Tag: rants

Some miscellaneous thoughts

On By Luther M. SilerIn life

One week until Spring Break. And really the last day before the break doesn’t count, so only four teaching days until Spring Break. I can do this. And apparently ILEARN starts a week after we get back? I had no idea. I thought we had at least a couple of weeks, or maybe the last week of April. One way or another, I don’t even look at the results any longer.

We’re taking a road trip tomorrow for an academic competition for the boy, and we have to be up at like 5:30 in the fucking morning for it. I am complaining here because the boy does not read the blog– I’m pretty sure as of right now he is still unaware that it exists– and I will not complain about it around him, because I’m not going to be that kind of dad. It can be taken as read that the entire thing makes me want to die, though.

Pearl Jam has a new album coming out on April 19th. If you’ve been around a while you probably already know they’ve been my favorite band for basically my entire adult life. They just released a new single off of the album today, and along the way announced that they’re doing what they’re calling a “Dark Matter Global Experience” on the 16th at 500 theaters around the world. One of the 500 happens to be nearby, so I snagged tickets for my wife and I since they were basically the cost of a movie. They’re going to play the new album twice, once in darkness and once with “mesmerizing visuals.” I gotta be honest: even as a huge fan, huge enough that I just bought tickets to this thing, I have no idea if I think this is a good idea or not, but I’m willing to burn $24 on it, and I can’t wait to get home and wash the weed stink out of my clothes so that I can go to work tomorrow without raising eyebrows. If nothing else, this will be a unique experience, I imagine.

Speaking of new music, Fletcher, the other woman in the Miley Cyrus video that turned every woman on TikTok into a lesbian for a few days,(*) released her sophomore album this week. I’m four songs and– sigh– ten minutes into it and so far I’m liking it quite a bit except for the way streaming has fucking ruined music, because I should never be four songs into an album if only ten minutes have gone by. There is one song at 4:09, one at 3:05 and one at 3:02, and every other Goddamn song on the album is less than three minutes long.

I need the whole world to get off my damn lawn.

Every morning, I wake up, roll over, pick up my phone, and say a little prayer that I’m about to discover the shitgibbon died while I was asleep. I am going to add more Republican resignations to the prayer, because that shit is getting more hilarious by the Goddamn day and it’s not like God is listening anyway so I can ask for whatever I want.

I note that Jimmy Carter is still hanging on, though, despite all odds. He’ll outlive that fat bastard yet.

(*) It’s me, I’m women

On school supplies

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Teaching7 Comments

A touch of housekeeping before I dive into this: I set a personal record this morning for the fastest time I’ve ever fled a PD session, leaving after the keynote address, which was basically a very nice and funny man going “Man, teachers are cool, aren’t they?” I left because apparently having a few hundred teachers in the building to learn stuff wasn’t enough of a reason to turn the fucking air conditioning on in the building, and I was sweating like a pig and I really needed eyedrops from my car and when I got to my car I found it impossible to get back out and go back into the building.

Do other careers do this? Do lawyers need to get together every now and again to get a rah-rah speech about how cool and important lawyering is? Do venture capitalists work in buildings where basic things like environmental control are hosted off-site and not accessible to the people who actually work there? No, right? It’s no.

Can we talk about school supplies, just for a minute? I had a whole rant I went into about this at dinner tonight, and part of the reason I have this site is so that when I feel compelled to rant about something or another it lands here and not on my family, and I broke that rule tonight. The problem, of course, is that now a lot of the venom is exorcised and I don’t necessarily need to write the post. Nonetheless! Let me provide you with a few pieces of advice, for those of you buying school supplies for your kids:

  • Yes, you are responsible for buying supplies for your own kids, the same way you’re responsible for food and clothing for them. Yes, the school is funded with tax money. Yes, you pay taxes. Would you like that dollar back? Go buy some fucking pencils and paper.
  • Many teachers, myself included, keep large amounts of school supplies on hand for kids who for whatever reason don’t have them, and this is absolutely not a wealth thing. However! The very second you imply that I personally am responsible for providing your child with school supplies, your child loses access to anything I pay for and bring to work. This is irrevocable unless you personally apologize. Go buy some fucking pencils and paper.
  • Some teachers are very picky about school supplies! There are probably reasons. Some, but not all, of those reasons may be good ones! Ask them.
  • If your kid’s school is picky about school supplies, however, it’s probably because the school secretary is sick and fucking tired of parents asking what kind of pencils they are supposed to bring and so now the supply list says “Yellow Ticonderoga #2 Pencils” and not “Pencils.” Whatever pencils your kid has will be fine. Whatever paper your kid has will be fine, although do pay attention if a particular teacher asks for loose-leaf, because those little torn edges are annoying as fuck.
  • I have literally never encountered a school that asked for Yellow Ticonderoga #2 Pencils and actually got uppity about some other pencil. I would love to hear about it if it happens, and you’re within your rights to complain about it. Politely.
  • Some teachers (hi!) are going to shrug and say something like “they need something to write with and something to write on.” Others will be more picky. Guess what? Teachers are human, and policies vary from class to class, because there are different humans running those classes. Again, ask, and if a teacher says they don’t really care or doesn’t specify a list, just make sure you kid is prepared to take some notes. That’ll probably be good enough.
  • Some teachers will not have lists at all! Sometimes we just got our job four days ago. Sometimes we haven’t thought about it yet. You’ll be okay. Go buy some fucking pencils and paper.
  • Some things are going to be communal! If you don’t like it, eat a gallon of ass and homeschool your kid. That box of tissue paper isn’t just for your child. If you are upset because little Jimmy got the real expensive colored pencils and you don’t want the dirty poors touching his pencils, if you think that’s communism, find a bridge and jump off because your kid is better without a parent who ego trips about school supplies. I mean this genuinely and with all my heart. Go buy some fucking pencils and paper.
  • If you saw a supply list at Wal-Mart or whatever, be aware that no one at the school knows where the hell that list came from, and no one at the school has any idea that that list even exists. That list got made up on the spot and sent over by a secretary twelve years ago and they’ve been photocopying it every August ever since, and there is not a single person at your child’s school that knows anything about it or can do anything about it.
  • That said! You already know what the basics are. Buy those– paper, pencils, a couple of notebooks, some hand sanitizer and tissue paper, maybe some markers or colored pencils or crayons depending on your kids’ age. Again, nobody is really as picky as these lists indicate. Your constant stupid questions made us this way.
  • There is one exception to this rule: if your child is of middle school age, or otherwise is expected to travel from class to class while carrying their materials, do not buy them a pencil box. Buy them a pencil bag. Pencil boxes are for kids young enough to have their own desks that things can be stored in. Why? Because if you drop a pencil bag, it hits the floor and goes splat and maybe if it’s unzipped a pencil might fall out. If you drop a pencil box on the floor it will explode, and your kid’s shit will go everywhere, and because passing period is chaos and middle school students are savages, your kid’s stuff will quickly be kicked to the four corners of the universe and your kid will die of embarrassment on the spot.
  • This is what I mean when I say unreasonable-seeming specificity can sometimes have a good reason. Please do not buy middle schoolers pencil boxes.

This is what happened after the dinner rant, y’all.

And for the last time this school year, my Amazon supply wish list is here if you are willing and able to be generous.

On editing my brain

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

I decided tonight that I need to have admin access to my brain.

I mean, that’s not a new thought by any means, but it struck me particularly hard tonight. There are certain things that I know about that I really don’t feel like I need to know about, and I would like to be able to identify unnecessary information that’s stuck in my skullmeats and simply cleanly excise it, and if there was a way to prevent myself from relearning that information in the future– perhaps some sort of memory mute button– that would be great too.

There exists a man who intentionally wishes to be known as Yung Gravy, and I had to retype Yung four fucking times to convince WordPress that yes, that was the word I wanted, which really only adds more pain to this process. He is, supposedly, a musician; I am aware of one of his songs and I do not like it. This is his song:

I’m not watching this video. You can’t make me.

Anyway. Mr. Gravy presumably has fans; you may be one of them. That’s fine! He can have fans. You can be one of them. I just don’t need this man in my brain, and I would like to remove him. You may have my memories of him, if you’d like. That’s fine.

It gets worse. Would you like to know why I am aware of the existence of Yung Gravy? Because it’s not because of his music. No, the rabbit hole goes deeper than that, and I don’t want any of it.

I know Yung Gravy exists because, somehow, I found out that he was dating Addison Rae’s mother.

(Do you know who Addison Rae is? If you don’t, I suggest you stop reading now. This knowledge will not improve your life.)

I do not want to know that Yung Gravy is dating Addison Rae’s mother. I don’t particularly want to know about Addison Rae, although she’s not all that offensive– she’s just pretty and kinda vacuous, and … whatever, right? But I definitely don’t want to know about Addison Rae’s mother, who is far too old to be dating anyone with “Yung” in his name. She has also managed to be the famewhore in the family despite giving birth to someone who dances and prances around in a bikini for her millions of TikTok fans. Addison Rae’s mother is odious in a large number of ways, I do not like her, I definitely do not want her or her stupid Karen haircut in my brain, and while she is exactly the type of person who would divorce her husband and latch onto a third-rate rap artist with a stupid fucking name in hopes it would get her a couple of extra clicks beyond what she’s already siphoning off from her only-four-years-younger-than-her-boyfriend daughter, I don’t need to know about any of those people. At all.

So now I’ve made you aware of all of this, unless you had the good sense to stop reading this post before now– and who would blame you?– and it doesn’t help. All I’ve done is spread the infection, I haven’t cured it. Because you, as one of my readers, are a person possessed of both intellect and rarefied taste, and you don’t need this shit either. So help me. Let’s all go back to grad school and become brain doctors and figure this shit out together. Because after I get rid of Yung Gravy, I need to tear out the Kardashians and Kanye West, and that’s going to require a bit more work.

Anxiety disorder, or just stupid?

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy

Mental health is so much fun. There is nothing like being midway through a three-day weekend and finding yourself paralyzed and indecisive about what you should be doing, not because you’re overwhelmed with work, but because you haven’t finished Sandman yet even though every second you’ve watched of it has been amazing, and She-Hulk is probably one of your favorite comic book characters of all time and she’s sitting on your desk staring at you and wondering why you don’t love her enough and haven’t watched even a single second of her show yet, and oh by the way you have a Lord of the Rings tattoo on your leg and there is no work of human literature up to and including the Bible that has had more of an impact on your life than LOTR did and oh that new show started this week and have you watched that yet no you have not. How the hell am I eighteen hours behind on TV?

It is just amazing to be freaking out because you are so behind on things and what you are “behind on” is fucking television. Also I haven’t showered yet today, I’m halfway through like fifteen genuinely minor tasks that would take probably two minutes each to accomplish, and I need to write a blog post and record an episode or two of Raji: An Ancient Epic because like an idiot I found a way to make video games into an unpaid job.

An example of those minor tasks: there is a box behind me, maybe five feet away. That box is full of action figures and crap that I took off of my desk because I decided it was starting to look super cluttered and I only wanted it to look a little cluttered. I took a bunch of stuff off, put it in the box, and then put the box behind me, intending to move it into the closet in this room. We are talking about opening a closet door and moving the box ten feet. It might not even be that far.

The box has been sitting there for at least a week and a half.

There are three credit cards sitting on my desk that have been here for months. They need to be moved into my safe. The safe is locked and on a shelf down the hall. Months.

I’m really psyched about tomorrow. Why? Because I plan to spend all day at my computer getting shit done for work that didn’t get done before school started, so now that we’re about to start Week Four I probably ought to, like, get some vocabulary words up on the wall. Tomorrow at this time I expect to be happy at the amount of stuff I got done during the day, including a truly impressive pile of grading.

But that box? It’s still gonna be there.

In which I’m still annoyed

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy

Can we just get rid of the apostrophe, please?

I found this three hours ago, and I haven’t Tweeted enough today to scroll the irritated tweet I wrote about it off of my screen, so it’s still sitting there bothering me. I don’t know if the person who designed this shirt (and there’s a whole line of clothing with this idiotic design) doesn’t speak English as their first language or what, but a whole bunch of people looked at this fucking shirt and didn’t do anything about it before it showed up on Amazon to annoy me.

I mean, before an R? Who the fuck thinks we need apostrophes before the letter R?

Seriously, though: there are seven apostrophes in this post so far. There’s not a single word— and there’s apostrophes number eight and nine– that would suddenly become ambiguous or unclear if the apostrophe was removed. I don’t have any fucking clue why this is so complicated to so many people– seriously, it’s not fucking hard— but society just needs to get rid of the fucking thing. We don’t actually need to have a whole punctuation mark to indicate removed letters any longer. I’m not completely convinced we ever did, to be honest.

There is a sports bar a few miles north of me called Mitch’s. Or maybe it’s Mitchs’, I don’t fucking know, because the front of the building and their road sign spell the name of their own establishment two different ways. I have never set foot in this place and I never will, because I hate them, and I drive past the place fairly frequently, and every time I drive past them, I have to think about how much I hate them and decide for the ten millionth time that I’m not going to burn the place down.

I give up. It’s enough. Human beings cannot be educated to do this properly, they’re not capable. For my sanity, society needs to abandon the apostrophe.

In which he doesn’t like it

On By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting2 Comments

Does anyone else out there have, or did you at one point have, a kid that just wouldn’t fucking eat?

I’m not talking about picky eating. This is not a situation where the kid will only eat French fries and chicken nuggets or some shit like that. This is “it is 4:15 PM and my son has not had a meal yet today, because he’s refused every offer of food I’ve made and has not gotten any for himself, and it’s probably the fifteenth time out of the last twenty days that that’s happened.”

Once dinner rolls around, he will eat three or four bites of something and then proclaim himself full. And he’s not filling up on junk food, either; I literally just handed him a bowl of chips to get him to get some kind of calories inside him, and he handed it back to me.

He is not underweight and he is growing like a weed; at nine years old, he is alarmingly close to my wife’s height already. But … shit, if child protective services were to show up at my house and start interrogating my son about how much he eats, I’d end up in jail, and I would understand why. It’s like he lives on air. I don’t have the slightest idea why he’s not incapacitated by hunger right now, but he’s not. He’s completely fine.

Someone, please, explain this to me, or at least reassure me that eventually it’s going to stop.

Want some, come on and get some!

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching1 Comment

Some of my parents must think I’m new, I swear.

Just came out of an IEP meeting that went abruptly south when the parent decided to start casting blame far and wide for her kid’s seven current failing grades. Now, here is the thing: I am fully aware of how hard this must be for a lot of our parents. I am keeping track of one child while trying to keep up with my actual students and doing my job to the best of my ability and it is difficult. I am not keeping track of more than one, the extra kids that I don’t have to keep track of aren’t at multiple grade levels, and as things go my actual child tends to be pretty self-sufficient in a lot of ways. And it is still hard.

Now, what that means is that I’m bending over backwards to make sure my students have access to me. They have my phone number, and know they can call or text me basically anytime between 8 AM and 10 PM. I am online in a Google Meet for about four and a half hours a day every single day so that they can come in and ask questions, and I am monitoring my email whenever I am awake. There are no penalties for late work on any of my assignments, and I’ll even allow unlimited retries for anything a student wants to redo. I have posted personally-recorded video lessons for every single piece of new content we’ve done that they can access any time they want through the magic of the Interwebs.

(I am actually at my computer during my lunch break right now, too, because I have kids testing. I’ve left this desk twice in the last three hours– once to pee, and once to get some cold pizza from the fridge.)

This is not for cookies. I don’t want praise. This is because I think what I’m doing is the minimum amount of flexibility teachers should be showing right now. But what this also means is that if you try and come at me for not teaching your child when your child hasn’t taken advantage of any of these opportunities, I may not be entirely sympathetic, and when you try and blame me specifically for your student’s failure I’m going to start bringing out receipts.

Because I have them. I can see every time you’ve logged in to check your kid’s grades, for example, and I see that you’ve done so repeatedly over the last few weeks, so don’t even try and pretend that you didn’t know he was failing. I can also search my own email, so when you claim you’ve emailed and talked to all his teachers? I never delete anything, ma’am. I can assure you that you have not.

Oh, and I see that your email is here on Google Classroom, which means that you’ve been receiving my weekly emails about everything we’re doing in class, all of which contain my phone number and constant reinforcement to contact me if you have any questions or any needs at all that I can be helpful with.

I am not the one, God damn it, so don’t try it. Just don’t.

In which I vent

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews, Writing4 Comments

I– well, all of us, really– got a letter from my superintendent this morning outlining the district’s plan to reopen this fall, and I am not exaggerating when I tell you that their plan is basically “we reopen, and nothing changes, so try not to die.” Apparently he mentioned some vague sort of “we’ll try and create a virtual school, and you’ll have options for e-learning if you want them” thing at an event this morning, but there are no details, there is as of yet no staff for such a thing, and the letter makes no mention of it.

Everyone will be required to “have” a mask.

Have.

Not “wear.”

I was expecting a lot of different things, but “we’re going to do nothing” was not one of them, and I am frustrated and, frankly, frightened beyond my ability to describe it right now. Like, “take one of your emergency brain pills” frustrated.

So the best thing to do, obviously, is lash out at some bullshit that doesn’t have anything to do with what I’m mad about, and luckily I just decided I was done with this deeply stupid book here. Here’s my entire review: don’t read this fucking book, and don’t trust anyone who tells you this is a good book, and I am seriously looking askance at the two Actual Authors who recommended this to the skies and back, because you’re both out of your damn minds.

Need some background for that review? Okay. First, look at the title. The title of this book is Story Genius: How to Use Brain Science to Go Beyond Outlining and Write a Riveting Novel, Before You Waste Three Years Writing 327 Pages That Go Nowhere. That title is wordy as fuck and deeply obnoxious, and if you can’t literally get the front cover to your book done without being wordy as fuck and deeply obnoxious then your opinions on writing are probably not to be taken terribly seriously. Second, this author 1) has no relevant experience or expertise in psychology and 2) has never written or published a fucking novel.

Which … really, at that point we’re done. Your book is garbage. I don’t have to read your book to know it’s garbage. Unfortunately, I did, which was clearly my mistake, as I’ll never get that time back, and I should have been using it to look for a job.

Also, there’s no “brain science” in the book. None what-so-fucking-ever. There’s the occasional sentence where she says things like “brain science tells us …” but there are never any citations or, like, quotes from actual people who work in the field, or anything like that, and she also appears to think that “brain science” is a thing, which it’s not. There’s no one in the world where if you ask them their job they will tell you “I am a brain scientist.” The word is psychologist. I would also accept psychiatrist or neurologist or probably a couple of others. Hell, even an anthropologist would probably be useful for some of the claims that she makes, but there’s none of that either. It’s all fuckin’ hooey, and worse, it’s hooey that really only applies to literary fiction and doesn’t work well with genre at all. Don’t believe me? Let me introduce you to George R.R. Martin, who could probably tell you a few things about how his books violate every single one of the rules in this book– if you can coax him off of his gigantic money bed in his gold house to come talk to you in the first place.

The whole book is bullshit; know-nothing, arrogant, prescriptive bullshit, and it’s an easy candidate for the worst book I’ve had to read so far this year.