Guess that theme song! (Kilala.nl (Cailin Coilleach)) by Cailin Coilleach

PLAYTRACKmystr1.mp3

While rummaging about the web last week I ran into this OP for a cartoon series that I used to love. So, guess that theme song! I'm looking at you Nik, though it might ring a faint bell in Menno's head as well.

Posted in: childhood , geeky , tv

25 years ago... (Punkadyne Labs (Punkwalrus))

This August marks 25 years since a rather memorable day in my life.

I was a sophomore at McLean High School in the fall of 1984, and a new member of the McLean High School Science Fiction and Fantasy Club. This club had a fine tradition with roots that went back to 1974 when the Literary Club renamed itself because they almost exclusively read science fiction and fantasy. Later on, this was to be challenged when a real literary club tried to edge in on our funding, but because they were 2 people and we were about 30, they always lost.

One of the first "sponsored field trips" our group did was to see the newly released film, "Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension." We all dressed up in funny thrift store clothing and descended upon Springfield Mall, one of the theaters still showing it. Back then, as it is now, Springfield Mall was a little low class and run down (from about 1989-1999 they tried to change all that, but now I heard it's so badly off, the county is stepping in to revitalize the place). It was a favorite hangout with punks and goths, mostly because the Pizza Delight was so cheap (they were later shut down when they were found to be among several hubs for an East Coast cocaine-distribution ring, and the front for their money laundering). I was wearing some pretty obnoxious stuff, including a cape I had worn for

Back then, the mall was dark and pebbly. The movie theaters were run down and a little skeevish. I was approached by a punk who said her boyfriend liked my costume and wanted me to have a cookie, and my friend stevonwolf and I tried to discern whether the cookie had been laced with something.

When we went to the movie, I was floored by it. It was so insane, so unique, so darkly humorous, and spoke to us on some level I am sure this generation's anime fans would understand. But we didn't have anime (well, some of us did, but it was very hard to come by back then). It was about aliens, but never took itslef very seriously. Peter Weller always seemed to be one wink away from a smirk to the lens. John Lithgow completely poured himself into his part, proving there are no small parts, just small actors. He ENJOYED his part. Ellen Barkin was way hot, with unbelievable legs, and Jeff Goldblum played himself which he's still doing to this day. It looked like a fan-run production, dripping with camp, and afterwards we all agreed it was the best low budget move we had ever seen.

I had felt bad because earlier in the year, at the Worldcon in Baltimore (Constellation), I had turned down the mass amounts of freebies on the freebie table relating to this film. I didn't know sometimes those freebies pay off. I have since learned my lesson.

But this was my first outing with what would later before "my people," a.k.a fandom, and this film will always be cemented in my heart as the beginning of something truly great. Posted in: buckaroo banzai , childhood , fandom , mclean

Games and books from my past (Kilala.nl (Cailin Coilleach)) by Cailin Coilleach

Like many of my colleagues and friends I became enamored with roleplaying games and TCGs in high school. I got my first set of Magic cards (3rd ed. woo! /o/) from my father who used to go on business trips to the US. I think I was fourteen at the time. Over the years I bought a big wad of additional cards, though I never did actually get "good" at the game :) I still have all those cards, neatly kept in a suitcase for a Later Time(tm).

Later on I got the First Quest boxset, which was our first introduction into AD&D;. It really was a nice set for the beginning player. However, AD&D; never really did it for me, neither story-wise, nor mechanics-wise. I did however get to meet Maya Deva Kniese, who was a huge AD&D-geek; at the time. I believe she went on to actually work for WotC for a while. I wonder how she's doing these days (I used to have a bit of a crush on her, despite the age difference ^_^).

When I got into college our clique quickly moved to Warhammer 40k and White Wolf's World of Darkness games. All of this under the influence of Erik (Orc), whose surname has escaped me :)

EDIT: "van 't hof", that's it... That was his name.

Now, we never really did play many WoD games because none of us was really good at storytelling :) So basically we ended up mostly fantasizing about the stories we could be experiencing, instead of actually playing them :D I had a big stack of books, which I loved to pieces! I tried to get a few friends of mine in on the games, but unfortunately this actually led me to lose a number of my beloved books ;_;

Which leads me to tonight... I'd finally had enough of my moping about the lost books and decided to get onto eBay. There I quickly found the exact books I used to own for Werewolf: the apocalypse and Changeling: the dreaming. Obviously I will probably never play these games again, but I really do want the books back in our library. They made for nice reading/fantasizing material and who knows, maybe our kids will some day find them interesting.

*sigh* How things change when we grow older... My RPG books have been stuck in their boxes for over five years, I've sold off most of my WH40k army and even our game consoles haven't seen much use in the past year. Am I actually growing up? ;_;

Posted in: childhood , games , reading

Music and my childhood (Kilala.nl (Cailin Coilleach)) by Cailin Coilleach

PLAYTRACKfigaro.mp3

I'm very grateful for many aspects of my raising, one of them being my musical upbringing. Personally I'm not much of a musician (though I enjoy singing), but that's not because I wasn't encouraged :)

Through our parents we got to hear a very diverse palet of music, including classical, opera, finnish folk music and country. They never denied us our own choices in music either, even if they hated the music themselves. Heavy metal, house, pop music, everything was allowed into the house. We were allowed to try any music we liked, which was pretty awesome.

We were also encouraged to learn to play musical instruments, which in the case of my siblings has worked out wonderfully. Sister-dear plays the flute and cello, while my brother's a veritable one-man band. Me, I stupidly let myself be blocked by a fear of learning how to read sheet music and by the idea that playing the recorder "is for girls".

The above MP3 comes from Le nozze di Figaro. My father has a lovely music box with this particular piece and we loved it as kids. I was reminded of it today when watching Mezzo, together with Dana. We saw a wonderful performance by Teresa Berganza, which I've promptly bought on iTunes.

Anywho... There's not much point to this post except for two things:
1. I'm very grateful for how our parents brought us up :)
2. I can only hope that we can give Dana a similar upbringing.

EDIT:
Proof that my brother's indeed doing pretty well :D -> Distained. Menno, go check out that page and see if you can pick him out. My bro's done some growing up :D

Posted in: childhood , music

Random story from my (mother's) youth (Punkadyne Labs (Punkwalrus))

My mother used to tell stories about growing up in the Swedish slums of Chicago.

My mother was the 5th child after 4 stillborns, and thus was very precious to her parents. Yet, she was a little hyper and annoying at times. One of the things she remembered was during those World War II days was when they used to collect rags, scrap iron, and rubber for the war effort. My mother was never sure about where they actually went, but at age 5, she ran around when the "rag man" came by, screaming "RAGS AN' IRON!!!!" at the top of her lungs, just like the rag man did.

Her father was in the construction/demolition business, and sometimes he'd bring home stuff he'd find in buildings they were demolishing. This is how they ended up with a Tiffany lamp, for instance. But they were still very poor when she was growing up, and one of the stories about her father centered around this glass tabletop he had for the coffee table. Oh, how he loved this thing. To him, it was the symbol of the house's elegance. My mother didn't have a separate room growing up; she slept in the living room (when I was growing up, she said this misery made her determined I would have my own bedroom no matter where we lived). So she got the brunt of the warning and scolding about the glass top.

"DO NOT SCRATCH THE GLASS TOP!!!" she'd hear.

"DO NOT PUT YOUR FEET ON THE GLASS TOP!!" he'd warn.

And when he was cleaning this glass top, he'd take it off the table, and carefully wipe it down with cleaner until it was almost invisible. All the while he'd yell at anyone, his wife, my mother, not to step on the glass top while he was cleaning it. "Heaven forbid... any one of you...!" Then he would clean the wood table underneath, and ever so gently, he carefully put the large, fragile glass top back. I don't know how many years he did this, but the BIG ISSUE in the apartment they lived in was that glass top. It became a center of angst for my young mother.

One day, my grandfather was cleaning the glass top as he usually did. On this particular day, he was very angry and made a very big deal about my mother running around the house while he cleaned it. He warned that she would step on the top while he was cleaning it, and go stay in the kitchen while he cleaned. He got so worked up about it, at some point, there came a resounding *CCRACK* from inside the living room.

My grandfather stood there, looking down at his own foot, surrounded by a spiderweb of cracks. He had stepped on the glass top.

My mother told me this story over and over as I was growing up. I know I kind of surrounded this mini fable with a little embellishment, but I wanted to emphasize how my mother's eyes lit up with glee when she told it to me. It is almost not a story at all, and I am not sure what moral tale one could spin from this, except perhaps a weak sort of karma. "Don't yell at people or you'll do the thing you yelled at them about that they hadn't done..." or something. But this story was important to my mother.

And I wanted to plant this seed in all my readers, so she's not forgotten. Posted in: childhood , grandfather , mother

Trying to align my punk roots (Punkadyne Labs (Punkwalrus))

I haven't written much of a blog entry in a while. It's mostly been Twitter feeds. Sorry about that, but I haven't had time to write very much except for my fiction, which is kinda going nowhere. I also have about 3 blog entries that all started to meander and didn't seem to go anywhere. Here's a snippet from a post that was supposed to be about fandom:

For instance, when I saw the movie, "Sixteen Candles," there's a scene where an incredibly wild party happens. I didn't realize this was a humorous exaggeration until a few years ago when it was pointed out to me that "parties like this don't happen in real life." Uh, yes they did. This was far more the classic McLean style party (at least among the guys) because many of my "peers" had lots of money, lived in big houses, and were given a lot of free reign as far as getting away with being popular. Remember the movie, "Valley Girl?" Yep. Those parties, too. When I hung out with a goth or punk crowd, sometimes we'd crash these parties. It's hard to call it crashing since the parties were so out of hand, we were barely even noticed. Most of the times we crashed, it was to pick up booze and interact with the dealers that knew just where to be at what time. But as a hanger-on, I declined the liquor and weed for food. Really, among my goth friends, I was the guy who always snatched the free candy and soda at these parties. How sad is that?

I try and think of the goth and punk crowd I briefly hung around with, and the memories are blurred and confused. There are some severe inconsistencies which make storytelling difficult. The way I sort of remember it was I met them via theater when I did county productions from 1981-1982. These people introduced me to Rocky Horror, that I remember, because we used to practice the lines and Time Warp moves backstage (usually a band room in a school that let us practice after hours). I only went to the actual film once back then, because the crowd, frankly, frightened the crap out of me. I started county productions in 1981, did them for 4 seasons, went to drama camp once, and then ended my Thespian ways after my freshman year in high school, which would have been summer of 1984. But in late winter of 1983, in 8th grade, I dropped my punk friends abruptly in an incident I won't go into, but let's just say I was poisoned and nearly died. So my "punk/goth" friends were from the summer of 1981 until late winter 1983, which kind of matches what I always thought. I really didn't hang around them until summer of 1982, when a bunch of them felt really sorry for me and my home life. So they started to kidnap me on various nights. But now that I have the years nailed down, certain things start to fall apart.

For instance, I remember distinctly being introduced to "The Sugarcubes" via my punk friends (even though it's more of a post-modern avant garde group). I remember the record shop, the huge vinyl disk in a blank sleeve, and listening to it in someone's basement. But Wikipedia says that they didn't have the single I remember, "Birthday," until 1986, which would have been WAY after those days by several years. This would mean either I was introduced to them via punks/goths in fandom (whom I only hung out with peripherally), or I am confusing the punk/goth crowd of the early 1980s who would have introduced me to Klaus Nomi, David Bowie, The Dickies, Iggy Pop, and the Sex Pistols. All I know is that SOMEBODY introduced me to The Sugarcubes, but if it was fandom, whose basement was I in? What record shop? I'd have to have been in high school or later. Still, after "the incident" in 1983, I refused to even acknowledge my punk roots, so unlike a lot of other memories, these were locked away too long and atrophied.

I have had to conclude that I am mixing up memories. So now I have to try and align some very vivid memories and see where the come from. Maybe you guys can help.

- "Slam dancing," banging my head, and doing the "Pogo" at various venues with a girl I had an enormous crush on. I really place this in 1982 because of the girl.
- At some venue, where "Ziggy Stardust" was playing on the wall, and a disagreement among my friends at a metal cafe table whether David Bowie was a man, woman, hermaphrodite, or transsexual version of any of those. This venue also played other random films while live bands were playing, from "The Wall" to "Santa Claus vs. the Martians."
- The 9:30 club when it was a hole in the wall playing local punk bands. I remember the entrance was a black door with a railing, and there was a bar with a filthy fish tank. They never checked ID.
- Hanging out at Georgetown on a cold winter night, where a bunch of us would hang out and I was one of the few who didn't smoke. The old green and white Hamburger Hamlet that said "O HAMBURGER" on the side. Drinking coffee I hated but needed to stay up.
- Hanging out at the Kispy Kreme on Rt1. Watching the sun come up while sitting at dirty wet metal tables chained to the ground.
- Listening to new wave/punk bands and laughing at the cool names. "The Pubic Savages," "Puke and the Rabid Dogs," "Spitting Blood," "Pink Spawn and the Five Spades," "Slug Patrol," "Malediction," and "Mantiza." Posted in: childhood , new wave , punk , theater

How I got in trouble in second grade #14 (Punkadyne Labs (Punkwalrus))

I was always a big reader back when bookworm was an insult. By second grade, I had read the book, "Jaws," which I will admit I bought because it had a cool shark on the cover. By the time I had finished it, the Spielberg movie based on the book had been released. Naturally, during my book report, the teacher was very skeptical whether I had read the book versus just seeing the movie. So she asked me to open to some random page, read it aloud, and then explain the passage in my own words.

In a moment of cruel fate (for me or the teacher, I am not sure which), the passage I flipped to was where Hendricks had found the half-eaten body of the missing girl. The moment of my book report went something like this:

Teacher: Mr. Larson... that's an awfully big book for you to read.
Me: Uh huh.
Teacher: [looking at me sternly] Are you sure you didn't watch the movie instead?
Me: No, ma'am. It was rated R. My mother was scared to watch it because she heard it might scare her from every swimming in the ocean again, and she likes the ocean.
Teacher: Uh huh. Well, that is a book for adult readers.
Me: It was in the science fiction rack at the library.
Teacher: Okay, so you said you can read and understand this book?
Me: Yes.
Teacher: ... really...?
Me: Yes ma'am.
Teacher: Okay, do this for me. Pick a random page and read it aloud to the class. Then explain what you just read in your own words.
Me: Okay. [flips to book, starts reading blindly] "Suddenly he stopped. For a few seconds he stared, frozen rigid. He fumbled in his pants pocket for his whistle, put it to his lips, and tried to blow; instead he vomited, staggered back, and fell to his knees." See, this guy was from a search party looking for the missing girl. In the beginning of the book, they said that the girl had been eaten while skinny dipping, which means to swim naked.
Teacher: Er...
Me: "Snarled within the clump of weed was a woman's head, sill attached to the shoulders, part of an arm, and about a third of her trunk. The mass of tattered flesh was a mottled blue gray, and as Hendricks spilled his guts to the ground into the sand, he thought--"
Class of sheltered second graders: [gasp]!
Teacher: Okay, that's enough.
Me: "... he thought -- and the thought made him retch again -- that the woman's remaining breast looked as flat as a flower pressed in a memory book."
Class: [giggles at the word "breast"]
Teacher: MISTER LARSON!
Me: That passage means that he only found the top half of the girl because the shark ate the lower half.
Teacher: I GET it, PLEASE sit DOWN!
Me: And she was a mottled blue due to rotting on the beach. Her flat breast was probably due to loss of blood or guts. Hendricks is vomiting because the sight of only half a body made him sick.
Teacher: I AM CALLING YOUR PARENTS!

She did, and my mother got a big kick out of it. I did not get in any more trouble and my teacher didn't doubt my reading skills anymore. Posted in: book report , childhood , elementary , jaws , school , shark , teacher

22 years ago today... (Punkadyne Labs (Punkwalrus))

My mother took her life. I am not sure when, but the paramedics told me probably early morning around 6am. I was fairly alone through the whole thing, and it was only because of friends I survived at all.

Normally, I get through this day without much mishap. Sometimes I even forget it until days later. But today, it came at me from out of the blue. When I try and trace the brain threads activated by this, it was due to a recent memory about the movie, "Xanadu," hearing about Anya's mom is trying to do a book about her brother, and someone who visited today brought her teenage daughter, and I had no idea they were mother and daughter until the last moment. Not sure how they are related.

So I am playing ELO's, "Don't Walk Away," and crying because I am a sap.

I really wish I had a grave to go to or something. My mother would have been 70 this year. I know that her death gave me a kind of freedom that would not have been possible, and one of the few suicides that seemed like it helped more than fucked over loved ones. I also know her drinking and tranquilizer abuse had damaged her mentally, and I was taking care of her more and more, so if she was still alive today, she would probably be in a nursing home. And in theory, I'll get to see her again when my time to pass comes. I *know* of all this, folks.

I still miss her. So sue me.

I wish I had known her as an adult. Like one more day, at some sober point maybe in the mid 1970s, I could go back in time, show her photos of a grandson she never saw, introduce her to a wife I am so grateful to have married, tell her about the relatives in Sweden, ask questions about my family I have always wanted to know. I wanted to let her know I turned out okay, and actually fairly successful and social. I wish some of you could have met her. A few of my readers have. A very few remember her not as the neighborhood drunk, but knew her as children themselves. Just. one. more. day.

Sadly, many of these mental exercises still end in how I would have to tell her what happened and how I ended up this way, and I don't know how I could avoid it. This is the "time travel is not as great as you think it is" training of being a science fiction writer. You want to be all smiles and warm thoughts, but then how could I not be tempted to tell her, "Your husband is FAR more an asshole than even you or I thought at the time. You want to know how your funeral went? Sit down, because this is going to hurt." If one of you got visited by a grown child of yours at age 40, wouldn't you be curious about the sobbing? Or why your kid had to go BACK in time to introduce some of the people important in their life like a wife and son? You wouldn't have to be Dr. Fucking Who to figure out something very bad happened. I doubt an hour would go by before that became the elephant in the room, and the smell of peanuts and manure would be overpowering to the point of tears.

I guess part of me wishes I'd hallucinate and see her ghost and have some kind of closure. But in some odd way, the fact I *don't* see her ghost kind of validates the fact none of the other weird psychic shit I encounter almost daily is made up. I figure because if any of it was some strange subconscious projection to be "special" or whatever, seeing and communicating my mother's ghost would be top of my list. Those that have lost a parent or loved one know what I am talking about.

Anyway, to Gladys "Mama" Larson, I miss you. Many times I have missed you far too much to be reasonable, I am sure. Why 22 years is some magic number of years, who knows. I bet some astrologer or numerologist could whip something up. Double 11s, something.

Today is hard. Posted in: childhood , mother

For posterity: The Tale of Don Gato (Punkadyne Labs (Punkwalrus))

We used to sing this in music class in elementary school. It was one of my favorite songs, and oft-requested by most of the students at Lewinsville. At an early age, it taught me about love, heartbreak, and what a solar plexus was:

O Senor Don Gato was a cat.

O Senor Don Gato was a cat.
On a high red roof Don Gato sat.
He was there to read a letter,
(meow, meow, meow)
where the reading light was better,
(meow, meow, meow)
'Twas a love-note for Don Gato!

"I adore you," wrote the ladycat,
who was fluffy white, and nice and fat.
There was not a sweeter kitty,
(meow, meow, meow)
in the country or the city
(meow, meow, meow)
and she said she'd wed Don Gato!

O Senor Don Gato jumped with glee!
He fell off the roof and broke his knee,
broke his ribs and all his whiskers,
(meow, meow, meow)
and his little solar plexus
(meow, meow, meow)
"Ay Caramba!!" cried Don Gato.

All the doctors they came on the run,
just to see if something could be done.
And they held a consultation,
(meow, meow, meow)
about how to save their patient,
(meow, meow, meow)
how to save Senor Don Gato.

But in spite of everything they tried,
poor Senor Don Gato up and died.
No, it wasn't very merry,
(meow, meow, meow)
going to the cemetary,
(meow, meow, meow)
for the ending of Don Gato.

But as the the funeral passed the market square,
such a smell of fish was in the air,
though the burial was plated,
(meow, meow, meow)
he became reanimated,
(meow, meow, meow)
he came back to life, Don Gato!

Posted in: cat , childhood , don gato , lewinsville , song

Stupid memories... (Punkadyne Labs (Punkwalrus))

While I try not to post a whole lot about my father anymore (in part, because why should he get all the glory and fame just by being a sociopathic ass?), I felt the need to write about him because... well, this rather TMI-like vision comes to my head:

A few of my readers are asthmatic like I am, and would relate to this well. But to those of you who are not, try and remember the last time you really had a bad chest cold: preferably the kind you had to take antibiotics for. You know how sometimes the mucous (which my friend Brad unpleasantly, yet accurately, calls "lung butter") comes up in such huge volumes, the only way to get rid of it is to spit it out? Like you can't do the "snort and swallow" anymore, but you discretely spit it out in a tissue, pretending to blow your nose, or maybe "hock a loogie" on the ground if you're from a cheaper finishing school.

That's exactly why I post about my dad in my blog.

Sometimes memories and angst about him boil up, and the attempts to diminish it normally are not good enough. When I started this online diary, I didn't want it to be "my dad was an asshole, pity me!" but over the years, many readers feel about my dad the same way they feel about Osama Bin Laden: if they ever meet the son of a bitch, they are probably going to kill him. Recently, I spoke to someone who isn't even an adult yet, has never met my dad, and she expressed interest in traveling with me and my son to San Diego someday to tell my dad exactly what she thinks of him. I might take her up on this offer, possibly in a moment of weakness like right now. Better judgment actually restricts some of the stuff I post about him, because some of his random abuse was so over the top and freakish, I don't think anyone would believe me.

In all honesty, despite all kinds of complaints, my father has stayed out of my life since I left the house on September 11th, 1987 (yeah, I know). I don't want to think he is sitting on his lanai, looking over Mission Bay, sighing into a glass of $40 Chianti, and saying, "Thank goodness I screwed that kid up. Good job all around. To you, Arvid," and toasting himself to the setting sun. No, I think in all honesty, he never thinks about me. I know for a fact he has told people he doesn't have any children, although I reserve the faint hope he meant "Nicole and I," when someone asked him that question. But I pretty much believe he looks at his 29 year marriage to my mother and my legacy the same way most of us look at who we sat at lunch with in junior high, "That was a long time ago, I don't recall what really happened, and it doesn't really matter these days."

After years talking with people about him (who knew him at various stages of his life), and the fact he never showed up or even acknowledged his own mother's death with the same callousness as he dealt with my mother, I have come to a sort of peaceful junction of my life where I can say, "my father was a sociopath, and there was nothing I could have done to make him love or care about me." A sort of peaceful reassurance, from my own gut, that calms me down and stops taking it personally. And given *everything* I did as a child back then, both good and bad (and I was no angel, believe you me), his disappointment in me wouldn't have been any different had I been a straight-A perfect Aryan boy. In fact, had I been that, I am sure it would have made my life worse.

As I get older, I have tried to understand a little about what "being messed up" means. When I was told I was dyslexic at age 8, and what that meant, the reading teacher I had said, "It doesn't mean anything is wrong with you. You just have a different way of looking at things. We're going to help you adapt to how others look at things." She approached it as not a handicap, and didn't seek to eradicate my dyslexia, just help me understand the rest of the world. And that philosophy lay dormant for a very long while until I was 20 or so. One of the things this has blossomed into is that we're all different for a reason. People used to ask me, "How do you come up with such creative and different ideas?" Dyslexia, folks. Dyslexia is not just "I read things backwards with jumbled up letters," dyslexia is a an entire wiring of the brain. You have it for life. It affect all sorts of things, and dyslexia for each person is different. I also firmly believe dyslexia on my father's side is the root for most of the "insanity." But like any philosophy, it tends to contradict day-to-day living. So you work around it. You don't eliminate it, you don't shame it, or hide it. It is you. Love it. And then adapt to others. I am proudly dyslexic, because it really helps write comedy, the very art of "self-healing contradiction." So I started to look at all my "problems" the same way: there's some ulterior survival benefit to it.

Still working on my dyspraxia. There's some reason I have it. Perhaps in physical combat, it makes me unpredictable. It may surprise no one I am hesitant to test this theory, but I have learned being a little crazy gives you a leg up on mental combat, so maybe...

Anyway, when I look at my childhood with my dad, I also try and understand how the things I did really saved my ass. I will not lie to you: the survival method of being depressed, suicidal, and full of self-loathing damaged me in ways that haunt me every day. Mental paths that I forged where I collapsed in self-pity and cried at any source of conflict still plague me with unhelpful periods of panic and general neuroses in some of the most simple of tasks, like learning how to drive. My dad was cruel. I say with no exaggeration that had I "stood up for myself," he would have murdered me. Not in that metaphorical sense, but more of at literal, "He would have taken my life with no remorse." He would have ended my life as efficiently as one might stamp on a bug crawling across their kitchen floor. I would imagine, given some close calls I had, it would have been a beating that didn't stop. Or just at one point, he would have calculated his options while sitting alone in his den and later killed me in my sleep with a neutral look on his face like one has when taking out the trash, perhaps adding a contented sigh of release when he was done. I think the only thing that stopped him was I was always under that borderline of his rage and the complications of explaining my death to others (or hiding the body). He enjoyed my suicidal thoughts. He encouraged them, and mocked them like a challenge.

I spent time with him after my mother died, and he acted like someone who had to fix a broken window after a storm. "Well, lets get this mess cleaned up." He argued with the funeral director about having to pay for a coffin and urn for cremation, claiming they weren't necessary for a bunch of ashes. At one point the funeral director said, "We could put her in a box like they do for homeless people," as an unsubtle hint to his callousness, and my father immediately latched onto that. So my mother's "urn" was a white plastic box (with simulated marble), that cost I think $109. Cheapest in their catalog. It was displayed at the wake, and I never saw it again. My father said he was going to scatter the ashes on the Chesapeake so that "little crabs may eat her remains" in a sort of "cycle of life" symbolism, but when I asked him about it years later, he forgot he said that, and I had to remind him. "Oh yeah, I can't recall what we did with those. I guess we did that, sure." I used to be angry he was so callous, but I can now understand his motive. Like the Klingons say, "Dispose of the corpse like you would for any empty shell." My mother's body was without connection or purpose: it was a mess he had to get rid of, and didn't want to pay a lot to do so. Sadly, I am sentimental. I have several boxes of ashes for past pets. I even have old computers I hang onto because of their service and memories. I am sure this kind of emotional investment in the past is confusing and silly to him. Why visit his mother's funeral? Why even acknowledge it? She gave birth to him, acted as a faulty mother during his upbringing which he had to fix, and her purpose was done. Besides, funerals have people who expect you to be upset, and that's just a waste of time.

Anyone here remember the oven range they grew up with as a kid? Would it upset you to know it was destroyed years ago? If someone called you from your home town and said, "That Avocado-colored oven was in a scrap heap for a long time, and we're gonna use it for parts and melt down the rest. You wanna fly back here, and say your final goodbyes?" I doubt most of you would. It's the same thing to him, I think.

Knowing this has helped me disconnect from his view of me. Most of the time now, I just think of him as broken beyond repair, and he was broken before I came onto the scene, and would have continued to be broken whether I was born or not. I am not completely comfortable with writing him off like that, because it seems too convenient. And it hasn't been a panacea, as this morning reminded me when I remembered yet another childhood trauma that he inflicted, or the hurt that comes from never having your father's love or approval. There are still isolated pockets of rage that sometimes erupt, but they are less and less every year as the numbness of old scar tissue helps deaden the pain.

The memory? It came up recently while I was discussing with someone about parents who force their kids to do all these extra activities (soccer, band, karate, etc) at the expense of their childhood. I was in theater for a while, and a memory of my father walking out on my performance. I asked him about it later, and he said, "You were boring." Ouch. Posted in: childhood , father

The Star Wars Christmas Special (Punkadyne Labs (Punkwalrus))

Like many of my generation, I saw it live in 1977, and in the early 1990s, I was one of the people on Usenet purporting it did really happen at one time, no it wasn't our imagination. Not many of us could recall much except for the Wookie family, a Boba Fett cartoon, and some musical acts. There was one certainty I could remember:

Even at age 9, I realized this was a terrible, terrible show.

A few years ago, I saw some clips on Youtube, and eventually got a copy from the Gnutella network. It was then, watching a show so terrible it made my eyes hurt, I realized that I cannot watch this show from beginning to end. I simply cannot stomach it. Recently, I got a copy with Rifftrax (please donate) synced with it. I... I couldn't make it past Luke Skywalker and his massive pancake makeup.

This show is not "so bad it's funny." I can't make up my mind why it doesn't make it to "Plan Nine from Outer Space" status. Maybe it's so far into the camp it's shot past camp into the lake. Or maybe it's not camp enough. I can't make up my mind it's so bad it can't be funny or not bad enough to be funny. It's a combination of the terrible writing, bad editing, horrible acting, and misplaced variety acts that made an aggregate that simply cannot coalesce into any definable form. It's part Rocky Horror, part Sonny and Cher Show, and part Family Circus humor with a Star Wars front that barely passes as anything relevant. The sci-fi influences are almost peppered on like some unwanted spice to an already dismal stew. There simply cannot be enough pot in the world to make this show watchable.

It was then I realized, "The Star Wars Christmas Special" is the video equivalent of "The Eye of Argon." Posted in: childhood , star wars

Last night I made more cookies (Punkadyne Labs (Punkwalrus))

When I was a kid, my father used to complain that my mother's recipe for chocolate chip cookies "weren't hard enough," meaning texture and crispness. He didn't want soft cookies, he wanted crunchy ones like the store bought ones. My mother tried all sorts of things, but they either ended up soft or so crispy, they were tasteless and bitter. Finally, she found a good balance, and things were okay for years until Keebler introduced "Soft Batch" and then my father wanted soft cookies again. My mother was livid.

One day, she told me the secret behind her cookies. She had perfected a chocolate chip cookie recipe based on a "Tollhouse recipe" she got from somewhere. She said she'd take the instructions off the back of a Nestle's wrapper, change some stuff around, and then "eye the dough as you go along." She was an amateur gourmet chef, and she knew her cooking well. One of the things she told me was that cooking "by touch and feel" or "by eye" was a lot more reliable than recipes right out of a book once you got used to it. While book recipes work 90% of the time, in her experience, a good eye of experience will also tell you, "That dough is a little too runny for something baking at this temperature..." Some days, you need to add more or less flour than usual if the humidity in your kitchen was extremely low or high. Another thing to consider is that not only is everyone's oven different, but cooking things in batches can change from batch to batch. The first batch of cookies take 10 minutes, the next might take 7, and the ones after that may take 12... you never know. Same dough, same sheets, and you'd never know. If you went by hard literal recipe and did 10 minutes each time: the first batch may be undercooked, the second burnt, the third maybe okay, the fourth burnt... you get the idea. "You can always cook more," she said, "not less." The same goes for adding salt.

After years of learning how to cook, I got that sixth sense as well. I forget how ingrained these lessons are until I cook, which is really rare these days due to my diet change. But as I baked the cookies, like a reflex took over. Here's how the batches went:

1st batch: I put down "7-9 minutes" in my recipe notes so I set the time for 7 minutes. It took about 12.

2nd batch: This batch took about 10 minutes. This is probably because the baking sheets were cold, and I was swapping them out, but the oven was starting to reach a steady level heat due to a large pizza stone I keep in the oven for just that purpose (If I don't have that, I store my cast iron skillets in the oven).

3rd batch: This batch took 8 minutes, probably because the baking sheet was still warm from batch 1.

4th batch: This took 6 minutes, but the edges were getting a little crispy and the middles were still too soft. The oven temp was the same, so this was probably because to dough was reaching room temp, and the pans were too hot.

5th batch: After storing the dough in the fridge between spooning them out and letting the sheets cool down longer, this batch took 10 minutes. I reached nirvana perfection in cookie consitency, and I swear I hear a choir sigh.

6th batch: I was getting to the bottom of the bowl, where chocolate chips tend to be thin. No matter how evenly I think I mix them, by the end, I really just have brown sugar cookies with maybe one chip in them. Cookies came out a little more crispy than I strive for after 10 minutes.

7th batch: I didn't care at this point, I just wanted to use the excess dough I was scraping from the bowl. I finished with one really long cookie with no chips in it at all. Oddly enough, these last cookies came out perfect after 12 minutes, evebn if they were a little short on chips. Posted in: childhood , chocolate chip , cookies

No free toys for me (Punkadyne Labs (Punkwalrus))

When I grew up, my parents didn't buy sugared cereals because "they are bad for you." So I grew up to Shredded Wheat, Grape Nuts, Cheerios, and Wheaties. No sugar was on the breakfast table, and pouring milk in your cereal was considered "a waste of milk." Since I wasn't allowed to watch any TV besides PBS when I was young, I wasn't subject to the media blitz of "Chocolate Coated Sugar Bombs" as was my peers. This also explains why I never grew up to Kool-Aid, Soda, butter, and salt. Sugar, salt, and butter were not *banned* from my house, per se; for instance, we had cookies and crackers. But it was just heavily discouraged.

The rare times I was allowed to stay at someone's house, my mom called ahead and said I wasn't allowed to eat sugared cereal, and she'd send me with a sandwich baggie of "approved" cereal if requested. This was one of the MANY reasons I didn't sleep over much.

When I was about 12, I did some research and found Cheerios and Wheaties had sugar in them, and pointed this out in a moment of pure stupidity (the plan was to try and get Kix on our table, but this backfired). Guess what cereals I now had left until I left home?

I stopped eating breakfast around this time as well. I was *well* aware of other cereals my friends had growing up and the concept of toys and such, but sadly, to this day, all I can stomach for sugared cereal in the morning is Fruit Loops (thanks to my wife, who weaned me up to them). Posted in: cereal , childhood

Thanksgiving - biggest damn turkey ever (Punkadyne Labs (Punkwalrus))

So, this year, takayla, CR, and I are going to someone else's house for Thanksgiving, which is the first time we have done this since her mom died over 10 years ago. It's Anya and Brian's house, where we'll be met by her parents and Brian's mom. It will be a mixture of German and Korean, I think. I am very much looking forward to this.

I have blogged before about my rotten childhood, and how I hated Thanksgiving because it was one of those few times a year my parents and I ate together, and my father usually teased me until I cried, and sometimes my mother was tipsy. Those days are long gone, and only a kind of unhappy memory at this point that has healed over trauma and begun to bore me. Towards the end, I used to have the meal at Kate's house, and then my first Thanksgiving after my mother died was at the FanTek house, which was all shades of awesome.

I'd love to regale you with some fantastic tale of science fiction about that dinner. Like maybe how the turkey was covered with Christmas lights, the stuffing had a sarlacc in it, we had Klingon qagh as a side dish, and we cut the turkey with a lightsaber. But it wasn't all that science-fictiony, really. It was a fairly normal pot luck affair on the huge table that we normally folded and printed "The Castle" on. The only sci-fi we had was the normal decor of the FanTek house.

Living at the house in November of 1987 were Bruce, Cheryl, Liska, Debbie, and myself. We invited Bruce's family over, and I think there were some other people, but I forget who, but I recall the total being around 8-12 people. Bruce has a nephew named Jamie who was 13 at the time, I think. "He likes to put ketchup on everything," he said. Bruce was prone to hyperbole about other people's actions, so I didn't pay that much attention to it. When we got the food, Bruce got Jamie his own bottle of ketchup.

The turkey was a story in itself. A few months previously, we were shopping for food at the Shopper's Food Warehouse on Rt 1, when some guy at a table asked us if we wanted to pre-order a turkey and save a lot of money, plus they came fresh from some farm and were not frozen ever. Bruce talked to the guy, and it seemed legit, so he asked, "How big do they go?" The guy didn't know. "Twenty pounds?" Bruce asked. "Sure," the guy said. Bruce looked at me, and spoke out some math about the number of guests and how much we expected them to eat, and arrived at 30 pounds somehow. "Can we order a 30 pound turkey?" he asked. The guy seemed a little skeptical, but said, "give it a try. You only pay by the pound when you pick it up, so if it's only 25, you only pay for 25 pounds." So Bruce put down:

35 pounds.

I laughed. "That's a big turkey," Bruce said. I don't think we expected to get over 25 pounds. Our plan originally was to cook two turkeys, have one main turkey on the table, and a plate of stuff cut from the less presentable turkey.

A few weeks before Thanksgiving, we got a postcard that said our turkey would be available 2 days before thanksgiving, and it would not be frozen, so bring a cooler. On the card, it had some check boxes next to the weights in steps of 5. Ours was checked "other." We also got a call from SFW when it arrived. "Your 35 pound turkey is here." Liska had answered the phone, and said, "You mean 25 pound." "No, ma'am, 35."

Bruce and then picked up what was the largest damn turkey I had ever seen. "Wow!" he said, "It's really 35 pounds!" It didn't fit in the cooler we brought. We had to move shelves around in the fridge. That's when Liska, in shock, asked, "You think it will even fit in the oven?"

It did fit in the oven, barely, but did NOT fit a roasting pan. We had to take two disposable foil roasting pans and sort of fold-stitch them together. None of our cookbooks had instructions on how to cook a turkey of this size, they all pretty much ended at 25 pounds. Liska and Bruce were in charge of the cooking, and using their vast experience and chemical know-how, they figured out how to cook it fairly well. They also had extra time since they planned on cooking two turkeys anyway.

The turkey came out juicy. The meat practically fell off the bone. Nothing was under or overcooked. Both Liska and Bruce are accomplished masters of the kitchen, and this was no less than an achievement on their part.

And Bruce was right, Jamie *did* put ketchup on pretty much everything on his plate. Including the stuffing and yams. Posted in: childhood , fantek , thanksgiving , turkey

I have to get this out of my head (Punkadyne Labs (Punkwalrus))

I was reading on this board about people who talk in their sleep, and it reminded me of many times my mother would do this during her various stages of drinking. I was never sure if it was the booze or sleep or lack of one of the other, but she used to have huge disjointed conversations with me. The worst was when she woke up at, say, 7pm on a Saturday and think it was 7am on a school day. Sometimes there was no convincing her I wasn't going to school, and she'd get ANGRY. But her conversations were both responsive and incoherent. For instance:

Mom: [sing song, like you do with small children] Greeeeeeegoreeeee... time to get uuuup...
Me: I am up.
Mom: Time to go to schooool....
Me: No it's not, it's 7pm on a Saturday.
Mom: No it's noooottt...
Me: Yes, it is. It's dark outside.
Mom: [pause] No.
Me: yes--
Mom: No. NO! You better... go and then go to see... you better go, Mister!
Me: It's night time. On a weekend!
Mom: Awwww... don't tell me... you... if you don't go. You will GET.... NO! No go and then I'll... you'll see! It won't!
Me: [says nothing]
Mom: ANSWER ME!
Me: Answer what?
Mom: You need... I'll tell your father and you'll see what I can go, and then you won't know what... you don't want that!
Me: Don't want what?
Mom: Yeah! That's what I thought... you get your coat!
Me: It's Saturday. There IS NO SCHOOL! Go back to bed!
Mom: You can't tell... the school won't get ANY and you'll be punished. PUNISHED! Don't be silllyyy..... Get any? No!
Me: Get any what?

And so on. Not answering her caused her to scream and come downstairs to yell at me, which would have been bad if she passed out ON the stairs. When she passed out, there was no moving her. You just kind of walked around her, or hoped you could wake her up enough to help you drag her to bed. Usually, though, she would abruptly end her nonsense conversation and go to bed on her own. Later, she would not recall the conversation at all.

This would be bad when my father was there, because he'd be furious and sometimes took it out on me (usually by yelling at me for a while about how if I got good grades, she wouldn't need to drink). I rarely brought friends over after the age of 12, it was simply too unpredictable.

Sadly, as a teen, I brought my friends over during trick or treating. wombat1138 and eeedge might remember that night when my mother didn't know who we were, and counted just the four of us (including Kate) three times... eeedge stopped her at 12.

I think about this every Halloween. :( Posted in: childhood , mother

Another childhood memory that bugs me (Punkadyne Labs (Punkwalrus))

So, one of the things I started doing early on was counsel younger kids. In 6th grade, I was part of a program to help 1st graders in learning how to read. One of these exercises we did was a "creative writing" class that was merged with my 6th grade class because my teacher thought it was a good idea for extra credit. A few students joined me and the other "peer counselors" for getting a bunch of 1st graders to write a story.

Early on, I knew the value of a creative work to its writer. Thus, when I got assigned "Travis," I sat with him for about half a day, helping him write. Travis was obsessed with the Hulk. I didn't read comics much, but I knew who the Hulk was and what he was famous for. So I helped Travis with his story about the Hulk. I knew he was only about 6, so the while the story was simple, the only editing I did was to flesh out the sentences. The story went something like:

One day the Hulk was angry. He got so angry, that he punched down a building. Then he punched a giant dinosaur. Then he punched himself to the moon. Te got very lonely on the moon, so he punched himself back to earth. Then he ate cake. Then end.

I forgot the actual text, but that's the gist of the style. Typical first male grader, whom I remember was obsessed with the Hulk's ability to punch. I recall the ending about cake was kind of funny in a nonsensical way, like how Monty Python would end a skit. We had a good laugh about that when I explained how humor worked, so we kept it in after a few other suggestions, among which involved toilets (again, a boy). I thought we did a good job, and Travis provided illustrations. In general, we had a really good time, and later on Travis would still wave and talk to me even when I was 18, walking home from a D&D; game.

But our story was not well received. The first indication something was going wrong were the other stories. There was one girl who had a story like this:

When I was a younger woman, I would wile away the days of my youth in a field of daisies. Father was ever so strict, but I always managed to find more time outside on the moors than I spent inside with my studies.

It was a fine spring day when I realized that my horse could communicate with me. Her long mane would gently flow in the late afternoon breeze and as I rode her bareback, I felt I could carouse her simple thoughts and understand the equine nature of philosophy as it applied to my life which would prove to be so far much longer than hers. Oh, to have those days again!

Okay, it probably wasn't THAT sophisticated, but that's how it felt. My first thought was, "That's not how a first grader would write! Obviously, the bored little girl behind her had a story about a talking horse, and you managed to pad it out to three pages of that fluff." I recall even to this day the elements of, "Why would a 6 year old reminisce about her youth?" and how many stories from girls were about horses.

The next story was more of the same. And all the little kids looked really bored because they had to sit through 10-15 minute stories that were obviously not their own. I wondered just how much of it they wrote, and I felt like they had been gypped. Sadly, when mine came up, it was all of a minute, with pictures, and followed by silence. Luckily, Travis was too into his story being read to get subtle clues like awkward silence.

I got a C.

The reasoning that was given to me was that I had not "spent a lot of time helping him," (come on, 3 hours is a LONG time for a 6 year old's attention span), using already invented characters was a cheap shortcut, and how the story was rather immature. I had the rebuttal, "I was told the assignment was to help him write a story, not take his plot and write my own." I was told that it was not the spirit of the writing exercise; it was a writing exercise for me.

"Then why was it extra credit for volunteering?" I asked. "I was the one who brought the program to you, this is what our group always did."

Silence. I got upgraded to a C+ for my efforts, with a hinted warning that it was just extra credit anyway.

"Aw, heck," as my friend Neal would say at the time.

I don't know why this still bothers me. But I feel I still did the right thing, because Travis had a great time and stayed friendly to me until I left McLean some 6 years later. I don't know whatever happened to him, but if anyone who grew up ion McLean knew a Travis who lived on Southridge near Great Falls, I'd like to know. He'd be about 33 now. Posted in: childhood , writing

Kindergarten (Punkadyne Labs (Punkwalrus))

So, this random memory wafted by my head, and won't leave. I assume this lesson is for me or one of my readers, perhaps both, and I won't know until I write it down. Doing the whims of the spirits, so to speak.

So, my Kindergarten teachers were Mrs. Wood, an older lady, and Mrs. Charlwood, a younger assistant teacher who had the same birth date as mine. Both were very kind people. The way Kindergarten worked back then was based on the fact they didn't think young kids could take a full school day, so we had AM and PM Kindergarten (they still do that here, do they do that where you are?). I went to the AM one.

We had small round tables assigned to us for various grouping purposes. Mine was furthest from the windows. Our claim to fame came during the winter months when our PE teacher, a guy named Mr. Hendron, had a "balloon blowing" game of some kind. They'd put a balloon over your table, and everyone at the table had to blow and blow to keep it in the air and over the table with a straw. Years later, I would reflect that this was a good way to keep the kids sedate: it made you dizzy as hell to keep blowing through a straw. Our table won over all the other tables, and we got a sticker that said, "Best Balloon Blowers: AM Kindergarten."

The bastards at the PM Kindergarten peeled it off. Or rather, tried to. They peeled most of it off, and our whole table was really upset about it. To this DAY this memory sticks in my head.

I kind of imagined that whomever sat at our table in PM Kindergarten did not win the balloon blowing game, and in anger and resentment, tried to peel off the sticker.

So, SCREW YOU, LEWINSVILLE PM KINDERGARTEN CLASS! :) Posted in: childhood

McLean folks: I ran into a few people (Punkadyne Labs (Punkwalrus))

Well, I ran into ONE person.

Mary Thorpe, now under a married name, was in the local Red Robin. She's got two kids, aged 3 and 7... I think. The most amazing part of this is she's lived a few block from me for the last 4 years. She told me she spoke to Donnalee's mother a while ago, and Donnalee is not doing so well, so I will have to break down and call her. I have her current address and number, but my life got really complicated a few years ago, and I couldn't follow up on the lead. I have to be a decent person and call her.

Also, Stina MacLamore contacted me on Facebook. She's practicing LAW in Miami, of all places. Speaking fluent Spanish helps her, but she's not reading sci fi anymore! Dude. Well, she's married to a handsome Cuban man, so who cares about SF! Hah.

Man, just a few years ago, I barely knew what happened anyone from the old school. Now, I am finding all kinds of folks. The Lewinsville Reunion may happen after all. Posted in: childhood , mclean , school

It's Mark's fault (Punkadyne Labs (Punkwalrus))

The Christian religions have the Devil, but what do us neo-pagan-whatevers have? The DMV and Post Office? No. I will start an anti-hero. A nemesis. And it is based on a real event.

Okay, if anything has anything go wrong in their life, blame Mark.

Mark came to us in 1986. I was with friends in a central square in my high school, when from on yonder, Mark came unto us and said:

"That's it! Everything is my fault!"

I peered at this vision, and blinked in wonder. What did Mark just say? He was ranting like a madman, seized and tormented by demons or something. Truly, this was a moment to remember.

"What?" wombat1138 said.

"EVERYTHING THAT GOES WRONG IS MY FAULT!" said Mark.

"Everything?" I asked. Surely, Mark, that is dramatic.

"Even when it rains?" Kate asked.

"EVERYTHING!!" Mark ranted. Surely he was touched by something. "EVERYTHING THAT GOES WRONG WITH YOUR LIFE IS ALWAYS MY FAULT! OR ANYONE'S LIFE!!!" I swore I heard a choir of angels. This was truly a moment worthy of an Oracle at Delphi.

"How convenient!" Kate exclaimed, who was always the brighter one in our group.

Thus, the Scour of Mark was born in the Satanic Cult of the Smiley Face. Whenever anything bad happened, we blamed Mark. He said everything, and anything bad that happened especially, was his fault. He would insist this for days until finally we relented to the wisdom of the voices that spoke though him. Later, weeks later, we would come down from his vision, and proclaim he was having a bad day at the time, and to stop blaming him for everything.

But we knew better! He had been taken over by a divine prophesy, and given us a scapegoat! When a hotel comes down on you for having too many people at a convention in your room, Mark is to blame! When your parents grounded you for something your older sister did, Mark made them do it! Mark re-elected Reagan! Mark gave me strep throat! Mark even spoils honey!

Mark is a good name to be at fault. It denotes "target." Later on, the wisdom of a nemesis became more apparent when one cannot control the series of events in their life, and need a temporary resting place of angst until you regain control.

Sadly, the downside of this, is if you actually know someone named "Mark." They may think you are blaming them, and not the Scour of Mark, and was proclaimed in McLean in 1986. This is why I cannot bring the Scour of Mark to the local anime community*. The Scour of Mark presents a similar problem to those named Adolph after 1939.

Perhaps I need to think of a better name.

---
(*... sorry, deepthink) Posted in: childhood

Some odd notes (Punkadyne Labs (Punkwalrus))

While I was basking in the sense of relief I passed the LPI 101, someone on a private LJ talked about problems she's been having with her father's previous abuse. I guess one of the things I have to deal with, although much less so lately, is my own father's abuse. Part of this healing is tracking him down, even though he doesn't really want to be found. But, ironically, he's got such a list of people who are mad at him, they find ME out.

Think about that for second. People, often people he hasn't seen or worked with for 20 years or more, take time from their day to complain about him. That's a pretty lasting impression to make on a person. In some cases, they are really pissed off.

I got an e-mail a few months ago from someone my dad worked with at SRI (Stanford Research Institute) back in the 1970s. Like many e-mails I get of this nature, it starts off with the usual, "I debated sending you this mail, but I read some of the things you had to say about your father, and you may find this info to be of some use." Many people feel a sense of guilt, which is then followed by a wave of pent-up anger. A lot of these people are older than I am, and we're talking in their 60s or 70s.

I already had been contacted some years ago by fellow alumni of Stanford, where my father got his PhD. None of them said anything I hadn't heard before. But this guy had some fairly detailed comments about my father's work at Stanford, including a copy of his thesis, "Cost-effective Processor Design with an Application to Fast Fourier Transform Computers." It's as boring as it sounds; my father is a very poor writer. This man also said he remembered me as a very small child, wandering around the computer labs. He said that I had an "implicit fascination with how things worked" and everyone agreed that I would someday be working with computers.

Funny. You know, everyone knew about my future with computers but me until 1995.

I barely remember those days as a kid. I must have been 4 or 5. I don't remember who I met, I only remember huge stacks of punch cards, paper tape, large machines with spinning tape reels, men with long hair and glasses, and some kind of huge metal green printer thing. Only sparse images and a sense of wonder and nervousness of being told not to touch anything. Later years, my afther worked in offices, and was surrounded by nervous employees. All I remember about those rare visits was the hot cocoa was free.

Most of these letters end the same way, too. "I am sorry you suffered as a child, your father was a brilliant man, but we didn't understand how he married such a wonderful woman, and I am glad you took the traits of your mother," and so on. Some feel regret and pity my mother was an alcoholic, but it's reassuring, in a dark sort of way, that they also understand why. Some offer advice to suck it up and move on (but in more friendly terms).

So as this private LJ spoke about things she remembered about her father, I wonder if in the future she'll be told the same things. If people will come to her and say, "I knew your dad, and he was an asshole. Thank goodness you turned out like your mother." If any legacy her father left her, any talent and skills, will be delayed because she identifies them with her memories of him. Only to end up in the same industry.

My advice to her would be, "Go with the flow. Talent doesn't fall far from the parent tree, but that doesn't mean you have to grow up the same way. You have another chance." Posted in: childhood , father

Lego Minifig turns 30 (Punkadyne Labs (Punkwalrus))

Article here

Yesterday, I reflected on the Lego minifig and my first encounter with the little guy in the late 1970s.

I had a friend Andy Oman who was the first one to have the set with a minifig. It was some kind of rocket lancher set, with two astronauts: a white one and a red one. Later on, he'd get more sets, including the Galaxy Explorer. I begged my mother for the rocket launcher set, and eventually, she gave in.

I recall mulling over the minifig and looking at the construction between my fingers. So miniature, so perfect. Everything fit in every way. Before, there were only two kinds of "Lego people." There was some kind of 2-part blocky guy. He had the Lego head and hat ability we still know today, but there was no face. The torso looked like he had his hands in his pocket and the rest looked like he/she was wearing a tight skirt that went all the way down to the feet. In fact, it kind of disturbing looked like someone wrapped up in a latex fetish body suit. The other kind of "people" were these heads with faces about the size of a Dum-Dum lollipop. They also had large hats/wigs you could snap on. The head fit into a 2x2 brick that also had an assembly for the arms. Arms were a snake-like with as many joints as you had pieces. The body was whatever you build from normal bricks.

Both lego people types were kind of lame. But the mini-fig was awesome. And 30 years later, the only thing they have changed is faces with expressions, printed hair, and beards. Plus more torso types. The skeleton was a nice addition.

But as a kid, I was hooked on the space sets. I built this one array that was a "space gas station." It was on top of a metal supply shelf I had in my room. It had two levels. The top shelf was the landing pad. It rad rockets, ships, and generic factory like facilities. It even had a diner. The shelf below that was "underground" where a small town was. Here people would mill about without the use of space suits. It had shops, restaurants, hotels, and housing. I collected a LOT of minifigs. I must have had over 40 of them by the time I was 12. They were always in little scenes where they would be doing something. Sometimes, I had a dark streak, and I recall one "scene" was an auto accident with dismembered limbs and some red modeling claw for guts, blood, and organs.

This made friends jealous, and quickly I began to realize that my Lego men were disappearing. I was so anal about them, knew each and every one I had. So when 2-3 of them disappeared right after a friend visited, I quickly put two and two together. I only caught two people, whom I will call "R" and "A" because, well, records are sealed at 18, right? ;)

"R" was REAL stupid about it . He used my Lego men in a diorama project at school. He denied it at first, but I told him I wrote my name on the foot on each Lego guy, and did he mind if I checked? He fell for my bluff, and gave me more Lego men than he actually stole (I didn't tell him). Then he tried to back out with the lie that he didn't steal from *ME*, but from "A," who was "stealing them from everybody." I mean, I knew A had taken some, but he denied it. Then A was confronted with R's evidence. A had recently been burned badly when he stole a bunch of cap guns from a toy store and got caught when he was giving them out to all the kids on his block. Sadly, A was not as anal about his toys' care, and so I got some of my men back melted with small magnifying glass holes. This actually ended our friendship (which was shaky anyway because of other stuff he was doing).

Ah... sixth grade politics.

At some point, I got hold of an unspecified "European toy catalog." This had Lego sets that were not sold in the US at the time. This had castle sets, plus some Lego knockoffs someone was selling that had dragons and tanks (I forgot, but I think this was way before Megablocks). There was no order form or address, and my mother had to tell me the sad news she was not having anything shipped overseas because that was way too expensive. I was DEEP in some kind of avarice and was totally pissed off. Nowadays, I get things from the Internet with such ease. I wish I could buy a ton of minifigs from Bricklink and send them back in time to myself with a note, "Sorry your parents suck, hope this helps ease the pain a little. And tell A[censored] he can't come to your house anymore." Posted in: childhood , lego , minifig

A window into my childhood (Punkadyne Labs (Punkwalrus))

Kids of the 1970s probably remember the Dinky toys. I used to get some of these models from Sullivan's Toy Store in Tyson's Corner back in the 1970s. I played with them until they broke, which seemed to be quicker for those with plastic parts and slower with those who had all metal ones. I had this catalog for a long time, and sometimes I'd read it, envious of the models I didn't have, but my friend Andy and Pat did.

http://www.zeigermann.com/toys/Dinky_1974/dinky_1974.html Posted in: childhood , dinky

CR! Rock on! (Punkadyne Labs (Punkwalrus))

No longer a high school go-gaggu-wa

Ray Romano has this bit where his mother tells him to complete college. When he asks why, she says, "So you can say you're a college graduate." You mean I can't say that now? "I am a college gajjeet! A ko-kakka go-gaggu-wa! Dammit! Three credits and I could have had it!"

So CR, after 18 years of moderate childhood angst, has made it my education level. I mean, yeah, I also got scattered college credits, but they don't count. He is a full graduate of Chantilly High School, even though he had to finish it in the summer.

His graduation ceremony was modest and he was among about 20 graduates from 5 nearby schools in his summer program, and maybe 1 of 3 born in this country. Some kids were graduating early, there's a 15 year old in his group; she's going to be a college student before she learns how to drive (her biggest complaint). Another had to leave the country to be by his dying mother, but came back, and was graduating at age 20. He actually gave the student-based inspirational speech, and even though his English was pretty bad, his story was heart-wrenching and very, very well composed and written. The whole thing was maybe an hour long, indoors, and I was happy to see so many graduates had HUGE families that came to see them. In front of us was a very sweet Hispanic family, and one of the Islamic students had maybe 20-30 people cheering for her. Even the neglected kids seemed to have friends who showed up and cheered for them. "GO BRITTANY!!! WOOOOOO!" "TYLER! YEAH!!! HOO HOO HOO HOO!" CR was one of 6 or 7 graduating from his school, and he graduated with an old childhood friend from Bailey's, the magnet elementary school he went to from grades 1-5.

Contrast that to the McLean ceremony I had in 1987, which was slated to be six hours long, had two famous guest speakers (I think Senator Chuck Robb, and Desmond Tutu's daughter), several local guest speakers, a few student speeches, and over 340 students to go through. It was held outdoors, in a hot and muggy summer day, during the *height* of the 17-year cicada season. So in addition to being hot, bored, and covered with thumb-sized insects, the combined apathy of the graduating class and the growing unrest in the bleachers of parents forced the students to END the graduation early. Anya said when she graduated in 1995, it was about the same, except it was down to four hours, and no cicadas. While takayla didn't mention hers, she agreed this was MUCH better than what CR's class had a few months earlier: 3500 parents and students at the Patriot Center, where tickets were like $70/person, I think. Yikes!

We did have to pay, however. The $188 we paid for this one included me, takayla, and Anya, if you combine the "senior dues" he had to pay last year (they never collected for this year... oh they ASKED for it, but never collected), and $128 extortion fees on "owed equipment," counting a $108 "advanced graphic" calculator CR never owned (he never took advanced math courses), but someone said he did, and they wouldn't let him graduate unless he paid (and we couldn't complain because "the woman" who handles these affairs was "on a cruise for the next two weeks"). On the check I sent them, in the comments section it says, "Bribe money" and on the back where you sign the check, I wrote, "By cashing this check, Fairfax County agrees that this was paid under duress, and completely illegal." I know they never look, I did this with other "mysterious fees" the schools have charged us in the last 13 years, including his junior year "senior dues" and various other untraceable "equipment charges." I learned this trick back in the days of bill collectors who had a juicy habit of "forgetting" you paid them.

But it's over. He has his diploma in a purple leather binder, and on Saturday, takes entrance exams for college. The current plan is 2 years of NOVA (which is no shabby college, let me tell you, one of the best Community Colleges in the nation), and then onto a graduate college (one of several in Northern Virginia are being considered, I'd love to get him into VA Tech if we can afford it). His current idea is to become a TEACHER for small children which is AWESOME and I think he'd be a great teacher.

Congratulations CR! I am so proud of you, and I love you very, very, very much!

In other news, aksident, whom wanted to be with us, and we wanted her as well, could not attend because she was doing volleyball tryouts at her school. Good thing, because she not only MADE THE TEAM but was ONE OF ONLY TWO FRESHMEN picked for the JV team! Usually they only pick Juniors and Sophomores if they are lucky. But she's always been skilled and competetive, and I wouldn't be surprised to see her at the 2012 Olympics. Posted in: aksident , childhood , cr , graduation , mclean

In Search Of... happy memories (Punkadyne Labs (Punkwalrus))

So, last night, I was on some web site where someone was making fun of Leonard Nemoy as being an "unlikely Hollywood star that makes Fred Gwynne look sexy," and they dropped the name of the show, "In Search Of..."

I used to LOVE that show.

And I forgot about this moment until Glark mentioned it on his Twitter feed about how most investigative monster hunt/alien sighting shows end with a maddening, "... but you'll have to decide for yourself." I agree with him on this point, because it made me stop watching these shows. "Then why the hell did I sit here for an hour then and watch your damn program?"

But this is not really a rant, but a rarity in my journal, a happy childhood memory.

It doesn't start off nice. There were many weekends I spent "alone" in my house because my father was on a business trip and my mother was drunk and passed out. One didn't happen because of the other, in my opinion, since both happened with enough frequency to make them overlap a few times a year by chance. The time that these highlights happened was from about age 9 to 12. I liked the time alone, because I felt I could be myself, and I got tired of my room all the time. Plus, I had the run of the house. Wheeee!

I would get up early on a Saturday morning. Normally, I got up late because when my parents were around, I felt I had nothing to look forward to in a day if I didn't have school. Even if I was up until o-dark-thirty the night and morning before, I'd get up early at watch cartoons. I wasn't allowed to watch TV as a kid, except a few sanctioned PBS shows, and only when I wasn't in trouble. But when I had the house to myself? Awesome... I'd crawl out of bed, check on my mother, and if she was passed out in bed, I was in the free and clear. Sometimes she'd be passed out on the floor or on the toilet, and I'd have to get her to the bed if I could get her awake at all. But most of the time she was on the bed, snoring away.

I'd go to the kitchen and see what food we had. Most of the time, we had an acceptable variety, and since my mother taught me how to cook when she was sober, I could make do with an odd assortment of ingredients. Like even at age 10, I could cook a steak, roast a chicken, make sauces, and so on. But usually I'd choose something easy, like frying my own hamburgers or a TV dinner of some kind (if I was lucky, my mother wasn't into frozen foods much). If there was cereal, I'd eat that, too. We didn't have a microwave, but we did have a toaster oven, so I'd often make toasted things. My favorite was a toasted PB&J;, although it made a mess if the jelly dripped.

I'd turn on the TV in the kitchen, and flip around to the various shows. We didn't have a TV guide or anything, so at each half hour interval, I'd check and see what else was on. Generally, there were 4-5 channels with kid's cartoons in the DC area in the late 70s. You had channels 4, 7, and 9 which were the major networks of NBC, ABC, and CBS, respectively. Then you had local channels, 5 and 20 on the UHF dial. PBS was 26. On good days, you could also get channels 22 and 45 from Baltimore, which were PBS and a local Baltimore station. 5 and 45 later got bought out by FOX when it wanted networks. The "good cartoons" were on the major networks, and the local ones had older shows like Warner Brother and MGM cartoons, along with syndicated old shows like "The Little Rascals." The local channels gave up on cartoons fairly early, usually around 10-11am, and started showing various older, low-budget movies. The cartoons on the older networks ended around noon or so, usually when "Soul Train" started.

I'd watch a bad movie or two, usually on channel 20, which would then show some older serial cop programs like "Beretta" and "The Rockford Files." Then it would show, "In Search Of," which I'd watch religiously. In the later years, channel 20 would show "Kung Fu Theater," which probably saved my life since before that, I'd go down to DC to watch kung fu movies. I loved kung fu movies. I still do, in fact! I love watching some terrible flick from Hong Kong with grainy wow and flutter music and terrible subtitles. The gorier... the more DISTURBING gorier... the better. Regular, over-rehearsed fight scenes were okay, but I always liked the one way some guy would die and go, "Daaaaag!" I recall one guy died when someone stuck half a hornet's nest on his face, and pushed him over a cliff. Then he fell on some spiked fence and got torn in half.

I didn't just sit at our kitchen table and watch, though. Sometimes I did homework, but often I'd drag up my big collection of Legos and build stuff while watching. The sun might have been shining through the window, but I was constructing weird Rube Goldeberg machines with rubber bands, gears, and wheels.

The evening would bring about some scattered TV programs. The best was when Love Boat came on and then Fantasy Island. I would usually end the evening with Saturday Night Live or Benny Hill, checking on my mother every once in a while. Sometimes she'd get up and wander around the house, lost like a deer in a parking lot. My job was to make sure she didn't bump into anything, fall down the stairs, or pass out somewhere other than bed. But most of the time, she'd be snoring away.

Sometimes the weekend would extend into Sunday, but the TV was pretty awful on Sunday. When you're a kid, "Sunday morning" was dead for TV, and the TV didn't really pick up until the evening. I guess there was sports, but I hated sports, so.I had to find something to do. In the earlier days, I'd go down to DC and wander about. If it was Saturday, I'd take the 24T bus from West Moreland to Ballston Metro, but if it was Sunday, only the 23A bus to Crystal City was running near me, and so I'd have to walk about a mile down to Chain Bridge road to pick that one up. That one also went to Tyson's Corner, so I'd go there sometimes. I never had much money, so often I'd have some extra cash from some odd chore, or I'd... [gulp] rummage through my mother's purse. Yeah, I stole from her purse sometimes, but I "justified" it by taking only what I thought I'd need, and only sparingly, and usually no bills larger than a 5. Back then, bus fare was only about 35 cents, and Metro was like $1.60 round trip. A day in DC, with movie ticket, would have only cost about $6-8.

I guess I should have wandered around lonely and feeling sorry for myself, but in reality, I didn't. I actually enjoyed the "alone time." At age 10, you don't want your parents hassling you, and both parents fully knew I took the bus down to DC. It didn't bother them at all, since both grew up in Chicago. It's funjny, when CR was 10, I wouldn't have so much as allowed him to think that was okay, so I am not sure if it was parental neglect or things were different back then. Probably a little of both.

In DC, I used to go to the Zoo a lot. Museums, too. I also went down to some of the places where they showed cheap movies and the only staff at the theater was some old guy who didn't care if you were 10 and wanted to see an "R" film or not. In fact, that's why I saw a lot of the "Hong Kong Fooey" because they weren't rated anything, even though in reality they should have gotten an R rating for the extreme violence and gore.

I did have some friends to hang around; I wasn't a total social pariah. There was Neal in 6th grade, and before that, sometimes I'd hang around Pat, Andy, Kyle, Richard, and Carrie. Maybe FJ and Jean. But because my father insisted on spending so many weekends on his damn boat, I didn't really get to connect more than be that peripheral friend that hung around a few times a year (except for Neal that last year).

But those are happy memories, anyway. I don't really go down to wander around DC much these days. It's a shame I know more about Baltimore than I do DC. Posted in: childhood

CR's last few days as a teenager (Punkadyne Labs (Punkwalrus))

I guess you could call 18 and 19 "teens," if those "barely legal" sites are to be believed, but in my mind, being a teenager is 13 - 17, and then you are legally an adult. apeyanne tells me that the brain stops growing at 25 or so, which explains the behavior of me an my friends in Prune Bran. Haw.

But this post isn't about how I am throwing away his sailor suit and huge striped lollipop, but some good news in the fact he got a job again! He used to work at Five Below for a week, but they he got real sick last year. They said he could come back whenever, but then the entire chain started to go down the tubes. So now my son will work for a giant multi-national corporation as a barista!

And you can probably guess where. Rhymes with war bucks.

So if you are in Greenbriar some weekday evenings, come stop by and see CR in his first adult job.

I am very proud of him. Posted in: childhood , cr

On friends (Punkadyne Labs (Punkwalrus))

Old Prune Bran Alumni badmagic has a post about How do normal people make friends? which has spurned some debate. I suggest you take a look. But then I asked, "How did I make friends?"

In clusters.

As a kid, I had a few friends which thinned out for a while. At first, I hung around a group of mostly girls, like Denise, Allison, shuttergal, Meredith, and Jennifer. Then when girls thought boys were icky, I hung around Mike, Jean, Andy, Kyle, and FJ. I had one "best friend," who was Neal, but he moved away in 6th grade.

In the early, early years, my poor mother couldn't understand why I wasn't the popular kid. She was the popular kid in her school. Not the "snobby Heathers" popular, but like everyone got along with her, she was in so many school photos, had lots of friends, and so on. She would invite all the kids from my class to various parties, I guess in hopes to make me popular, but that didn't work out as well as she hoped. Even in high school, she worried that most of my friends were girls, and I *know* there was some bedroom talk between my mom and dad whether I was gay. Theater? Hangs around girls? Doesn't play sports? Loves musicals? Yeah, I had all the signs. Sadly, though, I got the hots for girls and considered men "hairy and icky." Personally, I don't know how you girls stand them. But I digress. My mother had kind of resigned that she had a gay son, I think, who had no sex life I was willing to talk about.

In junior high, I hung out with two neighbors, John and Jennifer (brother and sister), but I must have been a disturbing kid because they dropped contact with me pretty much as a teenager, and to this day, attempts to stir up some mature friendship bonding has resulted in a cold shoulder at best. I hung out with some community theater folks, gaming nerds (like stevonwolf, Fred, and Nicole), but apart from a few moments of hanging out, not much friendship actually occured. Junior high was pretty depressing, and I think the lowest point in my entire life. At least Neal kept me sane, all the way from El Paso, via cassette tape letters back and forth.

In high school, I got some badly-needed therapy, and first struck up some friends in the goth/punk community, before abuptly leaving that for a "peer-managed" group of misfits (yes, the county assigned me friends based on the fact that loners scared them). But I was in theater, and some of those people were in the sci-fi club. In my sophomore year, I started to make *real* friends, the first since Neal, and I am friends with most of them to this day. While I had different sets of friends, the best were Kate, Jason, Mark, wombat1138, and eeedge, who were a core gaming group as well as people I could just hang out with.

But as badmagic postulated, how does one move to a new area and make friends? I did that when I graduated high school. I was alone, and needed a place to live. That's when FanTek became like a surrogate family. Bruce, Cheryl, Liska, sasqatch, Debbie, and a variety of Daves. Then I got married, but stayed in fandom, where I met friend after friend. I can't tell you how many I have now, but my LJ list is not just a collection of random people who likied my blog. More than half of them I have hung out with in the last 20 years, sometimes for long periods of time (as in years), and many of them are deep, good friends I'd gladly risk my life for. I now have several groups of friends. Online groups, old convention fogies, childhood friends, user group friends, and some assorted stubs.

But... say I get sick of America, and move to Sweden? While that is unlikely, that presents some challenges. Even though most people speak English as a second langauge there, there would still be a language and cultural barrier. But this is a skill my mother was famous for: making friends and social connections in foreign countries she has just arrived in. I must have it in my blood.

First, I'd seek the alternative community. There is an SCA in Sweden (I met some at an Iron Forge museum), I know there's a thriving sci-fi community in Stockholm, so assuming I am in a major city center, I'd target those communities first. Look for computer club notices and Linux user groups. The Internet would make this so easy. At first, I'd make friends with a lot of people I'd probably lose within a year. Not by choice, but that's the reality of it. Maybe I made some mistakes culturally, or maybe we just didn't click after the first few times hanging out. A few I might have to avoid once I realized they were crazy or personally broken in a bad way, but that would only be a few people. But out of a few dozen people I tried, I think one or two would "stick." Then I'd build from there.

If I moved to, say, Lincoln, Nebraska, I'd do the same thing. Or Pittsburgh. Or Salt Lake City, Miami, or Phoenix. Internationally? Tokyo, London, Paris, or Hong Kong I would find a way. Hell, maybe even Beruit. As long as I wasn't in some podunk rural town with no Internet, I would do well. Ad even if and up in Singlegoatistan near the Chinese border where the town only has one phone and two bicycles, eventually, I would do well. It might just take a while. I think I might have to shift around some hobbies... though.

"Wild camel tipping? Tonight? Sure... I'll get my pole." Posted in: childhood , cons , conventions , friends

Ad perpetuam rei memoriam (Punkadyne Labs (Punkwalrus))

So, when I was a kid, I wanted to learn Latin. I knew it was a former "defacto" language (to later be replaced by French, then English) international language of science in Europe until the 17th century, as indicated by class, order, and phylum. It was the root of the Romance languages, and learning Latin was the key to learning French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian. Besides, speaking Latin seemed cool and edgy.

But alas, no, my parents said I must learn Spanish. My school offered Spanish, Latin, German, French, Italian, Russian, and Japanese, but my parents said all of those were dead or dying languages, and determined that Spanish was the best route as far as usability. They turned out to be right, but I still wish they would have allowed me to take Latin.

My friend Neal took Latin, and sometime he described "declensions," which were noun cases, like verb conjugation, but it seemed so weird and foreign. I deduced on my own, and Neal later confirmed this, that with nouns being classified as such, the order of the words in a sentence became less important and used instead as emphasis. Many times I tried to find the root words of various things, but found I confused Greek and Latin constantly.

While I was in New Orleans, I picked up a Latin textbook from the 1960s. Last night I read through the first few pages, and found that all my years for trying to decode Latin roots made a few basic paragraphs completely transparent. I was stunned how many workds I could pick out or guess their meaning. I think most of my readers would also have an easier time of it than some poor 12 year old who never played D&D;, wanted to be a paleontologist, or thought "dead languages" were "pretty damn cool."

For instance, take this phrase: Canis meus id comedit.

You probably could guess "canis" means dog, like in the word "canine." "Meus" sounds like "me." The words "id comedit" are a little harder. I know "comer" means "to eat" in Spanish, and you see it in words about food and eading like, "comestibles" means "edible things" as in food. So you'd think "Something to do with a dog eating something." "Id" sounds like "it," so if you were told, "this is a phrase used as an excuse by children," "My dog ate it," becomes very clear.

This is why Latin kicks ass. Later on, you can sound really snobby at all the legal affairs, because law uses a TON of latin phrases: habeas corpus, pro bono, bona fide, de facto.... Posted in: childhood , languages , latin

Apology to Alissa (Punkadyne Labs (Punkwalrus))

I was not an angel as a child. Sometimes, when I think of my abuse, I have to pause and think about the abuse I unfairly doled back to others at random moments.

When I was about... 10 or 11 or so, there was this girl named Alissa Gawlik who shared a bus stop with me. She was a year younger than me, and somehow she got promoted to being patrol at our bus stop, much to my displeasure at the time. I used to called her "Piss on Garlic" in my head, because making fun of people's names was a popular form of insult to me back then. Her sister was named Yola, which was just too good to pass up the obvious Star Wars pun in the days when "Empire Strikes Back" was THE movie of the decade, and damn anyone who dared call it, "Star Wars II." But that's a different topic. I never knew what ethnicity those names had, but they looked like normal WASPs that soaked the McLean neighborhoods, flowing among the assorted Jewish and Catholic kids.

I can't even remember why I didn't like Alissa. I have this vague memory I thought she was snotty and arrogant, possibly on a power trip. I have no idea if this was true or not, due to my age at the time, and how emotionally unstable I was. But I recently thought of her while discussing something else, and I have to confess a very mean thing I did to her.

Alissa made me mad one day. Like, angrier than I normally was at her. My sketchy memory tells me that she punished me for a minor infraction, and it had something to do with favoring her "friends" over me. I put "friends" in quotes for later referral in this tale of shame. When she was done with me, she turned away from me, and engaged in general "girl talk" where my seething eyes saw someone who was petty and stupid. Her back was towards me, and between her and I were the springtime buds of a dogwood tree that encroached into the sidewalk corner that made our bus stop.

Alissa had really long hair. Like, unusually long hair down to her butt. I am not sure what made me think of this, but I took small ribbon-like strands of her long hair, and tied each ribbon to a bud on the tree. I recall her hair felt really smooth, like the kind of smooth professional hair products give you, but I didn't know those existed at the time. Because her hair was so long, and she didn't move much while engaging in idle gossip, I managed to tie almost a dozen strands to the tree. She looked like a lopsided maypole. Her "friends," as well as everyone on the bus stop, saw me doing this, too. A few giggled, including one of the girls Alissa was talking to. Nobody said a word.

Then the bus arrived.

While this is a letter of apology, the point must be made that the peak comedic moment of this event, the moments that made it all worth it to my adolescent brain, was when she moved forward to line us all up. There was a step forward, and then her head jerked back with a sound that was out of a cartoon, and could probably be spelled, "Gluck!" But sadly, I had not gaged her reaction beyond the moment, and the comedy quickly turned tragic when she panicked, and... got tangled in the tree. I mean, not really. No one had to cut her out, but the bus driver had to get out and assist poor Alissa, a victim of my ill-conceived revenge prank.

I never apologized to her. I mean, everyone KNEW that I did it, and despite the ill-conceived escape plan of sitting at the back of the bus, word quickly got out that I was the arboreal and cosmetic assault upon Alissa's locks. But the bus driver made it sound like she didn't know, shouting at everyone that it wasn't funny while looking back at us from her wide rear-view mirror. Poor Alissa was crying, and I countered my guilt with some hastily-piled hill of mental rocks made up of all the things I could think of her deserving. But my face was burning, and I regretted my actions as the familiar boiling sensation in my stomach roared... a sensation that years later would lead to my ulcer.

I got to school, and nobody said anything. Had I gotten away with it? Since she wasn't in my class that year, quickly the incident was forgotten. Until about 2 hours into class when I was called out by a teacher named Mr. Dowden.

Mr. Dowden was a sixth grade teacher whom I didn't care for. He was one of those manly men who "rewarded " his class with a Friday game of football if the weather was nice. To me, "football" was anything but rewarding. Football to me was like a punishment, and I used to watch his class outside on those Fridays they played, wondering if he knew those frail blue bloods that peppered McLean kids were not having a good time. The skinny Asian girl who played the violin flouncing about in her confused femininity, years away from her already delayed puberty, looking as if someone released a cat into a box of Styrofoam peanuts. The genteel boy from Manchester, an old world Brit out of his element, trying desperately to run as far from where the ball as possible because he knew that if the ball got close to him, the burly Brazilian kid, who already had facial hair, would run him down like a bulldozer over a watermelon. Mr. Downden was also famous for having a "fort" in his classroom, where one could go and read. He may not have been nearly as bad as my memory paints him, and in fact, I know many who spoke of him with great fondness.

But he was also the head of the patrols. And this day, he was very angry. Justifiably so, of course, because I can't imagine him just taking this event in stride. But he did something that, had it occurred in today's day and age, would have been considered grounds for dismissal. I knew this would end badly because he took me behind a set of stairs.

First, to his credit, he asked me if it was true. Then he asked what happened. He didn't start out calm, and he really started losing control of his temper as I explained, obviously trying not to laugh, the events that unfolded. I remember I kept thinking how angry I was that I was snickering, because I didn't want to. I wasn't so stupid I was being cocky about it, but I am sure it came across that way.

"Let me tell you something," he said, and grabbed my shoulder with one hand in a firm grip. "If you EVER do something like that again, to one of MY patrols..." and his other arm cocked back with a fist.

This is when I knew what was coming. Having been hit by my own father and countless bullies, this scene was as familiar as a well-worn glove. Time slowed down. Already I planned to take the punch to the face and let my neck act as a shock absorber while I used the momentum to carry myself backwards. This would spring my chest back, where I'd pitch to the floor in such a way, I'd slide away from the assailant, and have a good roll to stand up and a run to get away. It wasn't a flawless system, especially if another kid was pinning me down while I got wailed upon, but it was all I knew, and worked enough times for there to be an inner monologue detailing the instructions like I was readying my ship for launch. I closed my eyes, timing the punch to take so many fractions of a second, and wondering if he would strike my lower jaw, cheek, or eye.

But the hit never came. Instead he said, "I will punch your lights out. You'll see more stars than the star spangled banner." I paused. My adrenaline for taking the punch and rolling was now stopped abruptly, and for a few seconds I still wondered if he was doing this to catch me off guard to hit me when I went, "Phew!" But he never did.

And STILL I could not help snickering. I now know this was a nervous reaction, but I was cursing myself inside for not being able to stop. But he let me go. And time sped back to its normal speed.

I don't think he would have actually hit me. These days, I am pretty sure of it. As I write this, there's a part of me that respects how much he protected his patrols. I am sure he saw me as this plump, skittish kid, probably slightly crazy, who had bullied a younger girl. One of HIS younger girls. I think that would have been an accurate assessment of me, "the Larson boy." Despite how I felt about Alissa's "power trip," which may have totally been my imagination, what I did was wrong.

It occurred to me that Alissa would have been about the same age as Scarlet is now. I still feel pretty bad about this, and not because of Mr. Dowden's actions, but just how petty and cruel this was. And I don't think I ever acknowledged this with Alissa. I recall we pretty much avoided each other after that, and I was burning with guilt that I couldn't stop giggling about it for a long time.

I don't know where she is nowadays. I last saw her in the halls of our high school, but we never crossed paths. She became as anonymous as most other classmates a year below mine. I don't even know if she remembers the incident, because I was only one of several who were mean to her in elementary school. I recall things got better with her social life in junior high. And she cut her hair short.

So I am sorry, Alissa. That was a mean thing for me to do.

Your former grammar school classmate,

Grig (aka Gregory or "that Larson boy") Posted in: alissa , childhood

What is this, an International Blog? (Punkadyne Labs (Punkwalrus))

Mira...

Cuando yo aprendí el español, de tres años de español en la escuela secundaria para ser exactos, no sabía yo que lo esté usando para sobornar a los trabajadores hispanos no cavar hasta mi casa.

Me acordé de algo que mi mamá le hizo a los trabajadores obtener la basura para recoger la basura en nuestra nave en lugar de la acera: ella sobornó con cerveza. Nuestra cerveza había ido "skunk", por lo que sobornó con una botella de "Parrot Bay" ron.

Creo que funcionó. A pesar de que sólo habla un poco de Inglés, y yo sólo habla un poco de español escuela secundaria. Creo que se llegó a un acuerdo.

Perdóname, mi español es terrible, y en parte proporcionados por Google. Me carnicería de otra hermosa lengua. Posted in: bribes , childhood , gas , spanish , utilities

Mean Mrs. Green (Punkadyne Labs (Punkwalrus))

I need to post something, but nothing of interest happened to me. So I will post about a teacher I once knew, Mrs. Green.

Mrs. Green was kind of short, maybe at 5'2"; my memory is a little sketchy, but I recall her being my height later on, when I was 5'2" from 4th grade until 9th (another rant for another day). She had a round helmet of gray hair, which gave her a kind of figure like a squat boom microphone. Her skin was the consistency of a balloon skin that had been inflated too long. In addition to her polyester pants suit, she sported a cloud of rogue under each eye like some troll/china-doll hybrid. She was not a bad person, probably. She just didn't take any guff from anyone, even if you didn't mean to give her guff in the first place.

When I came from Palo Alto to McLean, I had already done a year of Kindergarten. But Virginia put their wee tykes a year later than those nut jobs in California, so I was put in Kindergarten again which my parents said just wouldn't do. My mother fought hard and long to put me in 1st grade, and eventually won out. But sadly, the year was already half over, and so the day I reported to Mrs. Wood and Mrs. Charlwood's classroom at Lewinsville Elementary, I was told to report to the classroom across the hall.

Mean Mrs. Green. All the kids knew about her. I thought was in trouble, because, well, she was one of the more present personalities on the playground, and famous for being a total bitch. Now, in retrospect, I cannot find a single memory where she did anything to anyone other than general yelling and maybe absconding with a toy or kickball. I would like to regale this blog with great tales of unfairness and treachery, but I simply cannot lie. However, her reputation was enough to cause a single young white haired lad from the west coast to almost wet himself in fear.

When I got to the class, I was told I was late, and to sit down. That's about all I remember; being in trouble just for showing up. And for a week, I endured whatever teachings she doled out. I'd like to claim she said or did something so horrific, I blocked it out, but all I know is that there was this event where I collapsed to the ground in what was first assumed to be an epileptic fit.

There was a principal, I think his name was Mr. Koreda or something, who showed up to assess the situation. I was later told I was curled up in the corner of the classroom, knees over my face, shaking uncontrollably and speaking in tongues. I have no memory of this. I was also told that someone on site figured out was not having a seizure, but a nervous breakdown. I don't know if my parents were called or what, but I think they found out eventually, because I was put back in Kindergarten the next day, and that was the end of having Mean Mrs. Green as a teacher.

Knowing how skittish I was, I have always assumed that she probably didn't do anything SO horrible, but probably after a week of her, I just snapped. Having a few nervous breakdowns since then, with similar symptoms, I am sure this actually happened. My father was furious with me, the school, and my mother for just "allowing this to happen." But we were not allowed to speak of it, and that was that.

Years went by, and I avoided that woman like the plague. I forgot who ended up being my first grade teacher, I think it was a Mrs. Shanis, who I recall was very young and pleasant. Then had Mrs. Knott, Mrs. Kusmuck (who also had a mean reputation, but apparently something nice happened to her over the summer, and she was always nice to my class and every one thereafter), Mrs. Showalter, Mrs. Estes (who was replaced by a horrible Mrs. Cordell halfway through the year), and the best teacher, Mrs. Ray (the one who taught me to write) for 6th grade.

When I became an A/V nerd in 4th grade, I recall one of our frequent calls came from Mrs. Green. Apparently, she was a minor technophobe, and refused to touch "modern gadgets" like film projectors, record players, and filmstrips. I didn't have to do her classroom until 6th grade, but it was an simple job.

You'd get paged over the intercom, and if the teacher could let you go, you went to the library, picked up and signed out the equipment, and went to the classroom that needed setup. Almost all of the teachers that needed help were older women, but sometimes it was a younger teacher who just didn't have time, and all you had to do was set up. Mrs. Green not only needed setup, but you had to run the entire film for her. So being paged for Mrs. Green would be a 40 minute job or longer, depending on the film. Most of the time, she wouldn't even be in the room during the film. She'd see you come in, and walk out as you started to assemble things. But before she left, she'd look at her class and go:

"If I hear any of you maggots FUCKING get out of LINE, I will find you, and beat your parents in front of you and make you watch them DIE! Then I will scoop out your eyeballs and step on them until they pop! The last thing you will see is the lips of your dying mother asking, "Why?" You mess with the bull, my friends, you get the HORNS! Got it? This audio visual specialist is YOUR NEW GOD! And I will SACRIFICE YOUR SOUL to him when I rip out your hot beating heart with MY TEETH? COMPRENDE???"

Or something that sounded like that, it was hard to hear her while cowered under some kid's chair.

;-) Posted in: a , childhood , teachers , v