Wednesday, April 18, 2012
Sunday, April 8, 2012
Good Friday Weekend
When I was a youngster, we'd always get a nice vacation come Eastertide. "Easter vacation," we called it. We'd get a week off from our studies, either the week before Easter or the week after Easter. Then -- for reasons of political correctness, I suppose -- they changed it to "spring break."
At first, the change was merely terminological: they continued to schedule spring break during the week immediately before or after Easter. By the time I got to college, though, spring break didn't necessarily coincide with Easter time. In fact, it usually didn't. It was truly no longer an Easter vacation.
I never cared what they called it, though, so long as I got my week off around early April. For me, the name of the holiday was totally irrelevant.
Then I finished my schooling, and suddenly I no longer got shit with respect to any time off in April. The nomenclatural issue had become irrelevant in a whole new way.
Without this time off, I became bitter (as those deprived of leisure are wont to do) and disgruntled, and for decades I considered strategies for building some sort of a socio-political movement that would bring a week-long holiday to all working people, laborers and professionals alike, in late March or early April. Why should the students have all the fun?
Eventually I realized that my dream of a spring break for adults was never going to be a reality. There was simply too much work to be done. Sure, it was all well and good for young people to take a week off in order to go drink beer and do drugs and hump each other till chafed...let's face it, they probably wouldn't have been attending that many classes that week anyway. But if the nation's mature, employed citizens were to stop reporting for duty for an entire week, well, then that'd be an entirely different story. Civilization would grind to a fucking standstill.
Somebody has to bring the butter to market, you see. Someone has to chop up all the cows, and somebody else has to squeeze all the oranges to make juice. And it's not like hot water and electricity and the Internet are going to just magically pump themselves to us. No, people need to show up each morning around 9am; otherwise, none of this shit gets done.
My vision of a universal, week-long spring break was a chimera, and to continue pursuing it would have been madness. I let it go.
Still, April's the perfect time of year for a new three-day weekend because April is, quite arguably, the bleakest of months. First of all, it's a holiday wasteland. You got your Cesar Chavez Day (if you were lucky) in March and then there's Memorial Day in late May, but in April there's nothing. The glow of Yule has long since faded, and the warmth of summer is still but an inchoate promise. Plus it's tax season, and so April is a sad, dark time that groans in its misery and begs for relief. Of course, I now understand that it isn't feasible to give everyone an entire week off, but I'll bet that society could afford one more three-day weekend.
Unfortunately, since Easter Sunday always falls on a Sunday (duh) it has no potential as an anchor for a new three-day weekend. Who needs a day off to celebrate a day off? That's why we who would effect change should all stop emphasizing Easter so much and why we should start taking Good Friday a lot more seriously. Besides, Good Friday's where all the action is anyway. After all, it was on Friday that Christ took the hit for us (praise Him!). It was Good Friday when His glorious sacrifice absolved us of our sins. It was Good Friday when His sufferings set humanity loose from the chains of damnation. After Friday, whatever happened to Jesus was pretty much Jesus' problem. I mean, I guess everything worked out okay for Him in the end, which is great, but whatever....
At first, the change was merely terminological: they continued to schedule spring break during the week immediately before or after Easter. By the time I got to college, though, spring break didn't necessarily coincide with Easter time. In fact, it usually didn't. It was truly no longer an Easter vacation.
I never cared what they called it, though, so long as I got my week off around early April. For me, the name of the holiday was totally irrelevant.
Then I finished my schooling, and suddenly I no longer got shit with respect to any time off in April. The nomenclatural issue had become irrelevant in a whole new way.
Without this time off, I became bitter (as those deprived of leisure are wont to do) and disgruntled, and for decades I considered strategies for building some sort of a socio-political movement that would bring a week-long holiday to all working people, laborers and professionals alike, in late March or early April. Why should the students have all the fun?
Eventually I realized that my dream of a spring break for adults was never going to be a reality. There was simply too much work to be done. Sure, it was all well and good for young people to take a week off in order to go drink beer and do drugs and hump each other till chafed...let's face it, they probably wouldn't have been attending that many classes that week anyway. But if the nation's mature, employed citizens were to stop reporting for duty for an entire week, well, then that'd be an entirely different story. Civilization would grind to a fucking standstill.
Somebody has to bring the butter to market, you see. Someone has to chop up all the cows, and somebody else has to squeeze all the oranges to make juice. And it's not like hot water and electricity and the Internet are going to just magically pump themselves to us. No, people need to show up each morning around 9am; otherwise, none of this shit gets done.
My vision of a universal, week-long spring break was a chimera, and to continue pursuing it would have been madness. I let it go.
Still, April's the perfect time of year for a new three-day weekend because April is, quite arguably, the bleakest of months. First of all, it's a holiday wasteland. You got your Cesar Chavez Day (if you were lucky) in March and then there's Memorial Day in late May, but in April there's nothing. The glow of Yule has long since faded, and the warmth of summer is still but an inchoate promise. Plus it's tax season, and so April is a sad, dark time that groans in its misery and begs for relief. Of course, I now understand that it isn't feasible to give everyone an entire week off, but I'll bet that society could afford one more three-day weekend.
Unfortunately, since Easter Sunday always falls on a Sunday (duh) it has no potential as an anchor for a new three-day weekend. Who needs a day off to celebrate a day off? That's why we who would effect change should all stop emphasizing Easter so much and why we should start taking Good Friday a lot more seriously. Besides, Good Friday's where all the action is anyway. After all, it was on Friday that Christ took the hit for us (praise Him!). It was Good Friday when His glorious sacrifice absolved us of our sins. It was Good Friday when His sufferings set humanity loose from the chains of damnation. After Friday, whatever happened to Jesus was pretty much Jesus' problem. I mean, I guess everything worked out okay for Him in the end, which is great, but whatever....
Sunday, March 25, 2012
Physical Education
As a youngster, I took considerable pride in my ability to easily touch my toes. I had countless opportunities to display this prowess as it seemed that toe-touching (with one's knees locked, of course) was the cornerstone of all calisthenics. My peers would always moan and groan whenever it was time to touch one's toes, but I'd perform the task with gusto. If we were standing rather than sitting then I liked to fold my wrists out and press my palms flat against the ground in order to better demonstrate my great stretchiness. My classmates and teammates mocked me for supposedly being a showoff, but I felt it right to celebrate my achievement.
In my early teens, it dawned on me that the reason I could touch my toes with such ease was that my torso was disproportionately long. Or, rather, I should say that my legs were disproportionately short.
Obviously I immediately became terribly embarrassed of my short legs. I started wearing motorcycle boots with heels so as to get that extra centimeter or two of leg length. Had cross-dressing been a viable option, I would have switched to dresses as I thought they might better hide my shamefully meager legs/torso ratio.
Needless to say, I stopped reveling in my ability to touch my toes. For me, toe-touching became psychological torture. It was physical torture also. As the angle created by my torso and legs became more acute, so did my nausea. I'm sure my parents would have been willing to apply for some sort of medical waiver exempting me from PE, but I knew that if I revealed my newfound distaste for toe-touching then I ran the risk that my peers would catch on to me and notice my teeny, tiny legs. They'd tear me to shreds. "Hey, knuckle-scraper," they'd say, "why don't you go climb a tree? The Neanderthals called; they said you gotta go home soon. Dance like a monkey for me, bitch." Kids can be so cruel.
So I started gradually reducing the apparent enthusiasm with which I'd touch my toes. Every day I'd go through the motions of toe-touching with a slightly less impressive show of élan than I'd put on the previous day. Eventually I was touching my toes in a completely lackluster fashion. The constant struggle, of course, was to not vomit.
I dreamed of grumbling alongside my proportionate friends; I envied them their gall as they whined ridiculously just because they had to bend their bodies in mildly uncomfortable ways while not even slightly nauseated. Sadly, theirs was a destiny not for me, not even to fake.
But then came college and with it some degree of liberation. I had a whole new set of peers and, except for summers and Christmases, I could be whomever I wanted to be.
College didn't have a PE requirement, and so I signed up for an elective, one-unit gym class. It wasn't really much of a class, though; everybody just came in and started lifting weights or whatever. There weren't any mandatory calisthenics. Nobody made anybody do anything. I spent the course wincing and complaining while I touched my toes on the mat in the corner. Occasionally someone would ask me why I was in pain, and I'd say that I must've pulled my hamstring or something but that, hell, I'd never really liked touching my toes anyway. "You're not supposed to be able to touch your toes," I'd say. "They're too far away. You gotta bend your knees."
By the end of the semester, I'd overcome my nausea. Shortly afterward, I realized that I had no interest in any sports or fitness activities that emphasized the physicality of my legs. (I did start working on my biceps and triceps, though, and to this day I have some pretty sweet guns.)
Later, in grad school, I discovered that I was at my best when seated. My long, gracefully august torso would tower over tables and desks, and I would govern proceedings with magnanimous bearing and much largesse. Sitting around a table, I was almost invariably the tallest fellow. Meanwhile, underneath the table, my little legs, without a care in the world, would swing idly from my chair. I tried to arrive early for classes and sessions so that I could always be seated by the time that everyone else arrived.
I took to wearing a hat while in transit. When I walked, I was like a duck on land, a self-conscious duck with a hat: my tiny legs, without the obscurity afforded by pond scum and murky water, struggled visibly to propel my substantial and impressive upper body with appropriate dignity, and so I would constantly fuss with my hat to draw attention away from my perverse gait. When forced by circumstance to arrive late to a meeting, I'd wave my hat with great flourish in order to distract people as I entered the room and headed quickly for my chair.
Now I'm fast approaching middle age and until this morning I hadn't toe-touched in decades. (I do, of course, continue to bathe my toes and clip my toenails as necessary, but I always bend my knees.) This morning, though, I happened to be sitting on the floor and I decided, "What the hell, why not? For old times' sake…."
I could do it, but only with extreme discomfort and only for about a half a second at a time. I sat there on my jute rug, my arms and legs outstretched, and I bobbed toward my toes. With the seventh or eighth bob, I experienced a painful muscle spasm in my mid-to-lower left back. Then the pain spread to a nerve running down from that section of my back through my left hip and into my left leg. The pain radiated out and into my bowels and left testicle. It was excruciating, and it lasted almost an hour. I remained on my floor, crumpled and whimpering, waiting for my suffering to pass. For a while there I thought I was going to need to call for an ambulance. Finally the pain subsided.
I feel a lot better now, I guess, but I won't be trying that exercise again any time soon. Only a fool doesn't learn from his mistakes.
In my early teens, it dawned on me that the reason I could touch my toes with such ease was that my torso was disproportionately long. Or, rather, I should say that my legs were disproportionately short.
Obviously I immediately became terribly embarrassed of my short legs. I started wearing motorcycle boots with heels so as to get that extra centimeter or two of leg length. Had cross-dressing been a viable option, I would have switched to dresses as I thought they might better hide my shamefully meager legs/torso ratio.
Needless to say, I stopped reveling in my ability to touch my toes. For me, toe-touching became psychological torture. It was physical torture also. As the angle created by my torso and legs became more acute, so did my nausea. I'm sure my parents would have been willing to apply for some sort of medical waiver exempting me from PE, but I knew that if I revealed my newfound distaste for toe-touching then I ran the risk that my peers would catch on to me and notice my teeny, tiny legs. They'd tear me to shreds. "Hey, knuckle-scraper," they'd say, "why don't you go climb a tree? The Neanderthals called; they said you gotta go home soon. Dance like a monkey for me, bitch." Kids can be so cruel.
So I started gradually reducing the apparent enthusiasm with which I'd touch my toes. Every day I'd go through the motions of toe-touching with a slightly less impressive show of élan than I'd put on the previous day. Eventually I was touching my toes in a completely lackluster fashion. The constant struggle, of course, was to not vomit.
I dreamed of grumbling alongside my proportionate friends; I envied them their gall as they whined ridiculously just because they had to bend their bodies in mildly uncomfortable ways while not even slightly nauseated. Sadly, theirs was a destiny not for me, not even to fake.
But then came college and with it some degree of liberation. I had a whole new set of peers and, except for summers and Christmases, I could be whomever I wanted to be.
College didn't have a PE requirement, and so I signed up for an elective, one-unit gym class. It wasn't really much of a class, though; everybody just came in and started lifting weights or whatever. There weren't any mandatory calisthenics. Nobody made anybody do anything. I spent the course wincing and complaining while I touched my toes on the mat in the corner. Occasionally someone would ask me why I was in pain, and I'd say that I must've pulled my hamstring or something but that, hell, I'd never really liked touching my toes anyway. "You're not supposed to be able to touch your toes," I'd say. "They're too far away. You gotta bend your knees."
By the end of the semester, I'd overcome my nausea. Shortly afterward, I realized that I had no interest in any sports or fitness activities that emphasized the physicality of my legs. (I did start working on my biceps and triceps, though, and to this day I have some pretty sweet guns.)
Later, in grad school, I discovered that I was at my best when seated. My long, gracefully august torso would tower over tables and desks, and I would govern proceedings with magnanimous bearing and much largesse. Sitting around a table, I was almost invariably the tallest fellow. Meanwhile, underneath the table, my little legs, without a care in the world, would swing idly from my chair. I tried to arrive early for classes and sessions so that I could always be seated by the time that everyone else arrived.
I took to wearing a hat while in transit. When I walked, I was like a duck on land, a self-conscious duck with a hat: my tiny legs, without the obscurity afforded by pond scum and murky water, struggled visibly to propel my substantial and impressive upper body with appropriate dignity, and so I would constantly fuss with my hat to draw attention away from my perverse gait. When forced by circumstance to arrive late to a meeting, I'd wave my hat with great flourish in order to distract people as I entered the room and headed quickly for my chair.
Now I'm fast approaching middle age and until this morning I hadn't toe-touched in decades. (I do, of course, continue to bathe my toes and clip my toenails as necessary, but I always bend my knees.) This morning, though, I happened to be sitting on the floor and I decided, "What the hell, why not? For old times' sake…."
I could do it, but only with extreme discomfort and only for about a half a second at a time. I sat there on my jute rug, my arms and legs outstretched, and I bobbed toward my toes. With the seventh or eighth bob, I experienced a painful muscle spasm in my mid-to-lower left back. Then the pain spread to a nerve running down from that section of my back through my left hip and into my left leg. The pain radiated out and into my bowels and left testicle. It was excruciating, and it lasted almost an hour. I remained on my floor, crumpled and whimpering, waiting for my suffering to pass. For a while there I thought I was going to need to call for an ambulance. Finally the pain subsided.
I feel a lot better now, I guess, but I won't be trying that exercise again any time soon. Only a fool doesn't learn from his mistakes.
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Free Time
Extra time being the greatest conceivable gift, I've been getting pretty fuckin' pumped about Leap Day. Everything that happened tomorrow was gonna be like gravy, like a free side of icing with my already iced cake. But then I realized that tomorrow's Wednesday and I just gotta go to work. Why couldn't Leap Day fall on a weekend, goddammit?!
I guess it's a good thing anyway, though. Shit's been pilin' up pretty bad at the office and I definitely could use the extra day to catch up...boss man's been on my ass lately like sticky on putty.
Fun fact: in Muslim cultures, Wednesday is their Friday (i.e., the workweek's final day, which is, as we all know, the weekend in spirit). Lucky bastards....
I guess it's a good thing anyway, though. Shit's been pilin' up pretty bad at the office and I definitely could use the extra day to catch up...boss man's been on my ass lately like sticky on putty.
Fun fact: in Muslim cultures, Wednesday is their Friday (i.e., the workweek's final day, which is, as we all know, the weekend in spirit). Lucky bastards....
Saturday, February 11, 2012
A Hardscrabble Life
Whenever I start a new game with someone on the Internet Scrabble Club, I say "hi and gl," which means "hi and good luck." It's pretty much standard practice to do so (although a lot of folks simply write "gl"...the salutation is implied, I guess); everyone types "hi gl" or "gl" or whatever into their respective message fields while they're waiting to be connected to an opponent and then, once connected, they just hit the send button real quick as they begin playing. But I never mean it. I'm always actually wishing them the worst of luck. I'm hoping that I'll get both of the blanks. I want the x, the z, the j, and a steady supply of esses. I want everybody else to keep pulling cees and vees. Fuck 'em. I don't care about those people. And I don't believe that they really care about me. It's a dance of lies.
Monday, February 6, 2012
Open Letter To The Chinese
Dear Chinese people,
There are no dragons. There were pterodactyls, but that was millions of years ago. Dragons are total bullshit. So you're celebrating the year of the total bullshit. I don't even know what a lunar year is. At least the other animals in your zodiac are all real.
I'm not trying to denigrate your culture. I know your food is awesome, and I'm sure you have a lot of other great stuff going on too. But the whole "dragons" thing is bullshit. You're not fooling anybody.
Yours truly,
Il Vermicello
There are no dragons. There were pterodactyls, but that was millions of years ago. Dragons are total bullshit. So you're celebrating the year of the total bullshit. I don't even know what a lunar year is. At least the other animals in your zodiac are all real.
I'm not trying to denigrate your culture. I know your food is awesome, and I'm sure you have a lot of other great stuff going on too. But the whole "dragons" thing is bullshit. You're not fooling anybody.
Yours truly,
Il Vermicello
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