Tag: stupid

In which it sucks how much this sucks

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

Screen shot 2010-10-13 at 11.16.32 AMFirst things first:  sent the summer teacher grant application off today, meaning that I’ve applied for nearly fifty thousand dollars’ worth of grants in 2013, which seems kind of ridiculous.  Now we get to move into my favorite thing: waiting to find out if people will be giving me money.  Cross your fingers for me, ‘k?

I’m in my office right now, hiding from Trick-or-Treaters because they’re too much of a pain in my ass to deal with.

I hate Halloween.  There, I said it.

This hasn’t always been true– in fact, for most of my life Halloween has been one of my favorite holidays if not my actual favorite holiday.  It was great when I was a kid, and there have been scattered moments of greatness in my adult Halloweens as well– dressing as Darth Maul right around when Episode One came out was certainly a highlight.  But I am officially too old and too crotchety to enjoy this shit anymore– working in a middle school, for one thing, has ruined Halloween for me, because it turns my kids into such huge pains in the ass– and on top of that the cultural shift where “slutty _____” has become the default costume for every girl over ten years old everywhere has turned me into a goddamn puritan.

Not everything has to be about fucking.  Halloween isn’t supposed to be about fucking.  There should not be any such thing as a “sexy cat costume.”  Cats aren’t sexy!  No one thinks cats are sexy, and if we find someone who breaks the rules and does we lock them the fuck up and feel good about ourselves for it!

(Which… huh.  I don’t appear to know how to link to Google Images sites anymore; Safari just puts the damn search term in the address bar.  Ah, there we go, it works in Chrome:  None of these women look like goddamn cats.  This is what Mardi Gras is supposed to be for, goddammit, not Halloween.  You wanna have a holiday called Dress Like A Stripper Day?  I’m in, and I’m willing to insist that guys dress like Chippendales for it too.  That’s not a cat.  It’s a stripper with stupid ears.)

Also, and this is more of a personal thing, we have two huge dogs and neither of them are terribly great about strangers, meaning that we have to do whatever we can to keep the doorbell from being rung all night.  We currently have our candy in a bowl on a picnic table in the driveway to keep the kids away from the dogs.  Many of the children, unsurprisingly, are not bright enough to notice it– some of them will literally walk around it on their way to the front door, which I’ve done my damnedest to make look uninviting  And it’s raining, which means that even if they were wearing cool costumes, and most of them aren’t, they’re covered up in raincoats and umbrellas and hoodies and shit.  Sacrifice for your art, goddammit.  Get some bloody waterproof makeup and show off the damn costume.  Assuming you’re actually dressed as something, that is.

grandpa_simpson_yelling_at_cloud(Huge ruckus outside; I prepare to actually literally go tell some teenage kids to get off my damn lawn.)

(Ruckus ends abruptly as it started; I think the neighbor’s Rottweiler tried to eat someone. Good.)

Note the following:  I will drop at least some of my objections to Halloween as soon as local jurisdictions acquire some goddamn sense, drop this October 31 nonsense (not one person in a hundred can explain why Halloween is October 31) and bloody move the holiday to the last Friday in October.  Halloween during the week is idiotic for a wide variety of reasons, not least among which is going to be the spike in suspensions at schools across the country tomorrow.

Bah.  Humbug.

Regrets, I’ve had a few

On By Luther M. SilerIn Cooking, idiocyLeave a comment

Heartburn(That’s how the song goes, right?)

My lovely wife is in Indianapolis on some sort of work-related sojourn that required that she bring food.  She had me make piles and piles of grapefruit guacamole last night so that she had something to bring.  We didn’t get around to doing this until after the boy had been put to bed, so I finished the guacamole around, oh, 9:30 or so.  We made way more than normal so that we could have some.

And then we had some.  And by “some” I mean “everything that she wasn’t taking to work.”  At 9:30 at night.

I spent all night with massive heartburn and woke up this morning and threw up; the last eight hours have not been pleasant.

It’s not the guacamole, mind you– it’s that I’m not goddamn 22 anymore and I should never eat like that again.

I am not very bright.

The end.

IN WHICH NEVER MIND

On By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking, idiocy, TeachingLeave a comment

Today was actually a pretty good day, all told. For some reason, my first and second hour class was in a behaving sort of mood today– or at least they entered a behaving sort of mood just as soon as the first kid to act up had his parents emailed on the spot– and the rest of my classes more or less followed suit. My main plan right now has to be to come up with a way to get through Monday without losing my soul to despair, which has been the pattern set by the last several Mondays.

OH MY GOD OTHERJOB SO BUSY WHY IS IT JULY GOTTA GO

Holy crap, is it the last warm Friday night of the year or something like that?  For the last several Fridays I’ve been able to write and/or read and/or grade more or less in peace at OtherJob because we haven’t had enough customers to keep me away from the laptop.  We got killed tonight starting two hours ago and just calmed down about twenty minutes ago.  And it was a crazy group of people, too– one group of Juggalos, one group of about fifteen Mennonites, and the local center for severely and profoundly disabled people had a crew out.  All at the same time, plus the usual assortment of families and couples on dates.

I cannot deal with Juggalos and Mennonites and Logan Center folks at the same time.  My brain can’t cope.  The Mennonites are all on Rumspringa and trying to buy weed from the Juggalos and the Logan Center kids keep asking who smells like pinecones.  Brain: broken.  At one point I was so frazzled I called a grown man “sweetheart;” I’d just been arguing with his daughter about which of us had had a longer day.  She was about seventh or eighth grade which tends to trigger my teacher vocabulary.   Luckily for me, he took it in stride– he turned to his daughter, said “He wins,” and then told me he was flattered but I wasn’t his type.

I may need to go home and get to bed soon.

Let me know what you think of the new site design, by the way.

Back to the Bible, dammit.

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, TeachingLeave a comment

There are apparently two new children at my school this year. Their names are Osiris and Goliath.

I just… I can’t, anymore, with this. Just no. No. No. You can’t. No.

I will be calling them Peter and Steven if they end up in my room.

(It has not escaped my notice that Goliath is a Bible name. My official response: shut up.)

Pfah.

On By Luther M. SilerIn BlogwankingLeave a comment

“Write every day, no matter what,” they tell me.

“Stay in practice,” they tell me.

“Have good ideas and something to talk about every day,” NO ONE EVER SAYS.

Stupid writing advice.

I made friends with a bug last night.  But the story ends in tears so I’m not going to tell it.  Instead, I’m going to go make soup.  I like soup.  It’s tasty.  Tomorrow, I will make risotto and invite Joe Bastianich over to eat my food.  He won’t come, but at least I’m trying.

The end.

Okay, stop the world, I’m getting off

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

Ladies and gentlemen!

I give you… the internet.

In which I peeve your pets

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

black-man-yelling-into-phone2It was, basically, a perfect day.  Not a cloudless sky, quite, but I like a few clouds in the sky for contrast.  Sunny, low eighties all day, not humid, nice breeze.  If there’s a way for South Bend to have a better day in July I can’t imagine what it might have been like.

I was at OtherJob, expecting a busy day, an expectation that was, more or less, fulfilled.

I had the following conversation one thousand times today:

Ring ring!

“<other job>, how may I help you?”

“Yeah, are you guys open?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, thanks!”

Click.

Lemme explain something, Internet.  First of all, OtherJob is an outdoor family destination.  If you can’t figure out that a place that does 70% of its business for the year in June, July and August is open at 4:00 PM on a Thursday on what will probably prove to be the nicest day of the year, you may in fact be too stupid to use the phone.  Yes, you morons, we’re fucking open.  Look outside!  Of course we’re fucking open, what the hell is wrong with you?

But even.  Sometimes shit happens, right?  Maybe we lost power, or the sewer exploded again, or maybe everywhere else you’ve been to today has been inexplicably closed and you’re starting to wonder if there’s something wrong with the universe.  Or you live forty miles away and you just want to be sure.  That’s okay!  I mean, you can probably safely jump to a conclusion on this one, but it’s okay!

Here is how that conversation should go, guys:

Ring ring!

“<other job>, how may I help you?”

“Oh, hi, I was just calling to make sure you guys were open.”

“Yep!  We close at (time.)”

“Okay, thanks!”

Click.

Alternately, instead of admitting that you’d just called to make sure we were open, you could ask about closing time or the prices or something.  Or just hang up!  That’s actually okay too.  Because, see, if we answered the fucking phone, it means that we’re open.  We don’t pay employees to sit around in a closed building and answer the phone to tell people that we aren’t here.  No one does that!  It doesn’t make any goddamn sense!  Seriously, what the hell did you think was going on here?

You goddamn idiot.

Sigh.  Seriously, one thousand times today.

Now that I’m done griping about customers, lemme take a minute and thank a couple, because it was kinda rude for me to horn in on that couple’s private conversation at the picnic table just because I heard the words “bacon” and “peanut butter” in the same sentence, and when you explained that you were actually talking about a bacon peanut butter jalapeno burger, and where I could get such a wonderful-sounding thing, you became my very best friends for ever, and I wish I had gotten your names and addresses so that I can babysit your kids or something.  Because holy shit bacon peanut butter jalapeno burger.  Oh my god.  

Dinner was good tonight, y’all.

Edit, maybe one minute after hitting “Publish”:  I will say, however, that bacon peanut butter jalapeno burger farts are not something that I’m hoping to have as part of my life for the rest of the night.  I really don’t want to sleep on the couch.