Jack the Jerk Bounces Checks at the Class Reunion

So, the class reunion.  Did I post about Jack?  Former super-suave, ultra-cool funny-guy jock turned grown-up loser.  Think Freddie "Boom Boom" Washington from Welcome Back Kotter.  

Now imagine Freddie's degenerated into a drunken junkie who manipulates the folks who persist in caring about him with bogus suicide threats.  

Yeah, 30 years down the line, and life hasn't been kind to Jack.  To be brutally straightforward, he's earned what he has.  I've been watching him with a somewhat jaundiced eye since he threatened suicide and then disappeared from Facebook for over a year back in 2011, ignoring the desperate pleas from old friends to please get in touch.  

Despite my misgivings I, of course, sought contact information for him for the reunion.  And he was contacted, and said he planned to go.  And then, out of the blue, maybe two weeks before the reunion, Jack says he's off to kill himself.  Says he's checking out, he's done with this life, see y'all on the other side.  And then off he goes, POOF!  All his stupid little friends begging him to call, to check in, to please, please don't do this.  

I say "stupid" because I've been the person who just keeps letting some creepy creature manipulate me because he likes the attention and it gets him off the hook.  And I was stupid.  No other way to put it.

Jack shows back up a week later, with no mention of his suicide threat, just saying yeah, he's going to be at the reunion, gonna kick everyone's behind at golf, blah, blah, blah.  Sanitizes his Facebook wall to hide the BS, and shows up to ALL the reunion activities.

And bounces checks for every one.

What a lowlife.  What a scumbag!  The folks handling it are, I guess, trying to be delicate.  I wouldn't be.  I'd post it on the reunion group page and then wait for the inevitable suicide threat sure to follow.

You suck, Jack.  We'll remember this next reunion, lose your address.

And no, his name's no really "Jack."  But it seemed more believable than "Jerk," and both end with "Off."

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Speaking of old schoolmates, I want to tell you about Kris B.  Really nice kid, he was a classmate in Mrs. Jordan's second grade class.  I didn't know him well, but he always seemed a good kid, I don't recall him ever being mean to me.  So many kids were, so that sticks out.  

Another thing that stuck out was how he spelled his name.  "Kris."  See, that stuck out, because I was "Kristy."  So many "Christophers" and "Christines" out there, but we were K-kids.  

One day, early in the school year, I . . . the dog ate my homework.  You know.  Out of the blue, I had this brilliant idea.  BRILLIANT!  I walked over to Mrs. Jordan's desk, pulled Kris B.'s homework out of her inbox, and added "ty" to the end of his name.  On every page, I did this, until all his homework was mine.

Understand, I didn't do this to be mean or to hurt him.  In fact, it never occurred to me that he might get in trouble!  Hey, I was seven!  I just knew that now my homework was handed in and I wouldn't get yelled at by my dad.  Of course, it proved to be such an easy thing that I took to doing it pretty frequently.  

I don't think Kris flunked second grade, but I don't know for certain.  I think about the grief this must have caused him and I feel really bad about it now.  Imagine this poor boy, insisting he's done his homework only to be told he clearly didn't.  

Ack.

I did this for a couple of months. my two best friends, Allyson and Kelly, being fully aware.  Now, I should have known that I was the spare part in that three-way friendship.  Allyson and Kelly had been buds before they ever knew me, and they were the thin, pretty girls.  And I?

Wasn't.

Anyway, one day, Allyson was standing before the class giving some book report/presentation. And she was rocking it because that's what Allyson did.  It's who she was, she was a performer, a brash, enthusiastic star who really did require attention.  That's not an insult, it served her well and she did good things with it until her untimely death in 2005.  But under all that brash, at least in second grade, was a whole lot of insecurity.  So when she sneezed and blasted this gigantic wad of snot out her nose, a wad that, attached by a stringy runner, snapped back like a bungee jumper and smacked her in the cheek, my sudden, raucous cry of laughter was unappreciated.

I wasn't being mean, I swear.  I was seven, a big booger smacked her in the face.  I laughed.  If I could take it back, I would.  If I could have taken it back that MOMENT, I would have, because, while I was clearly not the sharpest knife in the etiquette drawer, I was lethally quick when it came to catching emotional/mood cues from other people.  It was a survival thing.  I knew immediately I'd messed up, but there was no bailing it.  Allyson hated me from that moment on, and it was a deep, long-lasting hatred.  I don't think it ever really went away, in fact.  I never saw Allyson look at me without that curl of the lip, that heavy-lidded glare.  Last time I saw her was the end of 12th grade, and she clearly still despised me.

First thing Allyson did after I laughed was go to Mrs. Jordan and "narc" me out for stealing Kris's homework.  I wish I could say she didn't know what that would lead to, but Allyson knew.  The belting, the screaming, the crying, the devastation that was visited upon me when my father was called?

More than made up for the laugh.  

I don't blame her.  She was seven, too.  And poor Kris B.?  The most innocent of us all?

Well, a websearch tells me that Kris has done just fine.  Whatever damage I might have done him academically doesn't appear to have held him back in the least.  And that's good.  I have enough guilt in my life.

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I came across a headstone in my search for old classmates who've died.  An incredibly embarrassing, ironic mistake in the headstone that made me shriek with horror when I saw it.  And then, yes, laugh.  Part of me hopes desperately that it was intentional, that it was a little inside joke between the dead folks and those who come later to see.  But I know that's not likely the case.  I turned to my husband and cried, "DON'T YOU DARE GO GRAMMAR-STUPID ON MY HEADSTONE!"

And he said?

"That'd be one way to find out for sure if there's an afterlife, huh?"

Here's the headstone:

Give yourself a minute.  No screaming.  Yes, I could crack some "alot" jokes or link you to hyperbole-and-a-half, but this actually makes me very sad.  How embarrassing.  How heartbreaking.  It's not like it can be Photoshopped all better or erased and rewritten.  It is, in fact, carved in stone.

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While on the subject of bad grammar and dead folks, I came across a memorial the other day where someone shared that folks had gathered and  "recanted their many fine memories" of the deceased.

Well, that's sad.  Really sad, in fact.  

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Speaking even further on the subject of bad grammar, there's a Utah thing (happens sometimes in the South, too).  It's the whole "buy, bought, boughten" thing.  You know, like "get, got, gotten."  It's never affected me, though sometimes, when I'm tired and trying to say "gotten" and "bought" it slips out.  But the other day?  I was talking to my husband about making smoothies and I said . . .

Blent.

You know, like spend/spent and rend/rent?  Blend/blent.

Now I have a habit of intentionally making up words because it's fun and amuses me.  But this wasn't intentional--in fact, it took me a few seconds to figure out what was wrong with the sentence I'd just uttered.

Goodness.

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I have a thing.  On my arm.  In my arm, really.  It started back before 2010.  I spoke to my dermatologist then, when it was really just a thickening, with the skin feeling harder and getting rough.  She looked, said it wasn't anything.  I asked her again before we moved, because it seemed bigger, sort of.  Less rough, but thicker.  Again, she said she didn't see anything she was concerned about.

Last year, I went to my primary care physician because, at that point, it had become sort of a dent with a bump.  She referred me for an ultrasound, which showed exactly nothing.  The Radiologist said that she saw no edges, no borders, no nothing--it was just a dent and a bump that didn't show at all.  She said any further action would be up to my PCP.  

My PCP didn't feel any further investigation was necessary.

I haven't really paid attention to it for months.  I don't, you know?  It doesn't hurt, it doesn't DO anything, so I go months without really even thinking about it.  But I looked at it the other day, and really got in and explored it, and I'm sure it's bigger.  I feel certain of this.  

And suddenly I'm very worried.  

Am I just winding myself up because things are tight and stressful and so I'm obsessing?

I hope so.  Because it's going to be November or December before we can afford to have this looked at by . . . whom?  To whom do I take a weird arm thickening?  An orthopedic doc?  A rheumatologist?  What do I need?  An MRI?  

The fun really never does stop.  

It's hard to get a shot of--it's not well defined, but it's where the arm rises up instead of being a straight line.  And I have no idea what it is or if it's related to the various arthritic/rosacea-ic, various other things I have going on.  Knowing my luck, it's something horrid.  Scleroderma or sarcoma or some such crap.  

Or maybe it's nothing at all.  Just a weird, totally benign, not-at-all-a-problem growing thing under my skin.  Because those exist, too.

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And that's about it.  Except this:  if you ever find yourself tempted to name your baby "Quazarius" or "Tennzlee?"  Don't, because THOSE AREN'T NAMES!

Murder, Grammar, and Dead Ducks ,,,,,,!!!!!????

I'd like to start today off with a grammar rant.  I'd like to talk about ",,,,,," and "???????" and maybe some "!!!!!!" for good measure.

Let's start with the obvious one--the multiple commas.  Like that MEANS anything.  What does that mean?  Is it like stage direction, indicating a particularly long and meaningful pause?  Like a POWER pause?   Because we already have ellipses and commas and semi-colons that do the job super-nice without making you look like you've gone twitchy on the comma button.  Perhaps this is "text speak," but it's creeping into more formal written communications, and it's making people look like . . . well, like texting children.  Who haven't quite mastered the written language.

Now, let's talk about "?????" and "!!!!!!!" for a second.  We all know what "?" and "!" mean.  So are the multi-packs indicative of MORE?  How can you be MORE inquisitive than inquisitive?  What, it's not just a question, it's a SUPER-question?  If you're trying to communicate interrogative disgust, "Are you KIDDING me?" is usually pretty effective.  On the "!!!!!!" front?  Okay, you're excited.  You're REALLY excited!  You're MEGA-excited!  Fine, use two.  But dang, please stop with the 10+ exclamation points, wouldja?  Nobody's that excited without dancing on the edge of cardiac arrest.

This came across my Facebook feed yesterday.  Would be funny if it weren't so close to the truth these days.

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I've been following the news about the toddler shot in his stroller by muggers near Atlanta.  Checked out the Facebook page of one of the accused.  His "about" blurb? "ME IN MY NI**A"S A TURN UR BLO5K IN TO MURDER SCENE"  (the ** are mine, to keep from getting grief from Blogspot).  The photos?  All baggy pants down past his ass and gang signs and obscene gestures.  All "thuggin" and "thug4life fo sho."  Class act, typical.  STEREO-typical.  Living DOWN to that awful stereotype.  Exactly who you would expect to do what was done.

We have a problem.  We have areas in this country that are absolutely disconnected from humanity.  So bogged down in poverty, in substandard education, in violence, drugs, and stupidity. We have one generation of people lost to this rearing the next generation, which will rear the next.  It's self-perpetuating, and this sort of festering gob is what it produces.  We can't just build a fence or a wall--one, that's crap, and two, no such thing as a "forever" fence.  We need to stop futzing around and sort this disaster out before it's too late.  You should SEE the writing of this kid, of his friends and family--barely literate, barely even comprehensible.  It's like a swamp with utterly turned around ideals and goals and ideas of what is and isn't intelligent or right.  Posts hailing a small child dressed as a gang member, calling her "lil thug girl" and proclaiming "SHE A STR8 THUGGG ! ... LOL!" and "lil cuzz killin idth !!"  Some of the posts demanding, in the most broken excuse for English, that the accused be released because "he din do nuthin, crackrs!!"  Seriously.  We need to fix it--it's hurting ALL of us.  Not just the poor little boy who is dead, not just his devastated mother.  We are ALL diminished by this, and allowing poverty and horror and prideful stupidity to take hold in our streets and separate us is what's brought it into being.

We need to fix this.

I'd post a horrific rap video one of the accused killer's friends posted to his wall--all about killing these folks and killing those folks and mutha this and mutha that, but I do actually try to keep things somewhat "clean" here.  Kid's not hard to find, though.  Look him up if you're curious.  As an example of what I'm talking about, here's a snippet from his page, going back to the dressing little girls up as gang bangers:

"Omg ! Ni Av'yianna .... U kno better she look ah hot mess today my granny hve her lookin me kinda way and idk whe she get this fang banging Frm ...lol I love her doe she look so throwed away today! Ugh"

 English?  Mmmm, I don't know.  What I DO know is that THIS is what our poorer-area schools are turning out.  What good does that do us?  Seriously, even if we're not going to look at the lives and the prospects of these poor, barely literate, barely understandable kids, let's look at what good it does SOCIETY to have schools acting as holding pens and pumping out illiterates, many of whom are caught on the "high school to prison" assembly line.  What good do we get from this?

NONE.  NO good.  So let's fix it.

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Hubby and son are off to play paintball today.  Breathtakingly expensive, but it's the BIG b'day present for our boy.  Was supposed to be last weekend, but it was rainy, windy, and in the low 40s.  Today?  Sunny and fifties.  That's better.  I want it to be a good time for him.  It's something he's wanted to do for a couple of years, and it's not something we'll be able to afford again until around Christmas, most likely.  I hope it's everything he wanted it to be.

The Paintball Layout

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Do you like duck?  You know, like eating duck?  I ask because I had a hellish ducksperience when I was a kid.  My dad came home from hunting with two dead ducks and made me pluck them in the kitchen sink.  I was maybe eight?  It took hours, it was horrifying.  See, I liked duck--I liked seeing them fly, I liked feeding them at the pond, I loved finding the stray feather here and there; stuck them in my hatband, called it "lucky."  This?

This was a nightmare.  And my dad kept coming in, checking my progress, and telling me I needed to do better.  I was missing things.  I was messing it up.  I was breaking off feathers instead of cleanly plucking them.  For hours, this went on.  Finally, my dad took over.  Angrily.

I've never liked duck, meal-wise.  But I hadn't had it since my first husband totally screwed one up by COOKING IT IN THE MICROWAVE.  Understand, this was winter of 1983.  Yeah, not quite the defining era of microwave cooking technology.

So, when hubby ordered duck with our Chinese meal a while back, I decided to give it a shot.  I mean, it had been almost 30 years since the microwave disaster, and it had been almost 40 years since the plucking nightmare.  I figured it'd be palatable, at least--after all, it was drenched in orange sauce, right?

WRONG!

I never even got past the smell.  I don't know what other people smell when they get a whiff of cooked duck in orange sauce, but I smell blood and metal and dead and feathers.  I didn't even perceive the orange or other things--just the gore.  It was intense, it was immediate, and it was gut-wrenching.

No way that's just an emotional thing--not when I haven't smelled it in decades.  No, this somehow indelibly marked my neurons, changed my brain in some way.  It was horrifying, and I felt bad because it was my husband's dinner and I literally recoiled, gasped, and clapped my hands over my face.  I said terrible things.  And he had to eat it!

I was going to post a pic of a duck being plucked,
but turns out I don't have the stomach for it.

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Watched a documentary the other night, name of "Kumaré."  In a nutshell, it's about a guy who's had it with religion and had it with the gullibility of people, and so, as an experiment, he starts his own religion.  Or, rather, he borrows heavily from eastern/Indian traditions and adds in his own completely nonsensical gobbledygook.  I won't tell you how it goes or where it ends up.  I will tell you that some of it is painful to watch because there are people who are so pathetically, desperately dependent on being told what is, what to do, what to think, and how to see the world.  People who cannot exist without believing in some supernatural this or that--like they can't just trust themselves, they have to be led.  It was sometimes funny in a not-nice way, and sometimes heartbreaking in a very human way.  I enjoyed it.  Here's the poster--it's a link, too:

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Still no red paneling.  I suck.

Do not reprint without permission. © KAQ

I am defiantly going to write about that one . . .

Down, grammar snobs, DOWN!  No, I didn't just totally screw the grammar pooch in my subject line.  It was purely intentional, a reference to a conversation hubby and I had last night about the word "definitely" and how many people seem unable to spell it correctly. 

I am a bit of a grammar snob, myself--not hawkish about it, I don't police people's posts or Tweets (we all make mistakes, and it's not my job to run around putting out grammatical fires), but I notice.  I notice, and sometimes it drives me just a little batty.  Other times?

It amuses the hell out of me.

My favorite grammatisaster (I just made that up--speak of the devil)?  Definitely "defiantly."  It used to piss me off, but now I love it!  See, it makes every misstatement that much more emphatic and courageous.  I'm not just going to bed, I'm DEFIANTLY going to bed!  "Screw all y'all, I'm going to bed NOW!"  I don't merely think that the new Celica is a nice car for the dollar, I DEFIANTLY think that, so come on, just TRY to stand between me and my automotive opinion!  I double-dog DARE you! 

Another fave?  "Your" vs "You're."  Oh, I LOVE a good possessive in place of the contraction!  Why?  Because the difference between "YOU ARE screwed up" and the screwed up you possess is delicious!  "Your rude!"  What?  MY rude?  I have a rude?  Did someone give me a rude and I didn't know?  Was it you?  Awwww, thank you!  I've always wanted a rude!

One that drove me nutty for years is now a source of joy, thanks to a blog I stumbled upon.  "Alot."  Used to make me scream, but now?  Now I smile and imagine all those happy Alots who have loving homes because of the grammatically challenged. 

Why is this all such a big deal to me?  Well, it's actually not a huge deal.  I don't lose sleep over it (hell, I don't even LOOSE sleep over it!), but I guess . . . words MEAN something.  They do, every last one of them has a definition, a meaning.  When we use the wrong word (or mangle the right one), we fail to communicate in a meaningful way.  Sure, our audience can probably chew through the dreck and figure out what we meant, but why make them work like that?  Why not just use the right words, learn the correct spellings and communicate our meaning clearly instead of making our audience jump through hoops?

Having lived in Utah for decades, I have experienced a special bunch of speech and grammar disasters that folks in other parts of the world may not have enjoyed. 

Let's start with the long vowel sounds, which seem especially problematic when the word ends in an "l" sound.  You know, like "sale," "feel," "real," "deal," and "meal."  Most English speakers, when considering a trip to the local fast food joint, might say something like, "Hey, I feel hungry and McDonald's is having a sale--I think I'm gonna grab myself a real meal deal!"  Hey, they might!  But not in Utah!  In Utah, they'd say, "Hey, I fill hungry and McDonald's is having a sell--I think I'm gonna grab myself a rill mill dill!" 

I know, you think I'm exaggerating.  I'm not.  It's so bad that many Utahns spell how they pronounce.  So you see Craigslist ads boasting cars for "sell."  You see heartfelt Facebook posts proclaiming "I fill so sad, I felled my test!"  Coworkers actually have to approach their originally-from-out-of-state peers and ask, "Is it a sell boat?  A sale boat?  How do you spell that?"

A particular point of frustration/amusement?  The abandonment of the interior "t" in pretty much all words.  You know, like "mountain" becomes "mou-un," "Layton" becomes "Lay-un," and "carton" becomes "car-un."  This inspired epic comedy when the "ay-un" names became so wildly popular--you know, "Pay-un," "Day-un," "Say-un" (okay, I'm joking on that last one--not too many Satans running around Utah).  This phenomenon was beautifully illustrated by a friend who wrote the following Limerick a few years back:

There was once a young lady named Pay'un

Who lived in the city of Lay'un

Her interior "t"s

Were lost in the breeze

Or, possibly, stolen by Say'un  

While there are many other grammatical (and accent-related) language disasters that make me a bit crazy (there/their/they're and it's/its leap to mind), and many arguments against folks like me ("you knew what I meant!" and "how well I write doesn't have anything to do with how smart I am!" come to mind), the one grammar-related thing that makes me nearly wild with anger?  Calling people who value the proper use of the language "Grammar Nazis."   

Holy cow, really?  "Nazis?"  Guess what, kids?  Still too soon.  Using "Nazi" to describe a non-violent, verbal reaction to crappy grammar is like using "rape" to describe a jacked-up price at the car stereo joint.  Which brings us back to the point--words MEAN something.  Calling someone a "Nazi" for any reason other than murderous, genocidal, dastardly deeds is stupid and careless.  Whether it be grammar snobs or breastfeeding moms, the word "Nazi" doesn't apply.  Don't do that.   

And now that I'm done ranting, I have no doubt that this blog entry is riddled with typos and errors.  It must be, because that's the nature of the beast.  Complain about lousy spelling or crappy grammar, and you're guaranteed to make the kind of mistake that makes little trolls cry with joy.  That's okay.  I don't use a spell-checking program and I only vaguely proof-read when I'm operating on less than four hours of sleep.  Like I said, while this is all a pet peeve of mine, I don't cruise message forums or Facebook walls and correct people's grammar.  Except inside my head, and there's nothing to be done about that.  

Have a super day!  And, hey, if you injoyed this, just you wait intel you see my next one!  Yore gonna think it's a rill big dill!    Or maybe not.  Either way, I hope you enjoyed reading this.  I enjoyed writing it.  

Oh, hey, totally unrelated--is diet Vernors ginger soda supposed to smell like vomit?  I'm being serious-it's my first can (12 pack, actually), and it smelled like pure puke.  I thought it might be me, since I had an upset stomach, but hubby sniffed and said, "Yep, wow--vomit."  I dumped it down my sink (which now smells like someone hurled), and I'm unsure--have I got a bum 12 pack, or does it always smell like this?  The flavor (I took one sip) was just sweet--not gingery, not at all what I was expecting.  Just a sort of "aspartame water" thing going on.  Is it always like that?  Should I take it back to Wegmans?