Month: September 2005

Last week, I saw a woman named Jeanette who used to be in church choir with me. I don’t know that I’ve seen her since Lydia was born, or shortly therafter.

Also, I saw this woman Jennifer, with whom I used to play racquetball, for the first time in at least three years.

My old boss, Michelle, who has been living in Chicago, New Hampshire and Bermuda since I last saw her in 1994, popped into town a couple weeks ago, as did my high school friend Jon, last seen by me at his wedding in 1990.

There were a couple others as well.

And of course, I saw Fred and Lynn, but at least I helped initiate that. These others all unexpectedly showed up. Likewise, Carol went to see her friend Kathy for the first time in seven years.

It’s probably the convergeance of all of these items that prompted me to call my old friend Susan (or not so old, she insists) after losing her phone number, twice; I last spoke to her in 1999.

I remember reading a truly terrible book called the Celestine Prophecy a number of years ago. It was awful, but it was a page-turner, and I finished it in about a day. It had some mumbo jumbo about nine “insights,” the first of which was (and I’m paraphrasing here from a book I haven’t seen in at least seven years): “Everything happens for a reason.” It’s not dissimilar to a line in the play “Boys in the Band”: “There are no accidents.”

Certainly, our hearts go out to those affected by Katrina. So, is it sacrilege to suggest that living below sea level isn’t exactly a great idea? See what Greg Burgas thinks. More pointedly, read this National Geographic article posted by Socks in Box on September 2.

Bush: Vacation Ruined By ‘Stupid Dead Soldier’. From “The Onion,” natch.

Since you were planning on filing for bankruptcy anyway, now seems like a good time.

You haven’t heard of the Flying Spaghetti Monster? Clearly, knowledge of Him must be taught in our schools. If you and if you want to see Him for yourself…

When the child doesn’t sleep, I have weird dreams: in a sea of black suits, charcoal gray suits, navy blue suits, and dark brown suits, Fred Hembeck is named as head of the FBI. Not the real Fred, cartoon Fred. And he’s wearing a robin’s egg blue tux.

A Mr. Burgas was doing a contest (actually three contests.) One involved describing the worst job the reader ever had. There were even prizes involved. Of course, that was really a secondary consideration. The primary thing is that it gave an excuse to write this piece, appropriate for the beginning of the Labor Day weekend.

You might think it would be a job cleaning huuman feces from a wall (mentioned SOMETIME last month) would be the worst job I’ve ever had, but you would be wrong.

I worked in a box factory. You know the cardboard that separates cans or bottles in a case of beer or soda? There was a conveyer belt in which four people, women as it turns out, took these innards and put them together. My job was to tie them into bundles of 20.

These women were developmentally disabled with IQs of about 70. Perhaps that is why the repetitive nature of the work did not seem bother them, but it certainly annoyed me. So they were much faster putting together the box innards than I was tying them into bundles, using a specific knot that I did not know. (Why that specific knot, I never knew.)

The work was 2 hours on, 10 minutes off, 1 hour 50 minutes on, 30 minute lunch, 2 hours on, 10 minutes off, 1 hr 50 minutes on, go home. No variation. No one with whom to have a decent conversation.

And since I couldn’t keep up with these women, the boss was screaming at me by day 2. Moreeover, the women on the line were resentful of me, because if they slowed up, it meant that they didn’t reach their bonus goals. Not so incidentally, the guy doing the tying was not eligible for any bonuses.

My back was very sore every night from the bending and lifting.