We’re regular enough at the 21st that the waiter not only knows to bring raspberry snapple, he knows to politely confirm that i’ve read my cap before clearing the table.
Archives for November 2004
A Picture Share!
I went incognito for a stealth trip to s-bucks.
It’s not supposed to look good, it’s just supposed to look different than that powder (oh my god if i have to see it one more time i’m going to gouge my eyes out) blue from the last layout. I still have about 800 things to fix, but at least everything works again.
Actually, this is pretty similar to CK’s original layout. Full circle, or plain lazy?
Please, spare your comments for another day.
Postal Service
In grade school I found the concept of Pen Pals stultifying; try to find one kid to strike up a slow-motion exchange with via handwritten letter? Handwritten letters took too long to write, were too hard to read. Why not just trade phone calls? Or, at least, typed letters.
It was third grade, and my teacher absolutely refused to allow me to type my letters. I had a typewriter at home, my little blue manual on that folded into its own suitcase, on which I would peck away grade school murder mysteries and horror stories. Having recently received a note from my incredibly square Wisconsin friend, I anticipated a dreaded letter writing exercise in class the next day. In a pro-active academic turn (still rare, to this day) I got out my steely blue friend, and pecked away.
The next day in class, when the teacher told us that we would be writing out our replies, I raised my hand. I had brought mine, I pointed out, and it was already neatly typed.
My teacher was not amused. I couldn’t get out of the exercise just because I could type. I would still have to write out my letter.
Defiant, I struck back; I would love to write my letter in the horrible, awkward, cursive of third grade, but surely I would be allowed to place my wonderfully neat typewritten note into the massive envelope that would shuttle letters to our sister-school of hopelessly sheltered born agains in WI?
She was aghast. A typed note? No no no.
At this point the details become a bit muddled; to the best of my recollection, I may have refused to write out my letter so that she would be forced to use my typewritten one. She may have taken the typewritten one from me and insisted I write one from scratch. All I recall is that I was flustered, and made to turn my desk to the wall and write my note by hand, possibly in duplicate.
I can’t remember if my mother found out, but I suspect if she did she probably just had a hearty laugh. For all of my critique of her, one principal she has stood by is that no child should be restricted by a lowest common denominator (she knows the phrase, but god help you if you ask her to show you what it means with fractions), in the same way refused to let teachers force me to show my work on repetitive addition tables in first grade when I had already figured out how to multiply.
I hate when I figure out how to do things the fast way but am restricted by a classroom (or a world) of slow movers.
I’m No Al Gore, but…
I have an obsession with connectivity.
If I have five free minutes at work, waiting for a phone call or finishing lunch, I immediately connect to my favorite people and topics on the internet.
I always say I had been waiting for this my whole life, and people think I’m trying to say that I am Al Gore and that I invented the internet. I’m usually at a loss to describe what I mean, but I have finally thought of a good example.
When I was five or six, He-Man toys were all the rage. However, being the equal opportunity battle coordinator I was, I also wanted to have She-Ra toys to fill out the gender ratio. I had nearly every He-Man toy, and I know for a fact that I had every single She-Ra. Except for one.
Spinnerella. She was one of the last of the series to be released, with the result being She-Ra didn’t take up all that much shelf-space in the action figures department anymore. My mother and I were intent on finding her – we had just found her net-tossing friend and, my personal favorite, Entraptra and Perfuma. Just one more She-Ra to make my fantasy world complete.
To this day I’ve never seen that damn toy in person. We went to every toy store in the Greater Philadelphia area to look. Were we supposed to cross state lines? Call stores around the country? In 1986, how were we to coordinate our search?
In my tiny, five-year-old mind, I remember thinking how silly it was that I couldn’t find that one toy. It obviously existed. Knowing what I know now about action figures, I’d wager to say that my spinning friend may have been short-shipped, or may have appeared with lower frequency in each case. However, at the time, I just knew they were out there somewhere, and couldn’t get over the mystery of why they had to be so damned hard to find. Surely there was a store that had too many of her that they couldn’t sell? Surely some girl had gotten two for her birthday, and had an extra?
I may not be Al Gore, but even then I knew there should… there had to be a way to connect to a larger group of people with the same interest. Some kind of a collective intelligence.
The internet came as no surprise.