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This Halloween, we’re taking the baby out to trick-or-treat for the first time. This will most likely be a horrifying experience for her, spent clinging to my in order to avoid strangers and tugging endlessly at a witch hat she has no interest in wearing. On the bright side, we get candy for hauling her around the neighborhood. The witch costume is cute, but every time I see it on her, I can’t help but think of another Halloween.
When I was 5, my sister (then 2) and I were in our rooms inventorying our respective hauls from trick-or-treating. The rewards for vampirism and witchdom had been high that year, and the typical system something of counting, count 1, eat 3, was taxing my young pancreas. I don’t really know if it was temporary, sugar-induced deafness from the candy, or that I just didn’t care, but it suddenly occurred to me that my sister was screaming hysterically in the next room. She had been doing so for about 5 or 10 minutes.
Being somewhat curious, but mostly fed up with the noise, I went in to investigate. My mother was standing in my sister’s room wearing a ratty old pink bathrobe and panty hose over her head, giving her a pig noise. Her bottom jaw jutted out, and she spoke only in grunts and gestures. My sister was glued to the opposite wall, screaming her head off, her witch makeup running down her cheeks. In the nearly 30 years since then, I’ve never heard a person scream like that. Even though I recognized her, I was still a little skeeved out. Mom really sold it.
My sister sucked her thumb until she was 8. I never considered the connection until today.
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The first week of this school year is in the books. All told, I’d call it a resounding success, with a 100% survival rate for all parties.
1. I have an 8th grader. How is this even possible? Didn’t I just finish 8th grade myself?
2. Not only is The Boy an 8th grader now, but somehow he’s in football. He hasn’t ever played before, never watched the game, still needs a physical, and doesn’t understand the game’s most basic concepts. Should be awesome.
3. We have Baby’s first sinus infection! Kudos to her for joining the Fucked Up Timing Club. She’s a lot better now, but it made for an interesting week.
4. This makes me happy. It’s not related to school, but it’s a fatherhood thing. I will be this man when I get older.
5. Alien started 2nd grade this week, and his teacher labelled all of his school supplies with his name. The only problem is that she misspelled his surname on all of them. Of course, she would say that the joke’s on me because I misspelled the word ‘sirname.’ In other news, we’re not looking for Alien to learn much this year.
6. The 4 year-old learned to spell his name, and played video games. A lot of video games.
7. I learned to get up early again. This is no minor accomplishment. While we’re not out of the woods yet, I think I will survive. Not sure about everyone else yet.
This is why we needed to bail out the auto companies. In our time of national crisis, we need strong reminders of American innovation. This guy gets it.
A man accused of using the Cash for Clunkers program to ditch his BMW after a fatal hit-and-run crash is due in a Phoenix court on Thursday.
If this isn’t taking a shitpile of lemons and turning them into $4500 worth of lemonade, I don’t know what is. Honestly, I probably would have spent a day trying to bury the car, but this guy knows real opportunity when he sees it.
Phoenix police say Kissida was driving his light blue BWM 325i shortly after midnight on Aug. 8 when he hit bicyclist Charles Waldrop. The 52-year-old was riding home from work and his bike had lights and reflectors.
Two things amaze me about this part. First, this guy was driving a BMW. How does that happen? Second, this BMW qualified as a clunker? Did it have a hole in the gas tank? Did it have an actual anchor?
Later the same day, Kissida allegedly told a dealer that his car was damaged when he hit a javelina, a pig-like desert mammal. He was arrested after a tip to police.
“Oh, sorry… did I say javelina? I meant Huffy. You guys wanna smoke a bowl?”
All right, one last thing… Who the hell centered that mugshot? Did the ears throw them off?
A friend of mine from school died this morning. I learned that something was amiss this morning on Facebook, when the status messages of mutual friends were consistently somber. A quick exchange of messages revealed the details–she was in an accident and suffered a number of serious injuries, she was in a coma, had suffered brain death, and that the decision had been made to pull the plug. Being familiar with the location of the accident, I quickly located the street on which she crashed in Google Maps, and “drove” down the road in street view. Alternating between personal and detached, it was almost too fast and convenient.
Rachel was a part of my closest circle of friends, spanning junior high and about half of high school. We were a living John Hughes movie, or at least thought we were. Through the miracle of the internet, I’m in some form of contact with nearly all of them, although very little of it is direct. I had just reconnected with Rachel through Facebook about 3-4 months ago after 16 years. After dealing with her fair share of drama and unpleasantness, she seemed really grounded and happy. A psychology degree was imminent. Things seemed to be going right. A few months later, she’s the first one of us to go. It’s scary, depressing, and an overall stomach punch.
At the end of the day, I find myself wondering if all of the technological ‘help’ was a good or bad thing. Everything happened so quickly, and it was extremely impersonal. Overall I think that it was good though, if for no other reason than the fact that the internet allowed me to connect with her during the last few months of her life, to satisfy my nagging curiosity, and to remember her as happy.
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