A few months ago, I received a postcard in the mail. It was from my high school, and it said, essentially, "Please send us your current address." I threw it in with the junk mail recycling. When I got the second one, it seemed clear that they already had my address, so I tossed that one out, as well. I knew they were leading up to this, but was still a little bit surprised to get the e-mail entitled, "Pleasant Valley High School Class of 1993 Reunion". I now have to officially decide if I'm going to go.
For me, high school wasn't all that bad. Sure, I was gawky and awkward and kids made fun of me and said mean things and all the usual stuff. But most people didn't know who I was because we moved to a new town my sophomore year, so I managed to fly under the radar for a long time. Also, I was a good kid and, as such, I had a lot of freedom to do as I pleased. I had three free periods my senior year because I was totally burned out, so I dropped physics and convinced my art teacher to let me skip class and complete my fine arts requirement as independent study. I spent a lot of time sitting in the quads, or at Donut Nook, or at the park, stretched out on the sleeping bag that was always in the trunk of my Mercury Topaz. Although, to be perfectly honest, I probably spent more time in the journalism room or the library working on the school paper -- I was that kind of nerd.
There's no burning desire to go back, though. I keep in touch with several of my friends from high school, and I already know what they're doing. I can't even think of anybody I'm dying to see. The part of me that wants to go is simply curious. What happened to everybody? What became of them? So many stories with only beginnings... I wonder if I'll go.
I've always liked the Joan Cusack line in Grosse Pointe Blank -- she's talking about her reunion, and she says: "It was just as if everybody had swelled."
So? Did you watch it? The State of the Union? What did you think? I thought it was a well-written political speech (in that there wasn't a whole lot of substance), and it rather confirmed the fact that we will launch a war against Iraq in February or March. I think Bush could have been a little more blunt and stated some things outright, though. "I want to fight Iraq and we're gonna," he could have said. "I've contacted Merriam-Webster and had the word 'nuclear' officially changed to 'nucular'. Me and my friends, we don't want to pay taxes. We want to tell women what to do with their bodies, and we actually don't care about Medicare/Medicaid because we have our own little thing set up, but you do, so I have to bring it up anyhow. Hey! Who snuck this environmental crap in my speech? What about drilling for oil? Oh well, I'm feeling cocky because me and my peeps have rolled into Washington, and we have the majority in all three executive branches. Mom, do I look earnest? Oh yeah, God bless America."
Okay, I got a little carried away there. Satire is fun. The truth is, I'm not politically savvy enough to have strong opinions on his speech with any amount of confidence, so I will look to political analysts to break it down for me (to some extent) and piece things together from there. In the mean time, I will just make fun of it. My favorite thing about the State of the Union is actually watching to see who doesn't clap or stand up when everyone else does (and, in the case of Senator Kennedy, who falls asleep).
While visiting my sister and her family a couple of weeks ago, I pulled bath duty for my nephew, Danny. This is fairly easy, as all that is required of the bath duty person is that you sit there (usually on the toilet with the lid down), get splashed a little bit, and make sure the kid doesn't drown. Benefits of bath duty are that it's fun dumping water on Danny's head, and there's the occasional opportunity to teach him something new.
While bathing in a tub of toys, with a few drops of water thrown in for good measure, Danny was playing with a fireman and a policeman. You know the little toy figures with round heads? Yeah, those ones. At one point, Danny had the fireman and policeman kiss. "Those are Village People," I told him. "Vil-lage Peo-ple". He looked at me and blinked and laughed. "Village People," I said.
Pretty soon, Elmo joined the fun and was talking to the Village People. When it was time to make his exit, Elmo (channeling his voice through Danny) said, "Bye, Village People."
Boy, he's a fast learner.
"It's going to make you really mad," a friend of mine told me when I said I had bought Stupid White Men (Michael Moore) but hadn't read it yet. He was right, of course. I started it this afternoon, and already I'm reeling.
There are many reasons it's interesting, not the least of which is that it was written before the September 11th attacks (it was actually supposed to ship out on that ill-fated Monday). The political climate was quite different at that point, but the problems with the government are still the same, just exacerbated now that there's so much focus on foreign conflict. I'm a little surprised to read just how rigged the presidential election was, at least as Moore tells it. I'm certain there's a compelling Republican side to the story, but I have to believe that Moore checked his facts, and it all makes me even more pissed off that Dubya is now in office. I'm not confident that Gore would have made a wonderful Executive-in-Chief, but I'm pretty sure he wouldn't make me as angry as Bush does.
In other news, I bought fourteen books today. Not one of them is political in nature. Tonight, I think I'll start reading The Idiot Girls' Action Adventure Club (Laurie Notaro) to take my mind of the dismal state of the world.
Look, I don't like to talk politics very often, but I'm pretty unhappy about the way things are going. I see this war as being inevitable at this point. You know the one I'm talking about. Dubya has managed to turn the War on Terror into a War on Iraq with very few logical stepping stones that lead to a reasonable explanation. But there you have it. Our towers were knocked down, we wanted war because, well, we were pissed. Then he and his cronies tried to redirect that anger toward Iraq, who were not involved with the knocking down of said towers.
Only it's not working. My anger has not been redirected. Instead, I am angry at a president who has chosen to stand on a war-hungry platform. These are not the people I want to represent me. I feel like they're barging forward on this plan without thinking it through. Nobody needs to convince us that Saddam Hussein is a bad man; we know he's a bad man -- nobody likes him. I'm not saying that I'm inviting him to my birthday party. What I'm saying is, I don't think this means we need to bomb Iraq. All anybody is asking, myself included, is that we let the inspections work.
The message our government is sending us is that the UN is a joke, and we should have no faith in it. France and Germany? Apparently they just don't know what they're talking about. Before Tuesday, I never wanted to be French, but I'm afraid I'm with them on this one. What's the rush? That's the crucial question. Why, if all signs point to Saddam's power weakening, are we in such a goddamn hurry?
Aren't there other things we could be paying attention to? What ever happened with the anthrax investigation? Are they drilling for oil up in Alaska yet? Where is Osama bin Laden? Is this a ruse to divert our attention? The North Korea situation seems to be way more unstable than the Iraq situation. As usual, The Onion summed that one up rather well with, "Bush on North Korea: 'We Must Invade Iraq'".
I have more questions than can be answered, and ol' George and I differ rather pointedly on a lot of topics. It's becoming more and more clear as the days go on that he's not any kind of person I want representing me.
So my main problem right now is one of frustration, because I'm one person and because I feel helpless. I'm not planning to leave the country, but I really don't know where to begin. I suppose I just feel like there are too many things going on that warrant more attention than we're giving to Iraq. We're breaking our planet. Oregon, where I live, is in deep shit as far as schools and unemployment are concerned. If the schools are bad, the kids are poorly educated and the future looks even more grim. Where does one person even start?
When I saw the sweatshirt in the road as I drove down Columbia Blvd. last weekend, it struck me as a rather whimsical thing to be lying in the middle of a rain-soaked street. I started thinking about things that you find lying in the street that just look out of place, even though they're somewhat common. Things like shoes and hats and Big Gulp containers. I tried to imagine what happened with the sweatshirt and figured it was probably in the back of someone's pickup truck and blew out.
When I saw the two shirts and about three or four other pieces of clothing, which had been run over and were, therefore, unidentifiable as I cruised by, it became clear that this was more than a one-sweatshirt clothing accident. This was big.
It continued. Almost all the way down the street, I passed little groups of clothing. There were about four or five little bursts of men's casual wear with the occasional lone item thrown in between. First the sweatshirt, then some other shirts, possibly some pants. The boxers were last. There were about ten pair of them littering the street, some of them run over, some haphazardly strewn across the train tracks that cross the street. They were mostly blue, if memory serves correctly.
The more clothing I saw, the more possible reasons there were for it being strewn about Columbia Blvd. on a rainy Saturday afternoon. Was there a laundry basket in the back of a pickup truck? Perhaps the wind peeled off the layers of clean laundry one by one, like an onion. Perhaps there was a lover's quarrel at 40mph where the driver was helpless as his pissed-off partner shook his duffel bag out the window of the car, leaving a trail of apparel in their wake. But why didn't the fool just pull over?
Of course, I can't discount the man who had pulled over, coming from the opposite direction. He stood there on the side of the road, holding up a soggy long-sleeved shirt, examining it for damage. His car, parked behind him, was a sedan and there was no indication of a lover scorned sitting in the vehicle. Due to this lack of a ready explanation, I figured he couldn't be the owner of the clothes; decided instead he was a lowly scavenger, always on the lookout out for some free threads.
Did you buy any music between 1995 and 2000? If so, you're eligible to file as a claimant in the Compact Disc Minimum Advertised Price Antitrust Litigation Settlement. Craziness.
I have an affection for cheesy pick-up lines. My friend Tom and I were talking about this tonight, and he told me a new one, but I forgot it already. He also brought up an oldie, but goodie: "Is there a mirror in your pocket? Because I can see myself in your pants."
Another favorite is where you reach around and look at the tag on someone's shirt and then say, "Just checking to see if you were made in heaven."
They're just so stupid, they make me giggle. Do these actually ever work?
Who out there is cell phone savvy? I have a question, and that question is: does dual-band still matter?
See, I use Working Assets for my wireless service, and they are on the Sprint network. It seemed logical that I'd be able to buy a Sprint phone, and get Working Assets to activate it. No dice. I called this morning and they said that, no, I'd have to buy a phone directly from them. Poop.
The problem with that is, Working Assets' phone selection is fairly limited, and the phones that aren't refurbished are single-band (which the dude at customer service seemed to think was a selling point). Somehow, the idea of a used cell phone seems wrong to me, and when I was looking at phones two years ago, dual-band kept coming up as one of those really important things to look for. Is this still the case?
I also called Sprint this morning. After wading through Sprint's phone system and getting transferred and disconnected twice each, I finally talked to a customer service person and found out that I can't keep the same phone number if I were to just switch over to Sprint. It makes some technical sense that this is the case, but common sense in the wireless industry is severely lacking. At least that's my take on it this morning. My take on Sprint's customer service is that it sucks. Working Assets dude, even though he couldn't tell me what I wanted to hear, was much nicer.
Tonight, on Jeopardy, there were three genius kids competing for the big cash. I was rooting for Ina because she's a smart little whipper snapper, but Max won. I think Max is going to grow up to be kind of snotty, if you want to know the truth. Actually, he's probably a little bit snotty already. It's not fair of me to say that, but there you have it. I'm not a nice person.
Also, I've seen a couple of trailers lately for some movie where a kangaroo ends up with a bunch of money and two doofus guys chase him all over trying to get it back. The only thing I can think of when the commercial comes on is "Hey, isn't that the guy who was in that My Secret Identity show?" Well, that and I tend to wonder how it's remotely possible that anybody thought this movie was going to be a big money maker.
When John interviewed me, I was relaxed. It was the golden age for web developers and I already had another offer. I seriously thought I wouldn't take the job, even if it was offered. I was just trying to keep my options open, but there was something about the office -- maybe it was they way they had removed all the flourescent lighting and put in floor lamps. The people seemed pretty cool, too.
"Why are you looking to change jobs?" he asked.
"Well, I've been working for this insurance company for four years," I said. "I'm really sick of boring, useless meetings that all last exactly an hour."
He laughed at me. He hired me. He sent me to Alabama.
Then we all got laid off, and three of us started a punk band. We were called Combustible Duck, and I was the bass player. For a day. Then I got a job and couldn't play in the band anymore, as it was all about sitting around in a garage at two in the afternoon drinking PBR. Anyhow, here it is, almost three years later, and John and his lovely wife, Heather, are in Thailand as Peace Corps volunteers. Now you can all meet John as he records the random thoughts running through his head at sircringe.net.
(And for the record, I was never any good at Counter Strike. It was that Cherz boy doing all the damage.)
