When I was about six years old, my dad had to buy an IBM PC, one of the original ones, for his business. He was an insurance agent, and the company he represented put all of their actuarial models into a brand new “program” that ran on PCs, and agents were told they would have to run pricing models themselves instead of calling up the home office for the models to be run on the company’s mainframes. Dad wasn’t thrilled about it; to say he’s not technologically oriented would be an understatement. Being a precocious kid who loved anything complicated and new, I volunteered to come into his office and try things out.
Moving
I’m moving again. There’s a pile of boxes, some random furniture, and a couple of cleared off bookshelves and some tables in my living room, ready to be moved over later today to a new studio apartment closer to my son’s house. I’ll also bring his bed and his things, ready to occupy pride of place in the new apartment. I need to buy a bed and a mattress for myself; the queen size bed I have now doesn’t make sense for a studio. I’ll get a ZipCar van today and get the bed, then swing by my current apartment and pack the rest of the furniture, and move in.
Living in exile
When I left university and moved west, my parents found a great birthday gift, a t-shirt that said “Born in Maine, Living in Exile”. It remains my favorite t-shirt, although by now it’s barely holding together after twenty plus years of wearings and washings. I only bring it out on rare occasions – for example, I wore it to Safeco Field for a Mariners-Blue Jays game. Since most people at the game were Canadian, I thought I might get a good reaction, and sure enough, some Newfies now living in Vancouver who were following the Jays spotted the t-shirt and we struck up a great conversation about growing up on the Atlantic and living on the Pacific.
A twist of Lyme
This wasn’t the vacation I was expecting. They never are, but this one was more unexpected than normal.
Community affairs
I have friends from across the political spectrum – an increasingly rare and difficult thing to pull off these days – and while they have vastly different reasons for doing so, they all complain about “society” and its rejection of their values or political views or whatever. My right-of-center friends complain about how media – both news media and movies and television – reflect a version of society that is uncomfortable for them, filled with gay marriage and casual sex and with no room for faith. My left-of-center friends complain about the persistence of traditional notions of marriage, gender roles, and the pervasiveness of casual violence in society. They all talk about how “society” seems to denigrate what they hold dear, and many of them talk about how they have felt isolated or rejected by society for the choices they have made.