The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
Writing tomorrow’s lessons took a thousand years, and I still have to do postcards and Arabic tonight, so … yeah.
Wanna watch a Pearl Jam show?
EDIT: Well, shit. They haven’t, like, blocked me specifically despite what the statement says. Just click through, it’s a good show. 🙂
You can probably expect me to keep rattling on about this until these damn things are all done; I managed 35 of them today, and I’m done with almost half of them. My stamina seems to be growing, so I’ll shoot for 40 tomorrow and see what happens to my handwriting at the end.
Anyway, I’ve been fiddling with the message I’m supposed to write on these things as I’ve been going through and I think I’ve settled on the Luther Approved Version. I think I posted this already, but here’s the official text that I’m basing my cards on:
Hi [voter’s first name]! Thank you for being a voter! Your friends and family may need your reminder to vote. Please ask them to vote in the Tues. Nov 5 election! – [your first name].
And here’s my version:
Hi [voter’s first name]!1 Thank you for being a voter!2 Your friends and family3 may need your encouragement4 to vote. Please ask5 everyone6 to do their part7 in the election on November8 5!
-Luther
Also, did you know how much a postcard stamp goes for nowadays? Fifty-six cents, which means two hundred of them runs a hundred and fifteen dollars after the handling fee. I had no choice other than “standard” delivery, which had bloody well better get the damned things to me by the 23rd or I’m gonna fight somebody. You’d think the post office, of all places, would tell you specifically how fast “standard delivery” gets me my damn stamps but they don’t.
I need a new obsession to keep me busy between now and the election. The way this weekend is going I’m going to have to do a full news/internet blackout in the next couple of weeks if I want to keep my sanity. Anyone want to buy me a lathe or a pottery wheel or, like, an easel and a bunch of those … things … you paint on, that I’ve forgotten the name of for some reason?
Holy shit, I really can’t remember.
Canvases! Anyone want to buy me an easel and some canvases? And I guess some paint?
Got thirty more cards done today. I think that’s my limit before my handwriting falls apart and I start misspelling things at random, as evidenced by the fact that I typed “limmit” just now and it was 100% deliberate and not a slip of the fingers. Either way, that’s a fourth of them done. Not bad.
Maybe I’ll make my son a couple more notebooks. He seemed to enjoy the first one well enough. I’ve got all this bookmaking crap lying around, I may as well use it.
I put addresses on the last two and a half pages of postcards today, and got 25 written with full messages– those are the ones that are in the rubber band. If I can keep up that pace I’ll have them all done by the 19th, well in advance of the mailing date on the 24th. And since tomorrow is Sunday and I don’t have any grading to do, I figure I can get at least two days’ worth done and get ahead.(*)
I dunno. I’ve gone door-to-door on Election Day, I’ve done voter registration, and now this, and of the three I think I like voter registration the most as a pro-democracy activity. The Election Day I spent canvassing for John Kerry did not result in a single extra voter being sent to the polls but did result in at least two people threatening my life and one threatening to sue me, and I just don’t have a ton of confidence in the messages they’re asking me to put on these cards.
Part of it, I suppose, is I fundamentally don’t understand the mind of the non-voter or the reluctant voter. I vote in every fucking election. I don’t have to be asked or talked into it. It’s part of my damn job. This particular year required probably the largest investment in time I’ve ever had to make in order to vote and I was probably in line for about an hour. I know that in some places the lines can be horrendously longer, and things can go wrong, and sure, there are good reasons why some people aren’t able to vote. Fine. But just … choosing not to? I don’t get it and I never will, and the notion that you might be a nominally Democratic enough voter to get on one of these mailing lists and still need a postcard reminder in order to vote just doesn’t make any sense to me. Like, I want to see the screening methods they used to generate these lists.
Blech. I’m gonna do it anyway, obviously, because I can either do something or I can go insane, and I don’t have the temperament for phone banking and I’m never doing door-to-door again, so voter postcards it is. I just wish I could convince myself that this was actually going to make some kind of difference.
(*) And it occurs to me that I have parent/teacher conferences on the 21st and 22nd after school, and I’m absolutely certain I’ll be in no shape to come home and write postcards, so I probably ought to get these done well in advance. Maybe I’ll do 30 a day instead of 25.
21 years teaching, and today was the first time I had to make a CPS referral.
Second long week of the week.
I don’t know if you’ve ever taken 8th graders on a field trip or not. I suspect you probably haven’t. And since I was primarily responsible just for my advisory, who I love, and about four other kids who I didn’t hand-select but I might as well have, it really wasn’t a bad or stressful field trip at all. The kids behaved admirably and I was proud of them. But Jesus, trying to keep constant track of 21 people out in public all at the same time is exhausting, and once we got back to school they (entirely predictably) decided that they’d all collectively had enough of their best behavior for the day, and then actual fucking sex assault drama blew up in the 8th grade, and … yeah, I wanted to talk about LL Cool J tonight and I just don’t have the spoons.
That said, watch this, especially the verse that starts at about 58 seconds, and see if you can figure out when this motherfucker is breathing. Dude has been rapping since 1985 and I’ve never seen anything from him like this.
I’m sitting here writing addresses on a stack of 200 postcards, and I can’t decide if I’m proud of myself for starting so early– they want them mailed on October 24th– or pissed that I put it off for so long, since I’m sure they’ve been sitting on my desk for a month by now. Probably a little bit of both?
At any rate, I’m more or less taking the night off tonight, because every time I touch something electronic I start doomscrolling and I don’t need it. I can’t do anything about anything that happens in Florida tonight, and watching the utter idiots who appear determined to livestream themselves drowning in their own homes tonight is not helping my mood or my mental health. Therefore: postcards, and once my handwriting starts to suffer I’m going to spend the rest of the night with a book. I’ll see you tomorrow.
I did get a sticker, but I got Indiana’s boring one, not any of these cool stickers.
I always try to vote early, but I don’t recall ever voting on the very first day I was legally able to before. This year, though? I wanted that shit over with, and I drove from work directly to Mishawaka’s county services building, arriving about 20 minutes before the doors closed. The line for early voting was out the door, and it took about an hour to get my vote cast.
For the most part, my votes will not surprise you.
These six fine ladies, along with two male ticket members:
Kamala Harris and Tim Walz for President and Vice-President
Jennifer McCormick and Terry Goodlin for Governor and Lieutenant Governor
Valerie McCray for Senate
Lori Camp for US House
Destiny Wells for Indiana Attorney General
Maureen Bauer for State House
(They’re up there as a gallery, so it’s possible the order of the pictures doesn’t match the order of the names.)
I voted for the Democrat in all of the local races with one exception: I did not vote for Dave Niezgodski for State Senate, because Dave Niezgodski is a sex pest and I don’t vote for sex pests. I thought briefly about voting for his opponent, but without knowing anything about him, I decided to refrain; honestly, this will be a small enough turnout contest that I feel like simply withholding my vote is enough. I don’t need to actively vote for the other side.
I got to vote against the loathsome Derek “I have a penis” Dieter again, which always pleases me, because fuck that guy.
Purely voting strategically, I voted to retain all of the judges up for vote. I don’t really like voting for judges, to be honest; I rarely know who any of them are and they don’t campaign, and for some reason the Indiana bar’s survey isn’t out yet despite their website promising it’ll be ready by September 30th. I voted to retain because all of them were named by Mitch Daniels or Eric Holcomb, and if they were drummed out of office Mike Braun will likely be picking their replacements, and Mike Braun is a fucking lunatic. Whoever he picks will not be an improvement, so absent any information of use for any of them, retention it is.
The only thing left is the school board, and … our school board candidates are not exactly covering themselves in glory this go-round. My specific candidate for my district isn’t up this year, so I’m just voting at-large, and … ick.
I ended up voting for Jeannette McCullough and George Jones. I know both of them and I am not especially fond of one of them– in fact, I have suggested voting against one of them in the past– but the other choices are worse. In particular, if you’re local enough that this matters to you, I specifically do not endorse Gabrel Kempf and I really really really do not endorse Marcus Ellison. Please do not vote for Marcus Ellison. I have known him for a very long time and I do not want him on the school board.
Related:
Getting from work to the early voting center I used involved about ten miles of driving on a road that was sporting a surprising number of political signs. They’re really not all that common yet, although I’m sure that will change, probably by this weekend. And after a while something struck me about all those signs: first, that there were quite a lot of Harris-Walz signs, more than I really expected, and that most of the lawns with Harris-Walz signs also had other signs for local or state offices.
The interesting thing was the Republican signs. For the most part– and I may take this route again on my way home on Thursday to take a closer look and maybe do some counting– it seemed like lawns that had Trump signs only had Trump signs, and even more curiously, lawns with signs for any other Republican candidate often did not have Trump signs. There would either be a Trump sign by itself or a dozen local and state candidates and no Trump sign.
At the moment, I’m presenting this only as an interesting anecdote and I am not drawing any conclusions. I just want it noted for the record. Feel free to speculate on your own, if you like.
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