Daft Musings

Last night, Peter and I had a chance to watch a movie together, something we haven’t been able to do for quite a while. We chose one of our Netflix options, a movie called The History Boys. It seemed like it ought to be good: it was about British prep school boys (and who doesn’t like movies with English prep school boys?), set in the 1980s. But it was pretty pointless.

Here’s the spoiler, so you don’t waste time on the movie. Inexplicably, every single one of the candidates gets into Oxford’s History department, whether they wanted to or not, thanks to the help of one eccentric gay teacher who trains them to spontaneously act out vignettes in French, and a new school teacher who teaches them to just make stuff up on essays, cuz that’s the sort of stuff that’ll impress the admissions board at Oxford.

Once they’ve matriculated to Oxford, everyone abruptly comes out with his homesexuality. The ignorant stuffy headmaster comes to his senses and reinstates the eccentric gay teacher, whom he’d sacked for fondling the boys, even though none of them really minded. The new teacher (who is, of course, now openly gay) takes a joy ride with the eccentric gay teacher, whereupon they have an accident and one of them dies. The only character who may not have been gay dies when he grows up and gets shot in an Army regiment which hasn’t existed since 1968.

The end. It just reminded me that all English men are gay, even if they’re straight, just as all Italian men are straight, even if they’re gay. Is that really so? Anyway, you might like the early 80s songs, if you’re into that sort of thing.

I found out yesterday that I could feed my latest blog postings to my Twitter feed. I could also feed every quiz, poll, and repost I put on Facebook to my Twitter feed too.

It must be annoying my Twitter followers like anything, since they all have better Twitter etiquette than this. On the other hand, I got 3 new followers once I started doing this.

So what else could I feed onto Twitter? Or should I stop, stop now, before I destroy all that is Twitter already?

I love homeschooling, but I originally only planned on homeschooling my academically precocious son. In November, Kelly joined Charybdis and Scylla when I saw her class and couldn’t leave her in there. But it was tough. No matter how we framed it, for Kelly, being pulled out of a class with her peers seemed like a huge punishment.

I did all I could to mitigate it. We joined our fellow homeschoolers on nature hikes. We went to the early elementary age park day every week; we joined academic group activities, like Math Out & About; we had two storytimes every week; and we had lots of field trips, both as a family and with other homeschoolers. Kelly made friends and went to their birthday parties; set up a homeschooler Easter party; and joined clubs, in particular the local Junior Grange, which functions as a loose educational co-op.

In the meantime, my focus on Neil’s school work lagged. All the activities slid our lesson days from 4 times a week to 3, and our extra PE/field trip day was replaced with a storytime. I only had to spend an hour on Kelly’s actual lessons, but she hates working alone, so when I turned to having lessons with Neil, we’d be interrupted multiple times by Kelly wanting to show her half-done math pages, or a story she’d just come up with while finishing a science worksheet. All too often, Neil’s lessons degraded into “you’ll have to complete this on your own now…” as the day dragged on, or his friends appeared to play.

It all came to a stressful climax when I got a job. Yes, a job, a good one which I didn’t expect, not only appeared, but fell right on top of me, and oozed down in front of my eyes. Nonetheless, I was torn between a really cool job and my commitment to my family. I insisted  I could only work part time, on evenings and weekends. I was near to quitting after going full throttle on my antidotes to the Ghastly Powerpoint. However, when I returned from Albuquerque, my boss as much as implored me to go full time. I was ready to flee screaming, but Peter offered to come home earlier to take over child care,and helped me come up with a schedule that might save my sanity. And it really is a neat job: I get to learn new exciting things, I get to write in my own voice, and my manager’s even nice and intelligent. But it was pretty obvious the one thing that would have to give is Kelly’s social activities, even though she would take my calendar and fill it with her plans for sleepovers, parties, and playdates.

It was a sad situation. I have to confess that one day I dressed Kelly in the San Jose Unified uniform and when the lunch recess began, I sent Kelly to play on the playground of the local school with the other students. I had some quiet lesson time with Neil, and when I went to fetch Kelly, she told me how she’d seen her friend Lauren from last year, and was heartbroken she couldn’t go into a classroom, no matter how dysfunctional.  While I was tearily working away, Peter popped by the local Catholic school, which wasn’t that impressive. We could take it or leave it for $9000 a year with Kelly in a class of 35.

It was pretty dire. Just before I got started on my first full day of work, I thought I may as well call Apostles Lutheran, where Kelly had gone for Vacation Bible School, another school substitute that let Kelly have some time with peers while I had some time for lessons with Neil or work. I was pretty sure they’d be either full up or too expensive.

To my surprise, their 5-6 year olds kindergarten class (where Kelly fit and wanted to be) had openings where she’d be in a class of 12; there was a part-time option which would still leave her free for storytime with Andrew; and I could afford it, thanks to my new job. On the Friday afternoon before classes began the following Monday, the principal was interviewing us in our home, and making sure we’d be ok with all the Lutheran stuff that we and Kelly would be exposed to, like singing songs in church, and having some snacks with nice people afterwards. Are you kidding? That’s like Kelly’s dream life. Peter and I would have to take a Bible class; I have to admit the Christian philosophy lessons at Charybdis and Scylla have been sorely lacking, so I’m actually looking forward to it. Personally, the principal had me hooked when he regretted the lack of sauerkraut at school potlucks.

And so, as on Monday, Kelly is going to private school. Sometimes I still feel like a posh snob, but I have to say private school is wonderful. The class is open before lessons begin so the children can play together; the teacher lets us know the lesson plan for each day; they have milk service.

Best of all, she’s happy. Every day she comes home and writes in her kindergarten journal. Neil gets my undivided attentions for his lessons again, and I can make them as challenging and focused as they ought to be. In fact, last week, Neil modeled and recreated the fall of Constantinople, which even impressed my Greek neighbor, Demeter. I feel less guilty about working, and I have a purpose for earning money.

Last year I pondered why do homeschoolers take the summer off, like everyone else. The intelligent thing to do, it seemed to me, would be to have school during the summer when everyone else is packing the vacation spots and prices are high.

This year, I discovered why: it’s nearly impossible to get any schoolwork done, with the beach calling, non-homeschool friends eagerly dropping by to play, valuable enrichment summer camps available, camping trips, and the drama of the Comic-Con.

I knew it would be busy, so I deliberately made a light schedule, sometimes with lessons only planned for twice a week, and even that went awry. I think we managed to get in all of three weeks in lessons concurrent with the local school district’s break, and even those days had to be cut short more often than not.

Just as the summer started, we had Neil attending a Maya camp at Stanford. It’s 45 minutes to Stanford from here each way, so instead of giving Kelly lessons, we made it a day out more often than not, with a trip to Oakland Fairyland one day, and a hike at a nearby preserve another day.

July was even crazier. Kelly had a sleepover with her friend Haley, who introduced her to Vacation Bible Camp, which turned out to be quite an acceptable-to-me introduction to Christian concepts. We spent a day in Santa Cruz; we joined our homeschool group at a play; and Neil packed for scout camp. Then, Neil went away for an entire week, and shortly after he returned, he and Peter went off the mayhem of the San Diego Comic-Con. In between, we all became horribly sick. Oh, and I got hired on for a fabulous, well-paying job I can do at home…except that it’s nearly full-time, and I already don’t have time to spare!

When Neil and Peter returned, I had Kelly signed on for a week of Vacation Bible School at one church, and due a friend’s tip, had her at another Vacation Bible School the next week. This was a good thing, since I’d suddenly plunged into PowerPoint hell, which consumed my life completely. And as soon as that was done, we were packing up and driving to Albuquerque, where our Comic-Con booth was on a stage, as part of a movie set, with us in it.

And that’s not to mention that Neil’s neighborhood friends often came by (and were welcome) to play in the pool. I abandoned our last motley plans for summer lessons when Neil and his friend Brandon decided to spend the entire day trying to play each and every song in Rock Band. They almost succeeded, but Neil was in physical pain from the effort for 2 days afterwards. I’m usually a beach bum during the summer, but this year, we only managed to get to it once, and I think our museum count for the summer consists of a single trip to the Childrens’ Discovery Museum.

The local school has started, but our summer’s not over (and the homeschool group activities don’t restart until after Labor Day). We’ve got the State Fair and a trip to Legoland planned for this month, and at some point, I have to figure out how I can work 40 hours a week and homeschool my children.

When we stayed with my friend Chris in North Las Vegas last year, we were delighted to find a Dunkin Donuts near her house. Peter thought we’d left the franchise behind east of Chicago, but here it was, appropriately enough, in Sin City.

So for breakfast on this trip, we wanted to go to a Dunkin Donuts in Las Vegas. I asked the parking valet, who sadly admitted he only knew where the nearby Krispy Kremes were, but one of his colleagues remembered seeing a Dunkin Donuts on Sahara near Valley View.

I joked to Peter, “Dis here’s a Krispy Kreme town. But Dunkin Donuts is moving in.”

Peter riffed: “Nice donut shop you got here. Would be a real shame if people couldn’t get to it. Say, if there was to be construction, and road blocks…”

Laughing, we headed to Dunkin Donuts on Sahara. Color us surprised when we got there and the only driveway to it was inexplicably blocked by a series of cement pillars, the kind you see protecting federal buildings from drive-in car bombs.

Peter was not deterred. He drove up a side alley and found back way in. But when we parked in front of the Dunkin Donuts, it was closed. “Come see us in two weeks!” a sign cheerily announced. No indication for how many weeks that sign had been there.

So Peter enlisted technology to our aid. He and I tried to pull up a listing of the Dunkin Donuts in Las Vegas on our iPhones. But even with 5 bars up on the AT&T network, the page would not load. Luckily, having recently become mobile internet geeks, we also had a Palm Pre among us, and that had not been compromised.

Neil found only 2 other Dunkin Donut stores in Las Vegas. One number rang through to a “please hold” recording at the Fremont Casino. The other was answered by a man with a heavy Spanish accent who said the store was not open.

I waited through the hold line at the Fremont Casino,which confirmed that yes, there was a Dunkin Donuts in the casino. And they had their own number, which was answered by a real person surprised to find out other Dunkin Donuts were not open, or non-existent.

As it turns out, there was indeed construction in our way the Last Dunkin Donuts in Vegas. Lots and lots of construction. Every time we tried to follow the GPS directions, we hit a roadblock. The construction workers drank their coffee and looked at us suspiciously. (And it wasn’t Dunkin Donuts coffee they were drinking.)

We had to wing it and just head in the general directions along another street. As we got close, a suspiciously well-dressed man hurled himself in front of our car, but we successfully veered around him.

Finally, we saw the Dunkin Donuts sign, but..there was no place to park. This is highly unusual in Las Vegas, where every casino, strip joint, and barbecue pit not only has copious parking, but also valets to park your car for you, so you can get on with the important task of doing as many bad things as you possibly can before you have to go home.

Here, there was no street parking. The few parking garages nearby were full–at 8 am on a Monday morning.

I had Neil call the Dunkin Donuts in North Las Vegas. He got a recording telling him “This number has been disconnected.” Gulp.

We finally found a spot in a pay garage three blocks away. It was plastered with lots and lots of Krispy Kreme ads. And we had to walk past a Krispy Kreme store on the way to the Fremont Casino.

But there it was. Surrounded by a casino, this Dunkin Donuts had protection from the Krispy Kreme mob.

We bought 2 dozen donuts, and carefully walked back to the car. And then we fled, our precious loot in hand, keeping our eyes open for renegade Krispy Kreme vans until we’d left Las Vegas behind.

I heroically fought the battle against the Ghastly PowerPoint and can declare victory, but I was still dealing the the trauma of it as we headed off on Saturday to Albuquerque. I checked the emails I’d been ignoring, and found out the filming of the Comic-Con scenes had changed to the 11th and 12th, and that the rooms at the cast hotel were all booked out.

This would really not be a big deal ordinarily, but suffering from Post PowerPoint Distress Syndrome, I couldn’t deal. Aiiiee! We’d been told Atomic Avenue shirts out even though the studio had our permission to use the logo? And what if New Mexico is all booked out?!  And now we’ll be gone for a week! What if I come back and PHBs have muddled together the most odious possible way for me to do the Odious Task? Does my contact let me leave screaming, or am I locked in for all eternity? Will I be crying at the end of a breadline, regretting my principles and pride? What if? What if? What if?  I was still tossing and turning all night.

Peter called quits to it when we got to our hotel room in Las Vegas and tried to shampoo my hair with body lotion. “It’s Vegas, baby, and you need to be sedated.”

I wholeheartedly agreed. We went down to have lunch in one of the Gold Coast casino’s restaurants, where the waitress was familiar with Post PowerPoint Distress Syndrome.

“The only thing that will cure that is a yard-long margarita,” she advised. I’ve never had a yard-long margarita before (or if I have I, not surprisingly, don’t remember). I can vouch that, yes, a yard long margarita does cure PPPDS.

Just as an aside, I noticed the Gold Coast casino had keypads (for say, entering your PIN number) with really HUGE buttons. I guess that way, even after you’ve had a yard-long margarita, you can still pay for your drink.

And we are now in Albuquerque, where the studio got us into another nearby hotel. And Atomic Avenue shirts are just fine. And the rest of it, will just work out, Ghastly PowerPoint or not.

Last week, my supervisor asked me to research and put together my thoughts on two subjects…by Friday…in PowerPoint.

I hate PowerPoint. No, I loathe PowerPoint. For years, toiling away in the bowels of magazine land, I had to endure PowerPoint presentations droning on and on about market share and strategic opportunities when I just wanted to know what the d**n product I was going to review or not was and what it did.

And now here I was, being asked to take perfectly good information and pervert it into PowerPoint. To make things worse, when I asked for the  company logo/style to use for my presentation, I received what I can only describe as the Ghastly PowerPoint. I could only bear to see it for about 30 seconds at a time before I had to close it, and sit there quivering and shaking in horror.

I have tried hard to erase it from my brain, but I cannot, for the life of me, erase one image. It is of a slide with six narrow columns, with about 53 bullet points of useless information, so dense it had to be shrunk down to six point type. Oh, god, and I was supposed to produce something like this?!

In terror, I turned to Peter, who witnessed a portion of the Ghastly PowerPoint and laughed. “You don’t have to do that. In fact, you shouldn’t,” he said. He reminded me of the Don McMillan show we’d seen a few years ago.

And thus, with Peter often at my side for advice and moral support, I put together my presentations. It’s not that PowerPoint is perverse. It’s that it’s been perverted.

I had the responsibility to respect the medium in a way it rarely is. I snipped and condensed until each slide had less than ten words, often less. I refused to use text less than 24 points in size, and I used lots of pictures. Pictures that could make a point a whole lot better than a whole lot of words on the screen, read aloud as if the presentation were a storybook and the audience a bunch of illiterate preschoolers in business suits.

But the Ghastly PowerPoint still haunted me. I woke up in terror at 3 a.m. on Thursday morning, afraid that my supervisor would see the presentations and say, “Yeah, Carolyn, these are great, but I’d like to get some more detail, like all the irrelevant minutae you left out, preferably in the form of a really dense table in six point type. Oh, and you should use more enterprise-appropriate vocabulary like “leverage,”"strategize,” and “TPS report.” And please put everything into passive voice. Pointy-Haired Bosses hate direct imperatives; it makes them think they should do something and they’d have to take responsibility for it. They hate that.”

I had to calm myself by reminding myself that I’ve actually met my supervisor and he’s intelligent and not at all like Lumbergh. But then, he had almost certainly been subjected to the Ghastly PowerPoint (and more PowerPoint just like it) for a length of time far longer than I was capable of. And what could that do to a perfectly decent man? It was the sort of thing that could drive normal people to drop words like “fundamentalize” into their everyday conversation, and far worse,

Finally, on Friday, exhausted and frazzled, I gave my presentations. They went over well. I can’t disclose the content of the presentations, but I’m not giving away any corporate secrets when I tell you that among them, the two presentations included the number of fart apps on the iPhone, a Keith anecdote, a Monty Python reference, and a Steve-Jobs-like zone out on a particularly awesome fact.

I’d declare victory, but I’m not sure I can. PowerPoint did not suck away my soul and send it circling the drain of corporate despair. However, I found out a Pointy-Haired Boss had plans for me that would do just the same. I objected, of course.

And then I left for a week, to spend time on a movie set in Albuquerque. Que sera, sera.

Peter guesses that every year, the San Diego Comic-Con is 30% larger than the year before. I’d assumed that when the convention center reached 100% capacity (as it did last year), that it couldn’t get any bigger. I was wrong: the convention has instead increasingly sprawled out into its downtown San Diego surroundings and beyond.

For instance, this convention proves that no matter how fanatic you are, there’s always someone more fanatic than you. Last year, I was boggled that fans were lining up at 4 am for the Heroes panel at 10 am that day. I suspect this year, predawn lineups are standard; and now those fans have been shown up. This year, pop culture groupies started a line for the Twillight panel, not scheduled until 1:45 p.m. on Thursday, on Tuesday night, choosing to camp out for two nights for a studio presentation in order to guarantee they’d have a seat. On a related note, comics news blogger Heidi Macdonald reported more hotel rooms than usual opened up in July, as some attendees gave up their reservations. Hey, what do you need a hotel room for when you’re going to be camping out every night in order to get into the panels you want to see?

The con has become so big it’s now a vortex that sucks in people you’d never expect would even know about it, and then becomes a trap hard to get out of and into. A dancer I knew vaguely in college wondered if she was the only person in L.A. not going to the con. (Yes, Leigh, only you and essential emergency workers are left.) Soon Nevadans and Oregonians will be wondering whither their towns are emptying in late July. Despite my best intentions, I almost got sucked in myself, due to a booth emergency. Since Peter was out with flu, he couldn’t oversee the packing of the van, and a crucial component of our booth stayed home. I packed it up, packed my bags, and told my client I wouldn’t be available on Thursday, so please, please move any conference calls to early Friday morning when I could take them from a hotel room. Meanwhile, Peter tried to save me by rigging up a substitute at a friend’s house in suburban San Diego. And then, while trying to get back to the convention center just as Preview Night was beginning, he was stuck in near-immobile traffic for 2 hours. However, eventually (it seems), the fix worked (knock on wood), so I’m still home, today.

I don’t know if I’m yet safe from the Con. But there’s certainly a competitive fanaticism in play already. I wouldn’t be surprised if within a few years, people start lining up for panels within minutes of the Comic-Con announcing their times and places–weeks in advance. When the end of the line reaches the bottom of San Jose, I’ll tell you I told you it’d come to this.

With 15+ years of experience of packing up and going to Comic-Con, you’d think one of these years it would go smoothly. But no matter how much we’ve prepared, the day before Comic-Con is always a hot, hectic mess. I can’t even remember some of the details of all any more, but I cannot remember a single year we had no problems.

Right before our second (or third?) appearance at Comic-Con, Peter’s car got some front-end damage that made it undrivable, so we managed to stuff all the contents for our booth into my sub-compact 1990 Toyota Tercel. It was a tight fit, and we did have to tie down the trunk over the booth panels, which hung out of the back all the way from Sunnyvale to San Diego, and back again. Then, during set up, one of the computers fell down onto the concrete floor and stopped working, so we scrambled to find a Macintosh repair shop in San Diego. We found one, which diagnosed the problem as just a loose cable, and moments before the show began, we were ready to go.

Years later, I was driving with Loretta and my then-two-year-old son up Grapevine (the mountains on the northern edge of the Los Angeles basin) when the thermostat on my car gave out and the engine started to overheat. Loretta, who then had more experience with P.O.S. cars than I did, knew what to do. We turned the heater on to pull heat off the engine, and pulled off the road to let the car cool down (which by the time we reached Orange County took an hour) when the hot engine light went on anyway. We were in Los Angeles rush hour traffic in 80 degree summer heat in a black car with the heater on full blast. But we finally did make it to San Diego, where an auto mechanic replaced my themostat. My car was still a P.O.S. without air conditioning though, so on the way back Loretta taught me to put a car into lower gear when the gear it’s in can’t make it up a hill, and sprayed all of us with a water bottle to help with the heat.

After that, there was the year Peter and I had to fix our new light panels, which arrived at our house smashed to pieces in transit. We found a welder to create new cases, and a plastics manufacturer to quickly produce more stressable plexiglass panels instead of fragile plastic. The expensive custom-made cases they original panels had come in were worthless, since we couldn’t fit them into our vehicle. When he arrived in San Diego, Peter struggled to haul the panels in to the show floor, and one of the facings gave loose and mightily cut his fingers. Later, a doctor friend of his asked why he hadn’t gone to the emergency room to get such a horrible cut stitched; but Peter just didn’t have the time.

This year, like many other years, Peter was sure he’d have everything done early, so he could actually relax before diving into the outrageous extravaganza that is Comic-Con. Then I came down with a quickly-manifesting, especially vindictive stomach flu on Friday. It passed to Kelly on Saturday. It slew Peter on Sunday. And today, Neil, who we thought might have escaped the family fate by having been at Boy Scout camp and becoming almost compulsive about washing his hands, got wiped. Peter and Kelly have massive constitutions, so as soon as they’re finished being down, they’re right back up again. Neil and I have the constitutions of soap opera heroes, which means we linger on the verge of being admitted to the I.C.U. and recover gradually, bit by little bit. So I think Peter will once again miraculously pull through. And Neil, who like the other attendees who still brave that prodigious show, would be despondent if he had to miss it. So I suspect he’ll be there, albeit travelling in a fragile state.

Somehow we manage to pull it through every year. But really, I wish, just for once, that we didn’t have the perpetual last-minute drama before we had to be on.