The death of the American progressive

This article, found on the BBC news website, sums up most of my feelings on the current state of American politics.

Once, in this country, we had a powerful and vibrant progressive movement. A movement that said, without qualm or hesitancy, that the poor should be helped, the young nourished and educated, that the races were equal, that to the extent they were unequal the inequality stemmed from a lack of opportunity, that women should earn equal pay for equal work, that every American should have a job, that the environment should be protected and conserved for the benefit of future generations, that the rich owe a huge debt to the rest of us for their continued exploitation of the working classes - a debt they should pay back by way of financing the increased quality of life for those they oppressed - and that our duties to humankind do not stop at our borders.

Today, the Democratic party will loudly proclaim that the poor should be helped. They they'll turn around and have a $1000 per plate fundraiser and take gigantic corporate payoffs. They'll look the other way while the White House eviscerates programs designed to help the poor. Even when the people helped by the programs are sympathetic examples of the American poor like those served by the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program (the White House is planning a cut, with democratic support, in funding to "freeze" the numbers of people currently on a program whose stated goals are to provide nutritious food to women, infants, and children who cannot afford to eat).

The Democratic leadership will prattle on about how children are our future, but when was the last time that a bill was introduced to drastically increase federal subsidy of state education? When was the last time that Kansas (or any other state for that matter) voluntarily increased education funding by more than some paltry amount? Why don't our students have computers? Why don't they have modern textbooks? Why is their science and math education falling farther and farther behind the rest of the industrialized world when these are precisely the two subjects that determine the future of the American economy? Why are we allowing the fundamental religious right to further degrade science education by watering down scientific principles on equal par with the idea with the idea that everything we see is made up of smaller bits (atomic theory) or the idea that objects are attracted to each other over great distances because of their masses (the theory of gravity)?

Democratic politicians will nominally throw in their obligatory mention of racial issues in campaigns, but heaven help us if we suggest that our urban youth need drastic advances in their opportunities to help them realize the American Dream. As the Daily Show put it in the last Presidential election (paraphrase) "There was a single presidential hopeful who encapsulated the Democratic message, and spoke profoundly and eloquently on a wide range of issues. [flash up picture of Al Sharpton] But he was black, so they nominated this guy [flash up picture of John Kerry]."

The same can be said about any of the other issues. Democrats will argue that the environment should be protected, but won't do anything about it. Democrats will point out that we owe duties to the poor, but won't even admit that they themselves (mostly millionaires) should be giving up their third and fourth mansions to provide food to those who starve to death on the streets of cities they live in. Why?

Whatever happened to the progressives like FDR? Is it so taboo now to say that all Americans should have a job, and if the private economy won't provide it, then damn it, the government will. We could be doing good and generating international political capital by having teams of American youth building bridges, digging irrigation ditches, paving roads, planting fields, digging wells, rebuilding cities, engaging in vaccination programs, and any number of other things around the world, like we did decades ago. Why not now?

What happened to Johnson's "Great Society?" We made a commitment to the poor and elderly - a commitment that we are about to renege on - to do our best to keep them alive and well. We can't afford to subsidize the lives of our seniors so that they can afford both food and medication, but we can certainly afford to cut billions of dollars in taxes on those so fabulously rich that they will never want for even a hundredth yacht.

The Democratic party has abandoned it's historic role as the sanctuary of the American progressive. The party does not appear to care about the young, the old, the working class, those of minority races in any but a token capacity, the environment, or the world. When the did the Democrats become a party demanding that our troops come home from abroad because what happens in the rest of the world is not our business. A leading democrat even characterized the issue as "American troops should be helping Americans."

Isolationism is not a progressive value. Engagement is progressive. We should be saving the world. Why? Because we can.

Let Non Nobis and Te Deum be sounded for the American progressive. Let the dead with charity be enclosed in clay. He is dead and none exist to replace him.

Fill in the blank

Judge: Academian, you are charged with being a pretentious and passive-aggressive ass. How do you plead?

Academian: I must confer with my counsel, your Honor.

Academian (to counsel): What evidence do they have on me?

Counsel: Well, you can expect the prosecution to put on star witnesses Kansasgirl, Mrs. Marcia Dentist, and MindSpewer, who will all testify that you were a total dick. In addition, the prosecutor has, over objection, obtained – and is prepared to present – copies of several of your recent posts. Do you have any defenses you’d like to raise?

Academian: Can I say that I was temporarily insane at the time?

Counsel: I’d advise against it, Academian. The court looks disfavorably on adding a second layer of douchebaggery to the first.

Academian, sighing: Alright. Your Honor? I plead guilty to the charge of being a pretentious and passive-aggressive ass and throw myself on the mercy of the court.

Judge: The plea is entered and accepted. I hereby sentence you to…

For behold, I have laid down my testament among thee

So I finally got around to fulfilling my promise to creepy neighbor guy to spend some time with him and read his manuscript. All I can say is that creepy neighbor man just got renamed to crazy neighbor man.

His apartment is sparsely furnished, and what little he does have appears to be scrounged from construction sites. Covering an entire wall, he has a shelving unit made from cinder blocks and wooden planks. I'll not begrudge a poor man using what materials come to hand (although in this case, perhaps illegally) to spruce up his home, but every single space on that massive group of shelves was occupied with ceramic figurines. And most of them were clowns.

I had originally thought that reading Mr. Creepy neighbor man's manuscript would be a long and boring process (what with it being more than 200 pages and all), but I was in luck. As it turns out, he writes only on wide-ruled paper, skipping lines, and only on one side of a sheet. Already that takes his 200 pages down to something far more managable.

I would have still been hesitant to spend my time reading that lessened manuscript if the writing had been, in any way, competent. Again, luckily for me, he failed to disappoint. The writing style seemed aimed for very young children in terms of sentence structure and repetition, but the content of the sentences themselves were clearly not intended for young children.

An example of an exerpt might be something like this:

"Loren wanted to go get ice cream. Loren liked chocolate the best. Loren had sausage and eggs for breakfast, and his mother made him wash the dishes afterwards. Loren rode in the car with his Mom and Dad and Cousin to the ice cream store. Loren saw houses and trees on the way. Loren's cousin started fondly [sic] his manhood. Loren ate his ice cream quietly. The ice cream was delicious and cold. Little league practice that day was fun."

Note the clever use of completely unrelated details to what was obviously the traumatic event he tried to describe in this vignette. Apparently, his cousin either groped himself or, possibly, "Loren" (not creepy neighbor's real name, but the one he uses for the book) on a car ride when he was little. But the discussion of what he had for breakfast that morning, or the subsequent reference to Little League do little to further the narration of the message he was trying to convey, and do not seem to put the sexual issues into any sort of context.

The entire book (if you can call it that now), is composed of short stories rarely longer than what I printed above. They appear to be in no particular order, with what appear to be gigantic time-jumps in between the chapters. New characters are mentioned (like Fergy, Schuyler, Annie, and Bruce) with no introductions to who these people are, nor indications of how they are related to the main character (Loren). Frequently, previous 'chapters' only made sense after gleaning some detail from 30 pages later (like that Annie was his first wife).

He recounts what seem to be auditory hallucinations. At one point while he was the CEO of his Fortune 500 company (don't shoot the messenger, I'm only reporting what was in his manuscript), he heard the voice of God tell him that he would be punished for his extravagent lifestyle. He found out later that day that Annie was cheating on him with his buddy, Bruce, and continued on to recount Bruce describing in lurid (and unrepeatable) detail the sexual proclivities of "Loren's" former spouse. After Annie files for a divorce and throws "Loren" out on the streets, Loren is homeless and again hears the voice of God telling him which semi-truck to try to get a ride from (to go to Washington D.C. for reasons not given). I guess the voice of God also told him to perform sexual favors on the trucker as fare for the ride, because that was also described in the book using the childish sentence structure as above.

He recounts what seem to be visual hallucinations. When he died (he claims to have died twice already), he claims to have seen the moving black shadows just like at the end of the movie Ghost, and that he walked into the bright white light away from the shadows, but ordered God to send him back to complete his task, and God relented each time. He discusses how he traveled across some open fields one night, chasing a softly white 'orb' of light that sang to him with his mother's voice. He discusses when he first saw the devil in Oskaloosa. A small ceramic frog which sits on a table by his window apparently gets up and dances periodically as well.

He appears to have delusions of grandeur, saying that his message (which he ostensibly recounts as the idea that a loving God exists and that people should learn to listen to that God) is unique and novel, and that when his book is published it will revolutionize the world. Aside from the fact that books with this message are neither unique nor novel (Barnes & Noble have have a gigantic section devoted to religious books with similar themes), that message fails to appear even once from within what he has written.

He appears to have paranoid episodes as well, suggesting that his rambling autobiography will "piss off the churches, the FBI, the cops, and the President" and that after his book is published, they will attempt to kill him. He even decided on the ending for his book while I was there, reading and making comments about the work. Apparently, it will end with the book being published, and Loren will walk out of the publisher's office to a crowd of people. He will then simply end it with the sentence "And there was blood in the streets that day." He said he likes it to be up in the air as to which group kills Loren, or whether Loren in fact fights back and wins against all odds (as an act of redemption). Either way, I found that to be a little on the disturbing side.

He believes that he has ESP, and can read minds, but yet still believes that I hail from Iowa, am a Roman Catholic, and thinks that we share some sort of intimate connection because we both lived on an Indian burial ground (which I've never done to my knowledge).

He seems to have a loose grip on the meanings of several terms which makes understanding him a bit more difficult than it otherwise would. He told me about his son (Schuyler in the book, though that is not his real name either) and how his son liked to eat rattlesnakes. I thought surreal could barely go beyond this: "They don't have much meat on them, but they're a real delicatessan, so I made three." But after that, he told me about how his son was a member of the Topeka "Insane Clown Posse," and asked me if I was a member too.

In addition to general weirdness, he described additional troubling incidents. After his divorce from 'Annie' he visited a divorcee support group, where a younger woman asked him to walk her out to her car afterward. He writes that they hugged as a goodbye, but that his 'hug' was a little different and that it led to her alleging sexual assault against him. He eventually decides that this woman is an agent of his ex-wife trying to ruin him. In another story, he rides the bus from Topeka to Washington, D.C. (again for reasons not given), and sits next to another young woman. They share a blanket and he 'only barely' resists the temptation to "do things to her" under the blanket while she sleeps.

I'm a security conscious individual, and always keep my door locked. I think this guy just ensured that I double-check that lock before I head to bed each night. If I end up dead sometime, you might want to have the cops take a good hard look at Creepy/crazy neighbor guy from Apt 20.

Cap'n PA gets himself tagged, despite competing for Miva status

Four Jobs I’ve Held In My Life:

1. Soda Jerk for a historical park (under the Topeka Parks and Recreation Department) – the first job where I had to undergo criminal background checks and drug testing, but working in a store that sells only soft-drinks and ice-cream treats (all personally made), leaves one with the indispensable skill of knowing how to make ideal ice cream sodas (fie on those who only simulate the real thing with floats!).
2. “Bee-Wise, Immunize” bee/data entry specialist for the Kansas Bureau of Immunizations – I never hated bees until I had to wear a gigantic foam bee head at a county fair.
3. Research Assistant to Dr. John Hefferren at KU – I’ve never hated a job as much as this one. I had to take samples of dog saliva from (very dirty) beagles in the animal testing facility and determine the density of sulfur producing bacteria per mL of dog saliva to determine whether the chemicals we fed to the dogs freshened their breath (yes, Dr. Hefferren was using valuable research money to find a cure to that greatest of human problems: smelly doggy breath). To make sure that the ‘smelliness’ of the dog breath was caused by sulfur, I had to take subjective ratings of smelliness by sticking my nose inside the dogs mouth and taking a whiff. Those subjective ratings were then compared to the bacterial density titers to figure out whether my work was meaningful. I doubt you’ve ever had the inclination to try it, but don’t ever take deep breaths right from under the jowls. Try to the front of the mouth instead. It’s enough to make you gag.
4. Research Assistant to a grad student – Nothing like working for the biggest ass on the planet. He was a graduate student doing a thesis (which I helped him prepare) on tobacco taxes across the United States. You couldn’t dream up a worse boss. The penultimate chauvinist, and once told a student in a class he taught that the student’s home town was a ‘shit-hole.’

Four Movies I Could Watch Over and Over Again and Have:

1. Playing by Heart.
2. American History X
3. The Phantom of the Opera
4. My Fair Lady

Four Places I’ve Lived:

1. Smith Center, Kansas (1981 - 1985)
2. Pratt, Kansas (1985 - 1989)
3. Topeka, Kansas (1989 – 1999, 2004 – present)
4. Lawrence, Kansas (1999-2004)

Shows I Love to Watch:

I’ve got nothing. I don’t ‘make’ time during my week to watch any television, and (aside from the Olympics) probably haven’t watched more than a half-dozen hours of it since before Christmas.

When I was at KU, though, I loved to watch “Emergency Vets” on Animal Planet, though.

Four Websites I Visit Daily (and more than once daily):

1. Bbc.com
2. Sluggy.com
3. Novica.com
4. (surprisingly) skepticsannotatedbible.com

Four Favorite Foods:

1. Giant plate o’tacos
2. Mr. Goodcents, “whole number four on white, American cheese, standard plus mayo, quartered, to go.” (my 13-word order has been used so many times in the past decade that it rolls off my tongue without a thought)
3. Gambino’s “Classic Italian” pizza (pepperoni, Italian sausage, salami, pepperoncini peppers, red onion, “cheese blend,” and parmesan cheese = delicious)
4. Butterscotch Ice-cream Soda with just the right amount of hardened fluff

Four Places I Would Like to Visit:

1. Antarctica
2. Morocco
3. Turkey
4. Syria
There’s just something about the desert and photographs I’ve seen of North Africa and the near-east that fill me with a sense of belonging, like a homesickness for a place I’ve never been. My mother occasionally lets on that she believes in paranormal things like past lives, and periodically, I feel like she might be right. Is it weird that I’ve had dreams where I stood atop a sandy hill staring down at what looks to be an early Middle-Eastern village while my troops (and I knew they were mine) fought with spears and swords to subdue the inhabitants?

Four Places I’d rather be:

1. Snuggled warm in my bed
2. With someone who could look into my eyes and tell me they loved me without looking away or misusing the word ‘love.’
3. Atop my throne, surveying those who have come before me to entreat their lord
4. With my friend, Nik

Four Albums I can’t live without:

1. Milk, Inc., “Closer” (‘November’ = current favorite song anywhere)
2. Dishwalla, “And you think you know what life’s about” (‘Until I wake up’ = great track)
3. Shawn Colvin, “A few small repairs”
4. Live, “Throwing Copper”

(There was supposed to be a ‘tagging’ section here, but I know no other bloggers Mindspewer did not already tag, so I deleted that bit)

And away it has gone.

Due to apparently universal disdain for facial hair and the people who sport it, I have made a step to rise out of the simian class of diseased under-beings who elicit such disgust by shaving off my beard and moustache. My face hurts, my cheeks feel cold, and my face (which once had a semblance of a jaw-line) now looks strangely ridiculous. Yay.

Things that suck

In the spirit of a emulating one of my friends (and the comments posted to her entry), I present you with a list of things that suck:

-Women who cut their beautiful, long hair short.
-Women who don't have perfectly shaped eyes.
-Women who don't fit into a size 2 or smaller dress.
-Women who don't wear high heels all day long.
-Women who don't wear the correct shade of lipstick.
-Women who don't wear lipstick.
-Women who don't wear eyeshadow.
-Women who wear colors that clash.
-Women without trust funds.
-Women who don't have the perfect rear end.
-Women who don't have the perfect front end.
-Women who don't smile enough.
-Women who don't look like the models on the magazine covers.
-Holding an entire gender to unrealistic standards of beauty and acceptability only broadly attainable by a miniscule fraction of that half of the species instead of admitting that beauty can be found in people with wildly different characteristics.

Perhaps there's something to be said for at least one of these things sucking.

Miss Perfect

So I’ve been thinking about Miss Perfect lately. Perhaps it is a bit misleading to refer to her in the personal fashion since she’s really more of an abstract concept in my mind, of which individual women I meet are sometimes instances. Nevertheless, she has (and her various incarnations have) been on my mind.

I’m a deeply relational person. Despite my shyness and general tendency to be reserved, I am rarely happier than when I am close to another person. Paraphrasing a character from one of my favorite films, if there is a God, that God isn’t some nebulous omnipotent force. Instead, God is found in the spaces between people.

My life has, on the whole, been a bit more without warmth and comfort than have the lives of others. I wish I could say that I regret that turn of events, but in reality, I feel that it has given me special insight into who I am, what I desire, how I function, and the extent of my limitations. When you don’t have someone else with whom to be involved, you tend to become involved with yourself to stave off the gnawing emptiness of being alone.

I don’t really ever recall being a child. From my earliest memories, I worked and was treated far more adult than most other children. My brother and I were set to cleaning the china collections. I had to push a lawnmower when I was barely taller than the handle. My brother and I were stopped from trick-or-treating on Halloween starting when I was in the fourth grade because according to my father, it was time to put our childhoods behind us and start to become men.

I don’t ever recall going through a period as a teenager or young adult where I sought to ‘find myself’ and, in a fashion troubling to perhaps only myself, I’m not sure I understand what people mean when they refer to this apparently ubiquitous phenomenon.

High-maintenance. If I was a woman, that’s what men would call me, I’m sure. I imagine slights at every turn (and I know they are truly imagined at the end of the day), and need constant involvement to sate my hunger for human contact. I believe that I correctly label these things as drawbacks to my quality as relationship material.

But Miss Perfect is always there in the back of my mind, and I’m only now realizing that she makes me a better person, seeking to overcome my disadvantages and flaws to build myself into the person I should have been all along.

There have been 5 instances of Miss Perfect in my life, and all share certain qualities in common. I have felt an immediate chemistry with each of them, and in many cases before I even knew their names. I’m not trying to suggest love at first sight or even that I simply found them physically attractive (I’m too much a scientist to admit the former, and too much an ascetic to put much stock in the latter). Rather, I mean to say that in a few brief moments, I could see some special spark in the way that the person approached the world. From the way she smiled to the way she talked to other people, from the way she walked to the way she reacted to some emotional stimulus, I have seen and been impressed. I hesitate to suggest it because I don’t know whether it reflects badly about me and the way I react to the world, but in those brief moments, it seems as if I can see through her and down deep into her soul to discover the hidden woman deep inside. Letting the scientist in me step aside momentarily, it is magical.

Each time I’ve met women like this, I have further gotten to know them. And each time I have plumbed the depths of my relationships with these women, I have discovered that underneath her outer disguise, Miss Perfect was waiting.

Miss Perfect has surfaced in my life five times: once in my early life, once in high school, once as an undergraduate, and twice beyond.

When I moved to Topeka from Pratt, Kansas, I got one monumentally lucky break. My first day of school fell on Halloween, and I dressed up that year (the last year I dressed up until I was in college). My costume that year was a gorilla in a suit. I know, it doesn’t make much sense, but a little boy in a formal tuxedo (with bow tie) and a gorilla mask on really looks fantastically adorable. It’s hard to move to a new school. It’s much easier when you don’t have to show your face right away.

What I remember most about that day isn’t my classroom, my peers, or even my teacher (whose name I’ve forgotten). I remember her. On the bus ride to school, I watched out the bus window at all of the children getting on the bus. At a stop not too far from my house, a beautiful girl wearing a pink princess outfit stood with a friend waiting for the bus to arrive. She walked down the aisle of the bus and as she passed me, she looked at me, through the eyes of the mask, and smiled. I’m sure she didn’t know who I was or mistook me for another of her playmates, but I immediately was smitten.

Her name was Kari (pronounced like Carrie), and she was my hopeless crush from that moment on. She was a year younger than I was but that didn’t get in the way of what you might be thinking was nothing more than a puppy-love scenario. Perhaps it was, thinking back. But simple crushes tend to fade over time, and last for days, weeks, or maybe even months. Mine lasted for a decade.

I knew her from the neighborhood. She went to my elementary school. Then she went to my junior high. When I was in high school, I entered the debate program, and a year later, so did she. I was assigned to mentor her and train her. Two years later, I still harbored affection for that little girl in the princess costume, even when she was soundly beating me in four-speaker policy debate. It wasn’t until my freshman year at college that I found the courage to tell her that I was attracted to her, but by then it was too late. She got married two years ago.

When I was a senior in high school, I met Jessica. Jessica didn’t go to my school (she was a T-High girl), but she worked at the general store in the historical park where I was the Soda Jerk at the old-fashioned drugstore/soda fountain. The great part about working at the historical park was that virtually nobody knew it existed, and of those who’d heard of it… well, let’s just say that historical parks aren’t all that big of a draw even among the NPR-listening crowd.

The long and short of the matter was that we rarely had to deal with customers, and if the weather was in any way dismal or rainy, we would go an entire 8-hour shift without a single customer between us. On those days, she would come over to the drugstore and I would make us frozen treats from the fountain. We would tell each other stories, talk about our friends, and our plans and dreams. As the weeks went on, I found myself losing track of our stories while losing myself in her deep brown eyes. Once, we even stopped talking for about a half hour and just stared into each other’s eyes, lost in a world of our own thoughts.

It was me who introduced her to my friend, Aaron. Aaron was the classic man. He was tall, had dark hair and a well-trimmed goatee, and was devilishly handsome. He played trombone and trumpet for the school’s jazz band. He was “that guy” from my high school on whom virtually every girl had a crush, and in no time flat he and Jessica were dating.

Our freshman year in college was difficult for both Aaron and I because while Aaron and I went to KU, Jessica opted for a more prestigious offer to attend Wellesley (it helps to have a father who owns several banks). I missed the easy camaraderie I experienced with Jessica and Aaron must have as well. Midway through the year, Aaron decided to drop out of KU and enroll in a college in New York. I’ve always thought that Jessica being on the East Coast was one of his main reasons for leaving his family and friends behind.

But then came Spring Break. Aaron wanted Jessica to come down to New York to spend time with him, but instead, Jessica flew to Kansas and spent part of her time with me (her family had moved from Kansas to the East Coast along with her). This infuriated Aaron and he phoned her during the middle of Spring Break to break up with her.

I’ll never forget that night. I’ve only rarely experienced so many conflicting emotions all at once. I was exhilarated (Aaron had broken up with her), and heartbroken at the same time (she was weeping into my shoulder). I was outraged (How dare Aaron hurt her this way?) and guilty because I liked it (I can still remember the smell of her curls in my face as she sobbed).

We talked, with her sitting across my lap, my arms around her shoulders and her face buried in my shirt collar. Eventually, she cried herself out of tears and, as she snuggled into my collar in the dark, she made me promise not to leave her during the night. I gave my solemn word and stayed awake until dawn, doing my best to keep her monsters at bay, while she sleepily traced the lines in my hand with her fingers, as if committing each tiny variation to memory in the dark.

There have been times in my life when I’ve felt as if I found my proper place in the universe. When I won the State tournament and was told that I’d be going to nationals in policy debate, I felt as if I’d found what it was that I was meant to do. The only time I’ve ever hit another person (It scared me that I felt good about it) was when I was in second grade and a little boy on my block was pulling the back-ends off of lightning bugs. When on a trip through a state park, I found a turtle by a stream struggling on his back, and I up-righted him, I felt as if somehow the universe smiled down on me for just a moment. Perhaps it awakened something very primal and buried deep inside of man, but for that night with Jessica, I was the protector. I’d have given a lot for her consider our friendship as more than platonic, but I’ll be damned if I cast aspersions on what I had now. I would have laid down my life to keep her safe and warm. I’d never felt so right before, and I’ve never felt so in tune with the heartbeat of creation since.

When I was a junior at KU, I met Kari (pronounced Car-ee). Kari came from a dark background. She had an alcoholic, abusive father. Her mother so insulted Kari over every perceived amount of trace fat that Kari became afflicted with an eating disorder to “become pretty” enough for her mother. She had wild mood swings, and could change from upbeat and perky to quiet and distant in a span of hours. Once she even cut herself. I saw to it that she took a month off of school to go to an in-patient hospital in Kansas City where they repaired a lot of what was damaged inside her mind.

Kari was the most playful and innocent woman I’ve ever met and how she could remain so delightfully childlike in her outlook fascinated and captivated me. When it rained, she didn’t stay indoors. She ran out into the puddles and danced. We would take trips to a local park so that she could sit in the swings and have me push her higher. During the Springtime (in what I’m sure was a violation of university policy) we wandered campus picking flowers off of bushes. When we had enough of them, we threw them in a small pile on the hill by the campanile, and she lay in them, pointing out clouds that looked like animals.

Even things that would be a bit more worldly if others did them (she was quite possibly manic, including the accompanying hypersexuality) seemed to be simple, fun-loving games to her.

What I loved about her wasn’t that she could manage to find silver linings in dark clouds, but that she simply didn’t see the dark clouds in the first place. She got married this last August.

So I do know that Miss Perfect exists. She’s out there, and I enjoy our games of hide-and-seek. She wears disguises and crops up in unlikely places, with unlikely characteristics, but sooner or later I find her again.

Miss Perfect plays an important part in my life. When I am too focused inward, and I begin to mentally accentuate my flaws more than recognize my latent talents and gifts, she is there to remind me that she does exist, and that in every single incarnation of her so far, she has found me to be a charming (if somewhat eccentric) companion and friend.

And that is far more than I’ve dared hope in a long, long time.

Fundamental math lesson her trainers don't seem to understand

Sasha Cohen + a non-starvation diet = Gorgeous

What a messed up kid

Well, I took a trip back to my parents' house today to pick up a stack of mail that they collected for me (somehow it still keeps showing up there despite my filing a change of address form). While I was there, my father was going through some old photographs on the computer. One of them was a picture of me when I was in second or third grade.

I'm just glad I don't have a copy of the picture. My hair was spiked. I was wearing purple Jams (anybody else remember Jams? Shorts that went down past your knees? Nobody?). I had a ripped jean-jacket on over my orange/yellow hypercolor shirt as well. And as if the fashion nightmare wasn't yet complete, I topped it all off with a zebra-print slap-bracelet (surely people remember those things, right?)

Man, as much as I love the 1980's, some things about that decade should never be brought back. Ever.

Except for hypercolor shirts, because those were totally rad, gnarly, and tubular.

Hurts so good

Today, I decided that I would indulge in some of my guilty pleasures, and already I'm feeling incredibly better about my life. It's amazing how much fun self-denial can suck out of everyday things.

I used to be a fan of Dr. Pepper, and even though I wouldn't say I drank it all the time, I did decide that my glass or two a week were probably not in keeping with my diet and new health-conscious living. So I gave it up. I went without a single sip of anything even remotely resembling my beloved soda.

Today, I splurged and bought a 2-liter bottle while I was at the drug-store buying some other goods. I've decided to ration it out to make it last, so I only had a small juice-glass of it. Like the first sip of wine after crossing the desert, it was.

Then, I decided that I should make a trip up North to get my hair cut. I could have gotten a haircut at any of a half-hundred places closer to home than this place up near my parents, but there's a guilty pleasure up there that I have yet to find a replacement for: Her.

Good god. I can't even talk when she's cutting my hair. I've never found haircuts to be all that great, but when she runs her fingers through my hair... Wow.

How she can make a haircut feel good is beyond my understanding, but it has to be borderline illegal, I'm sure. But she has magical hands, and I'm willing to drive 7 miles for that.

For lunch, I eschewed my usual half-can of bland vegetables, and actually fixed myself a decent meal. Sure, I'm going to have to go to the grocery store that much sooner now, but damn it, I'm worth it.

Could you use a Taser to survive a zombie attack?

Saturday was a good day, for what little of it I was sensate. I got to judge a forensics tournament at my old high school (Go Vikings! Pillage and loot the village before razing it to the ground!) I love to judge the debate and forensics tournaments. I really need to get off my backsi… um… I mean tail, and call up the other schools to get my name and number on their lists of judges to call in for tournaments.

If you’ve never been exposed to forensics, here’s a brief rundown:

Saying you participate in forensics is like saying you participate in track and field. There will be periodic meets but in each one there are dozens of events. Forensics is like a speaking/acting track meet. People compete in events where they are judged on their ability to act (humorously or dramatically, singly or in pairs, prepared or improvised) or speak (on public domestic affairs, on international affairs, in an informative way, in a persuasive way) or in some less-than-prestigious tournaments like the one I was at, your ability to read someone else’s poetry out of a notebook.

I judged four events at the tournament (an event each round, plus finals). I got to judge informative speaking (first round), oration (second round), domestic extemporaneous speaking (third round), and international extemporaneous speaking (finals).

Informative speaking (informative for short) is a fun event, normally. Participants have to come in and give a 7 minute (or less, but more is favored) memorized speech on any topic of their choice where the goal is to inform the judge about some topic. People usually pick some interesting topic like the biography of some famous person, the history of a particular product (like chewing gum, say), or the existence of silly laws (honking your horn at cows in North Dakota when approaching railroad crossings or something). Typically, an informative requires some research and preparation just to get the material for the speech and then it still has to be memorized.

I got to see a speech on the lifecycle of your average garden gnome (apparently they come from a magical land with fairies and trolls, and I don’t mean David-the-Gnome style, either). The girl clearly was pulling this all off the top of her head and even graced me with her version of the gnome dance when an old gnome commits suicide to return to the magical land of his birth. Sometimes I wish I was ballsy enough to waste other people’s time in such a blatant fashion. I didn’t know whether to give her the best score for being so gutsy or tell her she ought to be disqualified.

I thought nothing could top that until my next speaker gave me a speech on zombies. I might have been interested in hearing a researched speech on zombification, as in the Caribbean Voodoo practice with drugs and such. No, his speech was about zombies – the flesh-eating, shambling undead who are animated by their hatred of the living. In a speech about how to survive a zombie attack, I would have expected at least a few references to Army of Darkness and chainsaws, but his speech wasn’t even that prepared. No, it was simply a listing of weapons you might use to kill zombies, like apparently, a crowbar.

Sigh. Domestic extemp. was about as bad. In “Extemp.” (whether domestic or international), competitors pull a question out of a hat (really) like “Should the United States adopt a hard-line stance on Iran’s nuclear ambitions?” Students then have 30 minutes to research the issue (with just the physical – not electronic – materials they have brought with them), write a 7 minute speech, and memorize it. Extemp. was always my hardest event when I was in high school. It just took me longer than a half hour to research, write, and memorize the speech. If I’d have had an hour, I would have been much better off.

One of the questions was about whether the United States should adopt stricter restrictions on the sale of Tasers. Apparently this issue was in response to several publicized Taser accidents in the past year or so. The speaker who answered that question for me did so with the following quote (I wrote it down after he said it because I couldn’t believe it):

“Opponents of Tasers will claim that they are dangerous and cause more accidents than they prevent. But Tasers are for more than just personal protection. The main reason to keep Tasers freely available is for personal recreation.”

Personal recreation? What the heck does this dude do with stun-guns, just for fun? Seriously, help me out here. I’m at a loss as to their purely entertainment value.

Sigh. The good news of the day is that when I returned, I was feeling a little under the weather (probably just a hangover of last week’s illness and my exposure to the frigid cold; it was 9 degrees when I left in the morning, and felt scarcely warmer than that in the school building). So I opted to reschedule my meeting with creepy neighbor guy for later in this week.

Maybe that’ll give him a chance to write another dozen pages or so. Who knows?