Stone Tower

Sent Me Off to Kill the Yellow Man

Why has no one in the political realm ever sat down and actually listened to Born in the USA?  Seriously, just try to catch one verse before you burn the CD and hand it to the guy running the PA.  It's worth the extra effort, trust me.  At the very least do a wiki search or something! 

Watching patriotic supporters wearing glee-filled smiles and waving little flags as they sort of sing along with Bruce in a crowded auditorium has been one of my pet peeves for years.  It's bad enough when it's some old guy up there (Bobby Dole, looking in your direction), but last night, watching the relatively young, hip Obama crew was a new low.

I mean some songs are supposed to be on the subversive side.  There is a fun vibe when the 'rents--do we still use that term, kids?--just completely miss the point (Dancing with Myself, nodding in your direction with my eyes closed).  And there is also sometimes an artistic vibe when the real point of the song is sort of muddled beneath the lyrics unless you listen very, very closely (Sublime's Wrong Way, <cough> <cough>).  And sometimes an intentionally nonsensical song is grafted onto some imagined meaning the likes of which only Snopes.com can save us from (I Think I am Turning Japanese, anyone?).

While many songs fit into these categories, Bruce Springsteen's Born in the USA is not one of them.  There is nothing subtle, hidden, or metaphorical about the unfortunate draftee in the song.  His repeated cry of having been "born in the USA" is not an enthusiastic cheer.  It's a bitter, enraged curse filled with regret, pain, and anger that denigrates into unintelligible, anguished wailing by the outro.

But keep on singing along, blond thirty something delegate from Vermont, with your blinking, red white and blue LED necklace and little flags waving in the air.  Obama was born in the USA too!  Woo!  No way, no how, no McCain!

I should point out--just in case you were worried that I was turning the Tower into some bitter political blog--that aside from those three minutes, I really enjoyed watching the DNC this week.  I don't think I've ever been honestly excited about a candidate before, so it's been kind of cool to get caught up in the pep rally of the DNC.  While there were plenty of minor cringe inducing moments during the speeches that reminded me that I am not quite a democrat, there were enough other moments to outweigh them--and to remind me that <EDDIEVEDDER>I sure as hell ain't no republican neither</EDDIEVEDDER>.

My complaints in this post are not really political, but simply coming from my standpoint as a writer and as a music fan.  Although, I guess it could have been worse.  One of the staffers could have decided to get the crowd dancing by blasting Brown Sugar instead.

I Suddenly Feel So Less Alone

I am sure I am a little late to this, but I stumbled on to this song tonight.  In following a strange, meandering path of links I ended up at Jonathan Coulton's website where I got to hear his song Code Monkey.  Minutes later iTunes was diligently downloading it (and three of its cousins) for my listening enjoyment.  I believe I have a new favorite song.

Without getting all Emo, I really needed the kind of smile this song put on my face tonight.  It really captures how I feel 75% of my day...I didn't think anyone else quite got that.  I foresee much quiet giggling at work for the rest of the week.

I know this is sort of a non-post, but I hope to get back to things here soon.  For now, Patent Monkey like Cool Ranch Doritos and 20oz bottles of Coke...

The True Meaning of New Years Eve

Growing up, New Years Eve was always a night where the rules seem to disappear. More than any other night of the year, I just have memories of that night being oddly liberating and all above-the-law. It probably has something to do with it being the one night of the year children are actually encouraged to stay up past midnight and--gasp!--make as much noise as possible.

For several years my "god-cousin" Amy (my godmother's kids and I came up with this term to define our relationship to each other) hosted a New Years Eve sleep over. The invite list would invariably be about a dozen of her "bestest" girlfriends, her brother--who was about a year older than me--my sister, and me. So if you do the math, that became more than a dozen grade school girls and two oddly out of place boys, all chaperoned by one very tired woman. Back then I could never understand why she seemed so frazzled and out of it by two in the morning as she was struggling to get us into bed. Wasn't she having as much fun as we were?

Drama always seemed to fill those sleep overs. Jonathan (Amy's brother) and I would enact our yearly competition to prove once and for all that boys were in fact better than girls. At least two of the girls would breakdown crying at some point and attempt to call home--attempts that were usually thwarted by Jonathan's Mission-Impossible-like removal of the mouthpiece transceiver from the house's only phone. And if you've never made Jiffy Pop on a gas stove and had the aluminum foil pan burst into flames...well, then you just haven’t had a real childhood.

There were other years where I got to stay at my grandparents all alone--well, except for my sister who would be snoring away in the guest room by nine--while the adults went out and did whatever it was that adults got dressed up in fancy clothes to do. I'd stay up well past midnight, watching the Three Stooges marathon on WSBK TV38, sneaking illicit peeks at the rated-R movies on HBO, and eating myself sick on the snacks and pizza my grandmother would leave for me.

The next morning I'd awake to find a stash of paper horns and plastic noise makers in a pile on the kitchen table. My sister and I would watch TV quietly in the living room until everyone got up, and then pester them for details on their night. We'd have a fancy dinner in the afternoon to celebrate the new year, and gradually life--complete with all its rules--would return to normal.

As I grew up into adolescence, the magic of New Years Eve seemed to dissipate. For whatever reason, the night became less about finding something for the kids to do than finding a way to include the kids in a family event. This changed the night into just another holiday, and I was a little sad to see it go.

I remember this most the New Years Eve of 1993. I was a freshman in college that year and had been invited to no less than three parties that night--including one at one of the unofficial frats off campus. Instead, though, I found myself in the back seat of my dad's Ford Explorer, driving up to have dinner at my uncle's place in Derry, NH. I was--I think understandably--less than thrilled with the plans for the evening.

My mom and I exchanged some words on the way up. I let her know how I was far too old for these silly family things, and she put me in my place in that practiced way she had. Nothing unusual really, but the fight made me realize for the first time just how much things were beginning to change. We made our peace in time to sit in my uncle's condo and eat chips and dip, and then later Chinese food from paper plates as we all sat around his big screen to watch Dick Clark. It was just another night, really.

This year I find myself celebrating New Years Eve back in the tradition of my childhood. As I write this, I've been off of work for nearly two weeks--a consequence of the holidays falling on Tuesdays this year combined with a nice backlog of vacation hours. Kim, Erin, and I have really just spent that time relaxing. It's been several days of sleeping late, way too much pizza, and a perhaps sickening amount of family fun--and a little non-family fun thrown in where Kim and I could manage it.

It's been a wonderful vacation, but tonight really marks the end of it. Tomorrow night I'll have to go to bed at a reasonable hour and get ready to get back to it. No more fun concerts, late nights drinking, or watching reality show marathons in our pajamas all day. I'm not really sad, to be honest. I'm ready for a new year, and the year's worth of challenges I've set out for myself (I'll stop short of listing a pile of "resolutions" here, don't worry). This time off has been a perfect way to recharge the engines, and now I am anxious to get back to it.

I guess what's really striking me today is what New Years Eve has meant to me over the years. I hadn't realized it, but this break from the rules on those years was such a well needed moment for me. Perhaps in a strange way I have learned the true meaning of New Years Eve this week.

It's not how drunk you get, really. It's how much fun you have once you are drunk...or something like that.

"Mark, why does life have to suck so bad?"

"Hey, Jay, you know that girl Ally?"

"From work?"

"Yeah."

"I guess, what about her?"

"I think I'm going to ask her out."

"What?"

"I'm going to ask her out, like to the movies or something."

"You're just going to walk up to her and ask her out? Just like that?"

"Yeah...why?"

A few minutes of stunned silence pass.

"Dude," is all I can manage for a reply.

Perhaps I should set the stage here a bit. My best friend Mark and I were about a month shy of our eighteenth birthdays when that conversation took place, driving around in his burgundy '87 Oldsmobile (pre-Nirvana stickers) to nowhere in particular. We both worked at the local supermarket (I had gotten him the job there a few months before) that year as we started our first semester at Merrimack College. Between passing each other in the quad and bagging groceries together thirty hours a week--to say nothing of our frequent propensity to ditch class together--we had sort of become inseparable.

The girl he was talking about, Ally, was one of the new cashiers at the supermarket. Every fall a new batch of high school juniors would come in to replace the group that had left over the summer to go away to college. A few of us, Mark and I included, stayed at home, though, to become veteran front end workers. I, myself, was an assistant head cashier--and was still young and foolish enough to believe that was cool. Eh, that's another story entirely, though.

Anyway, Ally was pretty cute. She was tall with chestnut brown hair and a slightly squeaky, Boston accent heavy voice that was incredibly endearing in 1993...but by 1995, as it would turn out, significantly less so. She was also one of those people with an overly outgoing personality, and she dressed like she was on her way to interview for a legal secretary position...in a sexy Leah Remini kind of way. And she'd talk to everyone she saw (which tended to hurt her items-per-minute numbers--and again 1993 me was actually enough of a tool to think that mattered to someone) and was something of a toucher.

"Jay!" she'd say, clasping my forearm with both of her tiny, ring covered hands, "I screwed this up! I ran this guy's milk in twice. I am so embarrassed!"

"It's okay, Ally," I'd say, reaching into my pocket with my free hand for the register key, "I can just void it out."

"I'm so sorry, sir," she'd tell the customer, patting him apologetically on the arm. "I'm new!"

Mark wasn't really a loser or anything, but at the time Ally seemed ridiculously out of his league. To be honest, though, any girl seemed out of our league back then. We were probably just being overly self conscious (or perhaps I should say he was, my self consciousness was in many ways justified--did I mention that I considered holding those register keys a point of pride?), but that night when he told me his plans to just walk up and ask this cute girl out I thought he had lost his mind.

Jump forward about three days.

"Hi Jay!" Ally's chipper voice calls to me from across the checkout area.

I look up to see Mark coming through the automatic doors with Ally happily hugging his arm the entire way. As they walk over to where I am bagging some faceless customer's order, Mark wears the triumphant expression of a man who has just taken his first steps into a larger world (they had just come from an innocent night at the movies--don't get too far ahead of me here, kids.)

"So we're dating now, is that okay?" Ally asks me, giggling.

"Um...I guess so."

"I mean Mark's your best friend and all, right? So I just want to make sure you like me. You like me, right? We have fun when we work together, right? I just don't want--"

"I like you, I like you!" I tell her, probably over packing a cheep plastic bag with cans. "It's totally fine."

"We're just picking up Katie," Mark tells me, his voice strangely two octaves cooler. "What time do you think she'll be getting out?"

This was code. I was technically in charge of the front end (I was the assistant head cashier, after all. It's a wonder Ally wasn't hanging off my arm, huh?) My pal was basically asking me to send Katie, Ally's best friend, home early. This was a bad idea. Katie was on until close, which meant she was there to help with cleanup before the rest of us went home. Sending her home now would put us one girl short for breakdown--keeping the rest of us there late and adding to the "hour overages" my boss was always complaining about.

"Let me check the window sheet," I said, tossing a final bag onto the faceless customer's carriage and likely squishing his loaf of bread in the process.

I sent her home. I knew I was sending her home before I even started to count how many girls I had on for the night. That's just guy code. Your pal needs to look cool in front of his new girl, you do what it takes. It's not like it's on my resume or anything that I had all of us there until 10:30 that night trying to catch up.

From that day on, things changed drastically. My best friend had a girlfriend. Up until that point, my entire experience with the dating world started and ended with reruns of Saved By the Bell. But now here was a guy I knew, with a girl, all because he had just walked up and asked her. I wasn't exactly cruising the strip on Saturday nights, but I was looking at the world a little differently. Maybe pretty girls weren't so unapproachable after all...

It wasn't all good news, though. For the next several weeks, I pretty much never saw Mark. I understood, and was honestly just happy for him. As I said, Ally was pretty cute, and, as it turns out, was not averse to letting my pal slide into second on a regular basis. Besides, I had plenty going on myself. My classes were going well, I had joined the theater group at school, and there seemed no end in sight to my supermarket career. There was even a stage crew girl from school who--thanks to Mark's inspirational feats--I was just about ready to start thinking about asking out. She wasn't terribly cute, but she liked to make small talk with me between scenes on a regular basis, so I figured that was my in. Mark, it seemed, had other plans.

"Okay, you have a date Friday," he announced one day while we were at work.

"I'm sorry, what now?"

"Yeah, Ally set it up," he said. "Her name is Nicole. You're going right?"

I stared back at him awestruck. Later, I would come to understand that he took my silence as me trying to think of a way out of this. Really I was just racking my brain trying to find a way to say, "Oh my god yes! Woo Hoo! Boobies here I come!" in a cool, restrained manner.

"Come on, dude," he said as my brain started to invent a little booby song that I still sometimes sing to this day. "It sucks that we never get to hang out anymore. This way at least we can double and stuff."

"Huh? Oh yeah, I guess that would be cool."

Smooth.

Later that night, as my excitement fell back a little, a wrinkle in this whole plan occurred to me. I had never heard Ally (or anyone else for that matter) mention this Nicole girl. More to the point, Katie--Ally's bestest friend in the world--just happened to be single at the time. Why weren't they setting me up with easily-a-nine Katie who was adorable, sweet, and liked to chat with me when I bagged for her (we had that whole "my best friend is dating your best friend" thing going)? I quickly decided that was a question that was best left unanswered and went to sleep thinking up cool things to say to the mysterious Nicole when I met her. ("That's right, baby, I'm the guy who approves the checks under $50. Growl!")

Friday couldn't have come soon enough. Nicole and Ally were babysitting, and so Mark and I came over after work (I did rush home to change first) at about 11. Nicole was a nice girl, but it wasn't exactly love at first sight. We made awkward small talk as Mark and Ally madeout in the kitchen, and at one point she found an excuse to rest her hand on my leg, eradicating any lingering thoughts of Lisa the stage crew girl from my mind forever.

So Mark and I left that night just two guys with girlfriends. The next few weeks were a magical time, all handholding and talking pointlessly on the phone for hours on end. While we didn't have much--well, anything--in common, we got along pretty well. Looking back, Nicole and I didn't so much "like" each other as we did "like" the idea of having a boyfriend/girlfriend. In hindsight, I can see we were really just friends who madeout on occasion. Not that it was a bad thing. In fact, I think it was pretty much all either of us was ready for at the time.

A couple months later, a new wrinkle popped up. The whole plan had been for Nicole and I to get together so that the four of us could hang out. But as the weeks rolled on, it seemed we never did.

"Why don't you ask Ally tomorrow if they want to go out with us Saturday?" I asked Nicole one night on the phone, with my sister impatiently staring me down from the kitchen (up until that point she'd never had to share the phone).

"Uh, I probably won't see her, why don't you ask Mark."

"What do you mean you won't see her? Don't you guys have lunch together every day?"

"Oh, I don't sit at her table."

"What? Aren't you guys like best friends?"

"No, I hardly know her. She just came up to me at lunch one day and asked if I wanted to meet this cute guy."

I'm pretty sure she added the word "cute" to the story, and I paused to enjoy that. Still, what the hell?

"Then why did they set us up? I thought the whole point was so we could all hang out?"

"I guess Ally just figured we'd be good together," she said with a mindless shrug I could almost see over the phone.

Oh, that's right. We're in a relationship. I'm not supposed to think of you as an interchangeable fourth wheel four our group who occasionally lets me see her boobies. Good thing the logic behind that comment went over your head. (Cut me some slack, I was eighteen).

Things were actually worse than that. As Ally and Nicole got to know each other they discovered that they hated each other. Double dating was pretty much out from then on. It wasn't all bad. I saw Nicole probably once a week or so, and over the next year I got to do all the fun dating things most people experience in high school. It got a little awkward as I started my sophomore year of college (I felt a little creepy picking up my high school girlfriend from that point on) but she seemed to really like me, and hey I probably wasn't going to do any better.

If Nicole and I took our cues from Saved by the Bell, Ally and Mark were reading from rejected scripts of Melrose Place. They were on again off again, fighting one minute then steaming up the car windows the next. There were impassioned notes written in purple pen and stuffed into pockets. There were screaming fights in parking lots and hastily purchased pregnancy kits. It was in a word: awesome.

See, looking back today--with my 32 years of worldly experience--I can understand that being in a tense, emotional relationship like that sucks. But then, at eighteen and in the tamest of polite relationships, it looked so god damned cool.

Ally would show up at my house late at night, tears running down her face, begging to talk to Mark--who would be hiding in my basement. She would act incredibly jealous all the time, asking him if he thought this girl or that girl was pretty--don’t even ask about the time we dropped by her house over the summer and Mark dared to glimpse easily-a-nine Katie in her bikini. At the end of one particularly vicious fight, she tried to win him back by crawling on top of him in the driver's seat of his car and whispering (in what I can only assume was a sad, penitent voice) that she wasn't wearing any underwear.

I wanted all of that! The drama, the borderline insane neediness, the begging him to be with her, promising she would do whatever it took. It looked so wonderfully awesome.

Now don't get me wrong, I was (am still am, I like to think) the furthest thing from misogynistic. I wasn't looking to toy with the emotions of some slightly unstable girl just to boost my ego. What was attractive to me was the idea of someone wanting to be with me as badly as she wanted to be with Mark. Here she was practically having a mental breakdown over the thought of him leaving her, and on the other side I was with a girl who couldn't be bothered to see me more than once a week--if she wasn't babysitting that is. I didn't see Ally's stalking, mood swings, and slightly inappropriate sexual advances as a cry for help as much as I saw them, in a weird way as romantic acts of love (the "boom box" scene from Say Anything comes to mind). And I couldn’t help but think that if I was with her instead of Mark all that drama would be put to a more positive end.

This ignorance on my part would ultimately lead to Mark seeking a new best friend a few years later, for reasons best illustrated by the time Mark and I attended our good friend's graduation party. Early into the party, we noticed Ally and Katie driving by the house over and over and over. Mark was mortified and considered leaving so that she didn’t ruin the party, but I thought it was the funniest thing ever--and perhaps a touch romantic. After about an hour, I went outside, stood in front of the house and waved cheerfully as they passed by for the dozenth time. I am pretty sure Mark wanted to punch me--and I kind of wish he had.

Two minutes later, their car pulls in. Jamie (our friend having the party) came out to smooth things over. He was nearly pulled into the car (he's kind of a little guy) as Ally caught him in a death grip with both hands on his forearm and begged him to get Mark. I remember standing in that driveway wondering why Mark didn't come out and see her. Didn't he want to get back together with her? How could you not love a girl who would make a fool of herself like this to show you how much she cared? I just wanted to scoop her up, take her somewhere romantic, and have endless conversations about our emotional needs and promise to never, ever leave her.

Yeah, I was a little emotionally warped back then.

Now through all this, sweet, adorable, easily-a-nine Katie remained strangely single. Stupid, gullible, not-really-getting-the-whole-picture-here me took a while to catch on as to why.

Over the course of this whole saga, Mark would often talk about Katie; how nice she was or this funny thing she said. Sometimes we'd be out driving (we did that a lot, just two guys driving around in a car aimlessly) and mysteriously find ourselves passing by Katie's house.

"I just wanted to see if she was home," he'd say.

"Huh...well, why?"

"I don't know, just to see."

"Yeah, how do you know where her house is? We're kind of in the boonies here."

"I just do, okay? Drop it."

Through it all, Mark insisted nothing was going on with Katie. Even so, it soon became pretty obvious that they at the very least "liked" each other (and that was clearly the reason I was with not-even-close-to-a-nine Nicole instead of her), and that perhaps they were secretly in love--a love that could never be. In Mark's own warped view of romantic love, I think that's what he wanted: a tortured, illicit relationship that was sadly thwarted at every turn. I think a large part of him loved being miserable, and pining away for sweet, adorable, easily-a-nine Katie while stuck with her "psycho" best friend just fit the bill perfectly. It was all very Emo, but about a decade too early (I think we called it Goth back then, kids).

Mark pretty much told me everything that happened with Ally, but he would only confess things to me about Katie in bits and pieces. I am sure he made a play for her more than once, only to be lovingly rejected in a way that left the door open. Reading between the lines, I think one night he made one final bid. Talking in his car after work, he told me her response:

"Mark," she had asked him, "why does life have to suck so bad?"

He just sat there in silence as if that just summed it all up, and while I was pretty sure it didn’t, I had no idea what else to say.

After that conversation I saw Ally differently. Before she'd always been "psycho-chick" without a cause, but now I had to wonder. Was she really a controlling, slightly insane girl or was she really just a normal girl--with the same insecurities we all have--whose first real boyfriend was messing around behind her back with her slightly prettier best friend? I felt a little guilty in that moment because, even if I hadn't taken it all very seriously, I had always taken Mark's side in the major fights. And while I don't know exactly what happened with Katie, my gut tells me I was on the wrong side.

That conversation seemed to end things, and Mark and Ally broke up for the last time. Mark left school and went out into the real world soon after, which I imagine put all of the drama with Ally and Katie into perspective. Mark and I grew apart rapidly after that and eventually lost touch completely when I moved away a few years later.

I saw Ally one last time before I hit the big reset button and moved down to Newport--probably about two years after their last breakup. Out of nowhere, she and Mark had strangely decided to be friends, and they asked me to go out to dinner with them to celebrate--just three pals hanging out, talking about the old days. It was beyond awkward. Mark got drunk passed the point of coherent conversation (he was a quiet drunk) and disappeared outside for a while. Ally and I just superficially joked about the old days, and how much more mature we were now that it was all behind us.

I got the sense how far things had come later in the night, after we moved to the bar to share a few drinks, when Ally returned to the table.

"Oh what was I thinking? I shouldn't have left that!" she said, sitting back down.

"What?" I asked.

"My drink, I shouldn't have... Jay, tell me the truth, did Mark put anything in there?"

"What?" I was a little unnerved by how she was staring into my face, trying to tell if I was lying or not. "Of course not! Why would you think he would?"

"You can tell me, Jay, I won't be mad."

"Ally, trust me, we would never do anything like that."

She considered it for a moment and then picked up her glass and took a sip. I guess I can take some solace in that she trusted me at least, but Mark was never the same after that conversation. Driving home, he crawled into the backseat of my car and grumbled for me to turn up the Tom Petty CD he had brought, and tuned us both out. As I said before, I moved away soon after that last night out with Ally and Mark and her strange accusation of attempted date-rape. I never saw either of them again.

It's been almost a decade since all of that happened. Part of me--perhaps the part watching a little too much Journeyman--has always felt that if I had been a little more mature or emotionally aware back then, I could have prevented most of what happened instead of really just making it worse. Maybe I could have helped Ally just move on or talked some sense into Mark. Really, though, we were all just dumb kids caught up in some giant drama that would hardly matter in a few years. We just didn't know it. But I guess that's how we grow, and how we figure out that the things we think we so terribly want aren't quite what will make us happy at all.

Despite everything, though, I'd like to think that Mark and Katie did end up together eventually. I sometimes imagine that they bump into each other at the supermarket years later and in minutes are laughing about what a couple of emotional teenagers they had been. And that chance meeting leads to dinner, just to catch up, you understand. But soon one dinner moves to two and then three, and before you know it, those two crazy kids have started up again right where they left off.

And maybe--just maybe--still adorable, sweet, easily-a-nine Katie sent Mark off to work this morning with a kiss and smile, then turned back to the counter to finish making lunches for little Zack and Emily and thought to herself, "you know, I guess life doesn’t really suck so bad after all."

And for the record, I married an off-the-scale-ten Kim. Now leave a comment you lovable jealous fool.

Boys, There is Beer in Heaven

I attended a small private (Catholic) high school growing up. I am pretty sure I've written about it in the past. Over the four years I spent there, in addition to the rigorous math, science, English, and history program of study, I also attend an additional "sixth period" of Religion every day. When I applied to the school I didn’t think twice about the religion classes. In fact, they sort of played as a nice bonus as the pastor at my church excused me from CCD (the normal--and somewhat useless given the format--religious education taught at our church on weeknights) from ninth grade on. I was pretty into religion at that age, anyway, and the idea that certain religious agendas could be detrimental to someone's science education wasn't something I could have conceived of back then.

Looking back today--after spending this weekend touring an absolutely terrifying "Christian" school my wife and I were considering sending my daughter--I see how lucky I was.

The kind of religious education I received at my high school can probably be best demonstrated by my far-and-away favorite lesson. I was in 10th grade at the time, and that year we had a split religion class. For the first half of the year we focused on morality. That class was actually really fun. It wasn't memorizing a list of "right vs. wrong" but more how to actually analyze situations in real life. Our teacher, Mr. Sullivan--a just out of college teacher who usually taught English--wasn't so much interested in giving us answers as he was in convincing us that there were so many more questions than we had ever thought about.

The second half of the year--working with the same teacher--we focused on church history, which was fascinating. It was a religion class without the religion. We studied how the early church was formed, all of the interesting stuff that happened just after the crucifixion, and how this strange little sect of Judaism flourished to become the dominant force in the world 2,000 years later, which wasn't always a pretty story. It was an amazingly objective look at where all of these beliefs--things we had just taken as granted up until that point--had come from.

Mr. Sullivan typically ran these classes as a large open discussion. He'd introduce topics, let us ask questions or make points, and sort of guide us to somewhere relevant. I had never heard the term at the time, of course, but what we were really learning was not so much our religion as it was how to apply "critical thinking" to our religion. As a side effect--or perhaps this was actually the point--we'd often break off the rails of a discussion as something we learned seemed at odds with what we'd been told in the past. One of these break outs--on the actual nature of heaven (most of us were science guys, after all)--lead to my favorite lesson which I still carry with me to this day.

"I'll tell you one thing," Mr. Sullivan said, walking back to sit atop his desk all cool-teacher-like, "there absolutely has to be beer in heaven."

Cue scandalous murmuring of two dozen conservative--and perhaps a bit sheltered--fifteen year olds.

"Heaven," he went on, "is a perfect place where everyone is happy and content. I love beer. In fact, nothing makes me happier than relaxing with a perfectly chilled, tall glass of beer. How could I possibly be happy for all eternity in a place where I couldn't ever have a beer again?"

I sat back in my seat and smiled as the room filled with even more scandalous murmuring. He sold me--along with most of the class--on his beer filled heaven that afternoon, and to this day I am still convinced he is right.

Now, that might seem silly or pointless to most of you, but that little moment from my tenth grade church history class is exactly the tone of the religious education I received for four years. And it is a tone I took for granted. There was no hellfire and damnation preached at us. No litany of rules from some obscure book presented as the "infallible word of God." We saw religion from an almost philosophical perspective, and we were given the freedom and the tools to explore it.

Last Saturday, my wife, daughter, and I went to visit a very, very different kind of small private school. There is a small "Christian" school in the town were we live--I'll refrain from mentioning the name. We didn't really know too much about it other than it was difficult to get into and that it was well respected academically. I had some concerns as my family is no longer Catholic and perhaps beginning to question if we are even "Christian." anymore. But my experience with religious private schools (as I wrote above) up until Saturday was outstanding. I realized we would need to have some discussions with the administration at the school, but I was confident that they would be focused more on education than religion anyway. Surely, reading and basic addition came first (Erin will be entering kindergarten next year), and how much Jesus loves you a distant second. How wrong I was.

Over the four hours we spent at the open house, my mindset progressed from nervous that Erin wouldn't be accepted, to oddly amused by the "prayer to center ourselves before the informative video," to more than a little weirded out as the phrase "infallible word of God" was enthusiastically tossed out three times in a five minute introduction, to slightly intimidated as the "headmaster" tried to answer my question on whether the presentation had just happily informed us that the school taught all the biblical stories as fact, to horrified as a science teacher proudly explained how they dealt with the whole "Darwin thing," and finally to just plain old furious at the condescending counseling the entire administrative staff gave us when my wife blurted out our new religious affiliation.

"I attended a U.U. service once," a woman said, clearly now disgusted to be standing in the same room with us. "They--they just allow you to believe whatever you want. They don't require you to accept any dogma. It's just so misguided!"

At one point--and Phil Plait forgive me!--I went undercover, pretending to be concerned that intelligent design would not be given an equal enough footing with evolution. I was assured that I had nothing to fear.

"We are concerned with teaching our students how to be a Christian in a non-Christian world," the director of the science department explained. "First we teach them what we believe and what is right, then we explain what others"--remembering the way he said the word others still makes me feel like I need another shower--"believe, and why they are wrong."

"That way," one of the administrator added cheerfully, "the students can make up their own minds!"

I managed to hold my tongue until we left. Our situation is a little desperate with my daughter, as our town's schools are terribly overcrowded and under funded. Although it got a little close towards the end, the rational part of me was in control enough to not burn any bridges in anger. Still, if someone had mentioned the age of the world, I think I would have lost it.

Walking to the car I was incensed and insulted, but mostly I was shocked. As an engineer and a writer, I am very mindful of the "war on science" (as Phil Plait likes to put it) going on. I knew things like the Creationist Museum were going on in this country--I even met a couple at Context who had marched in protest at its opening--but I guess I just never believed something like this could be going on in my own backyard.

As Erin--thankfully unaware of the den of mind-numbing evil we had just spend four hours hanging around in--climbed into our car, I couldn't help but let something slip out.

"Don't bother buckling your seat belt," I told her, looking over to my wife. "I am sure Jesus will protect you."

Erin cocked her head and looked at me strangely.

"Who's Jesus?" she asked.

Kim and I burst into a fit of hysterics right there in the parking lot, and much of the tension dissipated. Nothing could have made us prouder.

I've got the touch!

A few months ago, when Apple released the iPhone, Kim and I headed over to the Apple store to see what all the fuss was about. I'm not a huge cell phone guy--I think I've logged a total of thirteen minutes on my phone in the last year--so I wasn't that excited. I mean the commercials looked cool, but I just don't use a cell phone--or any phone to be perfectly honest--that often.

Still, I was impressed as Kim and I stood side by side in the store messing around with the phones. I was even almost considering picking one up after the salesman helpfully pointed out that the iPhone I was holding in my hand was the ultimate iPod. My iPod, I use. My little nano sees use on a daily basis, and it's hard to remember life without the little guy.

The $500 price tag, though, did it in. It was just too much. And the fact that the product was designed primarily as a phone was a major negative in my mind. It was cool, but it wasn't for me.

"You know," I said to Kim as we left the store, "That was really cool. If it were about $200 cheeper and not a phone, I think I'd be walking out with one right now."

Apparently one of the chipper Apple salespeople was taking notes as we left. I can only hope they didn't follow us to the next couple stores. Well, at least not with cameras.

Yesterday was iPod touch release day, and though I usually mock people for doing things like this, I ran right over to the Apple store after work and snatched one up. A week before--after hearing about the iPod touch on the morning news--I returned the 30Gb iPod I'd bought in August in anticipation of securing the serendipitous upgrade. Since then, I'd been checking the Apple website daily trying to get a line on the official release date. When I got the email from Apple Friday morning announcing that the product I had requested they create months earlier was now in stock, my emotions got the better of me.

This whole affair does put me in an interesting position, though. With the iPod touch being just over 36 hours old as a product, I have the chance to publish a topical post. How cool is that? Along those lines, let me present my initial impressions on my new iPod touch. Feel free to add your own thoughts in the comments.

POSITIVES:

1. The Touch Screen
The touch screen is certainly the most Star Trek part of this whole thing. As I virtually flip through my virtual CDs, I almost expect a cup of Earl Gray tea--hot, of course--to materialize on the desk next to me. The interface is nearly flawless, even with my giant fingers, and the response is very satisfying. Moving around the different modes and adjusting settings, I very quickly forget that the buttons and slide controls I'm using aren't really there.

2. YouTube
Less than a minute after turning my iPod touch on for the first time (after its initial sync with my MacBook, of course), I was watching Lisa Nova's 300 parody on YouTube. The streaming video loaded and played as quickly and seamlessly as if I were using my laptop. In fact, had I not picked the video at random and started it immediately, I would have been sure that the video had been cashed in memory somewhere.

The YouTube interface is a nice "toy," if not a key feature. I'm a big fan of YouTube and usually pop on a few times a week if for no other reason than to avoid the latest prime time game show Kim is watching, but I doubt I'll find much need to check out videos on the go. Still, it earns the device some major coolness points.

3. iTunes Store
What struck me about buying songs for my iPod from my iPod was just how much easier the whole process was. I browsed some of my favorite bands for a few minutes, eager to find something to buy--for test purposes, you understand. I soon found Seven Mary Three's Rock Crown, and was ripped ten years into the past as the opening notes of Lucky came through my headphones. Rock Crown safely holds a place in my top five favorite albums of all time, though I hadn’t heard it in years--my original copy was lost in a move. With a few button clicks--again, clicks of buttons that don't actually exist--the entire CD began to download to my iPod touch.

While I could have just as easily found the CD using my MacBook--and indeed have been meaning to for the last several weeks since I heard one of the album's songs on the radio--this illustrates what I think is so cool about the integration of the iTunes store on the iPod Touch. Before, I was somewhat shackled when searching for music. If I remembered an old song I loved but had lost or heard something new in a movie or on the radio, I had to file it away in my mind and hope I remembered next time I was on the computer. With the iPod touch, I can reach into my laptop bag and have the song in a few seconds--if I have Wi-Fi access, of course. It might seem a minor difference, but I think it's going to seriously change the way I find music.

NEGATIVES:

1. Batteries not included
Okay, the battery is actually included, but not much else. There is no AC power adapter, no cover or case of any kind, and the instruction manual would barely pass as an informative brochure. I realize Apple is fighting to cut costs on the entire iPhone line, but I can't even have a simple little leather sleeve to protect the screen?

Along the same line, the iPod touch has been deliberately handicapped, ostensibly to protect the marketability of the iPhone. Although by all reports the device contains a bluetooth interface, it has been disabled, forcing me to use a USB interface cable to sync with my MacBook. It seems a little strange that I can stream video from the other side of the world while browsing the stacks at Barnes & Noble, but to connect to my laptop I need to fish a cable out of my drawer. Likewise, the calendar application does not permit entering or editing of contacts from the device itself, and other applications, like Google Maps, have been removed altogether. While I understand the business reasons for introducing these limitations, they significantly bring down my the value of the device in my mind. Thankfully, iPodtouchhacks.com is already on the case.

2. Fingerprints
This is nitpicky, I guess, but I've had the thing less than 24 hours and the screen is already smudged to hell. It's pretty easy to guess that this will be the default state of any iPod touch that gets regular use. I have no idea what can be done to avoid this--and in truth its not really that big a deal--but if you are considering purchasing one of these and plan to watch video regularly, be prepared to keep a supply of screen wipes handy.

QUESTIONABLE

1. Battery Life
My main concern with the iPod touch--and what I plan to test the hell out of over the next 14 12 days--is battery life. All these cool new features are great, but if they mean I can only use the device for a few hours between charges, you can expect a review of the new iPod nano in the coming weeks. The Apple website boasts that the iPod touch as a music play time of "up to 22 hours." If I can get half that playing music, I'll be happy--my old nano gets 12 hours at best. We'll see over the next several days.

OVERALL:

Quality -- 5 / 5
Value -- 4 / 5
Raw Coolness -- 5 / 5

Television Programming

For the last several weeks, I've been experiencing an odd phenomenon.  Every Thursday morning I am struck with the overwhelming feeling that it is Friday.  This has been happing consistently for the last two months, and the feeling persists all day, no matter how many times I remind myself that it is, in fact, Thursday.  Even as I am writing this I know that tonight I will climb into my bed and be struck with crushing disappointment as Kim reminds me to set the alarm.  Something in my brain is just convinced it is Friday.

At first I thought I was just working a little too hard and longing for the weekend a day early.  But as the weeks rolled on, it grew way beyond that.  This week, I finally figured it out:  my television is totally screwing with my head.

In years past, Thursday night was the major TV night.  Oh there were always plenty of shows to watch on other nights, but it seems that since the first moment a shuffling, shoe gazing paleontologist attempted to awkwardly flirt with an out of his league ex-cheerleader, Thursday night became an event.  Shows like Friends, Seinfeld, ER, Survivor--and even Frasier for the briefest of moments--generated Superbowl level excitement in all of us.  Well, in me at least.

I would sometimes start looking forward to Thursday night as early as Wednesday morning.  Often there would be pizza involved.  At times it got to the point where I'd tape--do you remember VCRs, kids?--shows on CBS in one room, while watching the NBC line up in another, only to hurriedly get the tape at 10:45 and play catch up.  Thursday night was a night you knew you'd be up late, biting your nails at Tribal Council, laughing till your were dizzy at the Hanukah Lobster, and crying--figuratively mind you, I'm still a guy here--as the guest star of the week succumbed to some disease you'd never heard of and suspected Michael Crichton may have just made up at dress.

So for almost a decade, TV--driven by a seemingly self-defeating need to convince me to go to the movies over the weekend--has programmed me to think of Thursday night in a certain way.  Then, inexplicably, all of that changed.  Thursday night no longer seems to be the event it once was.  I think you could easily argue a number of root causes for this.  TIVO and the rise of reality TV certainly played their parts, but for me, I feel the biggest change is that I just don't care that much about anything they show on Thursday nights now. 

Survivor is still on and usually wins out as the show I actually watch on Thursday nights--after building a healthy TIVO buffer, of course--but I'd be hard pressed to tell you why.  Really?  Is that guy whose name I can't remember going to the run the ridiculously elaborate obstacle course faster than all those other people whose names I can't remember?  Oh look, a mildly attractive girl who hasn't bathed in three weeks just fell out of her top.  Hot!

ER has gone through so many changed premises, that I hardly recognize it anymore.  I don't just mean the characters; I mean the rules that originally governed the show.  Remember when it was hard to be an intern?  When Carter worked 18 hours a day and studied the other 10?*  When none of them had money for lunch, let alone rent?  Now they play in rock bands and furiously date each other?  I still like it, but it's just not the same show--and not something I need to stay up late Thursday nights watching.   It works much better on Sunday afternoons.

Then there are the few comedies still fighting for my attention.  The Office is fun, and I think Scrubs is brilliantly written, but neither of these shows demands that I watch them as soon as they air.  I look forward to watching them eventually, but if I miss an episode, I'm not going to furiously scour youtube for a bootleg.  Is that because the shows just aren't as good as Friends and Seinfeld were?  Have I reached some arbitrary point of emotional maturity where the comically retold love-lives of fictional charters--as clever and well written as they might be--just aren't that important to me?  Who are these people?  (That one's for the readers who remember VCRs, kids.) 

There are only two shows left on TV now that I am actually emotionally invested in: Heroes--safely anchoring Monday nights for NBC--and Lost--now, somewhat confusingly, playing at 10PM on Wednesday.  I look forward to both shows every week with the same fervor I once held for my Thursday nights.  Passing these shows off to the next day--let alone the weekend--seems unthinkable.  In fact, I make a point to watch both shows the minute I have enough TIVO buffer to ensure I won't be sitting through any infuriating Kia commercials wondering if Locke is really dead.

Part of it is really just how much I love the shows.  Part of it is their sheer popularity--try to get through a Thursday without hearing from someone what happened on Lost the night before.  And I am sure part of it is the excitement that we have some quality science fiction and fantasy sitting on major networks in prime time.  How ever you add it up, Monday nights are about Heroes (oh Vegas Whore Girl, you are my favorite!  What, you don’t make up cool superhero names for all of them?)  And Wednesday nights--well, perhaps I should just say Wednesdays--are all about Lost.  And, sadly, I've found the root of my day shifting problem.

For the last several weeks, I've spent all day Wednesday wondering what will happen on Lost that night.  I'll get snacks ready, dim the lights, put out the cat, and stay up till 11:25 (thank you TIVO buffer) on the edge of my seat--er, couch.  And because I go through this ritual, my body just assumes it is Thursday and tosses me into a Hooray-It's-Friday process loop--a process loop whose only exit conditions seem to involve large amounts of Scotch and sleeping late.

Yes, my television has slowly programmed me into its bitch over the entire course of my life.  I am its TIVO.  Choke on the irony, sociologists.

*If you are thinking of posting a comment correcting my math here, you are dead inside.

Tall Blonds in Short Skirts

A deserted, mid-afternoon airport.  A thirty-something blond, somehow managing to look all business in her three inch heels as she sips on a serious drink at the end of an anything but serious airport bar, her oversized coach bag sitting passively on the table beside her.

A mild-mannered, unassuming business writer over-laden with bags, in his search for a good place to grab lunch on the company's dime. 

The recipe for a fun romantic comedy perhaps featuring the sadly underrated and in badly need of a career boost Heather Graham?  Or perhaps something far more dangerous?

"You're late," she says, without bothering to turn around.

"Traffic was murder."

"Interesting choice of words."  She turns to face him, a teasing smile creeping across her face.  "And here I thought you were getting all squeamish on me."

The man doesn't respond, but takes a seat three stools down from her, casually looking over the drink menu.

"You have it then?" she asks after a few moments of silence, her cool appearance dissipating just for a moment around her, letting him catch of glimpse of her impatience and was that desperation?

"Would I be here if I didn't?"

"I'm not here to play games."

"Funny, it seems you played plenty with Ben before you left him in that freezer."

A storm of anger crosses her face, and she takes a long sip from glass.

"That was different and you know it," she says, any trace of a smile now long gone.

He stands up and pulls some cash from his wallet.

"We'll see," he says, dropping the money on the bar in front of her.

"I've got it," she offers in a half-hearted protest, which he ignores.

"Did you at least fuck him first?" he asks, venom filling his voice.  "Knowing the lecherous old bastard, he might have considered it worth the price."

She turns pale at the words, and if he hadn't known her better he would have sworn her eyes began to well with tears.

"It was business."  Her words come in a rasping whisper now.  "It didn't mean anything."

"I'll remember that," he replies, assuming a mockingly pensive tone.  "And speaking of business, let's finish this."

"This isn't over," she says, standing up and taking her bag.  "You're not Ben.  I would never--"

"Save it," he says too quickly, a bit of his own hurt and anger slipping into his carefully practiced demeanor.  He is quick to recover.  "I just want this done with."

She stares at him for a long moment, and then, as if turning a switch, she composes herself almost instantly in the next. 

"If that's what you want."  She's again looking at him with the dispassionate, icy mask he knows all too well.  For a moment he can't help but wonder if those hard, emotionless eyes were the last thing Ben ever saw.

"It's too late for what I want, isn't it?"

If the jab has any effect on her, she hides it perfectly.

"After you hear the alarm you have two minutes.  You understand?"

He only offers a nod in response.

"Let's go then," she says, before turning down the hall and walking off.

He doesn't move right away, but neither does she look back.  Despite everything, a small part of him begs to call after her, begs to make one last grab at a happy ending.

"Two minutes," he mumbles aloud to himself, as he buries the feeling with more than a little effort. 

Happy endings were for suckers, just like tall blonds in short skirts.

When I Was Young I Knew Everything

When I graduated high school, my parents bought me a Radio Shack Tandy 386 computer--complete with a thirteen inch bubble monitor and a black and white dot matrix printer (don't ask, kids, you don't want to know). This was actually the first real computer (in our modern use of the term) I had ever actually touched--and I was basically clueless.

My uncle--who conveniently for my parents worked at Radio Shack--loaded a Windows 3.1 clone operating system which ran on top of DOS. He set me up with a few "icons" to launch the different programs he'd installed for me, and I was off. I remember that first night with my Tandy, long after the rest of the family had gone to bed, poking around and marveling at the fact that I could open and close different programs without rebooting the thing and swapping large five and a half inch floppies (again, kids, just leave it alone). That night was my first tentative step into the technical world.

As a freshman electrical engineering student, I got a crash course in file systems and directory structures, and I found myself more and more comfortable with--and then eventually frustrated by--the old Tandy. The EE department had three separate computer labs, all with machines that ran circles around my silly (by comparison) Radio Shack toy. I bought a C-compiler from the campus computer store my sophomore year and started messing around with code. Soon after, my friend, Jamie, introduced me to this "program" called Mosaic (an early web browser for you computer history squares) in the civil engineering computer lab one day. I had no idea what I was looking at--or how it was about to change every aspect of the world as I knew it--but I knew it was cool, and I wanted more of it.

Soon after I went out on co-op jobs, and people began paying me to work with computers. I learned about networks, email, and unix. My junior year I ended up in a design group at an engineering company. Our main product was built on a PC platform, and within weeks of taking that job I was building up machines from spare parts I'd scrounge from lab benches to run tests. I learned computers from the inside out. I could install Windows on a formatted drive, tweak BIOS settings, and mess around with system files because those idiots at Microsoft clearly didn't know what they were doing. In a few short years I went from being essentially computer illiterate to a legitimate technical expert.

All of this was happening around the tech boom, and technology was changing so fast a guy needed a dot com salary just to keep up. I cashed in all my savings bonds at one point and went down to Computer City to pick up a new machine to finally replace the sad Tandy. I got an AST Pentium with a 100MHz processor, the fastest machine they had. The tower alone cost $2500 and came preloaded with Windows 3.1. I remember feeling like an adult for the first time in my life talking specs with the salesman. I wasn't sitting back in awe like I had when I had first opened the Tandy those years ago. I knew my stuff now, and I knew what all those numbers on the side of the box meant far better than he did.

Over the years, I kept learning as technology exploded around us. The AST got a major overhall just over a year later, with new memory (an insane 32MB--what program could ever need that much?), a new hard drive, and (finally) Windows 95. I started learning about TV and audio formats. I could tell you the difference between NTSC and PAL, RCA and S-Video, and why Monster cables were just silly. I would look at my sister with disgust when she'd whine that she didn't understand how to wire up a VCR to her TV (seriously, the ports are marked!) . I even--with the benefit of my slightly dot com style co-op job--built up a small recording studio in my parent's house, with computerized pre amps and effects processors and probably something close to a hundred pounds of cabling.

After college, living in Newport, a friend and I built a complete PC from scratch to replace the AST. Even with the recent upgrade, technology had lapped it again. We ordered parts from four different companies. We spent weeks researching exactly which mother board / microprocessor combo would be ideal for my needs. We built it with dual hard drives for safety and carefully selected the perfect video card for playing Starcraft over a 56k modem. I even hand selected the case and power supply from a computer show we drove to near Boston.

At twenty five, I was a full fledged tech guy. I wired up my home theater system without consulting the manual. I kept my computer on top of my desk--often with the cover removed--rather then hidden away underneath it. I was the boyfriend of your friend's college roommate who you brought along to Best Buy when you wanted to pick out a new TV. I watched technology announcements like most guys watch baseball trade updates on Sports Center. At parties you'd find me debating the pros and cons of this new MP3 format--foolishly arguing that consumers would never put up with such a lossy medium for the sake of convenience. Like a savvy junior executive at a New York brokerage house, I was on the forefront of it all.

Fast forward to half a decade later...and not so much.

I am not sure how it happened or when it happened, but now I'm just lost. I watched Wil Wheaton's web show (is that the right term, kids?) InDigital last night where they covered all the cool new stuff at CES (the consumer electronics show in Vegas last month). I was just baffled, not unlike the confused old men I once mocked while clicking away on my Handspring Visor. What the hell is a DVI port? Why do plasma TVs all now come standard with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth? For that matter, what the hell is HDTV really doing? There was a time when I could take a piece of paper and explain to you exactly how S-Video worked, and show you exactly what to look for on a screen when comparing it to RCA or coax video. With HD all I can seem to figure is that the colors are brighter and prettier. Oh, and you want 1080i not 1080p...or is it the other way around?

And it's not just new stuff. I suspect that my Tivo box and my Sony Vaio PC could play very nice together and let me burn movies and TV shows to DVD, but figuring all of that out seems like a lot of effort. I barely understand the protection mechanism on my iTunes downloads, but I just try not to let that worry me--even though the engineer in me is more than a little worried all this music I am buying is going to be unusable when iPods go out of style. My MacBook has some conflict with my Wireless router that I don't understand. I reboot it once every couple of days, and it seems to work. There was a time when I would have figured out the problem, fixed it, and sent a smug email to LinkSys--but now I just unplug it and plug it back in like an old woman working a VCR.

To top it all off, I actually said to my wife the other day, "You know this whole HDTV thing is just getting out of hand. I bought my Sony Trinitron eight years ago, and it was top of the line. I loved it then, and I don't see why I should love it any less now just because some new technology has come out."

Oh dear god, who talks like that? Not an uber-cool tech guy who could rewire a Playstation to play copied games while watching an episode of South Park, that's for sure. I've lost my tech edge. Satisfied with eight year old technology? Happy watching fuzzy S-Video on a 32 inch, slightly curved screen while a row of 52 inch plasmas lines the back wall of every electronics store I walk past? Too befuddled to resolve a simple network conflict? Mindlessly investing in music files that I might not be allowed to play ten years from now? What happened to me?

A wiser person might call this technical atrophy a healthy realigning of priorities, I guess. I mean sure, it's probably to the benefit of my sanity (not to mention checking account) that I am not obsessed with a $3000 TV down at Best Buy. And, as I've written here before, I've reached a point in my life where I'd much rather spend my time writing blog articles than debugging HTML to display them. Still, part of me misses that level I used to have. There is a significant discomfort in admitting you have no idea why the router locks up every couple days. There is a certain loss of pride when someone asks you what to look for in an HDTV and you realize that you don'’t even know the latest buzz words for the technology.

So maybe some remedial catch up is in order here. I might find there is some happy medium between being a hapless newb and being the crazy guy with the Intel news blog on his RSS feed. I mean, seriously, I used to be an engineer, right? I should be able to at least fix the router thing. It's a slippery slope, and if you let things like this go, the world will just pass you by. Hell, Erin (at three years old) already knows how to work Tivo!

With a little effort, perhaps I can avoid a future that finds a old, confused, scared version of me standing in front of a brand new holo-vid player for several minutes before a grown up Erin, too disgusted to even try to explain how it works again, pulls the Star Wars vid-cube out of my hand and loads it for me. Strangely, I find that vision of the future more disturbing than hair loss, incontinence, and global warming combined.