twenty_years_ago epitome of incomprehensibility Why do I feel it's somehow wrong for me to go to the "beach party" for local volunteers on Saturday? Besides the fact that forced cheer + costume contests are deterrent enough. (Save that shit for Christmas, Dorval.) A sort of squeamish sentimentality pins me, squirming, to a calendar twenty years ago. Eighth_grade_reunion. Where were you when you heard...? In school, as usual. Reading a book instead of working. It was easy to get away with, since we all had desks that faced the wall. Glorified homeschool cooperative. Material from Accelerated Christian Education. My teacher's daughter, herself an assistant teacher, came in and said something about an airplane crashing into the White House. At least, that's what I half-heard before turning back to my book. Then Peter tapped me on my shoulder and said we were leaving. Leaving? I didn't see what plane accidents in the U.S. had to do with us. But my teacher and classmates filed out of the room and I hurried to catch up. We went out of the school part of the building into the church part - not the sanctuary, but the library room. In later days that room would be a sanctuary too: I'd escape there to read books. You know what happened in New York: one step in a continuing tango between destructive forces, one violent stomp thisaway used to excuse another thataway. A mad dance, but "mad" in lowercase now, a dim echo of the Mutually Assured Destruction shadowing the decades before. It gets better - sometimes. But I suppose I feel guilty about turning things into obsessions that I relieved and/or fed by making jokes to upset my family with. David posited that it was partly their fault for reacting the way they did. I'm not sure. "9/11 = 0.8181..." seems too silly to be offensive, but used as an offense? Well, if Dance Troupe 1 could do it with passenger planes, Dance Troupe 2 with electrical wires... I can't hope to match their talent, which reminds me that I left the talent show out of eighth_grade_reunion. There are gaps, dot-dot-dots. Period piece, meet ellipses. In the aftermath of 0.8181..., the average grade of my most advanced degree was 82%. Second degree. But Brock wasn't Guantanamo Bay: I graduated unburnt, if a little scarred. It's been a weird twenty years, anyway. Cue Green Day: wake me up when September ends. 210909 ... kerry i was writing on blather_blue about boys that i liked and flooding the place with teen angst. horrifying. 210910 ... raze i was doing pretty much the same thing, minus the boys (for the most part). 210910 ... e_o_i You weren't missing much, to be honest. What do boys at that age do? Well, they sneakily compel you fall in love with them by saying "I'm going to keeeel you!" in a South African accent while passing by your desk. After other kids' scoffing remarks about your voice and height and messy hair and Value Village / friperie clothes, the non-serious death threats feel almost endearing. (This could have been a recipe for abuse if Peter G. had been genuinely malevolent, which he wasn't. He just said goofy things. In an accent you found attractive.) But then he had to go and give flowers to Becky, plus flowers AND chocolates to Sara, on Valentine's Day. You wouldn't go for the flowers, necessarily, but you're secretly jealous of the attention. And the chocolates. ... As for my blathe a few months ago, I have ZERO idea what I meant by "electrical wires." The stunt where someone walked by tightrope across the World Trade Centre? Can't be. Something about computers? That's_what_I_get for calling myself "epitome of incomprehensibility" here, I suppose (though, if I want to be pedantic, it's more like "occasional example of incomprehensibility"). 220402 ... past twenty years ago i was avoiding harry potter as "not my thing" and now here i am reading the books, for the first time, aloud to a couple of kids way too young for it. 220402 ... past the power went out. 230814 what's it to you? who go blather from