Tag: whining

Keep on trying me

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

I am bored and kvetchy and it’s making my anxiety act up something fierce. I actually got quite a lot done today– no big projects, but a ton of little jobs around the house and I got the oil changed on the car– but since the sun went down I’ve turned into a mess, and I can’t concentrate well enough to read.

That part’s the alarming part, honestly. It’s rare that I can’t focus enough to read. I’m watching someone else play a video game while I’m writing this, and I’m starting to think I need to dive back into Skyrim or something like that; I simultaneously need something new to do and am kind of aching for something familiar and comfortable I can just fall into.

I’m also, for the first time in several years, pretty excited (or at least not actively dreading) Christmas, mostly because I feel like I definitely won Christmas this year. I don’t know if other families do this thing, where they’re competitive about who gets each other the best gifts– hell, I don’t know if my family does this thing or if it’s just me– but one way or another it’s me, hi, I won Christmas, it’s me.

Anyway, I’m going to go take down the wallpaper in the library or something.

An anecdote

On By Luther M. SilerIn life2 Comments

Got home from work.

Made a pot of coffee.

Drank a large cup of coffee from my Rasta Lion mug, which is my favorite.

Immediately fell asleep in my chair.

I am not kidding when I say I am immune to caffeine.

Wait, I wasn’t done

On By Luther M. SilerIn ReadingLeave a comment

Please, for your interest and edification, note this Bluesky “skeet” from me, written roughly four months ago:

At the time I wrote that, I believed it to be true. And it is possible that it’s still correct; after all, Paige Mahoney has been getting knocked out for five books now, and Vis from Hierarchy has only had two. But it has got to be true that Domitor Vis Telimus Catenicus Leathfhear Diago Carnifex Deaglán Silverhand Siamun has been grievously injured more than any other character in the history of the written word. And it gets so much worse when he gets split into three, because then they can just totally throw logic to the wind and hurt the hell out of him in every chapter, because you’re not going to remember that spear wound in his thigh in six chapters when you come back to him, and the other two versions of him don’t have the spear wound. It’s absolutely nuts, and it’s one of those things that can’t be unnoticed once you notice it. This man has had at least seventy concussions. You’re ideally not supposed to be knocked out so hard you don’t wake up for a week even once in your life, and Vis has it happen multiple times over the course of the maybe a handful of years that both books take place over.

The second special bonus gripe is connected to Islington’s world-building, although this is not at all something that is unique to him, and in fact I’ve been seeing it a lot lately across multiple authors. Y’all, if you’re going to make “Gods!” or “Hells!” a swear word in your fantasy series, the gods or the hells need to have some presence in your book other than the swearing. Maybe this is another example of me being a sloppy reader, but there are a handful of gods named in a glossary at the end of the book, and there’s whatever the hell Religion is (I don’t know! There’s literally just a thing that the graduates can join called Religion! I don’t know what it is or what they do.) but worship and/or fear of and/or basic acknowledgment of divinity is damn near entirely absent from the book. Vis certainly doesn’t worship anything. And I’m sorry, but if any form of the concept of Hell made it onto the page at all beyond “Hells” being a swear word, I missed it. It’s lazy, especially in a world where they already both use standard English profanity and a made-up word, “vek,” that is a pure expletive in the way you might yell “Shit!” or “Fuck!” if something bad or startling happened. There’s no verb form. No one veks, and nothing is ever described as veking (vekking?) anything. But we don’t need “gods” or “hells” or “gods-damned,” which is somehow worse, and it’s one more annoying detail in a book full of them.

Okay, I’m done now.

And now I’m blind

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

I was not expecting that word search to be nearly as difficult as it turned out to be. No one came close to finishing it, or even finishing half of it, although a couple of my more obsessive kids told me they were taking it home over break and would bring it back on Monday, and I started poking at it myself around noon and as of right now, at 8:30, after putting another hour or so into it, I’m still missing 37 names. This generator does this absolutely wicked thing where they like to make clusters that are almost names but off by a letter or two, or let you spell a name if you make a right turn somewhere, and … damn. I’ve never in my life quit a word search because it was too hard, and this one won’t break me, but it’s coming close.

In which that can’t be it

On By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

I have a student who has missed a lot of school lately because of mononucleosis, but as far as I know that’s not traditionally contagious and I’m reasonably certain I have not been making out with him. But god damn, the last time I was this consistently tired several days running was after major changes in my brain meds and there haven’t been any of those lately either. I was yawning uncontrollably during my last class today. Giant, jaw-cracking yawns. The first thing one of my students said to me on Tuesday was “Are you okay?” Not a thing that happens often, y’know?

I’ll bet you a dollar I wake up at 5 am tomorrow and can’t get back to sleep, just like I have for damn near every weekend morning since school started. Sigh.

Okay NOW I’m dead

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

Made it through PTCs, and now it’s 6:42 pm and I may very well be in bed by 7:30.

And I still get to have a tooth pulled tomorrow, so don’t expect the quality of posting around here to improve for at least another day.

Today was exhausting

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

It wasn’t a bad day, really, but everyone was Super Extra today, and I resolved out loud more than once that going back to furniture sales (or, at one point, used cars) couldn’t be that bad. My first hour couldn’t stop giggling and making dumb noises, and they’re usually my super chill and/or sleepy group. I knew right then and there it was going to be a long day. And I couldn’t get my head on straight all day, not in an angry or emotional sense but in that I felt half a step behind where I was supposed to be all day long and had way more trouble remembering things than I usually do. You’ve got to be able to keep ninety things straight at the same time to be able to do my job correctly, and at my best today I was handling fifteen.

Tomorrow we have a billion teachers out. I’m covering three classes during the day. It’s gonna be super fun. I’m gonna decompress and kill some ronin now.

As per your previous request

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

I was asked after posting about my boneless sofa to remember to post a video next time. Today is next time! I now have a boneless sofa and a boneless chair in my classroom for my kids to sit in while they read.

They don’t read, mind you, but whatever. I’m an optimist, dammit.

Also, I’m not entirely sure why iMovie decided to change the aspect ratio of the video, but I’m not concerned enough about it to go back and fix it.

Meanwhile, I have survived my first full day of work for this school year without any particular drama or stress, although I do think the 2 1/2 hour faculty meeting we had this afternoon was, in a lot of ways, the wrong faculty meeting. In particular we had a dreadful half-hour or so where we got way too deep into the weeds about a hall pass policy that the seasoned teachers took one look at, realized it would never work, and immediately resolved to ignore; the less experienced teachers asked two hundred and forty thousand “well, what about this?” questions, causing no small amount of suicidal ideation among those of us who have been around the block a couple of times.

(We have new APs, and two of them are new-new, not just new to us; this has all the hallmarks of an idea put forth by someone with their heart in the right place but no sense of how an initially-reasonable-sounding plan might scale to a building with hundreds of kids and dozens of teachers. It’s kind of cute, in its way, and I can imagine our principal pushing back mildly against it a bit and then shrugging and saying “Give it a try and we’ll see,” knowing full well that a bunch of us were … well, gonna take one look at and resolve to ignore it. I’m not mad about the plan, necessarily, just that it led to a half hour of increasingly obvious hypothetical questions. Y’all have been in meetings, you know how it goes.)

Anyway. My wife and son both had to go out of town today to take my brother- and sister-in-law somewhere, so they won’t be back for a few hours; I’m gonna go play Wuchang: Fallen Feathers until they get back. I really will post classroom pictures tomorrow, I promise.