Tag: no thank you

#REVIEW: You Weren’t Meant to be Human, by Andrew Joseph White

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews3 Comments

I three-starred this. But keep reading.

Every so often, when you are in the habit of reviewing things, you encounter something that sort of breaks your review system. Most of the books I read get rated four or five stars, because I have been reading books for my entire life and I have gotten pretty good at picking books that I am going to like. Five stars is a book I really enjoyed and will recommend to people. Four stars is a book that I enjoyed but had some flaws or for whatever reason I feel less likely to talk about. Three stars is a book that was just kind of there; two stars, a lot of the time, was a DNF, and one star was a book I actively loathed and wish to punish.

You tell me: how do I star-rate a book that I personally really did not enjoy reading, but nonetheless recognize as a well-written book that may very well be appealing to other people? Because I have no damn idea, really. You Weren’t Meant to be Human is body horror. It’s about a trans man who gets pregnant. That’s already a body horror situation well before we get to the variety of mental issues that the protagonist, Crane, has. And to avoid being misunderstood, by “mental issues,” I do not mean the fact that Crane is autistic and very nearly nonverbal. No, I’m talking about the rape fantasies (as in fantasizing about being raped) and the degrading sex and the self-mutilation. If you’ve ever needed to read trigger warnings, go nowhere near this book. There are warnings at the beginning of the book, and they are extensive.

It floated through my head at one point that this is the book that TJ Klune would write if TJ Klune was KM Szpara, but I’m not convinced that makes any sense.

In addition to … all that, see those worms on the cover? Crane is part of (kidnapped and forcibly inducted into? Maybe.) a cult that worships, or at least … cares for? this possibly-alien hive mind intelligence that exists in our world mostly as a horrifying conglomeration of bugs and flies and worms and other grotesqueries. Crane knows who the (other) father of his baby is, but at the same time he spends most of the book convinced that he’s about to give birth to a giant slug or perhaps just a giant knot of maggots. The cult does a lot of murdering so that the hive has stuff to eat, and for most of the book Crane is protected/guarded/imprisoned by what is effectively a Frankenstein’s monster cobbled together from the people they’ve fed to the thing. The Frankenstein is named Stagger. Crane occasionally fantasizes about fucking it and there’s at least one sequence where he at least comes close. I’m not going to go back and reread to clarify my memory here.

Y’all, I’m okay with it if I never read another body horror again. I’m good. I’m happy with naming this book the pinnacle of the genre and then never touching it again. This is one of the most brutal and harrowing books I’ve ever read and has one of the most shocking and grotesque endings I’ve ever seen (which, now that I think about it, did get a bit of foreshadowing) and I did not enjoy one single second of reading it.

I’m not sure this book is supposed to be “enjoyed,” is the thing, which is why I’m not comfortable with panning it and why I more or less devoured the fucking thing in one sitting rather than putting it in the freezer and forgetting I ever saw it. A lot of the reviews I’m seeing for it are positively rapturous and the thing is I don’t necessarily disagree with them. I just …

*shiver*

Yeah. No more, thank you. That’s enough of that. But if you feel like you might be into this? I’m not mad about it.

Not gonna do it

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

I absolutely refuse to have an opinion on the whole Will Smith/Chris Rock Oscars thing. I will say this, and this only: that every middle schooler in America yelled the words “Keep my wife’s name out your fucking mouth” in the hallway at least once today, and I could maybe have done without that. If you really need to hear my opinion on it, feel free to go on the Internet, find someone else’s opinion, and assign it to me. I hear that it’s not hard to find people talking about it.

ALSO! My wife and son are out of town. It is the boy’s Spring Break, and she took the week off so that someone was home with him, and they have popped off to Indianapolis for a quick overnight trip to see some friends. I suppose technically I was invited. In accordance with my new temporary bachelor state, I had Chipotle for dinner, bought incorrect lightbulbs at Target (I did not realize that “sunlight” not only meant “full spectrum of light” but also meant “installs two miniature suns in your office”) and I am also currently not wearing pants. I will play video games for three hours once I am done with this post and then get two hours of sleep. It’ll be super.

Let’s see, what else? I have survived the first of the necessary four days until my own Spring Break, which doesn’t really start on Friday, but since Friday is a day with no students it may as well. Tomorrow should also be survivable; I’m hoping for suspensions and/or injuries leading into Wednesday and Thursday.

I received this email from my boss toward the end of the day:

To provide a little bit of possibly-unnecessary context to this, this year the teachers’ day starts at 8:40 on Tuesday and Thursday instead of 9:20, which is when school actually starts. Those two extra 40-minute blocks are supposed to be used for professional development and team meetings. Now, keep in mind, all day Friday is supposed to be PD this week, and as of right now I don’t have the slightest idea what the hell they’re throwing at us. I will be skipping this event and daring anyone to say anything to me about it, because I do not recognize “fun movement activity” as a concept that exists and this is either an extraordinarily tone-deaf joke or an actual insult. I ain’t going. I suspect that “morale raising” is supposed to be the point of this; they can best support my morale at this point in the year by leaving me the hell alone. If anybody asks, I got to work late. Fire me.

And, on that note, I’m off to the Lands Between. Hopefully I’ll notice when it gets dark; this lamp is really out of control.

Aaaaand I’m out

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

Well, that didn’t last long: I had planned on spending most of the day sitting on my computer in the office working my way through the course I was supposed to complete for the IU thing, and instead I lost patience with it immediately and quit the IU thing. I suspect, but cannot prove, that there has been a massive hemorrhage of people they’d hired for this this week once everyone looked around and realized what they’d signed up for, and I’d rather just quit now than get two or three weeks in and either bail after I’d spent actual time and effort on it or fall for the sunk cost fallacy and stick around just for the stipend. The $2500 would have been nice, but I have always valued my time far more than my money, and this simply wasn’t worth my time.

Y’all, I’m tech-savvy. I’ve had jobs recently where explaining tech to people was basically all I was being paid for. But what made me hit the brakes on this thing was hitting a point in this course where they wanted me to do the following:

  • Acquire (somehow) a Canvas account that allowed me to create courses;
  • Use that account (that I don’t have) to create a course that
  • Used my teacher account (that I also don’t have) on another site called Perusall so that I can
  • Copy material from the Canvas course I’m in right now in order to
  • Create assignments from the material already posted in that class which
  • No one, anywhere, will ever look at and then
  • Reflect on what the assignment has taught me.

Adding insult to injury, this entire process was labelled “optional,” but it was made clear at the beginning of the class that if you wanted any PGP points (useful for license renewal) for this process you had to do all the optional parts.

Could I do all of this? Absolutely. Maybe. I don’t actually have a way to create a teacher account in Canvas, at least not without using my work Canvas account for it, which I’m not going to do. So that could have been challenging. Am I going to jump through all of these hoops– the instructions were three screens long– to create an assignment that isn’t going to do me any good at all? On Saturday? Nope. I’m not. And most people are not remotely as good as I am with tech stuff, and the dizzying array of different accounts we were supposed to be creating and monitoring for this thing was too much for me.

So, yeah. Looks like I’ve got a bit more free time than I’d counted on for the next nine weeks. I almost wish I could watch this thing from a distance, fly-on-the-wall style, because as I said I think I’m far from the only person to look around and bail on the spot, and I think the whole thing is going to end up messily imploding in short order. I removed myself from the Google Chat room we were supposed to be doing all of our team communication in (yet another account I had to create) so I can’t keep an eye out, leaving only a GBCW post in my wake letting them know I was done. Good luck, y’all.

Speaking of noooooooope…

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

So, remember a couple of weeks ago when I said I was applying for a teaching job?  That wasn’t quite true, at least in the strictest sense of the word “teaching.”  It was a job, in a school, that would involve occasionally interfacing with kids but which seemed, from the description, to actually mostly involve backing up teachers and being a resource for them rather than a job where I was in front of a classroom all day.  I messed around with my work schedule a bit this week after getting a couple of emails from the HR director, who indicated there would be an informational meeting at the school that it might be useful to come to.

(I’m leaving out a lot of details, obviously; this program involves a pretty substantial infusion of money and is a new thing for the school to the point where renovations are happening in the building right now for it, so the idea that they’d invite people who are applying for the job to this informational meeting makes more sense than you might think– the building staff was also invited.)

So.  Yeah.  I went to the meeting.  There were maybe a dozen staff members present and at least three people who were there because they were applying for the same job I was– me and two others, in other words.

The lack of buy-in from the staff was a physical force in the room, and the sinking feeling that started moments after the presentation began never really got any better.

I happened, after the meeting was over, to walk out of the building with one of the other two applicants.

“Was that job what you thought it was when you applied?” I asked.

“Not even a little bit,” she said.  And she didn’t say “You can have it,” but it was pretty damn clear she didn’t want it any longer.

They are actually looking for two people to fill this job, who will both be in the new facility at all times.  Along with sixty kids.

Sixty.  At once.

Three blocks a day, of– lemme say it again– sixty kids.  Seventh and eighth graders.  In a program that, in my professional opinion, is a massive waste of time and resources if they’re going to treat it as a class that you get a grade for.   In a nicely renovated, brand-new space featuring two load-bearing walls in the middle of the Goddamn room that cannot be moved and guarantee that there will be no place where a single teacher can stand and see all of his or her students.

So.

oh-shi