Exhausted and crabby

Luther M. Siler1 Comment

Something they don’t tell you about the CPAP: it’s gonna lead to occasional times where you don’t feel like you’re getting enough oxygen just for the hell of it. I’m having one right now. Objectively, I’m fine; I’ve actually taken pulse ox measurements during these times and they’re fine. According to my watch right now I’m at 93%, which is a little low, admittedly, but the Apple Watch is not exactly a precision medical instrument, right?

I was going to blame panic attacks, but who the hell knows; maybe I’m dying. At any rate I’ve reached the point where if the thing didn’t tether me to my bed (it’s not exactly portable) I’d wear it all the time just for the hell of it. There’s something weirdly comforting about having oxygen shoved into your lungs whether you want it there or not.

At any rate, according to the device I’ve been sleeping just fine lately, but hell if I wasn’t tired and irritated all day today, at one point breaking up what was heading toward a fight in the hallway without breaking my stride, swatting a phone out of one kid’s hand and simply bullying the other one along in my path until they gave up and walked away on their own. You wanna get expelled, go ahead, but they’re gonna learn not to do it around me. Go upstairs if you wanna fight. Being home has improved my mood somewhat but not the tired; it’s 7:15 right now and I’m seriously considering just going the hell to bed as soon as I finish this.

I was not, for the record, expecting That Man to be arrested today, and in fact as soon as he announced that it was imminent I decided that it was going to happen any day but today. The more in the know than the former president seem to be suggesting that tomorrow is the earliest possible day an indictment could be handed down, and while the fact that they’re literally erecting metal barricades around the courthouse in New York indicates that this time this should probably be taken with a degree of seriousness I’m still not– forgive me for this, given the first two paragraphs– holding my breath. An indictment is definitely progress but at this point I won’t be satisfied until the fucker dies in jail. It can’t happen soon enough.

Now this

Luther M. Siler

I may have picked the wrong weekend to completely redo my office, as this week my wife is out of town on business and I’m a single dad until Saturday morning. Really all I’ve done so far is get up half an hour early to make sure I have time to make the boy’s lunch and feed the cats before I take him to school and I’m ready to curl up and die already. I slept like hell last night, probably not related to the lack of a second person in the bed with me, but I took her to the train station quite late– we left after I would ordinarily have been in bed, and it’s a good 20 minutes away– and it just threw my schedule entirely off, and I didn’t get to sleep until after midnight. Combine that with getting up early and … yuck.

And then it was Monday at work, and Mondays at work are never great, especially after three-day weekends. Today was really weird, though; first hour wanted to talk about anything and everything other than math– I rarely have to fend off questions about the afterlife from my students, but holy shit did they want to know every single thing about my opinion about what happens when we die today– and sixth hour was all about the what is this forrrrrrrrrr that I have a lot of trouble answering coherently for some reason.

Here’s the thing about algebra, right? You don’t use algebra, necessarily. Nobody majors in algebra in college. But if you don’t know algebra it locks you out of a whole lot of shit that may or may not have any direct connection to whether you can properly square a binomial or not. And if you want any future in a career involving math, forget it. I tried to make an analogy today to the alphabet. Imagine a kindergartner asking how they’re gonna “use” the alphabet in the future. Well … you don’t, really? Because the alphabet itself is just a baseline entry skill to a shitton of other stuff that is not, in and of itself, the alphabet. Do you want a career that involves reading or writing, kindergartner? Well, sure, or at least maybe, but what does that have to do with learning which letters are vowels right now? Am I gonna have a job in vowel-identifying later on?

You’re not gonna “use” a whole lot of algebra, honestly. You’ll need it because it’s building blocks to all future mathematics, which are useful to a whole lot of skills and careers, and even if you don’t go into those careers, I’m training your ass to think logically, which is useful to make you a more functional person.

But they don’t want that. They wanna know why they have to multiply binomials, and tomorrow they’re gonna be all about when am I gonna have to factor things, and my answer will be “Today, shut up,” and on we go.

Get me the manager

Luther M. Siler

I remain not in the mood for any of this, where “any of this” can be understood to mean “anything other than sleep,” although apparently I have a job or something that will require me to do some work tonight of some sort or another. I managed to get scammed at a car wash earlier today, discovering that what had been described as a month of car washes for a buck extra than what I was going to spend anyway was actually a monthly subscription to what appears to be their highest tier of car washes. If I hadn’t looked at my receipt I’d have had no damn idea that I’d been signed up for something monthly. I may go back tomorrow and firebomb the place; as it is, my receipt is displayed prominently on my desk so that I remember to cancel this bullshit as soon as it hits their computers. I tried already but they’re claiming the membership doesn’t exist, which I’m choosing to believe is legitimate since it’s literally only a couple of hours old at the moment.

I went the whole weekend without any real social media presence; I didn’t upload anything to the YouTube channel and I didn’t really post here. It floated through my head earlier to just turn everything off, which is a sign of where my head has been at lately. There’s no real worry at the moment about me doing that, but one thing I underestimated about switching jobs is just how much rewriting of absolutely everything I was going to have to do now that I’m at a new district that uses an LMS (Learning Management System) that I’m unfamiliar with. I’m spending more time planning right now than I have had to in years, and it’s meaning hours at the computer after work every day. I shouldn’t have to put this time in next year, or at least not nearly as much of it, but right now it’s hitting me harder than I really thought it was going to. I need to get more efficient about using my prep period at work, which can cut back on some of this, but half the time I’m covering classes during that time so I’d have to do the extra work at home anyway.

This job has added years to my teaching career, I really don’t doubt that, and I’m still enormously better off than I was at the other school, but … God, I’m tired.

Alive but unwilling

Luther M. Siler

I am sick AGAIN somehow and have spent most of the last day and a half napping and not in the mood for much of anything. I still owe you a story or two– this was actually a fairly action-packed week despite the fact that I only spent three days teaching– but creative output is going to be minimal until I overcome whatever the hell this crud is that has me in its grip right now.

Blech.

Free advice

Luther M. Siler5 Comments

If, after a reasonably relaxing six-and-a-half hour sleep cycle, you nearly die on the highway on the way to work because 1) somebody parked their car in a really shitty place on an offramp and oh also 2) you’re honestly fighting falling asleep for basically the entire drive, and then you get to work and, bleary-eyed and brainless, try to open your classroom door with your keycard badge, which, uh, doesn’t work on those kinds of doors, just go home. The day is not going to get better.

I also screwed up solving a problem on the whiteboard for my first hour class, only not only could I not find my error, neither could the entire class, and we sat and stared at it as a group for probably ten minutes. Turns out that, while 1.5 is half of three, that doesn’t mean that 3/1.5 equals 1/2! It equals two.

One grown adult, fifteen honors students, and it took me until lunchtime to figure out what I’d done wrong. I definitely should have given up and gone home after first hour.