The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
If anyone would care to explain why my post about The Expanse from three years ago is getting so much attention over the last couple of days, I’d love to know.
Meanwhile, I’m going to turn off the “comments close after two weeks” policy and see how fast I regret it.
Many years ago– I have told this story before, but in a previous version of this blog, I think– I had a deeply weird conversation with a second-generation Vietnamese student in one of my classes where I had to convince him that he was Asian. This was long enough ago that you still had to fill out a bunch of bubbles with a pencil in order to take a standardized test, and he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to fill out in the Race category. His first guess was that he was white, since he had been born here. And if the kid was younger I’d make an argument that I could see it; he was not born in Asia, which may in and of itself have short-circuited his brain out of choosing “Asian,” particularly if his parents only ever referred to their family as Vietnamese, which of course would not have been an option on the list.
He was an eighth grader at the time.
At any rate, no, son, fill out Asian, please, and then go home and have a conversation with your parents about whether there is anything else about your identity that they have not mentioned in the last fourteen years.
Today, out of nowhere, I had a student (Puerto Rican, I think) walk up to me during passing period and ask me if I was white. The look I gave her must have answered her question, because before I actually said anything she clarified with the following:
“No, I mean like real white. All white. White-white.”
Just in case you’ve forgotten, this is what I look like:
So … yes. Completely white. All the white. Flat White. Damn near pink, really.
I did not press the child for an explanation.
After I finished yesterday’s blog post I browsed around on that hat website for a little while, coveting many of the hats and wondering how many hats is too many hats, when I noticed that the bottom of their main page claims to “find your perfect hat” in less than 60 seconds. Well, hell, I want my perfect hat! They made me give them my email address, but whatever; I just had Safari make one up for me, which is one of my very favorite features of that app, and then jumped into the process.
This was the first question:
… as God is my witness, I have no fucking idea. I need a z-axis. I don’t fit on that scale at all and I have no idea what even the middle point between the Pope (which Pope? The Jesuit current guy or the previous dude, whose shoes were made from baby seals and dyed with the blood of virgins?) and Elton John, and Christ, which Elton John?
I chose a 5. I couldn’t justify any other number. I don’t know what the fuck a five even means here; I thought the pain scale didn’t make any sense but this is so much worse.
At any rate, I didn’t particularly like the three hats they suggested. None of them are my perfect hat. I’m considering going through the test again and answering that question with a 1 and a 10 to see what changes. The really inexplicable part is that I’m pretty certain that neither the Pope nor Elton John would be caught dead in any hats being sold on the site.
The weirdest thing? This image appears elsewhere on the site:
I think four of those people look great and one looks amazingly, uncharacteristically dorky. Guess which one?
Anyway, how many hats can I have? That was a real question.
Have you ever abandoned a long-term hobby? Not, like, because you weren’t physically capable of it any longer for some reason or some external reason, but just realized you weren’t interested in something that you’d been doing for decades and stopped doing it?
Not asking for any reason. Really.
(And absolutely not talking about the blog.)
In lieu of a post tonight, please to enjoy this brief email conversation between a student and I that actually happened this afternoon.
I love 8th graders.
How long do you have to feed the local stray before it’s your cat?
Current best guess is wind turbine blades, but hell if I know. I took this yesterday.
Ironically, I just snarked on Twitter about an article on how millennials are shit at DYI. Nonetheless:
I’m putting the new pool ladder together. Anybody have a better idea than needle-nose pliers on how to tighten those nuts? The bolt is smooth on the outside so I can’t go at it from there and no wrench on Earth will fit inside the plastic.
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