ATHF

Remember when the bomb squads were called in for a glowing Moonanite? I just found this entry, which I forgot to publish. I was fighting with the Red Line that day (and looking under the seats for suspicious packages like everyone else). I wrote this a few days later.

I have read a few people's blog entries on this subject and must say a word or two.

1) I feel very safe in Boston as I think our bomb squads and city authorities can and will respond quickly and successfully to bomb threats.

2) I do not trust our ability to recognize a bomb in the first place and call the bomb squad.

3) Guerilla advertising walks the line between giving me what I want (twenty-somethings promoting ATHF last year gave me free stickers and a poster. I was happy) and being very freaky (companies should not be spray-painting fake art around the city). Art for the sake of advertising drains our souls. But then again, artists have always created what their patrons told them to.

4) Boston over-reacted. Big time. I don't think a LiteBrite flipping you off is very bomb like. But where were the people in the crowd who recognized it? Did NONE of the cops know this show? HELLO? Why was it not called off sooner?

5) The company should pay up and that should be the end of it.

6) Those hired to design a company's idea should not be held responsible for the idea.

7) The two guys talking about hair were brave to flip off the reporters and stupid to put themselves in question/more trouble. Ultimately it was an interesting comment on media interaction with individuals.

8) This has not exposed a generation gap, it has exposed the difference between people who laugh when the authorities chase something silly and those who scream when the authorities have been made a fool.

Ever see Wonder Showzen? They have a game called FUNNY! NOT FUNNY!

Image of Urr, flipping us off: FUNNY!

Image of Longwood Medical Center being evacuated: NOT FUNNY!

Why can't the situation contain both? Lessons for the authorities and lessons for stupid glowing middle fingers?

Feet and Faces

This evening the better half and I received a photo album belonging to her maternal grandfather. Among pictures of his youth and of his children's youth, there were pictures from his tour during WWII. There were pictures of the liberation of Buchenwald.

There is one photo that is haunting me. It is of a stack of skeleton-like bodies. We've all seen them; there are many in the history of the holocaust. Some bodies are facing the camera, others show only their feet.

What frightens me is that I see the humanity, I wonder about the life of, the people of whom I can only see the feet. In the state of starvation at death, the toes of these people were more real and more human than their faces. Their faces are all the same, all blank, all devoid of reality. But the feet - the toes, all different, the feet of all shapes and sizes - I can picture these feet when they were a year old and they sucked on their toes and when they were five and wore their fathers' shoes and when they were twelve and scrunched their toes up in the sand of a beach with their family...

If I were a poet I would write something that captures the wrong, upside-down-ness of the feet and the faces of these people. But I am not. I cannot adequately express this feeling. I can only sit with it. And try to tell you about it.

The Hard Part

In June I graduate. I receive my bachelor's degree. I attain the goal that has been ingrained in me since the day I was born.

My question:

and then what?

My entire life I have had a structured goal. First it was learning to share and passing kindergarten. Then it was learning to read. Then math. Then doing well in middle school so that I would get into the good high school classes. Then I did well in high school so I could get into college. Then I did well in college so I could get a good job. And that is where the structure ended.

I'm having trouble grasping the idea that this is the part where I just...live. From here on out I just try to pay my bills and live. I could do anything. I'm aiming to be a teacher, though my teaching friends and family have been making me think twice about the deteriorating public school system. But I can't just start teaching this fall, I'll be too busy getting married, finding a summer job (probably the same crap I've been doing for a while, depressing as that is) and then I'll sub or get an aide job in the fall, if things work out. But I really could do anything. Which is kind of scary.

My parents didn't figure out what they wanted to do when they grew up for a long time. My father got his bachelor's around 30, my mom worked her way through junior college, college, and at forty-one years old (with two kids, mind you) decided to go to law school. That means to be like my mother I have twenty years to figure out what to be when I grow up.

There is a phenomenon in my age group that I've noticed more and more lately: we all want to be the opposite of our baby boomer parents and have a career locked in at twenty five, own a house at thirty, and have a retirement planned - itineraries for our trips to Kenya at seventy - by thirty-five. Somewhere I read about a CEO lecturer who ran into college student after college student wanting to get their whole lives in line right now. He told them to chill out. The beauty (or curse, depending on perspective) of a capitalist society is that you can have fifteen careers during your lifetime, retire and have two more part-time. You can do anything. At any time. There really is no rush.

I keep telling myself this, but I'm still frightened by the idea that I'm going to "waste" years of my life doing something that I hate or that I will never be able to retire because I didn't plan enough. My future wife is older than me and the idea of working until I'm eighty and alone is really frightening.

But I keep coming back to my friends and family who have all had a few careers apiece and are stable, financially-secure-enough, and even - get this - happy with their careers.

I will chill out.
I will chill out.
I will chill out.

Life is an adventure, and it's time that I throw my head back and scream frigging
"WEEEEE!!!"

Another Hilarious

exercise in futility.