oops!

And then I missed half my lunch and had to write my first three referrals of the year, none of which were for my own students or even my own grade level, and all three of which resulted in suspensions. I still haven’t written any for my own kids. I may very well make it through the first quarter. There’s only three weeks left!

That said, it left a bad enough taste in my mouth that I came home and killed yokai for a few hours, and now that it’s 8:00, and since the book I’m reading has nearly 1300 pages … well, it’s Kindle time in the Siler household. Because my wrists aren’t strong enough to hold a 1300-page book for very long. This is clearly what ebooks were made for.

Stupid brain is stupid

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy3 Comments

I called in today, after getting … maybe three hours of sleep last night? I woke up around 2:00 in the morning to take a piss. Not unusual; this happens most nights. Most nights I take care of business, put my CPAP mask on, and go right the fuck back to sleep. But every so often my brain decides that I would be more comfortable if I left the mask off and tried to sleep on my stomach. And last night the mask was occasionally singing me the song of its people, a sign that I’ve let it go a little too long without cleaning the air holes or just replacing the mask, and I succumbed to this stupid, stupid instinct.

I need it to be clear: I will always sleep better with the mask on than the mask off, and there are no exceptions. I don’t know how I survived as long as I did without the CPAP mask. It is virtually impossible to get good rest without it unless I’m deathly ill, and what’s happening under those circumstances rarely counts as “good rest” anyway. My brain convincing me to try and sleep on my stomach without the mask is mental illness. There’s no other reasonable way to describe it.

What’s worse? You would think that after an hour of tossing and turning and being conscious of the fact that I’m not breathing correctly, I would put the mask back on? No. On these nights, I can never convince myself to put the mask back on. I’m always right about to fall asleep, and “waking up” (I’m already awake, and miserable) to put the mask on would be a bad idea.

It would not be a bad idea, it is in fact the only thing that will allow me to break the cycle and go the fuck back to sleep, and yet I don’t do it. Some nights I can pull this mess off and not be a disaster the next day. I could tell within minutes of “waking up” this morning that school was just not happening, and I was blathering and incoherent for most of the day.

It sucked and I hate my stupid broken brain and my stupid broken fat body.

I’m fighting somebody

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Reading5 Comments

These four Tana French books are a completed trilogy and a standalone novel, and you will never guess which one is the standalone novel, and I want to have a quick sit-down with whatever filthy jackanapes were involved in making cover decisions over at Viking.

Bookish braindump

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Reading2 Comments

You, uh, might have heard that Sarah J. Maas had a couple of announcements today.

I got a text from The Friend I Talk About Books With around 1:00 in the afternoon, which I can only assume was milliseconds after the titles and covers for ACOTAR 6 and 7 were released. I had to ignore said texts until I got home, at which point our conversation reminded me that I probably need to reread this whole fucking series before I read the new books, and I also very much need to wait for both of them to come out and then read both of them back-to-back. And apparently the spider on the cover of ACOFM is hinting to people that the Throne of Glass series, my favorite of Maas’ work, is being folded into the ACOTAR universe somehow?

Y’all, I don’t have time to reread ACOTAR, and I definitely don’t have time to reread ToG, which is 5,000 pages all on its own. I’ve got four more Wheel of Time books, probably right around 4K pages all by themselves. I’ve got four more Temeraire books. I have fourteen fucking Realm of the Elderlings books that I was going to dive into once I got WoT and Temeraire knocked out. I do not have time for this. I need y’all– and by y’all I mean every writer in the world, and yes, I’m looking directly at you, Adrian Tchaikovsky– to just … stop, for a while, while I get caught up. Either that or I need my job to agree to keep paying me for doing my job without me actually doing my job, so that I can just sit at home and read.

Anyway, I’m going to hit Publish on this and then go see how much of the history of the Iranian monarchy I’m reading right now I can get finished by bed. Tomorrow I’m going to tell my students to stfu and leave me alone because I have books to finish.

Christ.