I generally enjoy the Dear Prudence column in Slate and the videos showing on SlateV. She’s sometimes snarky, but she often gets letters that warrant it.

Today I got caught up and she came across as unnecessarily harsh on a couple of emails.

The first was from a self-described food snob complaining about her husband’s meat-and-potato preferences. I was all set to side with the husband, but for the most part she was just asking him to be a good sport and he wasn’t. My food tastes are much more like his than hers, but Prudence’s advice to be more flexible really seemed more to apply to him than her.

The second was from a single mother that has three strong romantic prospects and wants to know how to choose between them. Prudence gives pretty good advice here, but then in the middle of nowhere tears into her writer for sleeping around and exposing the kids to the men in her life. Maybe the mother was being irresponsible, but there wasn’t any indication in the letter. Then, after this little diatribe, she then gave some more good advice.

What do y’all think?

At the outset of the new TV season, I wrote a review of the shows that I’ve been watching. With TV in a lull due to the writers’ strike, I thought that I might review the shows and give my updated opinions.

Back to You – My opinion of this one hasn’t changed much one way or the other. Before I described it as “competent, somewhat interesting, and quite funny at times, but never spectacular” and the description still applies. It’s proven itself to be solid, but has yet to move beyond passably interesting.
Original grade: C/C+
7 episodes later: C+

Big Shots – Most of the other dramas (including Life) have kept me interested with a hook: Detective Crews’s quest to find out who framed him, Chuck Bartowski’s history with Bryce Larkin, and Nick George’s search for his father’s murderer. Big Shots doesn’t need one to have my attention. The mixture of humor and drama works wonderfully. I care enough about the characters to care what happens to them, but not enough not to be able to laugh at some of their problems. Good stuff, if they can keep it going. Dylan McDermott remains flat, but so is his character. Christopher Titus is a jewel, but we don’t get enough of him.
Original grade: B+
8 episodes later: A-

Bionic Woman – Even the gorgeous Michelle Ryan can only hold your attention for so long. I stopped watching after scanning through the third episode.
Original grade: F
2.5 episodes later: F

Carpoolers – This show has proven to be a disappointment. The humor has grown a bit stale and the concept has not lived up to the show that I had imagined. My original grade was padded by what I thought were the possibilities of the program, but it just hasn’t lived up to them. I’ll continue to watch through the end of the season, but I’m not sure I’ll keep going after that.
Original grade: A-
6 episodes later: C-

Cavemen – This show keeps getting better and better as it goes along. I suspect that they were prepared at the start for the concept to get old so they put extra thought into the characters. They’ve avoided making it completely about their cavemanhood but produced something that couldn’t be made without that backdrop. I figured that when it inevitably got cancelled at the end of the first season that I would shrug. Now I’m really hoping it sticks in there long enough to make syndication.
Original grade: B
6 episodes later: A-

Chuck – A wonderful start that quickly slid into a sort of inertia for me. There’s nothing wrong with this program. I watched the first couple episodes but then started falling behind. There wasn’t much about the show that grabbed me. The genre-bending hasn’t worked out remarkably well. The big thing that kept me watching was finding out why Chuck got kicked out of Stanford and to get Bryce Larkin’s backstory. I got some of the latter and all of the former and am debating whether or not to stick around for the rest.
Original grade: B
7 episodes later: C+

Dirty Sexy Money – The characters haven’t become any more likeable, though the plotting has proven even better than I thought it would. The maneuvering between Tripp Darling and Simon Elders has particularly proven to be of interest, as has the nature of the George marriage. I’ve also taken a liking to the son, trying to figure out how to disentangle his best self from the temptation of living as a rich spoiled brat.
Original grade: C+
10 episodes later: B/B-

K-Ville – I was unimpressed with this show at the outset, but it’s grown on me. I might have given it up if my wife hadn’t become interested. They’ve used a good job of utilizing the unrealistic-seeming elements of it to encourage me to suspend my disbelief. I think that the show is chugging along pretty strong, but my wife isn’t quite as sure anymore. It’s hit and miss, but hitting enough to keep me interested.
Original grade: D
9 episodes later: B

Life – I previously complained that the show hadn’t lived up to its potential, but once it got moving it did. Detective Crews is one of the most interesting figures on television as he tries to reconcile his newfound zennish beliefs with his experience as a cop that was royally screwed by those around him. I was originally just waiting to see if they’d bother revealing who framed him. They sort of did and quicker than I had thought, though of course there is more to the story than originally thought. I don’t mind the continuing revelation so long as it doesn’t end up something extremely convoluted. It’s on the right track.
Original grade: B/B+
11 episodes later: A/A-

Reaper – As with Chuck, I couldn’t find much of anything to complain about with this show but had to search for reasons to watch it. I fell behind on this one, too, but unlike Chuck I did get caught up. I couldn’t care less about the protagonist’s romantic interest and far too much time was spend on it early on, but now they seem to be veering in a different direction for a little while so my interest has returned. I’m not positive I’m going to keep up whenever it resumes, but it’s possible.
Original grade: B+
9 episodes later: B-

The Big Bang Theory – Nothing I said in the original review is any different. Best new show on television.
Original grade: A
8 episodes later: A

Bob wants to know why tattling should be discouraged in kids if we want people to come forward to the authorities as adults. Dizzy suggests that we don’t want adults to report rule-breaking, either.

It seems to me that it depends largely on what rule-breaking we’re referring to and, perhaps more importantly, who is engaging in the rule-breaking and who is being hurt by it. We don’t want anyone to tell on ourselves, but we do want people to tell on other people at least some of the time.

We love our whistle-blowers. Sherron Watkins became nationally known and admired for being a “whistle-blower” at Enron before that ship went down. So much did we need some sort of hero that we largely invented one out of someone that wasn’t. Watkins never went to the authorities and only really made noise within the company in the context of legal liability and not moral imperative. But our need for a “good guy” and our admiration for whistle-blower converged and she became famous and admired based only on the appearance of tattling on the crooked bean-counters.

We also want witnesses to step forward when crimes are committed and the authorities try to protect them when they do, though such things require more resources than we are willing to spend.

Other times, though, people who come forward are condemned. For every Sherron Watkins there is a Linda Tripp. Words like “snitch” and “tattler” are attacks on people whose only crime is telling the truth. So what gives?

The question I think that runs through most of our minds is whether we are more likely to be hurt by someone tattling on us for doing something of equivalent severity or more likely to be hurt by the person doing whatever it was that that the tattled-on person was accused of doing. When people told on bullies in junior high, those of us that were pestered by bullies did not see any problem with that while bullies and their friends were critical of such telling.

When it came to Enron, Watkins is alleged to have told on big, powerful mean people that were screwing over there employees. We have a lot more in common with the people getting screwed than the folks screwing them over. Yay Sherron! Boo Enron! On the other hand, if a coworker turns in another coworker for coming in half-an-hour late last week, we see ourselves as more likely to get chewed out by the boss than we do being hurt by someone coming in late some morning.

People want the ability to get away with as much as they can. They don’t want to live surrounded by potential informants ready to report their every infractions. For the most part people hate speed cameras trying to catch speeders because we have more a fear of getting a ticket than we do of someone going 7mph over the speed limit getting into an accident with us.

Of course, we also want protection. We want the drug dealers down the street hauled away in handcuffs. We want anyone that witnessed a murder to step forward. We want anyone accused of doing something worse than anything we would do (or would be in the power to do, a la Enron) to get hammered to the wall. Witnesses and informants make that happen and we’re all for them.

Wouldn’t it be preferable, though, for witnesses of all infractions to step forward? If we were forced to enforce all of the rules, we’d have to get rid of the bad ones and the good ones would be enforced. What’s wrong with that?

In an ideal world, that might be the case. Sometimes, though, rules are really meant to be broken. Or I should say it doesn’t matter so much of the rules are broken some of the time. As a pirate might say, it’s meant more as a guideline than a true code. It doesn’t matter if I’m not in my desk at 8 in the morning, but you have the 8:00 rule to make sure people are there by 9:00. You have an understanding that traffic, trainstops, faulty alarms, and all that happen from time to time, but if it becomes a problem the rules are in place to put the hammer down. Tattlers throw a big, giant wrench in that productive general understanding.

Many moons ago my roommate Karl and I moved from one apartment (a 3-person place we were sharing with Dennis) to another (a 2-person place). Our DSL high speed Internet apparently did not follow us. Our phone line did, but DSL didn’t. It took them six weeks to get it up and running for us. We were charged throughout. When I complained, they said that it’s in the contract that their only duty was to provide us with Internet access and that high speed was a perk available most of the time.

“But you haven’t been providing us with Internet.”

“Of course we have. We got your phone line up instantly and you are always free to call on our dial-up system.”

“First of all, we weren’t paying $55 for dial-up, and second whenever we tried the lines were busy.”

“We can’t do anything about that, sir.”

“You could get more lines.”

“You’re free to go with another dial-up provider, sir.”

“But you’re the only ones that can get me DSL.”

“Yes we are, is there anything else I can help you with today?”

—

Our Internet at home has been down for the better part of three weeks now. We’ve been experiencing problems for a good part of our stay in Estacado. Typically on weekends for some reason it would go down between 2 and 10 times a day. It would usually only last for fifteen minutes or so before going back up. That I could deal with. Then, about three weeks ago, it flipped where it would only go up 2-10 times a day in fifteen minute increments or shorter.

Rather than force us to start spending more time away from the computer and not let the Internet become such a dominant factor in our lives, we began to schedule our lives around the Internet. In the rare occasion that it would come up, we would stop whatever it is that we were doing and rush to our computers to take care of whatever we could while we could. With an unreliable connection, there’s a lot you don’t do even if you are up. Going Internet shopping is an exercise in futility because you never have a connection long enough to get it done and the way that the sites are set-up are not conducive to frequent disconnections. The fact that we didn’t know if we’d have a whole fifteen minutes or whether it’d crap out in two made it even more impossible.

Thus far the outage has cost us about $170. $30 of that is our monthly fee for a service we weren’t getting, which is technically a sunk cost because we’re paying it whether the Internet is there or not, but I count it anyway because it pisses me off. The $140 came from airline tickets that we almost bought on a Thursday night, got disconnected, and when we tried again Saturday morning the fare had increased from $400 to $540.

We’ve been in contact with our cable provider, naturally. They haven’t been remarkably helpful, naturally.

After it had been down solid for a couple of days and it was obviously not going to come back on our own, I called the tech support line. The guy on the other end of the line told me that their records confirmed that I was getting frequent outages but that it was up most of the time. What was peculiar was that he didn’t start talking about how he was going to help me. He just said “Yeah, it’s down.”

When I pushed, he said that fixing bad connections wasn’t his job and if I wanted to do that I would have to contact a phone technician.

“What are you?” I asked.

“A customer service agent. There’s a difference.”

“Oh, well okay. What number do I call to talk to a phone technician?”

“You can’t call them directly.”

“So how do I get ahold of one?”

“I have to forward you to one.”

“Okay… well could you do that for me?”

Surprised sounding, he said, “Yeah, okay, sure.” and he did.

The next guy I talked to was more helpful. He told me how to read the lights on the cable modem and re-confirmed that our connection has been spotty. He could send somebody over, he said, but not for a couple of days. We were headed for Colosse, though, so that was a no-go. We made an appointment for the day after we got back.

The original live technician was also not helpful. He was sure it was our cable modem, so he replaced it. That didn’t work, so he replaced the power cable. That seemed to work. He said he was going out for a minute to check the line outside, the connection would go dark, but then he would be back and the connection would come back up. The connection went down and stayed there. The guy didn’t come back.

So I called the cable company again. To save time, I asked to speak to a technician rather than a customer service agent.

“You are speaking to a technician.”

“No, I mean someone that can help me with my problem. Not a customer service agent.”

“I am a customer service agent, but I am also a technician.”

“The guy I talked to yesterday said that they were two different things.”

“We are, but your account has been flagged to talk directly to a technician because of your problems.”

“Okay, so the problems haven’t been fixed.”

“What problems?”

“The problems we’ve been having that have me talking to you rather than a CSA.”

“Oh, well I don’t know what your problems are. Just that you have them.”

“There’s no notations about what I’ve been complaining about?”

“No, just that you’ve been complaining. You’re on our high complaint list.”

“Like the one that Sprint used to kick their customers to the curb?”

“Well we don’t kick people off for complaining, but the same basic idea, yes. So what’s the problem?”

I explained the problem to him and I swear he got more irate about it than I did. He railed against the live techs that leave before they’ve done their job, told me that he would stick the reddest of red flags on my account (he made that sound like a good thing) and that he could get somebody out there the next day. That didn’t work out because I needed to reserve a specific time period, so we were going to be without a connection for another week or so before they could stop by.

Then, naturally, it started mostly working again the day before the second tech arrived. It went back to its former behavior of going down regularly but coming back up quickly. It actually was going down more regularly (once or twice an hour) but coming back up almost immediately. So when the tech showed up this morning, naturally I had to tell him that it was mostly working.

I was expecting him to say that his job was done and leave, but to his credit he didn’t. He just lamented that that was going to make fixing the problem a little more difficult, but that if he didn’t fix it then they’d just have to send somebody else to try to fix it later.

It took him less than ten minutes to discover that our connections had gone bad in the guest room wall and the wall outside. He showed the connection to me. The wires were bare, several were cut and frayed. It was amazing that we’d been getting any service at all.

That all happened this morning. It worked great when he left. We’ll see how it works when I get home. I’m actually hopeful for once that the Internet will be there for me when I need it.

If I were to vote in Estacado in the primaries, would I be able to vote in another state in the general election? I’d think so since I wouldn’t be voting twice in the same election, but I’m not positive on that. Voting absentee in Estacado in November also strikes me as problematic if I’ve officially changed residence. Would I be disenfranchising myself by moving?

You guys want to know a bit of irony? Clancy has refrained from getting an Estacado Driver’s License thus far is now has to scramble and get one because she’s about to start a long haul temporary job in another state (Sierra). Her license is due to expire while she’s out there. She has to get it done today because she leaves Sunday.

I got a nice little email from my ex-girlfriend Julie asking how things were going. Julie doesn’t usually email me out of the blue unless there’s something very specific that she wants to talk about, but this email contained nothing urgent nor any questions. It was an update of what was going on with her (mundane stuff, no new job or boyfriend) and a question at the end asking how things were with me. I would bet $1,000 that if I write her back, she will not respond unless I ask her specific questions, in which case I’ll get a concise answer and a promise to write more later, which she never will.

The only times she writes when she doesn’t have anything urgent are cases where, for whatever reason, she wants to re-establish that we are still friends. Actually, “whatever reason” isn’t accurate. She has a very specific reason for this need.

To test my theory, I shot an IM to my friend Tony and asked if he’d spoken to Julie lately.

“Yeah, actually, we got the car title stuff taken care of.”

I asked how it went, he replied: “She showed up, pulled out the papers and I signed them. She obviously wasn’t interested in any banter, but I tried to remain friendly and asked her how she was doing and such. She was brief in her answers, I told her it was nice seeing her again and said ‘okay’ and left. Probably lasted less then a few minutes.”

Julie hardly ever talks to Tony anymore. She never even told Tony about Ohki’s death, even though Tony was Ohki’s step-dad for longer than I was. Sometimes something arises, though, where they have to talk. Such was the case with the car title debacle (which I’ll write about at some point). Also, from time to time, Tony will email her to hoping with futility to mend some fences to subconsciously convince himself that he’s really a good guy at heart despite hurting her.

Whenever she is forced to talk to him, Julie starts talking to me. She used to do this because she pined for him or was really angry with him, but she’s mostly past that now. Now she does it to justify my anger. Julie doesn’t want to think that she’s the kind of person that can’t stay on good terms with her ex-boyfriends. She likes to think she’s above the anger and pettiness that accompany heartbreak, but she’s as flawed as the rest of us are.

So she emails me I think as some sort of subconscious reminder that “See? I can be friends with exes. Tony is just a doodoohead.” As long as she and I remain friends, that means that she is not the problem when it comes to the fact that she and Tony never talk anymore. She can attribute their breakdown as something unique rather than that she’s human and talking to a man that she loved devotedly for 5 years still hurts after nearly three years apart.

Despite the fact that I know that she won’t respond to anything I write back, I’m still going to shoot her an email. She’ll read it, her virtue will be validated, and I will have served my function.

Several years ago, she did something similar for me. After she and I broke up and she and Tony got together, I embarked on a pretty rocky path dating Evangeline, being rejected by Evangeline, being dumped by her, trying to date other people and failing, dating other people and getting dumped, and so on and so on. That’s not to say that I was some pathetic mess, a victim of mean women, because I gave as good as I got. But it was those times when I was getting dumped on that I most needed Julie’s services.

Whereas Julie emails me periodically as an affirmation that she can be a good ex-slash-friend, I needed affirmation that finding love was possible. By keeping in contact with her, despite the fact that we didn’t really have all that much to say to one another, I was reminding myself that I dated this beautiful girl for nearly five years and that I could have married her if I hadn’t left her. I didn’t want to go back to her or still be with her, but I needed to know that whatever option had just been closed off wasn’t the only option I’d ever had.

It sounds pretty melodramatic, but at that point she was the only serious girlfriend I’d ever had. She was the only proof that existed. It wasn’t even a conscious thing that I was doing. I learned of my motivations in retrospect, reading over some of the emails, remembering how I felt, and remembering how being in contact with her helped me feel.

Julie indulged me as I now indulge her. The emails more-or-less stopped when I met Clancy. Clancy was never jealous or anything like that, it was just after meeting Clancy my pointless conversations with Julie were finally completely bereft of point, consciously or subconsciously. Though I continued to try to keep in contact for a little while once Clancy entered the picture, when Julie didn’t attend my wedding I shrugged it off completely.

I got an email from my domain handlers, which has informed me:

One of our associates has attempted to contact you with exciting new offers by {domain handler} to help your website reach its potential, but the phone number you gave us has been disconnected. We at {domain handler} are constantly adding to the services that offer existing and new customers, so please update your account information so that we can share them with you!

Wouldn’t it be more accurate if they had said:

You may have wondered why we have stopped bugging you with calls to pressure you into getting new bells and whistles, but it’s hard to contact to you if you don’t give us your current information. We at {domain handler} are disappointed that you have made our telemarketing job more difficult.

Pro wrestling (the entertaining kind, not the real kind) is coming to Santomas, Estacado, at some point soon. While I’m living in the big city (or what passes for it) going to a live pro wrestling demonstration is something I’d definitely like to do.

Suffice it to say, this sort of thing is not high on Clancy’s list of things that she would like to do. The thing is that I have an old college friend that lives in a nearby town who was one of the two people that introduced me to what was then WWF and WCW wrestling. I haven’t been following wrestling in years and I wouldn’t be surprised if it fell off his radar, too. That being said, he is surely more on top of things than I am and it would be great to go with someone more knowledgeable.

The problem is that I suspect that said friend is not in a comfortable position financially and I would be surprised if he’s got the money for that sort of thing, though if he’s still a big fan I’m sure he could make the money for it (he did back in college when he was particularly hard up). I wouldn’t want to place a financial burden on him and if he can’t afford it, I might be willing to front the cost of his ticket just for his company.

These things are always awkward, though. He’s a proud guy and if he can afford it he might take offense at my offering to cover for it and if I didn’t make the offer outright he’d probably find some reason not to be able to go (it’s on a weeknight, which could be reason enough). So how does one approach this situation? Typically when I’ve been in this situation, the hard-up friend hasn’t had a problem sharing in my generosity… but this is a different case.

To make matters potentially even more difficult, he’s had friendships end for the flimsiest of reasons loosely related to his pride and this sort of thing could blow up in my face entirely. He’s loosened up a great deal since he’s gotten married, but how much?

There ought to be a way I can ask the question without asking it, but that also has the tendency to make people mad. I in particular hate it when people do that, but mostly because I don’t get offended by questions easily. People who get offended easily by questions also get offended by people dancing around questions. That’s kind of annoying.

Then again, maybe he’s mellowed out enough since getting married that I’m working myself all up for nothing. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve walked on eggshells around a deaf person.