Summer Goals, Or: In Which I Write Fiction Again

On May 26, 2024 By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

With only four days of school left, none of which are really going to count for a damned thing– three days of babysitting and grade finalization and then a field day– it’s time to think about how I’m going to get through the summer without turning into a greasy lump. Since we all know I will turn into a greasy lump over the summer, let’s set some goals that I can feel bad about not fulfilling. Note that, for the most part, these are weekday goals; on weekends I still get to laze about.

Up by 9:00 AM every day. This actually won’t be that hard, as my body chemistry is finally starting to alter in such a way that I’m waking up earlier than this even if I don’t want to. I have tried to sleep past 8 AM for the last two days and not managed to do it. No, this is going to be the hard one:
In the shower within 20 minutes of waking up every day. The way my brain works, my day can’t start and I can’t do anything until I take a shower. The goal here is to have Things to Do and to Get Things Done. This means I need to bathe immediately, or close to it, every morning. I manage to do this every day during the week when school is in session and there’s no reason, or at least no good reason, why I can’t continue doing it over the summer. That said, I’ll be genuinely surprised if I manage to make it a week. Hell, I’ll be surprised if I pull it off on the first Monday of break.
Get licensed for high school math. This has a number of sub-goals. In case you’re not aware, I have a chance of being able to teach Honors Geometry next year, but in order to do that, I have to be certified to teach it, and as it’s a high school class and my math licensure is 5-9, I’m not. Therefore:
Pass the 5165 Mathematics Praxis Exam. Which I am currently not even remotely qualified for. I’m hoping to have this done by July 1. That should give me enough time to get the paperwork through the state board by the time school starts, even if I don’t pass on the first try. However in order to do that, I have to:
Study math for an hour a day, preferably in the mornings, after my coffee. I’m allowing myself some lounge time after getting out of the shower. Go sit in my chair in the library or on the back porch, drink a cup of coffee, idly fuck around on the web or read a book. But I want to spend an hour stuffing math into my brain each day. Right now the tentative plan is to take a practice test on the Monday after break to see just how far I have to go and see if an hour is realistic or I need more than that. That’s 20 hours of study during June for three years of high school math. One course a week plus some flex time. Sure, I can do that, right? I taught myself enough German to pass an exam in three days. I just need — heh– to be disciplined and to remember how to study.
Actual Arabic study, using some of the print resources I’ve purchased and haven’t paid much attention to. The apps have their place– which reminds me that I haven’t talked about an excellent vocabulary app I found– but I need some sustained grammar work and the apps genuinely don’t care about that.
Find some projects around the house. Stand by; we’ll see. There are tons of things I could be doing.
Maybe a part-time WFH job if I can find one. I don’t need more money, but if I could make enough to get this new computer completely paid for by the end of the summer that would make a lot of things easier. I need to remember that the overage pay goes away in a couple of paychecks. That’s not a problem– I was doing fine before I had it and I’ll be fine after it– but I’ll need to get a little more disciplined financially again. Luckily, summer is cheaper than the rest of the year most of the time.
Get the boy off the fucking couch. He will transform into a greasy lump if I let him– greasier than ever before, in fact, since he’s going to be a teenager in a few months and his Greasy Years are coming– and I should probably treat him like I’m his dad and not, like, a creepily older roommate who lives in the back office studying esoteric mathematics and languages he will never speak to anyone. He will literally spend the whole summer playing video games and watching YouTube if I let him; I should probably find a way to encourage other activities, even if that’s just making sure he has friends over every so often so that he interacts directly with people.

And, because not everything has to be serious:

I have video games to beat. I spend significantly less time on the PS5 since I turned off the YouTube channel, but I’ve developed this vexing habit where I play 90% of a game and then abandon it for something else, which means that I’ve got this vile backlog of games that I want to get off my plate and haven’t yet. Some of them are never going to happen– I’m looking at you, Baldur’s Gate III— but several of them are games I enjoyed and just got distracted by the next shiny. Literally all I have to do in the new Prince of Persia is beat the final boss! That’s, like, an hour or two! I can do this!
Reeeeeeeeead. Still making progress but God damn it I want the unread shelf cleared by the end of June. I can do this. I will do this. This is actually the thing on this list most likely to actually happen.

What about you? Any big summer plans?

Proof of art

On March 9, 2018March 9, 2018 By Luther M. SilerIn art, Photography3 Comments

I didn’t do anything today other than draw and sleep, and … well, I can’t make a post out of what I did while I was sleeping. I’m still not any good at this, really, but I’m enjoying it.

This might be my favorite picture I’ve done so far. The boy’s gotten back into Phineas & Ferb recently and I love Dr. Doofenschmirtz.

A lot of what I’ve been doing lately, when I haven’t been drawing established characters, is just playing with putting different body parts together and seeing what happens. I kinda like this guy but then again when I started drawing him he was supposed to be a woman, so …

This is what happens when I stare at Phineas’ enormous triangle head for a while and wonder what a rectangle head looks like. Answer: terrifying.

Dude on the left is random. The girl on the right started off as just a nose, and her nose was supposed to be the shape of her whole head, and then I decided it was a nose so she ended up oversized.

This was fiddling around, too; keep the same basic head shape and hair and play with the other face parts and see what happens. I kinda like the one with the straight mouth and the frog nose.

Art, again

On February 18, 2018 By Luther M. SilerIn artLeave a comment

…okay. I can draw recognizably female human faces. Good, that was worrisome. 🙂

I am sleepy so here is art

On February 17, 2018February 17, 2018 By Luther M. SilerIn art1 Comment

So as goofy and simplistic as they are these actually kind of represent some progress; I’m starting to draw original pictures rather than copying something that’s in front of me, and at the suggestion of drawabox.com I’ve switched to working with pens rather than pencils because they force me to stop and think before making a mark on a piece of paper. Sooner or later I will start doing little cartoon dudes with, like, bodies and shit, but I’m not quite there yet. Just faces for right now.

Weird phenomenon: I drew these five faces, and then realized they were all dudes. I mean, I suppose the monkey-thing doesn’t really have to be a dude, but in my head they were all dudes. And then I thought I ought to draw at least one girl to even things out and then panicked because apparently I have no idea how to draw women.

So, uh, I’ll work on that unexpected problem tomorrow, I guess? Sure.

Self-improvement is exhausting

On January 31, 2018 By Luther M. SilerIn art3 Comments

I remain fully caught up on the “draw every day” project, if only because I drew two pictures tonight. I am beginning to think that the best use of my time might be to actually find some sort of art tutorial thing rather than constantly drawing from .jpg files of animated characters. I can whip up a Buttercup in a hot second but I’m not convinced that being able to draw Buttercup well is the same thing as being able to draw. I remain vaguely terrified of the idea of drawing something unique for some reason. This is, of course, not why I started this project. Fuck fear. But if I’m going to take this seriously I feel like I ought to try and find some sort of resource more useful than thinking of a kids’ TV show I like and Googling good images of the characters.

Speaking of creativity, I left work today after telling my boss that I was only coming back on Saturday if I’d managed to get some writing done in the next two days. Luckily I have nothing in particular that I need to get done tomorrow or the day after, or at least nothing that I can think of (well, okay, I could use an oil change for my car, and I have to take the boy to school both days; I don’t think either of those really count) and so I won’t have any good excuse to not get something done. Then again, I’m really good at generating excuses.

I’ll finish Fonda Lee’s Jade City tonight, so expect a glowing review in the next couple of days. It’s an early frontrunner for my favorite book of the year, I’ll tell you that. I’m considering spending February only reading books by black authors, so if you have anyone in particular you’d like to recommend, please feel free to chime in in comments and make some suggestions.

In which fear is stupid

On January 12, 2018January 12, 2018 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy10 Comments

Holy cow, that tablecloth has gotten raggedy.

I had an idle thought the other day and put it on Twitter– I wonder what kind of artist I could be if I drew something every day for a year, it said– and now suddenly I own a sketchbook.

Well, “suddenly” if agonized over the idea of spending $5 on a sketchbook for two days counts as “suddenly.” I mean, as projects go, this isn’t much of one, right? I’m not talking about full-blown landscapes or some shit, just, like, a quick sketch every day to elevate my ability to draw from not the worst artist on the planet to maybe somewhere in the top half of humanity. I’m not about to start a webcomic or anything, although I’ll admit thinking about the first Questionable Content vs. how it looks now as a perfect example of what practice can do for someone.

So I own an inexpensive, yet reasonably robust sketchbook, and I bought some new pencils, which probably wasn’t strictly necessary but hey, pencils. And all I have to do is draw something. I don’t even really have to do it every day! Just draw some shit once in a while! Like, I get to set the rules!

And I put the sketchbook down, because I found the idea terrifying, and here I am blogging about it instead of just picking up a pencil and drawing something simple and calling it a day.

It’s so weird how hard I work (we work? It’s not just me, right?) to hold myself back sometimes.

EDIT: Boom. Don’t expect me to post these too frequently, if I even continue with the project (I’d estimate no more than a 50% chance this lasts longer than a few days) but at least I did it once:

Also, I need pencils with better erasers, as you can tell from Uncle Grandpa’s incorrectly-misshapen head up there.

On schadenfreude and self-improvement

On March 19, 2017March 19, 2017 By Luther M. SilerIn Politics1 Comment

So there’s this house I drive past basically every time I have any reason to drive north, and since I live on the south side of town “heading north” happens quite a bit. It’s a shitty house. There’s mold on the siding, visible plant life growing in the gutters, the roof is rotting, and the garage is not anywhere close to plumb. I suspect I could push the thing over if I wanted to, and there have been nights on the way home where I was tempted to get out of my car and do so.

There have also been a couple of prominent Confederate battle flags flying prominently around the house for the last several years. They keep moving them; sometimes they’re on the garage, sometimes by the side door, sometimes in the windows, sometimes just flying off the back of the shitty rusted-out pickup truck that you were already picturing in their side yard even without me telling you it was there.

I have no idea who lives there, but I kind of hate them. I don’t need to see your racist bullshit every time I leave my fucking house, and at this point anyone still willing to fly one of those symbols of treason over their house is pretty clearly signaling they’re not someone I’m going to enjoy associating with at all. These people are almost certainly assholes of some stripe or another and I don’t feel bad about not liking them on reflex.

The last couple of weeks I’ve noticed the flags were gone, and sometime in the last day or two a bunch of bank auction signs have sprouted up around the house. So it looks like the bank foreclosed on whoever lived there and is trying to sell this half-decayed house to recoup some of its costs.

And my first thought upon seeing all this was Good. Fuck ’em.

I’d like to be the kind of person who doesn’t celebrate in even a minor way when people lose their homes. For all I know there are kids living there who don’t deserve to be tarred with their parents’ asshole brushes.

I bet they’ve found a way to blame black people for them losing their house, though. Which brings me back to “Fuck ’em.”

Sigh.

In which I am a ray of goddamn sunshine

On March 28, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching12 Comments

At the beginning of this school year, I made myself a promise: I was going to do my damnedest to keep from yelling at kids this year. I knew from the beginning that this was not going to be a resolution that I was going to be able to keep for the entire school year; the relevant question was how long I’d go before I failed. I am, as you may have guessed, somewhat of a volatile personality. I’ve done better almost every year at keeping my cool in the face of nonsense. Some years (last year) I’ve backslid; I guarantee I’ve raised my voice to kids less frequently this year than I did last year. So, in that, I suppose it’s been a success. That said, I’ve had a few embarrassing displays even just in the past few weeks, so I’m not there just yet. Also, I keep losing sight of the fact that there’s still a full quarter of school left. Positive Man recognizes that there is still time for things to go wrong. 🙂

Here’s where I’ve failed so far this year, and where I’m going to do my best to improve substantially in what’s left of the school year: I have not been good enough in 1) emphasizing positivity in my classroom; 2) rewarding the kids who are not behavior issues; and 3) rewarding and/or simply acknowledging good choices in general. It’s very easy as an educator to get too tied up in managing pathology in the various forms that it might show up in your classroom; there have been times in this year where I’ve simply felt buried in it. Things have been getting better lately in my first/second hour block, which have been my problem children all year long– unfortunately, they’ve been slipping in my third and fourth hour block. My honors kids continue to be the living personification of why I’m a teacher.

For the rest of the school year I need to work harder at being positive, both to set an example and to give some recognition to the kids who sorely deserve it. Even when I’ve recognized positive behavior this year it’s generally been for kids where that positive behavior has been rare. That’s a good thing, mind you, but it leaves out the kids who do what they’re supposed to do every day, or even do what they’re supposed to do four days out of every five or nine days out of every ten.

I gotta do better. Time to start.