The discs I sent into Netflix on Monday still haven’t gotten there.

It’s almost like there’s something tying up the postal service.

🙂

My parents made it very clear that when I graduated from high school I would not be allowed to take a year off, even if I spent it working. Their fear was that once I got out of the school grind I would not want to get back in. It was not without merit and they may have saved my academic career by stepping in. Maybe.

On the other hand is my former roommate Karl. Karl has what is probably the strongest mind of anyone I know in my generation. I don’t always agree with him and I think his thinking has often lead him astray, but the guy is in my mind the very definition of intelligent. His ability to understand and dissect the logical flow of ideas never ceased to amaze me even when I thought he was off his rocker. His early academic career reflected this. He sailed through K-12 and by the time he was 18 had knocked out a couple years worth of college credit.

Unfortunately, by the time I knew him he was worn out. He went from being a star student at a magnet school of smart kids to flunking out of Southern Tech with a GPA closer to 0.0 than 1.0 (out of 4). We say of a lot of people that the problem is that they don’t apply themselves but it always applied particularly to him. The guy didn’t go to class, he slept through tests, and he didn’t write his papers.

He needed a break. But his parents took the same stance that mine did and denied it to him. But unlike the case with me it did his academic career immense harm. Unfortunately, the worse he did the more difficult his parents made it for him. They figured if they pulled him out of the dorms and made him live at home they could make him go to class, but instead they took a kid that couldn’t drag his butt ten minutes across campus and told him he had to commute for 60 minutes instead. It was, as you might expect, disastrous.

After getting kicked out of Sotech, he decided to go to work. It only took a couple jobs for him to realize that how much deeply he was at the mercy of employers without a college degree. He had no options and so he had to endure the unacceptable for as long as he could. After six months or so with the worst employer in all of Colosse he resolved to go back to school. He couldn’t go to Tech so he enrolled at the regional school on the other side of town. So motivated was he that he commuted 90 minutes each way every day until he finally dropped everything to move out there. He was on “B” away from a 4.0 GPA and is now in a Master’s degree astrophysics program at a school with a pretty good reputation out east.

It’s unfortunate that his parents were so insistent that he continue school long after it should have been apparent that it was doing him more harm than good. Unfortunately a lot of parents have this idea that there is nothing worse than either foregoing college temporarily or dropping out. Instead of releasing him to the real world to find out how important that piece of paper was to him they thought they could just tell him over and over again until he got the message. It didn’t work and it was never going to.

This brings up an interesting dilemma if Clancy and I choose to have kids. If my parents had given me more flexibility it’s possible that I would have become a 10-year college student forever chasing that degree rather than someone that graduated in under five years and entered the professional working world. So if our kids are anything like me I would be inclined to push them to go to college even over their reservations. But then I think of Karl and I question the wisdom in that. There are some kids that aren’t cut out for college and there are others that may be cut out for it but aren’t ready for it for one reason or another. It’s putting a lot of faith in a young man or lady to believe that they will naturally see the light and do what they need to do if they want to follow their dreams (unless what they would ultimately like to do does not include a college degree).

However, I also think that one of the problems with my generation (or at least the way my generation was raised) is that we were often deemed unready to make important life choices. Kind of odd to say that after mentioning how tyrannical I would be regarding my kid’s major and college, but for many it’s quite true. But both concerns stem from a fear on my part that a lot of parents are protecting their kids from “the real world” for far too long to the point that “adult responsibilities” don’t actually start occurring until the mid-20’s if they occur at all.

I’ll pick up this discussion tomorrow.

Jane Galt is mischievous:

Not thirty minutes later, in the Japanese restaurant, I confirmed this opinion by unblushingly informing the waiter that I am allergic to seaweed, and asking them to make the rolls without it. Now, in fact, I am not allergic to seaweed; I just hate the taste of it. But “allergic” produces more willingness to help me out by making the rolls without seaweed than “I hate one of the major components of your national cuisine, please cater to my philistine tastes”. I have used this line with great success in many other restaurants.

I hate hate hate tomatoes, but I try not to special order things even in fast food restaurants because having worked in one I know that it messes their juju. Besides, it’s easier for me to take my own tomato off. But removing sliced and diced tomatoes is a lot more difficult. So when I’m eating somewhere with sliced and diced tomatoes but an unmotivated staff (Taco Bell comes to mind) I have been known to pull the “allergic” card. I think it makes them slightly more attentive and also makes it so that I don’t have to say “no tomatoes” on each thing I’m ordering or if I forget they won’t.

The misspelling in the title is an ode to my younger self who couldn’t understand how allergic could be spelled any other way.

One of the more annoying characters I’ve run across recently is Janice Soprano from the Sopranos. If you’ve never seen the show that’s fine (I’m not far into it) as it’s not required. Janice Soprano has spent the past 10-20 years of her life finding essentially doing nothing that would differentiate herself from a 20 year old college drop out. She’s smoked some pot, done some protests, and that (at least thus far) appears to be about it. But that’s not what’s annoying about her. What’s annoying about her is that she thinks that her drifting from one location to another with no forward progress on anything ever qualifies her as some sort of enlightened renaissance woman whose worldly wisdom the world can really use (and those that can’t use it are just not enlightened!). She has no kids but is not at all hesitant at lecturing Tony and Carmella Soprano about how to raise there kid (the advice was correct, but only after she completely contradicted her previous advice). She’s been out of the mafia circle for fifteen years but lectures her boyfriend and her brother about how things really are.

Yeah, I’ve known a few people like that throughout my life.

I’m not completely referring to unrepentant potheads here, as Janice is. I’m thinking of all sorts of people that have done nothing with their life and thinks that the (usually self-inflicted) hard knox they’ve faced imparted some sort of wisdom. This is usually belied by the very fact that they look at their failures in life that were usually self-inflicted and see themselves as Job at the hands of a curious God and mischievous Satan. And they confuse their experience and whatever angle they’ve derived from it for philosophy or morality.

What actually comes to mind more than potheads are embittered failures. I almost said “cynical” but a cynic has to a degree found peace with his or her world as he or she understands it. Bitterness is something different. And it’s not a philosophy. It’s one thing to believe in the nefarious nature of The Government or Big Business or The Church, but without any explanation as to the underlying weakness of capitalism or socialism or religion they are not actually contributing to the conversation and generally speaking, they’re not helping. But they don’t know anything beyond the Cliff Notes of the philosophy they claim to hold even while they claim expertise. They have one or two stock answers for just about everything and those answers are never challenged because any question they can’t answer they determine comes from a questioner that “doesn’t get it.”

And not to pick fights, but the other thing that comes to mind is a particular strain of Christianity that I am reminded of any time I take a trip back to Delosa. Jesus is not the answer to every question and The Holy Bible does not contain the solution to every dilemma. I’m less offended by the content of their teaching than I am by the pure stupidity of it. I’m not talking about Christianity’s theological and philosophical history and I’m not even talking about the people that believe that every word of the Bible is 100% literal truth. I’m talking about this cotton-candy game wherein people are selling books about what The Bible tells you to eat and how God thinks you should go about trying to get rich and that a bigger problem just means that you need to scream “Praise Jesus!” a that much louder.

If any particular person wants to guide their life with this philosophy, I say “power to’em”. If it works for them and enough other people I may give it a go myself! The problem is that they don’t stop with themselves. They figure what has worked for them (which actually has rarely actually *worked* for them except by possibly blinding them to its failure) must work for everyone else and must work under all circumstances, even those that the person has never, ever been in and is not remotely familiar with.

It’s worse than a reluctance to grow. It’s even worse than proudly regressing into an adolescent intellectual mentality. It’s demanding that the world regress to your own level.

I’ve started listening to the 8th season of Frasier, which is the one immediately following the union of Niles and Daphne. As part of the terms for a non-acrimonious divorce from his four-day bride (that he just left for Daphne) he has to pretend to be her lover for a couple of months so that she can save face. You ever been in a situation where you’ve had to (or chose to) lightly pretend to be with somebody?

Due to some prior commitments, my ex Julie and I decided that we would keep the news of our breakup quiet. There’s nothing quite like kissing your ex-girlfriend in public days after you broke her heart. I can only imagine what the feeling was for her. What we didn’t know was that word has leaked within her family and the show we put on there was completely in vein. I should have known by the devil’s glare that they were all giving me.

You know how sometimes people get lonely and so they find someone to be physically intimate with to tide them over? I’ve never done that, but I’ve sorta done the inverse, wherein I’m not having sex with the person but I am going out with them and acting quasi-romantically (ie we’d act like we were on a date). Generally speaking they were the sort of people that I might be otherwise interested in but there was one huge thing (such as that they’d recently dumped a good friend or they were way too religious) that made a relationship impossible in my eyes. In retrospect I’m less sure that they were as sure about that as I was, though.

Of course, this sort of thing happens all the time with actors and actresses who have to kiss and act like they’re in a relationship without meaning anything behind it. Though I’ve done a bit of acting I’ve never done anything like that. Ironically I came somewhat close to assembling something that would have had me kissing Sally . It was a complete coincidence in that I didn’t know that she would be interested in the role. It never panned out and I was a bit relieved about that, to be honest. The whole thing felt more than a little odd.

In addition to Frasier, I’ve been recently watching the web-only series Something To Be Desired. I hope to write more about it later, but there was a subplot that was of some interest to me. A very minor character on the show set up something called NeedAWingman.com, wherein this guy will pretend to be your buddy for money. It’s good for cases where your girl is bringing a friend that you need distracted or if you just don’t want to be going to a bar alone.

The concept is, in my mind, genius. I say that because sadly I could really have used such a service back in the day. Most of my friends had left Colosse and I had been kind of slow to build new ones. More than once I found myself looking for a guy to take with me on some double-date or something, typically a girl from the online personals that was understandably nervous about meeting a strange guy alone. It’s actually quite embarassing in situations like that to say that none of your friends drink, most are bad in crowds, and you don’t trust most of them around girls.

I ran across this today in search for an image on the nerds post below and found it amusing:

quinkyle: Hay hay… if you don’t mind me asking, how much did you spend on your engagement ring?

trumwill: Mine was a family heirloom, so $0

quinkyle: Well poo to you

quinkyle: haha

trumwill: … so you… uhhh… looking for an engagement ring?

quinkyle: indeed

trumwill: Outstanding!

quinkyle: Makes me cry every time I look at prices, tho

trumwill: The “norm” is supposed to be two months salary, though I don’t know how many people actually do that

quinkyle: Nah, I’m going sub $1k

trumwill: Hmmm… if you invest that money in a mask and gun you may be able to turn a profit off this aquisition.

-{later}-

trumwill: I assume Lizzie hasn’t said anyting about what kind of ring she would prefer?

quinkyle: Yeah, she’s given hints, but I change the subject quickly. I want to surprise her

trumwill: Hehehe… I did the same thing. I remember at a coffeehouse once she was working the conversation as best she could into her letting me know that she was ready to get married. I changed the subject so fast that she must have thought that I was utterly oblivious, mad at her, having doubts, or the biggest jerk in the world.

quinkyle: haha, I’m a bastard insofar as that’s kinda what I want her to think

quinkyle: but not really… but really

quinkyle: you know what I mean =P

trumwill: Yeah

trumwill: Hey, if she comes home to an empty apartment with all of your stuff gone, that’d *really* fool her.

A discussion over at Bobvis got me thinking about the romantic fates of nerds. I summarized the dilemma as follows:

I’m sure that there are some supernerds that honestly don’t want relationships and I’ve known some, but by and large even the dateless ones I know do want a relationship. They just don’t know how to relate to people very well, meet comparatively few girls, and don’t know what to do with them when they have them. Often they have lofty expectations of what a relationship should be like because they’ve spent a lot more time imagining ideal ones than being in real life ones.

An anonymous commenter rightly pointed out that this applies to only some nerds. Nerds, after all, are typically smart people and should be able to learn. Leaving out for a moment the fact that it’s hard to learn when you simply don’t have much information and a lot of it is incorrect (the reasons that some relationships bloom dead) and the fact that the nerd pool is infested with people of mediocre intelligence that have convinced themselves that they’re smart due to commonality of interests with smart people, he’s actually quite right as far as that goes.

But nerds that can actually learn human lessons don’t actually stay nerds. They don’t suddenly start donning Armanis and watching NFL football or anything, but by the time they meet their generally non-nerdy wives they are no longer immediately identifiable as nerds. They may continue to have the same nerdy interests, but they no longer carry the nerd identity.

Being a nerd is not unlike being a jock or kicker or frat boy. It’s an identity you try on when you’re younger, but if you’re still identifying yourself (or identified as such) by that later in life that’s actually a sign of developmental failure rather than personal tastes. We all know the Springsteen Glory Days stereotype of the young athlete that never quite gets beyond their high school achievements and the frat boys that never truly grow out of it. The same is true for nerds. In fact, the parallel between the nerd whose glory days were in academia when his smarts were all that were needed for self-defined success is eerily comparable to the Al Bundy whose life highlight was scoring four touchdowns in a single high school football game.

But eventually we are to leave the comfortable confines of academia and our parents house and enter the real world. Our interests are supposed to expand. If we do it at all right, the high school (or college) label just shouldn’t fit anymore ten years later. We should outgrow it. We should integrate with the world as it is, not as it once was or as we think it should be.

The problem is, of course, not everyone does. And by the time you’re thirty most of the people that really identify as nerds are the people that haven’t grown. They’re the ones that haven’t found a way to integrate with mainstream society. They don’t have marriages to tend to or kids to take care of, so they just wave the banner of their malcontent. They concoct theories to explain why things didn’t just magically fall into line with them. Mostly, though, they just turn bitter. Above I explained how they become bitter towards women, but nerds are also disproportionately drawn to libertarianism out of bitterness towards the government that has somehow kept them down and drawn to socialism out of bitterness towards the capitalist system that has failed to recognize and reward their talents.

But most of us move on. Most of my nerdy friends are married now and the girl we married was far from the only option we had and I’m passed the point of being surprised about any of this. Most work in the computer field, though not all of them. Some are successful, some aren’t. Some are happier than others, but for the most part we are happy or not happy based on what is happening with us now and not the perpetuation of conflicts a decade old.

That of course makes it a little ironic that I spend as much time thinking about the fallen comrades that didn’t make it and are still stuck somewhere in the swamps. I suppose that I should just be happy that I made it across and I should thank the people that helped me get across.

Since my last post was kind of dirty and smelly, this post will be kind of clean and fresh. Sort of.

I’ve been running into a slump when it comes to cleany things. I am the sort of guy that buys something pretty loyally until I am disappointed or until they stop making it. Unfortunately the powers that be keep pulling the rug out from under me.

For five years I had the perfect deoderant: Speed Stick Ultimate Alpine Fresh.

Unfortunately, Speed Stick doesn’t seem to make it anymore. At first I tried some new Irish Spring scent, but it just didn’t smell the same. More recently I’ve tried Speed Stick 24/7 Fresh Rush and it, too, doesn’t work out quite right. Sometimes they’ll just repackage an existing product under a new name, but if Speed Stick has done that I can’t find the new name for the life of me.

Then they got rid of my microclean Irish Spring soap. Ever since I got my first bar from Evangeline several years ago, I’ve been a fan of what I call “whiskered soap”. I don’t even know how to describe them, but they’re these little particles in some bars of soap that add a little friction that I swear clean me off better. Unfortunately, not enough people agreed to keep the product on the market. Now there’s this new blue stuff that looked like it might have whiskers but doesn’t. At first I was excited at the prospect of a new option, but then I saw it was at the expense of my fav’rit.

And apparently my problems are contagious as the scent of Suave that Clancy has always used has also been replaced by different stuff.

Of course, as outraged as I get about all this I have an awful sense of smell and can’t tell the difference. So I suppose I’m mostly getting upset on Clancy’s behalf. As I discovere periodically when I do gain a sense of smell the world is not a good smelling place. So why oh why do the people take away from Clancy those few things that she deems to smell good?

I was at a neighbors house when I read about it in the local paper, “Local High School Coach Accused of Sexual Assault.”

I didn’t even need to read the article to know who or what it was about. I immediately ran home and called by best friend Clint. “They got him!”

We were mostly indifferent to Coach Montgomery except insofar as we feared him. He had this cold and mean way of looking at us. We were in regular Phys Ed, meaning that we weren’t athletes. We were also boys, making us even more useless to him. More on that in a moment. We’d had coaches yell at us before, but he wasn’t one of them. Coach Montgomery had a quiet scorn for us girly boys that were just as happy sitting around talking as we were lifting weights.

But while he didn’t like girly boys, he sure loved girly girls. We noticed it almost instantly. When he wasn’t scaring the living hell out of us with a glare, he was smiling and flirting with the girl students. He was initiating borderline human contact, meaning that he wasn’t touching them in inappropriate places, but he seemed eager to make physical contact with him. Many of the girls really appreciated the attention. Though not a remarkably handsome man, he had an incredibly impressive physique. While we were dodging basketballs thrown at our heads, he was otherwise occupied.

His inappropriate interests caught up with him and a girl’s parents found out about it. Once it’s out there, girls start stepping forward out of the woodwork. The secret that nobody cared about was suddenly out in the open. Coach Montgomery was having sex with students. A lot of them. When it all came out parents and administrators was wondering why no one had said anything. Our answer was that nobody asked. In all honestly we knew it was goofy and morally suspect, but it didn’t seem as monstrous to us as it did to parents. There was never any indication that the sex wasn’t consensual, even though some of the girls later apparently regretted it. The concept of authoritative manipulation hadn’t really been introduced to us at that point.

In between the initial questioning and his eventual arrest, Montgomery attempted suicide using pills of some sort. I don’t know what happened to him, but his career was over and his life wasn’t doing much better. Clint and I actually got a little bit of delight in it all. We didn’t like Montgomery and we couldn’t appreciate what was so wrong about it because sexual harassment was something that happened to adults and authoritative manipulation was a concept we hadn’t really been introduced to.

“It’s kind of funny that his life is practically over but Horton got away almost without a scratch,” Clint mentioned. Not well-versed in the ways of romance and certainly not that between an adult and a peer, the reason that we were so quick to pick up on what Montgomery was doing was because he looked at the girl students the same way that Coach Horton did.

Coach Horton was our coach throughout elementary school. Like Montgomery, he had little use for male students that weren’t athletic and he had too many uses for girls of all sorts. Except unlike with Montgomery, these girls were in elementary school. Rumors swirled for quite a while about the favoritism that he showed girls and the inappropriate ways that he would touch them. Nothing nearly as straightforward as Montgomery (as far as anyone knew), but the kind of creepy thing that lingers with girls years later.

Despite all the rumors and some awareness by the school’s administrators, Horton was there throughout my brothers’ tenure at West Oak Elementary up until we were in the fourth grade. At some point he slipped up and touched the wrong girl in the wrong place. A girl whose parents had enough pull in the community that they didn’t have to worry about the social repercussions of making an accusation. The problem for West Oak administrators was that if they were to fire him for molestation they would be be admitting that it took place and opening themselves up for a world of lawsuits from hundreds of parents. So they ultimately fired him for showing favoritism towards girls.

Last I heard, he was an elementary school coach in Colorado.