Kenan, I don’t know. My autumn weekends are suddenly filled up with either other things or my boss being out (so I can’t overlap). Looks like pre- or post-Thanksgiving is the soonest I could manage. Will people besides the Jammermans still be in town?
i won’t be in town the first full week of november.
Yeah, first wkend of Nov is when my parents are coming HERE, so that week was out. Or did you mean December, Kevin?
I’ll be around until Christmas.
i will be out of town the 6th through the 10th.
november 6–10.
What is up, dudes. This weekend I:
—Partied in Oshkosh on Friday night, really overdid and had to play a parade + two sets on Saturday morning with a crushing hangover.
—Made a bacon veggieburger
—Saw horrible, horrible hip-hop band from Mpls and had to leave
—Watched the first half of the Battlestar Metallica mini-series. You’re all right it is good stuff.
I won’t be around on Thanksgiving DAY, but I’ll be here for the rest of that weekend.
Also:
—Jesse, sorry for dropping out of chat again last night, my computer crashed as usual.
—Digd0wn will definitely be playing weekends at the Gr33n M1ll just before Xmas AND Fat Tuesday.
Yeah, I’m thinking maybe Nov 22–26 or something like that. Maybe I can get a jump on the airfare before Thanksgiving strikes.
I did not give a full weekend report.
On Friday I went to see the Fake Fixxiones rock the house at Alliance. On Saturday I spent the afternoon writing. I also watched Tristam Shandy (clever but not particularly entertaining) and then steeled myself to drive out to the suburbs for the BIG REUNION. Which was: hmmm, kind of fun, but also really weird and somewhat disappointing, too, because for all the people who were there that I was like “OMG that guy” there were twice as many who I wished were there. There were maybe 40–50 overall out of a graduating class of 300-something? But whatever: I got drunk on gin-and-tonics and heard this gaggle of girls say in disbelief, as I was heading outside, “John smokes?” (My goodie-goodie rep hasn’t left me.) Then yesterday Kr and I did laundry and then went to see Nina Nastasia (boring, although I think EZ likes her?) and Jose Gonzalez (totally captivating) at the Lakeshore Theater. THE END.
I’m thinking maybe Nov 22–26
you can have grilled cheese and salsa sandwiches with me for thanksgiving if you’re here. or you can go to jenny & jeff’s and have a real thanksgiving but whatever.
i’ll be around until after christmas!
I sort of meant to go see Michael Showalter and Michael Ian Black live last night, but I forgot.
I’m thinking Jenny and Jeff’s, if they’ll have me.
Also, for some reason, I’m thinking that good ship and true was a bone to be chewed When the gales of November came early. And that it’s hard to hold a candle in the cold November rain.
Weirdest thing for me re former classmates: how many of them live in the suburbs still. I mean, I guess I understand if they are a) teachers who want to live close to their school district, or b) if they have kids that they want to put in suburban schools (one girl I had a crush on in 10th grade has already popped out four) — but I was talking to this guy Eugene who was in my physics class senior year, and he’s totally still single and everything, but he was like, “Yeah, I lived in Chicago for a year, at Irving Park and Ashland, but I didn’t like it — too crowded.” He runs his own company now, and his office was next to the Holiday Inn the reunion was held at. I just can’t imagine why you would choose to live in the suburbs, though. Maybe if going to ethnic restaurants and rock shows and art movies isn’t important to you.
keeee-nan, you better take care
if i find you been creeping round my back stairs.
Although I’m realizing now that it’s precisely these suburbanites who were most likely to go to a high-school reunion in the suburbs.
John, I find that’s true a lot. People who grew up in the burbs tend to think of people who move to the city as some kind of insane mavericks. There’s always a bit of incredulousness for some reason. “You live in the city? Really?” As if to say, “God! Who could live in all that filth with all those black people?!”
i’ve never found that to be true kenan.
I guess the thing is, in high school you don’t realize your lifestyles and ambitions are SO different from your classmates, when you hang out with them on a daily basis. And maybe they weren’t, necessarily, at the time. I didn’t necessarily know what I wanted to be doing right after college, and at 17 I think I assumed I would eventually have a typical family-in-the-suburbs life — after a few years, I determined that this wasn’t exactly a priority.
Forget black people, at my childhood church someone said to me, “You live in, like actually IN New York City? It must be very worldly there, lots of temptation.” I think I might actually have answered, “That’s exactly why I moved there.”
...in high school you don’t realize your lifestyles and ambitions are SO different from your classmates...
No, I totally did.
i’ve never found that to be true kenan.
Yeah, I don’t know that the suburbanites are incredulous that I’m living in the city as much as I’m incredulous that they’re not. But most people are pretty boring.
I love how “worldly” means “corrupt” to Chistians, but to me seems more synonymous with “urbane.”
No, I totally did.
I figured someone would say something like this. I dunno. I certainly had desires to be worldly and sophisticated that probably weren’t matched by the majority of my peers, but I also really loved the community that high school created, and I liked knowing who everyone was and what they were all about. I mean, the roots of the whole “jaymc’s spreadsheet” meme can probably be traced back to when I ran for National Honor Society secretary, and my campaign speech was basically like, “I’ll be good at keeping track of our members, because I already know all of your birthdays.” (In fact, I surprised a few people the other night by saying things like “...so Jermaine, you’ll be 28 in a couple days, won’t you?”) My friend Adam and I made up bizarre animal-related nicknames for teachers, kids in our classes, people involved in theatre with us — and I made crossword puzzles where all the answers were inside jokes about such people and wrote a song about some weirdo in my gym class. We were stupidly competitive about our class rank and gossiped endlessly. So I mean, I had a lot of affection for this community, and after a while, you think of yourself as one with it. That’s why I didn’t even think twice about going to the reunion.
when i was a sophmore in high school we had to write one of those stupid “where do you see yourself in 10 years” essays for english class. i said i’d be living in chicago and that i couldn’t wait to get out of north backwater, massachusetts. i was off by a year or two but it’s odd how it worked out.
I had a desire to get the hell out of a small town and move someplace where I wouldn’t feel like the cheese who stands alone. That’s about it, the rest was pretty much negotiable. I could have ended up as an ivory-tower, never-graduating sort except that I dislike being a student, would rather feel like a productive part of something. I know we’ve discussed that balance before.
except that I dislike being a student, would rather feel like a productive part of something.
That’s an interesting dichotomy. I supposedly contribute to the world through my job, my band, etc., but don’t feel any happier for it than when I was doing my own work and receiving individual praise for it and getting a sense of accomplishment that collaborative endeavors can’t match.
I didn’t watch the video, but it makes me want a reuben.
You sillyhead. Vegetarians can’t have reubens.
i think some of you may join me in saying “what the holy fuck? no bell’s??!?!?!”.
if anyone wants to start making weekly carpool trips to k-zoo let me know.
I knew I was setting that up badly when I wrote it, but was trying to get the post up. No, we’ve covered this ground before: that I felt like school was a series of arbitrary tasks performed for the satisfaction of someone else (professor), toward a meaningless end (grades and/or pat on the head from one’s “elders and betters”) and enduring pressure from parents who were paying for my privilege. None of which endeared it to me.
There’s something going on where I don’t like feedback, even praise, from anyone except those I’m actually close to. I’d rather do work that is self-evidently either operative or not, that’s measured less subjectively. There’s more to it, but it’s not very interesting.
Oh man, when I was at Small Bar on Saturday the bartender was talking about the Bell’s thing.
1. Whoa, no Bell’s? I’m not nearly as over-the-moon about Bell’s as some of my fellow Kzoo alums, but I was certainly happy it was available in Chicago. That blows.
2. satisfaction of someone else (professor), toward a meaningless end (grades and/or pat on the head from one’s “elders and betters”)
Ideally, the satisfaction should be shared by you and the professor, especially in classes you like. And I didn’t see grades and pats on the head as meaningless, since they boosted my self-esteem and motivated me to continue doing good work. I would love to feel valued and inspired by my “elders and betters,” to have the same kind of mentor I had in Gail Gr1ff1n at this time in my life.
I could not have been any more different than John in HS. I railed against joining anything or being a part of anything except being friends with certain people. For me HS was something to be endured and I made a big show of “seeing through” the supposed importance of anything that went on there.
ditto. see: getting kicked off flag team for aggressively not-smiling.
I made a big show of “seeing through” the supposed importance of anything that went on there
Oh, I did some of that, too — I mean, I frequently talked back to teachers that I thought were full of shit (and a lot of them were), but I also bought into the whole “these are the days you’ll remember” thing. I was nostalgic for high school the day I graduated.
railed against joining anything or being a part of anything except being friends with certain people
no one joined anything at our high school. our senior class advisor was this ancient social studies teacher who told us he’d never seen a more apathetic group in his life. we didn’t even care enough about each to other to form cliques.
For me HS was something to be endured
same here, it was a prelude to a big nebulous something else. like a four year taxi down a runway. oh, and of course high school also means infidelity and bad lunches but that goes without saying, doesn’t it?
infidelity? to what? i had no one to whom i needed to be fidel.
or fiel.
Telling, perhaps: I skipped driver’s ed on the day of a quiz not to go out and smoke pot behind the school or anything like that but to go to another section of my favorite English teacher’s class instead.
i’ve never been unfaithful in that sense so i can’t answer but yeah, i remember a whoooooooooooooolllle lot of high school drama. kinda funny, a decade and a half later.
john, i’m far from a bully but i just want to slap the shit out of you when i read that.
John is an exception, but when I hear people say that they loved HS and it was the best time of their lives I think something is wrong with them and they are lesser human beings. HS was pinnacle of misery. Or maybe the nadir. I don’t know.
I did join band though. That was good. Until they made me march, then I dropped out. Not because I was too uppity to march, but because I was seriously bad at turning corners.
OH! expost to kevin, but I agree. John could bring out the bully in Mother Theresa.
John, I don’t like to acknowledge that anyone can raise my self-esteem except me, or a relatively small number of people I don’t mind admitting to the “trusted” category. I was TOTALLY unprepared, at school or college ages, to give and/or admit that I gave a fuck whether anyone approved. I know, it’s a little dumb...but it’s a big deal for me, as an adult, to let even silly kinds of praise make me happy! I’m still a stubborn pain in the ass, though.
HS Pros:
having a mostly good rep with teachers — this meant I could get away with things
quiz bowl — mad time off school on their dime
AP courses — didn’t have to see the mouth-breathing idiots in my class as much
HS Cons:
everyone knew my parents — couldn’t get away with everything
mouth-breathing idiots not entirely escapeable
most of my friends being older and graduating 1–2 years before me
growing sense of doom & depression in 12th grade due to having small friend base (silver lining—got even more into punk rock)
There are parts I remember fondly, there are parts I’d rather forget. On the whole, I did it, and now it’s over. I’m glad I never went to graduation because there are a lot of people I feel good about saying “fuck off” to and never seeing again.
Also, please note: for lunch I am eating home-made jambalaya with Zatarain’s spicy rice, extra veg, shrimp, and chicken Andouille sausages. AWESOME.
I don’t know if it was the best time of my life — it was so long ago that it’s hard to even consider it part of my life — but I did enjoy it.
The driver’s ed situation in more detail: There was supposed to be a two-hour Homecoming assembly at the end of the day, but at about noon it was cancelled because the school had received a threat of gang violence, and everyone was told that we’d remain in our 6th period class for the rest of the day instead. Since 6th period for me was driver’s ed, I was like fuck this. (To be fair, I didn’t realize that we were going to have a quiz, which I then received a zero on and had to scramble to get my grade back up to an A by the end of the semester, or else I’d probably have reconsidered.) I asked myself where I’d rather be during 6th period, and I thought, Well, EJ has another section of AP English right now. I showed up, explained myself, and she was like, “All right, JC, as long as you know what you’re getting yourself into,” and the class — many of whom I was friends with (as opposed to the mouth-breathing sophomores in driver’s ed) spent the rest of the day talking about current events and stuff.
(Ha, xpost: Dan and I both used the word “mouth-breathing.”)
I should have mentioned that AP courses kept me away from the mouth-breathing teachers, too.
(Also, when I found out I got the zero on the quiz, I wrote a long, eloquent letter to the principal detailing why I should be given a second chance. He said no, but he commended my writing and made a joke about how I should be his secretary. He was kind of a douche.)
I should have mentioned that AP courses kept me away from the mouth-breathing teachers, too.
Word.
We didn’t have any AP classes, or any weighted classes, or anything more accelerated than standard college prep, so I took the hardest classes I could and then did about as much work as I was interested in. It mostly evened out.
I mean, the decision I had was: Driver’s Ed with dumb-as-a-brick good ol’ boy John Cornelius, or English with a teacher to whom I loaned my copy of Raymond Carver’s Where I’m Calling From?
My Canadian friend told me that they had a word for people like John in HS: keeners.
People who delight in not only knowing the answer, but in the subsequent delight in their teacher’s faces when they present it so eloquently, as they always do.
When I say I made a big show of seeing through the importance of HS, I mean that I did OK academically and was pretty well-regarded by the teachers. I was known for having real talent and potential as a writer by all the English teachers. That was fine and I valued that.
What I hated was all the teenagers around me. I had 2 or 3 friends throughout my high school career, and even they didn’t last. I didn’t even take part in lunch, but instead sat in the library writing, stealing books and cutting pages out of the encylopedia. (I still have a color wheel from the World Book.)
Looking back this is probably bad because I was actually suffering from a pretty serious depression. Also religion was ruining my life because I would have probably joined some kind of club but I wasn’t allowed to go to Saturday meetings.
xpost— I had a good rep with the teachers too. I got to use the faculty bathroom.
(xpost) Oh good God, I hope I wasn’t as annoying as that. People liked and respected me.
I’m sure you weren’t an offensive keener.
I failed my driver’s ed course with a big giant EFF. This was because I was a freshman (in MT you could get your learner’s permit at 14.5 years old) and this was when I had friends. We all sat at the same table and I paid 0 attention.
The reason I had friends when I was a freshman was that I got the attention of the hippest senior whose name is T0r D@ahl (cool name even). He pimped me to the school full of assholes. Then he graduated and my 1 real friend moved away and I was a loser again. Goodbye yellow brick road;adlksfjf;askldjf.
I think I’m going to call today a sick day.
I’ll called in scared, “I’m afraid I can’t make it today.”
(Who would I even call in TO? Eh?)
(God?)
dan, i’m trying to remember, do you recall my friend Bill (or perhaps someone else) playing with the snout from that hog on saturday? it’s amazing how something that a couple hours earlier would have been a complete affront to all my sensibilities turned out to be the greatest thing ever after 5 hours of miller time.
Interesting. I didn’t think about it before but I was also pimped by the coolest kid in middle school (Boone J3nsen, also a cool name). The others weren’t having it though. I was actively and cruelly hated by the cool girls. The guys kind of just ignored me.
I had REALLY big hair in middle school. Like Kevin Ry5.
xpost Oh yeah, I remember. To me, hilarious, no matter what my state of inebriation (by that point, admittedly quite high).
Well, for part of middle school.
The rest of the time I looked like this.
Would you not go NAMBLA on that?
Thanks for the huge pink carnation and baby’s breath boutonierre! Who plans these things anyway?
I had good friends in high school and I enjoyed band, and my one “AP” class. It wasn’t an official AP thing, but it was a senior class where we just sat in a circle and did this whole philosophy survey and discussed shit. It was better than 80% of my college classes. Other than that though, high school suuuuucked.
I am not one of those people who is forever wishing they could go back to school. I’m happy working and I don’t think I ever want to be a student again.
OMG You look like Ralph Macchio!
Hahah, I almost said the same, then wondered if that was like “one cute Mexican kid looks much like another” RUH ROH.
Jesse you look so ready to be bar mitzvahed.
Ralph Macchio is Mexican?
xpost No kidding. The comments under that include Sarah saying “Charles in Charge?” and Jenny saying “Chachi!”
So now I look like a Jew?
Would you not go NAMBLA on that?
Yes, but that’s not news.
Another reason I disliked driver’s ed was because I was the youngest kid in my grade and so I had to take it as a junior instead of a sophomore. I felt like an idiot.
Macchio is a Handsomely featured, Italian-American actor with boyish looks that initially...
Trivia about RM:
Daughter, Julia, born in 1992, son, Daniel, in 1996.
Is a big fan of songwriter/singer Bruce Springsteen.
Born in the same Long Island town as superstar Mariah Carey.
Once saved a baby porpoise that was beached on the shores of Malibu. When reporters tried to cover the story, he asked to remain anonymous.
The dude who writes the Television Without Pity recap for Lost didn’t get why Sawyer called the kid in the cage “Chachi,” and I think it was less “I don’t think he looks like Ralph Macchio” and more “I have no idea what that name could possibly signify.” HI YOU WRITE FOR A POP CULTURE WEBSITE!
Noo, actually RM is Italian-American (XP)...but I vaguely remember watching Karate Kid and thinking that the character was Mexican or Chicano — to Kid Me, that would have explained the class/inequity thing.
How come no one uses the word Chicano anymore?
put that gun to my temple
put that gun to my heart
make me walk off the plank chicha
all always in to the dark
A I D S H I V
i cannot wait to die
can’t you tell
can’t you tell
can’t you tell
never finish my degree chachi
never play with the Pogues
throw my head out the window and
cement my feet into the dark
Aaaaay IIIII Deeeee Eeeessss..........
I don’t know, I didn’t find out “Chicano” meant until a year or so ago, when I read this book we publish and a Mexican-American colleague told me it was a classic of Chicano literature.
It just means Mexican-American, right?
i use chachi all the time, just as the striped-shirt set uses “chief”.
“chachee” is my housemate’s video-game/AIM handle.
Another reason I disliked driver’s ed was because I was the youngest kid in my grade and so I had to take it as a junior instead of a sophomore. I felt like an idiot.
Same here, dawg. See also: turning 21.
For some reason I think it specifically means the first generation born in America to Mexican parents, but don’t quote me on that.
xpost Also, when Sawyer said it in the season premiere of Lost and I cracked the fuck up.
I’ve been reading up on the word Chicano and the meaning/use is fluid. It seems that now it has a left wing politcal connotation. But before it was just Mex-American.
Interestingly the word Chicano is the root of the name “Chicago.” People in the Mid-West can’t pronounce the letter N so they said Chicago.
I think for a long time I didn’t realize it was so specific to Mexican-Americans. I knew it was different from “Latino” but was never exactly sure how.
xpost WTF
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Every journey starts with a single step, even if we’re talking about a journey from the door to a king-sized mattress with rubber sheets. It’s easy to stumble on what to say when you’re composing that rousing first email to the OutPersonals member who inspired warm fuzzies in your short-and-curlies, but keep a few tips in mind.
More importantly, say what inspired you to write in the first place. Even if that’s only the image of their majestic and awe-inspiring Groin Serpent[...]
Keep your first email a little on the short side.... Save the bit about being able to tie your tallywacker into a Winsor Knot for later.
Jesse...
Rubber sheets....
... and now Jerome!