Tag: stories

Dangit

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

I feel like I’ve been on another run of too many “taking the night off” posts lately, but … damn. I had a good day at work, went to the comic shop, came home, did a bunch of grading, and I’ve literally been sitting here staring at the screen for ten minutes trying to come up with something even remotely interesting or witty to talk about. This is the best I can do. This happened on Sunday:

Yes, that’s two Amazon vans, both at my house at the same time, suggesting that Amazon’s logistics aren’t maybe as good as they’ve always been cracked up to be. The packages were even both for the same person, so they don’t have that excuse. The second driver to arrive spent a few minutes either angrily venting or yelling at the first driver, waving his hands (and the package) around and hollering loudly enough that I could hear him from inside my house, although I couldn’t quite put together what he was saying. The other guy never got back out of his van and I suspect he was not enjoying the conversation one way or another. Then after a few minutes the first guy drove away, leaving the second guy in his pit of vitriol, and he brought the package to my porch and drove away, never to be seen again.

It’s not much of a story.

The end.

Crisis averted

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

Yesterday’s issue is resolved, and it doesn’t look like I’m going to have to commit any crimes, justified or otherwise.

This will be another short post, but let me tell you a fun story about teaching 8th graders: one of my boys fell asleep in class yesterday, farted loudly enough that it woke him up, and then, not realizing that the uproarious laughter taking place in the room was at him, joined right in on laughing so that it didn’t look like he didn’t know what was going on.

“Did you just fart yourself awake?” is not a sentence I ever expected to say to anyone at work.

On narrative consistency

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy2 Comments

Okay, look, McDonalds. This is bullshit.

Nobody believed your asses two years ago when you said that the McRib was on its “farewell tour” or whatever the hell you called it. Absolutely no one. We all knew that the McRib is always a seasonal or at least short-term item (length of term: however long it takes for pork prices to rise again) and it’s going to go away and come back. Everyone knew this. You fooled no one.

But yeah. You had to make a big Goddamn deal about how no, really, this is the last time. No more McRib, forever, and all that shit.

And now it’s 2024, and the fucking world is ending, and you bring this bullshit back … and you dare to just not acknowledge that you insisted it was never coming back? No mention of it at all? What, are you just hoping we don’t remember?

Call the motherfucker Son of McRib and put it on a round bun for a while or some shit, I don’t care. Slap a little mustard on it (no, really, think about it) and pretend it’s not the same sandwich. I don’t care. But, shit, can we pay a little attention to worldbuilding around here? All I’m asking for is some Goddamned consistency. This ain’t comic books. You can’t reboot the menu. Or at least you can’t reboot the menu and pretend you didn’t do it.

Do not assume that just because I just ate two of these sonsofbitches because I am sad that I didn’t notice what you did here, Goddammit. I see the Hamburglar in my neighborhood anytime soon I’m slapping him.

Okay, fine, I’ll do the math

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, idiocy, TeachingLeave a comment

I have removed the Second Skin from my new tattoo, and the itching is absolutely maddening, so I’m going to distract myself with math. Because that’s why you come here, right? As a reminder, this is the original image, and the question is the ratio of the inner square to the outer square:

The first thing we’re going to do is draw the two diagonals of the inner square. These are, by definition, perpendicular to each other, and they are also equal to the circumference of the circle. Let us define the radius of the circle as x:

What we have now is four right triangles inscribed inside the circle. Pythagoras tells us that the sum of the squares of the two legs are equal to the square of the hypotenuse, which is the line on the left of the square there. Therefore, defining the hypotenuse as Y, we get:

x2 + x2 = y2
2x2 = y2

Take the square roots of each side, and we get:

√(2x2) = √(y2)

And therefore:

√(2x2) = y

Which means that all four sides of the inner circle are equal to √(2x2), thusly:

To get the area of the inner square, all we have to do is multiply √(2x2) by √(2x2), which, conveniently, just gets rid of the square root symbols. The area of the inner circle is 2x2.

Now, we need to realize that since the radius of the circle is x, the diameter of the circle is 2x, and that the diameter of the circle also equals the width and the height of the outside square. So that outer square is 2x high and 2x wide:

Therefore, all we have to do to get the area of the outside square is multiply 2x by 2x, which gives us 4x2. Which, conveniently, is exactly twice the area of the inner square, which was 2x2.

The outside square is therefore twice the size of the inner square, and the ratio of the inner square to the outer square is 1:2.

Or, y’know, you could just rotate the fuckin’ inside square, which makes it visually obvious.

Whoops, I forgot

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

Local radio managed to really irritate me during the drive in to work this morning. I’m not going to get into the details, because I’ll just get all het up again, but let me just say that there was some major performative piety bullshit going on on the radio channel I listen to this morning, and I just absolutely was not willing to deal with it.

But this story isn’t about that, this is about how weird my brain is, and it’s nonetheless necessary to include here because it establishes that I was fully aware of the date when I arrived at my destination this morning– which was not the school I work at, but another one, because I had an early morning departmental meeting for all the middle school math teachers and it wasn’t at my building.

As I pulled into the parking lot for this other school I got a text from another math teacher at my school, apologizing and saying he was going to be late because of car trouble. I texted him back, still in my car, and let him know that I’d seen the message. “Don’t forget we’re at <other school> today,” I said, and then hit send.

And then I immediately realized something: that it was September 11, not September 18, and that my meeting was in fact not today, but next week. And that, further, I had managed to go through the last several days holding the following two contradictory thoughts in my head: one, that the date of the meeting was the 18th– I am convinced that if you asked me the date of the meeting on Saturday I would have gotten it right. Nonetheless, the second idea that I was holding in my head was that the meeting was today, regardless of the fact that the week between the 11th and the 18th hadn’t happened yet. It was Schrödinger’s meeting, happening simultaneously today and next Monday until I actually arrived at the meeting, at which point the waveform collapsed and I found myself late and at the wrong fucking school at 7:30 in the Goddamn morning on a Monday, not how I intended to start the week.

The punch line: I was not the only teacher on my team to make this mistake. Apparently three of us went to this building, two realizing in the parking lot that they were wrong and the third managing to make it into the building and have conversations with a few people before the fact that she didn’t work there got brought up.

The guy with the car trouble managed to beat me to work.

Great fuckin’ start to the week, that.

Something coherent

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

I was in bed before 9:00 last night, and probably dead to the world before 10:00, and as a result spent the day feeling much more human. I even got home still feeling human, which is a definite improvement over the last several days. We’ll see how long it lasts; I have plans to play Armored Core VI after finishing this blog post and hopefully once I start I’ll be able to tear myself away after a reasonable amount of time.

A brief (very brief) tale about today, one of those sorts of stories where the lead-in takes way longer than the actual story. I have talked, in this space and many others, about how Kids These Days don’t give a damn any longer about shit we, meaning The Olds, used to think of as private. I had a kid straight-up introduce themselves to me last year with “Hi, I’m <name,> I’m an asexual lesbian.” Like, that was the first sentence. Shit, I’m straight and there was no way that I would have actually admitted I liked girls to a teacher when I was in middle school. The Internet is fond of school bathroom discourse, and one of the frequent arguments of people who think we should let kids go use the bathroom at any time and for any reason(*) is that Girls have Periods and how dare you prevent her from doing whatever her teenage menstrual cycle might be demanding at any given moment just because she’s so embarrassed to admit it’s happening.

It is to laugh, because teenage girls do not give one single shit any longer about telling anyone and anyone who might have even the slightest claim to such information that they are on their periods. And while I’ve been teaching middle school long enough to have amassed a fair-sized stash of stories involving menstrual nonsense in some way or another, today was the first time a student looked me in the eye and volunteered, entirely unsolicited, that she needed to go to the bathroom so that she could change her underwear. The answer was going to be yes. It wasn’t even going to be “can you wait a few minutes?” Straight-up yes. And I got to find that out about her anyway.

As a reminder, this kid has known me for twelve days.

Teenagers are a lot of things, but they are absolutely not shy any longer.

(*) We will not be engaging in this discourse in this space at this time; suffice it to say that these people are Wrong.

A brief, weird little story

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy5 Comments

On my way in to work, late last week, I drove by a sign on the side of the road. I didn’t get that long of a look at it, obviously, because I was driving and I wasn’t expecting to suddenly encounter something interesting, but it looked permanent– it wasn’t, like, attached to a light pole or something like that. Somebody had dug holes and poured concrete for this thing.

It was advertising a local business, and had the following instructions on it under the name of the business: STRAIGHT AHEAD, ON THE RIGHT.

And underneath those instructions, an arrow. Pointing to the left.

I very nearly stopped the car and turned around to get a picture of the sign, but again: driving to work, and my margins for “arrive on time” and “perilously late” are, uh, thin, on the best of days. So I resolved to get a picture of it the next day, because obviously I need to put this sign on my blog.

And the next day, the fucker was gone. I have been looking for this sign for a week, assuming that I just didn’t remember where it was or something, and it’s no longer there, and it hasn’t been replaced by anything, either, because surely I would have noticed that. And so I’m left wondering if I just imagined the damn thing, or badly misread it, or what, and I can’t confirm my own memory, and that’s really annoying.

Slightly related, at least according to how my brain works: I live in northern Indiana, maybe a 25-30 minute drive from Michigan. This area is generally known as “Michiana,”(*) and that word is pronounced like you think it is, especially once you realize that the “-ana” part comes from Indiana, a word that is generally pronounced only one way. To be obnoxiously clear about it, that penultimate A is pronounced like the penultimate A in banana or Havana or bat. And I have lived here for more or less my entire life and I have never heard anyone pronounce it incorrectly.

There is a local radio ad that I keep hearing all the Goddamned time for a used car company, and the person reading the ad repeatedly– at least a dozen times in the ad, since the word is part of the car company’s name– mispronounces “Michiana” as “Michi-onna,” like the last o sound in Pokemon. And it drives me into a killing fucking rage every time I hear it, because not only is it wrong and stupid but it offends me on a deep and fundamental level that somebody from the company that paid for this ad listened to it and went yeah, okay, that’s fine, and didn’t immediately demand that the ad be re-recorded because of the constant mispronunciation of the name of their business.

I hate it. I hate it so much.

The end.

(*) I believe I have brought this up in this space before, or at least on Twitter, but Indiana also features Kentuckiana and Illiana, although I do not know if either Indihio or Ohiana, both of which strike me as linguistic abominations, are places. Do other states do this with their border regions? I know there’s a place called Texarkana which, oh, Christ, is in something called the Ark-La-Tex region, but beyond that is it a thing? Is there a Califoregon out there, or a Pennsylvaryland? Michiconsin? Colobraska? Help me out.

The pink panties story

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Teaching2 Comments

I have been reminded that I owe you a story, and now that I’ve totally fucked up the SEO for my site for the rest of time I may as well tell it. I have two Honors Algebra classes, one first thing in the morning and one in the afternoon. This is a high school class that they’re getting actual high school credits for. My morning class is quite possibly the most chill group of kids I have ever encountered. I’ve never seen anything like them. No drama. They come in, they do their work, they ask questions if they have them, and when they’re done they just sit and relax and chat. They’re one of those classes where if I needed to I could just leave and everybody would still be in their seats doing whatever they were doing when I left when I came back. I love them.

I’m at my desk doing something or another and the kids are working at their seats. The word panties floats into my ears, and I hear what sounds like vaguely horrified noises and some relatively uncharacteristic teenage giggling. I look up.

Now, I am perhaps twenty feet away, but it is still fairly clear that there is a pair of pink panties on the floor next to one of my boys.

“Please do not tell me there is underwear on the floor in my classroom right now,” I say.

“There’s underwear on the floor, Mr. Siler,” they say.

I stand up to go look closer. There is indeed a pair of lace pink panties on the fucking floor in my fucking middle school math classroom. There should not be panties on the floor. I take a moment to regret every decision that I have ever made in my life that led me to the point where I had to ask a room of thirteen- and fourteen-year-old children “Does anyone want to claim the mystery underwear before I throw it away?”

(Fun fact about me: I detest the word “panties” for no reason I have ever been able to enunciate, and I have already used it far too many times in this post. I do not say it out loud unless I absolutely have to, and that is not a condition that occurs often.)

I look around at my girls. Roughly half of the kids in the room, maybe a little bit more. I note two things: first, they are all wearing pants, and second, none of them appears to suddenly be having the worst day of her entire life. Most of them appear entertained; a couple look scandalized, but not in an oh my god those are mine sort of way.

No one wants to claim the underwear. Someone suggests that the boy it is sitting next to is responsible for them. This would not be enormously surprising, to be honest. I give him my firmest Teacher Look, and he fails to wither under my glare. I think there’s no earthly way he could keep a straight face right now and go to get a pencil, which I use to pick up the underwear.

At which point something equally horrible becomes clear: there is not just a pair of lacy pink women’s underwear on the floor in my classroom. There is a pair of lacy pink women’s underwear on the floor in my classroom and it has been worn. Several days in a row, from the look of it. Soiled would perhaps give the wrong impression, but … crusty? We can go with crusty. There are no obvious signs of blood on them; with girls this age the immediate suspicion would be some sort of menstrual disaster but that doesn’t appear to be the case.

I look around again. Each of my girls makes eye contact. There’s no way they would be willing to make eye contact with a male teacher holding their underwear by a pencil in the middle of math class. There’s just no way, right? That’s a literal nightmare.

I throw the underwear in the trash and forbid any of my students to ever speak of this again, a promise that all of them make and I’m absolutely certain that not one of them intends to keep. Two minutes later, my boss wanders by, because of course she does, and I tell her the story, mostly to gauge her reaction. She is horrified but thinks it’s hilarious, and having been a middle school principal for more than ten minutes, volunteers to take my trash bag out of my room so that the boys in the next class don’t go digging to find anything, no doubt to start throwing them around the room.

As of this moment, several days later, I still have no suspects.

It was a weird day.