Just in case you haven’t heard, even by 2025’s standards there was a pretty massive fuck-up by somebody this week, with billions-with-a-b of passwords leaked.(*) And it’s looking like a lot of them were from Apple and Google and Facebook, and places like that where you really want to make sure your password is secure. I changed about twenty passwords today– all of my email addresses except for work, anything connected with money, and this site– and while it was a pretty big pain in the ass, it really needed to be done.
You’re using a password manager, by the way, right? You should be using a password manager. Make your password for that a four-or five-word phrase that you’ll remember, substituting a couple of numbers for letters or maybe doing some strategic misspelling, and let the app worry about everything else.
Anyway, point is, go do that.
Dammit, I had something else for this. Uh … shit, getting old sucks; I’m watching a video on another monitor while I’m writing this and I’ve lost the ability to pay attention to more than one thing at once. Expect a quick post tomorrow; we’re going to my brother’s to celebrate both of his kids’ birthdays; we’ve had to reschedule this a couple of times now because one or both of them keep getting sick, so hopefully nothing other than the heat will be getting in our way tomorrow.
Gaaaah. If I remember the other thing I’ll either throw up another post or just edit this. There was definitely something but it’s gone right now. Sigh.
(*) I’m not actually certain of any of the details of the leak, which looks like it had to have been multiple simultaneous leaks, somehow? I just know I pay attention whenever Apple or Google gets hit by one of these things because those are the accounts I really don’t need compromised.
EDIT: Oh! I remembered! I woke up this morning to discover that I had a couple hundred page views already, which is not normal– usually there will be no more than a couple dozen overnight. The other weird thing? They were all from Hong Kong, and the specific posts that were seeing a bunch of views were all older posts with no clear relationship to one another. We’ll see if it happens tonight. Those couple hundred page views were also spread out over a hundred or so individual visitors, so it’s not like one person went through a big chunk of the site or something. So … yeah, Hong Kong folks, if you come back, can you tell me why? 🙂
Nevin Longenecker, my freshman Biology teacher, passed away last week. I was surprised to realize, when I checked, that Mr. Longenecker was not among the teachers who I dedicated Searching for Malumba to. I can sort of reconstruct my logic; every high school teacher I mention on that list was someone who I spent at least multiple years if not all four years of high school with, and I only had the one class with Mr. Longenecker. Among his many accomplishments as an educator was his senior Research Biology seminar, an opportunity that several of my friends participated in and which, over the years, generated literally millions of dollars in research grants. I was not planning on a career in the sciences, so I was not part of that seminar, and Mr. Longenecker’s direct role in my education ended after my freshman year. He was, regardless, one of the finest educators I ever had the pleasure of being in a classroom with.
He started teaching at my high school in 1968. And Adams wasn’t his first school. He taught for sixty-four years in total, and never actually retired, although my understanding is that health reasons prevented him from starting this school year. He started that research program in 1976, the year I was born.
Sixty. Four. Fucking. Years. I am a grown-ass man with white hair and I have sixteen years to go before I have lived as long as he was a teacher. Fifty-six years at the same school, and I’d bet money that hewas still in the same classroom that he occupied when I was there. I’m trying to imagine the pressure of being the next person to move into that room and I can’t do it.
The phrase “rest in peace” has had all the edges rubbed off of it by years and years of use, but I cannot imagine someone who deserves more peace and rest than someone who taught high school for six and a half decades.
Meanwhile, and the reason this isn’t headlined as an RIP post, I logged into my pension website and was greeted with, I believe for the first time, an indication that I was hitting my “retirement goals.”:
I don’t know who generated that $3533 number, for the record, or how or if it’s slid around during my years as an Indiana teacher, but this is the first time that dollar bill has been entirely orange. I don’t want to hear shit from anybody about how bad the economy’s doing; apparently my retirement account is up sixteen percent this year, which is ludicrous. I can’t even move that “might return” slider far enough to the right to account for sixteen percent increases (and, okay, I know it’s not going to last forever, too, but still.)
Anyway, I was happy for a minute, until I saw that retirement age.
68? Sixty-eight? Sixty-eight???? Shit, I’m not even going to be alive at 68 much less wait that long to retire. It turns out that if I play with that slider I can earn an impressive $55 a month if I retire next year, and the magic number appears to be 62, where the orange bar makes a big jump over to the right. That’s still fourteen years out, which feels kinda crazy.
I learned all of this and had all of these thoughts before learning of Mr. Longenecker’s passing. There’s no obituary yet and I’m not sure when he was born, but if he started teaching straight out of college he’d have to have been at least 85. The craziest thing is he was the teacher with the second longest tenure in the district. As far as I know, Bev Beck is still in the classroom.
(For giggles, take a look at the article linked on that page about the “80-year-old teacher” suing the district for age discrimination, and then look at the date on the article.)
I will, nonetheless, not be aspiring to equal either of those people’s feats. That said, I probably ought to start buying lottery tickets.
Pearl Jam, otherwise known as the greatest band on the planet, is on tour right now in support of Dark Matter, their most recent release, which somehow is one of the best albums they’ve ever done. Bands that had their first release in 1991 aren’t allowed to release one of their best albums in 2024. This doesn’t make any sense. They did it anyway.
Anyway, tickets to Deer Creek– fuck you, I don’t know what the hell the Ruoff Center is, it’s Deer Creek– were absolutely fucking ludicrous when the show got announced. Like $600+ for lawn seats.
I’ve been keeping an eye on them anyway, and … well, they’ll be at Deer Creek next week and tickets on the lawn (which, at Deer Creek, are still pretty damn good seats) are down to a much more reasonable $120 apiece, and even actual seats are at a price I’m willing to pay for them.
Now, note that I said “next week.” What do you think that implies about the actual date of the show? Or, more relevantly, the day of the week?
Because the Goddamned show is on a Monday. And I’m sorry, even building in taking the next day off, I absolutely cannot go to a rock concert on a Monday night when I am 48 years old. I just can’t. I have seen these guys in concert three or four times (I am so old I can’t immediately tell you exactly how many) and I have still somehow never seen them play Black live so I absolutely have to see them at least one more time before I die or one of them does, but I genuinely think I could get free tickets and the creeping existential horror that takes over when I even contemplate going out on a Monday night, much less to something I have to drive a couple of hours to, would keep me from going.
I mourn my lost youth. Not a lot; I didn’t really use it that well when I had it, but still.
Today was awful; I had to put a kid out in five of my six classes, which is fucking ridiculous, and I got asked if I qualified for a fucking senior citizen’s discount while attempting to buy a whole rotisserie chicken and two boxes of cookies at the grocery.
Forced Taught the boy to shave tonight, and his shitty little 12-year-old rat mustache is no more. He is disappointed. I have never identified more closely with my own father, who I recall having precisely the same conversation with me when he forced taught me to shave at about the same age. Also, I’ve reminded myself why I abhor disposable razors, which are even worse for a novice shaver, since he didn’t really know how to hold the razor and thus did less shaving than just shoving shaving cream around on his face.
I did not die yesterday, and in fact the boy’s team did quite well, and he managed a third place (of 23) in one of his events. The team, which is loaded with sixth graders (6-8 are eligible), did not qualify for nationals, but given that 2/3 of them had never competed before (and, oh, also, I don’t want to go to nationals) I’m pretty proud of him. That said, we got up at six and didn’t get home until about 10:30, so it was a long day, and I think all three of us feel somewhat robbed of our weekends.
One of my oldest friends’ oldest daughter— go ahead, parse it, it makes sense, although I have to admit I’m not a hundred percent sure where that apostrophe should be, or if “friends” should be plural in the first place– just accepted a college offer. Also, earlier today I made reference to an old movie, and a student asked me if it came out in “the nineteens.”
I’m going to go to bed, and crumble into dust, and not worry about any of this any longer.
I thought about putting an exclamation point at the end of my age up there– 47! — but that implies a level of excitement about this birthday that I don’t really feel. Honestly, I could do without it, and I’m feeling a little bit of stress about this one that I really don’t remember being there the last few times July 5 rolled around. Maybe it’s got something to do with yesterday being the hottest day in the history of the human race, or maybe it’s just that I’m undeniably in my late forties now, with 50 staring me in the fucking face, and I feel like my sudden realization earlier today that my hobbies haven’t changed noticeably since I was nine years old is kinda hitting harder than it deserves to as well.
But fuck it. I’m 47. That’s what 47 looks like on me. There’s a video going around on TikTok right now of a woman who claims to be 28 who looks at least a decade older than me so things could definitely be worse. And it’s not like I don’t know plenty of people who didn’t make it to 47 to complain about it, too.
(EDIT: This post is auto-linking to my birthday post from last year, which I also started with a selfie. I am wearing the exact same shirt today that I was wearing a year ago. Apparently the idea of wearing red the day after the 4th entertained me both years.)
Anyway, I’m an electrician now. This has been hanging in my former dining room/ current library since we moved in in March of 2011:
It had a bunch of dangly glass things with it that we removed almost immediately, and I’ve mostly been hitting my head on it since we moved the dining table into the other room. I finally took it down and replaced it today, with this significantly simpler model:
That’s an LED ceiling light, and you can adjust the temperature of the light. Right now my wife thinks it’s perfect and I think it’s too fucking white, so we can look forward to fighting over that for forever, but I don’t need to buy those stupid fire-shaped lightbulbs ever again. I also swapped out the existing dimmer switch with a newer one that was supposed to be specifically for LEDs. This is, as it turns out, a pretty simple job all around, mostly requiring convincing yourself that you’re not going to electrocute yourself while you’re doing it. It was made slightly more complicated by the fact that my house has aluminum wiring, having been built during the five-year or so period where copper was hugely expensive for some reason. There are special little boxes you’re supposed to use to connect copper and aluminum wires, but again, they aren’t complicated either; they just make the job a little scarier.
I also discovered while swapping out the dimmer that it was installed wrong, and was in fact installed without the little boxes, which is basically exactly what you’re constantly told not to do when you’re working with that type of wiring– you don’t want to pigtail them together like you would with two copper wires, because something something science science and they can spark and cause a fire. I hope to hell that that dimmer switch was installed a lot later than the rest of the house (it would make sense that it was a late addition, since, after all, it used copper wire) and I’m really hoping that I’m not about to find out that every power switch in the house is installed incorrectly. Since this went off more or less without a hitch we’re going to swap out a few other fixtures that we’ve decided we don’t like, and while we’re doing it I’ll look at the switches and make sure they’re installed right.
The punch line to all of this is that now that it’s in I’m not sure I like the new light. It’s higher in the room than the chandelier was, as you might expect, and so it throws shadows on the books and statues and various and sundry other things in the room in a way that was very different from the chandelier; you can get some hints of what I mean from that picture above, although I wasn’t smart enough for a “before” image. We’ll see; I’m sure I’ll get used to it. I also haven’t seen it at night yet, so we’ll see how I feel about it in a couple of hours.
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