The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
A double shift of Open House was already going to be bad enough— 1:00-3:00 and then 5:00-7:00– but I was not prepared for a fucking tornado warning to happen during the first half. Not fun.
Gonna die the moment I get home. Today started out with moving the cars away from the hail, so I’ve pretty much had enough of everything at this point.
I had a doctor’s appointment today, and after the doctor’s appointment, I had to run over to the post office to mail a couple of packages. You will note that the post office is closed on Sunday, and while it isn’t impossible, doctors that have regular appointments on Sunday are few and far between. However, since today is Monday, neither of those things were a problem for me today.
I got a call yesterday(*) that a medication was ready for me at my local pharmacist. On the way back from the post office, I drive past my pharmacy, and I did not turn into the parking lot of the pharmacist to retrieve my medication, because it was Sunday. No more than five minutes after leaving the post office.
I’ve been talking about renewing my teaching license; I decided to go ahead and get myself set up with my required CPR certification today, since I had discovered (unsurprisingly) that I do, in fact, need to have an in-person training where I interact with a CPR dummy and can’t do the whole thing online. So I need a class, and that’s probably best done before school starts. Conveniently, there was one available next week on Wednesday, on June 29, which seemed good, so I paid for it and then opened up my calendar to put it in my schedule.
And it was good that I did that, because it is, in fact, the 27th, and typically on the 27th of any month it takes two days and not nine before it is the 29th.
EDIT: You will notice that the headline for this post says “June 27” and not “July 27.” I swear to you that I did NOT do that on purpose, and now I’ve noticed it I’m leaving it in. My doctor should perhaps have checked for recent head injuries.
(*) JESUS, YESTERDAY WAS ACTUAL SUNDAY. THIS HAPPENED ON SATURDAY, TWO DAYS AGO.
That’s not a sticker.
I made multiple attempts to acquire this book through physical retail channels– I’m not sure why, but I really wanted to buy it in person– before noticing it was like 60% off or something like that on Amazon and giving up and ordering it, and it shows up with that … thing on the spine. I’m genuinely considering returning it and just reading it on my Kindle, because that’s going to bother me every single time I look at the book for the rest of time.
Maybe I’ll go to Half Price Books tomorrow and see if they have an earlier edition.
I finished another really good book today— maybe you can use context clues to figure out what it was!– but I feel like I’ve maybe used up all of my holy shit this was good you have to go read it now reviews for July? Or maybe that’s not a thing, or maybe I ought to just review the two books I DNFed in between this one and There Is No Antimemetics Division. Y’know, to combat the idea that all I do is slobber all over every book I read. I dunno. Are my book reviews too positive? Maybe I’m not trustworthy anymore.
I will say that July has been weird in that it’s featured both more amazingly good books and more DNFs than a typical month does.
Anyway, what else happened today? I spent part of my afternoon clearing out my Literal Physical Inbox, better known as the wire racks on my desk that I dump mail and paperwork into when it is too important to throw away and yet not quite important enough for me to file away immediately. Getting this done was a goal over Winter Break that didn’t happen, and then a goal over Spring Break that didn’t happen, and I swore to myself that I wasn’t getting through July without taking care of it.
I found stuff dated 2022, by the way.
Along the way I uncovered a ton of professional growth paperwork for my license renewal, which isn’t a critical necessity yet– my teaching license doesn’t expire until July of 2028, which means that technically it’s good through the end of the 2028-29 school year, but I figured I’d get a jump on getting the paperwork filed.
About half an hour ago I told my wife I was going to worry about getting it done tomorrow, expecting it to take the whole morning, and then I logged into the license renewal site just to see what I was getting myself into … and I’m done with the paperwork already. It took less than fifteen minutes. I have to wait for them to approve everything, which shouldn’t take more than a couple of days, and then I need to get my CPR certification up to date, and I think after that I can officially apply for my renewal, so in theory this might be done before the school year starts. Tomorrow morning I’ll find a CPR recertification class, which will probably take longer than uploading my paperwork did.
That will square up my teaching license through 2038, a year so far into the future as to be meaningless, and it might be the last time I have to renew my license, as I’ll turn 62 in 2038 and you best believe I’ll be retiring as soon as possible, even assuming that I make it through twelve more fucking years of teaching. That, all by itself, feels completely crazy. Not as crazy as the idea that if I don’t retire in 2038, I’d have to renew through 2048. That year’s not even going to happen. Let’s be real.
I came across this video while helping out a friend who is having jambalaya tonight, because having and especially cooking jambalaya without listening to Fats Domino is kind of sinful. I’m sharing it with you because of the two absolutely outstanding saxophone solos and also the completely inexplicable yo-yo guy. The one guy waving a hankie ends up playing the trumpet eventually. The other guy? He’s a mystery.
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.
My schedule lately is messing with my head, and I don’t like it at all. There’s something deeply weird about it being 12:30 and being home from work for the day. Like, I’ll get home, eat some lunch, fiddle around on my phone, read a bit … and then look around and it’s only 2:30 somehow and my wife isn’t even home from work yet, and mentally my day is over, and then it just, like, starts over again somehow? I’m doing this weird thing where I’m somehow packing two days into every day, and as a result I continue to not have the vaguest idea what day of the week it is at any given time. I thought maybe it was just an artifact of my wife being out of town for a week, but it’s still going on on whatever day today is, so clearly it’s gonna stick around for a minute.
Meanwhile, the horror hell storm that we heard about for two straight days appears to have curved south, and so far my social media hasn’t filled up with videos of tornadoes, so hopefully that’s because there hasn’t actually been any destruction and not just that I haven’t heard about it. There was all kinds of chatter about losing tomorrow again because of power issues, but at least as of right now the northern part of the state appears to have been spared. We’ll see what happens. For all I know, the kids will stay home anyway. We’ll see, I guess.
Also, I just found out that this exists, and I’m experiencing Big Weird Feelings right now, so I’m gonna go.
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’ obituary actually 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.)