Reasonably accurate quotes from this past week.

“That was awesome…like falling into the sun.” This was not from this week.  It was from 1999 or so when my friend Ralph walked out of our Math final exam.  I include it here because it expresses so much of the spirit of the moment.

“Please don’t kiss me anymore.”

“No, no, Drew.  The final is today, not tomorrow.” “It is?  Wow, this is the worst news ever.  I’m in a huge hole of crap.”  “Boy, am I relieved!  If it was tomorrow, that would be inconvenient for me because I have a conflict at that time.  See, look at my schedule here–”  “Can’t talk now, Joram.”

“The meal plan is way too expensive.  And you know, girls eat less than guys, so it’s like we’re paying for their meals.”  “Yeah, they should charge people for meals by weight. Like weigh people before and after each meal, in front of everyone.”

“Well, just come by my office.  It’s 125A.”  “Yeah, we know.  We’ve seen you in there before.”  “All by myself.”

“My baby can speak Latin.”

(mental stream of consciousness) “Man, where is the professor?  It’s like 20 minutes after the final was supposed to start, and he’s never late.  And why is no one else bothered?  Shouldn’t somebody go get him?  What are they doing, anyway?  Oh.  Looks like everyone is taking the final right now.  That explains the strange hush in the classroom, as well as the pile of blank final exams up at the front of the room.  It all makes sense.”

“I have to get a signed note from my wife before they will let me pick up her cap and gown.  I hate this place.”

“Hi, I need to get a book.  I turned it in last night and you haven’t reshelved it yet.  Can you find it back there?”…[several minutes later]…”Do you really, really need it?”

“So, how are classes?”  “Drew, I graduated a year ago.”  “Oh.”

Aw yeah

Yes I did.

All you haters should know, my wife digs it.

Who says you’re not a winner?

This morning I was eating my cheerios laced with matured (read: brown and mushy and sweet and if you like them green what the heck is wrong with you, they’re sweeter if you let them sit for a few days) banana slices, and I looked at the cereal box to read something.  (My wife makes fun of the fact that I read cereal boxes, shampoo ingredient lists, movie plot summaries and the weird tall/small writing at the bottom of the DVD that tells you who is in the movie and who produced it, things that I myself have recently written on scraps of paper, signs on walls like “fire extinguisher” that have been there for years, and other less fascinating material.)

Anyway.  Cereal.

So instead of a good story about Fred and Barny in Cocoa-Falls, Bedrock, having a chocoriffic time and me counting hidden flattened rice flakes in the picture, there was this notice about another sweepstakes, where you could win 10 million bucks or something.

And I did.  Win 10 million bucks.

Or something.

Inside the cereal box there was a neat silver-wrapped Discover debit/gift card worth five big fat bucks.  Usable anywhere Discover is accepted.  Yes, faithful reader–either one of those places!

So today my wife and I are going out for coffee and orange juice to celebrate the fact that I am a rocking winner of a man.

So who says you’re not a winner?  Go out there and make it happen.  Maybe you won’t get as rich as I have, but they have prizes of lesser value as well, so it’s not like it’s all 5 bucks or nothing.

By the way, the odds of winning 10 million or something according to the faithful box are 1 in 10.  That means if you buy 10 boxes of cheerios, you should win at least once.

Actually, there’s a 35% chance you still won’t win even once.  BUT if you buy 20, then you’re chances of not winning anything go down to about 12%.

So, who says you’re not a winner?  If you buy 20 boxes and don’t win anything, then I do.  Otherwise, don’t ever let them put you in a corner, baby.

The bad bad backspace button

So I wonder where all the letters and semicolons and stuff go when we delete them.  In typewriter times we just discretely covered them up with correction fluid, and so successfully prevented them from doing any other mischief.

Now, I just hope they get back in line inside the computer for another turn.  I hate to think of them slinking off into dark corners and forming obscene phrases when we’re not looking.

That would be hard to do with some keys, but I bet a jilted tilde would find a way.

The Man busted up my igloo

So we built this igloo.  This sweet fantastic self-enclosed structure that was so sweet it made my heart warm.  We worked on it in the sunshine, kids and grown-ups.  People would wander over from sledding just to watch us build it.

We worked as a team, we planned, we executed, we modified our plans.  We learned the benefits of slightly wet snow, used as mortar to hold the close-packed snow blocks together.

And as the bricks bonded together with impenetrable strength, so did our hearts, around our wonderful igloo.  It was completed, fully enclosed.  You had to crawl to get in but you could stand upright in it.  It was warm and snug, out of the wind.

It was priceless. We were proud of our igloo, proud of our ingenuity and work.  Proud of creating something from nothing and basking in its glory.  We smoked cigars in it that night, and that was probably the coolest night I’ve had in the last few years.

We figured it would stand for days or even weeks if the weather stayed cold enough.

And then the Man came and busted up the igloo with his big snow plow.  No warning, no discussion.  Just crushed it.

So now I know how Homie the Clown felt all those years.  After a lifetime of being allied with The Man, I have finally tasted his fury, and it was bitter.

You are on display

I bought a fountain pen.

A short story from my vacation

So today my wife and I played a game.  We each had 30 minutes to write a short story, and then share it.  She had already written one weeks ago and spent the 30 minutes editing hers, so the game wasn’t so fair at all.  Anyway, here’s my story.

It was the end of the world, and Hal could not find his shoes.  In between the intermittent blackouts he dug through piles of dirty clothes and layers of junk in his closet or under the bed.  When the lights went out he would use the Yoga techniques he had picked up by looking through the plate glass windows of the gym on Tuesday nights and calm his body and mind, trying to re-trace his steps and remember where he had left them.  Slow breathing: in through the nose, out through the mouth.  Indian style, on the floor, back straight, serene expression.  He never heard what the Yoga instructor said they were supposed to be picturing in their minds, so he always pictured himself picturing the perfect image for facial serenity.

He thought back now: to the shoe store, the week before the financial markets collapsed.  A pair of soft leather shoes, light brown color, firm arch support, the new shoe smell wafting up from inside.  He paid cash.  Tissue paper wads stuffed in the shoes, the shoes stuffed in a purple cardboard box.

Lights on again, and the hunt resumed.  Not behind the piles of old newspapers.  Not in the hallway, not on the porch.  (Nothing on the porch since he had boarded up the windows and doors.)  Not with the canned food or the water supplies.  Not with the guns.  Where were they?  He always misplaced stuff like this when he really needed it.

Lights off, the Yoga position.  He had carried them home under his arm, not wanting to wear them before tonight.  The vagrant with the bandage on his head asking for them.  Wheedling, whining.  “Don’t need no new shoes now, man.  Give em here and let me hold em for a day.”  Hal had moved on quickly.  Ever since the police services had stopped the homeless were getting more urgent, aggressive.  He had seen them surrounding a teenager the week before, searching him for food or weapons.

Home, finally, with his shoes.  Where had he put them?  He remebered setting them on the bookshelf.  But three days ago he had burned it and all his books to keep warm.

Lights on.  Not in the kitchen or the bathroom, not on the floor.  He was heading back to his room, probably to begin searching in all the same places all over again, in that fruitless repetition that helped him to feel like he was doing something, being active, while hopefully his subconscious would bring the elusive new shoes and their location bubbling to the surface of his mind, unbidden and certain.

Then he heard the bell.  It rang out so loud that he couldn’t pretend to ignore it.  A slow, sombre clong that resonated throughout the city–throughout every other city, too.

Hal stopped walking, paused for a moment, and sighed as he turned.  He shuffled slowly, glancing around one last useless time.  He turned the handle on the front door and walked out into the night, bare feet slapping on the wet sidewalk.

If you forget everyone you know…Happy new year

So we always sing “Auld Lang Syne” on New Years, and whether it’s my bad ears and faulty imagination or the slur of sleepy singers with too much punch in them, or the fact that I don’t speak Scottish and no one told me we were switching languages,  I always heard the words different.

To my tender ears the song was called “Old Anxine”, and it went thus:

“Should all acquaintance be forgot, in days of Old Anxine…”

Difficult to interpret, no doubt, but after much thought I came to the conclusion that Anxine must be something about anxiety, some stressful condition or state of woe.  Old Anxine, then, was some pretty bad days that our forefathers went through, and then they wrote this song referring to them.  Like the Potato Famine or the 1976 Bucs.

The gist then, is that if you forget everyone you know, like you wake up and have amnesia and you forget who all your friends and family and co-workers are, so that you have no more acquaintances; and then on top of that you find yourself in days of Old Anxine, meaning either really bad days that are like the really Old Bad Days that we all remember, or else actually in those bad days themselves (whether by time travel or else the guy was living in those days when he wrote the song)…

That’s where I always got stuck, because then everyone would sing about Old Anxine over and over:  “For Old Anxine, my dear, for Old Anxiiiiiine…”  Then they would start over.  No one ever told me what to DO if all acquaintance should be forgot in days of Old Anxine.  It was like people were coming up with this horrible hypothetical situation where you wake up in terrible times and don’t know anybody, but then right when they’re going to tell you what to do about it, they are drunk and so they just start singing about those Old Anxine days over and over again to their old drunk wife.

Therefore the song could run thus in a modern way:  “Hey man, here’s some advice.  If you ever forget everyone, and you’re in some trouble like those really bad days…hey, wow, remember those bad old days, pretty mama?  They were really bad, huh?  Yeah, they were bad.  So anyway, if you ever forget…”  And on and on in meaningless repetition.

Why those depressing, frustrating lines were always just right for joyfully ringing in the New Year and kissing someone was beyond me.

I am just glad I have never yet found myself in that situation.  But if I ever am an amnesiac in times like those bad times, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do:  wow, those times really sucked.

Some observations about the X-people

So I was watching X-men for the sixth or seventh time a few nights ago, while my wife was hanging out with her chick friends in the other room.  And I may not be the world’s biggest X-men expert.  OK, I am definitely not the world’s biggest X-men expert.

But how about Wolverine’s claws?  Where do they go when they retract?  If they only go back right beneath his knuckles then there’s no way he could bend his wrists.  He would be Stiff-Wrist Logan, the Canadian Mystery Guy.  Think about all the things you couldn’t do with adamantium wrists.  Like play the fiddle or deal cards in a smooth and attractive manner, or chip.  (As in golf.)  Or hold out your hand in the universal gesture for “stop”.  He would just be giving the sign for “I punch you in the face” or “I poke you in the throat”, which would make directing traffic awkward and give him a bad reputation.  Come to think of it, how would he arrange his hair in that swirly horn pattern without some repeated circular wrist action and a lot of product?

Or if they retract all the way into his forearms, he has to make sure his wrists are straight when he extends them or they would poke through the wrong spot in his hands.  Even with instant healing powers that would get annoying over time.

And cyclops.  OK, what’s the advantage of having laser eye beams if you have to use your hand to make it fire?  That’s like just carrying around a laser gun, which any storm trooper or GI Joe cartoon character can replicate.  Or it’s more like a laser gun that is attached to your face all the time.  Gunhead McGee is what they’d call you in school, and you couldn’t do anything about it because if anyone ended up with a laser hole in their chest, you know who they’d blame every time.

And why doesn’t Rogue steal her own powers when she touches herself?  And why are Storm and the frog tongue guy just all-around lame?

Don’t get me wrong; I believe we could all use some gratuitous genetic mutation that would bestow amazing powers or double jointed-ness in our knees and elbows, or the instinctive mastery of the semi-colon.  I just think the creators could think through the implications of some of the mutants they invent.

For example, you could invent a guy named Plastic-Face Alan.  His face looks regular, but it’s genetically really plastic.  So in addition to being able to change his face into whatever he wants it to look like, he could also absorb any face-punch ever, and trap your fist in liquid face-plastic.  That’s a double payoff for a single mutation, which is exactly the kind of thing we need to be working towards here.

hello, you’re failing

If you are getting this email, it is because you have a D or an F in this class.
Some of you are working very hard to bring your HW grades up, and this will undoubtedly help.
Many of you, however, are doing nothing that I can see.  Many of you are not showing up regularly to class, do not come to office hours, and repeatedly hand in no homework.

This is a warning.  You may be under the impression that at the end of the semester, one or more of these things will happen:
1.  You will suddenly find not only the time to make up all of your homework, but also a magical understanding of all the concepts that you have missed, without any help from anyone else, and without ever having studied them.
2.  I will then be glad to take all of your old HW assignments in a heap and quickly re-grade and return them to you.
3.  You will (in spite of zero preparation and study) suddenly do amazingly well on your second quiz and final exam, which will rescue your grade.
4.  Or, when none of these comes to pass, I will be overwhelmed with pity, and either give you a C- with a bow on top, or come up with some extra special plan just for you, because I simply can’t bear the thought of you failing.

None of these things is even remotely possible.  I want you to be aware of this NOW, because when you do come to my office at the end of the semester, needing a grade of 205 or above on your final and having 12 hours left before the test, it will then be too late.
The way to bring your grade up is to get in old HW assignments. You need to begin doing this NOW.

I am happy to help during my office hours, or to make an appointment with you if you have class during my office hours.  I really DO want you to pass, but I really CAN’T see how that will happen unless you EARN a passing grade by kicking it into gear.
If you begin working now, there is no reason why any of you should fail this class.  Everyone is still in reach of a passing grade.
Please email me or come by my office with any questions or concerns.
Have a nice weekend,
Mr. Thompson