Still beat

On April 16, 2025 By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

Sorry to do this two days in a row, but last night my CPAP machine shit the bed on me, making a tiny, high-pitched noise every time I exhaled that proved completely impossible to ignore, and so I tried to go without it, because the noise it was making was keeping both of us from sleeping?

Yeah. I can’t go back. I got maybe twenty minutes of good sleep last night. Maybe.

I’m going to tear the thing apart, clean every bit of it, put it back together, replace every single part I have a spare for, and go to bed, and if it starts singing the song of its people at me again I might cry until I’m actually dead.

(That’s not me in the picture. Probably obvious, but still.)

1000 words, etc.

On May 9, 2017 By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized2 Comments

On 2016, six days later

On January 6, 2017January 6, 2017 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy7 Comments

Jerry Holkins over at Penny Arcade wrote this the other day, and it crystallized a couple of things for me:

screen-shot-2017-01-06-at-10-00-10-am

And… yeah. That’s about right. Not only was 2016 the worst year of my life, even before we take into account anything that took place outside of my immediate household, its nefarious and evil aspects spilled over into the end of 2015 and the end of 2017. At the end of 2015 I had a Health Event, ending up in the hospital twice. I was on medical leave for months and resigned at the beginning of 2016. I figured I’d be employed again within a month. Two, at the most.

It took six. And I haven’t had a weekend off since, and three days a week I work eleven-hour shifts, barely get to see my wife, and effectively don’t get to see my son at all. And my income is, well, we’ll say unstable.

I’ve sold one book (99 cents!) in the last two months and haven’t written a single word of fiction since July.

Oh, and my mother-in-law is in hospice and probably has less than a week to live. It could very well be today.

And that’s before the part where we installed a fascist in the White House, a fact that overshadows every single other bad thing that happened outside of the walls of my home last year and that I have been firmly in a state of I Cannot Even for weeks. I was talking with an old friend about it the other day; it’s really odd to know you’re in a state of denial, to recognize it and not be able to do anything about it.

My job is dependent on the economy being functional. I need to be preparing for Armageddon over here, in what may as well be a completely literal fashion.

Nothing’s getting better this year. Nothing at all. As much as I’d like to endorse that last sentence up there, and I really want to, I don’t know how to protect anyone from what’s coming.

Fuck 2016. Fuck it to death. And by God, by the end of this year I’ll probably be looking back at it with nostalgia.

In which this is exactly what I didn’t want

On September 21, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching11 Comments

job-hunt Spent the whole day behind the 8-ball, because on my one day off this weekend I went to the zoo with my wife and my son instead of spending all of it planning for this upcoming week of classes. We had a stellar time at the zoo, too, probably the best visit to that particular zoo that I’ve ever had. And now I’m sitting on the couch coughing up a quick blog post rather than researching methods of teaching measurement and conversion between units (because we have an entire four-week unit coming that I have no material for, which is going to be awful,) which is what I probably ought to be doing, and also instead of hanging out with the aforementioned wife and son, which is what I want to be doing.

I have absolutely got to find a new job. I don’t want to teach anymore; I don’t want any of this– not the lesson planning, not the grading, none of it. I haven’t called a single parent this year, because fuck it. I can only think of two or three occasions during my entire career where it made any damn difference and it’s not going to this time either. I need to sit down and seriously crunch some numbers and figure out just how much of a salary cut I can handle and still stay solvent, because I can’t do this anymore. I need a goddamn job that I can leave at work and not bring extra shit home to do every single day. Enough of this crap.