Not long ago my relationship with Clancy reached a milestone: I have now been with her longer than I was with Julie. Clancy and I surpassed Julie and I in most ways in our first year. The only remaining milestone was simply a matter of running out the clock.

Julie and I were together for over four years when I decided to end it. Even before that I was subconsciously moving away from her. There came a point, though, where we had to either fix us or break up. The idea that she didn’t think that there was anything that needed fixing made breaking up all the more inevitable. She knew that I was upset, though, and tried to figure out whatever on her end was causing that.

She thought it might be her insecurity. It was, ironically, her announcement that she no longer felt insecure about our relationship that tripped the wire. I’d had no idea what to say. That night we had our first of several talks and we gave me two weeks to figure out what I wanted. Well, it was two weeks for her to try to change my mind.

She sent two emissaries to talk to me about it. The idea was to talk me out of it, but in both cases the mutual friend was closer to me than to her. The first was Kay Brown. Kay was one of the few people that knew that I had previously been intending to propose to Julie as recently as a couple months before. Laying out my thoughts was therefore easy for her. I was able to stick with the same program: I wanted to propose=>thought about married life with her=>determined it would be miserable=>did not want misery.

The second person she sent was our friend Tony. Shortly after our friend Walt died, Tony was divorced and in need of friends and so Tony sort of filled Walt’s slot in our social circle. I’d known Tony longer than she had, though, and unlike Walt he had a slightly greater allegiance to me than to her at the time. Even so, Tony dogged me about leaving a relationship that was so practical, peaceful, and serene. Once I explained myself, though, he sat back and said that it was a worst-case scenario: I knew exactly what I was doing, I had made my decision, and my decision made a great deal of sense.

Within a month of my breakup with Julie, she and Tony started dating. Within six months they were living together. Julie had a little time line in hear head that would have them married in 18 months and sporting kids by 36. But once they moved in together, things stalled. Tony’s divorce, which had previously been stalled by him when he was trying to win Lara back, was now being stalled by Lara. The reason that Julie and I didn’t get married was because we were young and in college, but similarly Tony and Lara couldn’t get married because Tony was still legally married to Lara and he said that he did not want to be planning a new marriage before he got out of his old one.

It was ironically the finalization of Tony and Lara’s divorce that did Tony and Julie in. Once that was out of the way, the Marriage Question loomed ever larger. Tony announced that he wasn’t really sure he ever wanted to get married again*. Then he announced that he was sure that he didn’t want to get married again. Julie had always wanted to get married and was horrified at the thought of having kids outside of wedlock (which was Tony’s plan). But faced with losing him, she finally relented and said that actually getting married wasn’t all that important to her anyway.

I was privy to both sides of this conversation as it was happening. I was to them what Tony was to Julie and I when we were together. The more I talked to Tony, the more disturbed I got. The more he started to sound like me. I wasn’t even surprised when he said that he wasn’t sure that he was in it with Julie for the long haul. Every conversation thereafter felt like I was talking to someone more and more emotionally checked out of the relationship. The program was clear: He considered marrying her=>thought about what married life with her would be like=>determined it would be miserable=>did not want misery.

When he finally broke the news to her, Julie of course sent me as an emissary to try to talk him out of it. I already knew by that point that the worst case scenario was true: He knew exactly what he was doing, he had made his decision, and his decision made a great deal of sense.

The part that struck me as the most disturbing was how similar the rise and fall of the relationships were. We both picked up Julie on the rebound, we both moved had quiet, happy, and directionless relationships, we both considered marrying her, and we both broke up with her. More striking than that, though, was that we had the exact same problems with her. Neither of us could really describe it very well, but we both knew exactly what we were talking about. I would have to write a separate post to do it justice, but both of us could tick off rather minor practical problems and yet we both knew that none of those would at all be an issue if there wasn’t this very distinct emotional void that came with being with her.

After they broke up I became the shoulder for Julie to lean on. She called me three times a day crying and sobbing her way through it all. She could go on for hours saying bad things about him and talking about how she destroyed she was. Thoughout these many discussions, never once did she acknowledge that her two serious relationships ended at the same phase for the same reasons. In fact, she never drew any connection at all between the two breakups. None at all. The only time she made any comparisons it was to say that I had done things the right way and he had done things the wrong way and how this hurt in a way that that one didn’t. Of course, part of me wants to say “Hey! I did so hurt you badly!” but that did not seem wise.

I don’t know whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing that she completely missed the connections. Had she seem them, it would have thrown her into even more despair and thinking that she wasn’t lovable and that any guy she got next would just leave her after over years. On the other hand, you can’t correct behavior if you’re not aware of it and if there is some behavior modification needed on her part it won’t happen without recognizing whatever role that she played in our decision. On the third hand, even if she asked me point-blank what she could have done to save the relationship I would not be able to give a clear answer and neither would Tony.

So maybe ignorance is bliss.

As an epilogue, by the time that Tony left her she had been in one relationship or another for ten years without so much as two months on her own. She’s been single ever since, though. She’s self-reportedly thrown herself into her work and doesn’t date very much at all. The last thing that she said to Tony was a message she passed through me: Tell him that I hate him. I couldn’t blame her for the anger on that, though, he’d just cost her her job. That’s a story for another time.

* - To be fair, that’s how he had always said that he felt, but he acknowledged that his mind might change once he was no longer married to Lara. It obviously didn’t change.

Near Julie’s house on the outskirts of Colosse there was a chiropractor that put up clever little jokes or insights on his sign to grab attention. It was successful as far as that goes. Had I needed a chiropractor, I knew where to go.

There is a hotel near where I work that puts up a different sort of sign. I remember the first one that I saw said “Made in the USA!” I thought it was a clever little joke because who the heck thinks that they’re mass-producing hotels in China to bring over here? The next one said something like “American-owned, American-operated!” I read that and figured that they were either simply playing up their American roots, though the thought was occurring to me that perhaps they were gently trying to say that you don’t have to worry about the hotel being one of those Indian-owned and operated outfits.

After that, the signs started to become more pointed. It went from “Serving Americans since 1957″ to “Serving Real Americans since 1957″. They’d also periodically have one about not needing to dial one to speak to someone in English in their hotel and another that was up for a while that said “America is for Americans”.

I am all about free speech and all that. I do not begrudge them the right to air their views with varying degrees of subtlety on their signs. It’s not particularly likely that I’m going to let the political views of an establishment’s owner (however indelicately expressed) affect my choice with only rare exception.

That being said, I do have to question the wisdom of expressing such views at a hotel. A hotel only a few hours from the Mexican border, at that. Patriotism is great for selling cars, but it is really such a good idea for the hospitality industry? The town where I work has Mexican police conventions, Mexican business conventions, Mexicans visiting relatives, and conventions that bring in people from throughout the world. Is taking jabs at people that are not Americans really a smart thing to do? I can’t imagine if I were in France that I would be drawn to a hotel that said “France is for the French” or some variation of “Speak French or go home!”

It’s really quite bizarre.

My wife Clancy and I had pretty similar upbringings. We were both raised in somewhat conservative families, both taught that school was a priority and that we’d be going to college one day, both were raised with a hot-tempered and an even-tempered parent, and were expected to attend church weekly when we were young. But in that last similarity is a pretty significant difference.

Clancy was raised in Bavariana, the eastern portion of our home state of Delosa. Bavariana has a notable and distinct German Catholic population. It’s one of the most Catholic-friendly regions in the south. When you cross the county line from Rockford to Mueller, suddenly all of the town names are German and all the churches are Catholic. She was raised Catholic and was surrounded by people raised Catholic.

I was raised Episcopalian in the protest remainder of Delosa. Central and western Delosa have a hundred thousand denominations and while there is a strong thread of evangelical protestantism, it’s presence in the upper middle class community where I grew up, with families that moved there from all across the country, it wasn’t all that strong.

One of the earliest disagreements Clancy and I had involved the nature of organized religion. My view is on the whole pretty positive, hers not so much. I view them as a building block upon which society is formed. I see religion, even when I disagree with them, as an ultimate positive for society. Clancy sees them with considerably more suspicion.

It’s no accident that she was raised Catholic and I was raised Episcopalian. We were raised in churches that are very similar in form but quite different in function. The way we see church is inherently influenced by our experiences in the ones we belonged to. I don’t see organized religion as inherently restrictive because I attend one of the least restrictive denominations. She sees them as more authoritarian because she belonged to a church that was more authoritarian

I’ve noticed a pattern with my friends. Those raised in more devout families or in more demanding denominations or religions are the most and the least religious people that I know. Meanwhile, those that were raised where the household religion was non-existent, less prevalent, one more of ceremony and social brotherhood rather than gospel and doctrine are more likely to be non-practicing (or sporadically practicing) believers or quiet, respectful disbelievers.

The most angry anti-religionists I can name off the top of my head are those in Deseret. They either felt the pain of leaving the LDS church or of being surrounded by the influence of a church that they don’t belong to. Deseret was also home to some of the most devout believers I’ve ever met. Outside of Deseret, I think of Catholic Clancy and my friend Kyle who was raised in the Church of Christ.

Inversely I think of most of my friends from my high school and college years. My friend Dave was not raised to be religious (as far as I know) and he’s not a very religious person. At the same time, he demonstrates a degree of respect for religious as it pertains to moral and spiritual guidance, provided that it stays out of the way of science. A lot of people I know that grew up in ostensibly non-religious (to be differentiated from “anti-religious”) house have that kind of attitude.

An example closer to me is Clint. Clint was raised a staid Presbyterian and was, as long as I’d known him, something of a believer but not in the energetic sense. He displayed no particularly animus towards organized religion… until he went off to Southern Cross University in Gilead for college. Cross was a very religious institution and by the time he got out he was almost an atheist. The further he got from Gilead, the less scary religion became to him and he’s actually started about going to church again.

For those of us raised in more accepting environments, church just takes on a new meaning. Church was once and I’m sure will be a place for me to find spiritual solace. Whereas Clancy’s experiences with organized religion involve a lot of it telling its perishoners what to do and how to believe, my mental associations don’t involve that at all. Less a pronouncement and more an exploration. It’s a place that welcomes me even if I don’t quite believe everything that they tell me.

I’m not going to say that my church’s way of approaching faith is right and others are wrong, though of course I see it that way if you can get enough scotch in me to get me to admit as much. But rather the way that I see church, the role I believe it provides as a social institution and facilitator of spiritual reflection rather than an institution meant to control, is very much rooted in the experiences I’ve had with it. The good news is that it is amenable to people like me that would have a devil of a time trying to acclamate ourselves with a more rigid theology. The bad news is that it makes it so much easier to stray from the flock. It makes the transition out that it’s become difficult for the Episcopal Church to hold on to its adherents.

On the flipside, other churches make it much more difficult to leave. I’ve had conversations with disgruntled Catholics and have praised the virtues of the Episcopal Church and I hit a wall. There’s a certain “It’s Catholic or it’s nothing” vibe. Sure, some liberal Catholics do become Episcopalians and some conservatives become Orthodox, but almost all of the disgruntled Catholics are I know are, by definition, Catholic, and almost all of the former Catholics I know stopped attending church altogether. While the Episcopal Church may fit the definition of what they say they want (a more theologically flexible Catholic Church) it simply doesn’t fit their idea of what a church is supposed to do.

They see the church’s function as being what the Catholic Church was to them, similar to how I see the church’s function as being what the Episcopal Church was to me.

Megan McArdle has a post about the merits (or lack thereof) of cable channel unbundling based on a post on The Coyote Blog explaining why he doesn’t believe it should be legislatively mandated. I’m against laws mandating unbundling of channels, but I don’t have the time and energy to debate the subject (my benevolent Webmaster and I have done so on multiple occasions). If you want to know why I believe as I do, ask and I’ll let you know.

But I am going to explore one aspect of bundling, which is that because some people are paying for channels that they’re not watching, some portion of the cable-buying public is subsidizing the viewing habits of another portion.

In the comment section of McArdle’s blog, Shawn Levasseur proclaims the following:

That’s happening now with sports channels, especially ESPN. As it stands now, sports channels are subsidized heavily by people who don’t watch sports. Cable systems bicker every now and again, threatening to drop various sports channels, or demand that they become optional premium stations (like the movie premium channels).

I could go on about how major league sports’ growth is currently driven by forcing the non-fan to pay in many different ways, but that’s a bit too much of a thread drift.

While Levasseur is correct that major league sports growth is financed muchly by non-sports fans (particularly in publically-financed sports venues), I believe that he has it backwards as it pertains to cable television.

I would be willing to bet money that ESPN and the Fox Sports affiliates are among the highest rating cable channels. I also suspect that without those channels, cable subscriptions would drop considerably. If you have any contrary data, feel free to prove me wrong. But insofar as that is the case, it is actually ESPN watchers* subsidizing the rerun networks (TNT, USA, etc) and niche channels (the do-it-yourself channel, fighter plans channel, and so on) which I would wager garner much lower ratings.

So hate on sports all you want and complain as loudly as you like about how publically-financed sports stadiums and student fee financed collegiate athletic programs are unfair to non-sports fans. I’ll agree, for the most part. But insofar as cable and satellite TV is concerned, I believe that they are doing you a favor.

* - Sports fans aren’t the only ones. Cable news networks, for instance, do better as well. Popular original programming channels such as The Cartoon Network and Comedy Central also have large followings and are helping subsidize the less popular networks.

I finally caught the end of Aaron Sorkin’s latest series, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. Sorkin’s first major TV show (that I’m aware of) SportsNight caught the attention of critics though failed to ignite with the public. His follow-up, The West Wing, was a hit with both. His third effort, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, was canceled after the first season and it was considered fortunate that it lasted that long.

So the question is… what went wrong?

The biggest problem, I think, is that Studio 60 played to Sorkin’s biggest weaknesses while failing to get the audience along for the ride.

The biggest problem was the most essential: the premise. Why Sorkin and NBC thought we would enjoy a TV show about Hollywood producers preaching to the American people is completely beyond me. I think Hollywood in general has this notion that because we buy People magazine and care about celebrities that we care a whole lot about what goes on behind the creative process. By and large we don’t. But worse than the faulty premise, they took the behind-the-scenes approach and made it unattractive to even people like me that might be interested by making it half about the making of the show and half about the point of the show within a show which is the main characters’ crusade within the show to overcome the stuffy network execs and censors and tell us how we should think.

Which leads to problem number two: sanctimony. Sorkin seems to be a pretty bright guy. It’s obvious that he thinks about the issues that are important to him. He seems like the sort of guy that yells at the President and other political opponents when he’s giving a speech on TV. There is almost a pent up rage there wherein he will go out of his way to have one of the characters air some sort of political rant that you can tell Sorkin, and not the character saying it, has been to let out. He did this a lot on The West Wing, too, but it was more appropriate to a political drama than to this. The conceit that we should be as happy to hear a Hollywood producer or actor spout off self-righteous diatribes as we are to hear the fictional President of the United States do it tells us quite a bit about the inflated sense of importance that Sorkin and Hollywood have for their place in the political debate.

None of this is to say that I actually had a problem with the content of the rants themselves. But even when I very much agreed with what he was saying, he made his point of view sound the incontrovertible truth when I could easy come up with a retort. Sorkin’s at his best when he’s doing back-and-fourth dialogue. Sorkin forgets that sometimes. On West Wing he forgot it during the mock-2002 election between Jed Bartlet and Robert Ritchie. Republican Ritchie was nothing but a rhetorical punching bag wherein Bartlet could display his intellectual superiority over an idiot Republican. Somehow, though, he was actually worse about the one-sided political rants on a show about a TV show than he was on a show about the White House.

On some level Sorkin realized this shortcoming and he tried to compensate for it by self-deprecation. The Hollywood liberal jokes were ever-present, but it came across more as that sort of half-joke that the guy with the really bad temper has when he pretends to get upset about something and you think he’s joking but the uncertainty and familiarity of it makes you more uneasy than humor-filled.

The last thing thing he did was fail to let the show write itself. In the first season of The West Wing, Sorkin attempted to set up romantic chemistry between Josh and Mandy. It didn’t work. No one cared. Everyone was a lot more interested in Josh and his assistant Donna. After the first season Mandy was unceremoniously dumped from the program. that kind of adaptability was absolutely crucial and completely missing from Studio 60. Nobody I know that watched the show really cared about Matt Albie and Harriet Hayes. I frankly believe that they were better off without one another. But for personal reasons (it mirrored Sorkin’s own romance with Kristin Chenoweth) and the show suffered as a result. Their lack of chemistry became immediately apparent when two episodes after her introduction I was thinking that Matt Albie and Mary Tate should pair off. Just as with his political views, Sorkin was more interested in saying his piece than he was in showing or saying things that might really interest us. No complaints about Danny Tripp and Jordan McDeere. I thought they were cute together.

Before I move on, I should say that on the whole I did enjoy the show. If it were on again next year I would probably watch it, though I’d do like I did this year and be constantly behind a week or ten. Despite the rants and mismatched romances, I really did like most of the characters. Sorkin’s dialogue — that is when he has two characters talking — is still really good (though not as great as it once was). He also managed to capture an energy like had had in SportsNight that seemed beyond hokey when applied to The West Wing.

The good news about the show’s cancellation is that it may leave Sorkin free to pursue other projects. What I would actually like to see him do next would be to take the best elements of SportsNight and Studio 60, namely the energy of producing entertainment for the masses, and marry it with the best from The West Wing, intelligent political commentary in an appropriate venue. I would love to see him do a show about a cable news network. SportsNight sort of did that, but it was a sports program. I’d like to see an NBS Nightly News program or maybe a cable news network. One of the things I thought he did very well with The West Wing was the interplay between politics and news. I’d love to see him do it from the other side.

One of the most unnerving and interesting changes to America over the past couple decades has been the rise (and rise and rise and rise) of health care costs, a rise which can be shown to mimic the rise in “Health Maintenance Organizations” (HMOs) and various insurance company influences.

Of course, since the “stated rate” for health care makes it impossible for most Americans to afford it without insurance these days, it is deemed a “crisis” and most of the US presidential candidates are launching “plans” to fix it. Slate’s “Health Care Primary” column has been analyzing them, though what Slate’s writer really wants to see (nationalized health care) is something I’m pretty sure both Will and I don’t want.

After looking over some of the plans, I’m reminded a lot of things that have bugged me about the US’s health care system in years past - some of which can be blamed on HMO’s, some on insurance companies, and some on the complication of trying to navigate them all.

Where I grew up, there was an HMO referred to by customers in a not-quite-joking manner as “Family Death Plan.” It was sold off in the early 2000’s, after years of mismanagement and amid the disgust of many people who became trapped in its clutches (it gave lousy service, but also gave low prices to many businesses in its city). It was at FDP where I had a drunken stooge of a “doctor” prescribe medication (on a 6-month period before he wrapped his ferrari around a tree late one drunken night) for what a competent specialist before and after diagnosed as a benign, no-treatment-needed heart murmur. This would come to have later effects on my health care options. It also makes me ineligible for military service, even were I to apply.

The ongoing problems with FDP were:
#1 - It took at least a month to get a referral for anything. This included having my mother diagnosed with Lyme Disease and treated. Had the referral not taken so long, the disease would have done much less damage.
#2 - Referrals HAD to remain in-system.
#3 - FDP regularly switched specialists around, making it impossible to get consistent treatment from someone who knew the case beforehand.
#4 - FDP regularly dropped primary care physicians as well, meaning that every time one walked into the office, you were apt to get someone completely new.

Part of the secondary crock of the current system is that pricing for most things is inflated. Insurance companies / HMOs claim that they “negotiate” lower prices for procedures and care “within-system”; this is something akin to the old retail trick of marking something up 30% for a month, then putting it on “20% sale” to make people think they are getting a bargain.

The worst part of the current system - and something each “plan” addresses, though in varying levels of acceptability - is the difficulty that one has getting insurance (except through a large pool such as being a government employee or part of a very large company) if there is a pre-existing condition.

This is where “el drunko doctore” screwed me royally - were my condition always listed properly as a benign one, getting independent insurance when I was between jobs wouldn’t be a big deal. With the stroke of a pen from one drunken jerk who should never have been let near a patient, however, insurance companies almost universally want to reject me.

Likewise, my neighbor is going through a rough time getting insurance for her son. Their previous company dropped them because some incompetent boob mis-keyed their renewal and listed a 14 year old kid as being “alcoholic and suicidal.” The insurance company has now jerked them around for at least 6 months in the process of trying to correct this - and at the 4 month mark he was hospitalized and diagnosed with juvenile diabetes.

Another problem is the prevalence of “pre-existing condition” exceptions in most coverage (in my experience, the smaller the insurance pool, the longer the lead-in time). Someone changing jobs has to worry about making sure they have “continued coverage”, even to the point of paying insurance premiums on two overlapping coverage items (COBRA to the old, plus the new premiums) during the lead-in time (usually a year these days) or risk having an insurance company claim that something is “pre-existing” and refusing to pay. In many cases, this contributes to people not seeking treatment for something that could be treated and handled/cured early, but which develops into a much worse case by the time they think the insurance will pay.

I’ve mentioned on a couple of occasions the rank snobbery and spoiled nature of my high school. This week’s Ghostland will consist of two stories about such.

—-

My Freshman year in high school I was at a table where I overheard an upperclassman explaining how she hurt her wrist.

It seems that she was driving down one day and went through what she was sure was a yellow light. Out of nowhere, a car must have decided that even though their light was red (which is what it would have to be if the light was “definitely yellow” as the upperclassman was driving through the intersection) they would go ahead and dart into the intersection.

Upon seeing that they were entering an intersection on a light that was still read (as it must have been), the other driver slammed on the breaks. The upperclassman swirved to miss the car, dinged it, but went across the median into oncoming traffic where she hit an oncoming car whose driver “wasn’t really paying attention”.

No one was killed or anything, though the driver of the other car (the one that wasn’t watching for cars crossing the median, apparently) did have to go to the hospital.

Upperclassman girl was pissed. She was pissed at the driver for darting into the intersection and forcing her to swerve. She was pissed that the other driver couldn’t dodge her. Mostly, though, she was pissed off at her father. Why? Her father wasn’t going to buy her another car for a month. Further, Daddy was going to get her another Mustang rather than the car of her choice (can’t remember what kind she wanted).

Her friends, throughout this entire story, were completely sympathetic. One expressed dismay that upperclassman was going to be stuck with another Mustang when she wanted something else and they were going to have to replace the car anyway.

—-

My sophomore year I took a theater class with a group of cheerleaders. Bessy was a cheerleader and not among those that I cared much for. We would sometimes have class in the auditorium for whenever we needed to rehearse for something. The auditorium was cold and she was either wearing her cheerleader outfit or something else that wasn’t particularly covering her up. She put word out that she wanted a jacket if anyone would be so kind as to loan her one (she didn’t use that terminology).

Now ordinarily I would gladly loan my jacket to any young lady (or even a guy) that needed one since I was a pretty warm guy anyway and I’m a sucker for a damsel in distress. But not for Bessy. I wasn’t surprised that she never asked me for one as she made the rounds. But then she asked her friend Ally, also a cheerleader, to ask around as well. Now Ally I liked, though I’m not sure why. Anyhow, when Ally asked me for it I handed it over despite knowing that it was going to Bessy.

Bessy snuggled herself into my jacket and thanked Ally for procuring it for her. Then she asked whose jacket it was. Upon finding out it was mine, she yanked the jacket off of her and threw it onto the ground, saying “ewwwwwwwwwwwww!”

Ally shrugged and handed me my jacket back.

A couple years later my class looked at me in confusion when I said “Yes!!” to the PA announcement announcing that the head cheerleader was going to be Donna Lerner. No one expected me to be the type to give a rat’s patoot about who would be the head cheerleader. Ordinarily I wouldn’t have, except that Bessie was supposed to be the odds-on favorite and Donna was okay by me.

I believe that the Battle Hymn of the Republic is one of the greatest song ever written.

—-

I don’t like people that say that they are spiritual but not religious. To me, that comes across as every bit as arrogant as those that say “My church is more correct than your church”. Maybe even more arrogant because at least the churchgoer isn’t saying that they’ve found the answers on their own without help, which is the implication of those that say that they have a handle on spirituality without help. At the same time, I find the notion that any particular church has it exactly right to be… unlikely.

I was baptized and raised in the Episcopal Church (USA), which was a (forgive the pun) godsend for me. I would not have done nearly as well in the Catholic Church or Mormon Church because of the rigidity of their beliefs. The funny thing is, though, that I often wish I was the kind of person that could put faith in a church’s tenets. I wish that there was a church that I agreed with all the time. I wish that I could completely buy in to what they’re selling. Really smart people believe this stuff, so why can’t I?

I wish that I could believe, with a degree of certainty, that God Himself picked a group of people to act as the final word and arbiter of His wishes. I wish I could believe, with a degree of certainty, that there was this guy named Jesus that took the bullet for all of our sins and by virtue of his having done so cleansed us. I wish I could believe that if I read and lived by this book, it would have all of the answers.

In a similar way, I wish that I could believe that all of our problems could be solved by having the government take care of us. Or that everything would work out okay if we just let the free market do its magic. Or that the Republicans were right about everything or that the Democrats were.

I would love to be a partisan warrior, a religious crusader, and a harbinger of all that is right. I am attracted to the imagery of that in the strongest way. I’m a comic book reader. I like right and wrong, black and white, good and evil. I get immensely frustrated by the constant equivocations that people make to excuse that which is wrong and diminish that which is right. And the most frustrating thing is that they make sense to me.

This all makes me sound like a wishy-washy person, which I don’t believe myself to be. Some people around me will describe me as being a moderate guy, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone describe me as wishy-washy. But I make decisions because decisions have to be made and not because an overwhelming since of what is right tells me to. Whenever I am told anything, there is a voice in the back of my head that says “maybe this is not so”.

The spoils go to those who fight for them. Religions that stick to their doctrine and demand adherence succeed while those that foster independence fall apart at the core. Our wars are not fought by those that spend their time questioning why, they’re fought by soldiers that have it within them to just do what they are told. The leaders are not those that question their motivations but rather motivate others to come around to their own righteousness.

People like me watch and say, “Hmmm.”

I was reminded of a conversation with a friend the other day.

He worked for a phone answering service that handled calls, took messages, and paged applicable people when necessary all across the country. They handled calls for doctors, corporations, and a whole gamut of people that needed to be contacted 24/7 but needed a filter for after-hour calls and didn’t want to hire someone to sit there for $8/hr to take one call every other week. The phone center had twenty people or so.

Because of the nature of the business, it was extremely important that they remain up as much as possible. Downtime meant that doctors weren’t getting important calls, corporate heads were unable to field emergencies, and so on. For reasons nobody understands, this company had no backup or procedure for when the office was down for whatever reason. They just paid a penalty for the unanswered calls and moved on.

Several years ago a hurricane was headed straight for Colosse and the city was evacuated. As it turned out the hurricane lost some of its steam, but ended up hovering over the city causing a flood that Colossians still talk about to this day. For two days, ten people lived at the office fielding those calls. Because they were only half-staffed, they took verbal abuse from companies in California and Dakota unaware that Colosse had just been hit with hurricane-related floods.

When it was all over, my friend tallied how much money the company made by virtue of the employees going far above and beyond the call of duty. The figure was nearly a quarter of a million dollars in lost time (they couldn’t charge their monthly fees if they weren’t open for the whole month) and penalties they would have had to pay and that didn’t include the business they likely would have lost.

These are people that made $8/hr. A couple of them attempted to drive in but had to leave their cars on the side of the road and walk the rest of the way. When all was said and done their cars were ticketed and towed and they were out $100 or so. My friend suggested to the president of the company that they should just cut a check for $2,000 to each employee that stayed. That was a drop in the bucket compared to what would have happened if they’d not weathered the hurricane, a huge amount for the lowly wage-earners, and the sort of thing that sends a loud and clear message that going above and beyond the call of duty will be rewarded.

Instead, the president of the company thanked them with coupons from a $6 coupon book that he’d bought. Within a few months, none of those employees were still working for the company.

-{To longtime readers of this blog, this story may sound a bit familiar. We were actually trading “ungrateful employers” stories. He won the award for that.}-

I’ve mentioned before that there are five television shows and/or movies that have had a profound effect on me. One of them is Hedwig and the Angry Inch. If you haven’t seen the movie and are open to a musical about a transexual rock star*, I recommend it. I won’t be giving too much away in this piece that isn’t already alluded to early in the film or that isn’t predictable from early in the movie.

Near the end of the film is a confrontation** between the protagonist, Hedwig, and her former love Tommy. Tommy did some really quite rotten things to Hedwig, moved on, became a star, and ignored Hedwig thereafter. When the two meet at the end of the film, the overriding feeling is that there is nothing he can say that will make what he did okay, and there is nothing that she can hear that will make the pain go away. Hedwig was left to confront that she had lost everything not only because of Tommy, but because of her inability to let go of him.

That was the part that I focused on when I first saw the film because I was dealing with the breakup between Evangeline and myself. The part I saw was the breaking up and moving on. Or trying to move on, anyway.

Several years later I find myself focusing on another aspect of the same scene. It was two people looking at each other, one destroyed and the other sorry. It was two people that obviously loved one another in their own way, but in a way that couldn’t ultimately be anything but destructive. Hedwig lost her identity; Tommy lost his soul. They each needed to get back what they had lost, but it was apparent that they would not be able to do so together.

I’ve mentioned that I have been gathering my thoughts on with Evangeline off and on since I found out that she was getting married. It felt sort of like my stomach settling. Things were rumbling around because some gas needed to get out. When I have relevent dreams it’s often a case of something on the periphery of my mind needs to be let out, so when I had the dream of Evangeline, I took it as a sign that I had some things to think about. Namely, why the happy occasion of her engagement discomforted me a little bit even though I was the one that shut the door on the relationship and I would not want to reconcile even if I weren’t well married.

When I decided to go forward with the marriage to Clancy, I closed the door on reconciliation with her. When I actually got married and moved to Deseret, the door was locked. When she ended up finally leaving her stable-but-unmarriable boyfriend Kelvin, my main thought was being thrilled that she wasn’t waiting for me to reconsider. It may sound egocentric of me to say that, of course, but it’s sort of what she said she would do, it’s what I might have done for her, and it’s precisely what my friend Tony’s wife Lara did for him when she waited years for Tony’s relationship with Julie to fail. Upon finding out that she was getting married, it wasn’t even the sound of a door being shut or locking. Rather it was an echo of the door closing years ago.

In that echo I heard the song Wicked Little Town, and I heard something that she once said to me.

The gas that escaped was the realization that taking a broadside look at the relationship five years since its destruction that we each had a profoundly negative impact on one another’s life. I guess I knew that one some level, but I honestly never really looked at the tally before. And with each step away from it, I realize that all of those costs incurred will never be recouped. It will never be made good.

I am left to ask myself how it is that two people with such an intense connection and such strong feelings can end up in something so destructive. How can the rhythm in our hearts beat in such synchronization and yet leave us so ultimately incompatible with one another.

The connection I share with Clancy, and the foundation of our relationship, is one of similar values and thoughts. This past weekend at the Oasis we found ourselves thinking the exact same thing at least a half-dozen times. I don’t always agree with what she’s thinking, but I understand what she thinks and how she thinks and I have the deepest love and admiration for her.

The connection with Eva was something on a more emotional or spiritual level (this is why she thought the decision between them was a heart vs mind that lead to my alternate future). In the same way that I can tell what and how Clancy thinks, I had a remarkable intuition as to how Eva felt. I was pretty consistently able to figure out what she was going to do before she did it, when the choice came down to her emotions. She also had a unique understanding of a part of me that no one else really sees, much less understands.

You would think that that kind of empathy would lead two people close together, but it never worked out that way. It almost made the two of us too sensitive to be around one another. I could feel when I was hurting her and she could feel the same. We’d hurt, we’d pull away. Most importantly, we’d process our emotions differently. Then we’d expect the other person to understand because of how good they were at understanding us the rest of the time.

How could something so special go so wrong?

The answers to that question are legion. Those things that I saw of myself in her were those aspects of myself that I was least comfortable with. She had trouble accepting how someone that felt so similarly to her could think so differently. The passion of our emotions always outstripped the virtue.

And at the end of the day, we caused more harm to one another than good. I’m married and she’s getting married. Even if I wasn’t married, she is not where I would turn. It’s too late to ever change the score. To ever make things even. To ever make things good. Ever.

It’s not unlike attempts to quit smoking. The parallels between breaking up and quitting smoking deserve a post all their own, but I’ll explore an aspect of it here. I can stop smoking for weeks at a time and I do. The problem is that there’s something in the back of my mind that freaks out at the thought of never smoking another ever, ever, ever again. That echo of a door shut.

With Evangeline, it isn’t that she and I won’t be together again or anything like that. Rather, it’s that the potential we had will never be realized. I will not attend her wedding as she never attending mine. I will never meet her children and she will never meet mine. We will never be friends. I haven’t spoken to her in over a year. When we were together we wallowed in our weaknesses. I don’t know if it had to be that way or not, but it was. And like Hedwig and Tommy, we are at our best when we are confronting life apart.

Despite all this, I don’t regret having met her. I don’t even think I regret the wasted time and the anger and the sadness. I met her at a time when I was emotionally dead and she brought me back to life. It’s hard to regret that on the whole because it made me who I am. It made the kind of person that could make things work with Clancy. If it weren’t for her, there wouldn’t be a me.

Even though she and I will never be able to make things right, things ended up alright. I’m sure at some point in the future I’ll have another little burp of gas from the past. Some song will come on the radio and it will make me think of her. That’s the way things work with memories. With the latest news is the opportunity to recognize that our lives intersected on our way to happy endings. Separate endings, maybe, but who can ask for more than two happy endings?

And in the end, who could ask for more than two happy endings?

* - I was and am viscerally uncomfortable with transexuality, but that didn’t stop my enjoyment of this movie one iota.

** - I call it a scene, but it’s actually a musical number. The song is really good, but the dialogue-free acting is phenomenal. It was better than any standard dialogue could be.

trumwill: I take it you heard about Robert Jordan?

quenkyle: Yeah. I expected as much, though.

trumwill: I never did get around to starting the Wheels of Time series. I wanted to know for sure that it would have some sort of ending.

quenkyle: Ironically it’s more likely that it’s going to be finished now that he’s dead.

trumwill: But if he’s dead, they may or may not hire someone else to finish it.

quenkyle: If Jordan were immortal, the chances that he’d end the series were still not good.

trumwill: I see.

quenkyle: I tried reading the 10th book in the series… 3 times. I couldn’t get past 1/4 of it before being bored to tears. It doesn’t bother me as much as other people… I got to read through 9 all at once without waiting, but he was definitely losing it. Most readers don’t give a rat’s arse about the history of the golden earring a random pirate was wearing on his right ear, and the political ramifications of his doing so. I’d much rather, I dunno… learn more about the *main freaking characters*.

trumwill: My ex boss said that the phone book has fewer characters and more plot than Jordan’s later novels.

quenkyle: Well I don’t know about the plot part, but the phone book definitely has less characters.

trumwill: Nonetheless, it’s a shame that he couldn’t finish his work. I can’t imagine putting that much work into something and not completing it.

quenkyle: I think he’s got different problems now.

trumwill: True. Being dead probably sucks more.

In addition to the issue of tattoos and piercings, a subject of much conversation was the decisions in bathing suits made by the various women there.

I came to the conclusion that bikinis are like master-planned community homes. Let me explain:

Ideally, a house is built to fit into its landscape. Windows are placed where the view is best. Architecture fits the motif of the area, if there is one. A house is built to blend in with its surroundings, such as a log cabin in a wooded area, stone in a rocky area, and maybe stucco in a dusty area.

One of the aesthetic problems with master-planned communities is that they are not built with their surroundings in mind. They are all designed in by some New York City architect or some guy in Toledo and then are exported to wherever it is that the developer sees a commercial opportunity. So a house in dusty Arizona looks like a house in swampy Louisiana looks like a house in rocky Colorado. I can understand and appreciate the amenities these houses have to offer, but I am spiritually an elite coastal snob when it comes to passing these places on the freeway because the terrain was redesigned to work with the house rather than the house fitting in to make the most of the terrain.

Some young ladies look outstanding in bikinis. Some look spectacular in 1-piece. Believe it or not some look awesome in those bathing suits with the little tutus. Some look cool wearing pants over a 1-piece. The list goes on and on. My basic point is that for every individual there is a bathing suit that brings out their best or shifts attention away from their worst.

But like the mass-production model homes, everyone seems to have shifted to a pretty standard model: the bikini. I would say less than 1 in 10 young women under the age of 30 wore a 1-piece and 7 of the ten wore a bikini. Some looked fantastic, others would have looked better in just about anything else. But by and large they went in the same direction.

There were three particularly disturbing groups wearing the more revealing outfits. The first is kids. It is apparent that there is no longer a minimum age in which a bikini is appropriate. For some of them I would have considered it less odd if they’d just worn male swim trunks they were so young. But in a way I actually find this the most understandable. Obviously they are not meant to compliment their completely non-sexual, prepubescent bodies, but they may have less control over their bladders as adults and I’d imagine that it’s a lot easier to get out of a pickle when all you have to do is pull bottoms down rather than wiggle out of a bathing suit altogether.

The second group are stick-figured girls. I honestly thought that the women carrying a bit extra weight looked better in the bikinis than did the girls without much breast and without much behind. Meanwhile, a tall, slender, and/or lanky figure can look great in a one-piece.

The third group is probably who you thought I was referring to prior to my delineation: chubby girls. I’m not talking about girls that aren’t a size 2 and I’m not even talking about young ladies that are overweight on the BMI scale. I’m talking about the women that have bona fide pot bellies or register in the “obese” category on the BMI. I really don’t like to just say “cover that up” but I’m not entirely sure what else to say.

Part of me feels a bit like a hypocrite for saying anything. My first day at the park I did not wear a shirt even though I’m not exactly thin and I have a 4-inch scar on my stomach that may be unsightly to some. I’m sure there are people there that would have preferred that I wear a shirt, but I hate the feel of wet shirt and was hoping to smooth out some unevenness of my tan.

The big thing, though, is that I didn’t particularly care what people thought of my body. To the extent that the aforementioned young ladies did not care about what other people thought, I can respect the utilitarianism of a two-piece. But by and large I did not get that impression. The fat girls in bikinis almost always had ornaments hanging from their navels and were more frequently tattooed than the average attendee in their demographic.

Even so, there is a notable double standard as far as this goes. As with most other venues of dress, men have it easy: we’re pretty much told what to wear. When it comes to bathing suits, we’re not particularly expected to wear a top. Even if a guy is overweight, I don’t hear nearly as much complaint as when a fat woman is wearing a bikini even though technically the latter has more covered up. About the worst a guy can do is inappropriately wear a speedo. That definitely would have gotten our attention, had we seen that.

So in my mind it’s sort of a stalemate. If I could honestly believe that the scantily clad heavy women weren’t trying to entice or show off, I’d probably cut more slack. But it’s a threshold that men have to go much further out of their way to fail to meet.

But to bring it back to the original point, to the extent that people are trying to look their best at such a gathering, it would seem to me that an evaluation of how the different swimsuits look would be in order. But it doesn’t seem that that’s happening. Either that or the self-evaluation women have about how they look in a bikini is exaggerated or the benefit they could have with a 1-piece, tanktoppy, or alternative style is unseen.

As I write posts on dress and tattoos and ex-girlfriends, I figured that I might share something pretty heady and fascinating that I haven’t heard in the American media:

On Monday afternoon Herman Van Rompuy, the veteran politician appointed by Belgian King Albert II as his royal “scout,” will report to the King about possible ways out of Belgium’s government crisis. The crisis has arisen as a result of the inability of the Belgian politicians to form a government. There is growing talk of a secession of Flanders, the Dutch-speaking northern half of Belgium. If that happens what to do with Brussels, a French-speaking enclave within Flanders? And what about Wallonia, the French-speaking southern half of Belgium? {…}

Although the majority of its people speak Dutch, Belgium has throughout its history been dominated by a French-speaking establishment. When in the early 20th century the country gradually began to democratise, this establishment feared that the Flemings would become the rulers of the state. Hence, Belgium was federalised giving Wallonia a constitutionally guaranteed veto over all major decisions and a guaranteed share of half the seats in government and major administrations. The conservative, free-market oriented Flemings have been complaining for decades that they are forced to subsidize the Socialist south, while no improvement of the economic situation of the Walloons has been visible. On the contrary, Wallonia has become one of the most corrupt regions in Europe with hardly any economic growth.

It’s all a bit confusing but really quite interesting. They’re toying with confederation, which as America, Russia, Serbia, and just about every other country that has tried it will tell you that it doesn’t work.

The Brussels quandary is itself quite interesting. The center of European unification is at the heart of a country that might be falling apart!

Clancy and I went to Oasis on the Hills, the local water park over the weekend. We had an absolute blast. We also got distinct reminders of how out of touch we are with the population as a while.

The big one was tattoos. When looking at 18-30 year olds, people without tattoos were almost the exception! Ever since my straight-arrow brother Mitch got a tattoo I’ve stopped thinking of them as rebellious. Besides, if someone wants a little private emblem of self on them, who am I to say anything?

But it wasn’t just an emblem or a design. It was entire arms and huge intricate drawings. I knew these things existed, but I really hadn’t realized that they’d become as common as… I don’t know, something real common.

That tattoos are but one example of something that bothers me for reasons I can’t quite put my finger on. It’s some variation of this, though: our bodies are not Christmas trees to decorate. The tattoos and the piercings and the boobs hanging out… good golly what has this world come to?!

Theoretically, as something becomes more commonplace we become more accepting of it. It used to be that long hair on a man was a sign of deviancy, now it’s a common thing. Ear rings in the right year used to signal homosexuality, now they’re common. Skinheads in long sleeve shirts are indistinguishable from a lot of young high-schoolers these days.

It really doesn’t work that way for me, though. I still haven’t come to terms with fingernail polish and honestly find a nose-ring less distracting. In fact, things that didn’t bother me before are starting to bother me a lot more now. I never really cared one way or another about tattoos, but as they become more common I’m becoming less rather than more agreeable to them. They’ve moved from signaling actual individuality to being another ornament on the Human Tree. And to get back to individuality they go further and further and get more and more tattoos and pierce more and more body parts.

What’s wrong with human ears just being ears rather than shiny silver repositories? Why make our bodies the (permanent!) landscape for someone else’s usually unoriginal art?

I guess I’m fortunate in that I married someone that doesn’t even wear make-up. While I wouldn’t mind if she wore make-up, the fact that that aspect of her personality keeps the nail polish, piercings, and whatnot is a godsend. I can understand make-up that accentuates the positive and I can understand trying to make yourself look as good as you possibly can, but why make yourself look like something that is less human, not to mention less attractive?

I recognize that this is an aesthetic preference. I’m actually a big sympathetic to less attractive people that figure if you can’t be better looking be different looking, but honestly I think it does more harm than good. Unattractive people look less attractive with tattoos and piercings. They’re hurt by it (in my eyes) in ways that more attractive people aren’t. For the guys the tattoos on their arm just drew attention to the flub on their arms. For chubby ladies the navel rings drew attention to their bellies. For the attractive people, it didn’t really make a difference except insofar as I didn’t like them. If a guy was toned it didn’t matter so much whether there were markings. If a girl was hot who the heck is looking at the ten earrings in her ears or the over-sized rose on her ankle? Or, if they see it, why do they care?

Tomorrow I will write about another observation at the Oasis.

It’s been a year or two since my high school reunion, but recent discussions have put it back in my mind.

I did not particularly enjoy my high school experience and (unlike my junior high school experience) I have no one to blame but myself for it. I was always a poor fit temperamentally for Mayne {pronounced to rhyme with “maybe”} High School. It was filled with people that had money and seemed to care most about those things that people that have money care most about. It was loads better than middle school, but it wasn’t for me. I never dated anyone from my high school and my picture appears in the yearbook only once because I never did any extra-curricular activities.

As such, I probably never would have attended the reunion at all had it not been for the chance to be reunited with my best friends Clint and Dave. Dave and I flew down from Shoshona and Deseret respectively, met with Clint in Ephesus where he was living at the time, and then drove to Mayne. Even if there hadn’t actually been a reunion, it was great to hang out with them even if much of that time was spent driving. Much to my surprise, the reunion itself was a blast.

Oddly enough, or maybe fittingly, I did not spend all that much time talking to people that I knew from high school. I spent it talking to people that I didn’t know at all or that I knew in elementary and/or middle school but not high school.

I went to West Oak Elementary School (WOES), which is about as middle class as you can get. We were looked down upon by the people that lived in Mayne, but were better off than those that lived in working-class Southfield and Larkhill. For middle school, West Oak and Larkhill Elementary School (LHES) fed into Larkhill Intermediate School (LHIS). Larkhill was much more working class, so working class that it’s actually mentioned in a Bruce Springsteen song. Larkhill Elementary was significantly larger than West Oak, so the average economic status at Larkhill Intermediate was not good.

The same sort of thing in reverse happened when Larkhill Intermediate fed into Mayne High School with upper crest Mayne Intermediate School*. As with before, the school we were merging with was considerably larger than the one we were coming from. Not only did they have a lot more students, but their students were wealthier, more achieving, and better behaved. Almost all of the “problem kids” from high school I knew from junior high and they were weeded out, dropped out, or farmed out to a correctional institution. So what I ultimately saw happen a lot was that instead of people hanging out with the people they hung out with in junior high we Larkhillers would gradually ingratiate ourselves into an existing group of friends from MIS (and Airfield, see note below).

So all of this is the long way of saying that the people I talked to were in three distict groups: people I was friends with in elementary school (who I was not friends with in junior high because they started going to advanced/honors classes), people I was friends with in junior high (a fair number of whom were weeded out or reinvented themselves into some other group in high school), and people I knew from high school.

Here are some observations that I recall (after looking over some emails that I wrote at the time) from the reunion:

• There were almost no Asian-Americans there, despite their presence on campus. I can literally remember two that I think are more of Pacific Islander descent and they were twins.
• The people I was most anxious to talk to were the ones from elementary and intermediate school. Particularly elementary.
• Once they started tracking us into regular and honors classes I lost contact with a lot of them. I hung out with the smart kids in elementary school, but didn’t get into the smart classes in high school.
• The Mayne/Airfield contingent was over-represented. The number of people I knew from Larkhill Intermediate but not West Oak Elementary (read: those that went to Larkhill Elementary) was nearly non-existent.
• I spent the first hour or so talking to someone that I didn’t even know in high school. After I got my food I needed a place to sit down but none of the tables had a friendly congregation. I decided that sitting alone while eating was one high school memory that I was not going to relive, sat down at a random table and made some friends. When we finally parted, our last words to one another were, “I wish I’d known you back in the day!” “You, too!” I wish I’d made more of an effort to get to know people back in the day.
• A couple of the guys did not really think that it might be inappropriate to talk about all the girls a guy “banged” when his wife of six months is sitting right next to him at the table.
• There was only one awkward instance of a guy that I knew that didn’t know me. I knew him in junior high and we were actually pretty good friends. It did not occur to me that he would not remember me. I guess it’s understandable, though. He was a nerd when I knew him but he became an ROTC nut in high school. he’s probably blocked out his nerdy years.
• The reward for the coolest guy goes to Jesse Brooks. I remembered him as being a really cool guy for a goth/punk/industrial dude. He ended up going to MIT, flying jets for the Navy, and working for a venture capital firm in Ephesus. Unlike the ROTC guy, Jesse remembered me despite having done a lot more in the meantime and more genuinely reinvented himself.
• While smoking a cigarette I had the obligatory conversation with a girl that I never, ever could have mustered up the courage to talk to back in the day.
• All of the cheerleaders and drill team members I saw there had engagement and/or wedding rings. Every last one. Only one that I saw married her high school sweetheart.
• Two Larkhill classmates had four or more children. I was not surprised by either of them.
• The girl that Clint obsessed over and Dave’s serious high school girlfriend both had kids. I missed out on any of that since I never dated anyone from my school and besides I was rarely interested in people my own grade. I wonder if I can sneak in for the reunion of the Class of 1999, wherein I could see the fate of the girl that I obsessed over.
• I don’t know what the jocks made of their lives since I didn’t really talk to them at the reunion. They didn’t look like they’d completely wasted away like I might have hoped once upon a time.
• High School reunions are great places to meet people romantically if you’re still single. None of the three of us were, though, so that was sort of a waste. On the other hand, the fact that we weren’t single may have made it easier to go. In fact, I considered my wedding ring a giant shield. So long as I wore it, I was impervious from female rejection.

* - It’s actually a tad more complicated than this. In my 8th grade year they built a new middle school, Airfield Intermediate School (AIS) and my 8th grade class was smaller than my 7th grade class with a portion of the wealthier students siphoned off. Most of the students at Airfield had previously gone to Mayne Intermediate, so they essentially had the same experience we did with the integration of the snobs, they just had a year sooner and on a slightly more limited basis. As such, I’m counting both the Airfield and Mayde students in a single group since they were both (at one point or another) dominated socially by the same people.

At the anime convention that I recently attended, I ran into an unexpected friendly face. Marianne Silbet and I went to the same school from about the seventh grade onward. She moved in from parts unknown. Marianne and I were never friends. The only real memory I have of interacting with her was when she went to the prom with Scott Sanders and the two of them plus Julie and I left the prom together and walked on the beach together.

The thing I remember most about Marianne, though, was that she was very, very unpopular in junior high school and I never remember her having very many friends at all. Marianne was sweet as sugar cane, cute if not hot, slender, acne-free, and at least after those awful junior high school years a smiley and pleasant person to be around. For some reason, though, she really, really got it bad in junior high school. And for prom the date she mustered up was Scott Sanders, one of the friends I was most ready to get rid of when I graduated from high school. The thing that I noticed then but struck me now was how completely, totally unfair that was.

I’ve mentioned before that I slummed around amongst the socially marginalized class of high school. I got to know a lot of them quite well. The guys, anyway. Some of them were a lot of fun to be around and I light up when I think about them. Some, like Scott, I would talk to only if there were absolutely no one else around and maybe not even then. But whether I personally liked them or not, I could easy tell you why they were unpopular. They were socially inept, they were fat, they were awkward, they were anti-social, they were smart-asses they were consumed with bitterness. The reasons go on and on.

I’m not saying that the criteria that found them lacking was a good one. It was stupid and superficial I am so glad to be away from it now. But at least I understood it. I knew what was hurting me and I could try to change it or I could accept the consequences of it. If they were to ask me and I were feeling particularly honest I could have told them ways that they could have improved themselves. It was warped and twisted, but it had its own little logic that if one could step away from themselves just for a little bit they could decipher.

But thinking about Marianne brings to light another observation: I have no idea at all whatsoever criteria, if any, the girls had for sorting themselves out socially. I have no idea what precisely it was that made Marianne so reviled and she’s not the only one. I knew a girl in elementary school named Louise that was dreadfully unpopular. As far as I could tell I was the only nice person to her. Then in the fifth grade her family moved and she went to another elementary school. Both our grade schools fed into the same junior high and apparently at the other grade school she had made quite the splash and when we ran into each other in junior high she had a lot of friends. Even though I was the only one nice to her in grade school, she was unusually cruel to me in junior high perhaps because she did not recognize me or perhaps because I was a throwback to an unfortunate time in her life. Other than the sudden cruelty, though, there was no big difference in her behavior to warrant the reversal of fortunes and I don’t think cruelty alone did it (there were a lot of cruel girls that were very unpopular).

A little closer to home, I understand why my wife was unpopular in K-12. I love her but she is stubborn and has unusual tastes and is not socially gifted. But the ferocity with which other kids went after her completely baffles me. I get angry just thinking about the things that she’s told me and there are things that were so bad, so much worse, that she refuses to tell me. When it comes to the guys that got it really, really bad in K-8 I understand why even if I think that the reason is dumb. But when it comes to Clancy, Louise, and Marianne I am completely and utterly baffled at the degree of derision they got.

My inclination is to say that the female social structure in schools is random and illogical, but it’s quite possible that I just don’t understand the logic because it was all in a world that I was not a part of. There were some that I understood. She was unpopular because she was fat or abrasive or socially awkward. But there were a number of them that I didn’t understand at all. I don’t understand either why they were unpopular or why they were as unpopular as they were. If I have a son like me, I’ll have an idea of what to say or what advice to give if they ask me why other kids don’t like them. If I have a daughter like Marianne, I won’t have a clue.

A case of banning the flag:

On the sixth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, students at one high school were not allowed to wear clothes with an American flag.

Under a new school rule, students at Hobbton High School are not allowed to wear items with flags, from any country, including the United States.

The new rule stems from a controversy over students wearing shirts bearing flags of other countries.

I have difficulty figuring why exactly students wearing flags of other countries is such a problem that it requires this solution.

Back during and after the Gulf War, there was a student of Middle Eastern descent that was a vocal Saddam Hussein supporter and actually had an Iraqi flag pinned to his bag. It was a bit of a distraction because a lot of people took great exception to someone wearing the flag of a nation that we were at war against, but teachers were unusually capable of alleviating the conflict and getting on with class discussions. It seems to me that the ability to express oneself, even if it causes some conflict, was worth the minor distraction.

The superintendant explained it thusly:

The superintendent of schools in Sampson County calls the situation unfortunate, but says educators didn’t want to be forced to pick and choose which flags should be permissible.

Even if we make a different judgment in the above case of an Iraqi flag in a time of war, it would seem to me that there is a substantive difference between wearing an American flag and the flag of a foreign nation. We are, after all, on American soil. I don’t think a “home rule” exception to the flag ban is wholly inappropriate, on 9/11 or any other day. Even if we don’t want to leave judgment in the hands of educators (heaven forbid), that seems like something of a no-brainer.

Sure, if one kid wants to wear a British flag and another a Sudanese and we allow the former but not the latter, that can become problematic. I could see how banning both might be preferable to making those distinctions. But we’re in America and an American flag ought to be uncontroversial.

The only gray area I see with the home rule exemption is if an exchange student says that Americans can fly their flag but he is not allowed to fly his. As such, maybe make the rule about flying the flag of the nation they come from. If a young Mexican or Canadian going to school hear wants to wear something with a Mexican or Canadian flag on it for Cinco de Mayo or Canada Day (or any other day, for that matter), that too is substantively different from some kid just deciding to wear some other nation’s flag cause he likes it or he wants to register his protest somehow.

These do not strike me as terribly difficult distinctions to make. They are pretty clear (American flag or flag of a nation that you have citizenship), easy to state, and not too difficult to enforce. I find it odd that the school district declined to make these distinctions and must attribute it to either some sort of transnationalistic thinking (we should want to be citizens of the world!) or, more likely, schools being terrified of making any distinction, no matter how unsound, that might come across as unfair to somebody, somewhere.

Either way, from a PR standpoint it almost never makes sense to mess with the red, white, and blue.

On the balcony is a big wasp’s nest. There are probably a good dozen of them there. But then about two feet away from that is a little bitty wasp’s nest in production. Why two wasps nests are needed in such close proximity is beyond me. I’m figuring that one of the wasps wasn’t getting along with the other wasps until he’d had enough and declared “Enough of you! I am going to go make my own hive! So there!”

Unfortunately I didn’t get to write or sign anything on the date 9/8/7. I love dates like that. Clancy on the other hand is more partial to dates and times that are mathematical rather than sequential. She likes 9/2/7 for instance because 9-2=7. I don’t know whatever made us think that we were compatible with one another.

Clancy is now unemployed. In the course of cleaning up around the apartment she found an uncashed paycheck from Deseret. She also did our taxes and yanked us a refund of under a couple thousand dollars. She asked how I felt about that and I told her I felt deflated. When asked what I meant by that, I explained that even when she’s unemployed she rakes in more money than I do.

I am so frustrated with the billing department from the cable company, which handles our broadband. They don’t inform me when my credit card payments start being rejected (I got four months worth of “don’t worry about it, you’re on autopay” before being informed that payments stopped going through four months ago in a collections letter), they take a whopping six months to renew autopay (starting with autopay is two months, but for some reason stopping and restarting or changing credit card info creates a six month lag), and they send me bills that don’t acknowledge payments I made more than a month ago.

I don’t know how two people without kids or pets can generate so much trash. We can only put so much in our trash can so sometimes we have a backlog sitting in the garage. It seems that every time we come close to clearing out the excess trash, some cleaning mission comes along and then we have ten trash bags stacked up in the garage again.

It’s generally been my belief that people that hold public office should be given the respect of the office, even if I don’t care for their politics. I never referred to Bill Clinton as “Slick Willie” or “Billy Jeff” and I refuse to refer to our current president as Dubya (much less “Shrub” or “George Dubya/W”). I opt for Clinton, Former President Clinton, Bush, President Bush, or least formally GWB. The only time I may use a first name is if I am differentiating Bill Clinton from his wife or George W. Bush from his father. Even then I will often opt for The President for GWB and President Clinton for Bill Clinton. If referring to Former President Bush I opt for “Former President Bush,” “George H. Bush”.

I’m not sure what I’m going to do when there are two people that are Former President Bush. I might go with the technically inaccurate Jr vs Sr, Bush 41 vs Bush 43, or George H. Bush versus George W. Bush. Here’s the thing, though, I don’t like saying the letter “W”. It’s three syllables for one blasted letter and I hate it. I don’t know why he couldn’t have simply gone by George Walker Bush (fewer syllables)or why his parents couldn’t have given him the Herbert name too so that it would be George Herbert Walker Bush and I could use Junior and Senior accurately. I say this as someone that is the fourth in the William _______ Truman line, but at least we all go by different names — William, Allen, Bill, and Will. If I have a son named William, you can bet we aren’t going to call him “Will” or any of the above names. Why make it so blasted confusing? They can go to the trouble of giving John Ellis Bush the nickname Jeb but nothing except that blasted three-syllable letter?

All of this brings me to the woman most likely (in my estimation) to be the next President of the United States, Hillary Clinton. It’s not always easy to differentiate between Clintons so there is the natural tendency to want to drift towards refering to them by their first name. It’s a tendency that I avoid for the aforementioned reasons, going instead for Senator Clinton, Hillary Clinton, or HRC.

Some people are concerned that people are calling her Hillary because she’s female and there is an implied familiarity or lack of respect. I think that it’s mostly a matter of their being two relevent Clintons. If Jeb Bush were running, he’d likely be Jeb (but not to me! Jeb Bush is two syllables, one fewer than W and easily shortened to Jebbush in my mind… kinda like Jackbauer whose names are almost always both said on the TV show 24 in the first couple of seasons). Ironically, her main defense against too much implied familiarity (and thus lack of formality and by extention respect) is that she doesn’t come across as a particularly warm person.

On the other hand, her likely opponent is almost certain to have a first-name friendly name and style. Mitt Romney is generally referred to as Romney rather than Mitt, but I could see people opting for the quirky familiar name rather than the less usual last name. But Rudy Guiliani is very frequently referred to only as Rudy even though there is little confusion over who you might be referring to if you say “Guiliani” (though it’s not necessarily easy to pronounce and whose name I had to look up the spelling of). Fred Thompson doesn’t even have the odd last name, but like Guiliani his website mentions his first name but not his last.

The only national campaign I can remember in my lifetime wherein the first name was so emphasized would be that of Lamar Alexander’s “Lamar!” campaign from 1996, which was ditched with his flannel when he ran again in 2000. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Kennedy brothers relied more on their first names than their last, though the rationale for that is pretty obvious.

Prior to that, though, Lyndon Johnson and Franklin Roosevelt are more commonly referred to by their initials than their first name, even though the former has a very unique one.

If marketing is often geared towards the least common denominator, I suppose that retail politics is the same. Clinton and Bush both got by with their folksy charm. I wonder if the future beholds parties looking for candidates wherein you do want to call them by their first name because they come across as so familiar. Me? I’d prefer a president wherein my instinct is to refer to him or her as Mr. or Madame President rather than Bob or Jane.

Addendum: I forgot about what should have been an obvious example. If I recall, one of Harry Truman’s slogans was “Give’em Hell, Harry!” It was said by people too Truman, but even so that counds as an informality given that he was the President of the United States.

I would be surprised if Spungen agreed with Ann Coulter on… well… anything. But this excerpt of something that Coulter wrote for George in 1999 actually sounded like something Spungen might say:

Boys in Washington don’t know how to ask for a date. What they do is try to trick you into asking them for a date. They say, “I know you’re really busy, so call me when you’d like to go out to dinner” or “Call me when you’re back in Washington” or, my favorite, “Are we ever going to get together?” What are you supposed to say to such completely insane things? I’ve never figured that out, which is why these conversations tend to end in hostile silences.

“Call me when you’d like to go out for dinner” isn’t asking for a date; it’s asking me to ask you for a date. For male readers in Washington, asking for a date entails these indispensable components: an express request for a female’s company on a particular date for a specific activity.