"They're gonna have to introduce conscription...they're gonna have to take away my prescription..."

June 1997: I blurt a surprised obscenity from my new cubicle. My officemate C. asks, "What's up?"

"A friend of mine joined the army," I said.

"Wait. A friend from Wesleyan?!" replied C.

So this friend of mine shipped out to basic training. He needed a job, and getting his loans paid off sounded nice. He went to Kuwait, and he has great stories about it. I don't know if he had to shoot his gun. I didn't ask. Other than acquiring a souvenir hat in "desert pink" that he trotted out to all visitors at his apartment, he didn't change.

A self-confessed "bad long-distance friend," we don't correspond much when we're not living in the same place. But I emailed him from Germany on September 17, 2001 -- the first time the US tentatively brought up IRR -- to ask him to explain it from the inside.

"I'm not entirely out, but it is extremely unlikely I will be called to
serve. Everyone who enlists is obligated for eight years of service
regardless of active time commitment. Any time remaining after active duty
is slotted as inactive reserve.
Don't worry, though, there are about 1.2 million regular reservists ahead of
me in line before those of us on inactive reserve are called up.
Pretty much unless this thing escalates to the point of re-instating the
draft, the inactive reserve will remain inactive.

How are things with you guys?"

We haven't talked in a year, but I'm thinking of him again today.

This is still slightly less creepy than the moment a few weeks ago when, in a room full of friends and acquaintances mostly in their early- to mid-20's, Rick turned to me and said, "I wonder how many of these people are going to be drafted."

I've discovered, while disputing a charge on my library card, that there is a Jennifer Jean Muehlbauer who lives in Van Nuys. I've got a doppelganger in the Valley! Cheap thrills, I know, but I was the only one in Boston.

BBC News Online reports, "Neil Diamond and Barbra Streisand sang together for the first time in 24 years at a concert for Democrat John Kerry's US presidential campaign." Doesn't that sum up everything that's wrong with the current Democratic party?

And Cheney didn't just tell Senator Leahy to go fuck himself, he explained US foreign policy.

LA Times: "A state Senate committee approved legislation Wednesday to prohibit drivers from smoking in cars if young children are passengers...'It's time to take a stand and protect children beyond what their parents are willing to do,' said Sen. Deborah Ortiz (D-Sacramento)...'"

Hello.

Shouldn't we leave parenting, even bad parenting, to the parents? If we start handing out tickets to everyone exposing their kids to something unhealthy, there'll be an awful lot of cops at McDonalds.

Sing it, Village Voice

From the latest installment in the Voice's sometimes insightful and sometimes merely whiny "Generation Debt" series:

"Choosing a career path is a high-stakes gamble on where the jobs are likely to be two or four years down the road. Guess wrong and you could end up at a dead-end retail or fast-food job, slowly climbing out of a deep, dank hole of debt. Guess right, and you'll enter a job market that offers less security than ever.

"May marked the nation's third straight month of job growth, but the long-range view is mixed. For the best handicapping, you want the job market equivalent of a Las Vegas line-maker, the Bureau of Labor Statistics in Washington, D.C. Every couple of years officials there release the mother of all occupational outlooks, the 10-year employment projections. The most recent one, published in February, projected 21.3 million net new jobs through 2012. [...]

"But here's the depressing news: Of the top 10 occupations with the rosiest projections, seven are by and large poorly paid McJobs: retail (596,000 new jobs by 2012), customer service (460,000), food preparation (454,000), cashiers (454,000), janitors (414,000), waiters and waitresses (367,000), and nursing aides (343,000). And the BLS admits its numbers don't distinguish between full-time jobs with benefits and part-time or temp work. In other words, there will be plenty of jobs, but far fewer careers."

I don't have Windows 2000 (and it wouldn't fit on this shitty laptop anyway) so iTunes is out.

I don't want to deal with Windows Media Player 9 (edit: and it won't run on my version of Win98 anyway). AND I don't want to deal with Walmart. So Walmart.com's selling-dollar-bills-for-90-cents download store is also out.

Does anyone know a legal way for me to pay to download music without yuppie-class system requirements? Mainstream music, that is. I have plenty of free, legal weird stuff already.

It's the year 2004. Why is this difficult?

A day later, I'm thinking it'd be less hassle to buy used CDs, rip the songs I like, and then sell them again. Grunt.

The closest I'll ever come to two entries in a row about ass

My fourth-grade student has started exclaiming "Booty!" whenever she makes a mistake or has to "go fish." (Yes, we play Go Fish with the phonics cards. Don't ask. It works.) I'm not convinced she knows what it means. But, coincidentally, she's been having trouble with the "oo" sound, possibly because it's rife with exceptions such as "good."

After one of her outbursts, I asked her how she'd spell "booty."

"B...u...aty?"

Sadly, this is close enough to be exciting. I showed her how to spell it, and circled the "oo," and told her to think of "booty" when trying to remember what the "oo" says.

Immense giggles.

"Don't tell anyone your tutor taught you how to spell 'booty,'" I said, ensuring that she'll tell everyone her tutor taught her how to spell "booty."

But I'll be damned, she remembered "oo" at the next lesson.

Now I just need some inappropriate way to get her to remember what "aw" says...

Today I learned that the fourth-grade girl I tutor plays chess.

Also, that math is easy. She doesn't know why everyone's so upset about the times tables. Multiplying is just like adding, but you add a lot more times.

This helps to explain how she has made it to fourth grade, despite reading on a first grade level.

Imagine how well she'll do in school when she's functionally literate.

I've been up since 3:20 this morning, and here's what's running through my head.

1) Can the English-speaking world shut up about Ronald Reagan for just five minutes? I'm begging. Politics aside, he was a very ill 93-year-old man. Quel surprise that he's finally in the great B-movie in the sky (or down below). I know the media prepared these pieces years in advance, since the guy was sick for so long, but did it have to prepare so damn many of them? Next!

2) "A Pentagon report last year argued that President George W Bush was not bound by laws banning the use of torture, according to the Wall Street Journal. The document also argued that torturers acting under presidential orders could not be prosecuted, the paper said.". I thought George Washington asking to be president, not king, was supposed to take care of this kind of thing. (Or is that an urban legend?)

3) A year later, and it's still hilarious to watch LA people pretend we have seasons here. We're into what the locals call "June Gloom," which means it's cloudy and "cold" (in the 60s and 70s). That happens to be what it's like in northern Germany (and, I presume, elsewhere in northern Europe and in the Pacific Northwest) year-round. Which means those places are the ones without seasons. Uh. Logic circuits short-circuiting. Abort! Abort!

5) Am I ever going to be able to write half-time and teach half-time without getting a credential or reselling my soul?

6) What happened to 4)?

7) Need sleep. Zzzzz...

The New York Times buries the lead

Okay, the US got 248,000 new jobs in May. Unemployment remained the same, but yippee skippee, new jobs are good, yes?

Sure, yes, jobs are better than no jobs. But can we be a little pickier here in the richest place in the world, please? Here's the real issue facing the country, many paragraphs into the story:
Job growth in May was particularly strong for temporary workers, in health care, in hotel and restaurant work and in retailing.

Those are shitty, low-wage jobs, except for health care -- and I imagine nursing home workers and even RNs might argue with the "except" part. As Rick put it, hotels and restaurants preparing for tourist season does not a good economy make.

Don't get me started on the notion that someone picking up temp work counts as creation of a new job.

Wisdom from the elders

Yesterday, while greeting the grandmother of one of the kids I tutor:

Grandma: How are you?
Me: Can't complain.
Grandma: Wouldn't do any good anyway.

LA Woman!

I've now been in LA for a full year. I'm not blonde (any more than before), or tan, or writing a screenplay. I've only spotted one celebrity, and that was last July. That's not counting Kevin Bacon's band, which I caught two minutes of while in the club for a different act -- he sucks.

Some stereotypes are perhaps true. I've watched the sun set over the Pacific, listened to hippies and homeless drumming on Venice Beach, and seen dolphins leaping out of the water off the coast of Malibu.

Then again, I spend the third Thursday of every month in a homebrew supply store's parking lot drinking homebrewed beer from quarter kegs, unlabeled bottles, and the occasional repurposed 7-Up 2-liter.

I've danced in a kitchen in Hollywood, eaten midnight chicken dinner at LA's oldest (best?) blues bar, sang a karaoke version of "Lady Marmalade" with half a dozen drunk female scientists, and visited one of the only bars in California where people still smoke.

I've met people who've never seen snow.

I've downed a wonderfully authentic $1 cow tongue taco, and a wonderfully inauthentic $1.39 hamburger-and-American-cheese taco. I've eaten fried chicken and syrupy waffles on the same plate. It turns out there's a Filipino cafeteria in my neighborhood, and the first noodles I tried in Koreatown made me cry. I've gone out of my way for a burrito from the University of Southern California's part of South Central. But I have not yet had a burrito in East LA or Chinese food in Monterey Park, let alone Hawaiian grub in Gardena or a single plate of Indian food anywhere.

I've passed canapes to television executives and taught a 6th grader the alphabet.

I've given a eulogy at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, wearing an angry red clip-on visitors pass that said, "Escort Required."

I've been a "hair model" at Vidal Sassoon in Beverly Hills, which entailed a 3-hour haircut from a hesitant student while listening to horrible 80s music.

I have, much to my surprise, made some kickass friends.

I've finally seen the Watts Towers, the multi-story folk art monstrosities built over three decades by a 4'10'' Italian lunatic. But I haven't been to the La Brea Tar Pits, the Getty, or any museum, really, let alone the really weird ones.

I've scrambled up rocks at Joshua Tree, up sand dunes, and around a dead volcano, but have yet to properly explore the woods, canyons, and mountains within an hour of my door.

I haven't even been to all the microbreweries yet.

So, I'm not bored, and I'm not done. And, though it looked for a few months like I might be, I'm not defeated.

God help me, I love LA.

One year down, four or five to go. Bring it.