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Luther M. Siler

Holy shit, today. Another good day with the kids, followed by an hour-long meeting at Hogwarts about a club the boy wants to join, followed by eating about seventeen dinners because I was dying, then a bunch of work email, and my Tallneck isn’t done yet and I need to record tonight and thank God I was smart enough to get a bunch of stuff done early at work so that I don’t have to do it tomorrow.

Also: I forgot to mention that yesterday also involved going shopping with the boy so he could spend his birthday money. Two good days in a row; I hardly know what’s going on around here.

The last post of last year

Luther M. Siler1 Comment

I keep almost writing a 2021 blogwanking post or a sort of round-up of last year, and then finding excuses not to do it. Not that the bathroom renovation isn’t more interesting (I hope, at least) than endless navel-gazing, but I can only put this off for so long before I just can’t write it any more. So, long story short: traffic last year was way way way down, which doesn’t matter because it’s still plenty high for a personal blog site of a non-famous person in 2021, and y’all are stuck with me here anyway for the foreseeable future. Two things are pretty cool. This is the lifetime map of countries that I’ve had hits from:

That’s … everywhere, basically; that island up at the top is Svalbard island, where less than fifty people live, most of whom are climate researchers, and it’s part of Norway anyway. North Korea. South Sudan. Tajikistan, I think? (EDIT: Nope, that’s Turkmenistan.) These are not heavily populated countries with a lot of infrastructure, in other words. And despite the low numbers of actual hits (down over 20K in hits and about 12K in unique visitors) the geography from last year is pretty gratifying all by itself:

One way or another, the notion that people from literally all over the world have at least popped in over here, if not actually stuck around and hung out, is pretty amazing.

I have to admit something that is, if not a Hot Take, at least not an especially popular opinion: for me personally, and my immediate family, I don’t think last year was that bad of a year. Now, you have to take this in context, where I am pretty sure that I have described every year since 2016 as the worst year of my life, and I remain of the belief that yes, my life really did spiral south for five straight years, culminating in the loss of my mother on January 11, 2020. 2021 was the first year in a long fucking time where I have a few good things to think about when I look back on it. My brother and his wife had their first child. My dad’s doing okay. We’ve done a lot of work on the house. I made more money last year than I’ve ever made before, a feat I should be able to repeat this year, and because I’ve paid off my credit cards, leaving me with no credit card debt for the first time since college, I’ve been able to keep more of that money and use it for more than just paying off interest. My son is happy and healthy and thriving at school. My wife got a promotion and a raise. I, who a few years ago was convinced I’d never see the inside of a classroom again, got nominated for Teacher of the Year again. By the time this school year ends, I’ll not only have paid off my car, but my student loans might be gone.

All in all, on a strictly personal basis, I can actually see some light again. I have reason for at least a guarded level of optimism, which has not been true for quite some time. I mean, the rest of the world is still going to hell, don’t get me wrong. But at least not everything is going to shit.

My one big personal regret right now is that my writing career is, at the least, on a significant pause, and very well might be done. I haven’t written a word of fiction in at least a couple of years, and I’m not missing it much. I mean, it’s not like I was changing the world or anything like that, as much as I tried to take everything seriously, I never managed to make any money at it– every single con I attended lost me money, so it was more of an expensive hobby than anything else. I’m not saying I’ll never release another book, but I’m not in a hurry to.

You never know. Most of my creative energy lately is going here and to the YouTube channel, and maybe eventually that’ll blow up. If not, well, we’ll see what comes next.

On optimism

Luther M. Siler7 Comments

I am fairly certain that I have described each of the last four years as the worst year of my life. Looking back on it now, 2020 does certainly seem to have won the battle royal– losing my mom is going to do a pretty good job of catapulting the year over the rest of them, even before the global pandemic enters the chat– but if I want to be a bit more specific, April 2019 to April 2020 is probably right about where the break points are. Maybe July 2020, if I want to include losing my cat, who I’d had for 22 years.

All I really want out of 2021 is for it to be better than the last four years. I don’t need it to be great. I don’t even need good. I just need better. My 40s in general have been an utter horror show– recall that I turned 40 in 2016– and I’m more than ready to be done with that.

There have been some vague signs that maybe things are starting to turn. I am, despite the pandemic, happier as a teacher this year than I have been in a very long time. Financially, I’m in the best shape of my life, both personally and jointly with my wife. The vaccine isn’t in ready supply yet, and I haven’t gotten my shots yet, but it exists. My family isn’t experiencing any acute health crises right now; my father-in-law isn’t in great shape, but he’s holding up, and we’re not hugely concerned about anyone else at the moment. And I’ll be an uncle in a few months.

Now all I need is for a couple of elections in a state I’ve never set foot in to go my way today, and to make it through the next fifteen days without a nuclear war starting or some other sort of nightmare scenario being unleashed on the world. I (and I’m sure I’m not alone in this) have gotten very, very gun-shy about anything that feels like good news over the last four years, and I don’t trust anything resembling optimism any longer. I feel like if it seems like things are turning around a little bit that’s just so that when they all go to hell again it will hurt worse.

Hell, I just want to make it through tomorrow without riots. I would like it if the worst people in America manage to make it through the day without killing anyone.

…at this point, I took about a 20-minute break from writing this, because the despair started kicking in again. There are at least a handful of reasons for actual optimism about this upcoming year. There are reasons to set goals for this year, and not just assume that there’s no chance I will achieve any of them.

I haven’t released a new book in forever. Hell, I haven’t written more than a handful of pages of fiction since Click became available to my Patreon subscribers– and that was mostly a rewrite and re-edit, not an actual new book. I’d like to say I want to get another book out this year, but it’s entirely possible that I’m just done with that. I’d like to be more creative in general this year, to make things, and I’m already looking at the whole idea of creativity and just exhausted by it.

I need a reason to be hopeful that doesn’t wash away a day or an hour or a few minutes after I happen upon it.

I need this year to be better.

We’re not all gonna die

Luther M. Siler4 Comments

positivity.jpgIt’s possible that those of you who have been around for a while have been surprised at how little I’ve been talking about my new job.  And the simple fact is I haven’t talked about it much because one of the things I’ve been trying really hard to work on with this job, for my own mental health, is leave work at work.

My new school has some issues.  Some fucking major issues.  I’m going to leave it at that for right now.

But.

I realized something at my last school, something I know I’ve said here before, but something I need to keep reminding myself of, over and over again, until it sinks the hell in.  When you don’t work in the classroom, and you don’t know any of the kids, there’s gonna be a good chunk of change where the only kids you interact with are the ones who are catching your attention, and the vast majority of the time the way those kids are going to catch your attention is with negative behaviors.  If 400 kids are in a hallway at one time and three of them yell “motherfucker” at the top of their lungs, my takeaway is going to be these fucking kids just swear in the hallways like it doesn’t even matter and the fact that 397 of those 400 kids weren’t cussing in the hall is going to go overlooked.

In a school with 800 kids, if 95% of the kids get through their day doing what they’re supposed to do and don’t get into any trouble, 5% of the kids is forty kids in the office, which in an eight-hour day is five kids an hour, or one kid in trouble every twelve minutes.  And those kids aren’t going to be evenly distributed– 2/3 of them will be after lunch, for example, and it’s really fucking easy to focus on those 40 and not the 760 who didn’t get into any trouble that day.  And that skews your perspective, right?

I know I’ve said it before.  I need to keep saying it to keep my shit together.

Lemme tell a story.

We have both a teacher shortage and an overcrowding issue.  There are some classes in our building that are massively too big as a result, and even just a couple of teacher absences can cause a cascade situation where we’re constantly having to find teachers to cover classrooms, because getting subs is basically impossible.  And we have a couple of classes that more or less haven’t actually had a real teacher yet this year because of that.

I got back from lunch at 12:45.  About five minutes after I walked back into the building I got a buzz on my radio from my boss.  She needed me to cover a class for a period.  Now, I’m literally the last resort for this a lot of the time for various reasons related to my actual job.  They don’t want me doing classroom coverage, so if they’re calling me in it’s because every other available adult has already been pressed into service.

She tells me I’m covering one of those overcrowded classrooms which has never had a real teacher.  It’s basically a study hall at this point because there’s nobody to write daily curriculum for the class, and most of the kids in there at this point have learned that whoever is trying to make them work today isn’t going to be there tomorrow and so it’s, to put it delicately, challenging to motivate them to do anything.  And I admit it, I groaned and rolled my eyes, because I didn’t really want to, but fuck it I’m gonna pitch in.  And then she says to me “It’s 12:30 to 1:11 and then take them to lunch.”

I look at my watch.  It’s 12:50.  

“You mean this class started twenty minutes ago?”

She looks at her watch, and without saying another word turns on her heel and fucking sprints out of the office.

Oh.

I follow her.  She heads to the classroom at a high rate of speed.

Where 30-some-odd eighth graders were sitting in their seats, quietly having a study hall, and making so little noise that for twenty fucking minutes, no one had noticed that there was no adult in the room with them.  

Now: this is on the grown-ups.  Somebody fucked up somewhere.  And the kids got reminded, somewhat vigorously, that maybe somebody should take the initiative to go to the damn office and let us know if no one is in the room.  But it’s kind of hard to get mad at a group of kids who are sitting and quietly, if not working, at least goofing off in a non-obnoxious manner– and a couple of those kids who had pencils in their hand and were clearly doing homework were not kids I would have expected to make those decisions on their own, so there was absolutely a bit of positive peer pressure going on there.

And I sat in that damn room until lunchtime and not for one second did I have to ask a kid in the room to do a single damn thing.  My presence in the room made no difference whatsoever to anything anybody was doing.  It didn’t have to.

And I’ll tell you what: a minute before they were supposed to go to lunch, I did something  I’ve not done very many times in my career: I flashed the lights in the room a couple of times (still hot as fuck, so the lights were out) and got everyone’s attention– to the point where they were closing their computers and turning volume off, which blew my mind– and I thanked them.  I basically said exactly what was in this post, only I said it in a minute instead of a thousand words.  I thanked them for being part of that chunk of kids who quietly did the right thing instead of god only fucking knows what chaos they might have been getting up to in there.  And I gotta say: my outlook on my fucking job got improved today in a lot of ways.

I’mma bring the little bastards doughnuts on Monday,  I think.

Neither of these people are me

Luther M. Siler8 Comments

8a202184c338637c55139ba665ce60e1c5ced87cf032df9e1131b7b21b7e31d6.jpgYou may have had a bad day today.

But look on the bright side:

You did not, somehow, while idly tossing your keys over your head and catching them, trying to kill time with fifteen minutes left in your shift, manage to get your keys stuck on a rafter fully fifty feet off the ground when there is no ladder higher than thirty feet on the premises, thus locking yourself out of both your car and your home with absolutely no way to get your keys that anyone can figure out.

You are also not the person responsible for loading out six thousand dollars worth of furniture into a U-Haul and doing it incorrectly, a mistake that the owners of the furniture did not discover until they had unloaded the U-Haul into their new house– in fucking Indianapolis.  

Go ahead, ask if we’ve figured out who the two extra pieces that were put on the U-Haul and weren’t supposed to be there are actually supposed to go to.