Alternate Entry

Part One (1985-1987)

In May 1985, I visited my Dad in Montana. During my return trip to Nebraska a week later, I passed by the small "city" of Blankton (not its real name), in northern Wyoming. I was impressed by its location in a gorgeous New England-like valley that runs along the eastern edge of the Big Horn Mountains (this should make it easier for you to guess which town it is; but please don't write the name in a comment). The mountains are only two or three miles west of the town (or so it appears to my untrained eye), and they dominate the horizon. Immediately east of Interstate 90 is the desolate scrub-brush prairie (or so it seems) that is so common in Wyoming (and which I have actually grown to like). I thought the area would be a great place to live just for the sake of the scenery. During my visits to Montana over the next two years, I occasionally stopped at an excellent second-hand bookstore on Blankton's Main Street. I always enjoyed having that excuse to stop.

Part Two (1987)

In June 1987, after graduating from college, I moved to Hardin, Montana, to put my teaching degree to good use by tending bar for my dad. Foolishly, I only stayed for five months (I was restless and wanted to return to my home state of South Dakota). My dad moved to northeastern Wyoming about a year later, so I never had a reason to go as far west as Blankton again.

Part Three (1995)

In June 1995, I learned (by sheer chance) that a museum in Blankton was hiring a curator. I was fully qualified for it in every way, and I was very excited at the possibility of living in Blankton. After applying for the job, I read five Wyoming history books because I wanted to "know my stuff" if I was hired.

Of course, I wasn't hired.

Part Four (2007)

In August 2007, I applied for the position of Macintosh Technician with the Blankton Chronicle (not its real name). The job description, as vague as it was, seemed like nearly a perfect match of my former duties as a Macintosh Network Administrator in a school district here in western Nebraska. I found it hard to believe that a daily newspaper in a small "city" in Wyoming could afford the services of a dedicated Macintosh Technician, but that's exactly what the job description seemed to say. I rationalized that maybe the owners of the Blankton Chronicle also owned newspapers in several nearby towns and that I might be a traveling technician (which was perfectly OK by me). I didn't really believe it, but I rationalized along those lines anyway.

I mailed my resumé the same day that I had found the listing on the internet (August 3). One week later, I received a letter from the editor of the Chronicle informing me that the position had already been filled.

Huh? How could they have found a Macintosh Technician so quickly in sparsely populated Wyoming? Mac experts are almost as rare as wooly mammoths in this part of the country. The editor concluded by saying that he would keep my resumé on hand if the job ever became available again. For some reason, I had a feeling that I would actually hear from him some day.

Part Five (2008)

"Some day" turned out to be February 21, 2008. The editor called me that day and left a message asking me if I was still interested in the job. I called him the next morning and replied as nonchalantly possible, "Yes, I am still interested." He explained that the position had opened up again when the wife of the man that he had hired last August wanted to return to their old home in Michigan. [I guess it takes all kinds to populate the planet. Right, Kathleen? ;-)]

I asked him for a few details about the job. He said that he knew very little about technology, so he couldn't tell me exactly what I would be doing; however, he assured me that it would involve "computers only." He said I would have to get the finer details from the Mac Technician (the one that I would eventually replace in a year or two, when he retired). Naturally, I brought up my salary. I told him that it would have to be pretty respectable in order for me to move to an expensive town like Blankton (it has become quite a resort community in the past twenty years, with land selling and renting at double-ultra-premium prices, even out in the "desolate" region). He assured me that the salary would definitely be more than "entry level"; but he didn't want to say anything specific unless or until I came to Blankton for a personal inspection. I said I could to do that, and he suggested that the best time for him would be Monday, March 3. He recommended that I drive up on Sunday and stay overnight (with the newspaper reimbursing me for my motel room). I couldn't argue with that.

It seemed to take forever for the date of departure to arrive. But it finally did arrive. During the long, cold, windy (and wonderfully liberating!) drive to Blankton on March 2, I kept thinking there has to be a catch. This sounds too good to be true. I could not imagine that I wouldn't be doing some sort of newspaper work too. The problem with that scenario is the fact that I absolutely do not want to do newspaper work (ever again) because it means doing the same stuff over and over and over and over again. And the repetition would be even worse at a daily newspaper. If I had wanted that sort of work, I could have applied for several newspaper jobs already. But I haven't applied for them because I know that after the initial thrill (if any) reality would quickly set in, as it always has before, and I would suddenly realize that I will be living this Groundhog Day existence for the rest of my life. In some cases, that might not be so bad, but not if it means I have to do the same stuff -- that I never wanted to do again -- over and over and over and over again.

I arrived at 3:00 PM (my first time back in Blankton in over 20 years) and checked into the large chain motel on Main Street that the editor had recommended. I then called him, as he had requested, to let him know I was in town. He hurried to the motel to meet me. He was very friendly and outgoing (a fairly young looking age 60). He took me to the newspaper office for a quick informal look, even though it was closed for the day. We spent about five minutes there, which was just long enough to depress me.

The building was not even one-third as large as the building used by the daily newspaper here in my town in western Nebraska, even though Blankton and this town are roughly the same size, and the readership (and surrounding communities) should be roughly the same, too. Even worse, it was filled with Macs ranging in age from about 13 years old (not the majority, thankfully) to about three years old (yes, Macs just keep going and going and going, like the Energizer Bunny). I knew at least half of the computers would be running nothing newer than OS 9 (Operating System 9) -- sheesh! -- while the few newest ones would probably be running various (and probably very outdated) versions of OS X (that being the present Mac operating system). For the record, OS 9 was discontinued in about 2000. It would be an unpleasant experience going that far back in technological time as a career move. I had envisioned this scenario many times before arriving in Blankton, but had kept hoping for the best. Of course, how could I have known any of this beforehand since the editor had not seen fit to list these details in the ad or mention them to me on the phone?

The editor also finally revealed that I would be doing some layout work (probably using one of my least favorite programs, QuarkXPress) in addition to my "technical" duties. And, of course, he said there would always be tight deadlines since "this is a daily paper."

To summarize: Old computers, old operating systems, mind-numbingly repetitive layout work in a less-than-stellar environment... EXACTLY WHAT I DID NOT WANT!!

He then took me on a quick tour of Blankton, which meant nothing to me since all American towns are the same in my book. It's the people and the geographic locations that make the difference. Blankton still has a thriving main street (a rarity in this day and age), but, aside from that, it is a stereotypical American town in every other way. It has the obligatory Wal-Mart, Taco John's, Taco Bell, McDonald's, Burger King, car dealerships and a vast array of gas stations/convenience stores, etc.).

During that guided tour, I tried to remain positive about the job, thinking that it might not be as bad as it had initially looked. I had driven too far, and I had had such high hopes, that I wasn't about to give up yet, at least not out loud. I would wait to learn more from the technician on Monday.

As we were returning from our tour of the generic suburbs of Blankton, he said, "Would you like to stop for a beer? I figure it's OK to ask you that question since you say you used to be a bar tender." I replied that that would be nice. A block or two later, he parked next to a tiny cinderblock liquor store. I said, "We're stopping at a liquor store?" He replied, "No, it's a bar, but it used to be a liquor store." He said it is his regular hangout. We stepped inside the sardine-can-sized building and found that it was packed with people. Most of them were watching the University of Wyoming Cowgirls basketball team lose to Utah.** We sat down on the last two barstools in the back room. We each had two beers and visited for about an hour. He was really doing his best to talk me into taking the job by mentioning great profit sharing, etc. He said I could work for the Chronicle until retirement, which, he pointed out unnecessarily, would be in a mere 18 years. My God! Talk about finding the right words to depress and disillusion a person!!! I was still a "youngster" just ten short years ago, with women in their 20s still taking notice of me!!! ;-( Now this guy is telling me that I could, if I wanted to, have a job in a remote community (Blankton suddenly felt very remote and lonely and cold) doing the same repetitive tasks day in and day out on old technology, while rapidly advancing in age toward retirement and beyond.

After that, he dropped me off at my motel room and told me to come to the office between 8:00 and 8:30 in the morning.

I ate supper at Burger King (a couple of miles from my motel). My motel's nice restaurant was open, but it was completely empty. I didn't want to sit in there all by myself with a hostess seating me (she stood there waiting for me to come in) and a waitress grudgingly asking me "how everything is," because it's part of her job duties. After Burger King, I spent the rest of the evening in my room writing emails and checking out my usual Mac web sites. I listened to people sneezing and coughing and talking (and maybe even blinking their eyelids) through the paper-thin inner door, while nearby train whistles occasionally bleated through the paper-thin outer door. Then some rude people parked their very loud and large pickup just outside my room and let it idle for about twenty-five minutes. I angrily got up after fifteen minutes and looked out the window just in time to see them drive an even louder Harley-Davidson out of the trailer behind the pickup and pull it into the driveway of a house across the parking lot. Sigh.

In the morning, I visited with the Mac Technician. He is a nice guy (also in his 60s), although I was told there is a less pleasant side to him. I could sense that was true, but we had a nice visit. The job he was doing when I first sat down (slowly importing next week's programming content into the paper's weekly TV-guide grid) looked exactly like the assembly-line work that I was dreading, and he was doing it on the ancient OS 9 operating system. He gave me more details regarding my job and showed me a few of the haphazardly arranged collections of aging computers. Then the truth finally came out, and it confirmed what I could already see for myself as I sat there: He said, in so many words, that I would be doing mostly layout work (in QuarkXPress) with some occasional "Mac Technician" work on the side.

It was all too depressing, but I was still trying my hardest to keep an open mind because I really wanted to get away from this town here in Nebraska, and I also really liked (like) the idea of living in northern Wyoming or southeastern Montana.***

On a shallow note: When I first entered the building and was walking to the back of the large room to meet the technician, I noticed that most of the female employees of the Chronicle are perfect clones of Trinamick's infamous Wonky-Eyed Beast. Egad!! I couldn't believe my eyes! How on earth had so many of them managed to accumulate all in one place like this? It was like a scene from a science-fiction movie. I certainly wasn't looking forward to spending the last wispy vestiges of my youth (sob, sniffle) working in such an environment. Fate has made darned sure that I have had nothing but rotten luck all of my life when it comes to being in the wrong place at the wrong time with regard to women; and this was just adding major insult to major injury. Is it any wonder that I want to become a hermit?

The final straw that broke the camel's back occurred when I visited with the editor again after my visit with the technician. I'm sure he expected me to love what I saw, and he wanted me to begin negotiating my salary. But I knew he wouldn't accept what I considered to be a reasonable minimum for moving there, yet I didn't want to ask for anything less. So I remained silent, and he finally set a much lower salary than I wanted (not much more than what I am earning now at my low-level job). His salary would be considered fairly acceptable in a less expensive part of the country, but it was much too low for a region in which land not only sells, but also rents, for prices similar to what you might find in a suburb of San Francisco. It was certainly way too low for me to uproot my entire life and move to Blankton in order to take a job that I already knew I was going to hate.

The editor had been so nice to me that I didn't have the heart to tell him I was leaning toward rejecting the job offer. Oddly enough, I also still wanted to have time to think about it for a while longer because, in spite of everything, I still liked the idea of living in that area. I told him I would call him with my answer in the next day or two. I tried to keep up a positive appearance, but I know he could tell that I was very disillusioned and was apt not to accept the job (I could tell because of some of the things he said during the meeting). He reimbursed me for my motel room and gas (giving me a lot more than I thought I should get, but a friend later told me I had received the going rate). As I was preparing to leave, he said, "I thought you were going to stay another day. I was going to take you to dinner tonight." Of course, I couldn't stay another day because I had to get back to work here. Besides, I didn't want to lead him on any longer or cost him any more money. I felt guilty enough being reimbursed since I was planning to refuse the job. But it was his fault that I had driven all the way to Blankton (660-mile round trip). He could have told me all the details on the telephone, but he had chosen not to do so.

The entire drive home was beautifully sunny (but very windy once I got past the Big Horn Mountains, which seem to block the wind). I stopped frequently to take pictures with my digital camera. I felt totally free for the first time in a long, long time. Even though it is winter, and everything is brown and white, I thought the scenery was absolutely majestic, frequently unique and almost always beautiful. Several of the towns in southeastern Wyoming (after I left the interstate for the final jaunt home) are very quaint and peaceful, even if they are dying.

All the way home, I thought long and hard about accepting or rejecting the job. One minute I was determined not to take it, and the next minute I tried to convince myself how much I would like living far away in northern Wyoming, so I would rationalize that the job might be worth taking in spite of all the drawbacks. Each time, the negatives outweighed the positives, and I knew I couldn't take it.

I spent the next two days trying to drum up the courage to simultaneously let the editor down and give up my greatest opportunity (so far) to leave this town. I spent most of Wednesday morning (before going to work) trying to pick up the phone. Just as I was about ready to do so, a serious problem (caused by the stupidity of my brother) arose that needed to be fixed. By the time that was over with (which required a visit to a bank), I just had enough time to make it to work. I called the editor the next morning at 8:30 and apologized for being late and explained why. I also said I was having great difficulty because I didn't want to tell him no, yet that's what I was doing. He was very rude and unfriendly and refused to say anything to me unless it was, "Uh huh" with an angry tone in his voice. Mostly, he was completely silent and left me hanging every time I spoke. I thought that his behavior was completely immature and unprofessional for a 60-year-old man in his position of authority. It was entirely uncalled for, no matter whether I was late in making the call or not (by only half a day, technically speaking). His behavior was embarrassing for me yet also relieving because it allowed me to stop feeling sorry for him. When I said that I should probably let him get back to his work, he rudely said, "OK, see ya," and hung up without waiting for a reply.

So, had his nice act had been nothing but an act all along?

It immediately occurred to me that if he could act like that because I was backing out of a job, then he probably acts like that toward his regular employees on a regular basis. I think I may have dodged a bullet by not going to work for him.

Epilogue Ever since the editor called me on February 21, to offer me the job, I had been looking forward to the entry that I would post here announcing my new job and my new home. That's why I concluded my previous entry with this sentence: "However, if I think I see a "perfect" job opportunity coming along, I'll take it, and then let you know." When I wrote that, I had already known about the Blankton job for a week.

Never fear. I'll keep trying. ;-)

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**The fact that Wyoming's women were losing to Utah was perfectly fine by me because they had had no business beating South Dakota State University last year for the right to play in the national championship; it was SDSU's first year as a Division I school, and, with a team consisting mostly of small-town South Dakota and Minnesota girls, they had beaten most Division I schools on their schedule that year and had almost become national champions!!!

*** I would especially like to live in Montana now, since the fascist Real ID Act has been outlawed there in no uncertain terms (Montana's legislature and especially its governor are my new heroes). Wyoming is also considering outlawing it, although I can hardly trust a state that so blindly supports Adolph Cheney, or should I call him Dick Hitler? Nebraska, much to its credit and my shock, is also considering outlawing the Real ID Act, although it is probably mostly for reasons of funding rather than for the sake of freedom. My beloved state of South Dakota, which seems to have been taken over by neocons in recent years, appears not to be rejecting it at all. I guess I will never be able to live there again.

Sleeping Pill(ow)

I still remember what it was like waking up during summer vacation when I was a teenager. Most of the time, it was wonderful. After having slept all night as soundly as a hibernating bear, consciousness didn’t simply barge in and cause me to become fully awake in an instant; nor did it approach steadily, without pause, like a muffler-free Harley-Davidson that is still 27 miles away when you first hear it. No, consciousness arrived in very tiny, mild, well spaced, palatable doses. My subconscious mind had time to analyze each dose, rate its quality and decide whether or not it was worth keeping. Most of the early doses were unacceptable, of course, so I would discard them and easily return to unconsciousness and wait for the next non-threatening dose of consciousness to arrive. This well spaced stream of tiny doses helped me to prepare for full-fledged consciousness when it finally arrived. As a result, my summer days frequently started with something approaching a sense of peace and contentment.

Of course, if you are a kid during school season, or if you are an adult, it is often necessary to be awakened by an alarm clock. As terrifying as that experience is, I still prefer to the following:

A few years ago, I was living in an apartment in a town that I did not like. I was working at a job that had long since become unacceptably repetitive and monotonous to my gypsy soul. I felt trapped in that job (and that town) by the perks (great coworkers who didn’t want me to leave and very decent pay). That isolated town in the middle of nowhere might not have been so bad at any other time in my life (or if I had not been single), but I was at that point in life where one feels ones remaining youth (and the opportunities that go with it) quickly slipping away. I wanted desperately to escape.

On top of that, I had to put up with a small, seemingly insignificant problem that had more of an impact than one might imagine: I had no control over the thermostat in my apartment. Every winter, all winter long, I felt as if I was living in a dry sauna. I am a very warm-blooded person. I get warm very easily in conditions that most people (especially women) find downright cool. I sleep very poorly when it is warm. Being overly warm when I am asleep causes me to have bad dreams. The greater the heat, the worse the dream. My only option to control the heat in that apartment was to open the living-room window a little at night and let in the stingingly cold sub-zero air (it had to be the livng-room window because the bedroom window was too close to the bed). That window was a very inefficient thermostat, and that cold air was much too icy even for me. Furthermore, that cold outside air did not blend well with the hot inside air. Instead, the cold air simply replaced most of the hot air in very short order. If I opened the window only a microscopic crack, then the apartment remained hot while a bitterly cold stream of air ran through the center of all that heat (in a manner of speaking).

To make matters worse, my bed (which came with the apartment) may have had serious ergonomic drawbacks that were not noticeable to the conscious mind.

In short, my (seemingly) bleak future, the excessive heat of my apartment and that unergonomic bed all combined to ruin my sleep -- almost every night for three and a half years -- in a way that I had never experienced before. It was very annoying, to put it mildly. The fact that it never happened when I spent my weekends here in this town proves to me it was related to one or all of those problems.

I should clarify that actually falling asleep was easy. In fact, it was as easy as ever (at least since college, when I had trained myself to let go of the stress of studying and fall asleep within a given period of time). For the first few hours, I slept normally; then, almost invariably, at around 4 AM, consciousness would flood my brain as quickly and as completely as a 400-watt incandescent light bulb floods a room when you flip on the power switch. I was simply 100 percent awake -- as if I had never been asleep. Every sound in the room was instantly audible. I knew immediately that there was no going back to sleep for at least an hour or two.

I cannot put into words how terrible it was to wake up that way. Even if I woke up that way a mere five minutes before the alarm went off (which was rare), I hated it. It just felt totally unnatural and wrong. On a few occasions (it's hard to remember how many), I would not awaken in an instant. Instead, I would slowly, unendingly become aware of the fact that I was waking up (like hearing that Harley-Davidson getting louder and louder and louder). I couldn't stop it from happening, and I certainly didn't want to speed it up, so I just had to let it happen. On those rare mornings that my alarm woke me up with its terrifying nuclear-alert siren, I almost cheered. I would much rather wake up feeling the pain and exhaustion that comes with an alarm than that "instant-on" feeling that I was getting without it. Sure, I still complained bitterly every time the alarm went off because it made me immediately aware that the previous two decades of Reality had not been a mere figment of my imagination. In fact, every time the alarm went off, I sincerely uttered, "Oh God! Not THIS again!"

But at least I had awakened "normally" on those occasions, and for that I was very grateful.

Nowadays, with that job and town long behind me, I almost never -- if ever -- wake up like that. But I don't wake up pleasantly very often either, the way I did when I was a kid. Yes, consciousness arrives in relatively manageable doses, but they aren't very pleasant doses. I seldom feel physically comfortable during the waking-up process. I also feel as if I have a headache that will only go away when I get up (but maybe the latter is simply because I need better pillows). Society has also trained me to feel irresponsible if I don't hop out of bed immediately. Did I say "trained me"? I meant "ruined me."

Making matters worse are the cold winters and four spoiled-rotten cats, three of whom invariably need to sleep right up against me like doorstops -- on top of the covers. As you might guess, this not only makes things even hotter, but it also prevents me from being able to roll over or move in either direction to the reach cooler parts of the sheets. But even if they weren't sleeping right next to me, the cooler sheets are usually too cold to touch, so I don't move around much anyway. Then there is the matter of the extra blankets that I need when I first go to sleep but which are too hot by about 2 or 3 AM. That's usually when the excessive heat and the unpleasant dreams wake me up. Since I am hot, I need to change positions somehow and throw off the extra blankets, but I don't want to move too much and disturb the cats (yes, I'm a pushover). I do what I can and then try to go back to sleep, but it isn't easy. I lie there, trying to retain some sort of grasp on my sleepiness through the power of suggestion. If I lie there too long with my ears wide open, full consciousness may strike, and it will be a struggle to fall asleep again (for some reason, hearing seems to play a huge role in thinking too much).

But there is a solution.

In the early 1980s, the only way for me to drown out the noise of a chirping cricket (one of the most grating sounds on earth to my brain) was to turn my head to one side so that my bottom ear was buried in the pillow. I also had my shoulder under the pillow pressed up against my ear. Then I grabbed another pillow and put it over my head and pressed it down on my other ear. If the cricket wasn't too close, that worked. If it was too close, I would have to get up and spray about 15 square yards of territory with Raid (I wasn't very skilled at locating them yet in those days ;-) in an effort to put it out of my misery. Eventually, the pillows frequently became ineffective because I couldn't help but imagine that I was hearing the cricket anyway (I also couldn't relax knowing that a rude and inconsiderate cricket might go "unpunished" ;-). So I just got used to getting up and spraying them and getting it over with. For some reason, in the late 1980s and 1990s, I generally had an easy time falling asleep again almost immediately. Therefore, the pillow tactic fell by the wayside.

Then I landed in that bad bed, in that sauna-like apartment, in that miserable town. I was forced to try the pillow tactic again. It didn't work very often there because there were too many problems to overcome. Lately, I've started using the sleeping pill(ow) tactic again after I wake up smothered by hot blankets and spoiled cats (that sleep nearly as deeply as hibernating bears at night). With those pillows blocking out most of the world, not only do I fall asleep again almost right away, I sleep as soundly as I did when I was a kid, and I wake up almost as peacefully and contentedly as I did when I was a kid..., until I remember I am not a kid. Then I think, "Oh, no! Not this middle-aged crap again!"

Anyway, the pillow tactic allowed me to wake up yesterday morning more relaxed and comfortable and at (TEMPORARY) peace than has been the case in a long time. For a while, even Reality and the remembrance of this annoying aging process couldn't spoil my peaceful frame of mind. Today was OK, but the phone rang a single time at 7 AM and woke me up. The fact that I remained relatively relaxed and somewhat at peace after it rang is a testament to the sleeping pill(ow).

Anniversary Gift

I've been very busy for the past week putting together a 50th-anniversary gift for my uncle and aunt. I've barely been online in all this time. I knew I would get distracted if I did.

Since 1998, I've scanned about 4,000 family photographs in my free time. Yes, that's a lot of photographs. If you are ever of a mind to do something like that, it really helps not to have a life. Luckily, I have been so blessed.

It also helps to have lots of old family photographs, but especially to have relatives who have even more old family photographs than my family has. I have actually taken several thousand photos myself since the 1970s, but I didn't include them in my gift. My aunt and uncle wouldn't care about most of those.

Hundreds of the family photos with which I have been working date back to about 1905 through the 1920s. Hundreds more date from the 1940s through the 1960s. Those are the ones that will be going to my uncle and aunt.

In the past year and a half, I have scanned almost 2,000 photos from the collections of two aunts and one great aunt, with about that many still remaining to be scanned from the great aunt's collection. Until last week, I had kept them in separate folders, so I wouldn't get confused. In order to put this gift together, I finally put them all in one folder and spent the last week organizing them and sorting them chronologically (the best that I could), using many different methods of detective work. I found and deleted a number of duplicates. That's not as easy to do as it may seem. Many of those duplicates had different dates on them. One aunt might have mistakenly dated a photograph as 1955, while the other dated it as 1952, so they were quite a distance apart in the folder. Or else duplicates were printed a few years later, and the developing studio would put 1928 on the photos, even though they may have been taken in 1921. It took a lot of searching and heavy use of the amazing indexing/searching/"weeding" capabilities of my Mac operating system to locate them.

I just finished this evening, a few hours too late to get the nine CDs in the mail to them before they head out on an anniversary vacation. It is extremely difficult to time a project as big as this one was. Thinking of it at the last second didn't help either. Oh well, there will be over 1,700 photos waiting for them when they return home. My uncle (my dad's brother) is a big history and "family memories" nut, just as I am, and just as my dad was, so I know he will be having a lot of fun for a while. So will my aunt since almost half of the photos were taken after their marriage in 1956.

My uncle has probably never seen most of the photos from before his birth because most of them came from my great aunt's collection (she should have been a famous photographer; she was way ahead of her time, as far as creativity and subject matter go). There are also many photographs from his sisters' collections that show him as a child and young adult, and he may not have seen many of those since the era in which they were taken.

One nice thing: When I was a kid growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, my relatives got together for a lot of holidays and usually always had a wild time. I have tons of cousins about the same age as I am, so we always had a blast too. Many times, all the different families took pictures at these get-togethers. My parents might have taken fewer than anyone else, or they may have taken more than anyone else. It just depended on the situation and our level of income at a given time. As a result, there have been many photographs in my family's collection that were confusing to me. I grew up looking at them and wondering which get-together is shown in them (the same is true of photographs from before I was born). My parents were famous for never writing on the backs of their photos, so I couldn't tell. Luckily, my aunts' collections include photos of these same events, and there are dates on them. In putting them all together in one collection, I have been able to ID many photographs for the first time since I was a kid. There is some satisfaction in that -- at least for oddballs such as myself.

The Difference

Emotionally and psychologically, what is the difference between a 28-year-old turning 45 and a 44-year-old turning 45? Absolutely none. It feels like a terrible injustice in either case.

No, it's not my birthday, or anything. I just thought of that for no particular reason.

Darned Light Bulb Burned Out

I didn't realize how difficult it would be to maintain this diary when I first started it. It might have been a bit easier if the events in my life were more significant than, say, deciding whether to put one or two spoons full of sugar on my Corn Flakes every morning, or whether to walk in clockwise or counterclockwise circles afterward; but they haven't been.

My life used to be interesting. Some day in the not-too-distant future, it may become interesting again (relatively speaking) -- although it will never again be what it once was (if I do say so myself). If it eventually improves one percent, or even three percent, I guess I'll count that as a positive event.

That being said, I'm not a big fan of the aging process. For me, looking on the bright side, as far as the future goes, is like waiting patiently for the band on the Titanic to play my favorite song.

For eleven months now, I have put a fair amount of pressure on myself to write these diary entries, even though subject matter is scarce. As you can see, I haven't been very successful (there are also a lot of bungled entries cluttering my hard drive). If I were a gifted prolific writer, as some of you are, this would be easy. But I'm not. Writing well, for me, is hard work (even this entry is causing me a lot of trouble). For some time now, I've realized that I should be focusing all that hard work on my favorite offline projects, the ones that have been important to me for as long as I can remember. They have suffered severely in the past few years. Therefore, I believe it's time for me to take an official break from this online diary stuff for a while (my many unofficial breaks in recent months were spent trying to write entries, so they don't count). Only time will tell if this official break is permanent. Presently, I have no idea.

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I will leave you with the following thought: Shortly after writing the above four paragraphs last night, I watched Finding Neverland, starring Johnny Depp. If you want to know the sort of inspired character I used to be -- the sort of inspired writer I used to be -- watch that movie. It will tell you more about me than I could ever hope to do in my own words.

If I Were to Guess...

How many of you have seen an episode in a TV series (no particular series) in which a group of good-hearted kids has an encounter with an angry old recluse, or hermit? Most of you? Good. In such shows, there is always one kid in the group who decides to befriend the hermit in order to show him that the world is really a magical, wonderful place. The hermit only wants to be left alone, but the kid won't give up. Finally the hermit has to surrender to the kid's persistence, mostly because the show is almost over, and the audience needs a neat conclusion to a formulaic plot.

When I was a kid, I always rooted for the kid to teach the hermit a lesson in happiness. As a child (and even in adulthood) I befriended my share of cantankerous elderly people, usually with the same goal in mind. Then one day, when I was in college, I think -- and a bit more experienced on the unpleasantness of life --, I was watching yet another "kid-befriends-angry-hermit" program (obviously a popular plot line in Hollywood). As the naive kid (a girl in this episode) tried to befriend the world weary old hermit, I suddenly had a premonition: "I bet I'm going to be one of those angry old hermits some day. If that turns out to be the case, then there is no way some kid is going to feed me a line about how wonderful the world is. Hermits (the non-insane kind) usually become hermits for very good reasons."

It turns out I was right. Every once in a while, and in spite of my not being a senior citizen yet (thank gosh), the hermit in me struggles to take over. I do my best to resist, but I don't always succeed (living in this town hasn't helped matters, either). For the past few days, I've been in my hermit phase (although not in an angry way), and it is a struggle trying to keep in touch with the world, including all you DiaryLanders and Bloggers. Every once in a while, in both the past and the present, one of you will "drop by" and try to drag me out of my isolation. My instincts are to say, "Shoo!" and "Scat!" but I know it would do no good. :-)

So I guess I will honor katm6's request and try to dredge up something insightful for this entry. By the way, she is new a new reader of my diary, and she found me without any help from me! I also have to thank her for "stopping by in person," so to speak, to check up on me. She is pretty persistent (just like one of the kids in the analogy above :-), pretty entertaining and very kind with her compliments.

OK... So... Ummmmmm... Let's see...

? ?

Well, dang. I can't think of anything to write about.

What was the last exciting thing to happen to me that I haven't already described in detail? Let me think... Well, there was this girl in 8th grade...

Too long ago? Well, not much happens to hermits, you know. :-)

OK, then, what was the last boring thing to happen to me that I haven't already described in detail? Well, there was this... Nah, I couldn't do that to you.

The Truth (not that the above isn't true, too; because it is... mostly)
One of the reasons that you haven't heard from me in a while is because I was in South Dakota for almost two weeks and returned last Friday afternoon (July 8). This time I made the trip to see if I could qualify for a particular job (it will be quite a while before I hear from them). I stayed with relatives for a week and lazed about visiting and talking and visiting -- and drinking too, while talking -- and that was about it. I also collected more old family photographs from one of my aunts to scan into the family history. The last time I was there, she was in the process of moving, so she wasn't able to find all of her photos. After she had finished moving, she found the box that contains the really old photos (some going back to almost 1900 -- one even earlier than that), and I now have them and will soon be scanning them. [Side note: Genealogy is very addictive once you get into it. It requires a lot of detective work (much of it on the internet), which is definitely the fun part. It is fun even when I do it for other people. Some of you might want to give it a try sometime. I think you will be pleasantly surprised.]

After saying good-bye to my relatives, I spent two days in one of my old home towns in central South Dakota visiting an old classmate and his mother (she lives across the street from him -- "Thaaat's right..." :-). Actually, she was sort of a second mother to me for a few months when I was a senior in high school (I'll write about it sometime). It was the first time I had been back there in several years and just missed the town's centennial celebration by one day. Strangely enough, I wasn't in the mood to see anyone else while I was there. This makes me wonder if I have finally lost touch with the "magic" that I used to feel when I lived there, or whenever I visited my friends there in the past. The depressing part is that it didn't depress me to feel that way.

During the final two days of the trip, I stopped in the town here in western Nebraska where I used to work for the school district. A state agency there had purchased a new Macintosh and wanted me to transfer all the files from the old computer (the lady who received the computer is the wife of a teacher who knows me). I thought it would be as easy as it always is, and it was; however, they didn't tell me that it also had to be connected to an ancient network with an ancient server (a server for two computers! talk about overkill). After ten hours of work (requiring an unexpected overnight stay) they are now computing with much greater ease than ever before. I showed them that they could abandon the server completely, as well as a Windows computer that some bureaucrat had mistakenly told them they needed for certain work, but that bureaucrat was completely wrong).

After finally returning home last Friday, I logged onto the internet for a few minutes (I wasn't able to do on a regular basis while visiting my relatives). I was too tired to do very much at that time, though (my car's air conditioning had not worked at all during the entire trip, so I was very, very tired from too much heat). When I tried to log on again later that evening, my internet company had had a malfunction, which they didn't get fixed for three days; therefore, I couldn't even check DiaryLand to see what you people had been up to; nor could I let you know that I had not abandoned you permanently. On Monday, I went to a local non-profit genealogy place (I think I've mentioned it before), where the owner -- a friend -- lets me connect to his wireless network with my PowerBook. Waiting for me was a very nice message from katm6 (mentioned above), in which she informed me that I had been tagged by Clarity25 on July 6. Due my having been away and the internet malfunction at home, I had not known this. Once again, I am amazed. Out of eleventy-hundred people in her favorites, Clarity selected me!

As for my having been tagged with that particular survey: After reading Clarity's and Eric's answers, I am somewhat intimidated. Their answers are excellent and mirror my own in most cases (not the excellent part, just the "gist" part). Eric's comment on patriotism is practically identical to what I would have written, except that he says it so much better and in far fewer words. And to think: He wrote his comments in English! His second language! How can I compare to that?

Now, for that survey:

This isn't the sort of survey at which I normally excel, so I hope you will forgive me if my comments are a bit weak.

1.) Cell phones - I agree completely with Clarity with regard to cell phones; however, I don't want to copy her comments, so I will go in another direction: I got my first cell phone in early 2002. If it had not been for the constant pestering by friends and family who wanted to call me all the time, I would never have done so (then, when I got it, very few of them ever called me). It had been three years since I had last had a telephone of any type. The lack of a phone had been unintentional at first, but then it became incredibly refreshing not to hear that thing ringing all the time (oops, there's some of my hermit tendencies surfacing). I wish I had never gotten it. For the first two years that I had it, it seemed that every call involved bad news. I came to dread hearing the thing ring (even more than I dreaded hearing the regular phone ring back in my "soul mate" days); and I still cringe when I hear that irritating "ring," even though there has been no bad news for quite some time. I just wish someone with whom I would really enjoy visiting would call me sometime.

As for this popular movement to ban people from talking on cell phones in cars, I find that a bit silly. If they ban them, then they should also ban passengers and radios. Just think about it. When a passenger is sitting next to the driver, the driver is not only carrying on a conversation, but he or she is also constantly looking at the passenger during said conversation. Tell me how a cell phone is worse than that. As for radios, how many of us have looked up at the road and wondered how long it had been since we had last paid attention to our driving?

2.) SUV's - Now that gas prices are criminally high, I don't feel even the slightest bit sorry for those people who bought giant vehicles for the shallowest of reasons (or for the mere sake of convenience if they used their kids as an excuse to buy big). They get what they deserve (no offense to any DiaryLanders who bought big ;-). This goes triple for the companies that manufacture these monstrosities (even more so since they've outsourced thousands of jobs to third-world countries). These companies have had ample opportunity in recent years to be mass producing hybrid (gas/electric) vehicles, as well as vehicles that run on other alternative fuels, such as hydrogen (my personal favorite); but they were lazy and greedy and probably in cahoots with the oil companies.

3.) Return to the Eighties - It was in that decade that shallowness, coldness, rudeness [...] became trendy, and it has gotten progressively and dramatically worse since then. In general, though, I don't think of decades in terms of national and international trends or fads. I think of them with regard to my own life and what I would do if I could go back for a "do over." I've been trying for many months to write an entry about a "do over," but it has proven impossible to find the right words.

4.) Patriotism - The following two quotes echo my sentiments for the most part:

"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others, because you were born in it." - George Bernard Shaw

"Patriotism. To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography." - George Santayana

There is another very long editorial, which I may post sometime if I can find out if the copyright has expired (it was published in The Ladies Home Journal -- of all places -- in July 1916). It states the idea of true patriotism better than anything I have ever read before.

5.) Buffy the Vampire Slayer - I've only seen bits and pieces of it, but it was more than enough to say, "Yuck!" every time I see it. What more can I say about it? I have always hated horror movies, so why on earth would I want to watch a show about a teenage girl fighting vampires, and other evil demons?

6.) Reality TV - It is an absolute embarrassment to humanity. It exemplifies the shallowness, coldness and rudeness that has become so trendy since the 80s. Sadly, since that crap is so cheap to produce, and people inexplicably like it so much, it won't be going away anytime soon.

A "Successful" Immunity

I have been struggling for some time now to express myself in this online journal, but I am filled with a certain degree of emotional emptiness, a condition that is very counterproductive when one is trying to bare ones soul via the written word. As I thought about my predicament, I remembered something I had written on August 21, 1994. It was only half true at that time. Now it is entirely true:

"In the continual evolution of the human soul, one does not fully realize — until it hits — just how wrong life can actually go. I have realized for some months now that I can sweep all past miseries and pains away as if they never existed. That bothers me because they were at least the miseries and pains of a living person, who thought of them as permanent, yet poetic, obstacles, to be battled with creative enthusiasm. This thing, however, this nothingness that I am now experiencing is so horrible that I can barely treat it with enough interest to write plainly about it.

"Much of the horror lies in the fact that I have fallen out of youth (relatively speaking). The rest lies with my belief that I can do nothing to overcome such an obstacle.

"...Probably the saddest thing, though, is that there is no magic left in the world that moves me. Even if I see it with my own eyes, it fails to move me."

Lately, I find myself almost wishing to become involved in another unpleasant relationship, simply so that I can feel alive again on the inside.

The Other Side of the Fence

A young, married diarist wrote an interesting entry the other day. In it, she admits that she is occasionally curious about the color of the grass on the single side of the fence. She's not the first married person to be afflicted with that same curiosity. In fact, I think the majority of them experience that curiosity. I've met and debated the issue with quite a few married people. For what it's worth, here is my two-cent opinion about the grass on this, the single side of the fence. Are you ready?

It stinks. It's miserable. It's a lot of show and no substance -- and sometimes there's not even any "show" (the young diarist described grass on the single side perfectly as astroturf).

Single life is lonely. [I would type that sentence in size billion typeface, if I could, but then you'd be scrolling to China to reach the rest of this story.]

Really, really lonely.

Really.

You could have fifty friends with whom you get together at least once or twice a month to visit and have parties (that was the case with me until I moved recently), but, since most of those friends are married, the visits frequently tend merely to accentuate your loneliness in the end. All societies are centered on the institution of marriage. The longer some people remain unmarried, the lower their self-esteem goes. It cannot be helped. You eventually begin to imagine that people (even other single people) are looking at you as if there is something wrong with you, because you cannot find someone to marry. In order to avoid their seemingly judgmental gaze, you start to avoid them, thus increasing your sense of loneliness even further.

[For the record, I'm not some homely misfit who never stood a chance with people in general, or women in particular. I have been (was?) quite the opposite for most of my adult life.]

Some of you may be convinced that you would never suffer from loneliness if you were single. While it may be true that some college-age singles (or those a year or three beyond college) are generally not lonely, it becomes more and more unavoidable as you get older. Why? Because it takes more than just you to tango.

It goes something like this:

As a single person, you might as well accept the fact that your friends, one by one, are going to get married as the years pass (usually within only two or three years of one another). As married people, they will give you fewer and fewer opportunities to get together with them. Their spouses and children will come first (as it should be), and TV (also known as mindless relaxation after an exhausting day of work and family) will come second. Once or twice a month, their consciences may get the better of them, and they will invite you to their houses for supper or drinks. However, sixty percent of their activities during your visit will be devoted to domestic issues (arguments, crying children, meal preparation, phone calls, etc.). You will soon feel as if you are really nothing more than a court-appointed charity case who is being given a free meal and a cursory visit in order to ease your friends' guilty consciences.

I can hear some of you now, saying that this won't happen to you. You'll just be sure to meet new, single friends. That sounds good in theory; but it is difficult in practice. You will soon realize that most adults your age, even the billions of adults that you don't know, are either blissfully engaged or stoically married. And, worst of all -- EASILY THE VERY WORST OF ALL -- when you reach the age of 30 (at nearly the speed of light when viewed in hindsight), the "younger" crowd, the crowd you most closely identify with, the crowd that proudly called you one of their own just a few years earlier, will look at you as if you are out of your mind for even thinking of trying to associate with them. Since you don't feel 30 (every single 30-year-old feels as if he or she is still 21), this unfair banishment will hurt like hell. You will eventually find yourself sitting on a barstool in your favorite young-adult bar, visiting with the extremely busy 22-year-old bartender (who is only humoring you because he or she is paid to do that). Soon you won't have the heart to return to that scene anymore, unless you are a glutton for punishment, or are considering the benefits of becoming a lonely old alcoholic (I am neither a glutton for punishment, nor a lonely old alcoholic, although I sometimes weigh the pros and cons of becoming the latter).

A few of you may be lucky enough to meet another single adult (someone just like yourself) with whom you can kill time (for time killing is what it really boils down to); however, single adults are extremely rare. Don't hold your breath while waiting to run into such a person. Also, don't think that they are magically going to make your single life worth living just because they are single too. You'll just end up being unhappy together.

You could continue to date single adults your own age; however, they are even more rare than single friends (this odd fact seems to be an unusual variation of Murphy's Law). On those few occasions that you are lucky enough to date someone, you may wake up one day to the realization that you are "recklessly" tap dancing on that slippery slope that leads to the vertical precipice overhanging marriage, which would defeat the purpose of living that single life that you are admiring from afar. Wouldn't it? :-)

Finally, there is a fourth choice: You could hang out with people who are still single because they are the most pitifully hopeless social misfits on earth. They are more common in our society than "normal" single people. And don't be too sure that you are skillful enough to avoid them. They don't always look like pitifully hopeless social misfits at first. Many of them put on a good show just long enough for you to show a passing interest in them. Once you've done that, you're trapped -- unless you heartlessly tell them to leave you alone (which I cannot do; so, therefore, I have finally decided to live the life of a virtual recluse).

As you may have concluded by now, everyone basically has two choices in life, both of which lose a lot of their luster with time: remaining single or getting married. Based on my years of observations of married couples, as well as on my personal experience with single life, I believe that married life is the vastly preferable choice, even with its large list of drawbacks.

Before concluding this commentary, I must make one clarification: Remaining single, even with all of its drawbacks, is vastly preferable to one particular type of marriage. That type is the one in which someone gets married just for the sake of being married. I would rather live a terribly lonely single life than one in which I "just settled" for the next available woman (I trust that it is unnecessary to explain why this is so). Since graduating from high school (and college, too, for that matter), I have had more opportunities to "just settle" than I care to remember (and a few opportunities in which I would have been ecstatic to be with certain women, but I was too stupefyingly chicken to approach them). I was always too kind hearted to hurt a woman's feelings by breaking up with her (if the attraction wasn't mutual), so I very foolishly passed up on a lot of dating opportunities. I was always worried that I would remain too kind hearted to one of these women all the way up to the point where the preacher says, "And you may now kiss the bride."