More CPAPpery

Luther M. Siler

So the geriatric snail that UPS assigned my new CPAP mask to finally completed his mission today, and my new “nasal pillows” mask has officially arrived. Good news and bad news! The good news is that my wife (I deserve no credit for this) figured out how to get the damned machine working; the bad news is that I’m an idiot. The problem? Was the fucking water reservoir, which wasn’t clicked in properly. The whole fucking time.

I checked that, by the way. Multiple fucking times. And I have to admit I’m a trifle pissed with my respiratory therapist, because once we had the reservoir snapped into place properly the entire machine became whisper quiet when before it was louder than both the fan and the air purifier in the room by a good amount. And my therapist, who commented on being able to hear it, didn’t realize that was a problem, or at least didn’t communicate that to me, where the knowledge could have done some good. So it turns out that both the new mask and the old mask work fine, so I just need to figure out which one I want to use. I thought the nasal pillows would be an easy choice, but … well, have you ever had air blown up your nose? Not, like, through a cannula or something, which is much smaller than your nostrils, but something that covers your nostrils to blow air up into them? My first thought upon putting the thing on was holy shit I can’t breathe, and I kind of forgot my mouth was there for a couple of moments, and while it’s more comfortable to wear I feel like the regular mask will be easier to sleep in. So we’re going to try that one tonight and swap back and forth for a while and see how it goes.

Four days to winter break. I can do this. Piece of cake.

In which I’m not there yet

Luther M. Siler

If you have never seen someone wearing a CPAP mask, be aware that it is impossible to overstate just how completely fucking ridiculous they look. Prince couldn’t look cool in one of these fucking things. Bowie couldn’t look cool in a CPAP mask. It’s just impossible, and it’s driven home by the fact that if you Google the masks you get a bunch of pictures of attractive people and models and they still look completely ridiculous– none of them are dressed for bed, and critically, none of them are giant, hairy fat men, which by my understanding are the main clients for these things, as our bodies are tired of us and thus try to strangle us in our sleep.

Anyway, you might be wondering why I haven’t given an update for the CPAPpery yet, and the reason is that I haven’t got one to give. I’ve got my machine, but the mask they sent me … isn’t working. At any size. It is absolutely impossible (I’ve said that a lot in this post already, but it remains true) to get the mask they sent me, at any size, to seal properly– my unit will work for no more than five to ten minutes before stopping because of a “major airflow leak” and tell me to reattach my hoses, which have never been detached and do not have any holes in them, nor are they attached improperly.

We’re trying a different mask of another style, one that is close to the diagram to the right but I think doesn’t feature the idiotic top-of-the-head air tube attachment, and I fully expect to find out when that gets here that there’s something wrong with my machine. Looking forward to it, even, because when you try three different versions of the same mask with three different people, two of whom do not have beards, and remain entirely unable to achieve a proper seal even once, it’s probably a sensor issue somewhere and not the mask’s fault.

I get the new masks on Thursday next week, supposedly, because they are apparently being sent by camel. I feel like given that the insurance company is already hassling me for “noncompliance with my therapy,” which I currently can’t do because my shit doesn’t work, and my respiratory therapist was supposedly going to take care of this exact problem, they maybe could have shipped the equipment faster. Maybe just, like, a guy, on foot. He could have gotten it here before next Thursday, I’m certain of that.

Anyway, if I ever get to attempt to sleep in one of these things, I’ll tell you all about it. It hasn’t happened yet.

Two unrelated things

Luther M. Siler

I’ve been thinking about an Iron Man video game lately. Now, to my knowledge, there’s not one currently in development; my point is there should be, and after the huge success of the Spider-Man and Miles Morales games, I would love to see Insomniac take a whack at it. I’m watching a playthrough of the new Guardians of the Galaxy game (which I don’t currently intend to play) as well and that seems to have captured pretty well what a team-based video game ought to be.

What’s got me excited is the prospect of customizability. Imagine a game where you’re constantly unlocking or finding or inventing (call it what you want) new modes and upgrades and powers for your armor, and then give you the ability to swap those pieces out at will, then skin everything however you like so that you can use whatever classic Iron Man colors you want, from the classic red and gold to the Silver Centurion to the short-lived-but-gorgeous black and gold suit to the Superior Iron Man white suit. Ideally you’d end up with something similar to Ghost of Tsushima where there are tons of reason why you might swap out a suit or a few pieces for a specific purpose. I loved how that game never let you get comfortable with a suit of armor; some would be better for stealth, some were straight-up dueling armors, some were more suited for archery and so on. And if the character is Iron Man, someone who could literally be fighting in dozens of different environments? C’mon.

There has not, to my knowledge, been a really good game yet featuring a character who can fly. The Spider-Man games have come the closest (and yes, I have played the Xbox 360 Iron Man game from 2008) and obviously Spider-Man doesn’t actually fly but they nailed the way he moves. C’mon, y’all, make this game happen so I can play it for a thousand years.

On the way home from my dad’s house this evening it crossed my mind that I’ve been stuck at 42 followers for my YouTube channel for a minute now. I am putting a lot of work into this channel, and (and this is not just me, for the record) it is significantly more difficult to pick up followers on YouTube than any other form of social media I’m aware of, and frankly right now the only strategy I have is “make good content and wait for people to find it,” which … well, that’s certainly not a bad strategy, but what it also isn’t is fast. Ironically, I realized just after getting home that that elusive 43rd follower had found me– and, as it happens, he’d left his followers open, so I could see who he was. Typically YouTubers keep their follow lists private, so most of the time when someone follows you only know because the little number ticks up by one and you don’t get any information about who’s followed you.

And he appears to be a middle-school-aged black kid, which immediately brought up the obvious question of whether he was one of my students. And here’s the fascinating bit– I don’t think he is, but I’m not 100% sure despite the fact that he’s posted a couple of videos where his face is visible. Why am I not sure? Because I don’t really know what most of my current students look like, since they wear masks all the fucking time. Especially given how fast these kids’ faces change at this age, if the video I’m looking at is more than six months or so old it’s entirely possible that he’s one of mine and I just don’t recognize him.

Fucked-up, that.

On returning to normalcy

Luther M. Siler1 Comment

I feel like I should already know why you get so many pictures of Warren G. Harding if you Google Image Search the word “normalcy,” or at least that I should be able to figure it out if I apply some thought to it, but I’m not going to do that. This post could use some weird, frankly, and that picture is funnier if I don’t know why it came up.

One of my oldest friends passed through town on Friday, and we hung out for a while and chatted on the back porch; the topic of masking did not come up. Yesterday we put the pool up; it’ll likely be a week before we can take a proper swim in it, judging from the weather report, but it’s full already somehow and ready to go, and my wife got to say the words “I’m going to go buy sand and acid” to me earlier today and that was fun for both of us. I mowed the front lawn today (no cicadas yet, but I’m watching) and did some weed whacking and other various Adult Chores, and I was done with my grading within two hours of getting up.

It has, by any account, been a Productive Weekend. I still have some school stuff to do after dinner, but there should be plenty of time for guilt-free video gaming tonight.

I also filled the car up with gas, which is only significant insofar as I needed to break a $20, so I went into the gas station to buy a lemonade, and realized when I was almost inside that I didn’t have a mask on. I shrugged and went in anyway; the county mask ordinance has been cancelled and a two-minute in-and-out at the gas station is about as safe as an indoor interaction can possibly be. If someone had said something to me, I’d have gone and gotten a mask, but no one did. This is the first time I’ve purchased something in a store without some sort of face covering on in well over a year.

(I even did it without any particular self-recrimination about looking exactly like the kind of guy who refuses to wear a mask rather than a vaccinated person who briefly forgot, but I’m blogging about it fifteen minutes later, so maybe I don’t get to pat myself on the back about that one.)

In keeping with the theme of this year, which had about six “first days of school,” this Wednesday represents the first Last Day of School; this year will feature at least three, if not four. My students have their 8th Grade recognition ceremony on Wednesday and are not expected to return to the building afterwards. Friday is the original Last Day of School for everyone else, and since there was a day of school cancelled in January because the entire city lost power, June 1, which is the Tuesday after Memorial Day, is the technical Last Day of School, a day after a three-day weekend where I expect no students at all to attend. Then there’s my Last Day of School, which is June 2, and then I’m off until August, barring a day or so a week where I’ll have various responsibilities that can be done from home and studying for this math test from Hell I have to take sometime.

Bring it on.

On masking up

Luther M. Siler2 Comments

Some good news: the mask panic attacks, after four days at school where I had to have one on for hours, appear to be subsiding. I have ended up landing on this one as my preferred mask, and the only complaint I have about it is that it rides up on my eyes a little more than I’d like it to, so I’m probably touching it and adjusting it more than I would like to.

I’ve been thinking more lately about what it’s going to mean to be “done” with Covid. It’s been made pretty clear that there’s a certain subset of the population who are going to have to be dragged kicking and screaming into vaccination, and to the best of my knowledge there is as of yet no shot that has been approved for use with middle school kids. So masking up at school is likely to remain a thing for a fair bit of time longer than masking up in general is going to be, especially since I live in a red state.

Thing is, it’s not like the masks are doing my kids any good, because as I suspected they cannot be convinced to wear them properly. Four days of in-person instruction in, I have reminded kids to cover their noses or their mouths with their masks approximately 123,425,208 times. And I’m probably still not doing it as often as I should, because there is literally someone without their mask on properly in my classroom 100% of the time, even with our current seriously-reduced number of students. I think I’ve been pretty consistent about this from the beginning: I hate wearing a mask, and wearing a mask genuinely fucks with me, but I’m going to do it anyway for as long as it’s necessary to do it. But hell if it’s not difficult to conclude that it’s safest for me to keep wearing one at work when I’m fully vaccinated and the kids around me are wearing theirs in a way that is literally not doing any good at all.

In general, I’m trying to be attentive to how much of my current behavior is reasonable and how much of it is basically quarantine-driven paranoia and, frankly, claustrophobia. I think it’s reasonable at this point to say that if you’re outside, unless you’re having a conversation in close quarters, you’re probably all good, and even in the building I tend to not put my mask on until I actually see another human being– if I can make it from my car to my classroom without wearing it, and frequently I can, I don’t put it on. But how long is it going to be until I feel okay going into a restaurant again? Like, I don’t even really have a guideline for what might make me decide “okay, this is all right now.” I got invited out for a drink with a couple of other teachers after work on Friday and turned it down. I’ve turned down multiple other such invitations over the course of the year. And I don’t even know what the plan is for when I might decide that sort of thing is okay again.

Actually, I do know one thing that would help: I don’t think there’s a solid consensus yet on whether vaccinated people can spread the virus easily. I know I’m not immune to catching Covid, it’s mostly just that if I do get it it is much, much more likely to be a minor case. But that doesn’t mean I can’t spread it to my father-in-law if I end up asymptomatic, and I’d prefer not to spread it to any strangers, either. But, like, if I spend the next six or seven weeks in a poorly-ventilated classroom and in near-constant contact with middle school kids who aren’t wearing their masks right (because, again, none of them wear their masks right) and don’t catch it, I feel like that’s pretty good evidence that I can at least, like, go to the store without having to wear one. Sitting in a restaurant? I dunno. Going into the gas station to buy a candy bar and pay for my gas and leave? When there’s plexiglass between me and the dude behind the counter? Is that okay?

I dunno. I’m kind of talking in circles about that, but that’s because I’m thinking in circles about it too. I need the people who are making this a political issue to walk into the ocean so that the rest of us can come up with a reasonable set of standards for when we let our guard down a little bit, and if they’re not going to walk into the ocean, the least we should be doing is employing government snipers with dart guns to vaccinate these idiots so they can stop fucking things up for the rest of us.

Biden should put that in the jobs plan, as a matter of fact.