During my last trip down to Colosse, I found The Cigar Box. TCB was a box of a brand of cigars that my somewhat famous Great Grandfather endorsed. Inside TCB was a bunch of old knick-knacks. I may talk more about the box in the future, but I wanted to share one of the findings, which I referred to once before:

Somewhere in the boxes of my parents house is something I call The Bizarro Letter. She wrote me a letter in marker that was at best vaguely comprehensible. I found it amusing and showed it my friends, none of whom had any idea what message she might have been trying to convey. It had profound passages like “In 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 years I will beeeeeeeeeee (buzz) 21 21 21 21 21″ (21 was written 21 times) and between talking about her cat and her mother burst out with “I SAW THE STRANGEST SHADE OF PURPLE TODAY!”

That was how I remembered it, but it wasn’t quite right. The above might have been from a mock-up that I wrote up once, while the letter was missing. Anyhow, he was the letter that Fever sent me:

Front of the Envelope - Nothing special here, and most of it is blacked out for privacy reasons. I mostly included it because I included…

Back of the Envelope - This was how I knew it was from her before I saw who it was from.

Page One - My name, her name, and a unique name are blacked out.

Page Two - A couple black-outs without explanation. They would require a story that would not be worth the time to write and read, but might be recognizable to the right person.

Back of Page Two - Not much here. Just a little… weirdness.

In the grander scheme of my life - indeed, even my love life - Cecilia played a bit role. In the small pantheon of former love interests, she would rank about fourth of fifth in terms of how likely it would have been that I would end up with her. Those of you that have been reading HC for a while may remember her. If you want the full story, read below the fold. It’s not integral to the post.

The short story: Cecilia and I met at an anime convention and were taken with one another relatively quickly. Due to circumstances, we were never able to fully pursue a relationship. But she was, really until I married my wife, sort of on the periphery. Someone with whom I seemed to have solid potential, if only things would work out a certain way. It never happened, and so her primary role in my life was that she was instrumental in mentally/emotionally dislodging me from my then-relationship

Though I haven’t talked to her since I married, I’ve been vaguely keeping tabs on her the way that I do a lot of old acquaintances. In her case, mostly to see that she’s turned out alright. A while back, I discovered that she joined the other team. That was possibly related to her seemingly quick exit from the military. The whole thing feels… weird. Were Dickwad and I just dalliances before she figured out what she was all along? Was she flipped along the way? Of the various women I’ve known and been either involved with or near-involved with, she would not have been high on the list of possibly homosexual. It’s not that I find such things unthinkable - I think one girl I actually dated was and didn’t know it or was fighting it - but her? A part of me was in denial. This was just to get out of the military. This is her response to a series of screwed up relationships with guys (mainly a particular boyfriend and her step-dad, but I can’t say that I was a positive figure in her life in the final analysis).

Whatever its origins, though, it has stuck. I checked up on her Facebook and she is apparently still with the same girl that she was a couple of years ago. They moved to another city together.

I’m a 30-something year old man that’s married in the mountain west. She’s a late-twenties girl in the south with someone that she can’t (yet) marry. We do have one thing in common, though: very similar taste in women. (more…)

The subject of indoctrination came up in my recent Captain Planet post and we started making a list of things that kids are indoctrinated about: the environment, drugs, and smoking.

One of the things I remember quite clearly is drinking and driving. Or rather, a bunch of kids being brought into an auditorium and being shown some grisly pictures of drinking/driving ads. They told us about how terrible it was to drink and drive.

What they were apparently less clear about was that “drinking” was specifically a reference to alcohol. I mean, I’m sure they mentioned alcohol, but they weren’t as clear as they needed to be that it was only alcohol that was a bad idea. A lot of kids went home and freaked out when their parents were drinking a soft drink or coffee in the car.

A few days later, the principal clarified over the intercom that it was okay if our parents drank coffee or soft drinks while driving, and that it’s only a problem if it’s alcohol.

What’s kind of funny about all of this is that I wouldn’t be surprised if years from now, drinking a soft drink on the road will be fully incorporated into the War on Distracted Driving.

I overheard this song playing at the coffeehouse. I’d never heard of it (or the band) before.

(I had specifically planned to find another video to put up, but the WiFi at this coffeehouse is worse than I have had in a very, very long time. Just about anything with scripts refuses to load. I find myself alternating between the computer and the 3G on my phone. Even where I am only getting 1 bar, it’s faster on the phone. But harder to coordinate a post. I really need to work on getting tethering.)

A reminder that I came up in the 80’s…

I didn’t say *my* 4th grade class. Even so, this was another class in my school, so I knew a lot of the kids because I was in the same class as them in earlier grades or the 5th grade. This picture will not be up for very long and will be replaced with an obscured one.

1 - Lived down the street from me. Disappeared from our school system at some point not long after this picture was taken (in fact, I could have sworn she had been gone by the 4th grade). She later died of a drug overdose.

2 - One of my best friends through parts of middle school. Then we went on different trajectories. He got a girlfriend pregnant almost immediately after high school and never went to college.

3 - I knew him quite well growing up, then at some point he just turned. He dropped out of high school and did a stint in prison.

4 - My family was close to her family and I’ve written about her on this blog before. She moved to Deseret and became part of some strange religion that required that she change her name. She was pregnant by 19 and had another kid by 21. While pregnant with her second, she cut off all ties to her family. She had one brother who ended up in Cascadia. He, too, severed all ties with his parents. It’s really weird, because their parents (who used to sit us often) seemed like great folks.

5. I was a horrible, horrible friend to this kid. I don’t even want to recount what exactly I did, but it ruined him socially. He must have known. Yet, years later, sent a Facebook friend request and we’ve chatted. If his Facebook info is to be believed, he has done unbelievably well for himself.

6. Remember that girl I posted about who married the guy several leagues below her? For those of you who don’t remember, she’s an MD now.

7. Is female. Even today, looks a little bit like a guy in drag.

8. Went to the prom with a guy who turned out to be gay. It should have been the first clue. She was gorgeous and he was utterly uninterested in her all night long. She was pissed, but they’re Facebook friends now, so I guess she got over it.

9. Graduated college at age 20, got two masters degrees and a PhD. Is a statistical analyst for a major insurance company. Four kids. Writes zombie fiction.

10. I was often confused with her brother, who was decidedly unpopular.

11. He left after the 4th grade, I think. He and I were friends, but the guy has the personality of a Monty Card dealer. I hope he ended up in Vegas.

With the exception of the tall brown kid, the boy below #4, and the girl between #7 and #8, I actually don’t remember any of the other kids in this picture. Which is rather astonishing to me, because it used to be that I remembered everybody.

Sometimes when I write about past romantic experiences, I likely come across as more adept at romantic interaction than I think I am. So here’s a story about not getting it.

I was, for a while, on a dating site with religious overtones. Though I still wasn’t exactly devout, I was at the height of my religiosity. And hey, try something new, right? Well, I was on a meet-date with a nurse. Things were not going remarkably well when she tried to fill the silence with a hypothetical. What would I do if I won $220,000,000 in the lottery (that was the prize, getting a lot of headlines).

My first answer was that I don’t really do the lottery. Play along, she urged. Which I did. So I said that it would be hard to say without a spreadsheet handy and an idea of what the interest rates would be for regular payments on a long-term, low-risk investment would be. But it would probably involve setting aside a million dollars from the first annuity check (and I would definitely go that route rather than the all-at-once route) and then put the rest in some sort of low-risk investment account. At the end of the first year I would put howevermuch was required to get the account back up to a million dollars and then put the rest of the second annuity check in a similar investment. That way I could live off a maximum of a million dollars a year, but I would have growing principal that would lead to growing interest payments. At some point, I would probably switch it from one million to two. Or if I had an ambitious something-or-other I would have to consult a spreadsheet and determine a timeline so that I could have maximal investment while at the same time be able to do whatever it was I wanted to do.

She said that she would get a boat. And buy her mother a house.

The correct answer, if I’d actually understood the question, would have been the ambitious something-or-other I had in mind but was too embarrassed to come out and say.

“I would take some directing classes and make a movie.”

I don’t know if that answer would have come off better, but it would have at least answered the question that she was really asking. It would have given her some insight to my hopes and dreams and stuff. Of course, my answer gave her insight into two core aspects of my personality: I am practical, and I can be socially stupid.

When I was in high school, my favorite (in the sense that I kind of liked him and was indifferent to or detested the others) was Mr Holt. Holt was a retired chemical engineer who struck it big with his employer’s IPO and decided that he wanted to teach.

His opening lecture had us take a simple sort of test. We were supposed to follow the instructions on a worksheet. The first of which was “Read all of the instructions first.” The last of which was “Disregard all instructions but the first.”

Nobody did that, of course. And so when instruction number two said “raise your hand,” most of the class did. Same for stand up for three seconds then sit down. One by one, we began to notice fewer people doing these odd little things. We went back to the first instruction, followed it, then saw the last instructions. Towards the middle of the document the commands became verbal “Say ‘This room is hot.’” By the end, you were to be saying things like “I cannot follow instructions precisely.” Only a couple got that far. Most had, by simple way of noticing what their peers were not doing, figured it out.

As someone that never got “in” to science, it was one of the most instructive lessons ever. Partially the social aspect of it. You noticed what others weren’t doing and then tried to figure out why. But mostly, it was a good lesson on understanding the importance of following instructions. Kind of important for a chemistry class. Kind of important for life.

On the other hand, going through the training manual for my (hopefully) coming job, it’s apparently a lesson I forgot. It said, quite clearly, “Do not do anything that is not specified in the instructions, no matter how obvious it may seem.”

Oops.

Back when I was in college, my then-girlfriend Julianne’s mother helped me get a job at Orion Technologies. I was hired for the sole purpose of the company being able to tell other insurance folks that they had Y2K under control. All I did was some light clerical work, responding to requests on Y2K compliance and sending out requests to some of our vendors. It was a pretty sweet gig, but it was obviously pretty temporary. However, while I was there, my supervisor Alan started working overnight. When I asked him why, he said it was because the night operator had been fired. He gave me a rundown of the job, asking how the hell anyone could screw up something so easy. It took me a couple of days to work up the gumption to ask my official boss if I could have that job. I could do the “Y2K” stuff in my off-time. Or something. By that time, there really was no Y2K stuff anymore. Everyone was just waiting for the hammer to fall and crossing their fingers hoping that everything worked*.

If one has to work a full-time job while attending class full-time, you couldn’t ask for a better job. Orion was a computer reseller, acting as a middle man between (say) Dell Computers and (say) a local school district. This was not a particularly good field to be in as suddenly it was becoming easier for entities to simply order computers online. The company was struggling and, before long, they sold their computers division and sales division to a company called Providence that was looking to get a foothold in Colosse. It was something of a relief initially, except that without a computers division and a sales division, I didn’t know what the company did anymore.

Orion and Providence worked out a deal where Orion would call dibs a certain percentage of its employees but beyond that Providence was free to try to hire away anyone they wanted. I was not on Orion’s protected list, but Providence tried to hire me. They were offering me a 20% raise. Alan talked me out of it, though, saying that Providence may offer me more money, but they only needed someone for a very short transition period while my position was a part of Orion’s org chart and so I wouldn’t have to lose my job. Staying seemed like the more prudent thing to do, though looking back (even without hindsight), that may have been a mistake. At least I knew what Providence’s business was and if I had proven myself there was a decent chance they would find another position for me.

But, I stayed. Meanwhile, Providence needed their own Night Operator. And as it turned out, my roommate Hubert needed a job very badly (his mother was divorcing his step-father and all of their assets were in limbo). So I recommended Hugh, he got the job, and we were, for a brief time. I trained him on what to do and we argued about who got Ethnack’s Chair. But then Providence’s operations moved over to their own building and I was working solo again. Orion was struggling more and more and there was round after round of layoffs until, lo and behold, I was laid off. Meanwhile, the “six months” after which I had been told by Alan that I would be laid off by Providence had come and gone but Hugh still had a job. It was just as well, though, since he needed the money a heck of a lot more than I did.

Hugh went on to get a job at Bregna. I told him not to do it. I told him that Bregna was one a notoriously bad employer. I didn’t know it at the time because I had never worked there, but as of a couple years ago they stood as the third worst employer in the entire nation according to an employee satisfaction survey. He ignored my advice and went to work for them anyway. For reasons that I cannot recall**, Hugh offered up Karl for the job instead of me.

I was working at Wildcat by that point, but my new roommate Karl needed a job. And so, he recommended Karl and so Karl became Providence’s new Night Operator, a full year and a half after I had been told that the job would expire.

Hugh did not last at Bregna long. Even though Hugh had the kind of personality that would ordinarily cotton to being employed by a very… structured… company, Bregna being the type of place that believes structure includes (no joke) monitoring frequency and duration of bathroom breaks, he was looking for a new job in pretty short order***. This created a bit of conflict when he applied for a job that he knew I was angling for****. But then, out of nowhere, he got a call from someone at Orion that had remembered him and offered him a programming position. Even though I was still unemployed, this did not bother me as the four-asterisk job did since (a) he didn’t find out about it through me, (b) they never posted the job, and (c) it was a job he was obviously more qualified for than I was. So suddenly he was working for my ex-employer.

The axe finally fell at Providence and Karl was unemployed again. He ended up getting a job at… Bregna. Then I lost my job and got a new one at… Bregna. The job at Bregna was every bit as awful as advertised and despite the three-asterisk optimism Karl decided that if this was the kind of job that college dropouts got he needed to go back to college. I hadn’t intended to be there long, but even then I left early because I thought it was unhealthy to work for an employer where the highlight of my evening (it was an overnight job) was urinating on the side of the building while the cameras weren’t looking*****.

Hugh, meanwhile, has made his career at Orion. He’s a VP now. The company has changed its name twice and relocated once since I left (which makes its inclusion on my Work Histories a pain in the rear). I still don’t know what the company does even after visiting the website. Last time I was in town, I asked him and got a string of buzzwords I didn’t care enough to quite make sense of. It’s something cutting edge. And, of course, I am unemployed in Arapaho. Karl went back to school and is now a PhD candidate in physics at a somewhat prestigious midwestern university.

Asterisks below: (more…)

One of my earliest crushes was a pretty little girl named Clementine Giovanni. The earliest rejection I got was - as politely and kindly as imaginable - at her hands. She grew from a pretty little girl to an attractive woman. When she added me on Facebook, I was only surprised that she was engaged insofar as that meant that she had not yet married. I was a bit surprised when I saw the guy she was engaged to. As I always do when posting “real” pictures, this one will be obscured or removed in a week or two.

I don’t know the chap. But I have no doubt that he is a pretty awesome guy. He has to be.

Mike Hunt asks:

HitCoffee, when you were younger, and didn’t shower daily, can I ask why you were like that? Were you fighting back against the values of others? Did you not think it was necessary?

There were a few reasons. First and foremost, I didn’t realize how necessary it was. As often mentioned, I have always had a poor sense of smell. Further, even things that smell bad to most people didn’t bother me because I found strong smells - even terrible ones - to be more interesting than troublesome. I knew a stink-bomb was supposed to smell bad, but it was to some extent a novelty merely due to the strength of the smell. So I usually couldn’t smell myself. And when I could, it didn’t really register as a problem.

Lack of appropriate feedback was another thing. It’s not that nobody told me that I smelled bad so much as it was the wrong people were telling me that. People who would not have liked me no matter how I smelled. People that made fun of what I was wearing even in those rare instances that I actually had clothes that were “in” at the time by accusing me of wearing fakes. So I thought it was just one more arrow in their quiver of ridicule. My perspective really changed when someone that was actually concerned about my welfare pointed it out to me. That was when I knew it was something to take seriously.

The third factor was simple logistics. We had two showers in our house. The one in the front was not very good. The one in the back was awesome. So I wanted to shower in the back. The problem was that this shower was unavailable after my parents started gearing up for bed. I was raised to take showers at night, which was of course when my parents showered. Showering in the morning never really occurred to me. I knew it was something that some people did, but the idea that I could do it, too, just didn’t really click. Also, the back shower was never available in the morning. When high school rolled around, though, I had to get up and out wherebouts five in the morning. Morning showers started occurring simply as a matter of waking up. I also became a little more grooming-conscious and discovered that if I take a shower in the morning, it was a whole lot easier to put my hair in place. These advantages outweighed the fact that the shower sucked. So, even prior to the above advice, I had started showering more often (when I needed one to wake me up and when I had time). Showering defined as being under running water. I was iffy on soap. Using it if I was there and wasn’t in a hurry (if I was in a hurry, I would just get a cursory swipe), but deciding to wait until the soap-fairy replaced it if there wasn’t any around to be had.

So mostly, it was a matter of ignorance. I wasn’t so much ignorant of what needed to be done as I was why it needed to be done. Showering was presented as a matter of health and something that was just a good thing to do because it was a good thing to do (the societal equivalent of “Because I say so!”). Germs never bothered me all that much. If it had been presented to me earlier as something that I should do for other people and that doing so for them would benefit me, I probably would have taken action sooner.

I don’t know how much we can universalize from my story. I was actually talking to Bob Vis about this a couple months ago. He is of the mind that nerds refuse to shower to, in Mike’s words, “fight back against the values of others.” Perhaps due to my experience, I tend to attribute it to a question of necessity or a combination of the two motivations. Sometimes they dig their heels in when this societal value is not explained, but not realizing that this sort of thing matters not only to those that made fun of them when they were younger but also people who otherwise like them and people whose approval they, for one reason or another, need.

Perhaps putting too much weight in my own experience, I think that this is one of the areas where our school system creates a degree of adverse socialization. We learn about societal interaction as much as anything in school. This is problematic because the values in K-12 are the values of children and they change over time. So we learn, for example, that there is a certain randomness and frivolity to who is liked and who is not. We (being nerds) learn that no matter what we do, people won’t like us (popular people learn other false lessons). While some degree of randomness and frivolity as well as popularity-helplessness does persist past K-12, it becomes considerably less of a factor for most people. And I really believe at that point, a lot of the disparities are actually caused by the confidence and social education we get or do not get when we are younger.

I don’t remember what year it was, but some time in the 90’s, my family and I were on our way to a couple states over for our then-annual trip to Shell Beach. Our van got a flat tire and we were stuck in Acadiana, at a Walmart waiting for it to be repaired. I fired up a portable CD player that I had just bought for the trip and… it didn’t work. This was a bigger thing for me than a bum piece of electronics. I had bought the thing with what little money I had for this trip! Because one of the things I loved most about our annual trip was listening to music while I walked along the beach.

I was devestated. I was, at times, a moody kid, but this really tore me up. Spending what little money I had on a player and a couple new CDs in preparation for the experience of walking along the beach at night with music in my ears and the light sound of waves crashing and the wind blowing through my hair as I pondered life, the universe and everything… suddenly wasn’t going to happen.

My parents were materially generous in all the ways that mattered (a future college education paid for, food on my plate, a roof over my head, and when I turned 16 access to a car that I would sometimes be able to drive. But one thing they didn’t do (and rightfully not) was try to buy their way about my being upset about something. Particularly when I went through electronics like candy. I wasn’t hamming up my displeasure in any sort of attempt to get anything because it never would have even occurred to me to ask my parents to replace something that I had just bought.

But that’s exactly what Mom did. Knowing, I guess, that this wasn’t a matter of my being legendarily careless with my stuff. I’d just bought it after all. And seeing that I was really, really upset about this. She bought it for me under one condition: I write the makers of my broken player for a refund. Beyond that, it was an early birthday present.

I still remember the whole thing all this time later because it was one of those generous gestures that was entirely unexpected and, on my part, unearned. Though since then the player she bought me had a latch break and it’s held closed with electrical tape, and though I later bought another player, I still have that player. Electrical tape or no, I’m going to hold on to that player - and the memories attached to it - for as long as I can.

While I was back visiting the family, the portable CD player that Mom uses to listen to audiobooks broke. I was stopping by Fry’s to replace a micro-USB cable that had broken. She asked me to get her a new player and she would pay me back. It’s rare that life presents this sort of symmetry, where I am able to repay a gift all these years later. In other circumstances, when the thing I am looking for isn’t where it is supposed to be at the store and isn’t in the other place it seems like it should be, I might just shrug it off and get it online (or, in this case, encourage her to do that). But I needed to find that player for her. h

I stopped one person who said - if they still had them - they would be in the audio section (I was looking in the portable electronics section). The second guy was pretty sure they’d stopped carrying them. The third guy thought the same, but asked a fourth guy who said “Aisle 59… if we have it.”

There were only three models left: a high-end Sony that was four times the price range I was given, a low-end Sony which was twice the range, and A cheap, no-name model right in her price range. Though I planned to pass on the player as a gift, I still wanted to find the right price in case she insisted on paying. But I didn’t want a no-name brand because that was what burned me in Louisiana and burned Mom more recently. So I got the low-end Sony, figuring that if she insisted on paying me back I would just tell her something within the range that we had discussed.

Mom loves it. This player, unlike her old, remembers where you are on the track (important for audiobooks). The earphones that come with this one have an ear-hook, so they aren’t as clunky as full earphones and don’t pop-out like earbuds. And a Sony is likely to last longer than a discount brand so she shouldn’t be left high and dry again. And with that, I was able to pay back a gift of generosity that I remember a decade and a half later.

This actually isn’t hypothetical, because it happened to a classmate in my college phys-ed class. About a third of our grade was based on overall physical fitness (our ability to run the mile-and-a-half, life weights, and so on), a third based on participation (were you at least trying?) and a third based on classroom work. That second part was also based on physical fitness, to some extent, because you started getting docked whenever you stopped jogging or when you had to call it quits for lack of physical fitness. The classwork was dreadfully easy. Obviously, for someone not in good physical shape, the fitness tests were hard.

My friend-for-a-class Ned was in overall pretty good shape (well, much better shape than me - and I was not a smoker at the time). The thing is that he was a smoker. He could start and stop at will and so for the fitness tests (most specifically the running test which was the hardest) he would actually stop smoking for a few days before the run. So on the jogging test, he kicked my posterior and actually came in 7th (out of 30). He beat me by some margin on every physical test.

When we got our grades, though, I got a B- and he got a C. When he talked to the instructor about this (I was with him to verify that we showed the same effort in class), she said that she docked him because he was a smoker. She’d seen him smoking first thing after class or before class. He smelled of the stuff. In her mind, his smoking was indicative of a lack of commitment to physical health. Ned’s counterpoint was that it was none of her business. He ran the laps, lifted the weights, and did everything he was expected to do. On what basis could she dock him points? She said that his “participation” grade was low because he really wasn’t giving it his all (usually working at the same pace that I did). If it weren’t for the cigarettes, she said, he could have done more. And since smoking was his choice, he lost participation points. And yet I (Will) didn’t, Ned argued, despite showing the exact same effort.

The difference, she argued, was that what was a greater effort for me was less of an effort for him. It’s graded on a curve.

He argued that he was then being punished for being in shape (in terms of effort) more than I was being punished for being out of shape (in terms of fitness challenge performance).

She shrugged it off, saying that physical fitness was about appreciating your body and that there was no sign that somebody didn’t appreciate their body like smoking, and so ultimately he deserved a worse grade than he got. Did he want that? The conversation ended there.

So, the question is, should phys-ed be able to punish someone for being a smoker if it doesn’t show up in their ability to practice and perform? Even though I later became a smoker, I can actually somewhat appreciate her perspective on the matter. Smoking, as compared to excess weight (my problem at the time) is a more binary decision. And as difficult as it is to quit smoking, the quit-success is much higher for smoking than dieting is for overweight people.

On the other hand, it seemed pretty apparent to me that this declaration was pretty arbitrary. She was punishing him for a habit that he found disgusting. Nowhere was it written down that smokers are penalized (beyond the physical toll it takes). Presumably, if it had been written down, he would have at least taken more care not to show up smelling like smoke. Maybe he should have done that anyway to be considerate, but being considerate is not a factor in his grade.

Of course, all of this comes back to the difficulty when it comes to grading people in PE. In no other college course is “effort” graded directly, nor should it be. Or maybe it is, since that’s what attendance grades and a lot of homework assignments are. Ultimately, though, most of your grade is supposed to come from the degree to which you demonstrate mastery over the subject matter. That’s hard to do for PE because you can understand the subject matter of running very, very well and yet still not be able to do it. It’s difficult to make up for lack of ability (over the course of a single semester) with determination and discipline. Most classes, determination and discipline are going to be, if not sufficient to overcome all, at least sufficient to overcome some of it.

And, ultimately, being able to run the 1.5-mile over a period of time isn’t really what people go to college for. Even classes like Comparative Folk Dancing offer something in terms of learning how to communicate ideas (regardless of the frivolity of the subject-matter). I suppose the ability to take care of oneself physically does matter to future employers, but that has to be viewed as a lifetime project and not something you’re going to pick up in class. It’s easy to translate term papers into something useful in the business world, but more difficult to translate squats.

All of this is of course contingent on viewing college as vocational training. I suppose if you disagree with that on a fundamental level, you can view phys-ed as a more abstract good. Of course, those that view college as a sort of a self-improvement thing apart from vocational training are also the types who hate jocks for all of the wedgies they got when they were younger.

On my Loose Change post, I commented “Or maybe they were trying to bribe me to move closer to my job so that I wouldn’t have such a bad commute (something Pam would pester me about).” (Pam being the wife of my boss, the CEO of Wildcat).

This was actually an area where my failure to cash my paychecks would actually come up. Pam was always frustrated with my commute. More frustrated with it than I ever was. I think it was a motherly thing as much as anything else because I can’t think of any instance where my commute actually affected my work. But my daily drive from Midlerth (30 minutes to work, 45 back unless I worked late) wasn’t remotely bad by my standards. Because I avoided the freeways, it was actually predictable, which was worth a little extra time. Before, when I’d lived in La Courneuve, my commute was anywhere from 20 minutes to 60. Usually shorter, but the inconsistency was maddening.

So Pam would pester me about it and I would quite simply say that I needed to have a roommate for financial reasons and that made moving closer to work difficult because he worked in a different part of town (for my former employer, kinda*, Providence Technologies) and we were situated about halfway in between. She would comment that maybe I could afford to get my own place IF I WOULD CASH MY BLEEPING PAYCHECKS (she said bleeping… a lot, she was a very Christian woman). She had a point. It was less than 48 hours after I got my raise before she asked if me this meant that I would finally move closer to work. I hedged, but I was sort of getting the feeling that this might have factored in to my raise.

In actuality, I was already thinking about living on my own. Then it became easier when Karl lost his job at Providence and shortly thereafter took a job at Bregna (leaving a former kinda employer for a future employer), which happened to be right down the street from Wildcat. Also, rent had - in the course of a year and a half - gone up over 50% in Midlerth. So we were looking for a place to live when he started having doubts on account of the fact that Bregna was one of the worst employers on the face of the earth (literally in the top five in the country, according to a survey) and he decided to go back to college. So I started looking for a place on my own. Kind of slowly, though, as I started feeling uncertain in my employment situation. Sure enough, before I found one, I was fired.

One of the first thoughts that went through my mind as I was driving home with my office belongings** and $6000 worth of uncashed checks was how fortunate I was that I had been fired precisely when I was and not a month later when I would have had a new lease to contend with.

* - I worked for a company called Orion Systems, which sold the core of its business to Providence. He was doing for Providence what I had done for Everglade in a collaborative job-arranging effort.

** - This included a motherboard/CPU combo. I am still amazed that he simply believed me when I said that I brought it from home. I can’t remember why I did, but it was genuinely work-related and a pressing enough issue that I just took one of my computers apart in order to test something or another.

The subject of cheating seems to be coming up here and there. A lot of it pertaining to this article, written by a professional ghostwriter for college papers. Further commentary by Otherwill and Rufus at The League.

Longtime readers of Hit Coffee may remember that once upon a time, I was a ghostwriter for my then-girlfriend Julianne at the college level. She and I took three classes together and she shrugged off all three. The end-result was that I would get upset calls at 2 in the morning from Julianne saying that she hadn’t started the paper due the next day, had no idea what to write, and little or no knowledge of the subject-matter because of all of the classes that she missed. So I would take care of it for her. I was happy to the first few times, though after enough reiterations of how these last-minute deadlines came at her suddenly without any warning (when she’d groused at me for reminding her of it as the date approaches) and her being caught flatfooted, it gets exasperating.

Anyhow, I’m sure that you’re shocked to hear this, but I can be a kind of wordy fellow and so when a paper was meant to be 3-5 pages long, I usually had to struggle to meet the five-page maximum. So there was usually an abundance of material for a half-hearted rewrite for Julie’s benefit. I would cut out several points, usually add a couple, or if it was a paper that we had flexibility on, topic-wise, pick up on something that got cut from my paper and run with it. The papers were junk. Typically mindless, unoriginal, and about as by-the-numbers as you could possibly imagine.

They also - every single one of them - got a higher grade than the papers that I turned in with my own name. And it was never that I was overtly docked for failing to stay on-point or for rambling on. Quite the opposite. I would get docked for failing to address a particular point. Her paper failed to address it, too, but it only seemed to matter on mine. I have a number of theories as to why hers graded better than mine, though none make a whole lot of sense. By the third class I though about simply reversing the names on the papers, but though a cheater I was I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I was proud of my A- papers and her A+ papers were, as far as I was concerned, parrot droppings. In two of the three classes I got a higher grade than her simply because I couldn’t take the test for her as well. In the third class I actually could help her with the tests, too, and she scored the highest grade in the class and got an email from the prof saying as much.

I’m sure if there are any Game-types that read this, they are thinking how pathetically beta my behavior is. Probably thinking that she lost all respect for me as I bent over backwards doing these things for her. The problem is that it couldn’t be further from the truth. She was actually very appreciative and did not lead her to dump by ass or cheat on me with an alpha. She did kind of take it for granted, and that caused some ill-will on my part, but she never took me for granted. After the third class together where she almost never showed up at all, I resolved that I wouldn’t take any more classes with her. It didn’t matter as our relationship collapsed at the end of that semester and she had flunked out of Southern Tech University anyway.

The second, and to me more interesting story, is this one from the University of Central Florida. Basically, some students got ahold of the test bank and the professor caught wind of it. There is a video of the lecture that the professor gave to his students, offering them an out:

“I don’t want to have to explain to your parents why you didn’t graduate, so I went to the Dean and I made a deal. The deal is you can either wait it out and hope that we don’t identify you, or you can identify yourself to your lab instructor and you can complete the rest of the course and the grade you get in the course is the grade you earned in the course.”

That’s a pretty generous deal. In fact, so generous that even if I didn’t cheat* I might fess up to having done so simply out of fear of their algorithms incorrectly identifying me as a cheater. I mean, the overall cost is lost face in the eyes of a professor and a four-hour ethics course. That punishment is guaranteed. But if the algorithms are wrong and you are incorrectly identified, the consequences are absolutely ruinous. It’s the same dynamic that leads people to confess to crimes they didn’t commit because they’re allowed to confess on a lesser charge. I mean, how much faith would you have in their algorithms? Probably a lot now, but back when I was in college? I’d probably grant at least a 5-10% chance of it being wrong. And I wouldn’t like those odds.

I wonder how many of the people that confessed were innocent but making that same calculation?

I never cheated on a college exam. I came close once, having printed out all my notes on a little piece of paper. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. In addition to helping Julianne out with her college studies, I also helped out some kids in junior high and high school for various reasons (some I regret, others I don’t). I did get caught trying to copy someone’s paper during a Spanish exam. I needed glasses and did not yet have them. The teacher did not have to be particularly perceptive to catch me. My friend Clint, incidentally, was caught by the exact same teacher trying to change his grade in her gradebook. She threatened to get a handwriting expert and he broke.

In a comment section on Unfogged, this comment got general approval:

I associate “My self-respect requires me to fuck myself over rather than accept an unpleasant situation,” with men rather than women.

The conversation on this particular thread that followed was whether this is part of the situation that benefits men because it’s part-and-parcel of men being more aggressive about wages and such, or whether it is simply a case of men being more stupid and less rational than women.

The thing is, though, that the premise doesn’t correspond with my experience all that much. I can think of a single guy that just upped and quit a pretty good situation for a pretty stupid reason. I can think of multiple women that have done the same. Men may get pissed off more about stupid things, but our response in my experience is that we simply start looking for other work. Sometimes to find a job, sometimes just to vent, saying in effect “HA! I don’t have to work here! See! There’s another job right there, there, and there.” without ever actually applying. I would take it a step further and apply for jobs that I knew I would never get an interview for. Usually because they were located far away. But it always felt so good to send out that resume.

I attribute this difference between men and women not because men are inherently more rational (because applying for jobs in Cleveland isn’t exactly rational), but because men generally identify with their careers and their career progression moreso than women do. That’s not to say that women don’t identify with their job. Many do first and foremost. It’s just that women are more often judged on other metrics as well. For instance, I think that cleanliness in the house is a bigger issue for women than men in part because women are judged on it in a way that men generally are not. And parenting is a competitive sport among far more women than it is among men. For men, having a job and not having a job is far more likely to affect self-esteem, not to mention dating/marriage prospects.

I was going to put the quitting examples in a Ghostland post, but I’ll go ahead and put it here. Back at Falstaff, there was a girl named Catherine who upped and quitted multiple times over incredibly dumb things. One time there was a power outage and while everyone else was enjoying the time off by chit-chatting, out of nowhere she just stood up, screamed profanities, and left. She was really good at her job, so they tried and succeeded in convincing her to come back. The last time she quit, nobody really knew why. I was sitting across from her at the time. She just got up at around 10am and left. That afternoon people were wondering where she was. They finally got ahold of her and she tendered her resignation. Nobody ever knew why.

She wasn’t the only female Falstaff employee to quit dramatically. One flew into a rage at another employee and quit. She was back the following week (or maybe the week after). I’m not sure how many of these count because there was sort of an understanding that if you were good the door would remain open for you. I commented to my boss Willard that it was getting to the point that if you wanted a 4-day weekend you just dramatically quit on Thursday and agree to come back on Tuesday. At some point, the policy was changed. Catherine herself tried to come back eventually, but she was declined.

The guy who quit was my early nemesis, Teddy Forbes. His department had been shifted to another division of higher stature. It was a poorly-conceived idea and within a month or two everything was shifted back, which meant that Teddy had to go back to a smaller cubicle and had to report to Willard, which he did not want to do. So he issued an ultimatum: promote me or I quit. He quit and the last I heard from him he was a part-time employee for the school district.

It was also the case at Monmark/Soyokaze, the company I worked for in Estacado, that periodically women would up and quit for reasons that were never fully explained or understood. But I can’t recall a guy ever doing to the same.

Then there was Mindstorm, where there was another girl named Catherine that reminded me of the first Catherine. I was fond of both Catherines, actually. They were mostly quiet sorts with sweet temperaments (most of the time) who were serious about their jobs and good at what they did. My only complaint about them was that they were too shy and difficult to talk to. The second Catherine quit due to an argument that arose over email signatures. Her boss had declared that everyone needed to have a uniform email signature. She explained that she had put a lot of time and effort into her signature and she did not appreciate one bit that he should be able to arbitrarily decide what her email signature should be. He, being the boss and all, was rather insistent. She then decided that she would no longer speak to him. At all. If he wanted to communicate with her, he would have to do so through her agency handler. She was fired the next day, though I still count that as “quitting”.

I remember being blown away at the time. Actually, I didn’t find out about it until sometime later. I didn’t understand how you could just quit a job like that. Even for somebody kind of weird (though delightfully so, when you could actually get her to open up), that was just alien to me. I’ve never been remarkably career-focused, but leaving a job for the unemployment line (absent some unavoidable reason) strikes me as a sort of surrender of identity into an abyss. It seems odd to say this as someone that has been unemployed for over a year, I guess, but I am also somebody that took a job driving my car around just to have a job and someone that applied for a permanent position that I was two-steps beyond overqualified for just so I could have a job. And that’s for money that we don’t really need. Back when I didn’t have a breadwinning wife, I tried a job taking customer support calls and I hate talking on the phone.

I don’t understand Teddy Forbes, either. Don’t get me wrong, I can have a pretty short temper when it comes to things at work being organized in a way that I disapproved. This blog was founded mostly as an outlet for my work frustrations. But I started blogging. I didn’t quit. One time I was so furious at Teddy Forbes over something that I almost wanted to quit just to spite him (long story, but it would have spited him). But I also recognized how stupid this was. Instead I just told my boss Willard that I needed to walk around the building a few times to calm down. I was cool about it and Teddy was informally reprimanded for what had gotten me pissed off. And life went on and things got better (particular after Teddy left).

I am sure that Teddy is not the only male offender. Maybe my experiences are unusual. Male or female, nobody with families pulled any crap like that and most of my career has been working with mostly single or childless people. The Catherines were particularly weird even beyond their dramatic exits. But the dramatic exit is still not something I see men do all that much.

Well, except Teddy Forbes and Stephen Slater. What’s y’all’s experience?

Update: Actually, when it comes to low-skill labor, I actually can think of a couple more male examples. Julianne’s ex-boyfriend cussed his ex-boss out for “being mean” and left in a huff from the fast food place where he worked. When I was working at a different fast food place, a guy quit because the boss used the word “niggardly” (in its correct usage). In the defense of the second dude, though, there were already some… questions… about management of that particular establishment in that regard apart from this non-incident. It could have been a last (and ignorant) straw or the manager could have used that particular word specifically to provoke a reaction.

I talk about various (usually mixed) successes with the ladies from my younger years. That might leave you with the impression that I am some sort of smooth operator. In reality, I don’t talk so much about my miserable failures (well, except here). They’re typically not as interesting. But I was reminded of one that might be worthy of a post.

I met Georgianne on an Internet dating site. She initially contacted me, opting to be the contactor rather than contactee by declining to put her picture on her account. So we chatted on the site’s chat mechanism and by the same day we were talking on the phone. Now, my mind already knew one of the crucial lessons of internet dating, which is not to talk too much before meeting them. If things go well, expectations get higher and higher and then the actual meeting - the most important part - becomes at best anti-climatic and at worst a huge disappointment. But she was rather insistent and we were getting along so well that I ignored what I knew. Always a mistake.

It was a Wednesday or so when it all started and by Thursday she was talking about making the drive from Charlton on Saturday (leaving on Sunday), where she lived, to Colosse. I can’t remember for sure, but I think that was my doing in order to mitigate the damage of all of this phone communication. Meeting as soon as possible was the order of the day and the weekend was the first realistic option. I did some cursory cleaning of my room and scouted out things for us to do together. And we talked more and more on the phone. She told me about her two serious relationships and I told her about Julianne and Evangeline. We had a fair amount in common. We were both people who had been very heavy in our younger years. We were mostly unlucky in love (viewing Julianne as a freak, albeit long and stable, occurrence). I was a computer guy and she was an engineering student. We both wore steel-toed boots (shown above)!

She drove down and I discovered pretty quickly that rules are rules for a reason. I can’t say that we had great chemistry. I was more impressed with her physical presence than I had expected. I liked her. Even though things were awkward, I figured that was something we would be able to paper over with time. She, however, didn’t seem to feel the same way. We went to a music show that night, but it wasn’t a particularly good plan. It was loud and she had never really been to one and didn’t really know how to act. We talked more and the talking was relatively easy as it had been on the phone. But she never really got comfortable.

I offered to sleep on the couch, but she insisted that we both sleep on the bed. She had mentioned prior that she prefers to sleep without clothes on, though she had also mentioned that given the givens she would make an exception. I found out later that she was hoping that I would say that she should sleep in whatever fashion she felt comfortable. I only had a twin bed at the time, so sleeping together was kind of difficult. Nothing happened, if your mind is going there. I woke up at around 4 to urinate and decided that I would just go on the couch and sleep there. By 4:30 she was waking me up wondering what the hell I was doing down there. So I went back upstairs and we slept through the night.

I tried to kiss her goodbye, but it was deflected. This had me concerned. Not so much because I just couldn’t go a weekend without a kiss, but because… well, I was becoming increasingly concerned that she was going to make me “earn” every step of the process. My main objection to that being that when it’s made a game like that, it’s usually a rigged game of “let’s see how little I can give you in return for how much you will give me.” That was a game that I was particularly uninterested in playing at that time, not too long after a marathon of said game with Evangeline. That was the guts of it from my end. I was looking at it through the prism of Eva. She was looking at it differently.

She was looking at the whole thing as a pretty big mistake. A part of me was relieved to be let out of the game I was fearing, though wounded pride is its own beast. I wish I could say that I took it all with great dignity, but I didn’t. The official reason she gave me for calling everything off is that my apartment was “disgusting.” That was a thought that hadn’t even occurred to me. Cleaning has never been a specialty with me in part because I have a pretty extraordinarily high threshold for what constitutes “dirty”. Clancy will attest to this and she will attest to the disgustingness of my apartment. I offered Georgianne that I would get a housekeeper. It was actually something that my roommate Karl and I had discussed. But that didn’t really matter to her. What mattered to her was that I was not the type of person to either know disgusting when I see it or to be properly disgusted by it.

Everything got weirder from there. It became apparent that her impression of me was something less than accurate. She came away with it all with the assumption that I knew next to nothing about women and relationships. She had determined that I was pathologically shy or something close to it. I had asked why she fetched me from the couch if she found me to be so ridiculously inept and unattractive. She apparently didn’t see anything odd about it and then asked, “So what, if I’d slept nude you would have seen that as a signal of some sort?”

“Well. YES!”

Further proof I knew nothing about women. She then asked how many girls I had even kissed and then slept with. My number is not exceedingly high, but it was higher than hers on both counts (hers were unusually low - two on each). She didn’t say it, but she was thinking so loudly that it could be heard from four hours away that she either didn’t know how a loser like me could actually have experience or how someone with actual experience could be such a loser. To this day, I find her impressions on me to be truly weird. Sure, I was nervous, but wasn’t it apparent that was something that could happen when you meet someone with whom such expectations had been built? The expectations were not one-sided. She was already planning for me to meet her parents.

Oh, and I found out that her previous experience omitted a few details. For instance, she talked about this one guy that absolutely freaked out and dumped her when he found out that she had been looking at wedding dresses. Unmentioned? They’d been together for three weeks. The other one bolted after ten days. A part of me wondered if she had dumped me because she was so wary of being jilted the way that she had before, but decided that was too self-gratifying. She wasn’t scared. She was just convinced that I was a loser.

-{This story is actually a retelling of a story I already told. I forgot that I had actually told it before. Interestingly, this one came to a slightly different conclusion than the other. I think that I went back and forth between conclusions when I used to think about it. Anyhow, I post this because I already wrote it up and there’s no sense in it going to waste. A lot of you weren’t around when I wrote it the first time, anyhow.}-

On Thursday I went to see a Nick Byers music show. Friday I drove to Ephesus for the Ephing Anime Convention. I mention Nick Byers because nothing good ever happens after Nick Byers.

The convention at the outset was uneventful for the most part, save for a blast from the past meeting someone that I hadn’t seen in years and almost hanging out with friends I haven’t seen in over a year. I did notice all the couples, which was interesting because conventions are full of unique people and it’s always nice to see unique people with atypical interests hooking up. I, of course, was only there with my guy friends, single as single could be.

I first saw Marla outside while I was catching a breath of fresh air. I didn’t think that much about her, really. Not until I saw her at the hotel bar. That meant that she was over twenty-one. At conventions, age can be a very deceptive thing. And Gannon’s viewpoint aside, over 21 in a land of 14 year old girls in Sailor Moon outfits is a good thing.

I was generally not good at picking up people in bars, and considering how often I went to them for musical acts, it’s something I ought to have been better at. So I decided that there was nothing to lose there (something told me - correctly - that she was not from Colosse). I went up to the bar, propped myself right beside her, and said “Hello.” It was a genuine accomplishment for me to be so cavalier.

We talked about the shuttle accident that had happened in the morning. Somehow connections to the military came up and she talked about her stint in the Navy reserves and I lamely mentioned that my father worked for the DoD and my brother for either a contractor or the CIA ha ha joking I think (he was very secretive about his work in our nation’s capital and had given me a CIA mug for Christmas). The conversations from there went everywhere and the next thing I knew we were talking about what we were like when we were younger, what we were like then, what we hoped to become. I talked about my career and she talked about college. I told her about the video production company I worked for and gave her my business card. We got to know each other at the bar for about two hours before we migrated to the balcony.

Out there, the conversation started drifting more towards relationships, where we established that we were both single. We’d both had a little to drink, so the conversation had flowed quite smoothly. Our inhibitions were gone. Thanks, Wurzbock. I kept thinking that if it wasn’t for the distance between Ephesus, where she lived, and Colosse, where I did, it could really turn in to something. When talking to women I found attractive and that were single and opening up to me, it was a fairly predictable thought-track.

The night wore on and we never had a lack of things to talk about, from goofy inebriated small-talk to our station in life and what we’re looking for in life and relationships.

I made a special point to look at the back of her admissions tag. She had my business card, I figured, so it was only fair that I know her full name, which is on the back of all the tags. “Marla Fitch?” I thought to myself, remembering a girl I knew a long time ago with the last name. But that wasn’t her name, that was just an assumption on my part because I saw the F and the top part of the T. I removed my thumb and corrected myself.

To the bar, to the balcony, the bar, the balcony, our talking continued. We started making more and more physical contact. I’d say something and place my hand on her shoulder. In the bar She’d chastise me for something and tap my hand, then leave it placed on top of mine. Outside, I put my arms around her and she put her hand on my leg.

Then there was a moment. You know, that moment. But the timing wasn’t right seeing as how my best friend Clint was sitting right across the way and there was another couple there and… so I took a raincheck. Okay, not then, but what the hell. She lived in Ephesus. Nothing to lose.

My best friend went back inside, the couple other people left, and we were alone. It didn’t take long for me to make good on my word.

Once we’d broken that threshold, the evening began to speed up. We didn’t really talk about it at first. In fact, prior to that we’d never even mentioned the prospect of an ‘us’ and, to be honest, I wasn’t quite sure if I wanted one. Nothing to lose, but not a whole lot to gain, either, except headaches.

Shortly after, we were joined by a crowd of people enjoying the fresh air. A young man with a goatee and sunglasses in the dark began playing his guitar for his friends. As Marla and I slow-danced to “Hotel California,” I decided that I wanted this to be for real. I just had no idea how to tell her that. I had no idea on what basis I could even imagine such a thing.

After another trip to the bar and back out to the balcony, I was looking out at the state capital absorbing it all with her under my arm. My mind was awash in alcohol, but I was trying to wade through it when she asked, “So what happens when you go back to Colosse?”

I told her that I wasn’t good at or comfortable with flings. She backed off and asked what I meant by that. Our inebriation was immediately put on hold while we discussed it. Three hours. Not a deal-killer, really. We both really wanted to try. “What can I do not to mess this up?” she asked.

Whatever my reply was, it was an outstanding one. That’s all I remember. Our next trip to the bar and she asked for another business card. She wrote her phone number on the back of it and put it on the bar. Balcony, bar. Bar, Balcony. By the end we were planning a trip together to Ponchartrain. The end of the evening was upon us as her friends arived to take her home.

The next morning, there was one image that was frozen in my mind. The card with her number sitting on the bar with my mind telling me “I probably shouldn’t leave it there. I might forget it.” Which, of course, I had.

I went back to the convention and she was nowhere to be found. I couldn’t remember her actual last name for the life of me with my mind only remembering “Fitch.”

I spent the next week or two trying to track her down, but with only “Marla” in my memory, it was pretty tough. At some point I remembered that my friend Hubert’s then-girlfriend worked at the admissions desk and had a list of the people at the convention. But she didn’t have a record of any Marla. Then, about five days later it came to me when I heard the last name on the radio. Flynn. From there it was pretty easy.

There was no grand reunion. I never saw her again. I called a couple times and she wasn’t home. She was at work. Except that she had told me that she was unemployed. I went to Ephesus again (moving a trip I had already planned a couple weeks out and stopped by. Her folks were nice, but there was… something… in the way that they told me she wasn’t home. Like I wasn’t supposed to be there. And I wasn’t. She’d had time to call me back if she had wanted to. Despite having planned it, my drive there was pretty ridiculous. My mind was having difficulty grasping the 60-to-0 that had happened. The thought occurred to me that in addition to having a job that she hadn’t told me about that there might be a boyfriend. In the end, what did it really matter?

There was really insufficient information to have really learned anything from the whole exercise. In “sour grapes” mode, I started remembering the things she did that I actually found kind of irritating. A fake accent. Jokes that weren’t funny. Her domination of the conversation. Then I decided to forget all that and remember that I actually, successfully picked someone up in a bar. That had never happened to me before. I had been picked up before, but that was it. Sure, it was illusory in that there was something wrong with the situation. And there was no sex involved (though she had actually asked, more than once, where I was staying and expressed concern that I might disturb the friend I was staying with if I came in too late and maybe I should get a hotel room). Ahh, well. Full victories were scarce enough that a partial victory would have to suffice.

One of my BBS flings was with a girl who went under the handle Fever. Fever was reasonably attractive by BBS standards insofar as there was nothing physically wrong with her. She was not fat. She did not have an acne problem. Not much more you could ask for than that. Of course, you don’t know that when you first start talking to text on a screen, but you sort of get a feel for it pretty quickly unless they’re lying. Only once did I drive across town to meet some girl whose face had been put on incorrectly.

Beyond that it was more like you knew they were overweight but they weren’t entirely forthcoming about how overweight. But no matter how they describe themselves physically, you simply get a feel for when you’re talking to them day in and day out. I can’t even tell you what you’re looking for, but you can actually sort of figure out from how they describe where they are socially by looking at classmates at your own school and seeing what kind of girls fit into that category.

Fever’s category was that of a theater nerd, of sorts. Probably attractive (unless she’s lying about her weight), but a little on the weird side. Needlessly dyed hair. Sides of her head shaved but covered by hair on top, that sort of thing. Fever was actually somewhat conventional, at least in appearance. The picture she sent me was particular good.

After a while, I met her. She was doing a play at the community theater and I made my way to Mid-town to go see it. She was in person almost what she was in the picture. Good enough. Not fat. But it was one of those things that meeting her in person accentuated things that were kind of cute on the phone or online… but in person made it really difficult to get comfortable around. What I had thought was a gregarious and quirky personality was really somewhere north of hyper into manic territory. She didn’t walk, she bounced. She didn’t talk so much as verbally burst. Loudly.

But she wasn’t fat. There was nothing obviously physically wrong with her. She was cute. Surely, I can’t let something like her spunky personality get in the way of things, can I? I wasn’t sure it would matter. I figured that when she saw the extra weight that I wasn’t positive I adequately warned her about or when she saw that I was really kind of a quiet and pensive fellow that she would lose interest. One of the reasons I went was to get the rejection out of the way, if it was going to happen. But that’s not how she responded.

So what then, I asked myself. I entered a holding pattern while I tried to figure things out. Either I started noticing how truly weird she was or she was getting weirder. I found out it was a bit of the latter. She said that now that we had met she was more free to “be herself” or something like that.

Somewhere in the boxes of my parents house is something I call The Bizarro Letter. She wrote me a letter in marker that was at best vaguely comprehensible. I found it amusing and showed it my friends, none of whom had any idea what message she might have been trying to convey. It had profound passages like “In 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 years I will beeeeeeeeeee (buzz) 21 21 21 21 21″ (21 was written 21 times in all) and between talking about her cat and her mother burst out with “I SAW THE STRANGEST SHADE OF PURPLE TODAY!”

But she wasn’t fat. There was nothing physically wrong with her. She was cute. And for that matter, she wasn’t a bad person. She was willing to overlook my weight (which, thinking back, may not have actually been as bad as I was thinking it was - it took me time to realize that I was losing weight). Surely, I could make accommodations with things like her new obsession with purple that caused her to start painting her walls that color. Right? I was increasingly unsure. Her outbursts aside, she was mostly a lucid person… but even when she was, it seemed like we were on different planes of existence. That’s really the only way I can describe it. And the more I thought about it, the more I recognized that this was true even before she was able to “be herself.”

But she wasn’t fat. There was nothing physically wrong with her. She was cute. And she was, on the whole, reasonably nice to people. How could I not pursue that?

The stalemate was broken by more logistical problems. Her over-protective mother was on to the fact that she had met some boy on the computer and was cracking down on her talking to people that she didn’t know from school. She wanted to try to work around that, but it was too much for me. She was pretty understanding and we remained friendly and would even talk on the phone some about her half-purple wall and acting pursuits. Despite all the kvetching, I know full well that without the logistical barriers I would have moved forward. I was 17 and she was fit and there was nothing physically wrong with her.

I always hated in it high school would people would act like they weren’t in any clique with the implication that they were above all that. Most of the people that are not in cliques don’t transcend them, they just don’t fit into any of them. Not because they’re unique snowpetals, but rather because no group would have them. Being outside cliques is typically being on the outside looking in and not above looking down.

That being said… well… I sometimes do disparate groups of people that I hang out with. And it’s not being on the outside looking in, exactly, but it’s also not looking down from above. Mostly, it’s inconvenient as hell. A significant portion of my friends loathe country music and think that anyone that likes it is a backwood bumpkin (though they always carve out an exception when they find out about my fondness for it… I’m a credit to my people, I suppose). Another portion of my friends thinks that anyone that likes anime just never grew up. My love of college football is a great source of lubricated conversation with some and for others it is emblematic of all that is wrong with this country. I mean, these aren’t just disparate interests, they’re disparate people.

I am not someone that is particularly interested in vindicating my interests and the identity that these interests represents. If someone hates country music, I don’t go saying, “Oh yeah? Well it’s among the few actual grown-up music forms out there that isn’t hung up on being dumped in high school or getting laid like a drunk frat boy.” I just keep my mouth shut or if it’s something that’s going to come out, I soft-pedal it. Same goes for anime, sports, or whatever else.

This was particularly true when it came to female-types when I was younger. One weekend I was headed out to Ephesus for an anime convention. I was staying with my friend and love interest Sally. Sally did not have a very high opinion of anime people, so I didn’t tell her why I was in town. But I didn’t have any other good excuse. So I was real clandestine about it. And a little playful. I claimed that I was on a fact-finding mission (a term in regular use back then primarily in reference to WMDs in Iraq). There was a little town north of Ephesus with a funny name and I was going to find out how the locals pronounced it. It was, of course, ludicrous, which lead to playful questions about why I was really there and my being all mysterious and crap.

I had to do the same for my friend Rick, who also didn’t like anime. Rick was suspicious that I was there to see a country music show and was wondering if it was something that he would be interested in. I wasn’t as inclined to be as playful as Rick and so when the “fact-finding mission” schtick wore thin, I just said that I was visiting some friends.

After that weekend, I started using fact-finding missions as an excuse any time I was doing something that didn’t fit in with what the other person would be remotely interested (or was something they were hostile to). The truth is that I was being overly self-conscious and I knew it, but I didn’t care. It became a source of amusement for all involved and sometimes a way of just saying that it was something I didn’t want to or shouldn’t talk about (such as when I used to explain the fact I was dressed in a shirt and tie for a dentist or anesthesiologist appointment.

Incidentally, I will be out of town again soon on a fact-finding mission in my old stomping grounds in Estacado. Details to be released eventually.

Back when I was in high school, I was driving a bunch of people home from a party. This included drunk teenagers. Underage teenagers. There were so many of them that they were laying on top of one another. Forget seatbelt laws. One of the little pricks in the back decided that it would be a hilarious time to use some flashy-thing he got that emitted a flashing blue light. I wanted to throttle him before I dropped him off.

—-

Web wrote a post a while back about LED Abuse, a subject that has taken a particularly importance to me in recent weeks.

The offending electronic right now is a power-splitter adapter for my car. It’s a neat device that I got at a good price. It even has a USB port, which I am presently putting on cell phone duties. The problem is that the LED on that sucker lights the whole car at night. It’s not as bright as the overhead light, but it’s much sharper. I thought that was bad, but it’s gotten worse. Now the light is going out. This would be good news, but until it burns out it’s basically flashing off and on. Off and on. Off and on.

When you’re driving, when you see a flashing blue light, this is cause for a heart attack. I wonder if I could sue…