12/97
Most people find it really hard to believe I’m an optimist, but I am. I’m kind of crabby,
I guess, but I still always tend to think things are either okay or on their way to being
okay. I think the reason I come across as pessimistic or bitter is that I like to tell
stories, and it’s the stupid, frustrating, awful things that make the best stories. For
example, take these journal entries (please). If they were just page after page of,
“Gosh, it sure is a super time to be alive,” they wouldn’t be worth writing, much less
reading later. Now, me fighting with cocker spaniels, falling down a flight of stairs,
gushing blood right before a job interview and getting hired as a bagel jockey? That’s
a story worth remembering. Even when I’m rereading those entries, I mentally see
above them the disclaimer “Everything else this month was pretty much okay.”
That’s why it surprised me to learn that, without me even realizing it, 1997 was a
really bad year.
There have been years (1994 leaps immediately to mind) when I’ve spent the entire
month of December thinking, “Good God Almighty, I’m just gonna go lie in bed for a
month and let this hellmouth of a year blow over once and for all.” There have been
other times (1995) when I’ve paused often during the year and thought, “Wow,
things are going a lot better than they were this time last year.” This year, though, I
thought things were pretty much okay. Then I looked at my Year in Review.
I’m an ardent, zealous, passionate, fanatical, close-minded, societally-outcast,
obviously-irrational-for-not-willingly-ingesting-low-dosage-toxins non-drinker. As you
can imagine, New Year’s Eve really bums my buzz. Harshes my mellow, so to
speak. Because convictions are boring, I typically didn’t have anything to do on New
Year’s Eve as a lad, and I began to spend the evening reflecting on the past twelve
months, assessing the year and myself. Collecting the memorable tidbits of the year
became a kind of tradition for me, one that gets bigger and more daunting every
year. In a way, my “Year in Review” exercises sorta spawned the document you see
before you. So, it only seems reasonable that this journal should be the vehicle for
“1997: The Year in Review.” I’m not sure these entires will be as interesting to you
as they will be for me in later years, and for that I apologize. In short: I’d like to put a
lot of it behind me, but there was no shortage of memorable moments.
When the clock struck midnight to mark the beginning of January 1, 1997, I was in an entirely different universe than I’m in now. At the time, I was a senior at Saint Louis University. While I was awaiting the end of Christmas break so that I could return to my new home (DeMattias, a dorm I’d moved into just before leaving for the semester), I was working as a member of the desk staff for their Department of Residence Life. I had a shift from midnight to six in the morning at the Marchetti West apartment complex. The ball dropped in the tape-delayed Times Square just as I was parking my car, and I could hear the howls of the hundreds of drunk people inside the building I was supposed to be keeping an eye on. As they threw beer off the balconies, I rushed inside and took my post.
Within minutes (for no reason I needed to know, apparently), Public Safety officers were everywhere. They were coming out of the trash cans; they were dropping through the ceiling tiles. Some were brandishing firearms, without necessarily brandishing high school diplomas. Before too long, one of them told me there had been a report of shots fired off of one of the balconies. Someone at the neighboring Union Plaza had called to complain. While I pondered the irony of Teamsters calling to complain about gunfire, Public Safety went upstairs to dispense cold steel justice and earn some overtime.
Before long, they’d flushed out the culprits. After going to the apartment with the balcony fingered by the Teamster, Public Safety discovered no weapons on the premises whatsoever. What they did discover was, by SLU standards, hundreds of times worse: twenty year olds, drinking beer!!!
As I later heard the story, the fleet of Public Safety officers stormed the room and found about a dozen people who’d had (maybe) three beers. They were just kinda lamely watching Dick Clark and nursing their drinks. They weren’t even playing loud music. In a strange twist, although only one of the dozen went to SLU, all of them had gone to my high school. As Public Safety herded them into the lobby, it started to look like a reunion. I kept expecting someone in a letter jacket to come stuff me in a locker.
In the interests of public safety, Public Safety threw all these drunks out of the building, telling them to just “get in their cars and go home.” SLU’s concern was with SLU’s students, and none of these people went to SLU. One of the officers expressed disappointment that there hadn’t been a gun, but he nevertheless regaled the others with the tale of how the drunkest of the renegade beer-sippers had given him “lip” and needed to be “sobered up” by the awesome authority of a SLU rent-a-cop. I’d seen this sort of thing so many times in my four years that I didn’t even think anything of it anymore. I chalked the whole thing up as typical, did another silent Graduation Countdown, and filled out one of Res Life’s Orwellian “Information Reports” on the whole affair.
Other memorable January happenings:
--I paused to think about what an odd group of friends I have after the following
conversation:
GREG: Hi Jim. Jay and I are going to see a movie. Wanna come?
ME: Which movie?
GREG: Um, either The English Patient or Beavis and Butthead Do America.
--School started again, and I began my last semester as a SLU student and my first semester living alone (like most DeMatt rooms, mine was a single; my roommate had just transferred to Mizzou to study journalism). I continued to work on the executive board of SLU’s Residence Hall Association. We went on a retreat, where we reorganized for the coming semester and prepared for the regional conferences that were coming in February. I hoped SLU administrators could go a whole semester without being jackasses. I was quickly disappointed.
From a mid-January e-mail I wrote:
“800 feet of snow fell. SLU was the only school, possibly the only institution OF ANY
KIND in the entire CITY, to remain open. We speculate that this was either because
a) {School President} Biondi determines whether or not to close school based on his
ability to get his newspaper off the lawn without falling down; or b) The
administration saw it as an opportunity to score points in its pissing contest against
Washington University, which had closed promptly after the first drop of frozen rain.
Yes, SLU, your penis is big; can we go home now? Student morale on this day was best summed up by a snowman in front of
State Apartments. In its hand was a bottle of whiskey; at its feet was a sign reading, "I'm Fr. Biondi, and I was too hung over to look out the window this
morning!"
The topper: as commuters slid backwards down the highway, Public Safety was not giving vehicular escorts because "conditions are unsafe for our road units."”
--My friend Katey began her semester at SLU’s Madrid campus. I had one more person to e-mail and one less person to eat dinner with.
--I finally broke down and looked up the word “noetic.” Ironically enough, it means “intellectual.”
--One of my friends came out of the closet via e-mail. While discussing this development with two friends over dinner, some part of the conversation caused me to squawk, “I’m gay I’m gay I’m gay.” Everyone in the vicinity turned around to look at me. Out of ideas, I winked at them.
--Most importantly, Star Wars was re-released in theaters. I began a season-long one-man festival, a culmination of six months waiting to see my childhood favorites on the big screen again. Every day was Christmas.... Taco Bell gave me Star Wars food and toys; Pizza Hut had Darth Vader on its boxes; Pepsi gave me Star Wars soda bottles; Doritos bags had Chewbacca pogs in them. I saw that movie at least six times in a month on the big screen at the Esquire theater. Centuries from now, those three months from January to April 1997 will be remembered as the pinnacle of American history. In fact, I think the reason I didn’t realize 1997 was so crappy was that I was still caught up in the afterglow of the Trilogy re-release.
Even my joyous reunion with the Trilogy was not without its setbacks, however. In particular, I remember visiting my parents one Sunday afternoon two weeks before opening night. While at home, I went through the pile of mail that had gathered since I went back to school. In the pile was an envelope labeled “The Fan Club.” My heart leapt; the rumors were true! Fans were being sent sneak preview passes! Ah, the wait was over early. Hurriedly, I tore open the envelope.
I was not disappointed. The envelope did contain a sneak preview pass, after all. It was a beautiful, radiant thing, like the Golden Ticket from that Willy Wonka movie, elaborately decorated and covered with inappropriately capitalized words. Unfortunately... I only have the vaguest memory of what it said. Let me paraphrase:
As I remember it, that’s pretty much what it said.
“Why,” I spat through gritted teeth as I stood menacingly in the kitchen doorway, ”in the name of GOD ALMIGHTY... didn’t anyone... tell me I had gotten this in the mail?”
My mom said to me, “It didn’t look important.”
So I shot her. Well, I didn’t shoot her, but I gladly would have. That mood eventually passed, though. In about mid-March.
|
Since I was National Communications Coordinator for SLU’s Residence Hall
Association (making me the SLU RHA NCC), I was obligated to spend two
consecutive weekends attending regional RHA conferences. The first was a
constitutional business meeting for MACURH (the Midwest Affiliation of College and
University Resdience Halls) that is so boring that it’s actually called No Frills. It was
held in Minnesota, thereby combining the boredom of an RHA conference with the
fun of driving to Minnesota in a crowded van. The second was ME, Missouri
Extravaganza, which was held at Middle of Nowhere University. It wasn’t supposed
to be as boring as No Frills, but it was.
I have many vivid memories of those weekends, but not just because of how bad
they were. I remember the conferences because they were bad, but also because
going to them caused me to miss 1) Valentine’s Day with my girlfriend; 2) the play
my girlfriend was in; 3) my one year anniversary with my girlfriend. Yes, they all fell
on those two weekends, and duty called. It was Shaft the Girlfriend Month, and you’d
better believe the I kept the florist busy.
Actually, that’s not true. I bought her some balloons, and maybe some flowers. She
forgave me because she’s understanding. And she only brings it up again every
couple of months now.
Oh, and I also missed the opening weekend of The Empire Strikes Back.
On the plus side, I got to visit the Mall of America, and my friend Jeff Long and I
introduced SLU’s RHA to the Spice Girls by playing a tape of “Wannabe” anytime
someone made us stop for a bathroom break on the trip home.
My memories, combined with several post-conference e-mails: “Well, Minnesota has
come and gone. A ten-hour drive to U of M Twin Cities, two visits to the Mall of
America, and a day-long business meeting later, I am no different a man than I was
a week prior.
Perhaps that's not entirely true. I always find my RHA regional business both painful
and illuminating. A room full of NCCs from all over the Midwest... just imagine. It's
quite a Bizarro World; they are all deadly, deadly serious about the whole piddling
business. They spend hours typing the newsletters I throw away without a second
look. They say things like "the high MACURH standard." They turn down paying jobs
because the jobs would take time better spent on RHA.
Example: Southwest Missouri State University nominates one of its students for the
region's Student of the Year award. No one else from any of the fifty other schools
present nominates anyone. ANYONE, from fifty schools. When SMSU presents
their nomination, the NCCs from these fifty schools make it their mission to destroy
SMSU for daring to have positive feelings for this person. "I'm sorry, he just doesn't
seem to live up to the high MACURH standard." "He isn't remarkable as far as I can
see." "What has he done that anybody else didn't do?" Ummm... well, he got f***in'
nominated, which nobody else in the bloody Midwest seems capable of doing! I
mean, if he's so lackluster, and everybody in the room feels so friggin' strongly about
it, WHY DON'T THEY BID ANYONE? There is a tipping point, when a muckraker
becomes a piss ant. I mean, only one person was nominated, and people voted for
nobody rather than condescend to give a $5 plaque to this poor shmoo. He just
didn't meet their high MACURH standard. Wasn't a big enough asshole, I guess.
Example: Part of the weekend was naming Regional liaisons, people who would
make sure every school in their given state was informed and prepared. The
spokesman for the state of M. named their representative thusly: "M. would like to
unanimously nominate J. W. for RCC. Her bid was very vague, and flawed in many
areas. There were several typos and a lot of unanswered questions. But, we
unanimously and wholeheartedly accept her bid."
Never in my life have I ever heard someone CRITICIZE the person they were in
FAVOR of. I mean, she might as well have said, "I could do a much better job, but I
don't feel like it." Bitch queen! I am sure that I'm not even approximately conveying
how ridiculous it was, or how furious I was.
These business meetings... all I can think to compare them to is a Star Trek
convention without the Star Trek. As if, at any moment, the Minnesota NCC was
gonna go, "We must pass this legislation... for, as Gowron the Klingon says in
episode 141, 'Par moch gahk toPah.'" I turn to the guy next to me to say, "Are these
people for real?" only to see him nodding, "Hmm. Yes. Gowron was a very wise
Klingon."
I was saved by Wash U. Their NCC hates RHA. As far as I can tell, he is NCC
because, at Wash U, being NCC means free housing. After it became clear to us
that we were surrounded, we began to entertain ourselves by automatically voting
against whatever the others wanted, no matter what it was. Even if it was a bathroom
break, we were against it and ready to debate for as long as it took. It made the
afternoon pass much more quickly.
That was the Minnesota conference, of course, No-Frills. That's the one that is
solely a huge NCC meeting, without any of the trappings or comforts of other
conferences. It was made palatable by Jen Griggs and the other relatively pleasant
people who went with me. Then I went to Warrensburg, MO, for the Missouri
Extravaganza. That's the conference just for Missouri schools. That one has
trappings galore: educational programming, diversity training, AIDS awareness
exercises, and massage programs, not to mention dances and parties. At least,
that’s what I hear. I wouldn’t know. As NCC and NCC-In-Training, Jen Griggs and I
had to go to a meeting to discuss bullshit constitutional issues for Missouri schools.
This meeting, which was scheduled for an hour, lasted nine. I got to do exactly zero
fun things. To say the least, I was displeased.
My irritation with local politics was worsened by my irritation with what I call Happy
Clappy RHA Crappy. See, to heighten the fun of these conferences (and make up
somehow for how dull they all are), there’s this tradition of turning the whole
weekend into a big pep rally. To show how great your school is, you paint your faces
and cheer for yourselves the whole damn weekend, thus inspiring your neighbors to
cheer louder. A popular form of cheer is known as butt-writing, wherein a group uses
their butts as if they were tips of a ballpoint pen and writes words in the air while
shouting out the letters. Very dignified. At the national meeting, the various regions
even get together and do a song and dance. I’m not kidding; last year, we had to
pretend we were cars and sing a song called “Beep Beep.” Being quiet is frowned
upon.
You can imagine how I react to the prospect of being shouted at all day. You can
also imagine how I react to the prospect of cheering myself hoarse for SLU. At best,
it’s like living in a high school football game. At worst, it’s like being locked in at TGI
Friday’s on your birthday. A nightmare no matter how you look at it.
In the cafeteria at breakfast one morning, the people from UM-Columbia, UMSL,
and UM-Rolla began cheering "UM System (clap clap clap clap clap)! UM System
(clap clap clap clap clap)!" I then realized that people can be excited about almost
anything. I looked at Wash U; Wash U looked at me; with righteous mirth, we began
screaming, "Private schools (clap clap clap clap clap)! Private schools!(clap clap
clap clap clap)!" Needless to say, the UM system accepted our scorn in silence.”
Other memorable events in February:
--SLU’s president announced that SLU owned too much artwork in an effort to get a
local philanthropist to buy SLU a nearby warehouse.
--My friend Joe was elected Academic Vice President of the Student Government
Association.
--ABSLAP was formed.
--While at work, I offered in the desk logs a handsome reward to anyone who could
explain the lyrics to the song, “No Diggity.” (“I like the way you work it/ No diggity/ I
got to bag it up....”) Some interesting answers came in over the following weeks,
including a delightful sub-debate over whether the lyric was “bag it up” or “back it
up,” but I never got a decent answer. The mystery haunts me still.
|
March was jam-packed with what the kids like to call “suckitude.” Again, I didn’t
realize it at the time, but things were really going badly towards the end. I can already
tell that this chapter’s going to be huge, so you might want to pack a lunch or
something....
My most pleasant memory of March, besides Return of the Jedi (the bastard child of
the Trilogy), was an episode we called SlimJimGate. Well, it wasn’t really pleasant,
but I took a really ridiculous situation and made my own fun. As usual, MACURH
was the source of stupidity in my life.
At the end of the semester, there was to be another conference. It was a national
one. We were to display regional pride by wearing a regional t-shirt. Since Randy
“Macho Man” Savage and his Slim Jims and “snapping into spirit” had become a
kind of absurdist running joke at No-Frills, members of the Midwest region were
going to put a Slim Jim logo on the regional t-shirt. You know. For fun.
This suggestion, as far as I could tell, brought this nation to the brink of civil war.
And it was mostly my fault. An NCC wrote to the MACURH e-mailing list saying that
she objected to the way Slim Jims would “make light of” and diminish the Midwest’s
RHAs in the eyes of the country. She threatened to make her delegation boycott the
t-shirt.
Boycott. The t-shirt.
I’d had all I could stand. I snapped. In that moment, I decided that I would devote
every second of my remaining term as NCC to being a jackass to any NCC who
breathed on me the wrong way. I wrote the following response to every RHA in the
Midwest:
> This whole Slim Jim thing is going a little too far. While a nice
Let me get this straight... we all paint our faces and walk around screaming all weekend.
Some of us dress up as pirates or wear tiger tails and do little dances like we're all stoned...
but when we put on a Slim Jim t-shirt, THEN we look like morons????
> If the Slim Jim logo appears on the regional t-shirt, we will not be
Is that a threat?... People are threatening to SECEDE from the T-SHIRT, everybody! Now
I've seen everything. I think I’m gonna cry.
> please do not use it in any way for the regional roll call. The conference
I will never understand how people who butt-write can possibly even pretend to take
themselves this seriously.
> we are opposed to representing something that is totally unrelated to what we are.
I'll remember that as I'm honking my nose and singing "Beep beep."
My e-mail inbox over the course of the following week looked like this:
I tried to keep the whole thing going with malicious, petty glee. After all the pointless
meetings, after all the ridiculous debates over the wording of a constitution no one
would ever read, after all the Happy Clappy RHA Crappy, I was finally spreading my
annoyance around. I argued as much about Slim Jims as I could, and when it
started to die down, I changed sides and started mocking people for arguing about
Slim Jims. My last message was this reply:
> more than 60 messages i discovered something. This was not a large discovery
Kids, if you don't wanna read slimjim messages, stop sending them. Please. For the love of
Christ. Shut up.
> diversion and a little fun for a regional conference like No Frills, take
> this national and people are going to think we're a bunch of morons.
> purchasing them for this conference. Mind you we will be bringing at least
> 40 people to NACURH this year as we are bidding for NACURH '98, and will
> create our own regional shirt if necessary.
> staff has previously decided how they wish the roll call to be run, making
> it fair for all regions, and we do not feel it necessary to deviate from
> their plans.
1 Re: Stop taking slim jims so seriously
2 Re: slim jims and the downfall of democracy
3 Everybody stop sending mail about slim jims
4 sending mail about slim jims is a waste of time
5
6 Re: I'm a vegan and this is important in some way
7 slim jims are fun but not worth all this e-mail
8 Re: slim jims burned down my village when I was a child
9 Re: my ex-boyfriend was nicknamed slim jim
10 Undeliverable mail: PMDF server overloaded with slim jims
> but it was an important one. Out of all those messages I had three that were
> really important and the rest were about a stick of beef.
^^^^Which category does this message fit into?
I went to a job fair in March.
God, that was depressing to type. I went to a job fair in March.
In great need of a place to live and a wage to live on, I had the first of many visions while at the job fair in which I morphed into Dilbert. MetLife Insurance. Northwestern Mutual Life. A.G. Edwards. I'll bet UC Berkeley's job fair looks nothing like this, I thought as the sweat beaded on my brow. Even the Peace Corps rep looked like Nixon's Chief of Staff.
Obviously, nothing came of the job fair. I did almost join the FBI, though.
Around this same time, my friend Nicole and I agreed that we would get a two-bedroom apartment together. Her parents disagreed, though, and since she'd still be a student suckling the parental teat during our time together, she had to back out. (My parents were not consulted.) It was okay, of course; I still had no way to pay rent. So, I thought, at least my being unemployed won't negatively affect her or anyone else.
March was also the month of spring break. For the fourth and final year in a row, I stayed at SLU and spent my break mostly alone. It was a peaceful existence, but it did serve to remind me why my job sometimes sucked. After all, I worked as a member of my own building’s desk staff, a job where everyone is always looking for someone to cover their undesirable shifts. As a result, I could never, ever leave the building or re-enter it, especially around vacation times like spring break, because every single time I walked past the desk, whoever was on duty tried to make me take a @%#$ shift. That week, it really started to drive me nuts. Leaving the building required me to spin an elaborate web of lies involving various nonexistent family members, engagements, and appointments. I just didn’t have the strength to handle all that polite evasion. And as mad as it made me, I couldn't be honest with them. My last shred of civility wouldn’t allow it. I just couldn't say, "I had six shifts that needed covering last month. You did nothing. Have fun working, fool! HaHA!!"
As an aside, March was also the month when Brian Darrow, a kid who was in my high school carpool, had a baby. It was damn weird.
And then, of course, there was my family.
As of March 1997, I was still considering in some fashion giving myself to the Alumni Service Corps. Every year, the ASC takes graduates of jesuit high schools, trains them, and installs them as teachers in other jesuit high schools around the country. They give you a place to live and a job, which were the only things I really wanted out of graduation. I can’t remember what phase of application I was in during March, but I remember having a lot of serious doubts. With those doubts in mind, I wrote at the time the following highly ironic statement: “My parents are wonderful people. I love them very much, and they always try to support me (after making me feel like a loser). I would be nowhere today without them. But it will be a cold day in H-E-double-L before you see me living under that roof. Can you imagine what they would subject me to on a daily basis? My life has never gone the way Dad wanted it to, and the thought of having to live with it every day makes me want to just sleep in my car for a couple years.”
My birthday/Easter at the end of March was a disaster. I went home that Saturday to celebrate with my family, my godmother, and my girlfriend. My parents began a discussion about family history that turned into a debate about whose parents had frequented which neighborhood pubs, which in turn became a heated shouting match about, as far as I can remember, nothing. All I can remember is watching them and thinking, “Ah, an important milestone in my life has passed. For the first time ever, I am ashamed of my parents.” I also remember the company squirming.
The thing is, my dad has a really odd way of chronicling family holidays. We record them on video like many families, but my dad takes a passively completist approach; he finds an out-of-the-way place to put the camera, and just sorta leaves it there like a surveillance device throughout the event. And I’ll never forget looking over in the middle of the fight and realizing that he was taping the entire thing. I still keep a copy to remember the evening by.
I was so angry at the both of them. They were both supposedly adults. They both had social skills. They interacted with people every day. Solved problems with people every day. Got their goals met at work every day. And all while being reasonable, all while staying civil and calm for coworkers and complete strangers on the street. But after almost thirty years of seeing each other every day, the two morons still hadn’t figured out a way to simply talk to each other. They still saved all their incivility and shouting for the people they were supposed to love. Screaming about nothing, and acting like it was the most important thing in the world. So important that they had to scream about it until my girlfriend started shaking. So important that they had to do it on my birthday.
I finally had all I could stand. I told them both to shut up, and that I was leaving the house and would not be returning to celebrate Easter. I wasn’t about to sleep under the same roof with them, I said, and I was certainly not about to sit in a church pew after listening to them make a mockery of everything their lives supposedly stood for. My dad, whose biggest pet peeve is that I leave in the middle of arguments instead of letting him chew me out at his leisure, turned his ire on me all the way out the door. (My sister later assured me that it was business as usual after I left.)
On Easter Sunday, I wrote my mom and dad both an e-mail titled, I believe, “Screw You.” My mom wrote back apologizing; she had already regretted her behavior. My dad wrote back telling me I was selfish for wanting a happy birthday.
That was the same week SLU got caught surreptitiously planning to double the rent for all on-campus apartments. If four people were living in a two-bedroom (which is often the case), SLU would be making nearly $1800 a month on a Marchetti Towers hole in the wall. This decision was approved in January. A student (accidentally) discovered it that last week of March. In addition, 33+ people were given eviction notices for their dorm rooms so that Res Life could construct a planned Wellness Community. RHA, which was supposed to be up Res Life's ass, had no idea this was going to happen until it was over. When we asked why we were in the dark, we were told that they asked for our help but we weren't interested. We weren't interested, they claimed, in whether 33 people were getting kicked out of their rooms. This was not taken well; I fired off this e-mail to the RHA exec board, and I ended up engaged with our "advisors" in a battle over e-mail at the same time I was fighting with my father.
And that was how I started April.
|
As winter gave way to spring in 1997, it became increasingly clear to me that I was
not going to have a job by the time I got my diploma. Things were starting to look
very bleak indeed. After all my ranting and raving about SLU and its bureaucratic
hoodwinking, I found myself loitering outside its administrative offices, talking myself
out of going in to drop off a resume. And I still needed a place to sleep.
After my birthday, even thinking about moving home made me go into convulsions.
Quite literally; I would get a mental picture of my father’s face, and my guts would
quake. So clearly, I had to find a place. But how? I didn’t have any money. No money
was coming in. I started going to appliance stores and sizing up the refrigerator
boxes, just to be on the safe side.
Of course, I wasn’t about to let pesky reality get in my way. I kept looking at
apartments in my spare time. After a couple weeks, I had found some decent places
in the Midtown area that would do under the circumstances. (I restricted myself to
apartment buildings nearer to SLU; I wouldn’t be going to school anymore but, I
reasoned, everything I did socially pretty much revolved around Midtown. Besides, I
figured, apartments for college students would tend to be cheaper.) Once I found a
place worth having, a place where the manager agreed to set aside an apartment for
me, only then did I seriously ponder how to pay for it.
I fretted and fussed over it for days. I was on a deadline. I needed to act. In a fit of
late-night despondent irony, an answer jumped into my head. Hopped right in there
like an evil spirit. I think I even laughed out loud at the prospect of it, a kind of mad,
desperate laughter.
I would just ask my parents for a loan.
Looking back, I can’t even begin to explain what I was thinking. The oft-repeated
axiom comes to mind: ”When you have nothing, you have nothing to lose.” Despite
the fact that my sister and I never got anything without emotionally paying through
the nose, I saw myself getting this loan. I seriously thought that, after storming out of
the house and writing my parents a letter entitled “Screw You,” I could call them up
and ask for several hundred dollars and get it. Maybe I thought they’d feel bad for the
recent unpleasantness and try to patch things up with money. Maybe I thought
they’d want to offer me a helping hand out of the nest. Maybe I thought they’d find
the prospect of me going away as appealing as I did. Maybe I was just a pistol, some
bullets, and a face mask away from robbing a convenience store and thought I might
as well exploit people who deserved it as long as I was desperate.
The funniest part is, they were going to give me the money.
In fact, once I asked my dad for the cash through the Family Wartime Transmitter
(code name: Mom), I predicted the outcome of the whole affair fairly well (except, of
course, for the part where I moved home like a whipped dog and stayed there for six
months). Little did I know that, by asking for several hundred dollars, I had given my
dad Christmas eight months early. He had gotten his favorite gift: my balls in a vise.
Dad has always had a problem with handling frustration. His kids didn’t turn out to
be little hims like he’d been promised in the brochures. Something had gone wrong.
He was a Chief Financial Officer of a major company who worked on Saturdays for
twenty years and had a copy of the Catholic Catechism in his office; his kids were
communists and art majors who hated working, devoted their lives to things that
were (clearly) a waste of time like painting and the humanities, and spent their
Sunday mornings comfortably in their beds whenever they could. He never knew
what to do about any of this, couldn’t think of a way to keep the kids in line, couldn’t
come up with a way to force them to live like he did. So he chose to resort to saber
rattling and threatening to take things away: privileges, cars, tuition, etc. As the kids
got older, he had fewer and fewer things to take away. The kids didn’t have to listen
to him; they had other places to live now. They could leave. They could hang up. It
was probably very frustrating for him. At least, that was usually my hope when I was
leaving or hanging up.
But all that was about to change at last. One of the kids needed several hundred
dollars. Money: the Restorer of Equilibrium. See, there are no harsh economic
realities to confront in my house, no matter how it often seems. If my dad wants a
jukebox, a jukebox appears in the basement. If my dad's car no longer fits his
station in life, it vanishes and is replaced by a nicer one. No, it seems that funding
hinges only on one's ability to acknowledge my father as the money's Overlord and
the willingness one has to submit to his whims. We as children have been
exceedingly docile in this regard.
Oh, the boy wouldn’t be storming out of the house again for a while! No sir, there
wouldn’t be any more “Screw You” e-mail coming from the boy! Oh, how the boy would dance! It must
have been a delightful thought.
Dad called that night, right after I had asked my mom about the loan. There was an
audible confidence in his voice. I knew the sound; as we talked, I felt invisible strings
jerking my limbs. I briefed him on my plight.
I pled my case, singing for my supper. I can't articulate the response. I heard a smirk.
"This is the kind of thing we need to talk about in person," he said.
Dear God. And so it starts.
“Oh Dad,” I said, my teeth gritted, “the semester is coming to an end. I have projects
and papers in almost every subject that I need to be working on, not to mention
end-of-the-year RHA stuff. I would really rather not spend an evening driving out to
the county just now. You’re here tonight. I’m here tonight. There aren’t any papers
we need to consult or exchange; there’s nothing we need to be face-to-face for. This
is the sort of thing the phone was invented for. Couldn’t we discuss this?”
"If you want an answer over the phone," he replied with measured ease, "I can give
you your answer right now."
Bastard. "When would be a good time for me to come home?"
"I'm free any time, any day, Son."
"Thursday?"
"Thursday's bad for me, try again."
Jump higher, you say? "How about Tuesday?"
"I have an important meeting on Tuesday. Come home Sunday."
Ah, the only day I’d have had to myself all week. I was hoping I could
spend it at home being poked with a sharp stick. "Sunday it is." Click.
His plan that Sunday would be to welcome me home, only to watch the last hour of a
hockey game in silence while I sat in the other room, watching the day go by and
wondering when we were going to actually have the discussion I’d come home for.
He would then sit down with me and explain to me that I hadn’t done anything to
deserve a loan, that I had not been pulling my weight as a member of the family, but
as long as I met his conditions and made some suitable changes in the way I wanted to live, he would give me the money anyway. Unfortunately, the first part got me so mad, we never got to the “give me the money anyway” part.
“I don’t know what motivates you to do this, “ I said, “but I’m tired of you using your
resources to manipulate me. You have so much; by myself, I have less than nothing.
You say these cruel things, and when we stop listening, you come up with ways to
force us to listen. I can’t believe I’m even here to run this little emotional gauntlet.
This has all been a complete waste of my time. You are a bad man, and I don’t ever
want to take anything from you again, because the thought of owing anything to you
makes my skin crawl.”
And with that, I left. I never got the money, and I never found a place to live. But it
was worth it.
Nothing else happened in April.
|
My final issue of The Promethean went on sale in May, or perhaps it was April. I
didn’t keep very good records of the whole thing. The Promethean was the closest
thing SLU ever had to a literary magazine, started by two friends of mine who asked
me to join in the fun. I put them off for the longest time; I dodged getting involved for
years. (If only I’d dodged RHA so diligently....) Once I found myself at the helm as
Literary Editor, though, it was easily the most fun thing I was a part of in college (with
the possible exception of ABSLAP, but bitterness is an unhealthy kind of fun).
The
two founders tended to look at me like I was an idiot from time to time, of course; I
always stuck up for publishing slice-of-life stories nobody else liked over the
pretensious crap that so many people thought was high art, and I also tried valiantly
to get all the artwork taken out to make room for more written stuff. (I stand behind
that idea, even a year later. Look carefully: “LITERARY magazine.” Unless “literary”
means “badly photocopied mediocre pencil drawings of my dog that I did in high
school,” we should have been using our scarce resources to--gasp!--print poems
and stories. But maybe I need to let go.) In fact, when I suggested removing the
purty pitchers, Andy may have even said to me, “You’re an idiot. That’s never going
to happen.” But it was that kind of dialogue that made The Promethean so
refreshing.
One thing I do remember is one of the published authors coming up and yelling at
me for publishing her. It seems that, in our zeal to get the magazine out on time, we
neglected to call the authors and tell them they’d gotten in. Some people don’t like
surprises. Oops.
Dear Fr. Biondi,
Dirt belongs on the ground. The ground IS dirt. That's what it's made of.
Sincerely,
Jim Ski
animal with a brain
I wonder how much it costs to use that much water, to compress that much air to propel that much water, to hire that many people to compress that much air to propel that much water and point it at selected bits of that much ground. More than it would cost to fix the elevator, I'll wager.”
As important as it was, there’s not much to say about it, really. I didn’t want to go; I wanted my diploma mailed to me. Weddings, funerals, and graduations aren’t really for the people involved. They’re for the families and friends to gather together and commemorate. My friends were graduating themselves, and as for my family... well, at the time their feelings were less than valuable to me. At the time, I was lying to my folks and telling them I had gotten temporary “senior housing” from SLU, when I was in fact sleeping on my girlfriend’s floor rather than going home.
In some weak final acts of defiance, I refused to sit in alphabetical order at graduation, choosing instead to sit with my friend Joan at what I think is called the commencement (the one where they call your name and you shake somebody’s hand) and another group of fellows at the actual graduation (the one where you stand up, get blessed in unison by the president, and sit back down). They didn’t hand me my diploma when they took my picture and shook my hand; they gave me an envelope containing my first copy of SLU’s alumni newsletter, which I believe is named “We Don’t Have Enough of Your Money Yet”. It struck me at the commencement (or whatever it was called) that my life had turned out very differently than I pictured it freshman year. If nothing else, I realized that most of the other graduates that I’d swore would be my friends for life were now incredibly annoying, while most of the people I didn’t initially think much of were now my friends for life. I think it really hit home when my old girlfriend came up to give me a congratulatory hug and all I could think to say was, “I thought you were dead!”
Our graduation speaker (...commencement speaker? If she was the commencement speaker at graduation, then what the hell is the non-graduation, call-your-name-and-shake-your-hand event called? I’ve already forgotten) was a local radio personality named Anne Keefe. Her speech was entitled “Life is Like a Journey: How to Beat a Metaphor to Death in Fifteen Minutes.” At other schools, I thought, they get people like Bill Clinton and Walter Cronkite. SLU gets a retired local AM deejay. I consoled myself by thinking of the year that Yale’s commencement speaker was Kermit the Frog. Gave the event a nice perspective.
After graduation, my friend Chris and I almost got taken away by security for trying to climb a fence at the Kiel Center to save ourselves a two-minute walk. In the melee around the diploma handout table, I never really got a chance to properly say goodbye to anyone. All the important people have stayed in touch, though.
Although she’ll kill me for noting this, I would be remiss if I failed to mention here that my girlfriend did not go to my graduation. For the record, she meant to. She overslept. I envied her.
The best thing to come out of May and graduation is the computer I’m currently sitting at. The technological might at my disposal almost makes Anne Keefe worth suffering through.
|
(When I started doing these reviews several years ago, they were-- tops-- five
pages long. That was kinda the point; I could go back when I wished and give a
year a brief overview. Keep track of when things happened without taking up
valuable brain space. This year, I’m at fifteen pages and I’m only halfway done.
Therefore, pardon me if the next few months are more brief. Besides, most of July
on are covered by early journal entries, right?)
A highlight of June was Flashback Friday. For reasons I cannot remember, my
friend Brian and I went out with our high school chum Adam and a girl named
Michelle. In high school, Michelle had dated Brian in a very silly teenage way (neither
could drive, and she lived 30 miles away) and quickly dumped him in a very teenage
way (I believe she had her friend tell him, over the phone no less; I saw her
snuggling with some other guy in the line for the Scrambler at Six Flags later that
week). A short while later, Michelle dated Adam and dumped him (to immediately
date another friend of ours, who she then dumped). Not too long after that, Michelle
and I had such a ridiculous teenage “relationship” that she didn’t even need to bother
dumping me; the whole thing started out as a great big dump and went downhill from
there. That was my way in high school; I liked driving 30 miles to pick a girl up and
buy her things, so that she could then hug me and tell me what a good friend I was.
It was, at least, what I was used to.
After she’d made her way through all my friends like some kind of demonic plow, we
all decided to get together and write her a venomous note in our high school paper’s
publicly-distributed Valentine’s issue. By “we all decided,” I mean I wrote her hate
mail and got my friends to sign it. That, also, was my way in high school; I was less
up front about being a jerk to people. Well, it made her cry, and she called me up
and yelled at me, and I apologized half-assedly, and she didn’t really talk to any of us
(except Brian, the cute one) ever again.
And then, one day in June, we all went to dinner.
I remember only a few things about the evening well. I remember Brian, as we
walked to the restaurant from his house, saying with malicious glee, “I think I still
have that valentine... let’s bring the valentine with us! Oh, and the stupid letter she
wrote me when she dumped me! I can run upstairs and get that, too! We can read
them with the appetizers, just to see the look on her face! Hahahahaha!!!!” (Did I
mention Brian’s studying to be a Catholic priest?)
I remember that we ate outside, and that a guy in the street was eating fire on a long
stick. A cop came up and stopped him, but only for a while.
I remember looking around the table and thinking, “Brian’s going off to follow the
Lord. Adam has another semester at Harvard. Michelle works for the Park Service;
soon she’s going to spend two years in Honduras. Me? I have $300 in my bank
account and a smile, and that’s pretty much it.”
I remember that Adam didn’t particularly seem comfortable around us after Michelle
left, as if the years had created a bit of distance between us.
I remember that it was a pleasant evening, and all the silly teenagers had turned out
to be very warm and decent human beings. It was reassuring.
My Girlfriend won't return my call.
Perhaps she's shopping at the mall.
Perhaps she's shelving videos.
Perhaps she's playing Mario.
Perhaps she's out with Phil and Nate.
...Perhaps she's with some other date!!!
I do not like my resume'.
I wish that it would go away!
I want to laugh; I want to weep.
...I think I want to go to sleep.
Good night.
“June,” an e-mail composition by jimski
|
Besides what’s in the journals, only one or two things happened in July worth
mentioning. Primarily, July will be remembered as the month when I finally
squelched the Celery Myth.
Have you ever known something to be true, just known it, only to have everyone
around you believe (for no apparent reason) some completely ridiculous opposite
thing? Well I have, and that thing was the Celery Myth. The Celery Myth goes as
follows: there are some foods on this planet which for some mysterious reason
(probably explained in the Bible Code) somehow burn more calories via chewing and
digesting them than they give via eating them. For example, according to the Myth, a
food would have 50 calories, but it would take 75 calories of energy to actually eat
the food. Maybe it’s hard to chew, and it contains something really crunchy (like
copper). Maybe this food is a base, and your stomach acid just has to work really
hard, or your blood starts pumping really fast to try and intimidate the food, or some
stupid f@%#&in’ thing like that. For whatever reason, you could eat twenty pounds
of this food every day and waste away to nothing. The primary example of such
foods, the one you always hear about in the telling of the Myth, is celery.
From the very first time someone told me this celery story, I said, “That is the
stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.” I mean, really; we live in the most superficial,
weight-obsessed culture in probably the history of the world. If these foods existed,
no matter how bad they tasted, no one in America would eat anything else. These
magical foods could taste like pestilent fecal death on a bun, and they would be on
every single menu item in this country. If nothing else, these mythical entrees would
be the most common knowledge on the face of the planet. You’d learn them before
you learned times tables. My God, it would be its own food group. Meat group, dairy
group, Magic Food That Digests Itself group.
And yet, the Celery Myth is one of those “Did you know...” trivial factoids that only
comes up in mindless dinnertime banter. They don’t talk about it on the news. You
never see it on the “Health Report.” Why? Because of some conspiracy? Is the
government afraid that, once the power of Celery is unleashed, the nation will plunge
into mass anorexia, making us vulnerable to the Communists? Are Celery farmers
unable to keep up with the riotous demand that would result from the revelation of
Celery’s true power, the power to make eating (coincidentally, our favorite thing) into
exercise (coincidentally, our least favorite thing)?
No. And do you know the real reason nobody ever talks about the power of Celery?
Because, dear Reader, it is bullshit.
And yet, every person I’ve ever discussed this with believes-- really believes, with
psuedoscientific religious fervor-- that eating celery burns more calories than it
provides. They won’t even entertain an opposing viewpoint. Somebody told them this
spurious factoid, and they swallowed it whole on logic as flimsy as, “Well, celery’s
crunchy and it tastes like glass, and it sure is hard to eat. Plus, if it’s true, then
there’s hope that I can be as thin as I am lazy! Sounds good!”
I am an irritable person anyway, but nothing irritates me faster than someone
defending the Celery Myth. And, in July, I found some evidence for people to eat
along with their celery. It was a bit flimsy itself, no references or anything, but it was
printed in a magazine and was not retracted later. That’s more eveidence than I’ve
seen from the opposing camp.
From Good Housekeeping Online:
There was more, but I was so pleased to have found anything at all that I only saved
this bit. I ran around to everyone I knew and showed this to them. None of them had
any idea what I was rambling about. It seems all the Celery Myth Believers had
graduated and/or moved away, and now I can’t even remember who they were.
I think I need to get out more.
>
> Q: I would like to find a complete list of foods that burn more calories
> by being chewed than they contain when ingested (like celery, for
> example). This list is very hard to find! -- Ralph Ison
>
> A: The reason this list is so hard to find is that it does not exist!
July was also the month when, while working a midnight shift for SLU’s Residence Life staff, my girlfriend was called a “piece of sweet *****” by a resident of one of the buildings who then attempted to join her behind her desk. She called Public Safety and notified them what had happened. As a result of reporting her attack, she was almost fired for pushing the panic button without notifiying the correct Res Life officials. While not a macho man, I still thought hard about going down to SLU and kicking some Res Life ass. All in all, though, I'm afraid she tells the story better than I do.
|
The highlight reel:
-I became my extended family’s designated Dog Watcher, due to my sloth and
desperation rather than any love I actually have for dogs.
Don’t get me wrong. Dogs certainly have their moments. But, until frisbee catching is
a valued skill and shedded hair becomes a stylish furniture upholstery, they do not
belong among humans. Everybody loses. The dogs get punished for being dogs
(i.e., marking their territory, stalking and gnawing on anything left on the floor,
shedding, being in heat), and the humans find themselves living like filthy animals
(hair on everything, urine on everything, chewed up shoes, and that wonderful new
dog smell). I mean, I’d do a lot for free food too, but dogs really get shafted.
“Hey, buddy! How ‘bout you move in with me? I’ll feed you ground-up horses and dirt
pellets for the rest of your life! Whenever you want to go to the bathroom, you’ll have
to ask my permission, and even then I’ll probably be watching you as you go! You’ll
forget all your natural self-sufficiency instincts, and you’ll rarely ever leave my house
again! I’ll become the center of your universe! And I’ll castrate you!”
“Woof! And in exchange, I’ll bark all night and roll around on your bed after I pee!
Sounds like a good deal! Woof!”
I don’t know why dogs keep falling for it. It’s not because they’re stupid; they
outwitted me for a week.
-One day, I came home from Six Flags to an unexplained three-figures check from Missouri and my Dad tried to tell me it was really his because he apparently doesn’t make enough money. A week later, he threatened to
throw me out of the house if I didn’t help Sis move, all without actually telling me he
had threatened me. I didn’t end up helping. He didn’t end up kicking me out. It was a
Dad-intensive month, that August.
-I finally had a doctor look at the blood geyser that had been on the back of my head
since late June. My medical saga began.
-Oh, and I got a job. Two, actually.
|
-Although the school year started in August, September makes me think of my alma
mater. September was when I realized that I didn’t go to college any more, and that
college did not miss me. SLU went on without me.
SLU, in fact, was pretty glad to get rid of me for the most part. Before graduation,
when I saw my “favorite” administrators for the last time in an official capacity, one or
two of them were positively giddy to be seeing me off. My original web page on
SLU’s server, which began with a small diatribe and linked to the Fascist Pig page,
was yanked off the SLU server by the webmaster the day I graduated, while other
alumni pages went undisturbed for six months more. (Mr. Webmaster and I had
earlier exchanged snippy e-mails. His said he was “disappointed” in me for saying
mean things about such a great school. I replied that, if he thought it was such a
noble institution, he obviously wasn’t a student. I then asked him if he’d ever left the
computer lab.)
Although I was really a nobody on campus, I still managed to make a few enemies in
high places during my short stay at SLU. Without really even realizing it, I got
involved in politics. A friend of mine needed to find someone to fill a position as his
assistant in the RHA, and he thought I’d be an amiable enough assistant NCC, and
he promised me I wouldn’t have too much hard work to do for the position. It
sounded harmless enough, so I ran and won. (I’m not sure I ran opposed. It’s been a
long time.) Anyway, I decided to go for it because I wanted RHA to be less of a Res
Life Cheery Fun Club and more of a student advocacy group. The bureaucrats in the Housing office and the Office of Student Development had
developed a nasty habit of arbitrarily toying with people’s lives, people who
incidentally paid them a lot of money to get treated so poorly, and I wanted them to
be held accountable. I wanted to fight The Man.
Of course, that was a ludicrous goal. I was only there four years. Nobody’s ever
there longer than six. And The Man knows it. The Man counts on it. If The Man
decides he wants to close down your dorm and scatter your community in random
rooms across campus, you can’t stop him. If The Man decides that rent needs to
double without performing any maintenance or renovation, so it shall be. If The Man
decides that there’s not enough money in the billion-dollar endowment to fix an
elevator that breaks every day, get used to taking the stairs and pray you never end
up in a wheelchair.
Or, say The Man wants to condemn and tear down an apartment. He throws out all
the people who want to live there and, when there’s a housing shortage, fills the
condemned building with people who don’t want to live there while the people who do
want to live there are forcibly living somewhere else. Ridiculous? Absolutely, but
what can you do? You’re only there four years. All The Man has to do is let you yell
and yell and yell, and promise changes, and schedule meetings to discuss things,
and just keep doing it all until you yell your way up to the podium to get your diploma.
Then The Man goes ahead and does whatever the hell he wants, no matter how
stupid it is. And none of the freshmen that replace you on campus know how things
used to be or how much worse they’re getting, so they certainly don’t complain. By
the time they can see how much SLU sucks, they’re on their way out the door, and it
starts all over again.
1997 was the year I let this simple concept sink in. The Man would do whatever he
wanted, because in SLU time I was as good as dead.
So, then: how do you fight The Man? Well, I decided, the only way left to fight The
Man was to make him as miserable as he made me. Go to every meeting and be a
confrontational, loudmouthed, sarcastic rat bastard. Have all your facts straight,
don’t get intimidated, and leave them floundering in public without a leg to stand on.
The 96-97 school year was the year RHA exec board nicknamed me “the Rock” (I
think it started as a play on my last name, but the RHA president told me it later
came to refer to my testicles in some way), the year the Housing director would
visibly wince every time she looked at me. I vowed that, as long as she went to bed
with a headache just one night a week, my job was being done. This is how politics
corrupt people.
All my years of fighting The Man had left me very disillusioned, and I was as glad to
leave it as it was to be rid of me. Still, I found myself having to go back to SLU
because all my friends were younger and still lived there. It was an uncomfortable
sensation. A lot of the time I felt like George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life, looking
around at a world where I was never born and trying to find the mark I was sure I’d
left on the place. The rest of the time, I just felt pathetic, like I was standing outside
the junior high trying to pick up chicks. I would make eye contact with people on
campus, and we would have the following telepathic conversation:
ME: Do you go to school? Here? You’re twelve years old! Where’s your mother?
I almost wanted to buy one of those I’M A SLU DAD sweatshirts from the bookstore
and put it on every time I went there.
-One of my primary SLU visit activities was a radio show I did with my friend Nicole
and sometimes Greg on KSLU, Saint Louis University quote-unquote radio (which
was actually broadcast over the university cable system, a marked improvement over
the 3-watt AM antenna they had when I was a freshman). Every Monday, we would
broadcast “The Erotic Penguin Current Events Hour,” a news update for the
uninformed and bored. We mainly entertained ourselves with the sound of our own
voices, just like most deejays on KSLU. It was a show we’d done that spring as well;
since Nicole was the kind of person who scheduled 185 activities, I figured the only
way I’d ever see her was if I made hanging out with her some kind of activity she had
to sign up for. So that’s what I did; we signed up, and we hung out. And SLU got to
listen. The show that fall was made more exciting by the fact that, as a non-student, I
technically had no business being in the studio. I also thought it was a kind of irony:
Greg, Nicole and I were all doing a show that, thanks to the SLU cable system, none
of us would ever have been able to listen to.
-Nicole and her friend-but-maybe-more-nobody-really-knows-what’s-goin’-on-there
Jim went out for a Slurpee one night in September and ended up in Memphis. This
is the sort of thing I always wanted to do, probably one of the great missed
opportunities of my college lifestyle. I always thought it would be fun to just decide on
a whim to drive to Jersey or someplace. Once or twice, my friend Karen would walk
up to me and shout, “Let’s go get an Egg McMuffin in Chicago!” Inevitably, though,
Greg would be there and say, “Fools. There’s a McDonald’s down the block. Stupid
fools.” And we’d say, “Yeah, he’s right.” And we’d never go. So, I was a little envious
of Nicole.
-I had my first surgery in September, and my first few days at my grown-up job(s).
-In September, my friend Karen and coworker Jerry indoctrinated me into the cult of
“Buffy: the Vampire Slayer.” Like all good drugs, it started out as a way to socialize,
and now I have a problem. (Don’t panic though; it’s only caffeine compared to my
heroin, “Star Trek.”)
-September was when people started to send me e-mail about my journals. It was
e-mail about how poorly I was keeping up with them, but it was mail nonetheless. I
never expected them to be of any value to anyone but me, but it was nice to see that
people were using them to keep up with my life without the annoyance of actually
talking to me. It made the whole experience rather gratifying, and it helped me decide
not to abandon them just as I was considering doing so.
12-YEAR-OLD FRESHMAN: Didn’t you graduate? Why are you still here? Did you
run away from the nursing home again?
|
-My friend Greg decided that he would realize his lifelong dream to build a potato
gun. A potato gun, for those of you who don’t know, is a big elaborate pipe that you
make into a cannon (powered by hairspray or some other insanely dangerous fuel)
that can be used to launch potatoes or potato-sized things a ridiculous distance at a
semi-lethal velocity. He went online, which is where all crazy people get the plans for
their weapons, and found a schematic that suited his needs well. (Apparently, the
large number of fringe elements with potato cannon fetishes allowed him to be
choosy in his selection of the right model.) He talked about it incessantly for weeks,
and finally decided to go ahead and build the thing, only to realize that his parents
had moved. He had no access to tools or a garage. The windshields and pedestrians
of Midtown St. Louis breathed a collective sigh of relief.
-My friend Joan the Medical Student came into town. People from all over the city
gathered to see her, in a kind of We Are the World, Hands Across America
outpouring of Joanlove. They shuffled in and out of Greg’s standing-room-only
apartment single file, just to say hello, almost like Lenin’s Tomb with a sense of
humor. We watched “South Park” and, as such, heard the word “bitch” probably a lot
more than Joan would have liked.
-My alma mater announced that it was selling its hospital to corporate rapists without
asking the permission of the Catholic church (which, by the way, happened to
actually own the hospital). Help the poor, shmelp the poor! Indigent care isn’t
profitable! Once again, I asked myself, “Where are the left-wing radical Jesuits who
taught at my high school?” Once again, I
answered myself, “They’re leading revolutions in Chiapas while the hypocrites run
the big moneymakin’ universities.”
-My sister dropped her class load down to twelve hours for the semester, and my
dad muttered about “summer school” to make up for it. Little did he know that my
sister was already planning summer school, in an attempt to avoid moving back
home at the end of the school year. Having tried the same thing myself after my
junior year (minus the summer class), I coached her on how to get a summer job with
the university’s conference staff.
-The Marguerite Coffee House, a project my roommate started during my
sophomore year of college, finally opened. I tried desperately not to go, but got
dragged there by my still-in-college friends. Absolutely everyone there who
recognized me said, when approached, “What are you doing here???” I was
profoundly uncomfortable, but luckily this did not disturb my friends, who utterly
failed to notice. I vowed never to hang out there again.
-My sister and I began the epic e-mail debate, “What is Going to Happen in the
X-Files Cliffhanger: A Twenty Part Speculation.” It got pretty heated, but we were
both right in the end.
-My girlfriend moved out of the dorms and into an apartment.
-For the fifth year in a row, despite what we were promised by born-again Christians
during my senior year in high school, the Rapture did not come.
-My girlfriend went to a goth club for Halloween with her school chums. She was
very apprehensive about letting me see her in costume for some reason; she was
afraid I’d disapprove or something. In order to see her costume, I ended up hanging
out at SLU.
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This page is too huge. November is here.