The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
Perfectly normal, I’m sure, to wake up at 5:30 in the morning on a Saturday, finally drag yourself out of bed at 6:30 after giving up on any chance of additional sleep, and then to take not one, not two, but three naps over the next twelve hours.
My body is stupid.
That absurdly tall, gloriously-haired kid on the right there— who is the same kid as this kid— graduated from 8th grade today. Which means that he is somehow a high school student now. Sooner than you might think, as he’s taking summer school classes right away and they start in a bit over a week.
That fat bastard on the left is going to be fifty in a month. He is somehow still alive.
I am feeling my mortality a bit more than usual this week, if you haven’t figured that out.
And my god have I been writing on this site for a long time.
That’s twenty-two years, I think? Twenty-three? Who the hell knows.
One of the things that happened at the event we went to last night was recognition of three retiring faculty members, and in fact there was a reception immediately afterward for them that we did not attend. The three had been teaching for, respectively, 29 years, 36 years, and a staggering 42 years, all at the same school.
If I retire from teaching, rather than eventually just quitting, I’ll surely be at at least 29 years. 36 is quite a bit harder to imagine. But 42? Imagine having taught for 22 years and still having the equivalent of an entire career to go before retirement. She was where I am and was barely halfway through. The notion that I’ll still be alive in 2046 much less still teaching is genuinely too terrifying to take seriously.
It turns out I was being very optimistic by suggesting that I might be able to come home from the last day of school and still have the mental capacity necessary to write a book review. Further complicating the problem is that various parts of my personality are at war with various other parts of my personality over how to write it, and the whole thing still needs to cook a little bit longer. It’s already got the lowest rating I’ve ever given a book I was sent for review; the question remaining is how … I dunno, I wanna say honest, but I think I mean abusive, I should be in the actual text of the thing. I am trying to tamp down my inner barbarian here, is what I’m saying. The only question is whether that’s the right move.
Probably. But we’ll see. The review definitely won’t be tomorrow but I’ll try to have it up on Saturday.
How old do I look?
Because, okay, I do have a Birthday of Significance coming up, in just barely over a month. I’m not entirely ready for it, to be honest. It has a good chance to be a pretty rough day. But do you know what shit happened to me today? I went to the grocery after work today, with my wife, because of course there had to be a witness along for this bullshit, to buy Many Snacks for the final meeting of my weird little gay kids club tomorrow.
I had too many snacks, so rather than going through the self-checkout I went through a regular register, with a checker and a bagger and shit. The human being manning the register … well, childing the register, was a larva. Maybe seven years old, at most. And do you know what this prepubescent little bastard(*) did to me?
Without saying anything or asking a single question, he gave me a senior citizen discount.
Which I took. Because fuck you, groceries are expensive, and 10% off is a good discount.
But seriously. Tell the truth, especially if you don’t actually know how old I am. I know The Youngs don’t have the slightest idea how old anyone over 30 actually is, but I can go back to this grocery store tomorrow and smack this little asshole, right? Because last I checked senior citizen means sixty-five, and … no. I don’t even plan on living to 65 and I sure as shit on my worst day on Earth don’t look 65 now.
I’mma kidnap this little diaper-wearing-ass smooth-skinned-ass no-retirement-plan-havin’-ass have-fun-with-global-warming-after-I’m-dead-ass whippersnapper and dropkick him onto my front lawn so I can tell him to get the fuck off of it.
(*) By seven, I mean seventeen, because if this little shit can fuck up my age I can sure as hell fuck his up.
… eh, I’ve looked worse.
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 he was 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.