Did you know the Indiana Dinosaur Museum exists? And it’s an actual dinosaur museum, and not a secret shrine to creationism, like you might expect from Indiana? One of my wife’s cousins is in town, and we were supposed to meet her and my brother- and sister-in-law there, and well, we did, but instead of exploring the Indiana Dinosaur Museum I got abruptly and rather disgustingly ill, and ended up spending most of my time either in the (impressively clean!) bathroom or the car waiting for them to finish the tour. Then we came home, cancelling the lunch that we were supposed to be hosting, and I went to bed for a few hours. I got up and watched France squeak by Paraguay, and … well, now it’s going to rain. There were no real plans to watch fireworks tonight (the Fourth of July has rarely been treated as much of a thing by my family, to be honest) and the rain would be preventing that anyway, so I’m watching it get dark super early and waiting for the sky to explode.
Speaking of disappointments, I was hoping for some horrible people to have bad things happen to them today, but it appears that that’s not happening either. I’m turning 50 tomorrow, and I’m not happy about it, and I really don’t know what kind of day tomorrow is going to be. I know I’m watching both of the World Cup matches– my devotion to watching soccer over the last month has been surprising even to me; it’s the only sporting event I pay attention to any longer, but I wasn’t expecting to prioritize watching nearly every match I could, and that’s what I’ve been doing.
So, yeah. America 250 is officially blech. We’ll see how Luther 50 goes tomorrow. What did you do with your holiday?
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.
Woke up at 6:30 in the morning, not because I wanted to.
Laid in bed and screwed around on my phone for a while, because to hell with getting out of bed that early on a Saturday.
Finished Kylie Lee Baker’s Japanese Gothic, which was fine, I suppose, but I don’t have a lot to say about it. I’ve read two of Baker’s books now and I feel like I bounce off of her a little bit for some reason that I can’t quite explain.
Finished a not-Lego build.
Watched the Netherlands absolutely demolish Sweden.
Did a really poor job at several online games that I’ve been playing lately.
And now I’m watching Ecuador play Curaçao, which just went into halftime tied.
Tomorrow my brother and his family are coming into town, so I need to spend the morning cleaning. A sensible person would have started today; I am not sensible.
This will be my third piece about a former teacher who has passed away, and to be completely honest, had you mentioned Mr. Nemeth to me before a couple of hours ago, I would have thought that he had already left us some time ago. He was my math teacher in seventh or eighth grade– I think in eighth, so this would be 1989-1990, but I cannot remember my other middle school math teacher to save my life, so it’s possible I had him in seventh. He spent, according to his obituary, 45 years teaching, all of it at the same school, and once again I find myself flummoxed at the idea that I’m as far into my career as I am and may not yet have reached the halfway point of his. He passed away at 90, so he would have only been in his mid-fifties when I had him.
I am trying really hard right now to not think too hard about the fact that he wasn’t that much older than I am now when I was in his class, and I’m definitely not trying to reconcile that knowledge with the idea I had that he was much older.
I really liked Mr. Nemeth– everybody did, as far as I remember– and while my memories from middle school are sketchy at best, I feel like he was one of the better math teachers I had. He was definitely someone who enjoyed working with kids as well, which is not exactly the same thing as being a good teacher– you can, believe it or not, be a tremendous educator and not “like kids” that much.
Now, I need you to be aware that I wrote those three paragraphs along with several others, and then made the post live. After that I went and looked at my yearbook from 8th grade, and then my head exploded. I have left the paragraphs above unedited– you will note that I said that I don’t remember if I had him in seventh or eighth grade? As it turns out, I had him in seventh grade, and this story that I wrote about him for an RIP post, the story that I’m going to reproduce below, was not about him. Because I went and looked at my yearbook and, yes, I did have Mr. Nemeth, and I liked Mr. Nemeth, but my eighth grade teacher was named Mr. Farkas, and he passed away in 2020(*). So I wrote this whole story intending it to be a charming anecdote about a beloved former teacher who had passed away and I was writing about the wrong guy.
(Fun fact about middle school: A good chunk of adults have very few working memories of the years between 12-14 as compared to any other era of their lives, and it’s because your brains are so thoroughly marinated in puberty chemicals that forming long-term memories is actually inhibited. I could not have told you Mr. Farkas’ name until seeing his picture, at which point everything just completely shook loose in my head. To be clear, I did like Mr. Nemeth, now that I’m remembering him properly, and I’m going to tell the story about Mr. Farkas anyway, with the right name on it, because now that I’ve written all of this out it’s too good to delete.)
So, returning to the original post: I have a quick story I want to tell about Mr. Farkas, and for the second time, the story I’m going to tell is a cherished memory on my end and absolutely something that he would never be able to get away with were he to do it today. There was a particular Friday in Math class where a few of my friends decided to start telling everyone that I was having a party that night. I don’t remember what triggered this; it was likely nothing at all, as I was not at the time known for throwing parties, and I definitely wasn’t known for throwing parties that were attended by girls, and my friends were making no exceptions as to who they were inviting over to my house. No one took the joke especially seriously, and at any rate the guys weren’t sharing my address or phone number, so it’s not as if anyone could have found me anyway.
As it turned out, that night I decided to have a few people over anyway to play video games, including the friends that were telling everyone I was having a party. There were maybe four or five of us, I think. My mom and dad were watching TV in the living room and we were playing games in the family room when there was a knock at the door. We were all briefly confused, as everyone we were expecting was already there, and I didn’t live in the kind of neighborhood where neighbors dropped by very often.
I answered the door. It was Mr. Farkas.
He had a cotton candy machine with him.
I remember that he explained how he had come to be in possession of a cotton candy machine, but I regret to inform you that I don’t remember the reason. I don’t know if he specifically put the cotton candy machine into his car to bring it to my house and see if we wanted cotton candy, or if he was bringing it back from somewhere(**) and he had just decided to check and see if party rockin’ was taking place at the Siler household that night.
One way or another, though, my math teacher was at my door, asking if the four or five of us wanted him to spin up any cotton candy for us, along with my brother and my parents.
That is not an invitation that one turns down, believe me. So Mr. Farkas made all of us cotton candy and hung out for a little while and then vanished into the night, taking his cotton candy machine with him. And Monday at school, the same friends who had invited everyone to my house tried to tell everyone that there had been a party, and Mr. Farkas had shown up and made us cotton candy, and … okay, this bit could be partially invented, but I’m almost certain no one believed us, and I half-believe that Mr. Farkas denied the whole story as well.
I have to have gotten my habit of gaslighting my students to death from somewhere, after all.
Rest in peace, both of you, Mr. Nemeth and Mr. Farkas. I hope my students have as warm memories, accurate or otherwise, of me as I do of the two of you thirty-six years down the road, even if I don’t intend to show up at their houses to create any of those memories.
(*) The punchline to all of this is that Mr. Farkas’ obituaryactually calls him The Cotton Candy Man, implying that this was not the first time he’d pulled this move and explaining why he had the machine.
(** I didn’t live far from school, so this isn’t entirely unimaginable, if there had been a sporting event that night or something that he was making candy for. I have a vague recollection that it was his machine, but again, this was a long damn time ago.)
I woke up at 5:00 in the morning and couldn’t get back to sleep, which didn’t stop me from collapsing into bed a bit after noon and sleeping for six hours. I feel like hell and am going back to bed in a few minutes; I haven’t eaten all day and I feel like some food might be a good idea. Not sure if my wife and son still live here, either, so I should probably go see if they’re still in the house.
Does anybody know what this thing is? Several of them have popped up on intersections near me; I’m pretty certain they aren’t cameras because, well, they don’t look like cameras and some of them are on intersections that definitely do already have obvious cameras. There also tend to be just one or two per intersection and so they aren’t covering all four directions. I mean, it looks like a bell, but as far as I can tell they don’t make any noise and why the hell would anyone be mounting bells on the roads at intersections anyway?
I was dead to the world by 8:00 PM last night, and considered making it twice in a row tonight. I can’t explain it; I am genuinely not having bad days at work by any standard but my god am I coming home exhausted. I’m back to wondering if signing up for summer school was a mistake again, but I still feel like passing up all that money for a job I’ll be done with by noon every day is a horrendously poor decision.
In other news, I got an email today that is almost certainly a scam. I’m following up on it; if it’s a scam, it’s a quite detailed one and I’m going to follow it down the rabbit hole until the part where they ask me for money just for the lulz. If I’m wrong and it’s not a scam, it’s big news, but obviously nothing I can share just yet.
(It’s gonna be a scam. It’s definitely a scam. But at least I’ll get a post or two out of it.)
The bride is the eldest daughter of my wife’s favorite cousin, and she and her sister are easily my favorites among my wife’s side of the family (who, for the record, are all perfectly fine people; I’ve gotten very lucky with my in-laws) but I was unfortunately unsuccessful in my attempts to encourage either chicanery or shenanigans. She’s marrying into a family that is substantially more religious than anyone on our side, and I am the least religious of our side by a significant margin, so I was at least hoping for some entertainment or at least horror stories out of that, but it didn’t happen– the church was lovely, the reception was gorgeous, the pastor seemed to be a perfectly fine fellow, and I really didn’t feel like the experience as a whole was any more Jesusy than any other wedding I’ve been to, so all good there as well. The wedding was even short! Twenty minutes, in and out.
That said, they put out a Bible next to the guest book, and asked everyone to pick their favorite verse and sign next to it, and … well … never ask an atheist with graduate degrees in Hebrew Bible to pick his favorite Bible verse.
(She will think this is hilarious. I mentioned to her at one point that I had briefly considered flipping her and her mother off as they officially walked into the church– we sat in the back and were the first people she saw when they walked in, and she and I locked eyes for a moment– and she laughed and told me I should have done it.)
They also did a neat thing where they put a card on each of the tables at the reception and asked the guests to give them advice, with each card to be read on the anniversary corresponding to the table number. Ours was table 7, so they will read our card on their 7th anniversary. I did not write that I hope they enjoyed my funeral, which was my first thought, since there is no way 2035 is even a real year.(*)
At any rate, we are back in our hotel room right now, a room which somehow is sporting four queen-sized beds for the three of us, and in accordance with prophecy and our most ancient and revered familial traditions, none of us have spoken a word since we got back. I’m going to read for a while and go to bed, since there’s a family breakfast in the morning and I will need to restore needed energy for further socialization.
(*) Not only is it not a real year, it’s not seven years from now. Shut up, I’m tired.
Coming home and dying on Fridays seems to have been a thing lately, and indeed, that’s what I did tonight, and we are going to be at a wedding out of town tomorrow night, so don’t expect much more than a hotel picture unless I can con the bride into something vaguely compromising. Luckily, I don’t have a lot of planning to do for Monday, because I suspect once we get back on Sunday all three of us are going to collapse into separate rooms and not speak again for a while.
