The Non-Traditional

What I Think About Native American Sports Team Mascots

2011-06-20T23:58:00.004-04:00

There is a movement out there to do away with professional sports teams using the names or imagery of Native Americans. From what I've heard and read, the argument is that the practice is fundamentally disrespectful; a sports team patronized overwhelmingly by non-Natives using Native-centric ideals is cashing in on the very culture that was brutally oppressed into near-oblivion by the ancestors of the team owners, managers, players, and fans. The Native identity is shrinking as it is, and how it is portrayed should be determined by the Natives themselves, and no one else. That's the argument.

I understand, I really do, as much as an extremely white guy with no Native blood whatsoever possibly can. The closest I experience, I suppose, to the feeling of multi-generational oppression that I imagine many Native Americans feel are the pangs of white guilt that sometimes try to intrude on my psyche, which I understand is but a pale shade (no pun intended) at best. I've long preached to whomever would listen that no ethnic group of any kind has been given the business in what is now the US as badly as the Native Americans have. Historically speaking, it's deplorable. We all know that.

That said, eliminating the Native American presence from the world of professional sports is not the answer. It's not even a decent beginning; in fact, it's a gross overreaction. For one thing - and this argument has been posited many times - the people in charge now are not the people who were in charge in the "bad old days". It's the Ye Olde Bibically-rooted Sins of the Father argument; just because the league owners' great-great-grandfathers fought at Wounded Knee doesn't mean that every white guy until the end of time should suffer for the 7th Cavalry's misgivings. This is not even addressing the fact that making it a White vs. Native American debate implies that the Powers That Be in professional sports are not only a whites-only club (which they mostly still are), but that they always will be, and that's not moving in the right direction.

Don't get me wrong - I'm very pro-Native American, and do think that steps far more aggressive than those we take now need to be implemented to help combat (among other things) the rampant unemployment, poverty, and depression among the Native population. I just don't think this is the way to do it. Picture it this way - suppose we did pass a binding resolution prohibiting Native American symbolism in professional or collegiate sports teams. All of it, gone. No more Blackhawks, Chiefs, Braves, or Seminoles; even the Edmondton Eskimos would have to change to something more palatable. Would that be better? Would it be more racially sensitive to the plight of their ancestors to wipe all mention of the Native American tribes, ethnicities, and titles from existence completely? No, the Native Americans are an intrinsic part of our culture, and deserve not to have a damnatio memoriae passed upon them.

Instead, the way to go here is to include the Native Americans, but to make sure to show them the respect they deserve, if anything more diligently than for other ethnic groups and nationalities. Some names have the respect built in; Chiefs and Braves are titles of superiority and warrior prowess in and of themselves. Blackhawks, Seminoles, and Eskimos are tribal or national names, and their presence on the sports field is as commemorative to them as Vikings or Celtics are to their respective nationalities (in fact, probably moreso, since Vikings is at its heart a misnomer, and Celtics is routinely and painfully mispronounced with the dreaded soft 'c').

The eagle-eyed among my readers will notice two glaring omissions from that list. That is purposeful, because I believe that these are the two teams that intrinsically fail in the respect department, albeit for opposite reasons. The first is the Cleveland Indians; there is some debate about whether 'Indians' is a proper term for Native Americans, but that is greatly eclipsed by the Indians' unforgiveable Chief Wahoo character. For those blissfully uninformed, Chief Wahoo is the name given to the Indians' logo-slash-mascot character, visible (among other places) in the center of their team ball caps. It's an awful, cartoonish caricature of how Indians were portrayed several generations ago, before civil rights; with its single-feather headband, giant toothy grin, and literally scarlet-red skin, it takes great steps to undo every bit of racial sensitivity harbored since its modern incarnation, 60 years ago. Here, take a gander:

Now imagine if Chief Wahoo were black, with ebony skin and a giant Afro, perhaps with a pick. Imagine instead he were Arabic or Asian or a Hasidic Jew or any other group of people anywhere. Is there any other nationality for which the general public would stand for Chief Wahoo without burning down Jacobs Field?

The other side of the racial insensitivity coin is the Washington Redskins. Having been raised in the suburbs of Washington DC, I know full well what an ingrained institution the Redskins are, so I'm sure I'll be stepping on more than one hometown toe here. That's fine.

Unlike the Indians, the Redskins have a very distinguished, even noble logo. The problem with the Redskins is what you've already seen - the name. Granting that the word 'Redskins' isn't quite to the incendiary level of various other ethnic slurs (I can type it in this article - five times so far - without feeling like Simon Legree, for example), but it's not a nice thing to call a Native American. Outside of mentioning the sports team, or a particularly tasty kind of potato, what other type of character would use the word 'Redskin' in conversation? Generally speaking, I would think it would in a Western movie, with the drunken prospector or trigger-happy ranch hand straight from central casting, nestled in its sentence between the words 'Damn' and 'stole mah horses'. The Redskins got their name in 1933; fortunately, our national conscience has progressed far beyond those days, and the Redskins name needs to progress with it. Might I suggest the Warriors, or revert to their original name of the Braves, if the Atlanta baseball people don't mind too much. They could even keep their logo and colors.

The end result of all of this is that, when I get elected President, I won't suppose there will be much I could do about insensitive actions taken by sports leagues, which are private corporations. If enough people get sufficiently outraged, they'll simply stop utilizing the corporation's services - that's how capitalism works, in theory anyway - and it wouldn't be the government's role to step in and force that hand. What President Me would be able to do, though, is to forbid the name 'Redskins' or the abysmal Chief Wahoo logo from being used in anything that is under the government's umbrella, namely school-funded Pop Warner football or Little League baseball teams. They frequently take their names, colors and logos from their professional counterparts, and as President, I would put a stop to that right away. It would be the least I could do.

And that's what I think about American Indian mascots.

It's a Miracle Any Of Us Survived the 70's

2011-06-18T23:21:00.004-04:00

Looking back, a 70's childhood seems like it should have been a death sentence. The big deal of child safety that we have today just hadn't wheedled its way into the public consciousness yet back then. Every day we - as typically wide-eyed, typically stupid rampaging children - would blunder into situations which would make the bulk of today's parents gasp in horror.

These were the days of unwrapped candy apples for Halloween. About every third driveway was made of sharp, unforgiving gravel, suitable for the goriest of knee-skinnings at the tiniest of stumbles, and kitchen safety latches (or better yet, those plastic fences to keep Junior properly penned in to one particular room) didn't yet exist, ensuring that all manners of household poisons and bladed weaponry were both convenient and accessible. Basement bedrooms were the coolest thing, but the only "emergency exits" they had were windows the size of the drive-through at the bank; to live in the basement meant tacitly acknowledging the risk of suffering a burny death if the dining room went up in flames. That's just the way it was; by today's standards, my neighborhood in the 70's was a veritable suburban abbatoir, where death - or at least painful disfigurement - lurked around every corner.

Case in point: I lived a little over a block from a library in one direction, and a swimming pool in the other. When my adventurous six-year-old-or-so self wanted to go play at either one, or at my neighborhood friends' houses scattered throughout the area, I would just walk down there. Alone. Allllll by myself. I asked my parents if I could go first, of course, but when I got the okay, it was just me, toddling down the suburban streets, not a care in the world about slashers, pedophiles, or slave traders hiding behind every bush, ready to pounce. I crossed streets, avoided the local bloodthirsty dogs, and steered clear of the yawning sewer openings, which were just big enough to swallow a little kid. I'd play with my friends for hours, during which my parents and siblings wouldn't see me at all.

In contrast, let me tell you about our family cars. When I was very little, we had a white 1967 Ford Fairline 500, a mid-size (for the 60's) sedan suitable for a family of six.

Theoretically, the parents and maybe my oldest sister would sit up front, and the other three of us packed in, Amistad-style, in the back. In practice, however, and especially on long trips, I - being the youngest, and therefore smallest and most victimized by other peoples' torment and elbows - would climb up on the ledge behind the back seats and sleep in the window. Car seats, schmar seats, who needs 'em, I'm catching some shut-eye back here. Of course, had whichever parent was driving ever feel the need to hit the brakes with any semblance of earnest or urgency, I would have been flung across the cabin like a bowling ball in a dryer. Fortunately, that never happened.

When that car died, we got a 1974 Ford Pinto Station Wagon, suitable for a family of six on a budget (hello, energy crisis). It was a smaller (read: narrower) car, and - unlike the Fairlane with its benches - had bucket seats, which meant that we could no longer fit three to a row. The solution: Mom and Dad up front, my oldest sister and brother in the back, and my middle sister and me in what we euphemistically called the "way back" - meaning the cargo area. We were shuttled around like groceries for the better part of a decade. There were no seat belts back there - we were lucky to have carpeting - but it did have the back of the back seat separating us from the uncool dorkheads up front, so it felt more like a clubhouse on wheels. It was cooler, to be sure, and more fun to tool around in, but it was only marginally safer.

The other main form of transportation that I remember was the bicycle - specifically, my mother's antique brownish-orange Schwinn cruiser. My parents would go on nice, relaxing, spring-day kind of bike treks, and guess who got to sit in the passenger seat? That's right, me. For those who didn't get to experience this, this was a little metal director's chair bolted to the back of the bicycle, probably with a strap, so when I sat in it I was basically staring at the middle of my mother's back as she bicycled around town. Linus and Lucy's little brother, Rerun, had one for years in the Peanuts strips.

Naturally, I wore no helmet or pads. I suppose the idea just hadn't occurred to people yet. Even into my teens, those of my friends who were inclined to ride bicycles rarely, if ever, wore helmets or pads. They just didn't exist. Besides, they would have been too cumbersome and restricting for my bonehead friends when they did their gonzo speed trials down the hill on Bauer Drive.

We had a fence around the back yard. It was white, wooden, and in a perpetual state of rot; we climbed on it daily, and over time I actually got quite good at being able to launch myself bodily over its top, utterly disregarding the risk of a spontaneous disintegration of the wood or an errant rusty nail embedding itself in to some important part of me. I wasn't much of a tree-climber, but the swimming pool across the street from my house had some skyscraping pines that other neighborhood urchins would climb like beanstalks. Afterward, we'd go over to someone's house, cram E-size rocket engines into a B-size Estes rocket, and launch it into the stratosphere. La-ti-da.

In fairness to my parents, though, I don't think they knew about those.

When it was time to go back home (usually because it was time for Starsky and Hutch or The Rockford Files or other high-quality 70's programming), we'd turn on the TV. Now, forget your modern image of the television set; in the 70's, they were looming, monolithic chunks of metal and plastic that couldn't have dominated the room more if they were Easter Island statues. Their glowing red tubes - visible through the heat vents in the back - emitted waves of ozone as they heated up, so anyone in the same room could actually smell when they were turned on. At first, we had console TV's, mounted within a wooden cabinet and with an external speaker and rivalling the size of your average aircraft carrier. Later, we moved "up" to regular sets, which nonetheless probably weighed more than I did, and we would keep this on - wait for it - a rickety aluminum stand. I'm pretty sure I could have bent these things by hand, and we relied on them to keep the 80-pound TV sets from crushing us like bugs, as we laid on the floor, head on hands, necks craned at 135 degree angles to catch the latest thrilling episode of Match Game '76. Considering how much of my childhood was spent hanging from the aforementioned fence, the backyard trees, the swing set, the refrigerator, the dining room table, the hallway doors, or my parents, it's a miracle I didn't pull that whole contraption down on myself at least once.

Oh, and this was also before surge protectors or power strips.

The TV cord (which wasn't grounded, by the way) was as a matter of course plugged into a splitter along with the cords of about a half dozen other things - radios, record players, lamps, fans, and, once a week, the vaccum cleaner. Once, it burst into flame. No, I'm not kidding. It almost blew up my sister.

It occurs to me as I write this that some may think my parents were horrible, negligent trolls. Nothing could be further from the truth; if nothing else, my mother is a nurse by profession, and was always very careful to keep us safe and healthy, often over our vehement protests. They were just different times - whether the dangers were legitimately less prevalent then, or whether something in today's culture has convinced everyone that the world is scarier than it really is, is anyone's guess. I suspect the truth, as if often does, lies somewhere in the middle.

Just to be safe, though . . . better buckle your seatbelt, kids. It's kind of a rough world.

What I Think About the Royal Wedding

2011-04-29T14:51:00.001-04:00

This morning, Prince William and Kate Middleton got married. I admit to being a gigantic Anglophile, so I've been looking forward to this for some time; also, I study history, and it's hard to miss the significance of seeing the future king getting married. Also, I never give up a chance to gawk at the luxurious interior of Westminster Abbey whenever I can. As it happened, the TV was still on when I fell asleep last night, so this morning I woke to the coverage of the wedding, with the couple standing at the altar, literally seconds before they spoke their vows. It was pretty magnificent.

I can understand some people not wanting to watch the wedding. It's cool, I get it, it's not your thing. That's fine, we all have our different things. When I cannot understand is the people who spend an inordinate amount of energy tearing it down, to anyone and everyone who will listen and some who won't, saying that the coverage pre-empted their TV show, or the procession messed up traffic, or the whole exercise was nothing but an egregious waste of taxpayer money. These people are missing the point.

The magic behind this wedding is how it gives some light in what is otherwise a pretty stressful time. This is the same reason why we have Christmas in the dead of winter, because humans need some celebration and social color when everything around them is bleak. Just within the last few months, people have been reading the papers and have read about are wars and layoffs and strikes and terrorists and earthquakes, seemingly around every corner; it does wonders that in the middle of it all is a weekday when people from every walk of life can go downtown, ignore their worries, and enjoy some parading of the regalia for a while.

And besides all of that, it's Prince William. I am one of many who have watched William grow up, literally since they were born. They were raised well, all things considered - running out into a busy intersection to help push a stranded motorist's car, for example. Stories came out about their martinet grandmother the Queen, their goofball father and what we'll euphemistically call his "love letters" to Camilla, his brother in a Nazi costume, and persistent rumors that their Mum was going to run off and marry (heavens forbid) a Muslim.

Then Diana died, horribly, tragically, in the middle of the night, and the whole world felt terrible for the two boys who had to be told about it. Everyone watched William as he walked, head down, behind her hearse, and we all felt terribly for him and his little brother. They became the modern equivalent of the Princes in the Tower: two boys, not even grown up yet, suddenly having to deal with the unseemly underbelly of grown-up life. We watched William as he went to school, did charity work, got his RAF wings, and now he pilots rescue helicopters and is getting ready to get married.

So now we see him on the altar, in his bright red uniform with a sword on his hip, seeing him whispering "You're beautiful" to the pretty girl when she comes up and stands next to him at the altar. Have people really become so jaded that that doesn't seem uplifting to them? It's a fairy tale ending if there ever was one, and people need fairy tales when times are rough, even if it's only for a day.

It's fun, people; it's a party. A big international party that comes once in a generation. Relax. Enjoy it. Have a biscuit.

Truthspeakers and Falsehoodmongers

2011-04-05T17:57:00.003-04:00

Not long ago, one of my friends linked me to the site Politifact.com, a project of the St. Petersburg Times in Florida which investigates the claims by various political entities and rates them as to how true that claim was. They have six levels of, for lack of a better term, truthhood: True, Mostly True, Half True, Barely True, False, and Pants on Fire. After keeping up with this site for several weeks, I decided to make a very stripped-down, simplistic list of who among the political elite are mostly telling the truth, and who are not.

In order to do this, first of all I am approaching it from a completely non-partisan point of view. I am not mentioning my own political beliefs, except to say that they are philosophically and diametrically opposite from the friend who recommended the site to me, and we both (apparently) subscribe to the non-partisan quality of Politifact. I am choosing people to investigate based on whether I recognize their name, and limiting it to people who have had at least ten claims investigated. Because I would rather focus on individuals, I am avoiding organizations. All numbers are as of today, April 5, 2011.

My system is that I will compare the truth - claims ranked True or Mostly True - with the falsehoods - claims marked False of Pants on Fire. The two extremes count double, and the Half Trues and Barely Trues don't count at all. If someone has twice as many truths as falsehoods, I will declare them a Truthspeaker (a Super-Truthspeaker if they are 4:1 or higher); if the opposite (0.5:1 or less), they are a Falsehoodmonger. If you want to see for yourself what they spoke the truth on, and what they didn't, just go to www.politifact.com, and search for whoever it is.

No falsehoods:
Washington Post columnist George Will - 16:0.
Senior Presidential Adviser David Axelrod (D) - 9:0.

Super-Truthspeakers:
Senator Dennis Kucinich (D-Oh.) - 7.5:1.
Secretary of State Hilary Clinton (D) - 6:1.
Former Senator Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.) - 4.33:1.
Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney (R) - 4.1:1.
Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.) - 4:1.

Truthspeakers:
President Barack Obama (D) - 3.88:1.
Former Senator John Edwards (D-N.C.) - 3:1.
Former Florida Governor Charlie Crist (R) - 2.9:1.
Former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani (R) - 2.67:1.
Filmmaker Michael Moore - 2.67:1.
Vice President Joe Biden (D) - 2.56:1.
Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Oh.) - 2.21:1.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) - 2:1.
Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee (R) - 2:1.

Middleroaders:
Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) - 1.83:1.
Florida Governor Rick Scott (R) - 1.69:1.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) - 1.67:1.
Former President Bill Clinton (D) - 1.33:1.
Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin (R) - 1.3:1.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) - 1:1.
Talk show host Rachel Maddow - 1:1.
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker (R) - 0.91:1.

Falsehoodmongers:
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) - 0.28:1.
Talk show host Glenn Beck - 0.19:1.
Talk show host Rush Limbaugh - 0.11:1.

No truths:
Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) - 0:22.

I was disappointed that there weren't enough claims against Sharron Angle, Julian Assange, Haley Barbour, George W. Bush, James Carville, Dick Cheney, Stephen Colbert, Anderson Cooper, Ann Coulter, Rahm Emanuel, Barney Frank, Newt Gingrich, Sean Hannity, Steny Hoyer, Ariana Huffington, Joe Lieberman, Bill Maher, Ralph Nader, Janet Napolitano, Lawrence O'Donnell, Christine O'Donnell, Bill O'Reilly, Michelle Obama, Keith Olbermann, Rand Paul, Tim Pawlenty, Reince Priebus, Ed Rendell, Karl Rove, Paul Ryan, Rick Santorum, Ed Schultz, Michael Steele, Jon Stewart, Donald Trump, or Meg Whitman to be statistically reliable. If, as I read this site, any of them climb over the ten-claims mark (as I'm reasonably sure some will), I will update this post.

The conclusions: Politicians and George Will mostly speak the truth, but don't put as much stock in talk show hosts or Michele Bachmann. Also, the people who have a lot of vocal critics more often than not deserve that criticism.

Another reboot?

2011-04-01T16:54:00.003-04:00

Eh, the weight loss blog kind of petered out, didn't it? I'm doing all right, but I just got tired of updating.

I'm considering restarting the blogging again sometime soon, on a much more sporadic, unfocused and casual level. Not much to say beyond that, at least for now.

Speedbump!

2011-01-21T23:26:00.003-05:00

So I'm up a pound.

This does not come as a total shock. I wrenched by back (performing the complicated and dangerous 'standing up' maneuver) early this week so I missed a couple of days of exercise, and last weekend I had friends over, we ordered Chinese, then on Sunday I had a friend over and we cooked up my flank steak and had some drinks. I didn't keep a rigid count of calories on those days, but I'll bet it was pretty bad.

So now I'm back on the Biggest Loser Ultimate Challenge horse, as it were. I think I should up the difficulty from 'Light' to 'Medium', but it being a computer program, it can't recognize some things. For instance, one exercise is to do a wiiiiiide lunge left and the kick your right leg straight out. Well, I have never been able to kick my leg out to the 75 or so degree angle that Bob the Trainer does on the program. At best, I can go maybe 30 before my hamstrings start screaming at me. It's frustrating, then, when the game keeps flashing 'Kick higher!' at me over and over. There are others where I think the limitations of the new-technology Kinect just refuse to let it see that I am actually in the right position.

I admit that I haven't been doing well with the exercising, even before the back spasm. I guess the only thing I can do, though, is to keep at it. I've heard that the first solid week is the toughest, and after that it gets more like a routine. I hope that's true.

Anyway, I have another idea, which may turn out to be another stinker, but I'll charge blindly into it anyway: there's a little counter there that tells me how many calories I burn in that exercise session. However many that is, that's how big my dinner will be. If I always work out right before dinner, which I think will be a good time, it will be like getting dinner for free. Plus, it will discourage me from eating out.

I also went shopping again today. I'm ramping up the bananas, eggs, and croutons, all of which I ate a lot of as a kid but haven't so much recently. Croutons are an especially rich recent find: in lowfat chicken somethingorother soup, they make a nice, big(ish) meal that's not actually very high on the calorie-o-meter.

That's about it for now. This week was not stellar, but I'm not done yet.

P.S. I got 12 responses to my last post - all vague, robotic form letters from 'Delhi Escorts', 'Bangalore Escorts', 'Hyderabad Escorts', and other escort spammers representing most major Indian cities. Lovely. No thanks. Anyway, I made it so you need to have some sort of logon to post a remark now. Sure, it's a pain, but any of you who might someday feel the urge to remark can blame the south Asian escort industry. Finks.

The Weekend Cometh

2011-01-10T13:25:00.000-05:00

First of all, let me preface this would good, yet possibly dangerous, news. Friday was my first weigh-in day, and I now have a brand-new, classic-style, round-spinning-wheel type of bathroom scale with which to weigh myself. Now, the last time I was weighed was back in November (or maybe October, details are fuzzy) at the doctor's office, when I clocked in at 252. Now, I've long suspected that doctor's office scales weigh one higher than they actually are, perhaps to convince people to lose weight. If so, it worked. On Friday, however, on my new home scale, I weighed in at a relatively svelte 245. That's a loss of 7 pounds over the Christmas holiday, which is pretty impressive, assuming the scales are in sync. The danger now lies in complacency, and I have to make sure that I don't figure I'm doing fine, so I can cheat a little, especially since weigh-in Friday leads directly into (dun-dun-DUNNN) the weekend.

Weekends, as we all know, run under their own rules, and often their own power. This weekend was perhaps more of an example of that than even most, because my friend Carlos had his annual weekend-long nuclear birthday party throwdown, which was a literally weekend-long party in which people, including myself, drifted in and out and generally had a crazy time. Now, I am not the craziest of the crazy in instances like this, but I did go there Friday and Saturday night and enjoyed some socializing time with the fairly sizeable horde at his house.

I honestly have no idea how many calories are in two KFC hot wings, or in two slices of shitty pizza from the hole in the wall down the street from Carlos's house, but I did eat those. I also have no idea how damaging mixed drinks are, but I had a few of those as well, plus one (I think) Sam Adams, enough red wine to remind myself why I think it's nasty, Sprite and apple cider as mixers, and a whole lot of water. In the end, however, I felt pretty good about my ability to refrain from eating like a monster in a social setting. Having eaten sensible food before I left the house on both nights, it allowed me to not have to fight hunger pangs while I was out, which was key.

And no, I don't remember what I ate beforehand. I am deliberately not writing everything down over the weekend, because it's the weekend. If nothing else I often won't be here to transcribe it all, and I don't want to become That Guy who has to chronicle every handful of pretzels he eats while he's out with his friends. That's just depressing.

So I'm kind of winging the weekends, but I definitely avoided the high-fat stuff. Anything I'll need to keep close watch on, limit my portion size, or starve the rest of the day for - such as that flank steak which has been in my freezer for two weeks - can be saved for during-the-week meals with no problems. Now that it's Monday, I'll restart all of my due diligence as I'd been doing before. I haven't eaten yet today, so I can start up my record-keeping when I do, which, judging from the growling noises in my stomach, will be soon.

Along those lines, I have another idea, and that is to count 'Calories from Fat'. It's on every label, and it makes more sense to me because I have been avoiding eating things like bananas and Alpen (that is, Mueslix) cereal because of the 100 or 200 calories they bring. Fat is what I'm trying to lose, and if I track that instead, it just makes sense to me that I won't be sacrificing protein or carbs, but really targeting the fat itself. The down side is that I have no measuring stick for how many is too many, so I'm just going to play a game where I try to keep the Calories from Fat as low as humanly possible. Let's see if I can come in under 100 per day this week.

But anyway, the weekend's over, and a new week begins. I have to restart my exercise routine, which I have been neglecting, and I will accept no excuses from myself for why I'm not doing it. I feel good about this week coming up, and about my chances to prove (again, to myself) that the seven pound Christmas weight loss was not a fluke, but the beginning of a trend.

And now if you'll excuse me, there's a bowl of Alpen downstairs with my name on it.

Day Two: Realization and Dilemma

2011-01-07T02:36:00.002-05:00

Today was fairly uneventful. I stayed at home today, reading for my winter course and doing housework. For breakfast, I ate that egg-white omelet - which was very good - and for lunch I grilled a chicken breast and doused it in buffalo wing sauce. That was amazingly filling for so few calories. In fact, the calorie count was so low I also had a box of Green Giant broccoli and potatoes with cheese (!) along with it. The cheese is worthy of the (!) because, in looking at how colossally unhealthy it is, I think it is going to be a much rarer treat than it has been. For my snack, I had two cajun-flavored fish fillets, and that brings me up to here.

And I'm starving. It's currently 2:28 am - I stayed up late goofing off on the computer - and there's no chance I'll be able to sleep now with my stomach this empty. So, I am instituting a new plan: bananas, tomatoes, and peaches are hereby exempt. I just won't count them. The reason I am doing this is simple: I'm not eating them. When I only have 400 calories for a meal, a 100 calorie banana just isn't worth it. So, yeah, technically speaking I may hit 1700 a day instead of 1500, but I'm okay with that as long as the extras are fruits and veggies, which I'm supposed to be eating.

Now, here's something I may or may not do also, tomorrow, and it has scant to do with dieting. Some people in Chevy Chase (about 25 or so minutes away, toward DC) are having an estate sale. It's apparently the estate of a 90-something retired Navy commander who passed away in November, and let me tell you, from the website's pictures, there are some fascinating things there. A map of the world from 1747; a leather-bound book titled "Towns of New England and Old England" bound in what looks like about the same time; a butler's desk; a very cool convex wall mirror; and a framed photo of the cherry blossoms that would look perfect in that big blank spot on the wall in my living room.

Oh, it'll be expensive. And it'll be early. And there will be bloodthirsty estate sale warhounds swarming the place, who know a lot more about the system than I do. But . . . a map of the world. From 1747. The picture is gorgeous.

So I'd like to say I'll drag my corpse out of bed tomorrow morning at seven-something and stagger on down there nice and early. Plus I noticed from the comparing yesterday and today that it is much easier to keep from overeating if I don't stay in the house all day. But on the other hand, it's now 2:33. That doesn't leave much time for sleep.

So I'll leave it up to whimsy, which is a wonderful thing.

A new beginning

2011-01-05T22:08:00.003-05:00

Okay, so I am repurposing my blog here. I am still a non-traditional student, studying history at the University of Maryland. I got (thankfully) laid off from my horrible job so I'm essentially living on savings. This should take me through until May, when the plan is to get a job, move to wherever the job is located, and then decide if I want to do Master's degree studies in Military History, which would start in September and run for 18 months.

But that's not really the focus here now. I have another joint priority in my life, and that is to get my fitness back to something resembling decent. For whatever reasons, I've been steadily gaining weight, with a particularly nauseating blossom of poundage in the last half of last year. I'm 6'1", and am now clocking in at a hefty 252 pounds - more than twice what I weighed in high school - and, though it is not to morbid levels, yet, it's still way above where I want to be. I hate how I look in the mirror, how out of breath I feel after running up even one flight of stairs, and how my pants keep getting progressively tighter and tighter. It sucks, and I know that if I don't do something drastic to reverse course, I'll keep doing so until I become Mr. Creosote. Therefore, I've decided it's time to change, right now, with the help of one of my closest friends, who is doing the same thing. This blog will now be a chronicle of that struggle . . . though I reserve the right to get distracted by the other things going on in my life right now.

So today, I went food shopping for the first time this year. Hopefully in chronicling what is normally a very daily-grindy task, it will be interesting enough that maybe it can help some of you all eat a little better as well, and maybe get some ideas about new and interesting things to buy at your average down-the-street grocery store which, in my case, is the Giant food store on Middlebrook Road.

Before I get to that, though, let me step back in time, just a little, to tell you about what I've already decided about what I'm going to eat. (The exercise half of the fitness plan will wait until a future posting.) The first thing I had to do was to decide which criteria I'd use to determine what foods are houseworthy. As it happens with things like this, some of my more favorite foods - Anytizers buffalo nuggets, for example, which I adore - had to be sacrificed on the altar of not being fat, and so they were out. I had previously invested in the Biggest Loser Ultimate Challenge video "game" for my XBox and it had suggested a 2200 calorie limit, which I think is way too high; I settled on 1500 - 400 calories for breakfast, 400 for lunch, 500 for dinner (woo-hoo), and a 200 calorie late night snack, because I know I'll be starving by then and I simply can't sleep on a growling stomach. So there were are; I tried to get things that would fit into these categories. I grabbed a cart, and went on in.

I started by buying every kind of fruit and vegetable that I can imagine eating. Bananas, tomatoes, spinach and mushrooms are my four main go-to's, so I got them all. I used to eat raisins as a kid, too, so I nabbed a box of those for snackage. Finally for the produce section, I had to consider the canteloupe. I should point out that I love eating the canteloupe, but for some reason I have this mental block about preparing it. I have come to grips with the fact that I am apparently easily irritated by the obnoxiously mundane or dreadfully boring, which to me includes the fine art of melon-cutting. So, canteloupes past have occasionally gone uncut and ultimately had to be trashed once they deteriorated into a fetid, boggy mass of yuck. It's a personality deficit worthy of the deepest scorn, I know, but at least I acknowledge it now. Anyway, I decided I was going to risk it this time, however, hoping that my new attitude, and my now calmer and lower-stressed lifestyle, will provide me with the impetus to actually get off my metaphorical ass and cut the damn thing up. We'll see how it goes. Neither result would surprise me.

Next was the 'natural foods' section. The danger in this part of the store is thinking that because something labels itself as 'natural', that is akin to it also being 'healthy'. Anyone who has ever read the nutritional information on a Caesar salad knows that that plainly isn't true. My suspicion is that calling something a 'natural food' is a less polarizing way of saying that it is in fact vegetarian. Accepting this, I decided to look in there and see what's up. A few foods caught my eye:

Cedar Lane All Natural Spinach and Mushroom Egg White Omelette. As already established, I love me some spinach and some mushrooms, and I have recently decided that I need more egg in my diet as well. From what I read, egg yolk is horrible and fat-filled and generally the instrument of death, but this has nothing but egg whites, which are apparently white and fluffy and sent from God himself. 270 calories; perfect with a glass of juice for breakfast.

I should take a paragraph here to note that I paid absolutely no mind to prices. The thunderously expensive is both rare in a neighborhood Giant, and pretty obvious to spot, so in the interests of keeping it simple, I ignored the price and just paid whatever when I checked out. Okay, back to the Natural Foods.

Kashi ("The Seven Whole Grain Company") Mayan Harvest Bake. I freely admit that I picked this up at first because I am fascinated by the mysterious collapse of the Mayan civilization in the 9th century, because I'm a tremendous dork, but the box says it consists of "plantains, black beans, sweet potato and kale Kashi 7 whole grain pilaf, amaranth, and Polenta spicy ancho sauce". I don't know what half of those are, or if I've capitalized it correctly, but it sounded enticing enough (and at 340 calories, healthy enough) to give it a try as a breakfast or lunch. Life is an adventure.

I also bought two things from Amy's: a box of cheese pizza snacks (for a dinner, maybe, despite them being called 'snacks'), and a spinach and feta pizza, one half of which would make a nice meal.

Now, it's time for the Great Yogurt Experiment of 2011, which is important because I eat a lot of yogurt and I'm historically picky about it. Normally, I like and eat plenty of Yoplait "Swiss-style" (that is, not "fruit on the bottom") yogurt. I like the taste, I like the consistency, I like the options, I like the price. However, several months ago, my now-ex-girlfriend Jennifer pointed out to me that Yoplait has a lot of sugar in it and is therefore not the healthiest yogurt on the planet. Pish and tosh, I retorting in my culinary arrogance, it's yogurt; how can it not be healthy? She tried valiantly to get me to try other flavors, but I hung on to my familiarity and remained with Yoplait. Now, of course, in my new-found label-checking frenzy, I realize, duh, she was right, and 190 calories for a 6 ounce yogurt is just too much. Sorry, Jen.

The problem here is that I like Yoplait. Fortunately, that does not automatically mean that I won't like any other, so I decided to institute the GYE. I invested a few minutes pacing up and down the yogurt section, peering at random brands like a mental patient, and bought one or two sample from several other brands, most of which (including Yoplait Light) have about half of the caloric content of the Yoplait. The only exception was a cup of Chobani Greek yogurt, which I bought because I have never tried honey flavored yogurt, and it sounded tasty. It is 170 calories, which is only 20 less than the Yoplait, but it will still qualify for late-night snack material. So, more on the GYE as it unfolds.

Never in my life did I think I'd become this domestic. I can hear my 25-year-old self groaning.

After I bought two gallons of skim milk (I have managed to successfully downshift from 2% now), I was finally out of aisle one. Now, as I can sense that your eyes are glazing over already from ready this treatise, I imagine that it will be some comfort for you to know that the majority of the store from then on was pretty unworthy of scrutiny. I deliberately didn't buy juice, having replaced it and its 120 calories per glass with water; ordinarily I would still buy orange juice except that my fruit juice needs are being met by apple cider from the Amish market down the street from my house. A future post will cover this glorious godsend, but for now, I just gave it all a miss.

Otherwise, I went through the bulk of the story carefully but uneventfully. I finally remembered to buy my Alpen, a mueslix cereal which I humbly think is the greatest breakfast food ever made. I decided to take Bob Harper up on his exhortations and bought some breakfast oatmeal to try, which I haven't had since the Dark Ages. Bob Evans is now packaging their pre-made mashed potatoes in smaller portions, for which I am glad. I opted to experimentally try out a few other foods - garlic bread, turkey steaks, parsely and basil Wheat Thins, Campbell's Select Maryland crab soup, and some kind of white wine vinegar for my spinach - and I am fully prepared to loathe some of them. I'll keep you posted.

The trip got moderately more interesting at the end, when I triumphantly walked, eyes forward, past all of the processed Hungry Man and Stouffer's dinners that I otherwise would have piled on. I made only a few exceptions in these last few aisles: I did get some Green Giant frozen vegetables, including broccoli with cheese, rice pilaf, and creamed spinach. They didn't seem repulsively caloric, and should work well as side dishes or late night snacks. I skipped the fish, the ludicrously breaded chicken, the Anytizers, those prepackaged Smuckers peanut butter and jelly sandwiches that I used to eat like candy bars, and the ice cream section in total.

There is one more company to exhort here, and that is California Pizza Kitchen. I had tried something they make called a Margherita, which is an overly flowery way of saying a little frozen thin-crust pizza, and I loved it. So, I bought another box of those and a full-size CPK Sicilian pizza, which, despite being physically larger, is only 12 ounces to the Amy's pizza's 14, and has the same calorie count. I checked out, came home, put everything away, and then proceeded to eat that whole pizza for dinner, with barbecue sauce.

Normally, eating an entire pizza for dinner is not the correct plan, but on this particular day, all I had eaten all day was a Cinnabon breakfast bar (150 calories) in the early morning, I could afford it. Total for the day so far, including the glass of apple cider I am currently nursing, is 1,218 calories and 43.5 grams of fat, far enough below my limit that I can still have my late-night snack, and probably a glass of milk or something. The food today was not particularly balanced - no fruits and veggies, for example - but I'm under my goal for the first time since I started this, and all it took was a day of errands and starvation to do it.

So there you are. Adventures in shopping.

Now, here is where I throw it back to you, my loyal readers. Well, since I've been neglecting the blog and have now changed the focus of it, I may not have any loyal readers, but if you're out there, this part is for you. If you know of any great but low calorie foods I may have missed or should give a try, let me know here in the comments section. I plan to keep this up for a while, with a fair but hopefully non-gruesome amount of transparency, and I'll let you all know how it goes. With hard work and the wind at my back, I should be able to meet my goal of getting below 200 by graduation, which is on May 19th. Wish me luck!

It's my birthday. Here's what you all can do for me.

2010-04-07T13:43:00.000-04:00

And it's my birthday today.

I am certain I will get plenty of well wishes today, but what I really want to address right now are presents. Now that I'm a grown-up, I've never really known for sure which tack to take regarding the gifts. If I say yes please, I'm being greedy, and if I say no thanks, I'm being a faux-humble wet blanket. This year, however, I know what to do.

If any of you are thinking of giving me a present, or buying a ($5 these days) card, or anything that costs money, I want you instead to visit my friends Anna and Becky's web pages for a charity run they're doing. It's called the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure, to benefit breast cancer research; it runs in many cities, but the first is in Boston in July, and my friends are racing in it. Anna and Becky are equally glorious and radiant women, and both have put in many, many hours schmoozing and begging and appealing to people of all stripes for their donations, so go to whichever of their web pages which you like.

Anna's page: http://the3day.org/goto/annaforcure

Becky's page: http://the3day.org/goto/drbecky

Now, we all know from the Haiti earthquake that people donate more when it's simpler for them to do so. That text-message system racked them up millions in record time; millions from people who otherwise might not have given. This system isn't quite there, but the web site makes it easy to contribute your dollars for a good cause. Even so, 'because it's difficult' isn't a really good reason to not give a few bucks, even though we all do it.

So, any presents, please contribute them in dollar form to the Race. In fact, if everyone who was about to wish me a happy birthday today would throw in just five measly dollars, it would be the best gift you could get.

Thank you!

Post-Super Bowl Upcoming Epic US Summer Popcorn Movie Roundup!

2010-02-09T02:52:00.002-05:00

So, spurred on by the Super Bowl commercials and encouraged by the fact that school is closed tomorrow, here is your first annual Post-Super Bowl Upcoming Epic US Summer Popcorn Movie Roundup (now with three more movies than in my Facebook version). Clear your schedule for a few minutes and gird your metaphorical loins, because I'm about to drop on you some great trailers for what I hope will be great summer movies.

Most of these trailers are from the apple.com trailer site. Just cut and paste the links, until/unless I get around to adding the hotlink to each and every one. Ready? Okay then, in date order.

This Friday, February 12: The Wolfman, a remake of the 1941 Lon Chaney classic. This one has Benicio del Toro, Anthony Hopkins, Hugo Weaving, and Emily Blunt. I recommend Trailer Two.
http://www.apple.com/trailers/universal/thewolfman/

Also this Friday, February 12: Percy Jackson and the Olympians: the Lightning Thief. Modern-day Greek gods go after Zeus's stolen lightning. Not as goofy as it sounds, I don't think. A cast to die for, and PG rated so it's safe for young ones.
http://www.apple.com/trailers/fox/p...lightningthief/

Next Friday, February 19: Shutter Island, a thriller about people disappearing from a mental hospital, set during a hurricane. Starring Leo DiCaprio and directed by Martin Scorcese.
http://www.apple.com/trailers/paramount/shutterisland/

Solomon Kane, starring James Purefoy, says only that it will be released "in February/March", which is amusing considering one of those is already here. At any rate, it's an epic popcorn flick set unusually in Puritan times. Dig the pilgrim hat.
http://www.solomonkanethemovie.com/

March 5: Alice in Wonderland. Helena Bonham Carter as the Queen of Hearts, and Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter. Sure to be popular with stoners for decades to come.
http://www.apple.com/trailers/disney/aliceinwonderland/

March 12: Matt Damon in the Green Zone, a man-on-the-run thriller set in the Iraq War.
http://www.apple.com/trailers/universal/greenzone/

March 19: Nicholas Cage in Season of the Witch. A medieval-age knight has to stop the Black Witch.
http://www.apple.com/trailers/lions...asonofthewitch/

Also, March 19: The Runaways. Would you believe Dakota Fanning and the girl from Twilight as Cherie Currie and Joan Jett? Those of us over thirty remember this incredible band, and the youth of the lead actresses stand a pretty good chance of wigging me out. On the other hand, rock.
http://www.runawaysmovie.com/ (click on 'Teaser Trailer')

March 26: Clash of the Titans, starring the guy from Terminator Salvation. Sure to mutate the stories of Greek mythology until they're just about unrecognizable, but nobody will care if it turns out to be as mind-blowing as it looks.
http://www.apple.com/trailers/wb/clashofthetitans/

April 2: Warlords, with Jet Li and two other guys as 19th century Chinese warlords taking part in a very impressive looking rebellion. Since it's an independent film, probably subtitled and was released in China in 2007, you may have to look hard to find this one.
http://www.apple.com/trailers/independent/warlords/

April 16: Kick-Ass. Some normal people become superheroes in the real world, and it turns out they're pretty good at it. Looks like half humor, half action, and all good.
http://www.apple.com/trailers/lions_gate/kickass/

May 7: Iron Man 2. If you haven't heard of this, I hope it's nice and comfortable under your rock. Robert Downey Jr., Scarlet Johanssen, Mickey Rourke, Gwynyth Paltrow, and Don Cheadle.
http://www.apple.com/trailers/paramount/ironman/

May 14: Robin Hood. This actually looks like one big stroke to Russell Crowe's ego, but why not. Cate Blanchett plays Marian.
http://www.apple.com/trailers/universal/robinhood/

May 28: Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. Jake Gyllenhaal in an Arabian-themed movie based on a video game. Something about a dagger which stops time.
http://www.apple.com/trailers/disne...thesandsoftime/

June 11: The big-screen remake of The A-Team. Liam Neeson's been busy playing god characters: Aslan, Zeus, and now George Peppard. Not sure he's right for this one, though - this movie looks like a tremendous bomb to me.
http://www.ateam-movie.com/

June 18: Toy Story 3. Pixar has a perfect 10/10 record for incredibly good movies. There's no reason to think this one will be anything else. I'm chuckling already.
http://www.apple.com/trailers/disney/toystory3/

Also on June 18: Jonah Hex. Adapted from a dark comic book about a disfigured civil-war era vigilante, or something, this movie is unusual - or perhaps damned - in that I can find no trailer for it online, even on its "official site". With Josh Brolin and Megan Fox.
http://jonah-hex.warnerbros.com/ (the aforementioned official site)

July 2, The Last Airbender. Based on an animated TV series, this has a lot to do with martial arts, elemental forces, and medieval China.
http://www.thelastairbendermovie.com/#home/video

July 16, The Sorcerer's Apprentice. More Nicholas Cage. This looks to have achieved the logical conclusion of the popcorn movie, and done away with plot altogether in favor of special effects. But whatever, it's not exactly Oscar season.
http://www.apple.com/trailers/disne...rersapprentice/

August 20: The Expendables. This one looks bad, as in B-movie bad, but check out the cast: Sylvester Stallone, Mickey Rourke, Jet Li, Jason Statham, Dolph Lundgren, Randy Couture, Stone Cold Steve Austin, and bad movie legend Eric Roberts. Also, cameos by Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Whoa.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7H_Q1-4Z6I

I can't tell when this one is being released in the US, or if it already has. It's a German film called the Red Baron, about the life of Manfred von Richtofen, and even though I have a feeling it is heavily romanticized, it looks really good.
http://www.apple.com/trailers/independent/theredbaron/

There are also impressive movies being released later in the year. They don't have trailers yet.
October 8: Secretariat, about the greatest race horse that ever lived. Diane Lane, John Malkovich.
October 15: Jackass 3D, in case you want to be really stupid for two hours, which isn't always bad.
November 19: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part I: The first half of the finale.
November 24: Rapunzel, a Disney animated movie about the girl with the hair.
December 10: Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. A half-new cast in part 3 of the series.
December 22: The Green Hornet, with Seth Rogen as the lead. Not very sure about the casting.
Sometime in 2010: Warrior, a movie about mixed martial arts, with Nick Nolte as a washed-up fighter.

I'm back

2010-01-28T02:00:00.000-05:00

And so, with my eyes bright and my tail bushy, I head back for another semester at the University of Maryland. And, true to form, I injure myself before I attend a single class.

Yep, that's me. Classes start on Monday, and Sunday my back starts to tingle. I miss my first class Monday, and by Monday night at work it's really coming on. Tuesday is a full-on back-spasm hoedown, and I miss everything and do nothing. Wednesday is rescued by the appropriate usage of Vicodin.

So I'm heading in for my first class, which is at 1 pm. What's that, 1 pm? Oh yes. I got smart this semester and didn't schedule any 9 or 9:30 classes, which would require me to sacrifice another large chunk of each day to the gods of rush hour traffic. Instead, I have 11 am classes on Tuesday and Thursday, and a gorgeous 1 pm starting time on the other three days of the week. I actually got to drive in today and was moving the whole time. It was, as they say, everything I thought it could be.

Anyway, there I was, walking in. I must have looked a bit like Joe Friday, because I had not yet taken any Vicodin for the back (since I'd have to drive again in two hours), and so I was expecting every step to cause a painful spike running up my spine. Some of them did just that, but I survived. Anyway, I noticed something different about the other students this time: there wasn't as much of the shell-shocked super-timid crowd. I suppose that's because even the youngest of the freshmen are six-month college veterans by now. Either way, that element of the student body - which must have taken up a full quarter of everyone I passed last semester - didn't look as aimless, as mind-boggled as they did before. Everyone - even the ones who looked like fourteen-year-olds - now walked as if they knew where they were going. Points to them.

Now, you'll notice that I said they had a solid destination now, not that they necessarily had speed to their travels. It's funny that I never noticed this before either, that college students aren't in a hurry. You'd think they would be, since they have schedules and time demands and so on, and they certainly have plenty of energy, but they just aren't. Perhaps it's because they haven't yet had their soul crushed by the working world, with its disciplinary actions for chronic tardiness and so on, but they just meander everywhere they go - most of them, anyway. It's actually quite amazing to see, especially because this is suburban Maryland, where everyone is so perpetually late for everything that they, as a rule, think nothing of elbowing you off the rack of clothes they want to see, or muscling your car into a hedgerow because they have to have to have to get home one car length earlier. Here, at college, is an oasis of the low-keyed. It's quite comforting.

Anyway, I had my first Latin 201 class. In the first five minutes, the teacher told us that the texts we used during last semester's horrific class were not very good, and in the next five minutes he drew a few charts on the blackboard that did more to explain all of those conjugations that my last Latin professor did in four months. It's too early still to tell if this will be the weight off my shoulders that I could really use, but it was a good start, to say the least.

The rest of the day was somewhat normal. I enjoyed a slice of Sbarro's mushroom pizza which I had missed terribly, I bought three hundred dollars worth of textbooks and then lugged them all back to the truck, I had a parking ticket waiting for me there, and then I went to work and Vicodinned myself to get through my shift. Funny thing about that: I had a very productive night at work, too. I wonder if Vicodin actually helps me do better work - if only it wasn't an addictive prescription narcotic. It's always something, isn't it.

Guess Who's Playing a Nazi

2009-12-13T20:34:00.001-05:00

No, not me.

I've been studying Latin all weekend, and in a moment of burnout I decided to cool my intellectual jets by watching the pilot episode of Ye Olde 70's TV show Wonder Woman, which as you may or may not remember was set in World War II times. Hey, don't judge.

Anyway, the opening credits were full of people who were stars back then - besides Lynda Carter and Lyle Waggoner, of course, there were luminaries such as Fannie Flagg, Red Buttons, Stella Stevens, Eric Braeden, Cloris Leachman, and one name in particular that made me think, "If he's playing a Nazi, this will be the best TV show ever." Sure enough, he was. And who's name, you may be asking, would make me think this?

Henry Gibson.

How I'm Going To Be a Golden God

2009-12-05T12:02:00.000-05:00

I am finding that there are some things in school that are actually easier to do now that I'm 42. One of my Profs (Mr. Green) decided to have us do that whole "Read this passage out loud" routine, and I volunteered to give voice to Judge Boschoff in Steven Biko's trial transcript. Now, this may not seem like a big deal to many, but when I was but a lad, I was so terribly self-conscious about . . . well, about being noticed in any fashion, but especially about performing in front of a group, which is how I saw the "read this out loud" segments. It didn't help that the rumbling, deep-throated Christopher Lee/Isaac Hayes basso profundo that I was hoping would develop never did; I'm not Mike Tyson, but my voice pitch turned out to be, as with so many other things it seemed, terribly middle-of-the-road.

So it used to be, in junior high and high school and even in to the first few years of college back in the day, that whenever any teacher started doing a head check for victims - er, I mean, volunteers - I would do all I could to meld into my seat, or vanish behind the head of whoever sat in front of me. I actually got pretty good at being conspicuously inconspicuous.

Back to the present day, I have to humbly note that my performance as Judge Boschoff was quite good, by classroom reading standards. I spoke clearly and loudly, didn't stumble over any words, and I articulated his interrogation with grace and poise. Perhaps it's natural maturation, perhaps it's the public performances I've put in between then and now, perhaps it's the higher self-esteem, and perhaps it's just raw orneriness, but I find it so much easier to speak in front of people now, for whatever reason and in whatever form.

Now, this brings me to another consideration. Which is true: If I am just as good at most things (after all, I am fundamentally the same person) but find it easier to do some things now, doesn't that make me an even better student at 42 than I was at, say, 20? Besides the above, I certainly have more drive and desire to do well. I have all of this life experience on which to draw, and have more connections and more money with which to do research. I'm still in good shape, despite the fact that there's significantly more of me these days (I kept up with a particularly fast-walking Army recruit for quite some time the other day, to my immense satisfaction).

I'd answer that with an "almost". I suspect that the 20-year-old brain is more capable of absorbing information than the 42-year-old one, just through the natural gear-shifting it goes through over time. The brain of a child is naturally geared towards learning and I'm pretty sure a fair amount of that still exists in the 20's. I also get more tired more easily, and the all-night cram sessions are tougher to pull off (but not impossible). I also have more bills, as I'm living on my own, and therefore need to work full-time, which makes me even more tired.

And all of this leads me to one conclusion: Manage my tiredness and my time, and I'm a golden god.

In This Post, I Break the Law

2009-12-02T01:32:00.000-05:00

I have never had great amounts of luck in the arena of getting pulled over by the police. I'm a big, hairy, pickup driver who looks much more like a redneck than I really am. As such, I rarely if ever have gotten out of a ticket, the one notable is exception being when a sympathetic police officer thought that the picture I had of my nephews and nieces were actually my own kids, and let me go, thinking I was working slavish hours to support four toddlers. Sucker.

So last night, I worked until 12:30 in the morning. My hours are technically until 11, but business being what it is, I had some things to finish up. I must have been on another planet, mentally speaking, because when I saw the lights in my rear view mirror I had no idea why they were there.

"Do you know why I pulled you over?"

Now, I have to say that I loathe these words. I despise and abhor them. They're game-playing on the part of the cop, and pretty much an admission that he's going to treat me as if I were six. Back in my wild twenties, I had one refreshingly plain-spoken police woman cut to the chase and say simply, "Runnin' radar tonight, boys. License and registration." I could have kissed her, but for the instant quadrupling of the ticket value it surely would have inspired.

Instead, this policeman from last night - whose name I didn't catch, so I will simply refer to him as Krupke - hit me with the condescending "Do you know why" question. I told him I had no idea, although I suspected some light was out, or I was just speeding, which I usually am.

"Did you know that you ran that red light at Great Seneca and Muddy Branch?"

Light? There's a light? "Ummm . . . I . . . uhhh . . . totally just . . . " I stumbled more than a habitual drunk with his laces tied together.

"License". A real wordsmith, this one.

I handed it over, helpfully pointing out the change of address card. He asked me a few questions: where I was coming from, where I was going to, had I been drinking, that sort of thing.

And then he handed me my license back. He told me to watch it, and that was it. He didn't even run my plates or check with the home office to see if the truck was stolen or if I was on the Most Wanted list or something. He just handed my license back, and that was that. My head was spinning. How was it that I, ticket magnet that I am, was completely and utterly skipping out on this one? I couldn't believe it, but I certainly wasn't going to question it. I got my license back and started back up to get the hell out of there before he changed his mind.

I got one last gift from him, though. "And by the way," he offered, heading back to his cruiser, "your registration stickers expired at midnight."

A Back to School Realization

2009-11-30T14:04:00.000-05:00

Today was my first day back after being sick for weeks. I did two days at work last week, to kind of ease myself in, but now I'm back in to my normally rigorous schedule. I'm not as caught up as I had hoped, I was late this morning, and I have work in a little more than an hour. On the surface, it kind of stinks, but it's not as foot-draggingly exhausting as I thought it would be - so far, anyway.

And there are advantages to being back - the first being the food. That's right, I love the cafeteria food. Well, not all of it; I have a weakness for the Sbarro's mushroom pizza there. Now, mine is not the most cultured of palettes - I am perfectly happy with food at the level of Boston Market, and don't feel the need to be festively dining upon glazed duck in a white wine sauce from a five-star bistro on the Champs d'Elysee in order to feel like I've gotten a good meal. That said, fast-food pizza is normally below me. The worst, of course, is that greasy slop in the clear plastic prisons at the 7-11; I wouldn't eat that on a bet. Sbarro's mushroom slices, however, are worth walking across campus for. Which I did.

But my time for scrumptious meals such as this is coming to an end. At some point I have to stop eating so much like a teenager and get serious about watching my weight. I just went to the doctor last Tuesday and the nurse came dangerously close to having to do the ca-chunk to the next 50-pound weight increment on that white upright scale. That was close.

The funny thing is, though, that I am not the biggest I've ever been. I'm wearing 36 jeans as I type, and for a while there about eight years ago I was up to the tubby 40's. I still have my tubby 40 jeans, and they're like clown pants on me. The only explanation for this is that I have less fat now and more muscle (muscle weighing eight times what fat does), I am not convinced that I deserve more muscle right now. Between work and school, working out or doing my weekend-warrior stuff has been pretty much bumped off. The things I do now are much less athletic, so I can't figure it out.

This all jives with my long-held belief that weight is not anywhere near an accurate measuring rod of how in shape you are. Even so, that white upright scale was a close one. I'm still in good shape, but I'd like to be in great shape, and even have occasional daydreams about really hunkering down and getting in Ricardo-Montalban-ish shape, or like one of those fifty-year-old guys on the Bowflex commercials. One day at a time, though, so I have to admit that the day will come soon where Sbarro's mushroom pizza with extra sprinkled garlic powder and red peppers on a fall afternoon will have to become a fond memory.

That sucks.

Bartlet for President . . . or not.

2009-11-25T22:25:00.000-05:00

I’ve spent the a lot of time recently re-watching The West Wing, one of my favorite shows ever, and I can’t help but to wonder whether President Jed Bartlett could be elected President in real life if he existed as a real person. President Bartlett, played by Martin Sheen, is presented as the ideal President; strong, wise, educated, frank, diplomatic, quick-witted, excelling both domestically and internationally, and were it not for his plot-advancing case of MS, healthy. He really should be perfectly electable if not for one big reason why he would never make it. Ten points if you can guess it before reading the next paragraph.

He’s too short. It's an unavoidable fact that we in America like to elect tall Presidents. In the last 100 years – 25 elections – the shorter of the final two candidates has won only six times, two of those victories belonging to George W. Bush, who is not himself a short man, but was just fortunate (or unfortunate) enough to go up against two super-six-footers (Gore and Kerry). In two elections, the candidates were the same height, but in the remaining 17, the taller man won. Sheen, by the way, is five foot seven, shorter than any Chief Executive we've had in over 100 years..

There is an interesting contrast here, which I think goes a long way to explaining the phenomenon: in the 25 older elections when the comparative heights are available (to me, via Wikipedia, at least), the shorter candidate won 14 times, with two equal-height contests. The difference, I suspect, was photography - the sea change occurred almost just at the point in history where the camera became available to reporters on the campaign trail. It's one thing to hear that Lincoln is taller than Douglas, but it's another beast entirely to see the two men standing together, looking rather like Mutt and Jeff.

So are we to blame? Are we really that superficial that a candidate who is otherwise perfectly qualified – if not overly so – to run our country would be dismissed out of hand because he doesn’t tower over his aides and bodyman? Maybe, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Part of the job is to represent our nation diplomatically, to encourage people in rousing stump speeches, to address Congress and occasionally even to influence them into voting your way. All of these things are much more effective for a tall man; try to imagine Lyndon Johnson intimidating Senators in his office as he did if he was 5'7", and you'll visualize my meaning. We may miss out on a James Madison or two out there, but the cameras don't go away once the campaign is over; the advantages that height gives will continue to be useful after he takes his seat in the Oval.

I suspect the producers of The West Wing were conscious of this, but overlooked it because they weren't about to give up on the simply fantastic Sheen just because of his height. They certainly seemed to compensate with the other Presidential-types in the storyline: 6'2" Tim Matheson played John Hoynes, once the front runner for the seat and later taken in as Bartlett’s first Vice President. He later resigns, and is replaced by 5’11” Gary Cole as Bob Russell, the munchkin of this paragraph. Bartlet’s predecessor is never shown on screen, but the one former President that is is played by towering 6’5” James Cromwell; Sheen literally reaches up to his sternum. 6’2” John Goodman plays a Speaker of the House who becomes de facto President for a few episodes when Bartlet temporarily steps down, and I hope I don’t give away the end of the show by saying that Bartlet’s successor is played by 6’3” Jimmy Smits, who defeats 6’2” Alan Alda.

I suppose that’s enough evidence to simply say that Bartlet is the exception to the rule, and could be the Jimmy Carter-esque short guy that pulls off the upset. Be that as it may, I have a hard time believing that someone that low to the ground could win in these 24-hour-news times, what with television constantly beaming images of the top of a President’s head bobbing along a sidewalk, lost among the forest of Secret Service redwoods that would invariably be surrounding him.

Well, I'm Back

2009-11-24T13:31:00.000-05:00

If ever I meet the guy who invented the swine flu, I'm going to kick him right in the knees.

I'm technically over it, and have just been cleared of pneumonia or bronchitis today, but I'm not really 'over it'. I still have symptoms and apparently will for a couple of more weeks. This really is the definition of mixed news.

So, this week I get to return to work. My work's Human Resources department, in a stunning move of nonsensical bureaucracy so bizarre that I would otherwise think it a Mike-Judge-like parody of the working world, decided that my doctor's excuse was invalid because it did not include the phrase 'can return to work with no restrictions'. It seems that unless the correct verbage is used, security (that is, my boss, I imagine) would have bodily blocked me at the door had I gone in, so I had to - had to! - stay home one extra day until my appointment this morning and the reissuance of a new piece of paper telling me what I already knew. Whatever. Pretty good business sense, there. Anyway, I got my new, correct, revised doctor's note and now will be let back in with the other fifth-graders in time for finger painting.

I am, however, not allowed to return to a full schedule - that is, school - until next Monday. Fortunately, it is a short week and I will therefore not miss much, but unfortunately, I will not only miss more but I will miss the chance for more of the pithy observational humor that I need to fill up these pages.

Today's article seems to be a nice size, what with all the railings about doctor's notes, and I didn't receive any death threats over the lack of an article yesterday, so that just leaves one more before Thanksgiving - for which, by the way, we are going to Jennifer's aunt's house, where I will meet one more of her siblings (leaving only one left to go). I may or may not write about that, depending on how dramatic, hilarious, or catastrophic the day goes. On December sixth, my family, scattered to the four winds as we are, is having our annual combo-Thanksgiving-Christmas horde-gathering, here at our new place. I'm continuing the new tradition I started last year, and ordering Texas barbecue from the Salt Lick, in San Antonio, for everyone. That day will almost certainly have drama, hilarity, and/or catastrophe, so I will almost certainly write about that.

Anyway, tomorrow I have a nice article planned around what has become my major pasttime while I was sick - that is, watching West Wing reruns on my iPod. Make sure you tune in for that one.

Say Hello to Swine Flu

2009-11-17T01:58:00.000-05:00

Well, I caught the swine flu. The doctor - who, by the way, was younger than I am, which is a phenomenon I'm still not used to - said I can plan to be out for at least three days, but probably more like five to seven. I'm having a particularly good few moments now, but generally my last few days have consisted of a lot of lying in bed, sweating, and moaning and wailing. Therefore, I will put these articles on hiatus until next Monday.

See you then.

The Sniper Is No More

2009-11-12T01:38:00.000-05:00

So, John Allen Mohammed was put to death last night. For those of you not from this area, you may not be as familiar with this guy as us suburban-Marylanders. He's one of the two snipers who decided it was a wise financial move to start randomly sniping people, and had a three-week spree back in October of '02 that left this who area absolutely nuts with fear. Anyway, he was caught (napping in a truck stop) and sentenced to death, which was carried out last night at - I wonder if this is a coincidence - 9:11.

I am no fan of the death penalty. I don't like it for several reasons, none of which I'm going to go into here. I can, however, understand that in the case of an unrepentant, slithering monster like Mohammed, I am, to say the least, in the minority. I can also understand that my society has decided that it's a good thing to rid the world of him and us, and so I don't feel the burning need to go stand on top of a van in Alexandria and start shouting through a megaphone how you're all going to hell because Virginia adopted the death penalty - especially since I'm a blue-stater from Maryland.

Nevertheless, there is an aspect of this case that I will oppose, and that is celebrating in his demise. Sure, he was evil through and through. Yes, he would have shot me if I were in the wrong place at the wrong time, too. Okay, society has decided he should get an armful of Liquid Plum'r and should be wiped from the earth. I can grok that. But when people start cheering, rejoicing, shouting "Good riddance", and sending each other Facebook gifts because of the end of a human life, that's backward.

It's sad that he died. Sad that he decided to throw away his life, and that of his youthful ward Lee Boyd Malvo, and had no empathy or feelings for his fellow humans. It's also sad that he took so many lives for whatever reason, whether to create a smokescreen for shooting his ex, or just the cold hard cash. It's sad that people's lives are worth that little to him.

So I won't be toasting, I won't be cheering, I won't be dancing a hardy jig and swinging arm-in-arm with anyone over the death of a monster. Call me Pollyanna, but I think the world would have been better if he had just never picked up the Bushmaster at all.

Registration Time

2009-11-06T01:14:00.000-05:00

One of my new, young, gray-hair-less, flat-bellied, eighties-born classmates recently posted that she had just registered for her last semester ever. We're both history majors, and is one of a few with whom I've had several classes, so it's kind of sobering to see that she's graduating next spring . . . and I'm apparently not.

College is really designed for five classes per semester, but I'd be completely crazy to take all five. As it is, I'm only mostly crazy now, because I'm taking four, in addition to the full-time job and the hour-plus commute in the mornings. Believe me, I would like nothing less than to be able to not work, and just read and write papers all day, but at least I can console myself by knowing that, at least in this arena, it's not my age (directly) but the fact that I have to work that is making me have to tough it out for at least one more semester. Maybe more, depending on which classes I'm required to take. I'll know soon enough.

I have learned many, many moons ago that I am not automatically superior than everyone younger than I am. In fact, an awful lot of them know an awfully large (and climbing) number of things that I do not. I am now, for the first time ever, older than James Bond (Daniel Craig is almost a year younger than I am). Several head football coaches were in elementary school when I was in high school, and I'm dangerously close to having to say that I'm older than the President - my oldest sister actually is older than him. Eeg.

The irony in that is that when I was younger (like, the age of my classmate up there), I did think that - I thought that by virtue of my advanced age of something like 22, I was just smarter than anyone who was, for example, 21. In many cases, I was right, but I can't fathom the amount of wisdom, advice, and arcane knowledge that I missed out on because I was too stupid to realize that I was, well, fairly stupid.

This is, in no small part, a reason why I have repeatedly said to Jennifer that it is indeed the fortune of the gods that we didn't get together back then (even though we first met at the tender age of twelve).

Small miracles, and all that.

Dealing With It

2009-11-03T19:45:00.000-05:00

Face it, everybody has a bad spell now and then. No matter how successful, or gifted, or laid-back, or golden-boyish someone is, the rough patches rear their ugly heads on occasion. With that in mind, here is the first, and probably not the last, episode of Uncle Jimbo's Unsolicited Advice Theater.

The trick is to not let your bad mood from one thing carry over into another. Case in point: me. I have four big things I do every day: early class, late class, work, and my girlfriend. (Heh.) If I have a rough time in my first class, it's always a good idea not to let that spill over into my second class. If I go through the ringer in my first and second classes, as I did yesterday, I want insulation before I piss off everyone at work - and for the love of all that is holy, I certainly don't want to take any of that home.

Fortunately for me and this article, I had time in the car between my rotten time at class yesterday and having to go to work. I made us of that time and distilled my proven method of making sure I don't alienate, infuriate, excoriate, or anything else that ends in -ate, the wrong people because my professor is being a condescending jackass. So now, without further ado or protestation, here is my proven five-point plan - and by 'proven', I, of course, really mean 'unproven, but it sounds good'.

1. Realize what's going on. Recognize what you're about to do - to briefly vent because someone cut you off on Old Georgetown Road isn't worth chewing out your boss and getting summarily fired for it. This is actually part of a bigger, more encompassing, ur-theme wherein one of the hardest things for anyone to do is to evaluate yourself objectively from the outside and see if you're being a schmuck. And it doesn't get any easier just because you realize it's hard to do.

If you're like me, the person you're often really ticked at is yourself, because you did something colossally stupid and you know it. By the time you've gains as much experience doing stupid things as I have, you get to be pretty good at quickly realizing that it was stupid, determining how not to do that stupid thing again, and moving on, all in your head and all in just a second or two. Along those lines . . .

2. Get back on the horse. If you find you have, in fact, done something stupid or embarrassing or simply delusional, once you get back to the 'moving on' part of the recovery, don't shy away from round two. Don't get shy or quiet or assume your next offering will be a bonehead blunder too. Speak back up, as loud or louder. This applies equally if someone verbally keelhauls you in front of your co-workers, but be warned: it does not apply if you just got a speeding ticket.

3. Don't change your plans. If you gasp and choke your way through your verbal presentation in class, don't get all glum and call in sick to work. If you print ten thousand copies of something with the wrong settings (which one of my co-workers once did), don't cancel your date that night because you feel bad. If nothing else, you won't be thinking about class while at work, and you certainly won't be thinking about work while you're doing the no-pants dance with your dinner date. If you are, the relationship's doomed.

4. Have an interval. Do something relaxing or fun or even just diversionary between things. Between my first two classes, I check e-mail, surf the Internet, and/or work on a different class for a little while. Between class and work, I drive and usually eat lunch. Between work and home, I have just-me-in-the-car time. I like to do things alone and in blessed silence, because I'm an introvert at heart, but whatever works for you, works for you.

A note about driving: Driving can be very relaxing, or it can be a monstrous hell-hole of stress, anxiety, and boundless apopleptic fury. Generally speaking, don't count on using your car time as your between-event de-stressor time unless your drive looks like a car commercial or an episode of Miami Vice. Driving a European sports sedan down a windy country road while eddies of autumnal leaves applaud in your wake is good; white knuckles clinging frantically to the steering wheel of your mid-90's Korean hatchback as you speed down a superhighway inches from a 22-foot U-Haul on one side and an unforgiving Jersey wall on the other is bad. Ploting a throaty late-60's muscle car along the coastal highway at night, with the top down and a moody Phil Collins soundtrack fills the war midsummer's night air is good, sitting motionless in hundred degree heat on the Beltway in your air-conditioner-less work truck while the car next to you pumps his bass out of his windows and through the skulls of both you and the fly who won't stop buzzing around your dome is bad. Err on the side of bad. Trust me on this; traffic is the devil.

5. Indulge. The worse your day is, the more self-imposed limitations on life you are justified to ignore, just for that day. My personal favorite is to gorge myself on an extremely fattening but oh so delicious Big Texas Cinnamon Bun when it really gets tough. They have them in the vending machine at work. They're pretty good.

It's not going to kill you as long as you have indulgences in proportion to the suckiness of the day. If you find yourself eating Big Texas Cinnamon Buns three meals a day, though, perhaps you need to change something. Fortunately, I'm not there yet.

A Rare Sunday Post

2009-11-01T13:59:00.000-05:00

So it's the weekend, and this morning I was relaxing with a nice hour-long History Channel show. I usually am pretty lenient toward the History Channel - sure, they stretch the limits of what is academically sound, and they do an awful lot about Hitler, but still it's entertaining and watchable and much more intellectual that the pablum that saturates the other hundred-and-something channels that I have. Today, however, I have to rake them over the coals.

The show in question was called 'The Real Wolfman' - the reference being to the Beast of Gévaudan. This is the creature that was fictionalized in the outstanding 2001 film Brotherhood of the Wolf, if anyone out there remembers - a vicious, snarling, bloodthirsty creature that tore a fair amount of French people to bits over a three-year period in the 1760's. I missed the beginning of the show, so I didn't quite equate how they made the leap from supposedly wolf to wolf-man, but apparently the hysterical peasants let their imaginations run wild, and stories of a Gévaudan werewolf arose. Anyway, after comparing the records of the attacks and the accounts of the witnesses and the stuffed-animal laden underworld beneath a Parisian museum, the conclusion they came to was that the Beast was, in fact, a hyena.

All right, I can buy that. Hyenas are dogs, typically attack the way the Beast did (back of the legs, guts, neck), they'd eat whatever prey was put in front of them, they look sort of like the contemporary illustrations of the Beast, and they could easily be mistaken for a big ugly wolf by ill-educated, non-worldly, and terrified peasants. African animals were often shipped up to Europe by the filthy rich for their own personal menageries - Zarafa, the wildly popular giraffe sent to Charles X in 1826 springs to mind - so it's not outside the realms of possibility that some numbskull brought up a hyena as well. If memory serves, the Bad Guy in the Sherlock Holmes story "The Speckled Band", himself an importer of African animals for his own personal zoo, had a hyena running about in the back yard.

But I digress.

So far, so good. The Beast was a hyena. The problem I have with this show erupts when they go to tackle what they call the second half of their mystery. The legend is apparently that a local hunter, Jean Chastel, killed the beast by shooting it once through the chest, using a silver bullet of his own manufacture. (Apparently, Chastel bought the whole 'werewolf' angle.) The two guys on this show, however, had developed a conclusion that Chastel was behind it all along, and set the Beast up to bring himself fame as the Mighty Beast Hunter. Now all they needed to do was to develop data that would support their conclusion, which they did.

Off to the local firing range they went. They had the guys there make bona fide silver bullets, and fired them alongside the traditional lead ones, to compare accuracy and killing power. The leads bullets were much more accurate because the rifling could get a grip on the soft metal, where it could not get a grip on the much harder silver. Also, the lead bullet shattered and spun and did all sorts of destructive dance moves upon hitting the ballistic gel they used, as compared to the silver bullet which went right through. A-ha, they cried. It's less accurate, so he must have missed! It's less dangerous, so it must not have killed the Beast! Chastel didn't hunt the beast, he set it up! He must have trained it! Villain! Blackheart! J'accuse!

Balderdash. First of all, they used a modern firearm; in 1767, firearms didn't generally have rifling at all; so much for their accuracy test. As for the silver bullet going straight through, without tearing up the insides, imagine a big dog coming straight at you. A shot from the front would go straight to where its heart is, no tumbling necessary - and hyenas are known for their large heart-to-body ratio, which is why they can run all day without getting tired (as opposed to, say, a cheetah, who gets quickly pooped). This is to say nothing about the tremendous logical fallacies they're tossing about during what was otherwise my lazy, rainy Sunday morning.

I'll tie this all into my schoolwork thusly: my History of Tudor England professor, whom I am calling Mrs. Peacock, has been reminding us nearly every class not to use the pseudo-historians whose books litter the Henry VIII shelves. She warns us to stay away from the romantic historical novels by the likes of Alison Weir, Antonia Frasier, and so on. They grab your attention at the B. Dalton's, and are fun to read, but they're not academic and certainly not totally accurate, so avoid them in your papers. I agree with her, and I toss upon that pile the shows of the History Channel. I wish I couldn't - especially since I was about to use one such special in another class - but this is all a reminder that while it's historical entertainment, the History Channel is really just entertainment.

And those two doofuses owe me a Sunday morning.

Complaining

2009-10-30T00:53:00.000-04:00

I don't like to complain. I really don't. It's non-productive and unattractive and not at all fun. We all know someone (or perhaps more than one someone) who is an otherwise likeable person but just seems to complain all the time. They are the ones for whose departure everyone else is eagerly awaiting, so the party can start being worth getting dressed up for. I don't want to be that someone, so I try not to complain.

The problem is that I have so much to complain about. Let me just select one complainable thing, one thing which I promise will not become a regular institution here: work. I don't remember if I've mentioned it or not, but I work in a printing plant from 3 to 11 every night to pay the bills until I can finish my degree. I, to put it bluntly, hate my job. I despise my work, abhor my company, and outright loathe the printing industry. If any of you get a chance to get in to printing, don't. Think twice even about publishing. It's not glamorous or interesting or challenging or even worth staying awake for. It's an industry that it decidedly not life-or-death, and yet everyone - especially management - thinks it is. It's not their fault, I suppose; if they don't make their deadlines, people will take their next project to the competition, and the plant will dry up and blow away. Even so, I know people in health care - literally, a life-or-death career if there ever was one - that have less stress on a day-to-day level. It's insane, it really is.

To wit: our big plate processing machine requires filtered water, but no one has bothered to run a pipe into the room that needs it - instead, we need to go upstairs, fill up the plastic jugs, and carry the water, Swiss milkmaid-style, down into the processing room. We also have a half-million-dollar proofing machine that sits in a room with no protection against dust, heat, cold, or humidity, and then we're blamed when it's not working. We have a customer service rep that can't read or write. Our office manager, eager to cut costs and curb employee theft, has taken away - I swear this is all true - drinking water. It's madness.

There. Now, two paragraphs is more than enough. I could keep going about what sucks about my job, but I'm drawing the line there. No more complaining, no siree.

Instead, and because I'm not feeling very well right now, I'm going to leave with one thought conjuring up one of life's little but profound pleasures. Whatever did we do, how did we face our days, and by what power did we motivate ourselves out the front door and into a productive, healthy, and satisfying work week, before whoever it was invented the Golden Graham?

Seriously, those things are manna.

A stumper

2009-10-27T11:59:00.000-04:00

Here's a question I often ask people, just to see: Who was the first African to win a major Academy Award? Not an African-American, mind you, but an actual African, from Africa. The answer is at the end.

I often toss this out to people, designed as a harmless trivia question, to perform my own (admittedly inexact) little self-test to see how people define an 'African' in their head. The experiment is probably a big fat flop of a failure, because if nothing else I have no idea what kind of conclusions I could possibly make, and I'm not exactly recording the data. Plus, people just don't care about trivia that much, so I get a lot of shrugs and "I dunno"s. When I think about it, I conclude that that's why it's called trivia - because it's ultimately trivial. No matter, I keep forging on nonetheless, as I do with so many other things. I also get a little bit of schadenfreudian glee out of tricking people with a trick question that's not a trick at all.

If I did become a sociologist or something, and I asked several thousand people and created data sets and recorded and transcribed all of the answers, I could smush them all together into some sort of conclusion, I guess. That's a lot of work, so I won't do it, but if I did, I imagine that it would tell me that most people - especially most white people - think of an African as being black. It is true, by playing the odds, you're most likely correct, because most Africans are black, but not all of them are. Qadhafi, for example, is Arabic but has lived his whole life in Libya, and in case you're wondering, has not won an Academy Award (although he can apparently conjure up insane amounts of drama in his current quest to be King of the Arabs).

My plan today was to spring this on Professor Plum, who teaches the History of South Africa. Despite my complaints about him, he does know his stuff about Africa, to the point that he can, without having to stop and think about it, pronounce those clicking noises in African tribe and place names. He ran late today, so he swept in and immediately started instructing, so I'll have to try again maybe on Thursday. I'll let you know if the question stumps him - if it does, I expect it will be because he doesn't know Oscar history.

And by the way, as you've guessed, the first African Oscar winner isn't black at all. It's Charlize Theron, who was born in Johannesburg.

Distractions

2009-10-26T14:52:00.000-04:00

Distractions will kill ya. They really will. That's not to say all distractions are bad - there are perfectly justifiable ones, such as eating, reading the news, spending time with my girlfriend, and watching out the window while the cops raid the druggie house down the street - but even those have to be tempered with solid grinding away at the homework and paper research and so on. In my case, though, the worst distraction I have is video games. This goes back to junior high for me - we didn't have a computer at first, and I utilized (or possibly abused) my friends who had a Commodore 64, or an Atari 2600, or - joy of joys - an Apple IIe with Wizardry loaded up. I distinctly remember my friend John and I going over to the house of the boy who lived across from him, solely to play Castle Wolfenstein for hours on end. We also burned out John's computer to the point where he had to have a shoe - a dirty, smelly, teenage-boy shoe - sitting on the F2 button, right at nose level, to keep the machine from freezing up. Good times.

These days, I have access to countless Java games on the web, and the brilliant world-building game Civilization IV, which can easily suck up an entire weekend if I ignored things like sleep and a social conscience. Even worse than that are the MMORPG's, relatively short for Massive Multiplayer Role-Playing Games, which are essentially one big virtual world into which hundreds of thousands of gamers will log in and play their characters at the same time. Now, it is fascinating to know that each of those other . . . we'll call them beings . . . on the screen are a real person, but the games are so huge, and the complexity so Byzantine, that your whole world will drain away while you're plugged in to the virtual unreality, as it were.

I am happy to report, however, that I only played a few of those, and gave them up some time ago for just that reason. I decided that even if I weren't in school and working, I'd rather do something where I have a finished product at the end. Sure, you may play World of Warcraft long enough to get a level 70 (or whatever they go up to now) Necromancer, or something, but in the end, it's just a bunch of arranged electrons. For the same reason, I am uninstalling Civilization IV, in the background as I type. I don't play it anymore anyway, and it hogs both battery life and disk space. The Java games, I can do nothing about, so I must simply steel myself to resist their siren call when I have homework to do.

I'm also growing quite a "Things I Wish I Had Time To Do" list. I recently added SCA stick fighting to it; I have some friends who are now deep into it, and I dangled my feet in its waters several years ago, but I simply don't have time. I'd like to get the full run of "How I Met Your Mother", which I've heard is very good, and watch it, if for nothing else to see if it can herald a return to the Seinfeld/Cosby Glory Days of the American sitcom, not to mention to the Fife/Rubble Glory Days of the name 'Barney'. One of my followers, Mike (Hi, Mike), has a web page about non-traditional students which I'd love to read from whatever the net equivalent of "cover to cover" is. I'd like to organize my iPod music collection, and National Novel Writing Month is closing fast. The list goes on.

None of these will get done any time soon; I have accepted this as fact. However, at least I know why they'll be getting not done. At least I can say I wasn't distracted.

Mostly.

There Is Booze In This Article

2009-10-22T11:41:00.000-04:00

Here's a tip for anyone who is about to go from the workforce back in to college, and it's one I learned the hard way. Whenever you suspect the school-related deadline to be, do whatever it is a few months before. This applies even if you think you're giving it plenty of time.

To wit: In order to get financial aid for a fall semester, I at first thought applying in early summer would be plenty of time. Wrong-o. The deadline for the first pickins is in February. I still can't figure out how you're supposed to know what you're doing or even where you're going by February, but that's the way it works. Along that same line, this semester is at mid-terms and registration for next is about to open.

In the working world, I was used to having things turn around in a day, if not in hours. Until I can gloriously cast aside my vocational leg irons, I work in printing, and it's not unusual for a job to come in at six and need to be done at seven. Deadlines are given, they are there, and you get them done, then move on. Collegiate deadlines are set approximately one ice age before they are due, I suppose to give all of the forms time to first gather a nice layer of dust and cobwebs.

Speaking of things which need to age, I did get to turn in my proposal for the Wikipedia project. I don't think I've explained this before, but in Mr. Green's History of Technology class, our Big Assignment is to find an article on Wikipedia, rewrite the history section, and post it, for real, on the site. I am told that there is a good chance that a muscle-reflexing Wikipedia watchdog will instantly remove it, as a matter of course, but whatever - I'll blindly trundle forward as I often do.

Anyway, I had to pick a topic. The best way I could figure to find one - not too broad that it's been covered to death, but not too specific that no one would care, and it had to be interesting - was to essentially surf Wikipedia. This was not a problem for me, as by now I am an old hand at just that. So I did, and hours turned in to days, and days into weeks, and the due date loomed. Finally, I figured I'd write about what I know, so I settled upon rotogravure printing, which involved etching an image on a drum, then coating it with ink and using a transfer papaaaaaaaaaugh oh it was so boring. Seriously, who cares. Printing hasn't been interesting since the monks stopped drawing those huge, ornate illumination pages. But it was what I had.

Until inspiration struck. The class is mostly guys, so I've been writing mostly about guy stuff in our weekly journals - weapons, booze, bikinis, that sort of thing - the only reason I hadn't covered the candy apple red 1965 Carroll Shelby Mustang Fastback with the 289 V-8 is because we haven't reached that point in history yet. I figured I'd take one of these - let's go with the booze - and do one last rundown to see if I can get a better topic.

And there it was, on the first page I checked. Whiskey. Uisge beatha. The water of life. Somehow, over all of these years, no one has really gone after the history of this fabulous drink. Look it up if you like - the history section is all of two sentences long (as of this typing) and the information is, to say the least, sparse.

So check it out again in about two months. I'll remind you.

People-Watching

2009-10-21T00:53:00.002-04:00

All right, I admit it. I wear sunglasses when I don't really need to.

There's a very simple explanation why: it's because I'm looking at people as I walk by them. I like people-watching, especially when I have a forum to write about them, as I do here.

A college campus has much the same cross-section as the rest of the world. Of course, all of the students dress very casually compared to the workforce, and it is painfully obvious to pick out professors and, even obviouser, the groundskeepers. Students vary wildly, but some sweeping generalities can be made, I think: for example, as one friend of mine pointed out years ago, freshman girls, still eager to impress the boys, are much more made-up than the senior girls, who are by now grizzled sweatpant-wearing veterans. The boys become a little less clueless when it comes to fashion, hairstyles, and skin care, and are more muscular and filled out, than the dorkface freshmen. There are very few overweight college students - since I've been here, I've seen maybe one percent of the population who are in need of a diet, and only one student who was at the whoa level. Otherwise, college students tend to run the attractiveness scale, the same as the rest of the world, running the gamut from the ready-to-model to the average majority to the outright cursed by God.

I've made a few other observations.

1. I'm old. So many of the good-looking kids look like, well, kids. They look like they could be the children of my friends and schoolmates. I can still acknowledge that they're good looking people, but they now look like they're not done growing up yet. I have this issue now, even outside of the collegiate atmosphere - on TV, for example. This becomes even moreso when I realize that they're, as a rule, younger than Wall Street, Licensed to Ill, and Married with Children.

2. I will never be "hot". Actually, I wasn't on par with the "hot" people, even when I was their age, and I've always been fine with that. I think the older people get, the more they drift away from the "hot"s and more toward being able to spot a good catch. They're not mutually exclusive, of course, but good catches are better than hots. I'd even go so far as to say that people I know who value hots over the good catches are those I think of as immature. I'm not on the market, of course, but I find myself doing exactly what I have no skill in doing these days, which is playing matchmaker. Fortunately, I (usually) limit it to inside-my-head mental matchmaking. That one would be good for this friend. I bet this one would do well with that friend. It's a variant on people-watching, really. Fun sometimes, too.

(As a side note, I recently tried my first attempt at real-life matchmaking. It seems the prospective female side has already started seeing somebody, so that was that. I don't really mind, since I'm happy for my friend. I have an idea for a second one.)

3. I try to be noble and egalitarian, I really do. I am, however, reminded of a song called "Everyone's a Little Bit Racist", and I can even expand on that. Snap judgments based on appearance, while unlikeable, are a fact of life; you may know them by their more PC name: "first impressions". I'll admit that I will, from time to time, make assumptions of someone because they have facial piercings, torn jeans, an accent, a chinstrap beard, or a tattoo crawling up their neck. In my South Africa class, there is a student with a long, Arabic-style beard who sits right next to another student who habitually wears a yarmulke. I'm happy to report there have been no fistfights yet.

Even more awkward is the guy who's missing a hand - that has nothing to do with first impressions, and plunges heartily into the realm of morbid wonder. I strain myself not to stare, but can't help wondering if it was a birth defect, or if he got his paw stuck in a Ditch Witch or something.

A long book, and Zulu

2009-10-20T00:35:00.003-04:00

Things are fairly ho-hum these days. I had one mid-term; I have another on Thursday and some preliminary papers due in between. One thing I don't understand; Mr. Green's History of South Africa class. All semester he's been assigning us just short reading assignments, and he's even said that's on purpose because he wants us listening to his lectures more than reading endless material. Now, though, he's assigned a full, 400-page book to be read in a little over a week. I can't do that; I have four classes, a 90-minute commute, a full-time job, and a girlfriend. I'll read the Wikipedia description of the event it covers (a 1922 race riot in the mines) and get through as much as I can, but that's all I can do.

Which leads to a pitfall I've noticed in time management: I absolutely cannot let one big assignment in one class make me ignore the other three. It becomes a sort of cost-benefit analysis in situations like this. Even if I manage to plow through this tome, it will be at the expense of homeworks and paper proposals and mid-term studying for all of my classes, including other assignments for that one, and a complete loss of sleep besides. No thanks.

Apologies for the short, and fairly dry, article tonight. I will leave you with this movie recommendation: Zulu, with Michael Caine, from 1963. I had seen it when I was a teenager, I think, but just watched it again because of my South Africa class. It's a great film with great acting, action, and scenery, and they treat the Zulus with respect for their culture, rather than just bloodthirsty mindless enemy soldiers. It's historically inaccurate for puzzling reasons, but whatever. It's a great film.

Rain sucks

2009-10-16T01:00:00.000-04:00

It rained today. All day.

The biggest pain, to me, of the rain is not the actual water falling down from the sky. In truth, after a season of nasty, hot, humid, typical Maryland summers with an extra dose of global warming, the water itself feels kind of good. No, instead what sucks is that I have to wear a coat.

In truth, I have a very nice coat. It's one of those Old-Western style dusters, made of heavy material and extending down to my ankles. It's got two rows of metal buttons up the front and even a collar flap to keep the rain from going down my neck. It's very City Slickers, and I love it. But the truth is, it's still a coat.

I am very much a t-shirt kind of guy. This may be why people often think I'm younger than I am; I'm not totally sure. Either way, I like t-shirts - they're comfortable and light and non-restricting and simple. Add on a big heavy ponderous coat and all of that goes away - now I have this thing hanging on me that gets caught in car doors and library doors and I have to keep buttoning and unbuttoning and then when I get to class, I need to do this little dance with it and my computer bag and my bottle of water. It's not a life-ruiner, of course, but it is a pain.

Also, thanks to the rain, I was late for my first mid-term of the semester. It seems someone on the Beltway decided to break down, which meant that everyone else on the road was not only in their usual mild state of morbid panic (as DC area drivers tend to be whenever it rains) but also rubberneckingly fascinated with the high drama caused by a police car, a tow truck, and a late model Civic with its flashing lights on. I'm convinced that in the back of the general populace's shared hive mind, there is a piece that just doesn't want to miss that tiny chance that the Civic driver is going to turn out to be an ersatz Tim McVeigh, and they'll get to see the takedown, right there in the middle of their morning commute. It never is, of course, but that doesn't mean we - er, I mean, they, did I say we?, I meant they - keep looking.

In other news, I have to admit, it's getting to me - "it" being the long hours, constant work of some sort, not having any time to do the normal life things (the Maryland state emissions test for my truck, for example, or getting that painful tooth out), and the sleeping through classes because I can't get up. I have to (quoting Sir Thomas Malory here) redouble my blows to get that second wind for this semester. That's about as far as I want to take this post into the Land of Ceaseless Complaining, but I'll leave it as a caveat for any of you who are sub-42 and thinking you can go back later: it's a lot, lot harder to do this when you're my age, compared to when you're yours. In other words: stay in school, punk.

Things are Tough Out In the City

2009-10-15T01:59:00.002-04:00

In light of today being a basically uneventful day, I'm instead going to tell you all about the movie I just watched. It's called The Warriors, it's from 1979, and it's what they call a 'cult classic' - which means it stinks, but a lot of people like it anyway due to a mix of fascination, nostalgia, and low standards. This is a movie begging for Mystery Science Theater: 3000 to come out of retirement.

In the world of The Warriors, New York City is divided perfectly evenly among several hundred gangs. Each gang, comprised solely of teenagers, runs their little corner of the city, and is constantly warring with, basically, everyone. Each gang has a cool and evocative name, such as the Boppers, the Hi-Hats, the Orphans, the Moonrunners, the VC Rangers, and the Turnbull AC's, the last two of which sound more like European soccer teams than inner-city New York gangs. Each gang also has their own distinctive clothing style, to which every member must conform, which I'm sure led to some interesting financial choices among the new recruits. "Guess what, Billy? The Renegades let me in to the gang. Now all I need to do is to buy seven pairs of camouflage pants, seven identical neon orange sleeveless t-shirts, and seven Foreign Legion berets with dove feathers. Awesome!" Others wear full-face makeup, which must be a pain in the ass to put on every morning.

Whatever. For movies such as this, you don't have to - in fact, you probably shouldn't - ask too many questions. Anyway, the heroes of our film are the titular Warriors, a gang of male models from the mean streets of Coney Island, where I imagine they spend a good deal of their time roughing up vacationing school children and flexing their gangland muscle at the guy who runs the hot dog eating contest, just to keep it fair. The Warriors all have this maroon-pleather-vest-and-feathers theme, which severely amps up the gay meter of the movie. The gayness isn't outwardly addressed, and in fact the characters almost go out of their way to display their hetero-ness at times, but ultimately this isn't the questionably-offensive, civil-rights-for-all kind of gay. This, dear friends, is the comical kind of 70's gay, the kind flaunted about by the Village People and Doug Henning. What's more, the Warriors have beautiful, professionally-styled hair as a group, and the majority of them are shirtless beneath their vests, which must get really interesting in New York City by around February.

The Warriors, and every other meaningful gang in the city, send their nine "best" to a huge gangs-only rally in the Bronx. The rally was called by a charismatic gang leader named Cyrus, leader of the Riffs, who naturally all wear orange martial arts ghis. Cyrus has this grand plan to unite the gangs, overwhelm the cops, and control the city. The crazy little guy from Dreamscape then defies the weapons ban, shoots Cyrus, blames the Warriors, and before too long every gang in the city is after them for vengeance. This leads to the hook of the movie - can the Warriors make it, unarmed, from the extreme far north of the city, to the southern tip of Brooklyn, while every gang everywhere is looking for them?

Well, I won't spoil it for you, even though the movie is thirty years old. I will, however, say that the viewer is then treated to a ninety-or-so-minute episode chain of increasingly bizarre gangs menacing the Warriors in turn, while a quasi-omniscient disc jockey broadcasts veiled, and not-so-veiled, threats over the air. Each gang appears to be played by fabulously-haired suburban kids in what I imagine, by the quality of their acting and power of their presence, is their only feature film role. The hero of the film is played by Michael Somebody, who survived this movie being on his resume only long enough to do Xanadu, then disappear forever. He's a terrible actor, with what looks like one facial expression, that of a blank stare which I'm sure is supposed to be slightly menacing, no-nonsense pragmatism, but which really looks like a mouse trying to determine if that quivering house plant has a cat behind it. Also, his character's name is Swan.

Wait, Swan? You're a badass two-fisted gang leader and you call yourself Swan? What, were Grizzly and Rattlesnake and Panther and Werewolf all taken? Swan doesn't exactly strike pulsating waves of fear into the heart of the, say, Flatbush Avenue Gang. Maybe it's because of his long, graceful neck. I don't know, but I'll work with it.

His requisite love interest is a dirty hooker whose character name I've already forgotten, played by Deborah van Valkenburgh, who is possibly the most unattractive actress ever to get a gig as a female romantic lead. The random dirt smudges, bad attitude, Bride of Frankenstein hair, and a singularly unflattering choice of wardrobe don't do her any favors, either. Of course, Swan falls for her enthusiastically, as the script dictates I'm sure. In case you don't recognize her unwieldly name, her other great claim to cinematic fame was as the older, bookish, uptight daughter on Ted Knight's sitcom Too Close for Comfort, where she was overshadowed regularly by Jm J. Bullock, if that gives you any idea of the level of her acting chops or timing.

Lots of people between about 30 and 55 remember this movie, and the image which most recall is that of the Baseball Furies, the most distinctive of the gangs that chase the Warriors around. Their image is iconic: pinstripe Yankees uniforms, Mikado makeup, and baseball bats. They never spoke, which added to their menace - and they needed all the menace they could generate, because despite rising in pop culture as a symbol not only of this movie, but of random urban violence and the rise of brutal gang tactics in the late 70's, they were hopelessly inept as actual fighters. To wit: they manage to corner four Warriors (Swan, Snow, Ajax, and Cowboy) and lead them on a pretty impressively shot nighttime chase through Central Park, before finally the two gangs clash. Four Warriors, unarmed, against eight Baseball Furies, every one armed with Louisville Sluggers. Guess who wins. Go on, guess.

The Baseball Furies drop like pop flies. Despite their sound and fury, they end up signifying nothing, and in the end serve only as a plot device, written by someone who must have been a fan of both Kiss and Mickey Mantle, to explain why the Warriors carry around bats for the rest of the film. They also gave us a good fight scene, and sold lots of Halloween costumes, I'm sure. That should count for something.

At the end, and again without giving away anything not painfully obvious, the Warriors make it back to Coney Island. There, we're treated to several establishing shots of the suburban-looking-but-urbanesque Warriors, silhouetted against the . . . roller coaster. Okay, whatever, because then we get the Final Showdown, which gives us the other Warriors signature: the twerp from Dreamscape again, and recurring movie villain, chanting, "Warriors, come out and play-yay," over and over before they finally do. A few anticlimactic moments later, and we've got movie wrap.

Ultimately, I liked the movie, in a very guilty-pleasure sort of way. I'd seen it before, but not for several decades, so I'm glad I watched it again. I wonder if I have time to get a Baseball Furies uniform before Halloween?

More fun with mental gaps

2009-10-14T01:19:00.000-04:00

Last night, I stayed up late. I wrote my article for here, then did homework and got my professor-mandated journal up to date for my History of South Africa class, which was this morning. Jennifer went to bed early, so after I was done - at two-something a.m., I think - I crept in in the dark, loudly running in to the door in the process, slipped in to bed and went right to sleep. No problem.

This morning, I got up early and went to class. As an aside, we finally got to the section which I had been looking forward to since I saw this class on the schedule. I refer, of course, to Rorke's Drift. For those of you not up on your Michael Caine movies, the movie Zulu got me more than interested in the battle. It was Hollywoodized, of course, but not very badly and it's still a more than gripping story. I keep threatening to watch the movie again. Hell, I may even watch Zulu Dawn, which was a) made in the 70's, b) lacking Michael Caine, and c) not very good. It's actually a prequel, covering the Battle of Islandhwana, at which the British got dealt a rare ass-kicking, courtesy of twenty thousand screaming Zulu warriors.

But I digress.

My 12:30 class (Tudor England) was cancelled, so I came home for a bit between school and work. Jennifer was home today, and it is here where our scene begins.

She: I'm sorry I made you grumpy last night.

Me: You made me grumpy last night?

She: It's just that when you come in to bed that late I like to talk to you a little. I didn't mean to keep you awake.

Me: You kept me awake?

She: Yeah. You came in and laid down, and I asked you how you were doing and you didn't answer, so I told you that . . . (at this point, I honestly don't remember what it was she told me. I'm sure it was important and I'm sure I'll regret this later.) . . . and you still didn't respond and I knew you were faking. No one can fall asleep that quickly.

Me: Hm.

She: And so I called you a faker, and you grunted. I asked you if you were faking, and you said, "Urmhrmgrlbrlgrbrl, leave me alone I'm trying to sleep."

Me: I said that?

She: Yup.

Me: I remember absolutely none of that. Not one bit. This all sounds like you're talking about another person. I have a feeling that I was, you know, actually asleep, just that fast.

She: Wow.

And there you have it, folks. This is what happens when to me at 42 and without getting enough sleep. Not only does my already-iffy memory dwindle even more - as evidenced by the post from a few days ago, and the botched retelling earlier in this very article - but I also get to enjoy periodic lapses in consciousness and sleeptalking in sentences complete and coherent enough that they fool someone with a Master's Degree.

I've become a monster. Half Romero extra, half Ambien addict.

Into the abyss.

Musings about Facebook

2009-10-13T01:51:00.000-04:00

The first thing I'll say about Facebook is that if it were around when I was 20, things would have been a lot different. I would have gone out and done more things, I would have met more people and kept in touch with the ones I liked (or even tolerated), and I certainly would have had more girlfriends.

There is a funny thing about it, though, in how decisively it's redefining my social life. I have friends - good, long-term friends - with whom I have practically no contact, because they're not on Facebook. In the meantime, I have Facebook friends who I really don't know that well, but I know what's going on with them much more because they have a profile. Yes, I know we still have telephones and e-mail, and I use them, but it's not really worth calling or even e-mailing someone to find out the little, day-to-day peaks and valleys that actually do bring people closer together. Besides, some of them don't even have e-mail.

Now, I am a Facebook friend hoarder. I meet someone at a party, or sit next to them in class, and I friend them. I do this without shame. The downside is that I now have a litany of Facebook friends somewhere in the 200's. This is not bad, but it is a little weird.

Some people do regular cullings of their friends list. I am not one of these people. What I'd like to do is randomly (or not so randomly) pick people and just send them hello messages, seeing how they're doing and so on. These days, however, I'm now doing several daily chores which I didn't used to do - exercising, writing these, attempting to floss - so it's likely that this will end up atop the pile of other things that would be cool to do, if only I didn't need to do things like sleep, drive places, and obey the laws of the universe.

Today's story is on forgetfulness

2009-10-10T02:31:00.000-04:00

According to Myers-Briggs, I'm an INTP. Someone tried to convince me once that I am, in fact, and ENTP, because some book called that 'the absent-minded professor'. If it wasn't for the fact that I am most definitely not an Extrovert (which is the E, compared to the Introvert's I), I could almost believe them, and this story can almost explain why. I swear it's all true.

Last night, on my way home, I noticed I was getting low on gas. There's a 7-11 with gas pumps literally just around the corner from my house, so I figured I'd stop there and fill up. Of course, I did not - I got to thinking about Latin or South Africa or something, and I completely forgot to go. As I pulled in to the parking lot, I considered going back, but figured nah, I've got enough for tomorrow, and I'm tired, I'm going home.

You can probably see this coming. Mrs. White, my spacey Latin professor, has given us the day off (for reasons which I suspect include her being able to sleep in), so I did stuff around here until it was time for work. Again I forgot I was low on gas, and since I was running late, I figured I'd get it after I got off work. There's a gas station right around the corner from my work, too.

Not learning my lesson to save my life, apparently, I got in my truck and blissfully drove off, away from the gas station, before I realized the 'Check Gauge' light (which is a Ranger's way of saying 'Get gas, stupid') was on. At that point, I was on route 370, approaching Great Seneca Highway.

There's a funny thing about this area. It's the suburbs of a major sprawling metropolis, and there are therefore many gas stations all over everywhere - well, all over everywhere except for the black hole that is the area around 370 and Great Seneca Highway. Out there, it's Death Valley as far as gas stations are concerned. I knew if I turned right - toward home - I would most certainly not make it. In my mind, I thought that turning left would lead me in to Rockville, which, in my mind, was one long, wide, straight, abandoned highway lined with gas stations of every stripe as far as the eye can see.

So I turned left. Well, there are a lot of apartment buildings to the left. Offices, too. Apartments, offices, and parkland. I saw a Citibank, but otherwise there wasn't a neon sign until way beyond the point where I thought my truck would sputter and lurch and coast to a definite, defiant stop. I had to be on fumes. I was sure of it. I distinctly remember saying to myself at some point, "Oh, I'm so screwed."

Well, the anticlimax is that I found a Shell station, glided in, and filled up. As long as I'm here, though, I thought I'd share one final observation on gas stations: when I was a kid, we'd pull the Fairlane 500 in to a gas station, and an eager young entrepreneur in a paper hat would come bounding up to the driver's side window. "Can I check your oil? Clean your windshield? Back left tire looks a little low!" He'd fill us up, take the money with a smile, and wave as we drove off.

By the time I was driving, in the late 80's and early 90's, the gas station guy sat in a little glass house, waaaaaay over there. For a while, there was this sort of begging and shopping around you needed to do to be able to pump before you pay. Either way, the disinterested and gloomy night shift attendant, often with a half-smoked cigarette hanging straight down from his gaping lips, wordlessly took your money through the little tray beneath the bulletproof glass, and avoided eye contact at all cost. If you were lucky enough to go during the day, the main difference was that you had to walk inside for him to be disinterested in you, but on the upside you could buy a Snapple and a bag of Dorito's.

Tonight, as is often the case now, I didn't even see any other people. Human interaction has been entirely expunged from the procedure. I swiped my card, entered my ZIP code, pumped my gas, and left. The place could have been overrun by zombies, a la Shaun of the Dead, for all I know. Give it another decade, and I figure we'll either have industrial robots coordinate the whole ordeal, possibly in transit via some sort of refueling drogue, or else it will be Mad Max, and we'll be sopping up leaking gas from junked automotive carcasses to squeeze into our own tanks so we can get to work and back that day.

Anyway, I've gone from a rather humdrum end of my work shift, to placing myself in either a zombie film or a post-apocalyptic thriller, and all of it could have been avoided completely if I had just remembered to fill up. Such is life. Such is being 42.

What I've Learned

2009-10-09T02:17:00.000-04:00

Here's something I've learned: the most important thing to learn in university, aside from the actual classwork, is time management. I firmly believe that that's a big reason why you can tell if someone's been through college or not, just based on how they run their day. College seems to be a never-ending thread of timing yourself; when to get to class, when to read your homework, when to work on your paper. Beyond that, there's when to go see the advising, and it can only be when they're open; I need to see my professor, but only during his office hours; is the library open, what about the book store, and do I have enough time to get across campus to buy the last book I need and still be able to get to class early enough that I won't be stuck with that one last wobbly chair next to the air conditioner in the back of the room.

Now, I've always been the kind of person who finds it much easier to concentrate than to multi-task, and I'm getting older, which exacerbates that tendency. All of this combines to mean that I occasionally forget to do the simplest things for days, weeks, lo there even months, right up until the point that the nasty letter arrives in the mail. It's not pretty.

This is all on my mind today because I just read that early registration for spring (!) is going to start later this month. That means I need to get to the History Advising department during their hours, find someone to go over what I need to graduate, and sign up for them. I'm taking a winter class as well; I have a tentative, grunting approval from my boss to take a class that eats a little into my work schedule, so that gives me some leverage.

Last year, they offered 'The History of Rock and Roll'. I so, so, soooo hope they do that again.

No Credit and Old School

2009-10-08T01:41:00.001-04:00

Okay, first off: I'll never understand the whole concept of taking a class for no credit. I get that the pressure of grading is off, but don't you want it to show up on your transcript at all? That seems like the equivalent of just sitting in the back of a lecture hall on your time off, and learning about Greek mythology or something without even enrolling.

I think I'm going to get the movie Old School and watch it again, now that my perspective has changed. It's been several years since I've seen it, but given that I'm sort of living that movie I should probably check it out. I don't remember too much of it - mostly I remember the frat party scene. I have to admit I sometimes wonder what a modern frat party would be like, but then I realize a) no one's going to invite me, and b) I'm not convinced I'd even go. I can think of few situations in which I'd feel more out of place than a frat party; I'm about twice their age. I'd feel (and probably look) like someone's Dad, coming in to make sure Kiddo gets the Buick home by eleven.

Of course, I have no idea when I'd whittle out a two-hour block to watch the movie, but I can at least get it and put it on the computer - or better yet, the iPod. And fear not; a full review is forthcoming.

About Health

2009-10-07T02:38:00.000-04:00

So, I didn't write an article last night. As it happens, I hurt my back over the weekend, and spent a bit of time on painkillers. I missed school both yesterday and today, as I doubt my fellow drivers would appreciate me hurling my truck at them while I was loopy on Norco. I think it was just a sprain, relatively minor as back pain goes, and I'm now off of the painkillers (ibuprofen excepted), and I'll be back in the saddle again, as they say, tomorrow.

This is another of those wonderful aspects of being old(er) and back in school - the bod breaks down more easily. One of my twenty-something classmates recently lamented on her Facebook status update how she absolutely must have five hours of sleep during school, but while she's on summer vacation, it's so easy to live on just two. Some day, twenty years or so from now, perhaps she will see that Facebook status update and scoff, much as I am scoffing now. In fact, maybe I'll call her from the retirement home or golf course or wherever I am, and remind her. Fact is, to a forty-something but me, five hours is the bare minimum (and probably all I'll get tonight, if I'm lucky), and two hours is a nap. I know in my head that, at that age, I could survive stupid-crazy sleep schedules like that too, but I still can't wrap my noodle around how it could possibly be done. It's simply alien to me now.

I have another topic, which actually dovetails nicely into this one. Rather than listen to my boss and co-workers yammer, I will crawl inside a podcast or my iPod playlist whenever possible while I'm at work. A few days ago, I was listening to Bill Maher on his HBO show, and as his final point he was talking about health care and made a point with which I agreed so much, I thought it would bear repeating. There is an awful lot of back-and-forth about health care right now, and what the government is doing to make us healthy, but not a lot of people looking at themselves and wondering what they could be doing to make themselves healthy. The most obvious culprit, as any of you who live in or have even heard of the United States have probably already guessed, is fat.

We're a fat country. We almost worship fat. Companies make a lot of money by selling us giant lumps of fat, and we eat them. Everyone knows that eating Double Big Bacon Classics with Cheese will make your arteries harden up until they're the consistency of mechanical pencils, but there are still lines at the Wendy's drive-thru every day. We're constantly bombarded with images of horrendously fattening food, and many of those have now wormed their way so far into our culture that we don't even think about it any more. This, of course, is just what the fast-food companies want.

The real kick in the teeth here is that there is a whole 'nother industry that tells us fat is bad, bad bad bad, and they'll be more than happy to help us lose it for a fee. The confidence tricksters and bunko artists infesting this business is second to none - just watch a few late-night TV ads for fat burning pills and you'll see what I mean. They apparently lose no sleep in implying, or outright telling us, that if we buy this machine, or take this pill, or use this system, we'll look like the professional fitness model they hired for their photo sesson. They like to leave out the part about how the model also works out six hours a day and has been altered by everyone from a makeup artist to a Photoshop wizard in post-production.

In fact, the only way to get in shape is to, in the words of my ex-fitness-instructor friends Dan, "eat less and move more". That's it, that's all, simple in its conception but oh so difficult in its execution. For a long time, I've known all of this stuff in my thinking brain, but I never quite moved it up to the back burner. However, I think Bill Maher (of all people) may be responsible for me finally trying to find a way to get it done. Well, Bill Maher, and the fact that I'm getting really tired of getting winded so easily and I'm in a long-term refusal to admit that I'm just getting old.

I did a mile walk on my break at work tonight. I'm going to work it up so I'm running at least part of that, if not all, and then make it longer and longer. Tonight was not a banner night for my don't-eat-that self-discipline, but I'm working toward that too. I have a history of starting things like this and then letting them peter out over time, but I like to say I'm getting better with that these days - after all, I've kept up this blog for a couple of weeks now. That's a good sign.

Wish me luck.

Peacock on a Tear

2009-10-02T01:21:00.000-04:00

Mrs. Peacock came storming in to class today, and threw her assignment book on the podium with a smack. "Uh-oh," the girl next to me said, "I think she's in a bad mood."

That was an understatement. Apparently her soon-to-be-ex-husband, or his attorney, or the state of Maryland did something to make her mid-divorce life hell. I know this because she told us. Several times. Then she warned everyone not to get married in Maryland, because the divorce laws are Byzantine. Wow. Understandably pessimistic, but it gets better. She had apparently had "two cups of strong coffee" this morning, and is 700 (!) e-mails behind, and was - in her own words - "on a tear". She was, too - at one point, she called out a couple of students she suspected of web surfing during her lecture. We all survived, though, and at the end she declared that she felt a lot better. I guess lecturing on Thomas Cranmer and Henry VIII's wedding to Anne Boleyn is therapeutic for her.

Compared to that, my second class, South Africa with Professor Plum (the jerk) was relatively mundane.

So, no article tomorrow. I'm heading out to Hagerstown, Maryland, which is an interesting amalgam of transplanted big-city commuters and entrenched mouth-breathing rednecks, for the weekend with a bunch of friends. There are friends coming from as far off as Boston, and some new people I haven't yet met. It should be a good time. Back on Monday!

White and Green

2009-10-01T01:11:00.000-04:00

So, my other two professors.

This morning, as I was getting ready to leave, I got an e-mail from my Latin professor, whom I will call Mrs. White. The e-mail said that, since the class tanked so badly as a group, she was going to make all of us retake the test, and have another one to boot. Every test now is not only open-book, but take-home, and she is making herself available for in-her-office tutoring sessions. Then we went to class and she repeated the whole thing. I think she was as irritated as she ever gets; she's a pretty effervescent sixties leftover - if you remember from earlier articles, she's the one who sings the translations to us, just to be bubbly.

Then she introduced Jose, our TA. He seems a nice enough guy, with sideburns and a mustache, and apparently a burgeoning love for all things Latin. Go figure. Anyway, Mrs. White did this go-around-the-room-and-introduce-yourself bit, the first part of which was "age". Now, I don't shy away from telling people I'm 42, but I don't run around offering it either. People tend to think I'm younger (and Mrs. White was no exception, apparently) and I'm just fine with that. Anyway, there's a 41 in class too, and I put her in her thirties, tops, so there you have it.

Mr. Green teaches the History of Technology. It's an odd class by design, with a lot of information that overlaps other classes. Seriously, I think half of the classes I've ever taken have taught me the history of the arch and the vault and the flying buttress. Also, every week we're supposed to write an article about what we learned the previous week (okay) and he'll sometimes read the really intriguing ones out loud. Today, though, he flipped that, and brought the whole class's attention to one student who wrote about the bronze production in the African nation of Benin. Problem was, he didn't actually write anything, but instead just posted a link to an article about bronze production in . . . Cyprus. Mr. Green asked him where the Benin information was, and the student said "it's in there". Mr. Green said, "no it isn't", and then the room was deathly quiet for about two or three minutes as this one student - who screwed up, sure - was totally lost. It was kind of humiliating, I thought, and unnecessary.

And Mr. Green does this weird thing - he has a hearing problem, so he gets super close to you when you try to answer. I've started talking in my RADIO ANNOUNCER VOICE to him, just because it's creepy to have his face three inches from mine. I guess there isn't much he can do about it, but it's just unnerving.

I went to Mrs. White's in-office tutorial, which was just us going over all of the same stuff, only in her very small, cluttered office. She has books everywhere, and on the other side of the room, one empty and dust-covered bookshelf. Hmm.

Anyway, now you've met my four professors. Tomorrow: a paper outline is due, and I just realized after weeks of planning that my concept doesn't work. Ah well, another adventure.

Plum and Peacock

2009-09-30T00:51:00.000-04:00

I am slowly coming to the realization that my History of South Africa Professor - whom I will call Professor Plum, is apparently a very good teacher, in addition to being a jerk. His tenacity at insisting that we keep up with the reading and cover the material is far beyond that exhibited by any other professors I have (or have had), and it pays off. His students, however, either have or must quickly develop a thick skin, because he does speak to us like we're idiots or children, even those of us who are neither.

This is actually my second year at Maryland, and last year I had a professor - Miss Scarlet - who, if our paths crossed in something besides a teacher-student relationship, I could see becoming friends with. I'm probably, if anything, older than she was (is), and she seemed nice and thoughtful and would be fun to be around. I hold Plum in direct contrast to her, in that I wouldn't last ten minutes in a room with him at a party before rolling my eyes in abject disgust, labeling him a blowhard, and probably going home early. That said, both Scarlet and Plum are equally competent teachers, as far as I can tell after having Plum for only a month.

My second class today - Tudor England, taught my Mrs. Peacock - is the one in which I had the terrible sleepiness problem. I may have solved that today, by simply taking a seat right up front. Actually, it is beyond the front, in her area, against the opposite wall, so I'm almost standing behind her. With her being so close, I basically have no place to hide, and the entire class looking my way as well. I did everything I could - almost including the Clockwork Orange-style eye-openers - and I made it through class. Huzzah.

It's also becoming painfully obvious that she's going through a nasty divorce. She's made little snide comments about how he apparently has just dumped her after x number of years, and he's a creep, and he's saying all sorts of mean things now, and so on. Today, she referred to him as "my hopefully soon-to-be ex-husband". It might be funny in a sitcom or a Judd Apatow movie, but here it's just uncomfortable, especially since it was only a few years ago that I lived through that myself. Not fun.

The bad news is that I didn't realize the deadline for the Big Paper outline was due so soon. Thursday! Ack!

Cue Daniel Powter

2009-09-29T00:56:00.000-04:00

So, I had a bad day.

Specifically, it was a bad day at work. It wasn't anything big or ground-breaking - no one died, for example, or lost any limbs - but just a collection of those little things that make a bad day at work just that. Everyone's had them - today, it was the machines being difficult, internal customers being idiots, me running late, the vending machine, the rain, and probably a few other things. Just normal bad day stuff, that probably irritates me more than it should. Such is life.

But when you're in school also, everything snowballs. The trick is to stick to my schedule, which isn't easy when all I really want to is go home and watch the Cowboys-Panthers game. I have found that, when juggling both work and school, the most important thing (for me, anyway) is to do the same thing, the same way, every time. I try always to do my Latin translation at this time, and my History of South Africa reading at that. It doesn't always work out, but if I just trust fate that I can do them whenever, the wheels fall off, quickly.

So anyway, I left work early (because I could), and am writing a somewhat abbreviated article tonight. Tomorrow should be more chill.

I hope.

Football!

2009-09-26T03:36:00.002-04:00

I love football. I'll get that out of the way right at the start. I look forward to the start of the season all year. It's as much like watching a civilized, standardized form of team gladiatorial warfare, where the point is not to kill but the drive back. At first, it may look just like 22 people running in to each other and falling down, over and over and over, but if you know the rules and formations and players and strategies and nuances of what otherwise looks like a brawl, it is gripping. I would love to go take in a live game on campus; I see Maryland football players every now and then on campus, invariably wearing a 'Maryland Football' t-shirt, and even more invariably being much larger and in much better shape than I will ever be. I might - might - be able to hold my own in a brute power pushing exercise with one of the least mountainous linemen, but I would have zero actual technique, and after about five minutes of that I'd have an oxygen mask on me like my own personal Alien facehugger. Another five and I would simply implode.

No, I am the spectator born. I would love to make it to a Maryland home game, but I simply don't have the time; between work and school and catching up in school and normal household stuff and the weak remaining shadow of a social life that I have, I just can't make the commitment. Plus, the ticket system rewards the students who can show up each and every game, without fail - they need the bleachers filled for the TV audience, I suppose, and I just can't do that. Of course, it may be just as well, because I understand the team is somewhat underwhelming this year. And by underwhelming, I mean it looks like they stink.

In lieu of being able to go to Maryland games, I turn to my old friend, the NFL. I can easily drain a day away watching three games in succession, even if they're teams I don't particularly care about, or don't have a ghost of a chance at the Playoffs. (Jags-Bucs? I'm there!) It's also a God-given right to doze off on the couch during the long-shadowed third quarter of a Sunday late game.

I do, however, have some footballish standards, and pretty clear ideas on what I like and don't like about American professional football. Teams should have logos on their helmets. Team names should end in 's' and should not consist of a sleazy pun based on your city name. Teams should not be named after derogatory terms for an entire nationality, nor should they be named after animals that don't live in the area where they play. Each team should have their own color scheme, and limits should be placed on how many teams can use black, teal, or the combination of blue and silver, in their jerseys. We should drastically increase the number of teams fire cannons off at every touchdown, how often the refs get to use the term "he was giving him the business" as a legitimate penalty, how many team mascots get to perform security duties on the field, and how many drunken sixties-era quarterbacks are interviewed on screen. That's just gold.

There is, however, one particular topic that I feel more strongly about than any other. There is an angry abscess growing upon the NFL, and I feel that it is enough of a plague upon this beloved sport that I call attention to it. Therefore, for public consumption, I call your attention to this league-wide problem, in an article I like to call . . .

Why I Hate The Raiders

I've been a Chiefs fan since I was a kid. The original reason was pretty simple; I was the youngest of four and desperately wanted something to set myself apart from my brother and sisters; what I hit on was that I was the only one born in Kansas City. The fact that we moved away when I was still in a basinet didn't matter to me one bit. Plus, they had bright red jerseys and weapons on their helmets. To a 10-year-old, that's enough of a reason. I learned names like Dawson, Buchanan, Stenerud, and Stram, and off I went.

As I got older, of course, that wasn't enough. I discovered that in order to justify liking an out-of-state (and even out-of-conference) team, you need a reason, lest you become That Guy. If I had to answer someone why I was a Chiefs fan in Maryland with the same kiddish responses, I'd become That Guy. That Doofus Guy. That Idiot Guy. That Guy Who You Might As Well Stop Talking About Football To Because He's A Moron Guy.

I certainly don't like the team because of the players. Face it; the players are essentially a collection of millionaire merceneries bound by volumes of laws and only hired after weeks of negotiation. Perhaps back in the Dawson days, you could like a team just for the players, but no more. Case in point: Tony Gonzalez. No one sums up the image of the quintessential Chiefs player over the last ten years or so than him. He was unequalled as a tight end, is surely bound for Canton, and is team-oriented, philanthropic, a nice guy by all reports, and he saved that one choking dude's life in the restaurant. And where is he now? Atlanta. What, am I supposed to become a Falcons fan now? I don't think so. (If nothing else, the boring-ugly black uniforms have too much Buddy Ryan stench left on them.)

It can't be a winning record; that'd make me a fair-weather fan (even the Lions have fans, or so I've heard). Lots of teams have nice stadiums, or good cities, or pretty cheerleaders. Quality of tailgate, while important, isn't quite enough to like a whole team. I've even heard of people who base what team they like by which mascot would win in a fight, sort of like Spike's Deadliest Warrior, only with more authentic science. This is, of course, idiotic, because it would ensure there would be nothing but Jets fans, which is a horrible fate indeed.

Lucky for me I just happened to like a team owned by Lamar Hunt. Now, there's someone I can rally around. He founded the AFL. About half of the teams in the league now owe him their existence, in one way or another. He stood up to the established, old-codger-ish NFL and its stable of dirty tricks. He was upfront when they were underhanded. He persisted in the face of low attendance, a skeptical fan base, and sniggering superiorists insisting that the AFL was the junior league. He also organized the merger of the AFL and NFL in 1970, and coined the term 'Super Bowl'. Everything he did was for the betterment of the game itself; his own personal success was a nice side effect for him. He was honest, upright, tough, sensible, and loyal. What's not to like?

The answer to that, of course, is Al Davis. A greater contrast in personalities could not be scripted by the best writers in Hollywood. Davis has consistently sought to line his own pockets, even if that's at the expense of the NFL. He started as a head coach, but as AFL commissioner, he started using dirty tricks himself. Instead of recruiting college players, he instead poached established NFL players and lured the over with promises of cash. He opposed the merger, and when he was outvoted, he took his ball and went home, resigning as commissioner. He snatched control of the Raiders away from one of the other owners by filing a motion on him while he was out of the country. He testified against the NFL in the USFL lawsuit. He's marched his team out of town in a huff, then marched them back in a bigger huff, and when he didn't get his way, sued cities, sued the league, sued everybody. He's also power-hungry, remaining as GM even though he stinks as it. He overpays his rookies, uncaring of the shockwaves that sends through the system. He name-calls when someone quits, and he holds contracts hostage.

Now, a lot of people call Davis 'a firebrand', or 'controversial', which really amounts to him being 'a giant pain in the ass' - that, by the way, refuses to go away, since he's sworn not to retire until he either gets two more rings, or drops dead. I can't really bring myself to wish death upon the guy, but can we craft him to special rings, in the hopes that may he'll be happy with that and retire? Finally? Please?

So I have nothing against the citizens of Oakland (except maybe for that "Woo-wooo" guy), or the Raiders fans, or players, or the colors black and silver. I do still think Jack Tatum was a worthless thug, but he's long gone. I even think it's kind of funny when guys dress up as Skeletor or a witch doctor or some sort of spiked alien robot in the Oakland end zone on game day. I just can't stand to see the Raiders win anything, because I know it's giving more credence and satisfaction to a guy who has done all he could to bring down the NFL in the name of his own interests. That's why it exceptionally pains me to see all of their records, to know that Davis outlived Rozelle, to know that they've won more Super Bowls than the Chiefs have, and to see their awful team beat the Chiefs' awful team in Arrowhead last Sunday. A more cynical person than I would claim that as evidence that there is no God, but I'll just leave it at "it's not right" . . . and "Al Davis is an unapologetic, greedy, geriatric, power-hungry sewer rat".

Perhaps after Davis does retire (or die) my vitriol will recede somewhat. Who knows. I may also hold an irrational grudge until I die . . . or win two rings.

The Sleepy Back Row

2009-09-25T01:39:00.000-04:00

I forced myself out of bed this morning - beating back the screaming voice that demanded I return to the lovely Narnia-like world under the covers - and stumbled my way around the house until I was dressed and ready to go. Bleary-eyed, I made it to school, lugging my computer bag over one shoulder, and trundled my way in to my History of South Africa class.

There, we covered the Zulus, which I was glad to finally get to. I admit it; I'm a Shaka fan-boy. The man was awesome, at least up until his mother died and he went crazy. I really liked his earlier work, though, so now that we're past all of this now-it's-Dutch-now-it's-English hullabaloo and got to the real meat of the history - that is, Impis running wild - I'm much more into it. Also, Tiffany, my classmate from last semester, told me she has the notes for the one class I'm missing, and she'll photocopy them for me. Outstanding. High five, Tiff.

Still tired, though, I spend my hour and change between classes trying to figure out how to sleep in one of the wooden study carrels in the library. It didn't work; I just don't bend that way any more. So I did some homework, and read some, and it was time for class.

'Class', in this case, was the History of Tudor England. Now, my professor there is extremely knowledgeable and has a well-deserved reputation for going the extra mile for her students. Ryan, my other last-semester classmate with whom I still converse, had her for a class last semester and sings her praises. From what I can tell, he's right.

I do have a criticism, however. Case in point: today, I am walking back from the library. It's an early-afternoon (12:30) class, so people like me who didn't get enough sleep and woke up early are starting to feel it. It's also insufferably hot today - despite it being, you know, autumn - and the room, which has 35 or so people crammed in, is pretty warm. Then, the first thing she does is turn off all the lights, so we can watch slides. Here's Henry VIII at three. Here he is as a teenager. Here's Cardinal Wolsey. Here's Cardinal Wolsey's house. It continues.

I can't stress enough how good a teacher she appears to be, but a dynamic speaker she's not. She doesn't talk to us or question us or involve us or, as far as I can tell, see us at all; she just speaks. She speaks right out of the apparently unalterable playbook. I get the feeling that we're about the twentieth semester to hear this lecture and, between her delivery, the warmth, the hour, and the darkness, we're fading.

I was doing the head-bob thing, and felt myself go several times. The funny thing was, this time, that I looked to my left and right and my whole row was nodding off. The girl next to me had her head down on her desk, bent in the way I no longer can, and looked she tried to get some quality sleep but couldn't.

I don't know if any teachers do, or will ever, read this, but if you do, please, please, oh please, spruce things up as much as you can. Talk to us, keep things lively, whatever you can do. At the very least, keep the lights on.

I should wear my Siouxsie shirt more often

2009-09-24T00:42:00.000-04:00

So I wore my Siouxsie and the Banshees t-shirt to school this morning. I rather like my Siouxsie t-shirt - it's comfortable, distinctive and, best of all, black. Plus, I like Siouxsie and the Banshees, and have no problem advertising them on my person. Off I went.

After my second class - The History of Technology, with Professor Gumby - one of the nineteen-or-so-year-old fellow students catches up to me on the way out. "Do you like punk rock? I'm writing a paper on the history of punk rock."

"Sure," I replied. "I listened to them a lot when I was growing up."

"Cool. What are you, like 23, or 24?"

I will take a moment here to say that there are certain moments in life when, in what was until then a mundane, normal day, something happens so stupefying, so mind-warping, and so conscience-spinning, that no matter what you say, you will, with absolute certainty, later think of some sharp retort or brilliant witticism that would far outshine what you actually end up saying. This was one of those moments for me. "Sure, in dog years" would have worked - as would have "Only if I was born a high school senior", "Yes, I am, because I lived on Saturn and the years are longer there", and my personal favorite, "I've got t-shirts older than that."

As it happened, I managed to keep from either laughing, spit-taking, hugging him, or simply fainting, and just whimpered out, "No, I'm 42."

"Hmm," he replied.

We talked for ten minutes or so on the history of punk rock, and how it got diluted the farther west it went, and the New York hard core scene in the 80's, and how badly the Sex Pistols actually sucked, and then I had to work. I thought about it later, and realized that, in thinking back to when I was 19 or 20 or whatever he is, that people that age have no real concept of the difference between 24 and 42. It would have been super-special if someone who was, say, 30, mistook me for 24, but whatever. I don't care. I'm totally not picky. At its basic roots level, I had someone think I was 24 years old, and that suits me just fine.

Trickery!

2009-09-23T00:42:00.001-04:00

So I was rused.

My History of South Africa Professor had no quiz in mind for us at all - it was just a ploy to get us all there, so he could tell us . . . to all show up. Seriously. So I stayed up until 4:30 reading all that stuff that I could have read this weekend, for nothing. Nice. Silver lining: Tiffany, another history major with whom I had two classes last semester, is still in the South Africa class. Note sharing, ahoy!

Another interesting side effect is that we did learn about the clicking noises that various southern African tribal lan guages have for various words. There are three of them, the only one of which I'm ever likely to see again being the 'Xh', for example in 'Xhosa'. I was inclined to just pronounce it like a 'Z', but apparently not.

The professor for my second class - the History of Tudor England - takes roll every day. As she was reading it today, I heard another familiar name - Devon, with whom I had an American History class two semesters ago, in my first semester at Maryland. Like Tiffany, she's young and blonde and perky and pretty, and I took a moment while the professor was speaking to Facebook-friend her. If nothing else, it keeps me from having to introduce myself to a total stranger, and she seems like a nice person besides. Hopefully she's not a serial killer, and if she is, hopefully she's not a very good one.

Now, I know that technically, we're not supposed to be surfing the web while the Prof is lecturing. It says so right there in the syllabus. My decision to do so anyway was hinged on three factors; a) It's sort of for class, for the note-sharing again, 2) it only took a minute, and 3) I was falling asleep because I only had 2-1/2 hours of sleep, thanks to my other professor. So blame him. I do.

Anyway, I felt better about it when Devon accepted the Facebook-friend request . . . also during class. It's good to know I'm not the only one on Facebook while the professor professes. Tee hee.

Screwing Forthcoming

2009-09-22T01:07:00.000-04:00

I did have grandiose plans for a nice long article tonight, but alas my chowderheaded professor just informed us of a pop quiz tomorrow morning. Nice of him to send out the e-mail the night before, while some of us are at work until midnight. Oh well, no one to blame but myself for falling a little behind on the reading.

So I'll be up until like 3 or 4, reading and taking notes. I'll bet you all a dollar that he wants us to read from our notes, even though my notes are on my computer, which he doesn't allow in class. I'll bet I get screwed in that regard.

But what can you do. I still force myself to remember that the worst college professor is nothing compared to the average dead-end power-clawing desperate manufacturing plant middle manager - under whom I will work forever if I don't get this degree.

See you all tomorrow.

Quiz!

2009-09-19T01:38:00.000-04:00

Today's quiz (the first of the semester, of any class) was not very hard. My hippie-dippy sing-song Latin teacher let us make it open book, which is to say she might as well give everyone A's. Apparently she's the kind of teacher that would much rather have you learn the material, than justify an A, and I must say that I like that kind of teacher (as does my report card).

Here's one thing the youngsters don't need to deal with as much: health. Not so much the kind of health where you get the flu a lot, or have to eat a quarry full of vitamins every day, or have a "procedure" done at the local hospital once every year or five. No, I'm talking about the kind where little things start to creak and groan; I find it, for example, much more uncomfortable to sit in those damn wooden desk-chair things that seem to be required furniture for every teaching establishment anywhere ever, going back, I'm pretty sure, to the dawn of time.

Today I hurt my arm. Well, it actually happened over the last two days, because I work in a printing plant and we (meaning I) have to move around a lot of heavy metal plates. I think it's just a simple muscle strain, and give me a few days R&R and I'll be good as new. I made the mistake of telling my boss, however, and after the little bit where he intones that she must report it (them's the rules). What follows is at least a half hour, probably closer to 45 minutes, of the two of us trying to decipher the Worker's Comp form. Then she had to call them and talk to a real live person and answer all the questions over again, plus more. All over a sore bicep. I shoulda just kept my mouth zipped up.

So I consoled myself by flashing back to my childhood for a bit. Remember all those Tonka fire trucks? Pumpers, ambulances, tankers, hook-and-ladders? Well, I just happened to be printing a job tonight for an association of fire chiefs, and there was an ad for a fire truck company. They have a web site, at svitrucks.com. Oh boy, I'm five again! They even have a boat!

2009-09-18T12:53:00.000-04:00

It occurs to me that it may get a little confusing with the date - when it says "Wednesday", that's actually Tuesday's article. My life and schedule being what it is, I'm usually writing in the wee hours of the morning.

That said, this is not one of those times. I am actually writing this - Thursday's article - on Friday afternoon. This is because I stayed up until two-something last night reading and memorizing and drilling and driving myself insane with Latin, after which I simply dropped into bed and passed out. Four hours later, I had to get up today for the first quiz of the semester. Wait until you see me at a real test, or even worse, a full-fledged exam. Like, with essays. I end up obsessed, unkempt, and babbling - like a mix between Young Einstein and George 'The Animal' Steele.

But I digress.

Thursday morning, I left early, expecting pulsating throngs of glassy-eyed Obamites to be clogging every artery and pathway into or out of the campus. I expected orange-vested volunteers, with glowing cones in their hands, guiding bewildered travelers to alternative overflow parking section 6000, from which they could take the complimentary but overcrowded shuttle bus to the arena. I expected Woodstock.

And I got none of it. It looked like Thursday. I parked in the same spot I always park in (right under the streetlamp, so I can find the truck more easily) and sauntered right in to class. Plenty of time.

In class, we learned more about South Africa - currently, the Dutch and English have moved in and they are now, separately and together, clashing and mixing with several different strains of natives, all of whom are also clashing and mixing with each other. It's a mess down there around 1800, but I can't help but to think that compared to the other nations in which the same kind of colonialism happened, the South African colonials did all right. Not perfect, maybe not even very good, but I'm noticing a distinct lack of, for example, mass murders.

I also learned something about my professor - he's kind of an ass. To wit: we have audio clips, read by him, of the diary of a gold mining expedition that trekked inland in Ye Olde Days. During the course of the semester, we'll be discovering more and more about what went on in this trek, as an example of relations there. No problem. Well, one of the characters is referred to as "Mister D. Francis" - or possibly "Mister DeFrancis." There is another character named "Francis", who may or may not be the same person. It's confusing, but it would be pretty clear if we were reading the diary, rather than him reading it to us over the Internet.

Now, I would think that if we were to study this historically, we should have access to the original medium - that is, the writings, in which it would be clear if his name was D. Francis, or DeFrancis. But no. When asked, he, with rather a significant amount of smarm, obstinately said that he would not release the written transcripts (even though some words are also hard to make out, for the sound quality), and furthermore we should all (including those of me who asked the question) feel like morons for not knowing - presumably by magic - what this dude's name is.

But what can you do about a teacher that may be a good teacher, but that you just don't like? I've had them before, as have many, many other students, and I'm sure I'll have them again. I think the best you can do is to suck it up and withstand them. After all, college prepares you for "the real world" and, having been in it for a while, I can say that even the most difficult and porcupiney professors ain't got nuthin' on my old boss, who we regularly referred to as 'the Ogre'.

The Fair

2009-09-17T11:25:00.002-04:00

Today started rather mundanely, and I did pretty well with my Latin translations in my first class. At one point, the professor asked, "How many of you are over 19?" and then, gesturing at me, said "Oh, I'm sure you are." It's pretty obvious, but that was more center-stage-y than I usually like to be. Maybe it's because I didn't shave today, and the beard stubbles has little flecks of white. That, by the way, is most of why I usually shave every day. My phone vibrated in class; I ignored it.

In my second class, the History of Technology, I was surprised not only by the fact that the professor knew my name, but asked me to summarize my discussion topic (the development of the Welsh/English longbow) for everyone. Again with the spotlight. I won't say I dislike being the center of attention, but it's not my usual state. Anyway, I must admit to a certain amount of pompous pride that I apparently did something right.

As I left class, I was drawn to a peculiar university tradition, that being when they line the main mall's walkways with display tables and eager volunteers, advertising every extracurricular activity and giving away buckets of free Starbursts to any who will listen to their spiel. I decided to go ahead and give it a walk and see who was where. It was, to begin with, crowded, which the university outdoors rarely is, even between classes. I had my huge computer bag over my shoulder, and I must have bumped a dozen people just in the first row. Everything about it shouted "We're on a budget", from the identically colored balloons spaced at equal intervals, to the aforementioned Starburst 'prizes', to the wooden flaking fold-up conference tables that look like they've been left out in the rain once a year since the Carter administration.

I headed down Activities Row, or whatever they called it, glancing quickly at each display, and feeling quite sorry for the lone nerd who had to pilot the predictably underdecorated and extremely undervisited Math Club table. The big center tent had a lot of outgoing collegiates shouting carnival-barker invitations for anyone to "Answer some questions! Win a prize", of which I did neither. I collided with more humanity, picked up some free post-it pads and a pen from the Department of Business Services (e.g. the campus printer), and escaped.

I dug out my phone and checked my message - it's my boss. Apparently the first-shift guy at my work called in, and she asked if I could come in early. I bought the last of my books at the book store (where I did run in to Ryan, from two articles ago, a very good guy), and headed to work. With that, the interesting bits of my day come to a screeching halt, because it's, you know, work.

Tomorrow Obama is speaking at the Comcast Center, which is on University grounds. Traffic is promising to be a nightmare. I leave work an hour early and go home.

Time, and swords

2009-09-16T00:34:00.003-04:00

My goodness, but did last night's article stink. I was dog tired, but I wanted to write something. I'm surprised it's coherent, and in English. Life moves on.

Today, life moved on in the form of me sleeping through my classes. I actually got up in sort of time, but then fell asleep on the couch while I was in mid-getting ready. Maybe I need an alarm clock down there now. I hope not.

One common complaint I hear about the education system is how it spends so much time and effort teaching us things that we'll never use again. Poor Mrs. Borelli, for example, went to such great lengths back in the day to ensure that we all knew and could recite the quadratic equation, which I still remember but have had absolutely no use for. So, while this is partly true, I think this is mostly applicable to the dreaded core requirement classes - once you get in to your field, things get pretty useful, even interesting. Beyond that, though, there are all of those things college teaches you that aren't part of the syllabus - social skills, critical thinking, how to deal with a thundrously frustrating bureaucracy, and, of course, time management.

It is this last discipline that I needed the most today. Here I had a day with nothing, but nothing, to do until I had to be at work at three. Sure, I'll pay for it later, but at the moment it was utterly free time, which I rarely have. So I slept. But then, after that, I got up and organized just about everything - I know have lists and charts and schedules about when to do what reading and which studying and by when I need to write the first two little paper-like things. I also read some and translated even more Latin.

So there won't be any pithy observations today, because I didn't observe any people. I did, however, just
now observe an article on CNN, on which I feel compelled to comment: it seems a 21-year-old Johns Hopkins chemistry student used a samurai sword to kill a burglar. That's right - a samurai sword. As it happened, the student's house was just burglarized earlier that day to the tune of two laptops and a PlayStation. He hears someone in the garage, goes to check it out, and brings his katana along. You can't be too safe, I suppose. Anyway, there's Johnny Burglar - freshly released from prison Saturday, by the way - crouching under a counter, caught in the act. Whatcha doin' down there, asks the Shogun. The robber answers by inadvisably lunging (dude, he's got a sword), and swishity. Burglar loses a hand, gets all sliced up in the chest, and dies just as the cops show up.

Now, far be it from me to make light of the death of a fellow human being, but I would like to express one thought, and that thought would be, "Zowie." That's a hell of a way to go. There is something intrinsically terrifying about a sword that most other weapons, and I'd include guns along with this, just don't have. A few other weapons - axes, crowbars, chainsaws, that sort of thing - have that capability to instill fear not just in the receiver of the business end, but in anyone who witnesses it, who hears the screams, or who reads the newspaper article about it later. Generally speaking, if you're facing down a weapon which is regularly and wistfully cited by Dawn of the Dead and 28 Days Later fans as the one they'd most want to have during the imminent zombpocalypse, run.

I also would bet the people in that house could leave their door unlocked and open, with all the lights on, and with a top-of-the-line laptop pulsating with blue cosmic power right there on the front doorstep, in full view of the entire neighborhood, and everything will still be safe and sound in the morning, right where they left it. Word must travel fast back at the Thieves' Den.

Finally, the line of the day: "[The police spokesman] said he did not know why the student kept a sword." Apparently, the burglar didn't expect it, either - otherwise, he would have brought - oh, I don't know - a shield.

What to avoid, part one

2009-09-15T00:40:00.000-04:00

So, I have been known to frequent an Internet message board or two from time to time (read: daily), and on one of them, one of the other long-time members was on the verge of returning to school. As he is in his late twenties (which, to him, constitutes being "older"), he was asking for advice from others who went back to school. One piece of advice, with which I totally agree, was "lose the idea that you're smarter than everyone else, just because you're older."

Now, I have to think that in this case (and this case only), it's actually easier to go back to college at 42 than at, say, 27. At least for me, it is. When I was 27-ish, I would have been completely convinced that I was smarter than everyone else around me, possibly including the professor. That is not the case any more. Sure, there are some fields in which I have a distinct edge over my classmates - I know what it's like to have a job, buy insurance, and see a John Hughes film in the theaters, for example. Otherwise, there are an awful lot of young people - kids, even - who just plain outgun me.

Case in point: Ryan. He was in two of my classes last semester, and one of three who I Facebook-friended. Every once in a while, I see "I got another A on my paper!" In class, he always had the answer, and quickly. He has now switched his major, in his senior year, from history to environmental bioscience, or something like that. I suspect he'll change again soon, this time to rocket science or theoretical quantum physics or something. I'm pretty sure I've got shirts older than he is.

Better case: I had my Latin class this morning. In preparation, I cleaned my slate yesterday and spent about nine hours reading Latin. Nothing but Latin. Latin, Latin, Latin. In class, we had to do on-the-fly cold translation, which my hippie professor for some reason loves. Everyone is reading the same page, but there is a short, slim, Asian girl (with an inexplicable Kathleen Turner-esque gruff rumble of a voice) who is reading through this like it's her native tongue.

In the meantime, I've become Josh Lyman: "Post hoc ergo propter hoc. Well, let's see, post is after, ergo is therefore, so . . . after hoc therefore something else hoc." Okay, okay, I get it: that one's a little too vague.

How to wake up

2009-09-12T02:17:00.000-04:00

Well, today is September 11th. I was originally going to write all about September 11th, but honestly there's already an awful lot of material out there about it. We all know about the craven cowardice, warped ideology, and pointless destruction of the terrorists, and we all similarly know by now that there is no greater definition of bold selflessness, valiant patriotism, and ballswinging badassitude than rescuers charging up a burning tower, or everymen storming a locked cockpit door. Those of us old enough (not you, freshman) remember where we were, who told us the news, which office mate was crying, and how many mental calculations we did to see how many people might be in 220 stories worth of offices at 9:00 on a Tuesday morning. The day was horrible, our countrymen heroic, our memories reflective of both a massive tragedy and a shining example of resilience and nobility and so instead I'm going to talk about alarm clocks.

Yep, alarm clocks. Since I have to wake up early now, I have to coalesce all of my philosophies on how to get a battery-operated ticking machine to boldly yet pleasantly roust my sleepy self so I can get to class on time. Of course, many of you use these on a daily basis, but on the off chance one of you can benefit from an alarm clock veteran's unsolicited advice, here it is.

Now, the first thing to understand is that the snooze button is the work of the devil. I cannot think of any device that is at once so reviled, yet so treasured by its constituents. It is somnambulatory crack; everyone knows that the sleep you get between the first ringing is not only not restful, but it is leeching away the time you have to get ready in the morning. I suspect it was invented on anarchists, intent on bringing down the economy of the west.

When I was a younger man, I bought in to the magic of the snooze button. Every morning, the last two hours of my sleep was taken in nine-minute increments. Common sense (now) tells me that, if I had to get up at 9, I should have just set the alarm for 9 and not used the snooze at all. Instead, I set it at 7, hit that damn button fourteen times, and still woke up not only late, but groggy. Besides, if I had set it for 9, I wouldn't have gotten out of bed until after 11. There was no debating that. It just was. I did all sorts of stupid things to compensate. They never worked.

So, every morning, my alarm would go off every nine minutes for hours, waking up every one else in the house. This did not make me the most popular person around, especially for those housemates of whatever stripe who, for example, worked nights.

So here's what I do now: I have my "alarm clock" by the bed. I use quotes because, like everything these days, it is in a cell phone. I just set it for a respectable time, and that's that. Now, across the room, I have what I call my Roger Rabbit alarm clock. I actually had to go hunt him down (which was a defining moment in my hate of Wal-Mart; they kept alarm clocks in jewelry, for some reason). Roger (for short) is one of those classic, big, round, obnoxious noisemaking sheet metal monstrosities, as God intended alarm clocks to be. It has no snooze alarm. Instead, it sports those two giant bells on top, like in the cartoons, with a metal hammer in between that I swear could raise the dead if left to its own devices. It sounds like a fire alarm. It is a klaxon. It means business.

Anyway, Roger sits across the room. Every morning, I play a game. The game is called "Keep Roger Silent", because if Roger was to go off, it would wake both of us up, plus two or three neighbors, several outdoor cats, and possibly the Germantown Fire Department. Seriously, on a clear, windy day, it can down planes. Anyway, I set the phone alarm for, let's say, seven o'clock. Roger is set for about 7:30. Of course, with those ancient analog clocks, there is no specificity - you set the alarm for about whatever time. Maybe it goes off at 7:25; maybe 7:40. The happy side effect of this is that it motivates me to get out of bed early, and stumble-stagger across the room to shut Roger up before he mobilizes the Air Force.

There has to be a better way, though. Jennifer suggested to me that we need an alarm clock that raises the blinds. That has some merit, but it would have to raise them super-slowly, like about an inch every minute or so. The last thing I want is to have the blinds just fwapfwapfwap and the sunlight FILLS THE ROOM in a blazing scorch. That's a big no-no. The other downfall to the plan is that now your blinds are up, and any passing neighbor has instant access to the inside of your bedroom first thing in the morning. Another big no-no. No one looks good first thing in the morning. Rita Hayworth didn't, I'll wager. I'm sure George Clooney looks like a river troll. Not wise.

I have also heard of an alarm clock with a propellor, so that when the time hits, it launches itself in to the air, and you can't stop it from its little strafing run until you find the tiny piece of plastic it ejected and put it back in. I can guarantee that clock would not last one day before I smashed it to tiny bits with the nearest heavy object, likely my fist or my forehead. I have also thought of a clock attached to a gas-powered winch that flips your bed straight up to vertical, so get sort of ejector-seated out in to the room. Upon further thought, however, I realized I would go from horizontal, to vertical, and right back to horizontal again, the other way, so I'd be smashed face-down into the carpet. Then I'd go back to sleep. Nix that idea.

I can imagine some of you are thinking that another person would be the best - a girlfriend, mother, or slave, perhaps. I can say without fear of recourse that this is a fool's errand. People are, by definition, unreliable. Alfred Pennyworth simply does not exist; eventually the other person would forget, or stop caring, or something. No, the perfect alarm clock must be a cold, unfeeling automaton, incapable of justification, negotiation, or pity. Besides, I have too many emotional scars left from the attempts used in my youth by my mother (who, I must add, I love very much), which included but weren't limited to yanking off the covers and flipping on the overhead light. Way too jarring. Way too cruel.

No, the ultimate alarm clock would have the ringer by my head (so it would wake only me) but the switch across the room. The sound would come in softly, and get progressively louder, and it would alternate between various mid-70's singer/songwriter soft rock classics - "Peaceful, Easy Feeling" would work, as would "Year of the Cat". It would play one song, and if I didn't respond, it would wait ten minutes and play another, a little bit harder and a little bit louder. Then ten more, and a third - a good, loud classic rock screamer. Repeat until the button is hit. Also, the whole timeline gets moved forward by twenty minutes if it is raining outside.

And as long as I'm dreaming, I'll throw in that it could automatically make me a bowl of Golden Grahams for breakfast. That'd be nice incentive.

Perchance to dream

2009-09-11T00:53:00.000-04:00

So here's one way in which I am very much different from the majority of the other college students: sleep. When I say 'different', I mean I need more of it. I need more than the other students do, and I need more than I get now. With two classes a day and work from 3 until 11 every night, I basically get six hours per night at most, if I perfectly budget every blip of time. I also would like to see Jennifer every once in a while, so she remembers what I look like. Currently, the only times during the week that I see her are when she is still asleep as I leave in the morning, and I'm as good as dead when I get home at night.

Sleep has never been my strong point. It and I have had a queasy, infirm relationship since I remember; in high school summers I would stay up later every progressive day, and in my young-20's I would stay out until ungodly time every weeknight except Wednesdays, when I would crash at dinnertime. I once slept for 25 hours straight, while having the ceiling collapse on me sometime during the night. That's completely true; I woke up and there were ceiling tiles and dust all over my bed and me, and I slept through it. My theory is that the cat crawled up there, and was too heavy for the drop ceiling. Stupid cat.

Anyway, the way in which all of these malfunctions, misfires, and bad habits manifest now that I'm in my forties is through a charming mix of insomnia and narcolepsy. Today, I fell asleep in both of my classes, in full view of the professors, which is embarrassing to say the least. In my second class (in which the lights were low and the room was warm, oy), I was typing on the laptop at the time. The result was something like "1471 - Battle of Tewkesbury - Prince of Walqswhs,:-r do;;rgfffffffffff" That's not a direct quote, but I think it accurately conveys the emotion.

So tomorrow morning is my earliest day - I have to leave the house by 7:30 at the latest. After two hours of sitting in one of those rock hard school chairs (I swear I'm bringing a pillow one of these days, if not a camp bed), I have a few hours before work. Saturday morning, we're going to a yard sale an hour away; I'm pretty sure we'll be bringing home more stuff than we take there. Anyway, that will entail leaving by about 6:30, and, to me at least, 6:30 am on a Saturday is a completely foreign concept. I'm not totally convinced it even exists, much like Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, or the Kansas City Chiefs' playoff chances.

The Flu-man Cometh

2009-09-10T00:46:00.000-04:00

My happy, cheery, sing-song Latin teacher mirthfully informed our seven-students-strong class that one of our classmates (Jeff) indeed has the dreaded swine flu. Now, I'm fully aware that the media loves to scream panic about some Biblical plague or another, and usually I afford them all the ignorance they deserve, but for some reason I'm treating H1N1 very seriously. I'm reading the CDC website daily, sending out alerts to my co-workers and friends, and regularly scrubbing my hands with all the zeal and focus I can muster.

I was, therefore, surprised to realize that there is no alcohol-based hand sanitizer in the bathrooms. All they have is that cheap foamy soap. I told my professor of this, and she aww-shucksed it off, saying essentially that we're lucky the building has bricks. I would guess they don't put them in because they fear the students will walk off with them. It's also worth noting that the UMD health center director just sent out an e-mail saying that there have been 256 seasonal flu cases but no swine flu, which is apparently either a dose of misinformation or a blatant lie. Neither option is particularly encouraging. I may have to contact the health center about both of these.

The other big thing about today is that it is 9-9-09. I read on the CNN (I think) webpage that this is the last time we'll get one of these for 92 years, until 1-1-2101. I guess that writer will be sleeping through the three times it's happening in the next three years, then. Duh.

I'm very much looking forward to the weekend. We are selling a bunch of our stuff at a yard sale on Saturday, then collapsing in a quivering heap that night. Sunday I've cleared my calender (translated: we're putting off the RenFest trip) so I can catch up on reading and homework, sleep late, relax in my undies, and watch so much opening weekend football my brain will, with any luck, completely caramelize.

They'll be fine

2009-09-08T11:51:00.000-04:00

Well, I'm back from Labor Day, and apparently, I'm an idiot. Between the new schedule and the day off and twenty-something years of having every day start at the same time, I got a little bit mixed up. I showed up bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and right on time for my ten o'clock class. The problem was that today is Tuesday, and my first class started at - you guessed it - nine thirty.

So, as I then walked right past my classroom door and across the campus, I couldn't help but to make an observation. I hear a lot of writers and editorialists and so on lament about how today's youth is devoid of social skills because Internet anonymity and instant gratification is devolving them into a race of mindless zombies. I have to say, I don't see it. I see a campus full of perfectly normal, well-adjusted college students. They walk together, they talk, they seem very social and engaging and healthy - if anything, moreso than back in the late 80's. It took until today before I finally saw one - one! - student who was engrossed in his texting, which people who are old like to say is "unhealthy" or something.

I have a theory. I think these editorialists and paranoidiacs are projecting their fear of technology on to the young-20-somethings. After spending the better part of their weekend on Facebook, playing Mafia Wars and discovering what Harry Potter character best describes them, the Old Person Writer thinks, "Holy crap, I'm wasting my life here. I bet the young impressionable college student minds are wasting even more. I must warn them."

But here's what the OPW isn't taking in to account: The young people are used to it. They aren't so entranced by the miracles of computers that it flabbergasts them all night long until they have to call in to work because they overused Twitter, or ran every band in their CD collection through Pandora, or spent too long Skyping with their cousin in Rangoon.

To wit: My generation grew up with TV; my parents' generation did not. I definitely remember hearing these same moans and wails back then, about TV. "How will they get anything done," they used to cry, "when all they do is sit in front of that damn TV all day?"

Well, we did. We survived, we persevered, we even realized that there's more to life than The Fall Guy and Three's Company. Just the same, the now-collegiate generation won't degenerate into a society of drooling Morlocks because they have more tech wizardry than we did in the age of plastic.

So relax, fellow Old People. They'll be fine.

Day Five

2009-09-05T00:08:00.000-04:00

End of first week.

Today is my early day. I don't remember the last time I had to leave the house at 7:30 am for anything. It was a good, though unremarkable, day at school, the only possible exceptions being that my professor had to kick one unruly and egotistical student out of the class, and she has the rather annoying habit of singing the Latin phrases we are supposed to translate, rather than just speaking them. I suppose her unbridled excitement about, for example, the vocative case should be inspiring and crescendo-worthy, but it comes across as uncomfortable and space-case-ish and more than a little bit creepy.

I will, however, take this opportunity to mention an interesting character I saw on, I think, Wednesday. I saw him in the cafeteria, which was bustling and moving and jam-packed with as much pulsating humanity as you'd expect at a university full of hungry collegiate types. I was cutting through the traffic as well as I was able, and doing a fairly good job at it if I do say so myself, when in a glimpse I passed by someone who was either having a very passionate religious moment, or a serious case of constipation.

He was standing against the pillar, thin and white with reddish-blonde hair shaped somewhat like a nuclear explosion. His t-shirt was a little bit small, his jeans a little bit short, and his hands clasped in what I hope was intense, fervent prayer. Over what, I could only guess. Whatever his spiritual crises, he was determined to pray his way out of it, to the extent where his face (which looked a little like a mix of Warren Zevon and Wallace Shawn) was red and strained and he was leaning forward, mouthing something that I dared not attempt to decipher. He quivered. I walked on.

There's a story behind his situation, and part of me wishes I knew what it was. I won't, of course, even if I see (and recognize) him tomorrow, because asking him questions like "What made you so freaked out" or "Is there something wrong with you" would just be wrong.

Day Four

2009-09-04T00:41:00.000-04:00

I finally made it to school on time today! Despite the Adelphia Road/University Boulevard stoplight system and, on a larger scale, the entire brain-dampened automotive population littering the northern arm of the DC beltway, doing their level best to slow me down to a maddening crawl, I scampered in to my History of South Africa class today, with somewhere between five and eight seconds to spare. Huzzah!

So we learned about the Khoisan - a combination of the native South African Hottentots (Khoi) and the Bushmen (San) - and saw some slides of some stone ruins in and around the area. Frankly, I find it difficult to get excited over some stone ruins built less than five hundred years ago. Yes, it's impressive that they cut the basalt so accurately and fit everything together without mortar and all, but weren't the Egyptians doing that, like, 3000 years earlier? Yawn.

I detect at least one guy in the class who's going to be mad all the time that racism is/was so prevalent in South Africa. Black guy, with an accent, though I can't tell from where. Can't really blame him, and we've barely started.

The professor for my second class was sick. Coughing, congested-sounding, the works. She even said she should be at home today. With all the hullabaloo about the resurgence of swine flu and how people like me - that is, people with asthma - will be at higher risk, I didn't get near her. We did, however, talk all about the Hundred Years' War and started on the War of the Roses. I picked up some brownie points because I knew that the battle in which all of the French heavy horse got stuck in the mud was indeed Agincourt. Go me.

I didn't have time to respond to the outgoing, pamphlet-wielding "got a minute" guy from the Human Rights Campaign (I think it was called) on the way out. I figured it to be an Amnesty International Junior League, but Jennifer tells me that it's more like an LGBT club. Either way, I would have been late to work. Maybe next time.

Tomorrow: The super early day. I have to leave here by 7:30. Ugh.

Day Three

2009-09-03T00:36:00.000-04:00

Well. Traffic is transcending its status as a concern or even a problem, and it is now becoming a big, fat, hairy problem. What took me 45 minutes on Monday took a little over an hour yesterday and almost an hour and a half today. I missed my Latin class in its entirety this morning (nice starts to the semester, that). Obviously, I am going to have to leave stupid early every morning just so I can sit in an empty classroom at best, a sweltering pickup in rush hour at the worst. Also, who knows, it may run me two hours tomorrow. Ridiculous.

The professor for my Technology class is half-deaf, so he likes to stalk the aisles while lecturing so he can hear our questions more easily. This is a problem when there our average-sized room is crammed full of 59 chairs. That's right, 59. He had someone count. I think we've found the ancient school-desk-chair burial ground. They're packed in like traders on the stock exchange floor.

I also had the unbridled joy of a dentist visit today, first time at a new practice. I got a good cleaning and a thorough lecture from my dental hygienist - and when I say thorough, I mean it. She didn't stop talking about dentristry the whole time. Okay, I know, it behooves me to see the difference between healthy and disease-ridden Number 14 teeth. I pick that number because that's the one that will need the cap soon - but that's my only real problem, so that was good.

Then I went to work. Nothing interesting, as always. Then I came home and wrote this. And now I will go collapse in a heap and go unconscious as soon as I can possibly muster.

Day Two

2009-09-01T23:49:00.000-04:00

So I was late this morning. That didn't take long.

I am tempted to think that a professor's idea of what it takes to be not-late is based mostly on students who live on or near campus, and generally walk to class, and therefore it's largely a time management misfire if they're late. However, I convince myself out of that idea when I realize a) they aren't that narrow-minded, as a group, b) there are a lot of commuters, and c) some of those commuters are the profs themselves, who themselves have to wrangle with the likes of University Boulevard at 8:00 in the morning. So what I'm saying here is that this is a wasted paragraph.

Anyway, I was late. I timed my trip on Monday at 45 minutes, and apparently something happened overnight to cause every car in the DC suburbs to get on the Beltway at the same time, and almost double the length of my commute. C'est la vie, I guess, but if nothing else I got to reflect even more on why traffic, of all things, gets us all so riled up that we want to choke the life force out of a total stranger for the most trivial of offenses.

Anyway.

Today's first class, what I saw of it, is at the 300-level and is all about the history of South Africa. Unsurprisingly, much of this will cover racism and trekking, which as far as I can tell are the two major historical hobbies of the South Africans. The professor seems knowledgeable, if a little strict and humorless. We have one interesting aspect: he's got a blog on which he is reading a passage a day covering a very long oxcart trek into the scrub in 1881. He said he is posting it a day at a time to give us the idea of the length of what I suspect will be a fairly punishing journey. I can only imagine that is also why he didn't just have us read the transcript. I hope there are Zulus.

A trip to the bookstore and a thick but slimey slice of Sbarro's later, and it's time for the History of Tudor England. Now, this is the one I have been looking forward all along. I love me some English history, and am even considering specializing (excuse me, specialising) in it. If this gives you any kind of insight into the tangled mass that is my brain, I considered it a special treat when she said we would cover the War of the Roses as well. Joy!

I had met this professor, a pragmatic middle-age woman, before, although I had not yet had her classes. Ratemyprofessor.com gave her glowing reviews (take that for what you will) so I am pretty sure that she'll be much more accomodating than the rest. I have a theory, yet unproven, that female professors are usually less teeth-clenchingly strict and more willing to work with you. Male professors are more likely to view it as a contest, I think, to see if you can prove your mettle by keeping up. But I digress.

The big thing for the Tudor England class is the paper; she has us thinking about a topic already. I have two ideas so far - the Battle of Tewkesbury, for which I saw a reenactment when I went to England last year, and Sir Francis Walsingham, who I understand is nothing like Geoffrey Rush portrayed him in Elizabeth and The Golden Age. I could see myself reading books about either one.

Anyway, that was day two.

The First Day

2009-08-31T14:08:00.000-04:00

I was a baby in the 60's, a kid in the 70's, and a teenager in the 80's. I am now 42 years old, and I'm a college student. Again. Today was the first day of class.

Now, I'm usually not a big believer in portents or omens, but the first thing I saw this morning when I went outside was a loose pit bull. I managed to retain my calm, said "Hello, Dog!" in the most cheerful and non-threatening way possibole, and quickly got a closed door between me and him. He had a collar on, and seemed gregarious and inquisitive - if he were almost any other breed, I wouldn't have been concerned.

He hung around until boredom overtook him. It was only later that I thought of him as a spookily accurate and possibly hilarious predictor of the upcoming semester and year - a happy pit bull who thinks he's playing as he's really tearing your face off. I went to class.

I am pretty sure I was the only one there wearing mirrored aviator shades and who listens to Siouxsie and the Banshees. I saw a few, passing me in the crowd, who could be in their thirties, but any other post-forty people I saw were likely professors. Some of the collegiates around me look unnaturally young, as if they are Doogie Howser-types whose same-age friends are still in Junior High - excuse me, Middle - School.

My first class was a compacted Latin class - two semesters in one. I had taken a community-college Latin 101 class several years ago, but it was pretty woeful and the teacher fairly spaced and we only got through about half of the syllabus, so this accelerated class seems right for me to catch up my language credit. The professor is a cheery and rather flouncy silver-haired woman who says we can call her by her first name if we like and radiates an aura of feminist liberalism. She also warned us that for an hour each week she will be unreachable due to her passion for EastEnders, which she simply cannot miss for anything. Most of our first hour there was spent having her read the syllabus to us.

On to my second class, a 400-level on the history of technology - invention, reception, that sort of thing. The professor here looks a bit like a thin, mustachioed Michael Palin, and I bet could be a quite convincing Mr. Gumby for Halloween. He has a pronounced lisp, had trouble getting the AV to work, and is apparently the world's foremost expert on zippers.

That's right, zippers. Look up "zipper" on Wikipedia and not only is he the main contributor, but he is also the author of the primary source book for it. He's spent a great deal of his life investigating, researching, and passionately delving in to the untold mysteries of the zipper. He even interviewed the inventor's daughter for jovial anecdotes about her brilliant, forward-thinking, society-changing, universe-cracking dad who gave the world the humble but ubiquitous zipper. Go figure.

I spent the customary Way Too Much for the books, then headed back to my car. I had about an hour at home, and now it's off to work. I wonder if I can read Chapter One of my overpriced new Latin book while on break?