Compared to last time around, the Christmas Eve service at St. Jude’s Episcopal Church was relatively non-eventful. There were no drunkards that required assistence. Apparently, the week after the drunk guy’s appearance at the church, Father Shelby mentioned him in a sermon. He more or less had the same point of view that I did: if there was anyone that needed Christian acceptance, it was someone that had a reason (or lack of willpower) to get drunk on Christmas Eve. He also congratulated the congregation on dealing with him, which was primarily my father the usher and my brother, who helped him find where we were in the Hymnal or Book of Common Prayer.

Once upon a time, St. Jude’s was a really up-and-coming church in the area. In fact, when we requested to move diocese the request was denied because the troubled diocese we were in needed at least one success story. We were building a new sanctuary that could actually seat more than a hundred and allowing the congregation an escape from the heat by air conditioning the breezeway. Then, rather suddenly, Father Blythe left the church for the private sector and, upon his exit, we found ourselves millions of dollars in debt. Once the shining star of the Bay, we suddenly had difficulty finding a pastor that was willing to try to wade through the financial ruin that our new building had laid upon us.

The church is not what it once was. There used to be three Christmas Eve services that were filled to the brim, but now there are two and the pews are barely more than half full. Some of it had to do with Blythe and his somewhat unpopular successor, but a lot of it trails the fate of the Episcopal Church as a whole. I never knew whether or not I would raise any children I might have as Episcopalians, but until recently it never occured to me that there may not be an Episcopal Church to raise them in.

It all began with Gene Robinson, the famously gay Bishop appointed in New England. That brought to bear a number of conflicts that had been lying underneath the surface for some time. Since that appointment, it has been one thing after another and now many of the most successful churches are threatening to break off and voting themselves out of the Episcopal hierarchy.

The press generally portrays the conflict as Liberal vs Conservative. The Liberals want the church to embrace homosexuality and recently elected a woman, Katharine Schori as the church’s Presiding Bishop. The Conservatives refuse to ordinate women, reject homosexuality, and apparently feel that they have more in common with the Nigerian Anglican Church than the Episcopal Church USA. All of this is true, but in a greater sense the staunch liberals and staunch conservatives are in a sense teaming up against the history and identity of the church as they attempt to reshape it in their own preferred image.

The ECUSA is and always has been a largely political organization rather than a theological one. To many, this is the primary weakness of the church and may well prove to be its undoing. But I don’t see it that way at all. To me, the Episcopal Church is a facilitator rather than a dictator of belief. If you believe in the Catholic tenets, then by all means become a Catholic. If you follow the evangelical march, become a Baptist. But if you don’t quite fit in anywhere else or you’re not sure where you fit in to the larger Christian community, the Episcopal Church is as good a home as you’ll find. The church was essentially founded on a rejection of the belief that any human institution can really get God right 100% of the time. That’s why we were not only given scripture and tradition, but also the ability to reason.

Unfortunately, the lack of a strong theological center has lead some groups within the church to try to make it into the church that they have long wanted to see. The conservatives want a Catholic Church without the pope and celibate priests. The liberals look around and see Christianity overrun by conservatism and want to set up a liberal church. The conservatives seek the approval of the Catholics and evangelicals while the liberals seek the approval of the seculars. Neither seem to really appreciate the church for what it is and both seek approval where they will not find it without substantially changing its identity.

I can’t honestly say that I find both sides to be “equally wrong”. By and large, my sentiments lie with the theological liberals. Until I fully appreciated the damage it was doing to the church (and that he is as intolerant of the conservatives as they are of him), I applauded Robinson’s consecration. I want women to not only serve as associate rectors, but to have their own congregations. But by and large, in their rush for social acceptability outside Christian circles, the liberal leaders have completely dispatched tradition and alienated the conservative lifeblood that a church needs to thrive. An institution needs those that seek to protect its identity even as it remains open to those that walk a different path.

The reason that there appears to be an opening for a liberal church it’s because those that have gone that route have lost their identity. The Unitarian Church merged with the Universalist Church and rather than growing its numbers have declined. Those that seek the approval of non-Christians ultimately become non-Christians, or their children do. Schiori was the Bishop of Nevada at a time when the state saw incredible growth, but the church’s numbers remained stagnant. People like me, that embrace the amendment of theological tradition, are the ones that don’t show up to church week in and week out. Those that want to protect the institution, to keep it in stasis, are the most reliable when it comes to preserving its identity.

Yet the Episcopal Church is one of the relatively few that allows anyone baptized to eat the bread and drink the wine. What the conservatives sometimes overlook is that the Episcopalian tradition is one of acceptance and growth, both spiritual and intellectual. The Episcopal Church is a political, and to a degree democratic, organization. It’s simply not a church where you get to tell other people what to do or believe. For people like me, that means that we have to hold back when our congregations do not approve of the changes that we would like to see made. For the conservatives, it means that it is New Hampshire and not Mississippi that gets to decide who the Bishop of New Hampshire is going to be.

I hope that this all gets straightened out in the years to come. There have been some encouraging signs. Schiori has backed off a bit and sees her first duty as to protect the institution (rather than remake as she would like). The Archbishop of Canterbury has stepped in and has also declared this to be a priority. The ball is in the conservatives’ court now. I can’t say that I’m a fan of their idea of joining the Nigerian branch, but at least that would keep them in the larger Anglican community and a part of being an Episcopalian is accepting the decisions of others within the community.

Passive Problem Solving is an Oxymoron:

Don’t get me wrong, I completely understand the sense of “don’t get involved” that pervades a neighborhood when someone seems to be beyond all hope. I once lived in a townhouse (there were 8 to a strip) where one of the tenants at the opposite end of our strip used to “garbage pick” and bring all sorts of crap home. Everyone knew he did it, because he made no effort to conceal his hoarding. Everyone collectively chose to ignore him (myself included), or rationalize his behavior, or their own passivity. One day, he was gone, and a team of people wearing hazmat suits had to come gut his townhouse. It took days to gut it, and untold days/weeks to return the unit to a liveable (and saleable) state. Something could have been done sooner, and wasn’t.

This story reminds me a bit of a story my mother told me about the Mitchell family, which lives down the street. The Mitchells were always a rascally bunch. Because of the non-infrequent manhunts for escapees from the nearby juvenile ward, no one in our neighborhood was ever allowed to park their cars on the street overnight. The Mitchells gave this law no mind and collected parking tickets like baseball cards. Mrs. Mitchell would then show up in court and demand a jury hearing for all of the tickets. The local court was ill-equipped to summon fifty juries and in the name of making it all go away would dismiss the tickets out of hand.

The Mitchell kids numbered six, one of which was my age. Nicky Mitchell was always a very odd young boy. During lunch period he would take all the cafeteria food and start mixing it all together. I’ve successfully blocked the mental imagery of pudding mixed with pizza from my mind, but it took years. His goal every lunch period was to make me vomit, which he succeeded at with regularity. We were pretty sure that he would graduate from high school to a prison or mental institution in fair time. And Nicky wasn’t at all the strangest of the lot.

The Mitchells had a stopped up toilet and called a plumber. The plumber showed up, fixed the toilet, left, and immediately called the health department and the CPS. It was kind of surprising until we realized that to an outside unaccustomed to the strange ways of the Mitchell family, their house was the kind of place that you alerted to the proper authorities.

Nothing came of it, as far as we know.

I actually ran into Nicky a couple years back as he was tending bar at the local pub. He acted as though we were best friends and served me drinks for free all night long. To date he remains the most amazing thing about the Mitchell family: he grew up and became an exceedingly normal, and perhaps even productive, member of society. It’s amazing what some medication can do for some.

Bin Laden associate killed:

A U.S. airstrike near the Pakistan border killed the Taliban’s southern military commander, a U.S. military spokesman said Saturday, calling him the highest-ranking Taliban ever slain by American forces.

Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Osmani’s vehicle was hit by a U.S. airstrike Tuesday as he traveled in a deserted area in the southern province of Helmand, the spokesman said. Two associates also were killed.

We take our military victories wherever we can find them, these days. The good news about killings like this is that it makes terrorism something of a dead end job, no pun intended. The bad news, of course, is that it’s still better than most job opportunities in the region and vacancies rarely seem to last long.

When I read the headline and the dateline, I’d really hoped that we’d gotten Mullah Omar (I believe Bin Laden to have died some time back, though it’s always hard to tell). The upshot is that even to the extent that a lot of these guys are alive, they’re having to keep their head ducked below the crowd, which is better than the case on September 10, 2001.

I generally don’t write about politics here and that’s a policy I will continue (it’s my hope, actually, that none of you even know for sure where I stand politically). But I hope that even in our divided country the war in Afghanistan is one that we can all support, whatever concerns we may have about how effectively it has been performed.

I caught an episode of Law & Order: Special Victim’s Unit over the break (who am I kidding, I love L&O and my folks have satellite, so I caught multiple episodes a day). This particular episode dealt with a girl that has Turner’s Syndrome, so she’s (more-or-less) stuck in a girl’s body even as she ages into young womanhood. She’s a 17 year old character that looks like she’s 12 or so. No older than 13 or 14.

In the story, she gets romantically involved with a gopher for her daddy that has a history of romantic involvement with underage girls (the guy seems to be in his young 30’s). At the end of the episode, the 30-something creep and the pre-teen-looking girl share a passionate kiss. I was curious about the ethics of such a scene, assuming that they had a 12 year old girl or so playing the 12 year old looking character and thinking how odd it must be as an actor kissing such a young girl.

Turns out that the actress herself (Betsy Hogg) was roughly 17 at the time of the shooting. So the episode featured a 17 year old actress playing a 12 year old looking girl that was actually 17. That’s kind of trippy…

I had dinner with my older brother Mitch tonight and then we came home and watched a bowl game on television. The subject turned to one of our favorite shows, The Office. He’d just gotten all the way caught up on it. In the course of the conversation the British version came up and he mentioned how much he really wanted to see it.

Would have made a great Christmas gift.

I’d actually considered giving it to him, but opted for something safer instead.

D’oh.

When I was a kid in Sunday School, I heard a different story of Mary and Joseph’s trip back to Bethlehem where Jesus was born. Mary and Joseph went around from one place to another in search of logic.

It was the neatest Christmas story I had ever heard. I had this vision in my mind of this guy and this pregnant woman on some sort of glorious search for Truth, going house to house and engaging in philosophical dialogue with the townspeople of Bethlehem to discover universal truths about life, the universe, and everything. So then they finally found someone cool and decided to hang out in their barn till the Son of Lord God was born.

It reinvigorated my interest in Christianity until I figured out that she was saying “lodging.”

I ran across a sorta Dear Abby thing for college sex and relationships and there was a letter to “Alice” about a daughter discovering that her father has been cheating on her mother. She’s asking Alice how to confront him about it. She gives good advice.

It reminds me of a good friend’s discover that his stepfather had some pornography on the family computer. He devised the perfect plan in that he would set a slideshow screensaver to that folder right before dinner. When the screensaver kicked on, he figured his Mom would look aghast at him and then he would look aghast at his stepdad.

He never did it, of course. His stepfather was extremely uptight, but that was preferable to his licentious father. But the possibilities of using a screensaver to bust him were quite endless.

I was pleased to (belatedly, I gather) receive a wedding invitation from my former roommate Dennis Loxley. Ever since his falling out with my other roommate Karl over the film Mighty Ducks 3, I’ve tended to stay closer to Karl (who I roomed with for two years afterwards and served as an usher at my wedding). I talk to Dennis irregularly, despite the fact that he actually lives only an hour or so away from me.

Anyhow, the surprise wasn’t that I was invited to his wedding, it’s that I was invited to the wedding of Dennis Allen Hobbes rather than Dennis Alexander Loxley. I figured that maybe I remembered his middle name incorrectly, but I certainly knew his last name. I’ve known a couple people that changed their name (even later in life) to take the name of their stepfather or that gets caught in some family split. But a quick accessing of some DMV records indicated that I had not remembered his middle name incorrectly. Oddly, the minor change to his middle name was more odd than the major change of his last name.

I had more or less figured it out before I brought up the subject with a mutual friend. Dennis’s relationship with his parents had always been rough. The more I thought about it, the more I figured that he wanted to change his name either to sever contact with his family, get a new start, or both. Changing his name to do so is very much the sort of thing that Dennis would do.

Apparently he only legally changed the name in the last few weeks. He gets married in January. One thing that I find curious, and I’ll ask him about this when I talk to him next, is why he didn’t just take his wife’s surname. I’m not sure whether or not she’s going to take his name, though the kind of girl that I figured he would end up marrying is the kind that would.

I almost asked myself what name I might take if I saw a reason to change it (other than taking my wife’s name, which I would have considered)… but then I realized that I blog under a pseudonym so that more-or-less answers that question, now doesn’t it?

A recent discussion reminded me of a story from a few years back during my woeful single years.

I met a Abby through a mutual friend (actually, more complicated than “a… friend”). We hit it off immediately. I didn’t have time to “seal the deal” and felt bad about not getting her number. No matter cause Abby was on top of it. She contacted me within a couple of days and we made arrangements for a date on Valentine’s Day. To make a long story short, I screwed up massively on the date. By the time it was over I knew that I had and I was trying to figure out ways to do better on the next one.

Turned out that there wasn’t going to be a next one. I could tell by the tone of her voice when she called me. To be honest, I wasn’t all that disappointed. It would have been a complicated relationship if there’d been one that wouldn’t have been ideal for either of us. I was kind of mad at myself for screwing it up, but not all that upset over the lost opportunity. Besides, I’d managed to go another year without being alone on V-Day and I had a new, double-underlined entry in “things not to do on a date.”

The only real problem was that she didn’t just dump me outright (well, she really didn’t dump me at all since we weren’t dating, but I don’t know a better term off the top of my head). Instead, she gave the “friends” speech. She thought that we could be really great friends. I said “sure” and went on with my life, figuring that I probably would never be talking to her again. Then she started calling as a friend and messaging me online.

For the same reasons that a relationship would have been complicated, a friendship wasn’t actually that desirable to me. I had enough female friends, enough ex-girlfriends, ex-sortas, and former dating partners that I was friends with. I was at a rare point in my life where my social plate was relatively full. So I essentially told Abby that I wished her all the best but that I really wasn’t interested in pursuing a friendship with her. I already had the best friends I could ask for.

I wasn’t really interested in a friendship with her and I didn’t think that she was with me, either. I’d figured that she was calling me out of guilt more than anything.

I regretting having done that almost immediately. By calling a spade a spade, I had rocked the customary dialogue of an amicable breakup. My role was to want to be her friend. Nevermind that she had deviated from her role of never talking to me again. Within days I was being told that she had devestated me and that I was apparently too hurt to even talk to her again. The second I protested I was apparently protesting too much. She sent just about every mutual friend we had to apologize for hurting me so.

Eventually I just stopped arguing. It was easier for me to let people believe that I was devestated than to try to convince them otherwise. I never made that mistake again. The next time I got the “let’s be friends” speech, I was amicable until she was satisfied that she could leave me alone without having to feel guilty over being disingenuous over the reasons that the not-really-a-relationship-yet failed.

Shortly before I graduated from college, when I was the only Truman son living in the Colosse area, Mom had an abnormality show up on her adrenal glands. Just about everything you need to know about my family (sans my brothers) can be summed up in what we did until the more complete test was performed.

Mom assumed she had cancer and cried endlessly.

I looked up “adrenal cancer” on the Internet. Upon finding the information that I did, I cried.

Dad looked up “adrenal gland abnormality” on the Internet, discovered what all the possibilities were.

Turned out that it was nothing. Never had a family of Episcopalians prayed thanks to God so fervently.

This morning I had a little crust on my tooth. I thought it might be a piece of food or something. While scraping it off, a hole appeared.

I looked up “I have a hole in my tooth” on the Internet. In most of the instances I found, the hole required the tooth being pulled. Gulp.

Then, taking a cue from Dad, I started just looking stuff up on the teeth. Turned out that the hole wasn’t on my tooth, per se, but rather just on my enamel. That’s about the very definition of a cavity.

Granted, this cavity is huge (though, oddly, not at all painful). It may be worse than I think. At the very least it’ll require immediate attention once my dental coverage begins on 1/1. But at least now I won’t be freaking out non-stop between now and then.

I’ll just be brushing about eight times a day.

One of the arguments against SUVs is that they are unsafe to other drivers on the road and create a sort of arms race where people that buy more ecologically and economically responsible motor vehicles are put at a disadvantage. I drive one of those more ecologically and economically responsible motor vehicles and will until buying an SUV or something makes more sense (which, if we settle down in the mountains of the west, we just might).

I got into a car accident yesterday. Traffic from the access road of the freeway merged straight in to my lane. A woman about to enter either didn’t know this or didn’t care as she was obviously unconcerned. I looked in my mirrors and changed lanes, missing the giant SUV that was sitting in my blind spot.

We both pulled over to a nearby apartment complex. Since her car had hit my door, my primary concern was to make sure that my door could open, which it could. I jumped out of the car to make sure that she was alright. She was driving an SUV. Of course she was alright. But the accident was my fault and feigning concern might make her less likely to sue for the pain and suffering of having to touch up the paint of her vehicle. Turns out I didn’t even really ding her paint.

My car, on the other hand, is quite bruised. The door opens and closes and locks and unlocks. I haven’t checked the windows to make sure they go up and down, though. Even so, the police were never called, I didn’t get a ticket, and I will take whatever damage my car might have sustained.

Which brings me back to SUVs. Had I run in to a lesser car, mine would almost surely have done some damage and I would face a ticket and possibly an insurance hike. So I am quite grateful about the superior force of SUVs. Regardless of who is at fault, better my car gets damage than theirs cause I don’t care about my car except to the extent that it gets me from Point A to Point B. And I am a relatively (though decreasingly) a young male and my safety isn’t of utmost concern, so better I be injured than I injure someone else.

Right up until kids enter the picture, at which point I will demand all SUVs off the road immediately! Or I’ll just get a Volvo.

“A company with ISO 9000 certification has a flag in front of their building and a piece of paper on the floor. A real ISO 9000 company doesn’t worry about the flag in front of their building, but someone is going to actually pick the paper up off the hallway floor.” -My company’s CEO.

“Organization is having a place for everything.” -President and CEO of a former employer.

Last night, 11:30pm

Him: I can’t sleep.

Her: Maybe you should take some Melatonin.

Him: I guess I could.

Her: I think it’s on the kitchen floor

Him: Yeah, under the cabinet and in between the stool and the trash.

Last night, 11:35pm

Her: Did you take your Melatonin?

Him: Yeah.

Her: Did you put it up?

Him: Yeah, but now I’m not sure if we’re going to be able to find it next time we need it…

Nothing says “filler” like online tests. I took OKCupid’s Brutally Honest Personality Test and got the following result:

Loser- INTP
13% Extraversion, 80% Intuition, 60% Thinking, 46% Judging

Talked to another human being lately? I’m serious. You value knowledge above ALL else. You love new ideas, and become very excited over abstractions and theories. The fact that nobody else cares still hasn’t become apparent to you…

Nerd’s a great word to describe you, and I seriously couldn’t care less about the different definitions of the word and why you’re actually more of a geek than a nerd. Don’t pretend you weren’t thinking that. You want every single miniscule fact and theory to be presented correctly.

Critical? Sarcastic? Cynical? Pessimistic? Just a few words to describe you when you’re at your very best…*cough* Sorry, I mean worst. Picking up the dudes or dudettes isn’t something you find easy, but don’t worry too much about it. You can blame it on your personality type now.

On top of all this, you’re shy. Nice one, wench. No wonder you’re on OKCupid!
Now, quickly go and delete everything about “theoretical questions” from your profile page. As long as nobody tries to start a conversation with you, just MAYBE you’ll now have a chance of picking up a date. But don’t get your hopes up.

I am interested though. If a tree fell over in a forest, would it really make a sound?

This is the first pseudotypology test that I can think of where I’ve been listed as a “P” rather than a “J”. My most common result (over 80% of the time) is INTJ. Looking at their description of INTJ, however, the description for INTP fits much more closely. I am guilty of many things, but arrogance is not generally among them.

Ezra Klein thinks that too many young people are learning useless languages:

Unless quite a few more folks than I think plan on doing development work in Africa, the absurd amount of French-language education going on in schools makes no sense {…} why we’re not throwing those resources into Chinese and a nearer dialect of Spanish baffles me.

I’m inclined to agree. I do have to tread at least a little bit carefully here as my sister co-majored in French and she is a much smarter and already more successful person than myself, but at the very least we ought to be branching out to the greatest extent possible. Some people in the comments point out that it’s difficult to get teachers for some foreign languages. I can’t imagine that we can’t find enough Chinese willing to come over here and teach Mandarin in return for a green card.

To the extent we focus on a single other language, that language should be Spanish (particularly if you’re west of the Mississippi River). Though I do think that Spanish is the #1 foreign language taught in schools, I don’t think it is so by a wide enough margin. I’d say the same about Canadians and French, except even moreso.

One of the more admirable things about the missionary program of the LDS church is that Mormons know foreign languages in very impressive numbers. It also makes them more fun to be around during the World Cup, cause they’re generally rooting for their mission countries or whatever they’re called.

I was approached by a homeless person last night while filling up my gas tank on the Interstate. He asked me for a couple of bucks. I declined, but instead of moving along he started up a conversation about how he needed to get him some wine before the homeless shelter closes its doors and stops letting people in for the night. I wished him luck, but he kept on talking.

The only thing I really said to him (other than “no”) was “I like your shirt.” He was wearing a Colosse Canes baseball jersey. “I’m originally from Colosse.”

He told me that it was on sale for seventy bucks at the athletics store of the outlet mall.

I told him that I couldn’t afford to spend $70 on a shirt.

Without skipping a beat, he asked “So can you afford to give me just a couple so I can get me some wine?”

The irony didn’t hit me until about ten minutes later. It probably never hit him.

I’ve been listening to the Harry Potter series on audiotape on my commute. I’m in to the fourth novel, though I usually take a break in between. Potter is perfect for listening to in the car because I don’t frequently have to “flip back” when I think I’ve missed something because Rowling is good about repeating connections that you might have missed. Not the heaviest reading (or listening), but good for audio in 30-60 minute increments.

One odd thing, though, that happens every time I listen. I start reading and even thinking in a British accent. Luckily, I don’t try to start talking in one. Though I have used the word “bloody” on a couple of occasions for emphasis.

The other day I found myself thinking of two different kids that I knew back in junior high that called me “friend.” Two very, very different kids.

Lewis Hibbard sat beside me. He was a stocky guy, some of it fat and some of it just bulk. He had an unusual mean streak, even for a junior high kid. He also chose his victims well, of which I was one. While Coach Dawson taught us American History, he would take a pen and jab it in my arm. It was more a stab than a poke. When he would get started, my arm would be bleeding by the time I left class. Without words, he dared me repeatedly to rat him out. Being a stupid kid in junior high that didn’t want to be the kind of kid to rat a guy out, I took it. I never said a word to anybody about what he was doing while our hapless teacher wasn’t paying attention. I am at once proud and angry at my silence.

He was a sadist then and I would be surprised if he wasn’t one now. I’m not sure what compels someone to stab a classmate. Yet despite the physical abuse, it never felt like he was picking on me. He never made fun of me. In fact, he never said anything negative to me at all that I can remember. In some perverse way, I think he considered me his friend. But nor did he do it because I was his friend… rather it seemed that I was his friend because I endured it.

One row over, two seats in front sat Orson Millard. Orson was a scrawny and short kid. He wasn’t smart enough to get in the honors class, though like me he stood out in the regulars. To Orson, I wasn’t a just a friend, I was his best friend. As far as I know, I was his only friend. I don’t recall being particularly nice to him, but since everyone else behaved so maliciously towards him, my relative indifference was the most kindness he’d seen.

In addition to being small and nerdy, he was also just a little bit weird. One day he mentioned, in passing, that his mother still bathed him. Had someone else said it we would have assumed that he was joking or lying to get attention, but he was nothing if not an earnest young man. Anyway, this little factual tidbit made its way around the classroom in very short order. Half the class was stunned, the other half couldn’t resist making fun of someone that was still being bathed by his mother at thirteen. The only person that came to his defense was the Coach Dawson, who said that his mother had bathed him when he was thirteen, too. It was his oafish attempt to get the kids to lay off, but it only confused us more.

Looking back and remembering meek little Orson, I wonder if rather than an odd little piece of creepy information what he told us was indicative of his timid, passive nature. I wonder what kind of mother continues to bathe her son at 13 and I don’t come up with very many benign answers. In fact, what comes to mind is a mother that likes to touch young men. If it were a father bathing his daughter at that age, it would almost certainly have caught the attention of the authorities. Looking back I think it should have been brought to their attention regardless.

Neither Lewis nor Orson went to high school with me. I figure that Orson just moved away and Lewis was probably placed in the district’s alternative school for thugs, troublemakers, and girls who found themselves pregnant.

I’d be interested in knowing what happened to each. I can’t image either story having a particularly happy ending.

Several years ago I dated a girl that was a public school teacher in a middle school in inner-city Colosse. Her occupation was a plus on the general assessment as teaching is an admirable occupation. Though she didn’t particularly choose her school (when you’re doing on-the-job certification, your school is chosen for you) it was still a tough job that doesn’t get enough recognition. That was my thinking going in to it.

The scorn that she had for her students made itself apparent very quickly. I was understanding about it until she talked about how some days she would see how many students she could get to cry. There wasn’t another date after that. “Who,” I thought to myself, “gets pleasure out of making junior high school kids cry in class?”

Coming out of a convenience store at lunch, I saw a couple mothers coming out of the Laundromat right across from the convenience store. One of the little boys was fussing up a storm with an obnoxious little whine. My sympathy for the mother started to dwindle when she started mocking her kid’s whine. Then again, I don’t have any kids and I figured maybe that was the only thing that worked so maybe that was excusable. Then she threatened to put the kid (probably 8 years old or so) in his little sister’s babyseat. The kid started bawling.

Then the mother of the bawling child bragged to the other mother about what she had just accomplished.

Yessirree… getting an already whiney eight year old to cry. That’s sure something to be proud of, isn’t it? It was quite difficult to imagine any way at all in which that might be remotely helpful. But Mommy got to feel good about her temperamental superiority, which was apparently what was really important to her.

Ron Washington, my home city of Colosse’s most recent former mayor, was a police commissioner of Colosse and a handful of other cities before getting elected. When he was first elected in the late 90’s, I remember thinking it odd that he only had support of one of the city’s two police unions and that endorsement took a lot of behind-the-scenes work by a local state senator. The support that he did receive was tepid at best and they declined to support his re-election bid.

As it turned out, Washington was a startlingly poor mayor. When he was re-elected the only rationale his supporters could offer up was that he was too incompetent to be corrupt (which was true, though since he was term-limited out, a couple of his former aides are now in jail). I remember thinking at the time that you would think that cops would support a commissioner-candidate because his cop background would make him more likely to consider faults in the department (such as cop pay and resources) a priority. After became obvious what a bumbling fool Washington was, I figured that the union had some insight into the mayoral candidate that the rest of us lacked.

But I stumbled across something interesting the other day.

Mike Moakley is Colosse’s current commissioner and the article I ran across was on the site of a police union of Sierra City, where Moakley was chief before moving to Colosse. It was pointing out Colosse’s rising crime and how Moakley’s top priorities are not particularly aimed at correcting this problem (upping grooming requirements, cutting down on high speed chases). I found it odd that the Sierra City cop union would take up web space denouncing a former chief and not so subtly saying his new employer should push him out the door.

That got me thinking that often the people that worked under you, regardless of how well you performed, may actually be the least likely to support you once you are no longer their boss. I would be reluctant to vote for many, probably most, of the company heads I’ve worked for. You get to know them a little too well and you’ve often suffered for their mismanagement. This is probably particularly true for something like a police chief, whose job is not to support the police officers but rather the mayor.

Over at Bobvis, a conversation about college education turned into a conversation about creepy older guys at college that couldn’t get any action.

Though I don’t have any creepy old guy stories, I have a creepy young guy story.

I was nonetheless reminded of Honors Chemistry II, which I took my junior year in college. For whatever reason, my class of 15 had only three guys in it. I was actually the only male to show the first day and one of them actually dropped the course before ever showing up..

I had to admit, I liked the odds!

I was actually sort of dating someone at the time, but my putative girlfriend and I were on a not-so-subtle race to see who could lend out of the relationship more safely and quickly than the other. I set my sights pretty quickly on a cute, smiley young lady named Kara.

Kara had already been partnered up with the Other Guy, who hadn’t shown up the first labs (neither had the third guy, but he’d dropped the course apparently before ever showing up). She had been working with me and my partner, which was how I had been getting to know her. So I wasn’t sure what to expect except an irrational fear of competition that had been drilled into me by a confidence-sapping significant other that had been persistently framing every boy she knew as potential competition for the four months that we’d gotten to know one another.

Anyway, so the guy finally showed.

He was wearing gel in his hair, jewelry all over, a smug smile, and more sexual desperation than I had ever seen on anybody in my entire life. Never in my life had I seen someone that oozed sexual frustration out of every poor of his body. You know that guy who pretends to be cool, but when he does it only outlines how uncool he is? Think Michael Scott from The Office. Yeah, this guy was pretending, from the get go, that he had ever had sex in his short and obviously miserable life, which was only outlining how lonely and desperate he was.

I can’t even explain what about him gave me the impression that I got, but my lab partner and Kara had apparently been thinking the exact same thing. “I need to take a shower whenever I think about him,” Kara later told me.

In some respects, I ought to feel sorry for the guy. He was most likely born with unexceptional (though not necessarily ugly) appearances. He was probably born utterly devoid of a personality. But some people just kick off a certain gear in your head that says “this guy is unsafe.” I don’t even know what I would fear that he might do, if alone with a woman and something went awry, but prior to meeting him I didn’t know such pitiable miscreants existed.

I ended up dropping the class myself. My interest in Kara waned the more I got to know her. The girl I was seeing beat me in the race out of the relationship that we both detested.