I will never mention my gay mother in school ever ever again.
Well, little one. Welcome to the harsh, harsh world of reality. You know how Mister Rogers is a nice guy who likes you just the way you are? A lot of the world is the opposite, and they will hate you, no matter what, and they are often people who have power over you and will use it to hurt you, and there is nothing you can do about it but suck it up and wait for it to be over.
I remember the ridiculous angst in college. People agonized over the creation of a “safe space” and over whether the existence of fashion magazines made a bookstore or a home hostile towards women. I remember arguing about whether it was fair to grade class participation, because some of the students were too shy to speak up.
Toughen up. You give thinking a bad name.
I love horror stories. Not the scary-ghosts kind. The embarrassment, shame, and agony-aunt kind: Mother-in-law horror stories, health insurance horror stories, rudeness in general. It’s brilliant, and it taps into something deep in the human psyche that I can’t quite pinpoint.
Similarly, the odd news stories– like the dead man’s cell phone — get me every time. Ananova is a great source of those.
My father writes:
As I was walking down the hall between primary care and Jordan Hall today, I saw one of our graduate-students carrying a thick white book with brown lettering. I asked him whether that was “Linux in a Nutshell.” It was. I said “my son wrote that.” He looked at it, I pointed out “Aaron Weber” and his jaw dropped. He said “Cool. That’s fantastic.” So you’re a celebrity. By reflection, I am now also.
NYT on sports doping. I see people at the gym who look like they’re juicing. But for the most part, they don’t look chemically enhanced– even the ones who are obviously working out too much, or too hard, or too often.
If it were cheap and easy, I’d probably do HGH– it seems to be so risk free! So exciting! But on the whole, my money’s still on the non-speed anti-sleep drug Provigil and of course Viagra or Cialis– I don’t (yet) need or want the subtle, long-term benefits of additional HGH in my system. I imagine I may feel differently in twenty years when my body has stopped producing much of it on its own.
I get sad when I see the depths to which political discourse in this country has sunk. What the hell is this? It’s more shallow than the religious debates.
Speaking of which: the line “I like Dubya because he’s a Christian.” That’s a bullshit reason. For starters, everyone in the race but Lieberman is a Christian, and they’re all sincere religious people, I’m sure. If you really want to vote for someone who’s all about Christianity, well, Sharpton is a minister, right? Yeah, you’re just using that as a cover for what you think his Christianity stands for– a particularly smarmy, narrow-minded kind of religion that’s barely spiritual at all, that consecrates and condemns the sufferings of others while forgiving all personal mistakes as youthful indiscretions.
Grrrr. You’re more soulless than a spammer. You’re as unbalanced as a … well, as anyone else in this screwed-up work-obsessed nation.
Yet one more article about how people choose stupid names for their kids. This is the third so far. Always hot on the scene of a breaking story or the analysis of data from the last decade, that’s us. Yeah.
Meanwhile, I’ve gotten totally hooked on the show ER. Yes, the emergency-room drama that’s been going on for about eight years now. I finally noticed it and have become drawn into it. Intense emotion, real situations, and characters I actually care about. Damnit! This is television! And old-hat, jumped-the-shark-ages-ago television, at that.
I also used to think of how cool it would be to go skydiving like Chema did. The various .mx skydiving groups are running an ad-hoc online memorial, and there will be masses held for him in the DF today.
Que te vaya bien, amigo, estés dónde estés.
JBZ has a new blog up about words and weapons and their impact on society, called “Sharp Tools.” Good writer, great guy, and scary smart. I look forward to seeing more…
This is not a new story, but it’s a good take on it: people giving their kids bad, bad names. My favorite is Darvon, which you like to think is an accidental misspelling of “Devon” or something. Who knows though. And it’s long been a joke that Toyota has been stealing the names of black women for its cars, Celica and Corolla being the best examples. Of course, Corolla is actually a place in North Carolina, so there’s no reason you couldn’t be named for that, rather than for the car. But you have to wonder: are these people qualified to name their kids, much less raise them?
Secretly Ironic 
