I was planning on having a series of posts on my recent trip to the Ephing Anime Con, but the more I thought about it the less interested I thought you guys would be in that. Instead I’m going to just throw out a bunch of observations. If any of them interest you and you would like to see a post on them, point them out to me and I’ll be glad to extrapolate.

So without further ado:

Good grief, when did I get so old? I remember feeling very old at the last couple conventions I went to, but it got three years more pronounced since my last con. I’m getting older but it seems that the average con-goers age is, if not static, aging at a much less rapid pace.

I’m going to have to let go of some of my old standard jokes about anime conventions. It’s really not just for geeks anymore. There was an amazingly larger variety of attendees. There were actual black people. Not like a black person or two, but at least a couple dozen. In anime circles, 50 black guys out of 15,000 is called “diversity”. The Asian-American contingent, which was never close to a plurality but always significant, was almost unnoticeable. I actually think there may have been more actual Asians than Asian-Americans. I only counted two people that seemed to weigh over 350 pounds. That, too, was unusual. The gender imbalance does not appear to have improved, though the age of the average female attendee seemed to go up.

By far the most enjoyable thing about the convention was the costumes. I always considered it a fun part of it, but having been to all of the panels before and not even being able to find the video rooms (and not that enthusiastic about it anyway), costumes were the main attraction. Well costumes and the feel of the place. It feels a little like an amusement part, except instead of giant Micky Mouses and Goofies it’s giant Gontaku the Destroyer costumes.

I generally frown down upon outfits that young ladies wear that are too revealing and have ever since I graduated from college. This is triply true for girls that are not yet out of high school. What’s funny is that there were a lot of young ladies wearing very skimpy outfits to the convention and it did not bother me at all. I guess since it was actually part of a prescribed costume they weren’t obviously doing it to tittilate or show off their bodies so I didn’t consider it as demeaning. Then again, who am I kidding? The anime producers decided on those outfits and the young ladies chose them for a reason. Nonetheless, it was a weird feeling to see so much skin and not feel at all uptight about it. I was more likely to grab my camera than scowl.

There aren’t many places where a thirty year old man can walk up to a twelve year old girl and say “Can I take your picture?” But you can at an anime convention and I’m not sure that there is a level of creepiness a guy can have wherein she will not be flattered. And yet no one seems to take advantage of it for that purpose. The stereotypical smelly con-goer almost never has a camera.

Thinking of the above psyched me out while I was there. I almost never took pictures of unescorted young girls out of fear of coming across inappropriately. A completely groundless fear that would not even have crossed my mind had I not thought about how unusual such an arrangement is. I was always happier to take pictures of guys than ladies. The coolest picture I couldn’t quite get was of an entire family dressed in costume.

My friend Clint and I once had the idea of only taking pictures of young ladies that weren’t wearing costumes to see what kinds of reactions that would get. Both of us are risk-averse in that regard so we never actually did it. Now I’m way past the age where that would be considered even a cute joke if she were to alert the authorities.

There are a number of things that you can buy at these conventions and that includes rather dangerous weaponry in the form of swords and knives. The thing is though that if you buy them you have to take them to a rack and store them until you’re ready to leave the convention. I was passing by said rack in the hallway when a handful of police officers were quizzing a crying young woman. I couldn’t imagine what it might be about but when they said that they were going to have to take her to the police station they feared that perhaps she had been sold something that is illegal in the state of Delosa. I couldn’t believe that the PD would be such hard-asses about it since it was obviously some sort of misunderstanding. No misunderstanding, it turned out. She had actually gotten smacked pretty seriously by her boyfriend and they needed her to go downtown to fill out a report.

One of the biggest differences between a convention in 2007 and one in 1997 is the dealers room. In addition to the aforementioned swords, the variety of things sold at those things has increased fifty-fold. There were swords and shirts and costumes and comic books and robes and magic crystals. You want to know what was missing? ANIME! There were all of two tables that were actually selling anime. To compare, there were as many colleges that had booths trying to recruit arts students and branches of the military trying to sign people up for war than there were booths actually selling anime at the anime convention. This was not the case in 2004, when I attended my last convention. I guess that it’s become so easy to get the stuff over the internet that the dealers room was turned over to even more eccentric things than anime.

At a convention some time ago, a friend of mine kept a cooler and went around selling cold cokes for a buck a piece and made a killing. Maybe next year I will try to be able to bankroll my own trip by selling cokes and batteries. Though they restocked batteries every morning, the woman at the convenience store at the hotel said that the batteries never lasted until 10:00.

Though I was glad that I only got a one-day pass, I really had a blast. Though I make fun of my geeky cohorts and even though it was on the whole a lot less geeky than it used to be, I really had a warm feeling at the convention of being surrounded by my peeps.

Julie works as a network administrator, but when I knew her she had far different aspirations, all of which having to do with animals. The first thing she was interesting in was veterinary medicine. That was followed by training dolphins or seals and eventually she decided that she wanted to be a dog trainer. In order to train as a dog trainer, she needed a dog.

She and I went down to the Colosse County SPCA to go pick one out. Animal shelters really are one of the most depressing places on the fact of the planet. Not only are there all manner of animals stuck in cages, but you know that most of the dogs you’re looking at are probably going to be put to sleep within a week or two if they don’t have a home. Further, if you’re picking between two finalists there is not an insignificant chances that the other will have to be put to sleep. Sad, sad.

I was raised with and prefer smaller, hairy dogs. Small was out of the question for Julie, so my goal was to help guide her towards a dog with more hair rather than less. She was had winnowed the choice down to a down to a Doberman and some mix-breed, neither of which had much of any hair. I, meanwhile, was hot on this one dog that was unfortunately pretty inert. I kept telling Julie that she was probably just waking up and while she looked at the other two I tried to get the little gal moving.

I ultimately succeeded and the dog began to respond. She was never particularly hot on the other dogs, so it wasn’t a tough sell once we determined that the dog wasn’t going to be a complete layabout. She was a mixture of Australian Kelpie and Chow, among other breeds I’m sure. She was mid-to-large with a very solid build and beautiful brown eyes. We named her Ohki.

Ohki integrated herself into Julie’s family very easily and Julie and I made good co-parents for her. She had a bit of a curmudgeon streak (which is odd for a dog, much less such a young one) but was nonetheless pretty playful and energetic provided that she wasn’t in a bad mood. When she was in a bad mood and you tried to play with her or do something with her, she had an absolutely priceless “Are you kidding me?” look of rejection. At least you always had a pretty good idea of what she was and was not going to do.

Before too long her younger brother got a black lab mix named Mathers. Ohki enjoyed dominance as long as she was the bigger of the two, but things became complicated once Mathers outgrew her. Mathers began to wonder why it was that she always had to defer to Ohki on the matter of who got to greet visitors at the door, eat at the food bowl, and so on. So war broke out between them as the tussled for alphahood. I was pulling for Ohki, but I thought that she was too small to carry the day. I made the mistake of trying to separate them and still have a scar on my arm from the incident. At the end of the day, Ohki emerged victorious. What she lacked in overall size she made up for by being a better tactician and having a higher threshold for pain.

By the time we broke up, leaving Ohki was almost as difficult as leaving Julie. I loved that dog. Fortunately, Julie got together with Tony pretty quickly thereafer and at least I knew that Ohki had a new step-owner. Ohki and Mathers were separated when Julie and Tony moved in together. Without Julie being around to monitor her diet, Mathers ballooned into a dog that could have pretty easily taken down Ohki. Ohki, meanwhile, got a new sibling in the form of a Jack Russell named Boston.

I haven’t had any dogs of my own any time recently with the exception of a weekend I was taking care of a stray and trying to find it a home. So whenever I visited Julie and Tony I was as excited to see the dog as I was either of them (particularly since Julie and Tony had a bit of a smug attitude about their being in such a happy relationship and my having blown it).

Above (clockwise): Me, Ohki, Mathers, Julie

I got an email from Julie a couple days ago that the tumors on Ohki’s back had grown to the point that she is going to have to put Ohki to sleep today. I was hoping that I would get to see her one last time since I went through Colosse this weekend to get to an anime convention in Ephesus. Unfortunately I couldn’t manage to schedule it.

Having no children and not having had any pets of my own, the four of us (Ohki, Mathers, Julie, and myself) are the closest I’ve had to having a family of my own. Two parents taking care of their kids (dogs or course are far away from kids as far as that goes, but it was the closest we’d gotten), having arguments about what to do with them, and so on. I don’t think back on my time with Julie all that frequently and rarely do I do so with a strong smile, but the two of us with those two dogs do bring me to smile.

Ohki is the closest thing I’ve had to a dog since my old little mutt died several years ago, so this is the closest I’ve come to losing a pet. As Barbaro’s owner said, grief is the price we pay for love. I really loved that dog.

Today during a yawn-inspiring meeting, I did what I do from time to time when I need to be awake but no one is providing me any reason to: I see if I can rattle off the names of our 100 senators and the state that they come from (I actually go through the states in alphabetical order so that I don’t count the same one twice). When I first started doing this I was in the low eighties. Today I set a record at 95.

I’m putting the names of the senators that I missed below the fold in case you have a meeting coming up today and you need something to keep you distracted: (more…)

I can’t think of an appropriate insulting curseword to use for Fortune’s Geoff Colvin, who is complaining about the laziness of the American worker. The ones I want to use are inappropriate and the appropriate ones are inaccurate.

The shorter Colvin is this: all of the economic developments we’ve made that have allowed us more leisure time are in the end going to be our undoing. For us to compete internationally, the working man (and woman) is going to have to take it in the chin. For the team, you understand. Nothing personal. Someone’s gotta do it and it ain’t going to be the people in the corner office.

When it comes to other developed nations, Americans get piddly vacation time. That time which we do spent at home, the so-called “leisure time” is frequently enjoyed at the pleasure of our employer that is free to call us any time, anywhere, for any reason. Much of the time that we’ve gained (which is a whopping 7 hours a week since 1965) has been due to less work needing to be done at home (we’re increasingly hiring people to do our lawns, fix our cars, etc.) that the rising tide of the economy was supposed to give us all.

As Colvin points out before he dismisses it out of hand, the whole point of having a solid economy is precisely because it gives us things like more leisure time. The infrastructure we have is the reward for the very hard work of our ancestors. Take that away and you’re not encouraging us to work harder, you’re telling us that there’s no point in working so hard to begin with. These sorts of things were not benefits generously bestowed upon us for our participation in the economy, it’s why we participate to begin with. It’s why we take out tens of thousands of dollars in student loans to participate. It’s why we leave our kids behind when we go on business trips. It’s why we face the daily liabilities of a relatively free market and inadequate safety net.

If corporate America honestly believes that our response to the economy going south is to take it in the chin rather than raid their profits, they are sorely, sorely mistaken.

Whenever there were complaints that our booming economy was so unevenly distributed, the retort was that even if it wasn’t all equal we were given a little more leisure time and a little more money. But Colvin is indicative of the exact attitude we can expect to see if our economy does hit the shores: when times were good, we fat cats earned our heap of money, but now that times are a bit tougher we - and by ‘we’ we mean ‘you’ - are going to have to tighten your belts and buckle down. Between us getting the spoils and you facing the liabilities, we make a great team!

Should times get tough, Americans will likely do what Americans need to do. Colvin had some decent points about our retirement age and whatnot. But the legitimate points he might have made are drowned out by the condescending tone I’ve heard out of every employer I’ve ever worked for when things hit the skids wherein when times are good we should be grateful for whatever we’re given but when times are bad we’re the ones that are going to feel it because we’re the ones not measuring up.

I say all this, but in the end I am actually quite bullish on our economy. I actually get quite irritated with people that so loudly proclaim that the future lies to our east. It’s almost like the race to be the first one to declare that a TV show has jumped the shark. Who knows if you’re right or wrong, but if you’re right you get to say that you called it first. If you’re wrong, oh well you get to still live in a healthy economy. Low risk with the reward of coolness. Who could ask for more than that?

-{link via Waiting for Dorothy}-

So the latest word on the upcoming GI Joe movie (still very early in development) is that they’re de-Americanizing the Real American Heroes:

In a follow-up to their confirmation that Stephen Sommers will direct G.I. Joe, Variety offers this new description of the team: “G.I. Joe is now a Brussels-based outfit that stands for Global Integrated Joint Operating Entity, an international co-ed force of operatives who use hi-tech equipment to battle Cobra, an evil organization headed by a double-crossing Scottish arms dealer. The property is closer in tone to X-Men and James Bond than a war film.”

Leaving aside for a moment the development that Cobra will apparently be headed by Destro rather than Cobra Commander (or perhaps it’ll be a Cobra Commander with Destro’s backstory)… Brussels?! What the holy heck?

I guess I can understand the international danger in American armed services actually being the good guys and in that vein I’m actually not so much bothered by GI Joe being an arm of an international entity. For some reason it’s the whole Brussels part that bugs the living crap out of me. Why not just make them part of the UN and let them at least be based out of the US?

What’s interesting here is that for all the grief I’m sure they’ll be catching for this in conservative circles, they actually dodged what could have been a much more politically potent plot. In the comic books, Cobra actually got its start as something of a right-wing domestic militia. They could have made Cobra a secret, maybe Klannish, organization working both within and outside of our government. It could have all manner of irritating politically correct goodness.

But man… Brussels. What the holy heck is up with that? I’m actually wondering if they’re going to go through and start assigning different nationalities to all the old faves. Flint could be French, already wearing the beret and all.

The first anime convention I ever went to was in the late nineties in Ephesus, a college town a couple hours away from my home city of Colosse. I had no idea that it would have the sort of repercussions that it did on my future life. I’d been to a couple of comic book conventions, but they were pretty piddly. When I signed up I was in a pretty happy relationship, so the idea of meeting someone was out of consideration (not to mention the obscene gender disparity that I correctly figured that there’d be).

By the time the convention had rolled around, though, my relationship with Julie had just barely begun to crack. Not enough for me or anyone around me to realize it, but enough to allow what happened to happen. It was nothing like the comic book conventions I’d been to. Scratch that, the dealer’s room it had was almost exactly like the piddly conventions, though on a significantly larger scale. What this thing had was people dressed up in costume, it had panels with voice actors and writers and import production company execs.

There was also a girl there dressed in a Ritsuko costume. I don’t know if I believe in love at first site, but from the very second that I first saw her something told me that this was truly exceptional. It wasn’t just her looks. It was something about the way that she carried herself. It was this weird feeling that, for the half minute I stared at her before I realized she might see me looking, that I had to meet this girl. And all at once I was scared to death about what might happen if I did.

It took the entire afternoon for me to get her out of my mind. This despite the pounding visual sensations of where I was. Later in the convention was a CosPlay that we were participating in. The line was hundreds long. Behind me was a girl dressed as Ryoko Takeuchi from Blue Seed. She started the conversation with me, but I wasn’t particularly enthusiastic because I thought that perhaps she thought I was older than I was. Between her height (5′11″ or 6′0″) and suit-and-skirt attire, I’d thought her to be in her late twenties. Desides, I reminded myself, I had a girlfriend, though maybe it wasn’t so bad to be flirted with as long as I kept my distance and didn’t act on it. She kept at it, though, and we talked.

She lived in Delianapolis on the other side of the state and was still a student. That piqued my interest a bit because that meant that she was at least still in school so probably not in her late twenties. I asked if she went to the University of Delosa at Delianapolis. She said no. I asked if she went to Delosa Lutheran University, also in the area, she said no. I asked where she went, she said Camden High School. When my eyes bugged out, she asked why they had done so.

I laughed. “Wow, I totally thought that you were in your late twenties. Twenty-five, at least. It never occurred to me that you were younger than I was. How old are you?”

“Fifteen. You?”

I coughed. “Twenty,” I replied.

This time she laughed. “I thought you were in your late twenties.”

That was a relief. If she was fifteen and thought I was in her late twenties, she must have seen me as a harmless old man and nothing more. After seeing Ritsuko earlier, the last thing I needed was another temptation. I already had a lot to think about in regards to my then-solid relationship.

“You’re smiling,” she noted.

I nodded. “I got some wires crossed. I didn’t realize that you thought I was twice your age. I thought that you might be flirting with me.”

“Oh,” she said. “You didn’t know that I was trying to flirt with you?”

“Was or was not?” I said, confused.

“Sorry, I’m not very good at this. Isn’t flirting kind of like joking, though, where it’s not any good if you have to explain it.”

“So you were flirting?” I asked.

She blushed.

“Even though you thought I was twice your age.”

“Flirting is flirting,” she said. “I’m kind of shy and not very good with people. I figured what better place than here to try to fix that? Besides, I’ve always liked guys older than me.”

It was funny that the more she talked the more rather than less surprised I was about her age. “So I’m a test case.”

She blushed again. I changed the subject.

Once we got out of there, I decided that it was time to look for Ritsuko. I had it figured out that I could play the two of them off in my mind, not get too far thinking about either one of them, and chalk it all up to harmless flirtation and fun. When I finally found Ritsuko, she was surrounded by guys. A couple of them I recognized from Southern Tech and I realized that they, as well as Ritsuko, were members of STAnC, the Southern Tech Anime Club. She lived in Colosse and went to my university.

Then, in what was already already becoming an uncharacteristically ignoble weekend, I took it a step further. Frustrated by my (both procedural and moral) inability to introduce myself to Ritsuko, I saw some young guy hitting on Ryoko. The dark voice in the back of my head told me that the odd connection I felt with Ritsuko was being denied and that I needed an ego pick-me-up. So like a vulture, I descended upon Ryoko.

She ditched the boy she was talking to instantly. The balance I was hoping to achieve was forsaken. I talked to Ryoko the rest of the weekend. Feeling awkward about having a girlfriend that I hadn’t mentioned, I did try to apply a bit of distance from her by saying that it was too bad that she was so young. She superficially agreed, so I felt safe. I saw a barrier, though it later turned out that she merely saw something to overcome. That would all open up in the months, and years, after that conventioned.

My relationship with Julie was never the same after that weekend. I had not cheated nor had I come especially close to doing so. But the events of what happened had created a tiny chink in the armor. It was not even a crack, but nonetheless layed out the groundwork for it.

In addition to keeping in contact with Ryoko, whose name I found out was Cecilia, I also kept an eye out for Ritsuko. Actually, it was more than that. I searched the whole Southern Tech campus for her. Any time I saw a blond with her body standing in front of me, I would pick up my pace and walk to her side to see if it was her. I really looked high and low for her. Even as I convinced myself that I wasn’t unhappy in my relationship, there was this person that I absolutely, positively, had to meet.

A year and half after the convention, I responded to an online personals ad that included no picture. After swapping emails I discovered that, in addition to a flurry of other near-encounters, I almost encountered her at that convention when she was dressed as Ritsuko. The funny thing is that I had an inkling, with absolutely no justification since it included no picture and all the profile included was her hair and eye colors, that it was her. Her name was Evangeline and she would become one of the most pivotal people in my life.

Heading out today for The Ephing Anime Convention in Ephesus, Delosa. It’ll be my first anime convention in four years or so and I’m sure that I’ll come back with a series of observations littering over the next week.

One odd thing that has crossed my mind is that there is probably a 50/50% chance that Evangeline will be there. She and I originally sort of met at an Ephing convention. I don’t think she’s so much interested in anime anymore, but I think that her boyfriend is. There’s also Cecilia, who I haven’t heard from in years. Anime was never actually her thing, but as near as I can tell she might live in Ephesus and she did show up at the second-to-last TEAC that I went to. The chances she will show are probably not much more than 20%.

Clancy is a little more concerned about the former than the latter. It’s hard to blame her, though, because I’m mildly more nervous about seeing Evangeline than I am Cecilia. Not that I’m gravely worried about anything in particular (nor is Clancy), just that Eva has something of a deleterious effect on my peace of mind when she’s in it and she is more likely to be in it if she’s sitting down the bar from me. I love her and wish her the best, but that doesn’t equate to an overwhelming desire to see her.

You know, relationships are complicated, not nowhere near as complicated as the run-up to a relationship and interactions after one.

As I start prepping some posts for this week, Clancy is sitting beside me on the bed filling out procedure logs for work. The software that they’re using is not totally dumb. For instance, it automatically fills in her name so that she doesn’t have to do that every time. Unfortunately, the gender defaults to “unknown”.

Clancy spends her time delivering babies. Her patients are the mothers. Their gender has yet to be either unknown or male. In fact, the software could probably safely assume that her patients are female.

But really, even in her old practice it would have been advantageous to have the patient default to either male or female. And even then “female” would have been the safer since women are much more likely to stop by to visit their MD than males are.

My initial thought was maybe they were worried that the docs would just leave everyone female, but gender is not a required field so anyone they might have left as female is also likely to be left as “unknown”. On the other hand, I guess incomplete information is better than accurate information.

Still, no excuse for a labor & delivery hospital to default to anything but “female.”

I don’t consider myself a particularly greedy or materialistic person, but then again who does. But I’m sure to lose whatever sympathy I may have garnered in the previous post with this one.

My mother and I have had a series of conversation that have rankled me a bit. I realize that even in a worst-case scenario I come out better than 95% of other Americans, and yet a sense of justice is being violated a bit.

My parents are rapidly coming to the realization that they have more money than they have time to spend it. Breaks your heart, doesn’t it? Mom always said that we wouldn’t get a dime in inheritence, but now she views it as an inevitability. Mom and Dad are in some disagreement as to how to split the money. Dad is of the mind that it should be split evenly between my brothers Ollie and Mitch and myself.

The first problem, though, is that Mom wants (and talk about “no inheritence aside” has always wanted) a college fund for her grandkids whenever she has them. A couple lucky investments over my grandmother’s estate (some fruit company and a company that seemed to specialize in soft, miniscule glass) helped pay our way through college. The issue, though, is that middle-brother Mitch does not plan to have kids. Dad feels that if they put down money towards grandkids’ college that Mitch is being jilted (as am I if I don’t have kids). Mom, on the other hand, thinks that if Mitch doesn’t have kids he’s saved a lot more than the college fund. And besides, college funds may not be even, but they are impartial.

The early skirmishes in this battle are actually being faught now. Having realized that it’s only our inheritence that they’re being generous with, the folks have become a lot more free with giving us financial help than they used to be. For instance, my parents helped us with our moving expenses from Deseret to Estacado. They have also covered plain tickets for flights home or at least offered to (we don’t always accept). They’re talking about helping us out with some of the hefty medical license application fees (that go well into the hundreds per state).

I am grateful for all of it and have asked for none of it.

But interestingly enough, when Dad cut a $2k check for our move down, he cut Ollie and Mitch each the same. Every help that he’s given us has also been extended to my brothers. Every time he’s helped Ollie out he’s given me and Mitch each a check. I have some mixed feelings about this.

Even Mitch has told Dad that he doesn’t need anything whenever he helps me or Ollie out. Mitch is an engineer and his wife is a pharmacist. With no kids in the picture, they ain’t hurtin’ for money. It’s less of an issue with Ollie because he’s always strapped for cash, but he’s strapped for cash because he spends his money stupidly. I don’t have any problem at all with their helping him out for a down payment on a house or helping his wife Kelsey through college, but the dude just spent $80k on a friggin’ boat.

But of the three of us, he’s the one that is going to need the college fund cause he’s the one that’s not going to have any money when it comes time. Frankly, Clancy and I are unlikely to need it (though who knows with tuition rates rising as they always are!), but if we have kids we’ll surely use it. Mitch, though, barely has use for it.

The second sticking point is the wealth of family heirlooms. It was always assumed that Mitch and I were going to team up to keep as many of those out of Ollie’s hands as possible. Ollie simply has less use for such things and would probably sell any antiques that he got. So to keep the stuff in the family, Mitch and I figured that we would use our slice of the pie to get those. We’d take what we wanted and then give the rest to our aunt. That way Ollie gets his cash and we get to keep the stuff in the family.

One thing I hadn’t considered is that his wife Brynne also has little use for such things as family heirlooms. She would be caught dead before putting any of that old stuff in her house. So what’s Mitch going to do with it? Give it all to Aunt Evelyn? Mitch is a good enough guy that I believe that he would do that, but the choice may not be entirely his. It’s not hard to see Brynne thinking that perhaps they should try for some of the more liquid assets. Standing up to Brynne’s is not one of Mitch’s strong suits.

So it’s easy to envision a situation wherein I use my entire piece of the pie reclaiming the antiques, most of which are going to Evelyn, while Ollie and Mitch get the stuff they will either actually use or be able to sell. That doesn’t bother me so much with Ollie because the stuff he will buy will probably make him happy (at least in the short term). But it just chaps my hide a little bit that I would be taking such a hit for honoring Mom’s wishes in regards to the antiques and heirlooms.

I am quite aware that I sound like a truly spoiled brat here, but such is life. If I don’t get a single thing from them that will be okay. But nonetheless it’s hard not to feel a tad resentful and I’m worried that resentfulness may cause problems. Estate division is one of the big family breakers out there and it happens with estates much smaller than my parents’. My mom and her sister stopped speaking to one another for almost fifteen years after divying up my grandmother’s. Clancy’s father’s relationship with his father was ruined in the latter’s final years with contentious planning (aided by some pretty serious manipulation by Clancy’s uncle).

Assuming that it doesn’t cause any problems, though, it’s good to air these grievances because it makes me realize how truly lucky I am that these rank so highly.

Approximately a week from now, Clancy will be unemployed. Her contract at the University of Estacado will be up. We had hoped that she might get another contract either in the Appalachians or the pacific northwest, but neither worked out in large part due to the Estacado Medical Board. The EMB dragged their feet for six weeks before they would give her a provisional medical license, making the contracts in Cascadia and Kanawha bad on a matter of timing as she couldn’t meet their start dates.

As luck would have it, Estacado is one of the most difficult states in the country to get a full-fledged medical license. Clancy has a student/faculty license, which isn’t the same. She can’t use it to work outside of university hospitals. The same is true in Deseret. Ironically, the only place she is presently licensed to practice medicine is Shoshona, a state in the mountain west where she had to get a license for a couple of rural posts as part of her medical training.

You wouldn’t know it by the way that they treat the doctors they have and the doctors interested in starting a practice there, but Estacado has a serious shortage of medical personnel. Especially in Clancy’s specialties, family practice and Ob/Gyn. Unfortunately, the application waiting list is up to six months or maybe longer and an application costs just short of $1,000.

We were somewhat excited to be coming to Estacado. Kyle, one of my best friends lives out here. It’s a nice contrast to stuffy Deseret. When I first came here several years ago for an anime convention I decided that this was a place that I would not mind at all living in. But from the minute we arrived the state of Estacado and U of E has been nothing but nasty to her.

First was the medical board. Imagine voluntarily going into some therapy during a particularly dark stretch in college. Now imagine ten years later being told that you have to track down every doctor that you’ve visited in the past ten years and have them send your medical records to the state board. Then you’re dragged in front of a panel in between a raging alcoholic MD and another on her fifteenth malpractice complaint and being treated like if you tell them that you’re fine you’re in denial or if you tell them you’re not you’re in trouble for not continuing medical care? All for the cardinal sin of seeking medical help ten years prior.

Oh, and in the process you’re unemployed and pushing back your 1-year contract into the next contract that you were hoping to take. That leads us to our current predicament. Clancy very much wants either the Cascadia or Kanawha jobs, so we are going to be biding our time for a year or so in order for her to be able to reapply. She’ll be taking temp jobs.

Unfortunately she will probably have to start in Shoshona, where she is currently licensed, so we’ll be a thousand or two miles apart. We’re hoping that she might get fast-tracked for an Estacado medical license because they already ran her through the ringer once and she doesn’t have a long history of medical practice* for them to comb over.

Before any of that happens, though, she’s going to be taking some time off. She’s worked 70-80 weeks over the past year with precious little rest to show for it and before that she was a resident. The only time off she got in between was spent moving or extremely anxious about whether or not we moved here for a job that she couldn’t take because of the damnable EMB. She actually got to see her family more when we were further away!

While she’s resting up and getting caught up with friends I will be the sole earner, continuing to work for Monmark and drawing a steady paycheck. We have some savings to lean on and once she starts temping we should start finding ourselves back in the black pretty quickly. Ironically, for all the trouble we’ve gone through, she should be earning more temping while working a fraction of the hours.

* - Ironically, the application process gets worse with the more experience you have. The more experience you have the more they have to review and the longer the process takes. If you were to judge Estacado solely on the basis of the EMB’s behavior, you would think that they didn’t need need any doctors and were downright terrified of doctors that bring experience to the table. In this case, though, that works to our advantage.

• I hooked up one of the laptops to the network for the first time since I last restored the OS. It comes with a firewall that apparently blocks out everything. It sort of defeats the purpose of having a network connection. Worse than that, no matter which setting I put it on, I can’t access anything. So I have to turn it off. I think I should start a software firewall company. All I’d have to do is write something to turn off the network. It would be foolproof and I would charge a quarter of what Symantec does!
• I have a couple Seagate Barracuda HDs that won’t work with Windows 2000. I’ve never seen that happen with a HD before. It’s only my Seagate drives (the rest are Western Digital).
• Firefox is starting to get Windows Syndrome. I swear each of their updates make the program more bogged down and less useful. It got so bad in Shell Beach that I started using Internet Explorer. I haven’t voluntarily used Internet Explorer in over four years. But at least with IE Java apps work without prolonged periods of Not Responding and it actually looks for words I do a search on within the document. Since they don’t let me downgrade to previous versions of 2.0, I’m seriously considering downgrading to 1.5 (which would be tragic because I would lose spell-check and my spelling is attrotious). and I am considering jettisoning Firefox altogether.

This is something I’ve written about in the past, but I haven’t gone over it recently and my readership since has changed so I’m going to go over it again.

There are advantages to working for a large corporation. The benefit packages are generally better, for instance. The pay is usually slightly better and though you read about massive layoffs, by my observation job security is actually higher (layoffs at Joe’s Auto Shop & Radio Repair don’t make the paper). There is also some stability to day-to-day tasks where when you get up in the morning you know what you will be doing that day and can plan accordingly. There are procedures that the company actually adheres to so you theoretically not only know what you’re supposed to be doing but also have a reasonable idea of what the people around you are doing. It may be a pain to be reminded to put the cover sheets on your TPS reports, but at least you know the TPS reports that cross your desk or that you have to look up will have a cover sheet.

There are also disadvantages, however. For instance, you are typically expected to dress more nicely. You have fewer opportunities to make an impact because your responsibilities are more narrowly defined. Your boss’s boss doesn’t know who you are, never mind the people who really matter. Productivity is likely to be more closely monitored and they’re less likely to be flexible with coming in late or leaving early. But mostly, the biggest downside to working for a larger corporation is that it can be a deeply impersonal place. It’s often worth it because of the advantages, but there is nonetheless a price to be paid.

What kills me sometimes, though, is when smaller companies go out of the way to take on the negative aspects of larger companies. A couple months ago Monmark decided to take photo IDs of everybody. Okay, fine, whatever. But now they’re saying that we have to keep our IDs visible at all times. Nevermind that we all pretty much know each other. Nevermind that it’s our managers and not spies that are putting our company secrets in jeopardy. They think that IDs will create a more “professional atmosphere”. They’re not even pretending that this is about security.

So what’s the big deal, you ask? First there is the symbolic meaning. It unnecessarily impersonalizes our place of work. It needlessly gives us that “you are a number and not a name” vibe. One of the advantages of working for a small company is supposed to be that we are not cogs in a machine but are agents working to make the company better. Many larger companies (the smarter ones, anyway) actually try to create this atmosphere, though it usually doesn’t take because the organization is too cumbersome. And yet here is Monmark, running right in that direction. Without, might I add, supplying any of the benefits mentioned in the first paragraph (with the exception of our benefits package, which is actually pretty good).

But aside from the symbolism of it all, there are practical concerns. The badge is also the access card into the building. Most of us keep it in our wallets because that’s the one thing we are not going to forget. So we almost never don’t have our access card on us. This is a good and joyful thing. But now we’re going to have to wear it around our necks or on our belts. We can drive all the way to work (45 minutes for most of us since we live in the next town over) without realizing that we’ve forgotten it. Unlike our keys, it’s not something our butt is going to feel naked without. That means that we’re not going to be able to enter and exit the building without a buddy. There will be an admittedly very marginal loss of productivity and a not-insignificant increase in frustration for… what? A more professional atmosphere?

Our original thought was that this was the idea of Osaka Heavy Industries, our Japanese parent company. It sounds like the sort of thing that the Japanese would be enthusiastic about and as far as OHI is concerned we are a large corporation. But apparently this came down from the American side of the business. Japan tries to stay out of HR matters that don’t immediately effect the bottom line*.

* - Interestingly, they did reneg on this general policy somewhat recently. They were horrified at the impressive-sounding job titles that our managers had. VP’s of this and VP’s of that and CxO’s and the like. All of the VPs and Chief Officers had their titles busted down to Director. It was all the Executive Director (formerly the CEO) could to do make it “Director” rather than the more pedestrian title “Manager”.

-{Warning: The conversation in this post veers into less than entirely pleasant, bathroom-related terrain}-

quinkyle: Hey, it’s been a while since we had lunch. Would you like to eat lunch this week?

trumwill: I try to have lunch on a daily basis, so I assume that I will eat lunch at least 5 days this week.

quinkyle: How about you and I eat lunch together. Like at the same time and the same restaurant. We can talk while we’re not eating. Is there anything I missed, Mr. Literal?

trumwill: Would we be eating at the same table?

quinkyle: It would make talking a lot easier if we were. And less rude to those around us.

trumwill: Sounds like a deal. Where do you want to eat?

quinkyle: A new Chipotle’s opened up near the town square. How about that?

trumwill: Oh yeah, I saw it. I ate the new Grande Quesodilla instead. That was a mistake.

quinkyle: Uh oh, did you outlay a brown waterfall, Cici’s style? -{ed note: CiCi’s pizza destroys my digestive system}-

trumwill: No, no. This produced very solid waste matter. It was more unpleasant going in than it was coming out.

quinkyle: I really could have gone all day without knowing that. At least the part of the day where I have food in my system that is digesting.

trumwill: You reckon I’m giving said food ideas?

quinkyle: Doubtful. Food can’t read. If it could it would probably be less complaint when directed into the building with the sign that says “Slaughterhouse” over it.

trumwill: True, and I suppose it doesn’t acquire the ability to read in between the slaughterhouse and your digestive tract.

quinkyle: That would be wicked-scary if it did.

trumwill: Indeed.

How ironic is this… I just wrote a post lamenting how impossible it is to discuss racial issues because both sides get so self-righteous and defensive, but the more I wrote the more I had to edit and the more I edited the less I could say and eventually I couldn’t say anything that wouldn’t get everybody self-righteous and defensive.

When I was in the fourth grade, I had a hot teacher, Mrs. Nelson. She was under thirty, attractive, and very nice and warm. So was so nice and pretty that she had relatively few disciplinary problems with the boys because none of us wanted to make her upset with us.

On the first day of class she gave a speech that it was in the fourth grade that she started needing glasses and that she would be on the lookout for kids in her class that might need glasses.

I’m not sure there was any clearer way that she might have said “If you have bad eye sight, or at least behave as though you do, you will get extra attention from a very attractive school teacher.”

Suddenly I couldn’t read the chalkboard so easily. I had to squint. I had to raise my hand and ask about any writing that might have been the slightest bit smaller or less legible than other writing. In no other class would having been moved to the front a reward rather than a punishment. When Mrs. Nelson told my parents that I needed to get my eyes checked, I was in too deep to do anything but intentionally fail my eye exam.

My first pair of eyeglasses had big, giant, purple frames. I was not particularly averse to wearing glasses in the abstract (I knew my genes and knew I’d get them eventually), but the combination of the girliness of the glasses and the fact that it made my perfect vision blurry, I wore them next to never.

A couple years later I was stuck in the back of my Spanish class, where the ability to read a chalkboard was more crucial in others. I could not for the life of me read what was going on. I don’t know if it was the first time I’d been sat in the back of a class in a year or two* or if my eyesight had just suddenly deteriorated between the fifth and sixth grades, but it was harsh. Out of pure desperation I put on the Ole Purples. They actually helped!

Unfortunately, I had enough popularity problems without those things saddling my already unimpressive personal appearance. So once again I was pretending that I couldn’t read what was reasonably clear so that I could get another visit to the eye doctor and another pair of (preferably black or silver or brown or gold or anything but purple) glasses. When it was all said and done my prescription was… almost identical to the bad prescription I had faked two years before. “This is great!” Dad said, “no need for new glasses!”

Ole Purples met with their untimely demise a week later when Dad sat in them in his chair. “So strange,” he said, “you’d think I would have seen them there.” Somehow they’d ended up below the armchair cover, which had itself been placed on the seat of the chair, making it pretty difficult to see. I managed to convince Dad that my glasses must have been on the armrest and that they must have fallen onto the seat of the chair where he sat on them. The elaborateness of my explanation was probably the most suspicious thing about the whole affair.

* - I don’t believe this to be the case. My last name for whatever reason would usually stick me near the back of the classroom in any alphabetically-assigned seating chart and any time we were given a choice I’d sit as far back as I could.

In the discourse surrounding American jurisprudence, sometimes a statement is uttered that I consider so counterintuitive that I can’t even process it.

Recently, in two very different camps, I’ve seen the same argument presented. The first camp is people who insist that legal (or not) immigrants who have kids and then commit crimes shouldn’t be deported. The second is the reduction or removal of social welfare programs from people who have lived on them for a long-term basis (sometimes generationally) and show no sign of seeking employment.

The argument goes: you can’t deport them or remove benefits because “you’re punishing their kids for their parents’ mistakes.”

I find this argument to be without merit and definitely two-faced, however. Society punishes kids for the mistakes of their parents every day. If a parent loses their job, the kid is faced with the adverse conditions. If a parent is incarcerated for a crime, the sentence is rarely set aside merely to let the parent stay with the kid (the one notable exception being that the sentence may be “deferred” for a couple months if the kid is a newborn) - and this applies even if they were a single parent and it means the kids go into foster care. If a parent is killed due to their own stupidity (car wreck or anything else), if a parent is maimed and unable to work in the same fashion… in all these cases, the kid is expected to simply accept the change in their life.

In each case, the problem for the kid is not a decision of “society” - it’s a decision of the parent. They choose to do something that gets them fired, or merely to work at a place where that is a risk; they choose to commit a crime; they choose to do something that puts them at risk of death. There’s room for “tragic accidents”, but we even expect the kids to face the consequences of those.

To make this argument for the two specific cases I mentioned above? I can call it nothing but duplicitous. It’s an appeal to emotion where the same emotion is not universally applied, and it does nothing but call attention to the fact that the other arguments involved are equally without merit.

“No pressure on when or if you want to have kids, but can you hold this really cute baby for us? Now can you hold still for a picture we can put on the fridge and send to everyone we know underneath the title ‘A Natural Mamma’?”

As with anime, my interest in comic books has also waned over the years. So… what exactly do I like about stories where guys and gals dress up in tights, fly around, and save people? What advantage to dialogue balloons, thought balloons, and sound effects written out have over the solidly written word or TV show?

I’ll tackle the first thing first. Why be interested in something as childish and unrealistic as superheroes? That very question assumes that comic books are childish and realism is something to be preferred.

When I was in high school, my theater teacher talked about “the illusion of reality” that the stage provides. It wasn’t supposed to be and look real. Everything needed to be exaggerated so that people in the back could see what was going on. Rooms needed to be bended outward to provide more room for movement. It didn’t have to look real, it just had to look real enough for people to understand and relate. Attempting to behave on stage as you do in real life would lead subtlety and nuance to be largely or completely missed. Just like you have to yell to produce a conversational volume to the guy across the room, you sometimes need to exaggerate things to portray common everyday things in new ways.

Many of the aspects of superhero stories are simply amplifications of everyday life. They’re a backdrop with which to tell a story in a new and interesting way. Secret identities often mirror the two faces we have during the work day and afterwards. In order to maximize our career opportunities we often hide our opinions and aspects of our personality. Superheroing is the opposite, where you hide your public life from your private friends. You also find yourself in situations like Batman and Superman wherein you are stuck working with someone that you have to respect, don’t particularly like, and almost never agree with.

My last couple of jobs in Colosse had me working as a (or the sole) network administrator. Whenever the network went down I had to drop everything and try to fix it. The first network outage we had in Deseret, I almost leaped into action before realizing that my employer had its own IT department and it wasn’t my problem. As I watched them scramble the thought that went through my mind was that I was like a retired superhero witnessing a crime. I even wrote a short story in that vein. A hundred thousand of my experiences have been outlined, in a more exaggerated and colorful form, in superhero stories.

The other big thing is that comic books allow for a comprehensive style of storytelling I’m not sure that I’ve seen anywhere else ever save perhaps for Star Trek. A Batman comic is not just a Batman comic. It’s a comic within the larger framework of a comic book universe. When Superman died, he did not only die in the Superman titles but the repercussions of which were felt in every other comic ever made. At any given time there are between 20 and 40 different comic book titles. They’re almost all written and drawn by different people. But together they weave a tapestry. They all become a part of one another as characters and stories cross over from one title to another.

Sometimes the writers differ from one another. Sometimes Bruce Wayne is portrayed one way in one comic book and then a different way in another. Sometimes there is a retcon where something in the past (like a supervillain’s origin) was retroactively changed. These sorts of things make a lot of fans mad, but I even like that aspect in me. The relativist in me says that the past changes all the time. What we always thought was actually was not. Sometimes perceptions of a person differ so greatly from one person to the next it’s like… they’re written by two entirely different people. I actually get a bit of a charge out of the ambiguous aspect of it all.

There are relatively few things that can compete with the comprehensiveness of a universe built on 350 comic books a year. Soap Operas can sometimes do it, particularly when they spin off and cross over with one another. Star Trek has sort of done it in between the various shows and books. The old overlapping stories of the Greek gods also did that sort of thing, with Zeus and Heracles and Agamemnon appearing here and there as part of some greater, mythical framework. But such things are very rare.

Superheroics, like Greek gods and science fiction, are very conducive to this sort of thing because it doesn’t seem to me that when a guy dies and comes back from the death a couple times it doesn’t matter whether he’s wearing a two-piece suit or underoos, you’re already outside the realm of possibility. I say you might as well have some fun with it.

Of the movie Troy, Roger Ebert writes:

By treating Achilles and the other characters as if they were human, instead of the larger-than-life creations of Greek myth, director Wolfgang Petersen miscalculates. What happens in Greek myth cannot happen between psychologically plausible characters. That’s the whole point of myth.

I appreciate the subtlety of a morally murky crime show or the philosophical pontifications of a courtroom drama, but sometimes stories are better told and ideas better presented with people that can fly or create giant green objects with their rings.

The reason that posting has been light this week is that we are spending it in a condo on sunny Shell Beach. This is our first trip back to Shell Beach since it got nailed by a couple back-to-back hurricanes. So everything here is new. That includes the televisions, where the old school tubes have been replaced by new HiDef TVs.

As most of you are aware, the aspect ratio (AR) on HDTVs are closer to the 16:9 of movies rather than the 3:2 of regular television. This presents a bit of a problem because though more and more TV shows have gone “widescreen” most are still in the traditional AR. The most obvious solution to this problem is to have black bars running to the right and left (the same way that black bars run along top and bottom when widescreen is shown on regular television.

The television comes with a handful of options:

• Normal - This is with the black bars running across the right and left, which can create the burn if used too much. It also is problematic when a 16:9 show comes on, because then there are black borders along all four sides becaue it’s a 16:9 inside a 3:2 inside a 16:9.
• Wide - Everything is fat. The advantage to this is that everything is visible. This is the way to go with sports where being able to read the text (stats and scores) is important, but a slight distortion isn’t that big of a deal as long as it’s consistent.
• Panorama - This takes up the extreme monitor by distorting the sides. It creates a glass type of effect, where everything front and center (which you would be viewing through glasses) appears nicely but the edges are grossly distorted (as they might look outside your glasses). This is a lot like “Normal” view but in a way that won’t create any long-term problems with the screen.
• Zoom - This is my preferred one, where it just lops off the top and bottom of the screen Similar to how “full-size” movies lop off the right and left of widescreen films, though those movies typically do it tactically rather than right in the center. Zoom mode of live television obviously can’t do that (though a scroll feature would be awesome!). For the most part you don’t lose much from the top and bottom. I was watching Law & Order yesterday and I was wondering if they kept declining to show the top of Fred Thompson’s bald head in some conspiracy to prevent him from looking too old to be president. Then I remembered that I was in zoom mode.

The United States is supposed to cease analog television in early 2009, at which point HDTV sales will start to increase significantly. As they become more prevalent, I can’t help but think that some more permanent solution will have to be figured out. New programming that hasn’t already will start switching to 16:9 AP, but what about all of the 3:2 broadcasts in reruns?

It seems to me that the most obvious solution will be to simply come up with alternate content for the 15-20% of the screen that is unused. This would actually allow the broadcasters non-stop commercials. They would have to be subtle so that they don’t detract from the main programming, but having corporate logos wouldn’t be that problematic, for instance. In fact, this is so obvious that I could see them doing it for new broadcasts as well as older ones. More benignly, during sports news on ESPN or Fox Sports they could have the boxscore cattle call appearing non-stop to the right instead of in a crawl at the bottom. For news broadcasts they could sum up the news story in bullet points or provide geared ads (say during a story on house break-ins, show phone numbers of home security systems and whatnot).

For the past few years they’ve been showing more and more new content in 16:9 AR even though for most people that means unused blackscreen. It’s not hard at all to imagine that they would keep new shows at 3:2 so that they can run corporate logos and emphasize product placement (”that letter-opener that the character is using is available at Staples for $6.99!).

The alternative would be for them to go over all of the old shows and crop like they do in the movies, which is a lot of work, or add the black bars in so people don’t have to keep switching from video modes (which runs burn risks, but solves the bigger problem). For better or worse, though, I can’t imagine that they would fail to utilize the opportunity to sell more ads, though.