Tag: mental-health

Summertime, I guess

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

Is that an AI photo? Or just edited to amplify the sundog a little bit?

Anyway, yeah, I guess I’m on summer vacation. I spent most of the day asleep– and sleeping hard, too, which probably shouldn’t surprise me but does anyway– and when I was awake I was mostly feeling like I was taking the day off for slightly illegitimate reasons, like I’d called in sick on a state testing day so I could go to the beach or something like that. Yesterday was as emotionally rough as I expected it to be– I can’t remember the last time I had this many kids crying at the end of the day, and I absolutely can’t remember ever struggling to keep my own shit straight, but I damn near lost it as the buses were pulling away. My favorite kid this year has a relative who works at the school, and I said something along the line of “Saying goodbye to <kid> was hard,” and somehow that was where my voice cracked. He, of course, immediately began vigorously making fun of me and I told him I’d deny anything he told her to my deathbed.

True fact, by the way: I genuinely cannot remember whether I just finished year 21 or 22. I think it was 22, but I would need to count to be sure and I haven’t taken the time yet. Granted, I honest-to-God forgot how old I was once, so this isn’t entirely out of character, but the thought that I’ve been teaching for so long that I no longer remember how long I’ve been teaching is kind of alarming.

I’ve got a couple of book reviews to throw at you, but I might be out of town tomorrow and it’s the end of the month anyway, so we’ll see what happened. My niece’s birthday party is supposed to be tomorrow but I just got a text that she and her older brother both have diarrhea, so who the hell knows what’s going on. Maybe I’ll double-post tomorrow, we’ll see.

Summer Projects mode, maybe

On By Luther M. SilerIn life5 Comments

I am nothing if not encouraging.

I have spent all day thinking of Decluttering, which is kind of a ludicrous term for me to use under any circumstances, but especially under these: I need to get rid of a lot of my shit so that I have room for more shit. I do not at all intend to lead a life of acquiring less shit, which would be the more sensible approach to … well, everything. Most of my ideas for this summer involve either getting rid of shit or clearing any of half a dozen different backlogs of unread books, unplayed video games, TV shows and movies I want to watch, and unbuilt Lego sets. The biggest need around the house, other than cleaning and organizing, is to fix the fence in the back yard that the tree fell on, which my wife is convinced we can do on our own. She has to catch me in the right mood to do it, but that’s at least imaginable.

Part of me really wants to review the book I posted about yesterday, but I don’t think I’m going to. Those of you who figured out what it was (and I apologize for being coy, but sometimes I don’t want a pan to show up on a Google search) may possibly have remembered that I reviewed the first book in the series and did not mention constant terrible writing. I kind of want to pick it back up and reread a couple of chapters to see if it has the same writing problems and I just was able to ignore them for some reason. I am interested to see if it had a different editor than the first book. If so, there are two more books and some novellas, and I really hope he had the original editor for all of those. We’ll see.

Anybody have big plans for Memorial Day? We do not, which is what I want; I need to create some substitute assignments (as in, they substitute for assignments I can’t print, not “I’m planning on needing a substitute”) for Tuesday and Wednesday and finish grading about an inch of final exams, but that and eating a couple of brats pretty much sum up my plans for the day. Let me know if you’ve got anything cool going on.

On my inner magpie, and other thoughts

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, Teaching1 Comment

So, um, these showed up today. They are hand-numbered, 41/199. When I die, my wife can sell them to pay for my funeral. They will make me happy every time I walk past my bookshelves for the rest of my life.

Have I read the books yet? Nope. Although now I kind of have to. We’ll make it a summer project.

Teachers complain a lot, right? The understatement of the decade, surely. Like, read the site for five minutes. Teachers complain a lot. But one thing I feel like doesn’t get discussed enough is how emotionally fucked up the end of the school year can be, and now that I’m down to the last three days I’m starting to really have to stare that in the face. This has, on the balance, not been a bad year– there have certainly been moments, there always are, but in the main it’s been a pretty good year. Top half, let’s say.

Some years aren’t all that bad– last year comes to mind. But this year there are a good half dozen kids who I really, really like, who I’ve grown pretty close to over the course of the year … and I get to see them three more times and that’s it. They’re gone. And because I teach 8th grade, it’s worse, because they’re not just no longer in my class, they’re gone entirely. Like, maybe I’ll see them when they do their grad walk in four years, but that barely counts? And even if they do stay in touch, and some of them do, of course, it’s not like this is the kind of relationship where I can drag somebody out to lunch or go see a movie or some shit like that. Like, not even in a “that’s kinda weird” sorta way! A “people are going to assume terrible crimes are happening!” sort of way!

I don’t want to commit crimes! I just think your kid is cool and I would like to keep them in my life after seeing them nearly every fucking day for a year.

Next Thursday is going to really suck, is what I’m saying.

Related, but not really: I had a parent email me about a concern over the final, which in and of itself is just fine, but in the middle of the message she threw in “as you know, he tried taking his life a little over a month ago,” and NO THE MERRY FUCK I DID NOT, MA’AM. I thought for a minute she had mentioned it and I had forgotten, somehow, and looked through every previous email I’ve gotten from her, and … NOPE. There very much was no message about it.

And, like, how do you respond to that? Do I just pretend she told me? I ended up not directly addressing it one way or another and answering the substance of the email, which feels … weirdly flippant, somehow? I feel like I’m yadda-yaddaing a suicide attempt, but I also really don’t want to correct her on it. I may contact our social worker and see if he knew about it, but that potentially opens up an entire different can of worms if he didn’t.

Mental note, don’t put the question in writing.

When the thing that fixes you breaks

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

I’ve complained about this a couple of times, but my CPAP has been making this godawful whining noise every time I inhale lately, and over the course of the night it gets louder and louder until I unplug the hose from the back of the thing and plug it back in, at which point the process repeats itself. I thought I had come up with a way to minimize if not fix it, but I’m fairly certain I got no more than half an hour of sleep last night, including when I gave up on sleeping in bed and went into the living room to my Comfy Chair to try and follow my body into taking a nap. Which didn’t work.

I don’t remember how I slept before I had this thing; it is entirely possible that I never actually did, but one way or another I can’t sleep without it now. So I finally gave up this morning and, after burning in my very last sick day for the year, because no one deserves me on half an hour of sleep, I figured out who I was supposed to call to talk about warranties and replacements and repairs and a bunch of other shit I didn’t really know anything about.

Turns out a “lightly used” reconditioned CPAP was only $150 and will be here tomorrow, so I went with that option. “Lightly used” means under a thousand hours; mine has nearly seven thousand hours of use, and it comes with a year warranty, so … yeah. I’m tasking my wife with waking me up in the morning, putting in earplugs, and taking a couple of Tylenol PM before going to bed tonight, so hopefully I can get enough sleep that I’m at least able to function tomorrow.

And if I can’t? Oh well. I’m going in anyway. There’s twelve days of school left. It’ll be fine.

Make it make sense

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

I was behind this … person … for a bit on the way home from work today, and the cognitive dissonance hurt so badly that I had to get a picture. You can, no doubt, see the “TEACH PEACE” sticker on the left there; that’s fine. The problem is the decal on the right, which, just in case you can’t quite parse it, is a Punisher skull, with an American flag overlaid on it, with the words “FUCK AROUND AND FIND OUT” around it. This image in red vinyl, basically. As an open endorsement of American fascism it’s not quite as overt as, say, a thin blue line cross, but it’s pretty fucked up! In general, any time you see someone idolizing the Punisher, that’s a bad person, and they are to be avoided (I’ve said this before: any police organization in particular that uses that logo needs to be dissolved, immediately) but combining it with “teach peace” is just fucking unhinged. The fact that it’s on a pickup truck is even weirder; that may be the only pickup truck on the planet with a “teach peace” sticker on it.

I can see someone already fixing their fingers to suggest that a married couple owns this truck and one of them picked one sticker and one picked the other; these people should not be married and they should also own separate cars. It’s unfair that they managed to cause me pain when all I was trying to do was get my ass home from work. I mean, the one who is married to the Punisher asshole is probably in pain every day, but I want them both to suffer.

Anyway, it’s April so I hate my job; there is no place in the world that is worse than a middle school in the spring, except that there is, and it’s a middle school during standardized testing during the spring. Unfortunately I have to go to that place every day, and tomorrow I get to be there from 7:30 in the morning until 8:00 at night, and then I have to go back on Friday morning for some fucking reason, so don’t expect much out of me tomorrow and whatever you get on Friday is going to be through a veil of barely repressed rage. It’s gonna be awesome for everybody, is what I’m saying.

Well that was fun

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

Jesus Christ, look at all the white people.

This is, technically, the last day of my Spring Break, as I’m not supposed to go to work on Saturday or Sunday anyway. So of course I have shit I need to do in the next couple of days to get ready for next week. I said before the week started that I didn’t want to do anything over my break, and holy shit did I succeed at that, as I didn’t even really succeed in doing the bits of nothing I wanted to do.

Which, whatever. It is quite obviously the height of privilege to get a week off and complain about it, so I’m at least going to have the dignity to not do it much. I did finish Hild last night, and I don’t really have anything to say about it that I didn’t say already– you want to read it if you have enough ability to concentrate to be able to read it, and I don’t, and as a result I can say that I appreciated the book but I didn’t enjoy it. I will not be bothering with the sequel, I think. I have a handful of other books I want to finish in the next couple of days before we go back to work; we’ll see how that goes. And since my wife is going to be back tomorrow I should probably spend some time cleaning.

(This is not to say that we lived like animals while she was gone; we didn’t, but still. I don’t want her to come home from a two-day drive and look around and think she needs to clean something.)

I was going to do all that today, but today was the Day of Unintentional Naps. My caffeine immunity is starting to become an actual joke; most people after two large cups of coffee in the morning are wide awake if not actively jittery; I woke up at 8, drank two large cups of coffee, and went back to bed. Then, after getting out of bed, I took a shower and fell asleep on the couch. I dunno what the hell my deal is lately.

Tomorrow, I will try to have something interesting to talk about.

In which I make a decision

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

…so, apparently I like my job?

I had a Moment this weekend, or perhaps a series of Moments, where a math job opened up at the boy’s school and I jumped on it faster than I’ve ever jumped on a job opportunity in my life. And then, once the cover letter was written and the resume was updated and everything was filled out and sent off, I immediately regretted it.

And that was … kinda weird? You’re telling me, brain, that I offer you a job with small class sizes and damn near universally kids who want to learn and whose parents are invested in their education and you … don’t want it? You’re supposed to kill people to get that job. I’ve been in the trenches for over two decades at this point! I deserve a job that no one would ever refer to using the word “trenches,” God damn it!

Now, because it’s my kid’s school, it’s kind of a weird situation, because in the “who do you know who works here” section on the application, I had to write “basically everyone,” because dude has been at this school since he was larval and that’s kind of what happens. And I emailed one person at the school and gave him a heads-up that I’d put in the application, because technically I used to be his boss and I thought it was at least a little possible that someone might go ask him about that if they put together that we were at the same school at the same time. And I very specifically did not tell two of the three people I put down as references, because no one ever calls references first and if I’m not taking the job I don’t need the drama at work about whether I’m leaving.

Anyway, yeah, several days in the row of anxiety, and do I really want this, and reminding myself that I really haven’t had a lot to complain about this year, and then the person I sent all the documentation in to emailed me back and she asked “are you sure about this,” because, in her words, their pay was “woefully” lower than what I’m currently making.

So, of course, I emailed her back and asked how woeful is woeful, because that word doesn’t really suggest a number to me if I’m being honest, and Glassdoor was being really unhelpful, and she got back to me.

Twenty five thousand dollar pay cut.

So, uh, yeah, I’m staying at my current school next year. That was a fun few days, though.

Here’s what I’ve got

On By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking1 Comment

I really ought to re-embrace the notion that I don’t have to post every single day, but I’m absurdly close to a year straight without missing a day and only, what, 2/3 of those have been bullshit? That’s a pretty good record, right? January and February have been exceptionally heinous, I know, but between being constantly sick and actually (don’t tell anyone) having a pretty damn good year at work, I’m both lower on good material than I normally am and less inclined to talk about it than I might be otherwise. The main things going on in my life right now are shit I actively don’t want to talk about here, which leaves book reviews and the occasional picture of a pile of fountain pens.

(The purple one on the right and the coffee-colored one in the middle are my current favorites. I am trying my best to not buy any more, because if I do, I’m going to start edging into more expensive ones. The most expensive pen there was $52. I caught myself eyeing one for five hundred dollars the other day and am uncomfortably close to pulling the trigger one that runs $150. I can’t do this.)

Anyway, speaking of video games (just pretend), I’ve been trying to put 9 Sols to bed but I’m completely stuck– I actually turned the difficulty down on a boss that I’m certain I could have beaten but I didn’t want to take the time, and now I can’t figure out where to go next. If I can’t figure it out tonight I’m gonna hit up a walkthrough. The game’s a lot of fun but I feel like it should have been a 25-hour game and right now I’m pushing 30 and I don’t know how much game there is left– at least two more bosses and who knows how much exploration. I have like four games on my PS5 I want to get to and another on the Xbox, believe it or not, and I can’t play any of them until I beat this one.