Tag: mental-health

Down, down, to Goblin town

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

There’s this weird thing going on with my incoming students where a ton of them have the same last names as people I either went to high school with or was otherwise friends with as a kid. I actually have never independently known a kid’s parents, or if I did I never had to have any contact with them.

Maybe?

That’s true, I think. Definitely never had to talk to any of them. Maybe I had one guy’s nephew, but he definitely never came to PTCs. At any rate, I’ve done a fair amount of cyberstalking this week and so far I haven’t uncovered any connections of any of these kids to anyone I know; that most likely means that there’s no relation, as none of the names are terribly unique, but I suppose I could have some distant cousins or something. I did find out that one of my mom’s oldest friends died at the end of April from breast cancer, and I’m in this weird place where I’m not actually surprised that the family didn’t get ahold of my brother or I, not least because I make it my mission in life to make myself hard to find on the internet (you can find my teaching license if you know my real name, but even that’s under a slightly unexpected combination of my name and initials), but also just because at this point I’m like a third-removed acquaintance of any of her kids and it’s just not reasonable to expect a call. I called her when Mom died, but I don’t think that necessarily transfers to them having to call me, y’know?

Anyway, point is, I’d have gone to the service. Which may actually not have happened yet, as the obituary says “at a later date.” Yeah, let me talk to you about putting “at a later date” in an obituary; it showed up in my mom’s and then Covid hit, and as of right now my mother has never had a funeral.

That, uh, isn’t quite where I meant this post to go, but sometimes the words do what they want.

Anyway, I’ve begun the annual Spending Money For My Classroom Unwisely spree, and there’s a surprisingly small box in my garage with a a vacuum-packed and possibly dehydrated Boneless Loveseat in it, and– amazingly, at my wife’s suggestion– I solved my desk chair conundrum by ordering a new desk chair for my office, with the plan to move the old one to my classroom once the new hotness shows up. I’m going to try to avoid ordering any new lighting this year, and I shouldn’t need any posters or anything, so hopefully these two big-ish purchases will be all I need this year.

(Teachers: don’t spend money on your classrooms. Don’t be like me. I make bad decisions.)

(The old chair is this chair, which I ordered a year before that post and I’ve now had for four and a half years, and if I took the time to clean the cat hair off of it, it would look brand fucking new despite me having spent at least an hour or two a day in it every day since I got it. So the new one is also a Secret Lab chair. They’re expensive, but fuck it; I’m clearly getting my money’s worth.)

(They also made my desk, which is this desk. I don’t seem to have ever reviewed it, but I love the desk too. These people own my soul.)

I finally beat Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 last night, and I’m trying to decide if I’m going to review it or not. I think I probably will do a full review, as the game’s failures are all of a very specific kind and I think it’s interesting. So maybe tomorrow.

GUESS WHAT HAPPENS TOMORROW

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Music, Politics1 Comment

I have been a huge fan of “Weird Al” Yankovic for my entire Goddamned life, and I will be seeing him in concert in Indianapolis tomorrow night, at the same venue I saw the Counting Crows at a couple of weeks ago. I would really appreciate it if the world would stop getting worse until the show is over. If the asteroid is coming, that’s fine, but don’t hit us until, like, 11:00 PM. The show should be over by then.

In other news, I’m really glad I’m going to be out of town tomorrow, because I keep getting into deeply stupid little spats online with deeply stupid people, and I need a fucking cleanse badly. I’m driving to Indy and back– my wife has the newer, nicer car at the moment, and so she has inherited long-distance driving responsibilities along with it– but I need to not be on my phone in the car, so I’m going to do the driving.

I was about to explain one of the spats, but Christ, you don’t need it. I was hoping to share some of the stupid with you so you could appreciate it from afar, but instead, I’m not going to make your world dumber. I’m a Goddamned saint.

In other other news, IU just cut my major, because the governor told them to, and I’ve spent a significant amount of my non-online time in the last 48 hours trying to decide how I’m going to handle it when they announce they’re building an ICE concentration camp in Elkhart. There was talk of one going in during the last time this pigfucker was in office, and it ended up not happening, but I’m pretty sure it’s inevitable now. This is gonna be the start of my supervillain arc, or at least my “tries to sabotage something, fails, and is arrested immediately” arc.

Mental note: delete that paragraph before doing anything.

So yeah. I hate it here. How are you?

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.