Tag: stories

Whoops, I forgot

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy

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 Teaching

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.

Just a thought

On By Luther M. SilerIn life10 Comments

A warning: this post has the potential to start out sounding kind of grandiose, like I’ve got a Big Point to make and I’m Going Somewhere; don’t be fooled, this is just an anecdote that is a bit too complicated for Twitter or Mastodon. Calibrate your expectations accordingly.

My wife does the grocery shopping every week, on Saturday or Sunday morning. This started out as a Covid thing where it made more sense for just one of us to be out in the world being exposed to people and has more or less solidified into What We Do Around Here since then. While she’s gone, I clean up the kitchen and get the dishes washed. This involves emptying and refilling the dishwasher, which means I’m putting glasses and cups back into the cabinets.

How many of you put your glasses upside down in the cabinets? Is this something everyone does? An Indiana thing? I have no idea, because it’s not like I’ve paid attention in other people’s houses, and when I *am* in someone else’s house and getting a cup out of a cabinet, it’s likely that it’s someone related to me, so they have the same practices. I have no idea if this is “normal” or not.

Anyway, as I was putting a glass into the cabinet this morning, it floated through my head that the reason I have always done it this way is that it keeps bugs out of the glasses. That’s why you put them upside down. It’s so bugs can’t get in. That’s the reason.

And that thought kind of stopped me short for a minute. Like I literally froze, glass in hand, thinking about that belief that I’ve harbored, unexamined, for my whole Goddamn life.

Because you know what I’ve never had a problem with, not one time, in my entire life, from growing up in my parents’ house, to a couple of college dorms, to various apartments and now the whole-ass house I’ve lived in for the last twelve years? Bugs in cabinets. And one of those apartments had an ant problem for a while. I have probably at some point or another found a stinkbug in a cabinet. One. Because during stinkbug season those fuckers get everywhere. But that’s it. And this belief, that you keep glasses upside-down in the cabinet because that’s how you keep bugs out of them, has been hard-coded into me for my whole damn life.

Which got me wondering how many generations back you have to go, to find the ancestor who had cabinets and had a bug problem, one bad enough that decades later that person’s descendants are still automatically following this rule they– well, she, let’s be real– created. I know it came through my mother because when I was a kid mothers did all the housework, but my grandfather on Mom’s side had a lifelong, solid, post-WWII Silent Generation union job in a factory and if they were ever poor enough that keeping the bugs out was an issue I have never heard about it. So we’re talking probably at least three generations back.

It really makes me wonder what other things I do without thinking about it that can be traced back to, like, the Depression or something like that.

In which I almost died but I didn’t so it’s funny instead

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Stories2 Comments

The shower in our bathroom is a two-piece affair, with an overhead rainwater-style showerhead and a second handheld one that’s mounted on a grab bar and fully adjustable. I generally keep both running for the entire time I’m showering, and the handheld gets used as a handheld quite a bit as well, because I am a fat man and as a fat man I have nooks and crannies and such a thing makes the whole hygiene process a lot more complete. There’s also a bench in the shower, which technically was put in there to be sat on but which I mostly use as a way to make my feet and legs easier to wash.

Well, today I was finishing that process up and managed to somehow drop the wand, and a lot of things went wrong very quickly. The first thing I did was to look straight down, as one might expect from someone who had just dropped something. Unfortunately, and I don’t think I could have done this again if my life depended on it, I managed to drop the thing in such a way that it landed pointing directly up. Which means that, while balancing semi-precariously on one foot, I dropped the shower head, started a little bit at the loud noise when it hit the tile floor, had time to think oh, shit, I hope I didn’t break anything, then looked down, to be surprised by a rather intense blast of water coming up from the floor and directly into my face.

Telling this story, I feel like it shouldn’t have surprised me to get water in my face while showering, but the direction was unexpected, y’know? You don’t expect the floor to spray you when you’re showering, unless you’re in a much more complicated shower than I was in.

And my surprised reaction to that led directly to being flat on my ass in the shower a second or two later, wondering what the hell had just happened. I then, in rapid succession, went from ow to did I break anything to did I break part of the shower to it would be super to explain what had happened if I’d landed on the shower head, because no one would ever believe that story, ever.

And that led to a mental apology to my wife, because if I had managed to break a bone on the way down– I’m not quite old enough to be worried about breaking a hip in a fall or anything but who the hell knows– my son was in the house but it was going to be several hours until he noticed he hadn’t seen me in a while, and my phone wasn’t going to be reachable without crawling across the shower, and one way or another there is no way I’m allowing any EMTs in the bathroom with me until I’ve managed to put some underwear on, which was also not especially reachable, so I’d probably have just decided to die instead.

But none of that happened, so I thought Okay, there’s today’s blog post sorted, dragged myself up to my feet and finished my shower.

The end.

On Nazis and pregnancies, but not at the same time

On By Luther M. SilerIn Stories

I’ve been playing Sniper Elite 5 on the PlayStation 5 lately, because setting the difficulty to something obscenely low and shooting Nazis in the face from a hundred yards away has been about where my brain has been at lately. I like this series, but not as anything I take seriously; I don’t want to be challenged in Sniper Elite 5. I want to be an invincible force of death. I want the Nazis to tell their children that I’ll find them if they’re not quiet and well-behaved, and then I want those kids to tell me where their parents are, because their parents are Nazis and that means I can shoot them in the face.

Also, it’s the anniversary of D-Day. Also also, any time the anniversary of D-Day rolls around, I start thinking about my grandfather, who wasn’t actually at D-Day but joined the Allied assault in France a bit later, eventually being wounded in the Battle of Nancy, being handed a Purple Heart, and rotated back Stateside with a piece of a mortar shell in his ankle that, presumably, is still in his coffin with him, since the surgeons never bothered to remove it.

And today something hit me: I have an aunt named Nancy. And I tried to think about the timeline, and ended up calling another one of my aunts, the one I can bother relatively early in the morning with nonsense like this, and asked her about the timeline between Grandpa getting home and Nancy being born and named. Had my grandfather named my aunt after the battle in which he’d been wounded? It seemed possible, at least; I had to know.

No, as it turns out. Grandma was pregnant with Nancy when Grandpa shipped out, and she was born while he was overseas and named him herself. Tantalizingly, though, apparently my grandmother named Nancy herself and wrote Grandpa and told him the name, and my aunt tells me that his response was that she should “take it (the name, not my aunt) out and bury it, because it stinks.”

It is perhaps indicative of the type of woman my grandmother was– this is the one the name Siler comes from, by the way– that she ignored his, uh, suggestion, and her second daughter kept the name that she gave her. It’s also possibly an indication that Grandpa knew when he wrote the letter where he was heading and where he was likely to see combat, but I’d have to know a lot more about timelines– they’re both gone, so who knows where those letters might be– before I could make a supposition like that.

This led, somehow, to a conversation about the timing of the conception of various and sundry of my relatives; turns out one of my cousins is the product of a “lunch quickie,” and that my grandparents were in the house when another of my cousins from her was conceived. I changed the subject as soon as the phrase “lunch quickie” came up, by the way.

(My birthday is July 5; my mom’s was October 3. I have always assumed I was a birthday present; Dad, if that was not the case, I don’t need further details.)

OK, Zoomer

On By Luther M. SilerIn Stories3 Comments

The following is a true fact: I am an Old. I have written before about how I’m at an age where I straddle the line a bit between Gen X and Millennials; my preferred nomenclature is the Oregon Trail Generation, but that’s not exactly what the cool kids call it. All that said, one thing I definitely am is Old. Yes, the oldest Millennials are old now. They have mortgages– some of them, anyway– and cars and kids and are starting to worry about paying for their college, and whether debt is going to be declared inheritable before they die.

Anyway. My wife and I were out doing some running around today, in two cars because one of the jobs involved bringing the last carload of stuff that we’re keeping back from my father-in-law’s apartment, and I told her that I was going to stop at a local gaming shop that is up by his place. The place is far enough away that if I drive past it I’m probably going to stop, just because I’m not up there very often. Anyway, I puttered around for a bit and decided to buy something and got behind a couple of high school-aged kids who were also checking out. Both of them, as it turns out, were buying card booster packs of some sort; Magic, I think, but I’m not sure and at any rate it doesn’t matter. What does matter is that the booster packs were expensive, and I heard the cashier quote a hundred and seventeen dollars to one of the kids, who pulled a handful of twenties out of his pocket, counted them carefully, and handed them over, receiving his change in the expected fashion.

And then the whole world went sideways, as the kid looked at his friend and said “I love these things. The money doesn’t come out of my account, so it’s like I’m not really spending anything.”

There was a moment of frozen silence. The cashier, a man of about my age, made eye contact with me, as both of us realized at the same time that this young man had just used the construction these things to refer to twenty dollar bills as if they were some sort of exotic and rare form of shell- or bead-based barter, and I don’t think either of us really knew what to do for a second. The kid’s friend saw the look we shot each other and also saw that I was either having a stroke or trying not to laugh, and rolled his eyes at his friend without saying a word and ushered him out.

I walked to the counter and placed my purchase in front of the cashier.

“Credit or … these things?”, he said.

And then I ceased to exist.