When I was younger, I was glad that I came from a Dodge family. All of our cars for my whole life were Dodges. It was the way my family worked. Dad would find a model that he liked and we’d get one after another after another of that model until the model was discontinued. I drive the family’s fourth Ford Escort (we’ve since become a Ford family), but at the time I was driving the family’s third Dodge Colt.

So why was I so glad to be a Dodge driver? Because it allowed me to… err… dodge the War of the Dueling Calvins. That would be the Calvins on the back of cars and trucks (well, usually trucks) wherein Calvin of Calvin & Hobbes fame would be urinating on the logo of either a Ford or a Chevy. Ford users targeted Chevy and Chevy drivers targeted Fords, and nobody targeted Dodges. Not that my constitution was too delicate to handle my car’s logo being in a little bumper sticker being urinated on, but the wars didn’t stop there.

I knew Ford people and I knew Chevy people. Back then it seemed like they were all car (well, usually truck) people and had more in common than not. Only since I became interested in computers and familiar with Windows people and Mac people did I understand the dynamics of the enthusiasts’ civil war.

As I’ve gotten older, I don’t really know any Ford people and Chevy people. I can’t remember the last time I met someone that identified with their car’s maker in that way. Now, though, I seem to entirely know Honda people and Toyota people. I know people that drive exclusively Hondas and people that drive exclusively Toyotas. No Calvin decals, but people are nonetheless spend a lot of time extolling the virtues of their preferred automobile manufacturer.

Part of me chalks up the shift to the problems that the American automotive industry has been having. The problems in Detroit are legion and well-publicized, so I won’t go over them here. Needless to say, more foreign cars are being sold than ever and domestic cars are having trouble keeping up. So I figured that the shift primarily reflected Japanese cars’ increasing dominance of the automotive market in the United States.

But there’s something else at work, too. When I got to by-stand in the Dueling Calvin Wars, I was spending a lot of time in the blue-collar town of Phillippi (pronounced “Phil-pee”), in between the suburb Mayne (pronounced “May-knee”) and the big city of Colosse (pronounced “kull-oss”… we southerners like our lazy pronunciations). Phillippi was solidly blue collar that grew on the fortunes and faded with the misfortunes of the chemical plants that emitted the odor that prevented it from ever becoming too suburbanized. Almost everyone in the Ford/Chevy struggle drove trucks. Usually pick-up trucks, sometimes suburbans and cargo-friendly vans. Never anything fuel-efficient.

Now, though, most of the people I know are entering the middle class or are already there. Gas prices have forced us to buy more fuel-friendly cars and there is now social encouragement to do so as well (and no social encouragement to “buy American”). If there’s one place that the American manufacturers still have a foothold, it’s trucks. If there’s one battle they’ve lost, it’s yuppie, compactish, efficient little cars.

That might also explain why one car included urinating cartoon figures and the other did not.

My job requires that I spend much of my time using touchscreen monitors, which is something of a new experience. Adding to my immersion into the touchscreen world, shortly after starting at Monmark/Soyokaze, I purchased my first Pocket PC which uses a stylus with a touchscreen.

It’s taken quite a bit of getting used to. The first tripping point that I experienced was when I tried to “right-click” on things using my middle finger and it kept acting like I was left-clicking it with my index finger. Obviously, I know that it can’t tell one finger from the other, but I had to rethink my right-clicking ways.

Now I’ve swung in the other direction. I’ve gotten so used to touchscreen that I find myself touching my regular monitors. Just a minute ago I tried pressing on a separate Firefox tab and momentarily got frustrated when it just wouldn’t click.

For a smart guy, I’m kind of dumb sometimes.

Instead of my standard Ghostland post this week, I’m going to do something different. I’ve been working on my novel lately. Though the whole work is not very autobiographical at all, there are various stories and anecdotes that mirror an experience of mine or someone that I know. The following is one that happened to me and some friends. It’s looking like it won’t actually make it into the book, so I figured I would post it here.

The novel centers around a handful of former users of a BBS, which was a place that people got on their computers to talk to other people before the Internet came along. The novel takes place in 2002 and the narrator is recounting a story that took place in 1992. Some of the themes of the novel is socialization, the difficulties of socialization, and the search for community, of which this scene was a part.

—

I was hanging out at Tom’s house playing video games with Tom (Tailfin), Mark (Toad), and Jeff (Okate). As was not infrequently the case, we multi-tasked and someone was on the board most of the time. I was about to take over when a girl with the handle of Bunnyflop sent him an IUM asking him how his day was. “Do you know someone by the name of Bunnyflop?” I asked Tom, whose account was online at the time.

“No. Should I?”

“I don’t know. She just sent you an IUM asked how your day is.”

“Tell her fine. Hey, can you stick on my account for right now. I want to talk to her as soon as I die here. I’ve got one hit-point left.”

I shrugged. I hadn’t sent in my subscription money yet for the month, so I only had an hour a day. Tom was a “silver subscription” account holder, meaning that he got 3 hours a day. Better his time than mine, I figured.

I told Bunnyflop that I was doing fine. I never found out exactly what happened to Tom’s game, but he must have rebounded because he was playing for at least another half-hour while I sat there and chatted with Megan, aka Bunnyflop. Megan was obviously pretty new to the whole BBSing thing and talking on line thing, so I carried the conversation. I’d been on the board six months and I was getting to be very good at first impressions (it was usually maintaining their interest that was the problem). I was on a roll that day. I can’t remember what all I said, but with all humility I can say that I was a comic genius.

“Dude, what are you laughing at?” Tom asked as he kept playing his game.

“Sorry. I’m just on a roll talking to Bunnyflop.”

“Are you still on my account? Does she know that you’re you?”

Oh, crud, I thought. Not only was I using Tom’s account, but I had told her that my name was Tom. I didn’t expect anything to come of this conversation. “Not exactly.”

“Sweet! Keep talking man. And be funnier! My account, my hero points!”

He had a point. I was using his time. If I’d decided to be funny and charming, it was all in his name. Besides that, things were looking somewhat good with Clarissa at the time and I didn’t need this particular fish, so I cold toss it over in his bucket. I viewed it as an opportunity to get some experience being charming and witty, though.

She was also a good conversationalist. She played off me wonderfully. Things were honestly going extremely well when she asked what I was up to the rest of the afternoon.

I explained that I had some friends over and we were playing some video games. We were going to watch anime that afternoon. Was she interested in coming over?

She was interested in coming over. Right now, in fact. She would bring over some movies if we wanted to. She was also an anime fan. When Tom’s character finally died, I told him what was going on. He was elated. It had been a while before he’d found any luck even on the board. I was happy for him, but I also felt a little cheated. After all, this was my kill. It bit to use all that effort scoring for someone else. Besides, if he faltered (and with Tom this was not unlikely) I would get my chance.

It actually wasn’t that big of a surprise when it turned out to be a moot point. I had picked up on the fact that she was probably going to be heavy, but she turned out to merely be a little thick. The problem was that she was hopelessly dull. It’s not that she didn’t contribute to our hanging out. It’s not even that her failure to contribute dragged on the rest of us. It’s that she somehow managed to singlehandedly make all the non-dull in the room simultaneously implode, leaving our pale and gaunt apparitions roaming around vainly searching for non-dull.

We gave her every opportunity to be interesting. We asked her questions, but she never gave a single answer more than a word or two long.

“So where are you going to college?”

“[private religious university].”

“Oh really? Why [private religious university]?”

“Parents.”

“Parents went there or they want you to go there?”

“Both.”

“So you want to go there?”

“I guess.”

“What do you want to major in?”

“Marine biology.”

“[private religious university] has a marine biology major?”

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe you should go to a school that offers the major that you want.”

“Maybe.”

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that she had been like this online as well. She mostly played off what I had to say in one or two word responses. In actuality, I had actually projected a non-dull personality on a remarkably, fascinatingly dull vessel of a person.

She didn’t appear to be having any more fun than we were. We realized that we were sort of bombarding her with questions, but it was mostly in an effort just to get her to talk. As a joke, Tom got a flood light and aimed it at her. “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” he asked.

“No,” she replied, flinching in the light. She didn’t get the joke, answering as though we’d asked if she knew the capital of Zimbabwe or some other non-offensive, serious question.

We all just looked at each other and realized that we were dealing with something peculiar here. We put in the anime tape, watched the show, and decided that we would rather all just go home than spend any more time with the dull-producing machine. Tom, of course, was the one that couldn’t escape because he already was home. He decided that he had some homework to do.

We all ended up going to my house. Once he was sure that she was gone, Tom joined us.

That night he got a System Message from Bunnyflop. She said that she’d had a great time and that she would like to hang out with us again and maybe watch some more anime. We were stunned and a little mad. We were partly stunned because she’d had a good time when we were sure that she was as uncomfortable as we were. In fact, we’d kind of thought that was why she didn’t say much. We were also partly stunned because it turned out that she could string multiple words together. We were a little mad because if she’d just managed to do that at Tom’s house, everything might have turned out very differently.

Tom never responded and we only saw her online a couple times after that before she stopped logging on.

The Observer:

In a book to be published tomorrow, Tim Gill, a former government adviser who led a major review into children’s play, argues that mollycoddling children by labelling ‘unpleasant behaviour’ as bullying is stopping them from building the skills they need to protect themselves. ‘I have spoken to teachers and educational psychologists who say that parents and children are labelling as bullying what are actually minor fallings-out,’ said Gill, the former director of the then Children’s Play Council, who is currently advising the Conservative Party’s childhood review.

‘Children are not always nice to each other, but people are not always nice to each other. The world is not like that. One of the things in danger of being lost is children spending time with other children out of sight of adults; growing a sense of consequence for their actions without someone leaping in,’ he told The Observer

Gill related an incident in which his own daughter complained that she was being bullied after three boys teased her about a game she was playing in the park. ‘What struck me was the use of the word bullying to describe that,’ he said. ‘Bullying is where the victimisation is sustained and there is a power imbalance. I do not mean we should allow unbridled cruelty, just that one option is asking, “Can you sort it out yourself?” ‘

I think a lot of what Gill has to say makes a lot of sense, but no one is going to tell me that bullying among kids is too aggressively monitored. One of the scariest things about middle school was the knowledge that the school did not have our back. That meant that even verbal taunting was not a threat free of the fear of physical harm. It informed Bob Vis’s libertarian views by giving him a distrust for institutions and it lead me to help people to cheat to barter for my protection. Energy that should have been devoted to learning and productive socializing was instead spent in crisis management making sure that people would not take my stuff or physically assault me. And these were not “lessons in life” that would help me later on because they were problems particular to the situation. They likely hurt my social development more than helped it. Same with Bob.

The notion that kids can “sort it out amongst themselves” assumes two individuals that want to sort it out. A majority of the time this really is not the case. The taunting and harassment is not means to an end… it is the end in itself. Or in the alternative it is the means to dominance, which really can’t be accomplished any other way.

I don’t know if bullying is worse now than it was 30 years ago or better. On one hand, there was the decision made in education circles to start deciding that bullies are misunderstood rather than thugs so they should be spared the rod and there is a general aversion to punishment (and the lawsuits that sometimes follow). On the other hand, there are institutional improvements such as alternative schools, the “boys will be boys” mentality has been replaced, drugs are sometimes used to sedate bullies, and I think that ever since Columbine there has been an effort to taking bullying more seriously.

So I don’t know whether things are better or worse than they used to be and how things rated when I was going to school. I also don’t have any clear answers as to what administrators ought to do. But Gill seems to yearn for the day when kids learned to suck it up and be tough and that is a dangerous attitude. That which does not kill you will sometimes will leave you weaker rather than stronger for it. Kids need to spend more time in school learning and less time dodging their classmates.

When I made the decision to go to Southern Tech University instead of the more conventional choice of the University of Delosa, I knew that one of the things I was missing out on Big Time College Football. I visited by brothers periodically in Ephesus almost always timed for a good college football games. Going to the annual showdowns between Delosa and the University of Louisiana was an annual tradition. Southern Tech didn’t have that. They had a team that had been great in the past but was struggling by the time I had gotten there. I was never a big follower of high school football, so despite the fun of going to Delosa Crimson Panther games, I didn’t figure that I was missing out on much.

By the time I graduated from college, I had gone to two or three games. The Southern Tech Wolf Pack had fallen on particularly hard times. They were rarely of anything approaching national championship caliber, but even less lofty goals like a conference championship or even a bowl game seemed out of reach. Any time we were playing a teach I had heard of we got trounced and when we played competitively it was against teams that one could take little pride in defeating. And while my brothers were surrounded by football fanatics, few of my friends cared.

Curiously, it was only after I left that I started following college sports more generally and the Wolf Pack specifically. Some of it is that the school was suddenly fielding decent and wildly entertaining teams. Sometimes they won, sometimes they lost, but rarely were they boring.

I find that I am not alone in this. One guy that I knew passingly in college, Al Cavanaugh, found me on a blog I used to write. Since then we’ve been in correspondence and we would make a point of going to at least one or two football and basketball games a year. Al went to the University of Delosa Law School and is a Red Panthers fan for the most part, but like me he has taken an interest in Wolf Pack sports. Being that he lives in Colosse, the Wolf Pack games are much easier (not to mention cheaper) to attend. An advantage to following the football team of a non-football school is that while you miss out on the high-charged atmosphere of 80,000 screaming fans, you don’t have to deal with the headaches of being in a stadium with 80,000 screaming fans.