I was reading this post by Witty Sex Kitten where Over-educated Nympho said:

Clueless Engineer sounds like the type of guy who pisses off most of womankind–then when we meet nice guys they wonder why the hell we’re so damn bitter and cynical.

From personal experience, I have a couple issues with that. Namely that the assmunch and the guy her bitterness if being projected on are often very different people. I’ve had the dating formulation of the following conversation more than a couple times:

Cat: Hey, pet me.

Lady: I don’t know… last time I pet a cat, it bit my arm and I had to go to the emergency room.

Cat: I’m sorry about your experience. Tell me more about it.

Lady: Well I was out in the woods and I ran across this wild cougar. I decided to pet it and it nearly bit my arm off!

Cat: Wait… a wild cougar?

Lady: Yes, and it bit me from here to here. It hurt so bad…

Cat: Lady, I’m not a cougar, I’m a calico.

Lady: Well you’re both cats.

Men and women both tend to repeat mistakes in relationships. Both also tend to project their relationships that failed in the past to future ones. Often - very often - when it’s least appropriate to do so.

There are absolutely instances where a man or woman’s selfish or mean streak only becomes apparent after some time. Usually, though, you can see these things pretty early on if you’re looking. Frequently, however, we ignore those signs and proceed. The succeeding burn scars into a shoulder-based chip that we tend to take out on everyone indiscriminately and then, indiscriminately, we let go and leave ourselves wide open to get hurt in much the same way again.

I know that for a while in my life, the mistake that I was not going to commit always seemed to be whatever one I had committed most recently. I’ve seen this over and over again in women. And men, of course.

On the other hand, “tend to my wounds” is a great posture for women to take. Guys are generally willing to for ladies that they dig and unwilling to for ones that they want to use for sex, companionship, and whatever. It doesn’t work quite as well for men, so I advocate taking all that hurt and rage to the gun range or use it to smash stuff. Or you can take vicarious pleasure in seeing stuff shredded. A guy can’t really go wrong watching an industrial shredder at work.

This day in history, courtesy of the Daily Rotten:

Mormon leader Joseph Smith, along with his brother Hyrum, are shot and killed by a mob while in jail at Carthage, Illinois. According to church legend, after Smith is shot a man raises a knife to decapitate him, but is thwarted by a thunderbolt from heaven.

Not to be a smart-ass or anything, but if God was just itching to get that involved in that series events, maybe he could have gotten involved just a tad sooner and actually saved Smith’s life?

Or maybe there’s some anti-decapitation dictum I am unfamiliar with.

I spent the weekend doing many things, among them having a nice chat with Ethan from The Vision Thing for his Podcast audio show. With any luck, audio editing magic will simultaneously allow me to sound coherent and entertaining, but that remains to be seen.

As is usually the case, lots of wise and clever stuff came to mind after the discussion was over, so I will extrapolate on various ideas on this blog.

Unless I totally and completely come off like a dork, in which case I will delete this post, mention nothing more about it, and pretend that it never ever happened.

We had the graduation party for the third-year residents that are now either going off into private practice, working for the government, or moving from student to faculty. The head of the program gave an interesting speech on ethics and values. Family values and sexual freedom, he noted, were set to be the big conflict of the next several decades. He mentioned abortion, but talked more about homosexuality.

Judging by both 2000 and 2004 poll numbers, Deseret is one of the two most conservative states in the nation. For a variety of reasons, the medical profession veers noticeably to the right politically. But the subject of politics had me looking around and looking at how unorthodox this program - and the town that houses it - is.

Clancy works for Beck State University at Beck County Medical Center. The town we live in used to be called Fort Beck, named after an early military settlement by that name. Fort Beck was the civil outpost - the only town in Deseret that was created by the federal government rather than mineral/fur prospectors or Mormon settlers. When the federal government and Brigham Young’s boys got into some military scuffles, Fort Beck was on the other side of that.

When all was settled, the Fort was closed and the university was put in its place. The township was dissolved and merged with Zarahemla so that it could be administered by good, elected LDS folk. Even so, Fort Beck remains something of a liberal oasis in the conservative suburbs of one of the nation’s most conservative states. It’s a hub for those that don’t want to leave the area, don’t want to live in the capital city, and don’t want to convert religiously or politically. Incoincidentally, it has a pretty nasty reputation outside of the area. The Butt-crack of Deseret, it is called.

The residency program itself has become something of an anomaly as well. Clancy’s class became the first without a single Mormon and with that the residency as a whole became non-majority LDS for the first time since its inception. The incoming class is 2/3 female making it now a female-majority residency. In Deseret.

But this is Deseret. Fort Beck is split about 50/50 religiously (between LDS and not-LDS, putting Christians and atheists in the same category for the first time in their lives). But just the balance makes Fort Beck the most tolerable place in Deseret.

I work in a town called Mocum that’s about a 50-minute drive. Mocum is a reasonably educated place with a couple colleges all its own, though a lot of them have to go down to BSU to get the four-year-degree of their preference. There’s a county hospital near FalStaff, though they don’t have a residency of their own. One of the thoughts that occured to me during the residency director’s speech was that even if Mocum did have one, I’m not sure it would even occur to them to discuss issues like sexuality.

There is so much assumed here. Just as church is considered a good place to meet a prospective mate down south, it’s considered a good place to find employees up here. Not entirely legal, but pretty widespread. Though it hasn’t happened to me, it’s not uncommon to be asked what ward (religious jurisdiction in the LDS church) you belong to. It’s not even necessarily an effort to weed out non-LDS members. Around here that’s like asking a high school kid what school they go to. Yeah, some might be homeschooled, but you assume not unless otherwise informed. Of course, once they find out you’re not a member of the Brethren, your chances of getting hired go down.

Though I certainly can’t wait to get out, I live in a pretty impressive part of the country. A religious group that is very much a minority across the country have created a bubble for itself. While it’s frustrating to outsiders like me, the homogeny here provides a commonality that makes things considered out of bounds morally also out-of-bounds conversationally. As one who supports gay rights, gay marriage, and so on, this can be quite frustrating. But looking at it from the perspective of someone that disapproves of homosexuality and wants those issues to be introduced later in life, it’s impressive. Deseret has even touched on a national nerve, setting up a handful of companies that - with great controversy - edit VHS tapes to strip them of objectionable content.

And I think that’s a laudable goal. I also think that the modesty displayed in dress around here is not a bad thing, either. The education system is one of the best in the country. Government waste is kept to as minimum as government waste ever can be. The cultural homogeny is to credit for a lot of this. I’m not sure why any of the Brethren would ever want to leave her. Nor am I sure why Fort Beck exists because I’m not sure why any non-Mormon would ever want to stay here.

Back in Fort Beck, Clancy and I attended a community theater production. There were a couple of questionably-dressed young ladies in their young twenties (if that, probably not even). One of them had a stroller. Her provocative clothing was betrayed the charactistic underwear that Mormons wear in order to repel evil spirits. To repeat, she was wearing the characteristic underwear that Mormons wear in order to repel evil spirits. Back in Colosse, such a young lady would almost certainly be doing the club scene until her early thirties, when she would scramble to find someone that’ll do and start a family in the pristine suburbs. But the timeline is different here than it is anywhere else. And there’s no evil-repellant underwear.

I leaned over to Clancy and asked, “Do you ever get the feeling sometimes that we live in a foreign country?”

She did.

This past weekend was the annual retreat for Beck State’s residency program. For the second straight year her father had a convention in the area and so her parents went with us (last year her youngest sister came, but not this one). I’ve got a few posts coming up on various observations that I made over the weekend. This is the second.

During the retreat I got to meet Lex Rogan, a soon-to-be-second-year resident from Delosa that I’ve heard quite a bit about. I also got to meet Brit, his freshly-minted wife.

One of the little interesting tidbits of medical school is the gender-relationship disparity. Most of the men in medical school are either married or engaged while most of the women are not. The reasons for this are many.

In some quarters, young ladies are still explicitly or implicitly taught to seek in a man the ability to provide. At least moreso than men, to be sure. The ability of a man to financially take care of himself and a family is just higher on the average female than the average male. Chalk it up to evolution or antiquated societal norms or however you like, it remains generally true however not universally so.

Inversely, guys are conditioned, trained, or inclined to look for other traits. Birthin’ hips, beauty, grace, whatever. While I believe the alleged intimidation that men generally feel when confronted with a woman with higher income is greatly exaggerated, it remains true that a woman’s wealth and income potential won’t mean as much to the average man as it would for the average woman. Sometimes it does indeed work in the negative when a particular man has a machismo streak, a man figured (per previous paragraph) that a woman wants a man with equal or greater income (or “ability to provide”), or a man figures that a career-oriented woman is not interested in starting a family. While the latter two erroneous assumptions can be disproven, it becomes a lot less likely because guys are less inclined to approach an unknown female that they are not romantically interested in as readily as they would approach one that they are.

So rightly or wrongly (which is the question, explored below), a male doctor gets more mileage with the opposite sex than does his female peers. Armed with that, a lot of financially successful men that are not otherwise extraordinarily generally date upwards in terms of beaty, grace, background, etc. Dr. and Mrs. Rogan struck me very much along those lines. So the question of the day is how we, as a society, should look at this.

Not long ago I was talking to a coworker who was frustrated with his lack of relationship success. It was a not-atypical girls-only-like-jerks rant. He’s 20. Girls at that age - particularly the type he is interested in - often do have an unhealthy preference for jerks or are at least indifferent to jerkitude. That subsides (as does men’s indifference to a woman’s intelligence) as they get into their twenties, but that’s small comfort to the frustrated 20 year old.

It reminds me a bit of the movie Reality Bites, among others. In Reality Bites, Winona Ryder is left to choose between the authentic, unemployed, and intemperate Ethan Hawke and the responsible, personable Ben Stiller. She choses the former and we’re supposed to applaud her decision because Hawke’s character is authentic and real while Stiller’s is a sell-out. Poppycock. Hawke’s character is lazy, arrogant, and generally worthless. Stiller, meanwhile, actually contributes to society and and the arts (if one can call the MTV-knock-off he works at the arts). He also demonstrated the ability to care a little more about her than himself.

Which brings me back to Mrs. Rogan and the tendency of male doctors (and other rich males) to go the trophy-wife route. I can’t say that I’m particularly keen on that, either. A man is more than his pocketbook. I can’t imagine someone marrying for money being happy in the long-run just as I can’t imagine being happy having married someone that doesn’t appreciate my personality quirks. My authenticity. But in my single days I certainly did feel that the work I put in to school and my career should count for something and would get agitated at times when it seemed not to. And shouldn’t the time and effort they put in to medical school or Harvard Business School or whatever count for something?

In other words, if Stiller’s chances with Ryder should be positively reflected by the fact he holds down a full-time job (”can provide”,”is responsible”) over Hawke (”lazy”), shouldn’t then Wall Street Banker man’s chances with random female be positively influenced by his wealth when compared to earnest-but-middle-class civil engineer man? If not, why not? After all, he probably worked a lot harder to get where he is than the civil engineer. If sufficient employment is good, shouldn’t super-employment be super-good?

Am I drawing the line where I am simply because to my left are the super-authentic slobs and my right the stiff shirt accounting wizzes? Oftenly convenient, don’t you think?

This past weekend was the annual retreat for Beck State’s residency program. For the second straight year her father had a convention in the area and so her parents went with us (last year her youngest sister came, but not this one). I’ve got a few posts coming up on various observations that I made over the weekend. This is the first.

I thought the problems we had last year were a fluke, but this year confirmed it: Clancy can be quite difficult to deal with when her father is around.

Last year I had to “take a walk” to get some fresh air and, to be blunt, personal distance. She took issue with my driving and spent so much time worrying about her father “losing it” that the tension of waiting for the ‘hammer to fall’ was worse than any falling hammer could have been. And in my eyes it never fell, but in hers it did.

A variation of the same theme played itself out again this year, although having now known her father for a bit longer I could see some of the same things that she did. His behavior never bothered me, but I could see how it was bothering her.

It’s interesting how different people are rubbed differently by others. My immunity (or tolerance) for some of her father’s boorish behavior is in large part because I didn’t have to deal with it growing up. I’ve never seen it at its worst. To date I have never been at the recieving end of it. She, on the other hand, has had a far less charitable relationship with him over the years. And a more charitable one. He’s her dad. He did the best he could and, given the success of his daughters, that was a damn good job.

The point of all this being that even if he does aim the barrels at me, so to speak, I can dismiss him. As the years pass I’m sure he’ll be more and more like a father to me, but he’ll never be my dad. He’ll never be that part of me that only parents can be. And when I look at my relationship with my mother (who is that part of me), it’s similar to Clancy’s with her father: love and tension.

When Mom drinks or is upset, I am very deeply and personally affected. When she’s upset with someone, I feel that. When she’s agitated, I feel that too. I’ve known her my life and I can pick up on things that others miss. Just as Clancy can with her father.

It was a trying weekend, though. We had to specifically plan things to minimize conflict. It was a vacation from which one needs a vacation. Poor Clancy was worn thin most of the time and at points I was as worried about her as she was her father. But it was nonetheless great to see her folks again. Hopefully in the future we can work it out in a more relaxing environment.

An unfortunate reality is that playing “hard to get” may not be such a bad idea in the realm of relationships. And while there are all kinds of marked similarities between hunting for a significant other and hunting for a job, I don’t think playing ‘hard to get’ translates as well from one to the other.

So with these things in mind, showing up for my interview at the wrong place and effectively standing up my potential employer was not one of my brighter ideas.

I was listening to one of my mix CDs on the way to work when I ran across a couple signiture songs by Rick Garland*. Though it had little or nothing to do with the content of the music, it couldn’t help but make me think of my ex-girlfriend Evangeline. In some ways I think those recordings always will because when that CD was recorded, Evangeline and I were in attendance. It was the last time that we saw each other that didn’t involve breaking up or trying to find the equilibrium a broken couple often embarks on the quixotic journey to find.

Colosse is a reasonably musical city. You can walk up and down Music Alley and catch all kinds of would-be stars and in some cases nationally-recognized artists that you would figure would be playing in larger venues by that point. It made for an active social life for even a loner like me. It also has a great “I knew him when” feel. For instance I was watching CMT and blurted out: “Hey, I used the urinal next to that guy once!”

That would have to be one of the things that I miss most about Colosse. Some days it makes me not even want to listen to the music because it will make me a bit homesick. But then again one of the reasons I was ready to leave Colosse was because so much of my past was in that city it was getting harder to look forward. I’m not sure whether listening to Garland and the rest helps or hurts that feeling.

Earlier this year I got to take a trip back to Colosse (incuding a road trip around Delosa) and it was a similar swath of mixed feelings. I hadn’t slept in almost twenty-four hours when I got off the red-eye flight, but I still couldn’t sleep on the ride through Colosse to Mayne. The skyline alone made me giddy. And, of course, I got to see people I hadn’t seen in a long time including both Garland and Evangeline. I got to go see my high school and college campuses as well as old apartments.

It was a great trip down memory lane and it reminded me of all the things I love about my home city. But there was also a spooky feeling because it no longer seemed alive to me. Maybe it was a defense mechanism to prevent me from wanting to go back. I missed the city even as I was walking down Music Alley inside of it.

Part of the problem stems, I think, from the an uncertain future and the lack of a present. Clancy don’t know much about where we’re going to live a year from now (and in two years it’ll likely be somewhere else entirely). And we have no present because our social life is stunted in all kinds of ways social and religious. A residents’ schedule barely gives her time just to hang on and finding a social circle up here has been… difficult.

Added to that is our insular nature. Both of us come from places that are larger than life. We tend to have small social circles and neither has really expanded since college. Even between the two of us there isn’t time to do much. So I find myself looking towards the past. Both our past together and my past preceding her. It’s a great way to avoid the frustrations of the present and uncertainties of the future.

But it’s also a trap, and I think that’s really why I wasn’t engaged while I was out there. It’s sort of like seeing that old lover that you know was no good for you. You can be so worried about falling for him or her all over again that you don’t even enjoy catching up. I admired her beauty, her buildings, and her culture, but only insofar as I could build a comfortable distance behind my eyes.

{*- I don’t ordinarily plan to put pseudonyms on artists and celebrities, but in cases like this my secret identity is actually associated with the person in question. That’ll probably be the case for most of the Colosse music scene.}

Me, Yesterday: I have got to cut down on my junkfood intake. I’m spending too much money on too much crappy food. So resolved, since I have run out of cash I’m going to go to work without any cash tomorrow. That’ll force me to behave.

Me, This morning: Clancy, do you have any cash I can borrow?

FalStaff, for a while, had its own Tamale Lady. The idea of someone taking orders and selling tamales was not new to me. In fact, it reminded me of a couple employers back in Delosa that had similar arrangements. For reasons a bit too complicated to get in to, after an email flap a few months back the relationship with the Tamale Lady was severed and she was no longer allowed to sell to us. I discovered this a few weeks ago when I asked when she might be back around.

I got a call yesterday from the lead receptionist, asking me to come out front. There was the tamale lady, asking if I could covertly go around and collect orders for her. Though she couldn’t sell them via email-and-delivery, she could set up her food bus across the street and sell us our orders. So I spent a good part of yesterday secretly asking people if they wanted tamales and telling them not to tell anybody as if we were dealing with nuclear secrets.

I had such fun doing it that it became clear that they don’t give me enough actual work here to be doing.

Clancy and I generally have to get up at different points in the morning. Since I have to drive 45 minutes or so to Mocum to work, I usually have to get up earlier. Mostly indelicate Clancy is most delicate in the morning and must be handled with extreme care. This means that she gets the alarm clock and I don’t cause she will sit there and hit the snooze button fourteen times rather than actually get up enough to set the alarm a couple more hours ahead. So in leiu of an alarm clock, I use my cell phone. {what’s that? get two alarm clocks? don’t be silly! that’s madness!}.

So at about three this morning my alarm clock starts going off. The geniouses that designed the thing decided that when it’s running out of batteries, the most prudent course of action is to get it to vibrate, light up, and sound off, because energy conservation is for communists. So I get up and take the exploding device to the living room and ponder my options. I can’t reset Clancy’s clock cause… well cause mostly indelicate Clancy is most delicate in the morning. That’s a torrent you seriously don’t want to get enveloped by. My cell phone charger was at work.

I then determined that I could set our stereo to go off. Clancy could sleep through a nuclear holocaust and I can wake up at the drop of a hat, so a radio going off loudly in the next room sounded perfect. The only thing is that it’s Clancy’s stereo (or was originally) and I’d never set it before. So from 3:15-3:45 in the morning I sit there trying to get the darn thing set up. Every time I’d change it, it would revert back to the previous settings (which had it inexplicably going off at 5:45, half an hour earlier than I like to get up). Clancy, being the sound, sound sleeper that she is, managed to sleep through my 3am cussing and cursing.

But when the morning did roll around, she actually woke up to the sound of the radio where I didn’t. I guess I should have put in an Insane Clown Posse CD or something rather than the soothing renditions of Simon and Garfunkel. Quality music, to be sure, but not the sort that gets one going in the morning in an energetic fashion. The convulsing battery-dying cell phone actually managed to stay on until morning, so i was going off, making my entire spat with the stereo entirely unnecessary.

From: Jarvis Hadley (hadlchar@falstaff.corp)
Sent: Tuesday, June 07, 2005 10:51 AM
To: RLC-Web Dept (rwd@falstaff.corp) ; RLC-Web-QA Dept (rwqd@falstaff.corp)
Subject: Emergency requests

We have just received several emergency requests. They want these done by noon. If you have one of these mythical documents, drop what you are doing and get these done.

—

From: Will Truman (trumwill@falstaff.corp)
Sent: Tuesday, June 07, 2005 10:56 AM
To: Jarvis Hadley (hadlchar@falstaff.corp)
Subject: RE: Emergency requests

There are 42 Code Red requests. Are all of these requests due at noon? Were they all elevated to Emergency at 10:45?

—

From: Jarvis Hadley (hadlchar@falstaff.corp)
Sent: Tuesday, June 07, 2005 10:59 AM
To: Will Truman (trumwill@falstaff.corp)
Subject: RE: Emergency requests

The noon emergency is the A42 series. Sixteen reports in all. They were submitted at 10:34 a.m. And like anything that gets ramroded through, expect to hear about this in two to four weeks when one of the reports contains faulty information.

—

From: Will Truman (trumwill@falstaff.corp)
Sent: Tuesday, June 07, 2005 11:02 AM
To: Jarvis Hadley (hadlchar@falstaff.corp)
Subject: RE: Emergency requests

You know I’m about as flexible as they come, Jarvis, but writing a request or even just elevating one and making it due in 90 minutes is not acceptable. Is there any way we can state this for the record to vaccinate against any later bites? Or at least for future reference?

—

From: Jarvis Hadley (hadlchar@falstaff.corp)
Sent: Tuesday, June 07, 2005 11:07 AM
To: Will Truman (trumwill@falstaff.corp)
Cc: Willard Lake (lakewill@falstaff.corp)
Subject: RE: Emergency requests

Unfortunately this falls under the category of who determines what the deadline is for anything and how long something takes. It’s an issue that apparently no one wants to address or even acknowledge as an issue. I agree that it is not fair to expect something to be rushed through and still be 100% accurate. A certain amount of time needs to be given if 100% accuracy is desired.

—

From: Willard Lake (lakewill@falstaff.corp)
Sent: Tuesday, June 07, 2005 11:07 AM
To: Will Truman (trumwill@falstaff.corp)
Cc: Jarvis Hadley (hadlchar@falstaff.corp)
Subject: RE: Emergency requests

Gary [the COO -ed], Grant [the Accounts Cheif -ed], and Gregg [the CIO, our boss -ed] are well aware of these requests. There is a customer that has said they will leave us because a competitor has these changes done and can offer them today.

This is damage control, and it needs to be done today, and quickly in order to salvage this account.

I understand that it is unreasonable to guarantee these are all correct and accurate by noon, but we have to do the best we can to get these done. This is an exceptional circumstance that we should not find ourselves in.

——–

From: Jarvis Hadley (hadlchar@falstaff.corp)
Sent: Wednesday, June 08, 2005 8:41 AM
To: RLC-Web-QA Dept (rwqd@falstaff.corp)
Subject: Emergency requests

I need you to start work on request A42 immediately. It was due yesterday.

—

From: Will Truman (trumwill@falstaff.corp)
Sent: Wednesday, June 08, 2005 8:52 AM
To: Jarvis Hadley (hadlchar@falstaff.corp)
Cc: Willard Lake (lakewill@falstaff.corp)
Subject: RE: Emergency requests

It was assigned yesterday at 4:33. There are eight reports in the request and a legal disclaimer. Did another client threaten to leave or something?

—

From: Willard Lake (lakewill@falstaff.corp)
Sent: Wednesday, June 08, 2005 9:07 AM
To: Will Truman (trumwill@falstaff.corp)
Cc: Jarvis Hadley (hadlchar@falstaff.corp)
Subject: RE: Emergency requests

Yes, actually.

——–

From: Jarvis Hadley (hadlchar@falstaff.corp)
Sent: Wednesday, June 08, 2005 9:49 AM
To: RLC-Web-QA Dept (rwqd@falstaff.corp)
Subject: Emergency requests

A53 is due by lunch.

To answer your inevitable questions:

Yes, I realize that it’s 11:30.

Yes, it was created fifteen minutes ago.

Yes, Tillman [the account manager -ed] maintains that the customer threatened to leave

Yes, account managers have figured out the new magic words to get something pushed to the top of the file.

Clancy gave me an exercise bike for my birth-not-a-day-again-until-2008. On one hand it’s been great, other the other it’s been quite frustrating. Despite watching what I eat and burning at least 500 calories a day on that thing, I haven’t lost any weight. As of this morning I weight the exact same amount that I did when I started.

But anyway, on a completely unrelated but equally annoying note, my clothes don’t fit anymore. Most pressingly, my pants don’t stay up anymore and the belt’s not helping as much as it should. I was watching a cop show on DVD and their holster gave me an idea: suspenders. So I bought a pair of suspenders tonight. So tomorrow I will wear a dress shirt and tie and the suspenders will add a very classic retro look.

Of course, I’ll be wearing black construction boots, but that’s a subject for another time.

Addendum: Everyone is pretty sure that I have a job interview somewhere today. Though I’ve been denying it, I do have to email someone about a previous interview. This could look kinda bad if I get hired.

With Becky househunting stateside, Barry in Virginia, and Larry scoutin’ west, I figure now is as good a time as any to take a break. See y’all Monday

I hate it when I don’t realize that a button is missing until I’ve made it all the way to work. Looks like today at work I’m going to be unintentionally showing off my chesthair. I’ve been mulling over keeping a change of clothes in the car for instances like this or oopsie-lookalikes. At the very least, I gotta stop getting my clothes at Walmart so that this will stop happening…

Speaking of Walmart shopping, the red-orange shirt I mentioned before has shown itself on a couple more people. The first couple of people to wear it were, like me, XL or larger in size. I figured lack of availability for those sizes was one of the reasons it was so popular, but now Marcel is in the act, and he’s kind of a toothpick.

I’ve mentioned before that FalStaff’s leadership tends to fall between two families. There are the Fallons, which founded the company, and a set of three brothers that are three of the VPs (COO, CTO, and Accounts Cheif). But even outside leadership, there are a host of family connections here. The assistent head of our sister department has a sister that’s a copychecker, for instance. And Todd Cummings, a long-time account manager here, scored a job for his sister Sally. It’s Todd and Sally I want to talk about today.

It’s interesting how sometimes our lives follow the formula of a sitcom. I don’t mean that in the sense of gosh-we’re-so-interesting-we-should-be-on-TV, but quite the opposite: we’re reduced to playing roles around one another, to the amusement of the others that may be laughing with us or at us if they’re even paying attention at all. Sometimes you find yourselves reduced to archetypes. It can be demeaning, I guess, but it makes life simpler because sometimes it’s easier to play a roll than to be who you are.

I had a very sitcom relationship with my ex-girlfriend Julie. All we needed was a teenage mischief-maker, a pre-adolescent insecure one, an oh-so-cute gradeschooler, and a quirky-and-annoying-yet-we-love-them neighbor, and we’re practically on ABC’s TGIF lineup (do they have that anymore? If not, it used to be a collection of monumentally bad shows including Full House and that Steve Urkel show). We were too young to have those things, of course, but that seemed very much like the life we were planning for. She was the condescending one that had her life together. I was the goofy-and-irresponsible dad with the big heart always getting in trouble cause I’m not quite as sharp as my know-it-all wife.

None of this was true, exactly. Her college career was floundering at the time while mine was taking off. People who met me and her independently of one another would likely peg me as the smarter one (not because I was, necessarily, but because she was so quiet). But when we were around one another, we’d be reduced to roles. I was the amiable dufus and she was the one that was always saving me from myself. A surprising number of people very close to me were very much misreading our entire relationship. Can’t blame them, though, because that was the show that she and I were putting on. But that’s a story for another time.

The thing to consider here is that all of those bad sitcoms were not written in a void. They were specifically pieced together to be familiar. While I will maintain that the idiot dad is as much a product of advertising demographics (the same reasons that wives are always the ones that have their act together in TV commercials - women have more buying power), it’s familiar enough that we don’t mentally challenge it. These shows are sort of like elevator music, existing precisely because they make us comfortable without making us have to actually think. For this reason, they have to work their way into the background of our conscious. To do this, they must remain eminently familiar.

Which brings me back to Todd and Sally. Todd is a good LDS guy, and I don’t mean that sarcastically. About my age, he’s married with at least four children. He is unmovably friendly and just reeks of stability. He is very much the kind of guy that you would love your daughter to bring home because you know that he would treat her like a queen. He’s actually got a certain slickness about him (he’s an account manager, after all), but even in that it’s still about building and maintaining trust. I’ve no doubt that he’s not as lilly white as he appears, but I’d be pretty surprised if he was too far from it.

Sally, on the other hand, is quite different. Were it not for the similar bone structure of her face, you wouldn’t even think they related. He’s Omaha while she’s LA. For starters, she’s unmarried with a kid, which is more frowned-down upon here than in other parts of the country. She dressed provocatively at work and when she gets off work, she’s often picked up by tatooed bikers or college students nearly a decade her junior. What really seems to drive him crazy is that she uses her sex appeal on married men at work to get what she wants.

Poor Todd is constantly exasperated. While they tend to keep it out of the limelight, half the days I leave I can see them arguing in her pickup. You can tell that he loves her but can’t understand her for the life of him. He sees a husbandless mother and doubtlessly thinks that she needs to look for a good stepfather for her son. She’s “damaged goods” out here, but if she plays her cars (looks) right, she can still get out of this. She, meanwhile, doesn’t see why she should want to. Right now she gets all she wants by being young and hot, and she wants it to be this way forever, and that can’t happen if she’s tied down to the kind of square that would be excited about taking of someone else’s children.

I have to confess I come down much more on the side of Todd in this dispute and more generally. But the fun is not in taking sides, but in watching him frantically try to look out for her while she constantly rolls her eyes at him. Some sitcom dynamics are much more entertaining in person than they are on TV.

The night that Clancy and I had met, I’d had a few drinks and she, obviously, hadn’t. I was already sort of in to her when she told me that she didn’t drink. My ex-girlfriend Julie didn’t drink either, and in fact that had caused some problems between us. So I was relieved when Clancy told me that she didn’t have any moral objections to drinking, she just knew that the deck was stacked against her genetically.

It was something that I could instantly relate to.

My mother had a younger sibling that drowned at fourteen. I won’t go in to the details of what all happened after that except to say that Mother no longer really had parents after that so much as she had alcoholic stand-ins.

While attending Carolina State University, she met and married a young engineer. Mom being Mom, she doesn’t blame anyone but herself. She knew the signs, but she didn’t really care. After a year or so, she help maneuver a move far away from home where she could discreitly get a divorce. Not long after that she met my nigh-teetotaling father.

Whether or not my mother became an alcoholic depends on how you define the word. But even when I no longer had a curfew I stopped leaving my room after 10 because I knew that she’d be out there, smoking cigarettes and drinking scotch. Enough scotch that I wanted to avoid her at all costs. At some social occasions where alcohol was served my brothers and I would set up Mom patrol, where we’d basically be around her so that we could step in if she was about to say something offensive.

But then, at the point we’d really start worrying, she’d stop drinking for several months before we’d say anything.

Clancy’s father was a similar borderline case except that while my mother is a gregarious drunk, her father is a mean drunk. Not physically abusive, but mean. Alcohol, combined with depression, almost cost him his marriage at one point.

Though in similar circumstances, Clancy and I seemed to react quite differently. She, like her cousin now, went completely dry. I, on the other hand, took a bit more from Mom’s example. I started stealing her scotch when I hit sixteen, I was illegally buying beer at seventeen.

But even as I was going to drinking parties at seventeen, I was almost insane about always being in control. I would play these games with agility games with myself to prove that I wasn’t affected. I constantly asked my friend if I was slurring. At one point I started a conversation with a police officer just to prove to myself that I was still in control.

Which is kind of funny because part of the reason I drank was to lose control. It was to to take the edge off. I can be pretty uptight and neurotic and the alcohol fixes that. But I never intentionally let myself go. My drinking career climaxed at three different nights that I don’t remember and a one kiss that I’d really like to forget. But those were the exception. The rest of the time I was dutifully asking my friends if I was slurring and walking a straight line with my eyes closed. I wanted to lose control - just not like Mom lost control.

From what Clancy tells me, the medical definition is pretty lax. I’d break the 14-beer-a-week limit using just half the week (Thur-Sat). I even chose one of the apartments I did because it was within walking distance of my favorite bar.

My brothers Ollie and Mitch got their drinking done in college and have simmered down somewhat since. I was dating Julie throughout most of college which limited my intake, but I actually had most of it out of my system before I met Clancy.

And for all of its faults, Deseret has been a really good influence on me. Drinking isn’t a social activity here. The social pressure against it is as strong as the social pressure for it in Delosa is.

Which is good. I don’t think I have any reason to worry about me following in the Hertzog footsteps, but you never really see that sort of thing coming. If anyone had told me at ten I’d be a smoker, I’d have laughed. One of the real upshots of our shared experience is that if Clancy tells me that I’m drinking too much, I know that she knows what she’s talking about. And she knows that I don’t want to go that route.

-{This post was inspired by Barry’s on the subject of addiction. As it’s bad tact to try to steal the spotlight of someone with a dilemma, I decided to hold off on posting on it}-
-{Confronting the Inevitable, A Man’s Gotta Do}-