The Aerie
Did a writing exercise tonight, the first free writing I've done despite being out of work for a month. You'd think I could get more done, but classwork and job hunting eat up my time.
For those of you who don't know, and why should you, my wife (the actual writer in the family) made three big piles of cards: Characters, Places, and Stories. The exercise is to pick one card at random from each pile and write whatever story comes to mind inside of half an hour. Tonight I got "The Belle of the Ball," "A Phone Booth," and "Food Fight."
Anyway, the story is after the jump, which when you click "Continue reading 'Writing Exercise'" means you agree to follow copyright law and conventions and not to copy or transmit my story anyplace in any form, but you're welcome to link people here...
Bedtime Story
Are you going to stay in bed this time? No? Really. Do you know when I was your age if we said “No” to our elders, we went to bed with our bottoms red and our stomachs empty? Oh you have never been hungry a day in your life don't tell me you wouldn't care. All right, if it will get you to lie down. What do you want to hear?
Why do you care how I met your grandfather, hm? You're knee-high to a cricket, romance ought to be the farthest thing from your mind. Don't boys have cooties anymore? Well, good, at least some things don't change.
All right, well, where to begin. Yes, there was a dance. What you don't understand is, there was ALWAYS a dance. Because in those days we didn't HAVE television. Well, most of us didn't and those that did had nothing to watch. Great Aunt Nelly says that was the “Golden age of television,” yes, but it was as stuffy and boring then as it is now, just like her. You will NOT tell her I said that. Remember about the red bottoms?
No, most of us had nothing to do and our parents would no more let us watch television all night than yours will let you play video games all night, so we had to amuse ourselves. So we had dances.
Now back then I was the belle of the ball. I did not RING, that means I was pretty. Of course that's why you're pretty. You are! Well that's the biggest pile of nonsense I ever heard. Didn't you just tell me boys have cooties? Do you know what that means? That means that when they tell you you're ugly they really mean you're pretty, that's what cooties do, they make your brains work backwards. Yes it does explain a lot, doesn't it?
Now where was I? The way you keep interrupting you'll be awake until your parents get home and then what kind of trouble will I be in? Of course I can! Well, no, they can't punish me, but your mother can give me the Evil Eye like she always has since she was your age and smaller.
SO (I'm ignoring you now you'll notice) I was the belle of the ball, and before you ask a ball is a DANCE. Oh you do? Well you're very clever with your Cinderella. Very well. And I was a young lady, all of seventeen and ready to go to college. Well, along comes your grandfather, and he sits at our table!
It was your Great Aunt Nelly and I and a girl named, oh, I don't remember anything but her big buck teeth. Well your grandfather sits at our table, next to Clara, oh, that was her name, Clara. And that put him across from me, you see, since I was sitting next to Nelly. I used to tease him that if Nelly and I had switched places that night he would have ended up married to her, oh he hated that idea!
No your Great Aunt Nelly is VERY nice, it's her liniment that smells that way young lady, and that's no way to speak of your elders.
Well anyway your grandfather, oh he was so young and charming, tall and slender, in a white sport coat with his hair combed up. Well my heart was all a flutter. And he asked me to dance and back then we danced real DANCES, not this jumping nonsense your cousins call dancing.
Now back then if you danced once with a boy, you were being polite, and if you danced twice you were a couple, but if you danced three times with the same boy, well, let's just say people would whisper. So we danced and I thanked him and went back to my table.
Well your grandfather was persistent, and the next week we danced again. And this time I was hoping he would ask me again, but he didn't.
The following week was an Ice Cream Social. It's kind of like dessert and dancing both. Yes, it's my favorite too. And there was your grandfather who had gotten quite regular in his habits, so of course he asked me to dance. And then, when I was going to return to the table, I felt him take my hand, this hand right here, except it was much smoother then, without all the spots, and he asked me to dance again.
No, we didn't get married right then, don't rush ahead! We were dancing our second dance, and I was hoping that afterwards he would give me his class ring to show that I was his girl, and I could hardly think straight the whole time, when what do you think happened next?
That's right, I've told you this before, haven't I, and only about a million times. Yes, GLOP, a big ball of ice cream hit him in the face. No, he didn't have glasses then, he got those later. Well, I was so surprised I didn't know what was happening.
And do you know what he did then? Yes, that's right. As all those boys and their cootie-brains started throwing ice-cream all over the room, your grandfather bent over to shield me from the mess. He hurried me off that floor as quick as he could, but it was crowded with young hooligans and my dress was silk and taffeta and one drop of ice cream would ruin it forever.
Yes, that's right, your grandfather wanted to protect me, and he hustled me into the safest thing he could think of at the moment, a phone booth, and crowded in after me. Normally that would have been quite scandalous but at the time everyone was busy with those boys throwing ice cream.
Now don't you jump ahead, and lay down. Get under the blanket, because when I stop talking you're supposed to be asleep, remember? Okay.
So yes, then he turned around, and he looked so funny with his face sticky with ice cream, but I didn't DARE laugh. You will learn young lady that you could shoot a boy with a gun and not hurt him half as badly as if you laugh at him. Don't you dare, I'm telling you this woman-to-woman, you have to keep that to yourself, it's part of growing up. You'll understand... yes, that's right, when you're older.
Where was I? So he turned around and looked so funny, but I kept a straight face and I said “Oh, dear, you're a mess. And I took my kerchief and I tried to wipe off the ice cream. And do you know what happened next? Of course you do.
Yes, he did. Oh, and it was wonderful. Yes, because it tasted like ice cream, did I tell you that already? I did, did I? Well an old woman forgets. But yes, boy's kisses usually don't taste like ice cream, they taste like whatever dreadful thing a boy has been eating, and let me tell you that can take some getting used to. But he kissed me, right there in the phone booth, while young hooligans all around were throwing food and whooping up a storm. We stood there in our tiny little phone booth, and we could have been on the moon for all I cared.
And that was how I knew I loved him, because when you kiss someone you love, no matter what they've been eating, they always taste sweet.
Well after that of course we got married. Yes,well, back then a boy didn't kiss you if he wasn't set on marrying you. No, not right away, a few months later before he went away in the War. Yes, I can, but that's another story for another night.
Sh, do you hear that? It's your mother and father home, and you still awake. Now you lie down and pretend you're asleep or your old granny is gonna get the Evil Eye. Yes, good night.
Well of course you taste like ice cream. You get it from your grandfather.
I read the headline of Gingrich's commentary with profound confusion, that only intensified when I continued into the article.
"Newt Gingrich: Alzheimer's: The fight that matters. Subheading: We could save -- lives and money -- by funding brain science research."
I mean, don't get me wrong - yes, let's fund Alzheimer's research and find a cure! But as the Republicans have been standing four-square against any kind of health care reform, Gingrich's comments and justifications are weirdly at odds with his party's platform. His call for Alzheimer's research dollars contrasts with his party's long-standing opposition to stem cell research, which many predict will yield advances in that field.
While you plan for retirement, checking your 401(k)s, do you consider the costs of long-term care? With Alzheimer's, the cost of life is staggering. In 2008, the economic value of the care provided by family and other unpaid caregivers of people with Alzheimer's and other dementias was roughly 9.9 million people at a cost of $94 billion -- not to mention the devastating emotional impact.
While curing Alzheimer's disease will be a wonder when it happens, the approved course of treatment will follow years of clinical studies following the discovery of a cure. Between then and now, how are we supposed to survive unless we have - what do they call it? - health care insurance?
Imagine the savings to you, your family, and quite frankly the entire country, if we could slow the rate of Alzheimer's.
Uh, okay, now let's generalize that...
Imagine the savings to you, your family, and quite frankly the entire country, if we could slow the rate of all diseases.
I'm sorry, is it just me, or does this sound a LOT like a call for universal health insurance coverage, so that EVERYBODY can see a doctor and EVERYBODY can get healthier?
Next Newt attempts to lay the blame for what he apparently considers unsatisfactory progress at "1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,"
The problem resides on Capitol Hill and at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Cumbersome bureaucratic red tape and lack of support are often the culprits.
This is strange considering that President Obama, who lives at that address, signed legislation legalizing stem-cell research only six weeks after taking office. And what did Newt have to say at the time?
Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich told The Washington Post he thought Obama's policy reversal on stem-cell research was an "ideological sideshow."
As laudable a goal as improved Alzheimer's treatment is, a cure would only be available to Gingrich, with his government-sponsored tax-paid Congressional health plan. For those of us who pay our health insurance out of pocket, the treatment would remain prohibitively expensive. If Gingrich is announcing his support for government involvement in research and universal health care, then I welcome him back to the world of ideology-free reality. Otherwise the manifold hypocrisy of his position is as confusing as everything else about his party these days.
Gingrich being who he is - that is, the man who presented his wife with divorce papers while she was recovering from cancer surgery - I can only assume that his sudden interest in Alzheimer's research was prompted by receiving a diagnosis that he has a pre-Alzheimer's condition. I hope this isn't the case, as I would not wish such a fate on even the worst political foe, but narcissism seems much more likely than altruism as a motivating factor for Newt...
Yesterday was even more tiring than those preceding it. In part that was my own fault.
I hadn't gotten to the gym on Thursday, so on Friday I thought I'd bike to a distant cafe and do some work there, with the bike ride serving as exercise. I rode to my destination, and was typing merrily away on my laptop when my phone rang and my wife informed me I had forgotten something. I forgot I had promised to help my mother pull up the carpeting in her bedroom.
Whee.
Since I had biked about 1/3rd of the way to her house, I called her and had her just pick me up at the cafe, and left my bike locked to a pole. I moved furniture, took apart her headboard, tore up carpeting and padding, and levered up all the stupid carpet-strips around the border of the room. While I was doing that, I also booted her computer and applied all the patches and updates it was clamoring for, then ran a virus scan.
Hours later she dropped me off, and I still had to complete my bike ride home. So I got in my exercise yesterday.
Today I went over Bob and Debbie's and set up their computers, wiring up their network and wireless hubs and configuring her SSID to be unannounced and connecting her laptop with WPA2 and TKIP. I also updated his virus scanner and applied patches, etc and got his e-mail working.
I got home pretty tired (especially having been kept up til 4:00 am with insomnia over joblessness), but I received a very nice treat when I read my e-mail....
Hello, It was nice to see this in your post. It is from my mother's grave. My sister found it on Google and sent me the link.
I had no idea what these comments posted to my blog meant, but they were in reference to entry #34, and this my dear friends is entry #654. Whose grave? What was being commented? Only a blog entry from the year 2000... Go read the post and the comments...
What a blast from the past, eh? I thought their comments were very kind and much more thoughtful than I deserve.
I of course remember NOTHING described in the blog entry. I have a terrible memory. But it was wild to read about those ancient days of wandering around a cemetary with the kids. And it was also amazing to me, as I dug around the archives, to realize that in a few short months this blog will celebrate its tenth anniversary. Wow...
Tonight we went to Movie Night, which featured a documentary by a fellow named Barry Kimm (who was in attendance) describing how his three siblings tried to salvage belongings and memories from the abandoned Iowa farmhouse where they had been raised. It was quite moving and very well done. Hopefully he'll put it on the Internet sometime.
One good thing about apheresis, it gets me blogging! Stuck in a chair with my left arm immobilized, it's pretty nice just tapping away at the keyboard with my right hand. The hard part is the needle-stick, where things usually go wrong if they're going to. The next tricky bit is near the end, when the needle tends to clot up, and it becomes a race to finish off the donation before my blood stops going through the system.
Last week was busy. No, it was really a circus. It began on August 29th, when we moved The Young Man into his dorm in Wisconsin. It was a big day for him, and when it came time for us to go, I could tell he was torn between not wanting us to leave, and wanting us to leave. We had spent the morning moving him in (a nice second-story dorm) and wandering the campus and the nearby town, and finally we were out of stalling tactics and it was time to go.
I really couldn't believe we were there, playing out a middle-class ritual that I had never experienced, Dropping Off at the Dorm. I had my own car when I moved out, so I don't remember such an event in my life. Although honestly my memory is so poor and i was so young and self-centered it may have happened and I don't remember!
But it was good and sad and exciting and dreadful and everything one must expect from the timely departure of one's beloved son from the nest. I wouldn't change anything, but I wouldn't mind another five or ten years of my kids being this age, living at home, either. It struck me a few years ago that I was living through some of the happiest days of my life, and I'm not looking forward to four years from now when The Boy (title held now my youngest) moves out.
And THAT was just SATURDAY.
Monday the 31st was my last day on my contract, and that was surreal. I can't really complain about the contract: it showed up right when I was losing the Best Buy contract last December, and allowed me to survive the transition and carried me halfway through August. But at the same time it was a very frustrating contract: I was brought in by the project management office of the client, and I made it VERY clear (after the debacle in '07) that I am NOT a project manager. 'No,' they said, 'we need a security architect.' And then they put my on projects where no security architect was needed - projects where the architecture had long ago been determined - and used me like a project manager. And got mad at me when I didn't perform like a project manager.
But worse than that (which after all I'd been through before) was the isolation. My cube walls were 5' 10" high, and opened onto three glass senior manager offices on a dead end alley. Only three people ever passed my door, two of whom were rarely in. So I could go to work and on some days go the whole eight hours without seeing another person. I could hear my cube-neighbors - the cheerleader blond with her fakey laugh, the guy with the Harry Potter ringtone - but they weren't on my project and I had no interaction with them.
Meetings were almost all on the phone (I had to provide my own headset, the smoothly curved handset wouldn't tuck against my shoulder). Most of my colleagues were in other buildings or other states, and I had no peers with whom to go to lunch. It was dreadfully, dreadfully isolating,,,
When I returned from our (priceless, irreplaceable) two-week vacation, I was informed that my hours had been cut in half, and that at the end of August I'd be done. What the point of keeping me on half-time was I do not know, but August being the second-worst month for finding new contracts (December is the worst), I was willing to take whatever I could get. People being people, my colleagues on my remaining project quickly realized I was a short-timer, and stopped giving me things to do. The last two weeks were a pointless exercise where I would go to the office at 9:00, stay til 2:00, Monday through Thursday, doing nothing in my cube and seeing and speaking to no one. But they paid me, so I was there.
Anyway THAT ended on Monday. At the final hour I delivered my badge to my manager. She smiled and said thanks and "It's been fun!" which was so at odds with my experience that it was all I could do to say "Thanks for the opportunity" before leaving.
Tuesday was The Boy's first day of high school, which was not so traumatic but still poignant. He was going to be reunited with all the friends he'd left behind when we moved him out of the benighted 'Anne Sullivan' middle school for seventh and eighth grades. Formerly an excellent school, it had been hit hard by the dreadful policies of Governor Pawlenty, and The Boy had gotten saddled with a bitter, misandronstic teacher who had no business being in charge of children. When after a hellish sixth grade year we learned she would also be in his seventh grade faculty, we switched him to a different public school. Since both middle schools feed into the same high school, he's back with his Anne Sullivan pals.
Wednesday we moved our daughter into her dorm. As this building is just a long walk from our house, it was easier both physically and emotionally. Still it is hard sitting down to dinner with just the three of us, all huddled at one end of the dining-room table. The move was pretty easy, although in the midst of it I got calls at the same time, one from Gio in England, the other from Rachel in NYC, asking for my help with computer problems. That was weird, trying to diagnose problems in two different distant places, while hauling my daughter's stuff up the elevator to her dorm. Then we took Gennie to Coffman Union to do some start of school stuff and get lunch while I continued to deal with computer stuff.
And after THAT I went to Rob and Lisa's house for gaming til 11:00 p.m.
Thursday Theresa and I went to the State Fair, which was rather nice, just the two of us, and the weather was gorgeous. Always tiring though.
Friday and Saturday were spent on errands and chores of various types, including getting my daughter's laptop working. At one point the laptop automatically downloaded a bunch of Microsoft patches, I hadn't meant for it to do this: I wanted to install these manually because The Young Man had so much trouble with these updates hanging and breaking his operating system. Unfortunately when i connected to the Internet to download the latest anti-virus signatures, I forgot to unplug it. When I went to reboot following the virus scan (I had imported all her files from her old computer and wanted to be sure they were clean), the computer interrupted the shutdown with the announcement "Updating 1 of 52 patches, do not reboot your computer."
Well of course it stalled at update 29 of 52, which was what I believe I recall seening my son's computer do too. I was unwilling to do anything to the computer, because I knew turning it off, even if I knew it was stuck, condemned me to hours and hours of rebuilding the operating system. In denial, I left it there.
When I came into my office on Saturday morning it was still sitting at "29 of 52" and I started to resign myself to the fact that I was going to have to rebuild it. Still, I procrastinated, dinking around my office, cleaning up, etc. Finally I steeled myself to do what I had to do, I had to unplug the laptop and rebuild it. Suddenly out of the corner of my eye I saw the laptop screen flicker. It was rebooting.
It booted up, installed three more things, rebooted again, and smiled at me as if it hadn't spent 20 hours in a coma. I checked the update logs...and update 29 of 52 had taken over 20 hours to complete, but complete it had, and the remaining 33 updates finished in about ten minutes.
For once, my denial and procrastination had paid off.
I finished up my daughter's computer and brought it over to her dorm and fixed her wobblying bunk bed (which I had caused to be wobbly in the first place) and headed home, exhausted.
The next day, Sunday, was the day to help our friends Debbie and Bob move into their new home together (from two separate homes). It was a LOT of work, although Debbie tried to limit me to merely electrical and computer help in honor of this being like the umpteenth time I'd helped her move. And ONLY Debbie would PLAN to hold a party on the same evening of the day she moved into a house, but she did! It was a lot of fun (although I was really tired and could have used a shower, but then so could we all). We inaugurated the house, and when Debbie's regular cook didn't show up (the redoubtable Reuben from Argentina) I stepped into the breach. Careful planning and charcoal distribution led to a long delay before cooking commenced, but then I got three grills going simultaneously and cooked all the hot dogs, hamburgers, and chicken breasts in about fifteen minutes.
Monday, Labor Day, began poorly, with the cat announcing reville at 0500 hours. Fortunately I did catch a nap later in the morning, but my clock was all fershimmel after that. The day was mostly spent preparing for Tuesday: when my resume needed to be available for work; and when my class at the U of MN started up.
Tuesday I worked on my coursework for the U, which included visiting the Bookstore to read the first chapter of the $125 (used) textbook. I have mail-ordered the book for somewhat less than $125, but it hasn't arrived yet, and with the first assignment due Wednesday night I had no other choice. The class itself is conducted through online discussions, which is kind of interesting, I've never had a class of this type before.
Wednesday was spent on job-oriented activities, and today, Thursday, the big event was that I went to donate platelets at the Red Cross, and went to Professor Barker's at night.
Across the last few days I have additionally collected and pressed and cooked and strained the grapes from our grapevine, producing about three quarts of quite tasty grape juice. I looked into making wine out of it, but I don't think I have the gumption to tackle that quite yet.
So despite being out of work, I am quite busy! Tomorrow it's back to Bob and Debbie's house to continue wiring up their computers and sound!