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Wed, 28 Mar 2012

When JW moved to town and started attending school with us, our fourth-grade teacher decided it was necessary to prepare the class for his arrival. "I want you to be nice to JW," she said. "His haircut is a little different from what you might be used to seeing. People come in all shapes, sizes, and colors. It's just a haircut. Nothing special. I want you to welcome him to our school and show him what good citizens you are."

We all beamed and cracked our knuckles in anticipation. We couldn't wait to get a look at this motherfucker.

A few hours later, when he finally finished whatever important public school orientation program had been arranged for him, JW walked into our class. It was way better than we had even dared to hope, for JW had a haircut that, in 1982 and in our particular corner of the Midwest, constituted a giant leap toward social suicide.

JW had a crew cut, or, as we called it at that time, a "buzz."

Imagine if you will, a pressure cooker. A very faulty pressure cooker. As it starts to heat up, you hear a few random squeaks and gurgles. Then the whole thing starts to shake. The shaking becomes more and more violent until at last something has to give way. A valve cracks. The weakest point ruptures. Suddenly, the steam escapes in one loud, cacophonous roar. Windows break. Dishes fall from their shelf. Someone gets hurt. That someone is JW.

When you imagine a moment from your past, it's impossible to gauge the accuracy of your memory. Your mind doesn't record memories, but rather reconstructs them as needed. Here's what my mind reconstructs: a room full of kids, hysterical to the point of tears. Pounding on desks. Pointing. Covering their mouths in shock and glee. I was not innocent in any of this.

I don't remember the rest of that day, but I do know that the ostracism of JW did not stop at this one event. You'd think we would have gotten over the shortness of his hair, but we never did. Pantomiming a hair clipper and making a "meeeeeeeeoooooooooooow" sound never got old, and JW never gained any kind of social purchase in our classroom or the school at large.

I think the stupidest, most hypocritical part of the whole thing is that none of us had a decent haircut either. A lot the boys had mullets, and when you look at photos of them it's easy to imagine the beginnings of the pubic 'stashes they'd grow in high school. The rest of them had long bowl cuts, the sides poofing out like earmuffs. The girls had bad, mousy versions of their own mothers' hairstyles: lopsided, feathered Farrah-dos that had long fallen out of fashion in the rest of the world, but would hang on seemingly forever in our neck of the woods.

My own hair fell into a style I want to call "The Default," the style that arises from an obvious lack of combing, washing, and cutting.

JW didn't last long at our school. I don't know why he left. It probably had something to do with his parent's profession, which I also don't know. If I met JW today, I wouldn't recognize him. In fact, if you showed me a photo of him from fourth grade, zoomed in on his face so I couldn't see his crew cut, I probably wouldn't recognize that either. I literally know nothing about him except that he had a crew cut, and that we found his crew cut intolerable.

The last time I saw JW, his father came to school to pick him up, accompanied by JW's younger brother who was about five years old. Both the dad and the little brother had crew cuts identical to JW's. That, to us, was the cherry on top of our cruel sundae.

[filepath: /journal/history]

Tue, 03 May 2011

Tech Nostalgia

So not only did I respond to Christa in that last post, but Jodi also weighed in on her blog, listing various reasons why she isn't quite ready to start reading books electronically. She makes a lot of good points, but what I want to talk about is this sentence, which really grabbed me:

I never look at Enid, my laptop, sigh dreamily, and think "wow that reminds me of a really good post I read."

About a month ago, I was searching for something online — I can't remember what — and I came across a photo of a computer that I used to own in the late 90s. It wasn't my computer, but it was the same model, an IBM Aptiva E-Series. It was just a plain, off-white tower, with a CRT monitor, ugly speakers, and a "rapid access" keyboard that had a lot of useless-but-colorful buttons that were just shortcuts to various IBM websites. The keyboard also had dedicated CD player controls on the upper-right-hand side, which was actually kind of nice.

Anyway, I saw this photo and immediately I felt a pang of nostalgia for the old machine. I've owned a lot of computers, but this one was special. I learned a lot of things from it, and did a serious amount of creative stuff on it. It was on this computer that I first learned HTML. I created not only my first website but also my first blog on it. I also wrote the code for the blog that eventually became my most successful internet endeavor to date.

I paid $150 for that computer. Its list price was something ridiculous, like $1500. But I remember getting all these deals and rebates. There was money off for buying all the components in a package. Each component had a mail-in rebate. If you signed up for internet access at the point of purchase, you'd get a huge chunk of money off. I had to shell out a lot for it at the time, but almost all that money trickled back to me eventually, which was great because I was really poor in those days.

Don't get me wrong. I don't want the damn thing back. It had a 4-gigabyte hard drive. (I have USB sticks that are way bigger than that.) The monitor broke three times. It didn't come with a CD burner, but I installed one and eventually wore it out. I still have those ugly speakers for some reason. They're in the garage. Recently someone broke into our garage, rooted around, and didn't take anything. No one wants enormous, 90s-era computer speakers. Not even me.

I don't feel nostalgic about any of the other computers I've ever owned, except maybe for my 15" G4 Powerbook, which was my first Mac and cost more than the car I was driving at the time I bought it. That computer's logic board crapped out during an electrical storm. I still haven't recovered from the loss, and dream of one day restoring it to its former glory. This is not actually feasible, since logic boards cost like $900 and are incredibly tricky to replace.

I think the hardware I use, for some reason, is capable of helping or harming my creativity. Is that stupid? I don't mean this in a superstitious way. I mean that certain machines work for me as extensions of my creative mind. There are computers I want to use to their fullest. I want to open them up and dig around inside of them. I want to fully learn how they operate. Others computers, they don't intrigue me. I don't feel comfortable with them.

When I replaced that dead Powerbook, I replaced it with a decent enough laptop that started a creative low point for me. I did almost nothing with that thing. I didn't write anything noteworthy. I didn't organize the files I saved on it. Even my music collection ended up being a mess when that was my main machine.

Some computers do it for me, others don't. It doesn't seem to have anything to do with price, or power, or the way they look. It's almost like the whole thing is trial and error.

I wish I knew the formula.

[filepath: /journal/history]

Tue, 26 Apr 2011

You haven't changed a bit

It took me at least half of my life thus far to realize that not everyone has a small indentation on the left-hand side of their hard palate, a neat little saddle-shaped groove perfectly suited for resting the tip of their tongue. I remember trying to describe that particular body part when I was a kid, and getting frustrated when no one knew what the hell I was talking about. Eventually, somewhere in my mid-20s, it struck me that this was an idiosyncrasy created by my habit of pressing my tongue on that particular spot.

Chicken, egg, etcetera etcetera. Evolution didn't put a groove there so that I'd have a place to habitually press my tongue. I habitually press my tongue there, therefore I have a groove on the roof of my mouth.

My chin has always had a strange shape to it. It's roundish on the bottom, and right where most people have a small indentation, I have a large crease. I had a lot of trouble with this crease as a young child, because when you're four years old you kind of eat with your entire face. A large crease right below your bottom lip is a great place for Spaghetti-Os sauce to lodge itself.

Anyway, I always thought this crease was hereditary, a part of my elaborate and obviously beautiful DNA makeup. Truthfully, I never gave it much serious thought because it's always been there.

The thing is, none of my relatives have this kind of a chin. Certainly no one in my immediate family has it. I can't think of any distant or mid-distant relatives who have it either. I've never seen it in any old, grainy photos of my ancestors, but then again, I've never actively looked for it there.

It's only been in the past few months or so that I've realized I created my weird chin, just like I created the groove in the roof of my mouth. I've always slept on my side in something like the fetal position. But I'd never noticed that I sleep with the first knuckle of my left hand firmly pressed against my chin. Apparently I've been doing this for four decades. Who knew?

I have all kinds of bizarre shit like this going on, and it goes way beyond the physical. Ever since I could talk and continuing into the present day, I have always misused the interjection, "Ow." Or rather, I use it both appropriately and inappropriately. Inappropriate moments I use it include: when I touch something cold, when I see something embarrassing, and when I almost drop something. This is, as far as I can tell, completely uncontrollable.

I'm not a big believer in free will. The concept doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. Sure, people change, and people are capable of changing themselves. But in my experience, people change by becoming more like their real selves.

Maybe believing that is some weird unexplainable habit of mine as well.

[filepath: /journal/history]

Tue, 12 Apr 2011

Time Traveler

When I was about ten years old, I developed what I thought was a great scientific way of discovering whether or not I'd ever get to travel through time. The way I saw it, barring anything tragic, I'd get to live way past The Year 2000. And back in the early 1980s, everyone knew that as soon as The Year 2000 hit, we'd most likely have time machines, sidewalk conveyors, and phaser guns, whatever phaser guns are supposed to be.

The plan went like this: I would simply commit a specific date, time, and place to memory. Of course, I could write this information down and keep it with me at all times if I wanted. But the best way would be to just remember it.

Let's say the date was September 24, 1983, the time was 5:45pm, and the place was my childhood bedroom. I'd simply remember these coordinates (I'm fairly certain that's how I described the information in my mind: as "coordinates") and in the future when I finally got the chance to travel through time, the first place I'd travel would be to those coordinates. The 10-year-old me would wait at that place and time for the future me to arrive. That way, I'd have confirmation -- immediate confirmation -- that someday I'd be a time traveler. The plan was foolproof.

I chose my set of coordinates, making sure to remember a time that was 20 minutes ahead of when I got the idea to commit the coordinates to memory. That way, I could sit and wait in anticipation of the arrival of Future Me.

Future Me never showed up. I found this kind of disappointing, but I shrugged my shoulders and went downstairs to watch The A-Team or something like that.

About a week or two later, I started thinking about my plan again. Too bad it never worked. It would have been nice to see Future Me last ... Tuesday? At ... was it 3:25? DAMMIT. I'd already forgotten the coordinates! No wonder it didn't work.

Clearly, memorization wasn't going to do the trick, so I'd have to write everything down and keep it in a safe place if I wanted this to work. I picked another date, time, and place. I wrote the information down on a piece of notebook paper. I waited. Once again, Future Me didn't show.

Frustrated, I threw the paper away. But wait. If I threw the paper away, then how was Future Me supposed to find it? It wasn't enough to write the information down. I would have to commit to keeping them safe and accessible for the rest of my life. That's the only way it would ever work.

So this time I wrote down the coordinates. I waited. Again, no Future Me. Still, I put the paper in a safe place where it could remain undisturbed until I needed it.

As I'm writing this, it's 2011. I'm sorry to report to my childhood self that I still do not have access to a time machine or a phaser gun. I've used sidewalk conveyors in airports, though. And I have a really cool pocket communicator that I'm sure you'd love.

I have no idea where that paper went, or what I wrote on it. It doesn't matter though. If could travel through time, do you really think I'd go visit that little freakazoid?

[filepath: /journal/history]