The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
On the one hand, I got neither of the two jobs I interviewed for last week. I really, really thought I was done with this, guys. Hearing that I didn’t get called back for one of them because the boss thought I was probably smarter than her was just the icing on the cake.
On the other hand, the wife has taken the day off and I get to go see this in a bit:
So… will there be a second post later today? Probably.
Team Iron Man, btw.
Well, the A to Z challenge is over. I finished it, which shouldn’t surprise anyone as the last day I missed a post was in December of 2014. So getting through April wasn’t that difficult of a job.
That said, I did it wrong. A to Z is supposed to be about meeting people and interacting with other blogs, and I failed to do any of that. I got my little posts done and had them pop first thing in the morning and let them serve as an excuse to not do a whole damn lot of other writing or exploring new blogs, which is not what the month was supposed to be about. It also didn’t help with sales any. Sales in general lately have been miserable, and that’s basically entirely on me; I’ve not been marketing smartly– hell, I’ve not been marketing at all, basically, short of some passive links on the website. My last few sales went unadvertised because I didn’t feel like pushing them. So no surprise when they don’t result in untold riches and massive fame.
Let’s see, what else? I had two interviews for two different jobs in the last week or so that I’m hoping to hear back from soon. Hoping to get back on the horse and get some fiction done this week, too. Now that it’s May I can officially say that I’ve been looking for a new job for a year, so I’m well beyond the point where I’m tired of it. Hell, I’m tired of saying I’m tired of it. I’m sure y’all are tired of hearing about it. So, c’mon, two jobs. Hire my ass.
And the primary is tomorrow. Turns out I haven’t voted early like I usually do and it’s unlikely that I’ll get out early and do it today. We’ll see if I get a sticker tomorrow. I never get a damn sticker.
My car is a 2001 Ford Escape with just over 150,000 miles on it. I got it when I traded in my beloved Toyota Yaris (shut up, it was the perfect city car) for something with a backseat big enough to put a car seat into. I literally walked into the dealership with one car and walked out with another; the Yaris was paid off and we did an even swap off the lot. I traded a relatively new vehicle for a much bigger, older one.
Calling it a hooptie is probably overstating things. It actually runs pretty damn well for its age; there’s an oil leak deep in the engine where it’s not worth the money to fix, and the brake lines chose a surprisingly convenient (that’s not a typo) time to blow a couple of years ago, but it’s done well for a car that is itself actually old enough to drive.
The running boards were rusted out enough that several months ago I tore them off the car barehanded. For the last little while, then, these ugly, rusty, sharp brackets have been hanging off of the sides of the car where the boards used to be attached. I finally got around to trying to remove them myself last week and my ratchet sheared off on the first bolt, so today I took it in and had professionals remove them. My car looks 50% less garbage now than it did this morning, which is nice.
There was a television in the waiting room, which made the experience way more surreal than it ought to have been. First of all, I’m so glad that the primary is just a few days away and that our usual television-watching methods don’t involve commercials, because holy shit does Ted Cruz have a lot of commercials. And he’s simultaneously running against Trump and Clinton, which is kind of hilarious. There was one Trump commercial and what seemed like a hundred Cruz commercials during the hour or so I was waiting.
The actual program being shown was the Today Show. The Today Show was celebrating 90s hiphop for some reason. Either that or I took some very serious drugs this morning before dropping my son off before school and then forgot I did it, which… might be possible? I guess? I brought a book, and was buried in it when the first verse of Ice Ice Baby broke into my brain, and I looked up to see Vanilla Ice dancing on a stage with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. And the word live was up in the corner.
I thought, for a moment, that I was either hallucinating or had gone back in time. Only the crowd, filled with old white people, managed to convince me that the body shop hadn’t warped back to 1993.
A performance by Salt n’ Pepa followed, which was also weird, as I could have sworn that at least one of them had sworn off rap forever. Kid n’ Play were interviewed. Fucking Kid n’ Play.
This is why I never leave the house, guys.
Okay.
I’m going to have a productive day today, people. If it kills me. I have a job interview in half an hour, and once that’s done I have a literal list of projects from which to choose from, and I’m gonna bloody well get to as many of them as I can before I have to go collect the boy from school this afternoon. Today will be productive.
You hear me, world?
Productive.
Getting stuff done.
Yeah.
If we were having coffee, it would be in near-silence, Prince playing in the background, enjoying this lovely spring Sunday morning.
Some days it’s okay not to talk too much.
Sat in a hot, stuffy, way-too-small room within punching distance of a guy with white power tattoos for an hour and fifteen minutes only to be ushered into the courtroom and told that the defendant in the case we were there for, a “high-level felony” that would likely have required a fairly lengthy trial, had just accepted a plea bargain. Thanks for your service! No more jury duty for two years! Go home!
I’ll admit– with my wife out of town, this was literally-no-exaggeration the worst week of the year for me to get called for jury duty, and navigating getting the boy to and from school and getting her picked up (not to mention a prescheduled major appliance delivery tomorrow) and a few other things was a huge pain in the ass that inconvenienced my parents as well as me, but I’m still a bit disappointed. Even with all that going on, though, at least the trial would probably have been interesting. That said, I got out of it the best way possible, without having to stage a rant about the unjust criminal justice system or begging that I just don’t have time to be an American this week or anything like that. So I’ll call it a dodged bullet for the moment, and maybe if I do get called again in the next two years I won’t actually use my get-out-of-jury-duty-free pass. We’ll see.
So. What shall I do with my suddenly free day? Ah, there you are, Dark Souls III, I’ve been looking for you.
Okay.
The boy’s at school, for the first time in two weeks. My wife is in Boston. I actually have the day to myself to accomplish my own aims for the first time in a while. I have, so far today, managed to get to the pharmacy and pick up some medication. That’s actually bragging! That counts as a thing!
I have at least 10,000 other things to do, though, especially when we consider that I potentially have jury duty tomorrow, and who knows how long that could last. Trials sometimes take a long time, right? This means that there are a number of things that I really ought to do my damnedest to get done today since who knows if I’ll be able to get them done during the day at any other point this week.
Then there’s that whole “write fiction” thing I used to do.
And I haven’t been to the pool in two weeks, because of the aforementioned boy’s Spring Break. I maybe ought to start doing that again soon.
So naturally I’ve spent the morning glassily staring off into space, idly websurfing, and trying to talk myself out of a barnburning politics post that probably is better put off until after New York votes on the 19th.
I thought about trying to see if anyone had streamed a playthrough of Dark Souls III, which might prevent me from having to buy it and then not playing it. That’s what has counted as ambition so far today.
Good morning, Internet.
If we were having coffee, I’d… yeah. Coffee would probably be good, 1:30 in the afternoon be damned. I’ve kinda got a headache. Caffeine may well be helpful.
I slept in an empty house last night for the first time in over four and a half years; since the night after the boy was born, I think. My wife is in Boston on bidness, and because she left so late last night the boy spent the night at Grandma and Grandpa’s house. So once I got home after dropping her off, I was alone in the house. She’ll be back on Wednesday; this will be the first time I’ve been a single parent for more than a few hours at a time since the boy was born. I’ve left home a bunch of times, but she doesn’t travel often. I’m not griping– I’m a grown-ass man and I’m perfectly capable of taking care of my son for three whole days while my wife is gone– but it was still weird to be alone in the house last night. I’ve officially survived the boy’s Spring Break, and have to manage to get him up and off to school on time tomorrow. Now, that’s usually my job, so it’s not like it’s a new thing, but it’ll be interesting to see how much of a coma he’ll be in when I get him up at “go to school” time and not “Spring Break” time.
I might ask you if you’ve ever had jury duty before. That’s on the agenda for Tuesday, and who knows how many days after that depending on when the trial is, whether I’m selected, and how long it goes. I’ve gotten the letter before but I’ve never actually made it into the courtroom. I’m actually looking forward to the opportunity since I’ve never done it before, but it could have had slightly better timing– in addition to my wife needing to be picked up on Wednesday, we’re having a new washer and dryer delivered, so I’m going to have to do some fancy footwork to schedule everything if I’m going to be in court all day without access to my phone.
Hoping to have some good news on the job front this week too. I’ve applied for several positions in the last several days that are in the “You have no reason not to call me about this” category, so hopefully at least one or two of them will actually come through. And that’s not counting the “work for the devil” job that I mentioned earlier this week, which I think I’m going to have to decline for a variety of reasons, some of which are better than others. Hopefully it won’t turn out to be a mistake. I’m tired of saying no to jobs; I know I’m not actually being a prima donna about what I do next but I’m starting to feel like one anyway.
But yeah. More coffee; let’s make this headache go away. How’re you?
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