On editing my brain

Luther M. Siler1 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?

Luther M. Siler

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

Luther M. Siler

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

Luther M. Siler2 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!

Luther M. Siler1 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.