Clancy and I went to Oasis on the Hills, the local water park over the weekend. We had an absolute blast. We also got distinct reminders of how out of touch we are with the population as a while.

The big one was tattoos. When looking at 18-30 year olds, people without tattoos were almost the exception! Ever since my straight-arrow brother Mitch got a tattoo I’ve stopped thinking of them as rebellious. Besides, if someone wants a little private emblem of self on them, who am I to say anything?

But it wasn’t just an emblem or a design. It was entire arms and huge intricate drawings. I knew these things existed, but I really hadn’t realized that they’d become as common as… I don’t know, something real common.

That tattoos are but one example of something that bothers me for reasons I can’t quite put my finger on. It’s some variation of this, though: our bodies are not Christmas trees to decorate. The tattoos and the piercings and the boobs hanging out… good golly what has this world come to?!

Theoretically, as something becomes more commonplace we become more accepting of it. It used to be that long hair on a man was a sign of deviancy, now it’s a common thing. Ear rings in the right year used to signal homosexuality, now they’re common. Skinheads in long sleeve shirts are indistinguishable from a lot of young high-schoolers these days.

It really doesn’t work that way for me, though. I still haven’t come to terms with fingernail polish and honestly find a nose-ring less distracting. In fact, things that didn’t bother me before are starting to bother me a lot more now. I never really cared one way or another about tattoos, but as they become more common I’m becoming less rather than more agreeable to them. They’ve moved from signaling actual individuality to being another ornament on the Human Tree. And to get back to individuality they go further and further and get more and more tattoos and pierce more and more body parts.

What’s wrong with human ears just being ears rather than shiny silver repositories? Why make our bodies the (permanent!) landscape for someone else’s usually unoriginal art?

I guess I’m fortunate in that I married someone that doesn’t even wear make-up. While I wouldn’t mind if she wore make-up, the fact that that aspect of her personality keeps the nail polish, piercings, and whatnot is a godsend. I can understand make-up that accentuates the positive and I can understand trying to make yourself look as good as you possibly can, but why make yourself look like something that is less human, not to mention less attractive?

I recognize that this is an aesthetic preference. I’m actually a big sympathetic to less attractive people that figure if you can’t be better looking be different looking, but honestly I think it does more harm than good. Unattractive people look less attractive with tattoos and piercings. They’re hurt by it (in my eyes) in ways that more attractive people aren’t. For the guys the tattoos on their arm just drew attention to the flub on their arms. For chubby ladies the navel rings drew attention to their bellies. For the attractive people, it didn’t really make a difference except insofar as I didn’t like them. If a guy was toned it didn’t matter so much whether there were markings. If a girl was hot who the heck is looking at the ten earrings in her ears or the over-sized rose on her ankle? Or, if they see it, why do they care?

Tomorrow I will write about another observation at the Oasis.

I was planning on having a series of posts on my recent trip to the Ephing Anime Con, but the more I thought about it the less interested I thought you guys would be in that. Instead I’m going to just throw out a bunch of observations. If any of them interest you and you would like to see a post on them, point them out to me and I’ll be glad to extrapolate.

So without further ado:

Good grief, when did I get so old? I remember feeling very old at the last couple conventions I went to, but it got three years more pronounced since my last con. I’m getting older but it seems that the average con-goers age is, if not static, aging at a much less rapid pace.

I’m going to have to let go of some of my old standard jokes about anime conventions. It’s really not just for geeks anymore. There was an amazingly larger variety of attendees. There were actual black people. Not like a black person or two, but at least a couple dozen. In anime circles, 50 black guys out of 15,000 is called “diversity”. The Asian-American contingent, which was never close to a plurality but always significant, was almost unnoticeable. I actually think there may have been more actual Asians than Asian-Americans. I only counted two people that seemed to weigh over 350 pounds. That, too, was unusual. The gender imbalance does not appear to have improved, though the age of the average female attendee seemed to go up.

By far the most enjoyable thing about the convention was the costumes. I always considered it a fun part of it, but having been to all of the panels before and not even being able to find the video rooms (and not that enthusiastic about it anyway), costumes were the main attraction. Well costumes and the feel of the place. It feels a little like an amusement part, except instead of giant Micky Mouses and Goofies it’s giant Gontaku the Destroyer costumes.

I generally frown down upon outfits that young ladies wear that are too revealing and have ever since I graduated from college. This is triply true for girls that are not yet out of high school. What’s funny is that there were a lot of young ladies wearing very skimpy outfits to the convention and it did not bother me at all. I guess since it was actually part of a prescribed costume they weren’t obviously doing it to tittilate or show off their bodies so I didn’t consider it as demeaning. Then again, who am I kidding? The anime producers decided on those outfits and the young ladies chose them for a reason. Nonetheless, it was a weird feeling to see so much skin and not feel at all uptight about it. I was more likely to grab my camera than scowl.

There aren’t many places where a thirty year old man can walk up to a twelve year old girl and say “Can I take your picture?” But you can at an anime convention and I’m not sure that there is a level of creepiness a guy can have wherein she will not be flattered. And yet no one seems to take advantage of it for that purpose. The stereotypical smelly con-goer almost never has a camera.

Thinking of the above psyched me out while I was there. I almost never took pictures of unescorted young girls out of fear of coming across inappropriately. A completely groundless fear that would not even have crossed my mind had I not thought about how unusual such an arrangement is. I was always happier to take pictures of guys than ladies. The coolest picture I couldn’t quite get was of an entire family dressed in costume.

My friend Clint and I once had the idea of only taking pictures of young ladies that weren’t wearing costumes to see what kinds of reactions that would get. Both of us are risk-averse in that regard so we never actually did it. Now I’m way past the age where that would be considered even a cute joke if she were to alert the authorities.

There are a number of things that you can buy at these conventions and that includes rather dangerous weaponry in the form of swords and knives. The thing is though that if you buy them you have to take them to a rack and store them until you’re ready to leave the convention. I was passing by said rack in the hallway when a handful of police officers were quizzing a crying young woman. I couldn’t imagine what it might be about but when they said that they were going to have to take her to the police station they feared that perhaps she had been sold something that is illegal in the state of Delosa. I couldn’t believe that the PD would be such hard-asses about it since it was obviously some sort of misunderstanding. No misunderstanding, it turned out. She had actually gotten smacked pretty seriously by her boyfriend and they needed her to go downtown to fill out a report.

One of the biggest differences between a convention in 2007 and one in 1997 is the dealers room. In addition to the aforementioned swords, the variety of things sold at those things has increased fifty-fold. There were swords and shirts and costumes and comic books and robes and magic crystals. You want to know what was missing? ANIME! There were all of two tables that were actually selling anime. To compare, there were as many colleges that had booths trying to recruit arts students and branches of the military trying to sign people up for war than there were booths actually selling anime at the anime convention. This was not the case in 2004, when I attended my last convention. I guess that it’s become so easy to get the stuff over the internet that the dealers room was turned over to even more eccentric things than anime.

At a convention some time ago, a friend of mine kept a cooler and went around selling cold cokes for a buck a piece and made a killing. Maybe next year I will try to be able to bankroll my own trip by selling cokes and batteries. Though they restocked batteries every morning, the woman at the convenience store at the hotel said that the batteries never lasted until 10:00.

Though I was glad that I only got a one-day pass, I really had a blast. Though I make fun of my geeky cohorts and even though it was on the whole a lot less geeky than it used to be, I really had a warm feeling at the convention of being surrounded by my peeps.

I was just down at the Post Office sending off a couple of packages when I swore I could recognize the guy behind the counter. I sat there and tried to figure it out the entire time that I was in line. He looked vaguely like my friend Tony, but he was like thirty years too old to be. The name Mike Nelson kept running through my head. Or Matt Nelson or Mark Nelson or something like that. But I couldn’t think of any Mike/Matt/Mark Nelson that I knew even though I did know the name. When I walked up to the counter I saw the name Mark Nielson. At that point I knew that I knew him from somewhere.

Then it hit me. “Did you marry into the Douglas family?”

He looked at me and said, without any intonation, “Yes.”

“I knew that I knew you! I dated Julie for almost five years.”

“Right,” he replied.

“Interesting to meet you way out here,” I said.

“I’ve lived here for ten years,” he told me without an ounce of enthusiasm.

What was funny was that up until I identified myself, he was unusually warm and friendly for a customer service civil servant. He made jokes with the guy before me and with me. But the second I said that I used to date Julie, his face just clammed up.

I can’t figure out if it’s because when I left Julie I became a villain in the Bernard/Douglas household or if it’s because at some point after I left he became a villain. He was a knight in shining armor when he first started dating Julie’s aunt. Julie had just been left by her husband, whom nobody liked, for a younger woman. In came Mark and all was right with the world. Then, at some point everything flipped and they all liked the ex-husband and Mark was the bad guy.

I figured that even if he knew that Julie’s family didn’t like her one bit that we were on similar ground there. An estrangement to bond over!

As soon as I got back to work I IMed Julie and asked what the state of Mark’s marriage with her aunt was. Pretty lousy, it turned out. He still does nothing but drink and smoke when he gets home (one of the reasons I had such trouble placing him was that he looked twenty years older than the last time I saw him seven or so years ago). They sleep in separate rooms.

I guess I can’t blame him for being less than warm to a former would-have-been in-law of a family that he got that kind of marriage from.

Will offers up his experience with beggars and bums below; I maintain a normally steadfast refusal to give money. My refusal is based partly on the behavior of those in Colosse.

When I was still a student at Southern Tech, we had experience with the bums. Generally they didn’t come onto campus (or campus cops did a good job herding them off), but they sat (and sit to this day) at the entrances to campus by the freeway, hounding people for money. Absurdly, they take shifts, and you can see them switching if you know what times they do it; one time we even followed one as he got “off shift” and went to a rather nice and well-maintained sports car to drive off.

The other thing that’s always a lark is their shifting stories. A couple summers back, there were some rather rough hurricanes; the local bums (whose signs had previously indicated out of work status) quickly shifted, all claiming to be refugees or that their places of work were destroyed by the hurricanes. When the second hurricane came by, that name went up on their begging signs, replacing the previous hurricane’s name; as if we wouldn’t notice that they were the same bum who’d claimed to be an evacuee of the previous weather the week before.

There is, however, one person I’ve given to in the past few months. I consider him the exception that proves my case. Driving home late on a wednesday night, I had the misfortune to hit one of the miscellaneous pieces of debris that inevitably come up in Colosse’s roads. It punctured a tire, and a mile down the road I was stopped.

Colosse’s freeways, alas, are severely lacking in proper-width breakdown lanes/shoulders, so when my can of Fix-A-Flat didn’t work, I got out my jack, set up to swap the tire… and realized it would be a VERY dangerous operation by myself.

A couple minutes later, a car pulled over and a gentleman got out and walked up; he asked if I needed any help, and aided me, keeping an eye out so that I didn’t get hit by anyone while the tire was switched. My spare was a bit low, but I was confident I could reach a gas station on it; I gave him what I had in cash ($20) and thanked him for his help.

I got to a nearby gas station, but my spare didn’t quite manage; the old thing had popped on the way up. Called my roommate for assistance, and as I was waiting for him, my earlier benefactor came by; he’d come back to check and make sure I got to safety.

As we were waiting, I got to know him a bit better; he was a military veteran who was a bit down on his luck, had his apartment and a car, but an expired drivers’ license and a job interview with UPS to become a driver later that week. He showed me his documents – they matched. I didn’t have any more money to give him, but my roommate had a few bucks, and we both thanked him – for his military service, for the help, for coming back – and then wished him good luck with his interview and getting the license renewed in the morning.

I refuse to give to a bum – but I also believe that my benefactor that night wasn’t a bum, and he was absolutely welcome to all the help I was able to give him.

-{Alms for the Poor}-

Southern Tech, my alma mater, is not in the best part of the city of Colosse. In fact, if you go across the Interstate or South Boulevard, you’re going to find yourself in the worst part of town. I’ve been approached by pimps* in the six times in my life, four times across the street or Interstate from the university. While there I got used to being approached by people looking for money. When I was younger and a bleeding heart, I was sometimes inclined to help them out. You get tired of it after a while.

Once I left the university I only found myself in the city when a lot of suburbanites are in the city, namely on weekends or when a professional sports team (or the Southern Tech Wolf Pack) were playing a game. Back then I had the perfect rejection: I don’t carry cash with me into the city. It was amazingly effective.
I wish that I could impress upon Santomas’s considerable homeless and panhandling population, it would be that none of the following are solicitations for solicitations:

• Smoking a cigarette outside a gas station.
• Going into or out of a convenience store.
• Having the porch light on at my home.
• Walking anywhere within the city.
• Filling up my gas tank.
• Waiting in my car going through drive-through.

Ironically, the only real safe place in Santomas is waiting at a red light, which was the surest way that you would get approached back in Colosse. Santomas is something of a liberal haven that is very kind to its homeless population, but I gather that’s the one thing that the local PD does not put up with (probably for congestion reasons). They’ll be out there on the corners, but they do not get on the street unless you signal for them. Interestingly, they’re a much more industrious lot here than in Colosse. There are a lot of curbside entrepreneurs, selling everything from fake flowers to (very practically) cold water out of a cooler. But again, they won’t approach you unless you signal for them to. The only time I’ve been approached has been by firemen with their boots or the occasional church collecting funds for something.

But with the exception of that, as you can probably gather from above, they are everywhere and not the least bit shy. So much so that I now consider it something of a downtown tax. If I smoke a cigarette outside of a convenience store, I am going to get approached. When that happens I have two options: I can either pay them to go away, I can snuff my cigarette early, or I can be pestered until I am done with it. The same goes for filling gas or waiting in line at a drive-through.

If you flatly tell them no, they don’t go away. Instead, they politely say “that’s cool” and continue to chat with you. Their chatter will almost always be how hard up they are and how rough it is in George Bush’s America or since 9/11 or whatever. They won’t ask for money again until the end. In the meantime, you will find no peace. If you tell them to go away, they’ll say that they understand, that they won’t ask again, and give you the sob story and eventually go back on their word and ask again.

I keep two wallets on me at all times. The first is my cash-and-cards wallet and the second is a glorified key-holder that typically was a wallet but has become ruined one way or another (typically it won’t hold change anymore). I have a driver’s license in each (my Deseret license in my keyholder and my Estacadoan license in my cash-and-cards wallet. I’ve taken to keeping a dollar or so in my cash-and-cards wallet. I’ll pay them to go their marry way and tell them that’s all the money I have. If I don’t have any money in there I will show them my empty wallet. The reason I don’t always do the latter is some of them will say that since I don’t have any cash would I mind going into the store and using my card to buy them something, anything, cause they’re so hard-up.

I’ve now actually factored that into the expense of doing anything in the city. Since I don’t work in Santomas I usually fill up outside of the city unless the dollar-or-two I’ll likely be hit up for is compensated for by cheaper gas (which is actually not infrequently the case, as Santomas gas is cheaper than outside the city). I’ve even taken to going to the suburbs if I want a drive-through burger or whatnot, though sometimes it’s worth an extra buck or two for the convenience.

(I kid you not, I was solicited while I was writing this email. A doorbell ring at 6:30 in the morning.)

Addendum: On an interesting sidenote, Santomas is a Hispanic-heavy city (though certainly less so than other parts of the state). And yet almost none of the panhandlers I see appear to be Hispanic. Most of the ones around my black-dominated neighborhood are black, downtown is mixed between black and white, and most by the freeway and in the suburbs are white. This is in contrast to the charity hospital where my wife works, wherein most of her patients primarily speak Spanish.

* – I never actually saw all that many prostitutes and was never approached by one. For some reason the standard solicitation is from a man informing me that he can “hook me up” for a certain price.

I’ve been a bit out of sorts lately. Feeling an overwhelming desire to be alone for a bit, I decided to take a trip to a coffeehouse. In between cups of coffee I went out and smoked. While out there, I was approached by a heavy-set Hispanic woman. I could see by the look on her face what I was in for. Sure enough, she started giving a sob story about being homeless and needed to raise just $15 to be able to get a place to sleep for the night. Wanting to be left alone, I stopped her and just gave her a couple of bucks.

She asked me if I’d just started my shift. I gave her a confused look. Turns out that she thought I was an employee. I hadn’t thought about it, but I was wearing a golf shirt the same color as the coffeehouse chain’s logo. Further, mistakingly believing that a bigwig from Osaka was stopping by work today I wore black slacks. Looking at myself I realized that I was one logo on my shirt and an apron short of wearing employee clothes. It was kind of weird.

Having gotten her couple of bucks, the woman promptly walked into the coffeehouse and ordered a mocha. I was too ambivalent to sarcastically be so proud that my money was going to a good cause. I was nonetheless surprised at the gumption she had to do it right in front of me, though.

The King of Santomas is Elliot Bergman, who founded a high-tech firm that you are all familiar with and many of you have used today. He is a bazillionaire and the quintessential Santomas millionnaire: a liberal eccentric workoholic. Those that live in the silicollege town of Santomas that have not eschewed capitalism altogether want to be Bergman one day. Not only does his company keep the city employed, but his example is the bunny-on-a-stick that keeps people on the treadmill.

The latest hip thing in Santomas is to eat kosher, whether you’re jewish or not. It’s what the cool kids do. Money gives you the opportunity to buy kosher. Buying kosher gives you something to talk to Sally Bergman about when you’re invited to her parties. The other huge thing here is organic food, which is getting bigger everywhere.

In Santomas, money buys status by way of authenticity. Organic and kosher aren’t about the health or spiritual benefits, but rather of being more in touch with… something. It means spending $50 at a vintage store what you could have bought at a second-hand store for $4. It’s about putting your zip code on your bumper sticker so that you can tell everyone that you live in that one zip code that hasn’t been run over by bulldozers and brought up to building codes.

This is in stark contrast to my home city of Colosse, where I suppose a more traditional view of wealth takes hold. Being wealthy means being able to wear not the coolest stuff, but the nicest stuff. You get to eat not at the restaurants that are expensive becuase they’re hip but the ones that are expensive because they flew a chef over from France. Wealth in Colosse means being able to buy a nice house, not an old house in an authentic neighborhood.

I don’t know that either form of wealth is right for me, which is good because it’s unlikely that I will ever be wealthy. Nonetheless, I find the contrast interesting.

I was approached by a homeless person last night while filling up my gas tank on the Interstate. He asked me for a couple of bucks. I declined, but instead of moving along he started up a conversation about how he needed to get him some wine before the homeless shelter closes its doors and stops letting people in for the night. I wished him luck, but he kept on talking.

The only thing I really said to him (other than “no”) was “I like your shirt.” He was wearing a Colosse Canes baseball jersey. “I’m originally from Colosse.”

He told me that it was on sale for seventy bucks at the athletics store of the outlet mall.

I told him that I couldn’t afford to spend $70 on a shirt.

Without skipping a beat, he asked “So can you afford to give me just a couple so I can get me some wine?”

The irony didn’t hit me until about ten minutes later. It probably never hit him.

Though I can’t prove it, I am an Estocadan.

For roughly two days about nine months ago, I was without a wallet. I didn’t have any cash, so I couldn’t get any identification. Without identification, I couldn’t withdraw any money. And the DMV wouldn’t take a check without a valid ID. It took some begging and pleading to get myself out of that jam.

Naturally, the wallet appeared two days later.

Legally, when something like this happens you are supposed to surrender or destroy the duplicate. That was no skin off of my nose as the picture was much better on the original. I decided, however, the become an outlaw and hold on to it just in case I lost my wallet again. Nevermind that I never found a place for it and ended up keeping in my wallet. Besides defeating the purpose, it significantly increased the likelihood that I would get caught.

The drivers license was the last piece of business that I took care of. Auto registration is a revenue-generator for some states, so they get really pissy when people don’t register after moving. Also, the vehicle must be registered in your resident county. Since I got a job in a neighboring county, I had to take care of that before I started working as I could take care of the drivers license during lunch. And you have to have your car registered to get a license. I don’t know what you’re supposed to do if you don’t actually own a car, but I was almost denied because I had forgotten my car registration paperwork. Who knew being an adult was so complicated?

So after passing the eye test, getting my picture taken, and all that jazz, I am given some pathetic little slip of paper called a “temporary driving permit.” It takes them a bloody three weeks to send me the actual license. Deseret, being the efficient little colony that it is, prints them on the spot.

So Clancy and I decided to go out to a music show last Friday at a bar. Fortunately for me, I had only surrendered one of my licenses. Otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to buy alcohol. My teetotalling wife would have had to buy it for me.

Moral of the story: it pays to lose your wallet and it pays to be an outlaw.

I got an email from my father yesterday, reminding me of about $1,500 I have stashed away at a bank back home in Colosse. Apparently, my folks got a letter from the state informing them that it was about to confiscate my funds for inactivitity. There is apparently some law on the books that any bank account that has not been touched in two years (money put in or taken out) must be turned in to the state. I suppose that the holder is presumed dead or something.

That’s actually kind of inconvenient, though, because I have rather enjoyed keeping that money out of my mind. It has been my last resort money if all other accounts have been exhausted. It’s the one bank account that never got put in the pot when I got married. Not because I was hiding it from her, but because I was hiding it from myself.

I wasn’t actually aware of this particular law until now, so I suppose I’m going to have to change my gameplan.