beautiful, funny, sad & true

Naturally, all of this Mac nostalgia made me think of the comic strip Bloom County, in which the character Oliver Wendell Jones got a computer for Christmas which had a hilarious mind of its own, and which was obviously inspired by the first Macintosh.  It was called the Banana Junior 6000.

You can click on all of these to make them large and legible, by the way.  Here are two strips, from when Oliver first got the computer. . .

. . .and here are two from some time later, when Oliver and the Banana started to feel the effects of Moore’s Law:

This was the 1980’s, after all, so there was plenty of heavy metal music in the culture at large.  Some people listened to it, some people ridiculed it, some of us even got guitars and learned how to play it.  I told you that story so I could tell you that Kiss was one of the biggest bands in the world back then (you could argue that they still are), and one of their claims to fame was definitely Gene Simmons’s tongue.  The creator of Bloom County designed a hilarious mock-advertisement for the Banana, using Gene as the negative model for what will become of your child if he or she doesn’t grow up with the necessary skills and tools to survive in this cruel and unforgiving world.  Like any good, intrepid Kiss fan, I instantly recognized it as a classic, cut it out of the newspaper, and tacked it to the wall in my bedroom.

Still rings true today, eh?

I love the name of the program ‘Bananamanager.’  That’s just pure genius.  Somehow, I suspect that’s where he got the idea for the whole Banana thing in the first place.

Incidentally, I need to give special thanks to this blog and this blog, from which I scrounged up these strips.  Without them, I would have been trying to take pictures of my old Bloom County books, which would have been a huge pain, and wouldn’t have looked nearly as good either.  My hat’s definitely off to both of them.

In all the stress, I forgot to mention the good thing that happened.  As of yesterday afternoon, I have a second niece.

So there. . .yesterday wasn’t all bad.

The other day, after writing the entry about flirtation and pedantry, I thought of a couple of examples of the type of sarcastic, pedantic, or downright nasty things I used to say to people.

ONE:
This occurred when I was nineteen, and I worked in the record department at a retail store.  Extremely glamorous (my tongue is very much in my cheek) and also low-paying.  One day, the manager and I were sitting around talking, like we used to do whenever business was slow, and a woman from another department ambled over to talk with us.  “Oh man, I hope today is better than yesterday; yesterday just drug.”

“Dragged,” I said, absently.

“What?” she asked.

“Dragged.  ‘Drug’ is something you take to achieve an altered state of consciousness.  ‘Dragged’ is what yesterday did.”

She gave me a look.  “What are you, some kind of encyclopedia?”

“Dictionary.”

She gave an exasperated sigh, then turned and walked away.  The manager put her hand over her mouth to stifle her laughter.

TWO:
This happened when I was about twenty-three, and I worked at a video store.  One of my fellow employees constantly talked about how she was on a diet, and about how she was doing this-and-that to lose weight, but she would constantly snack on candy throughout the day.  I don’t mean an occasional once-a-week kind of thing, either.  She’d buy a couple different bars in the morning and afternoon, and have an ice cream sandwich for lunch.  It was insane.

One day, she said, “I can’t figure out why I’m not losing any weight.  I mean, I eat like a bird.”

“What, you eat twice your own weight every day?”  Cause that’s what birds do.  “Or do you mean you put it down and peck at it like this?”  I made that pecking motion with my head toward her candy bar, which was sitting on the counter, half-eaten.

She got mad and walked away, and the other two employees cracked up laughing.  These days, I would never make that joke.  Maybe it’s because of all the women I know who have eating disorders.  Maybe it’s because I’m wiser about psychological matters now, and about the myriad ways that shame weasels itself into our lives, and into the decisions we make every minute of every day.  Or maybe I just think that it’s mean to make fun of people about their sensitive subjects.

All that being said, I have to confess that I do still think the ‘twice your own weight every day’ thing was funny.  But when I look at videos or pictures of myself at the time, though, I see what a jackass I used to be, and I have to cringe.

I must have been twenty-eight or thirty before I really started to change, and to grow emotionally, and to become the person I am now, but that’ll have to be a story for another day.

Was today frickin’ Christmas and nobody told me?  I got so many random gifts, it was absolutely unreal.

At work, my friend LC sent me an e-mail that said, “Are you here?” and then showed up with a bag full of CD cases.  There must have been twenty-five or thirty cases, and in each case was three CD’s!  I mean. . .oh my GOD that’s a lot of CD’s.  And best of all?  They’re all 80’s metal.  (Except for maybe a handful, like the New York Dolls and At The Drive In.  But otherwise. . .)  Seriously.  I was shaking, I was so excited to start listening to them.  After listening to the inauguration speech and a little bit of the commentary, I got through two Dio’s, a Mötley Crüe, and At The Drive In.

So then I called my mom while I was on my lunch break, and she happened to be over at her friend’s house.  This friend is my adopted aunt, by the way, who recently tracked us down on the net after we’d all been out of contact for almost thirty years.  Turns out that she lives about two blocks from my mom, so she wrote to my mom a few weeks ago and they’ve been reconnecting and spending incredible amounts of time together, which is mind-boggling and also makes perfect sense at the same time.  Naturally, my mom passed the phone to her, so I got to talk to her too.  In fact, here’s a picture of us together, which was taken when I was about a year old.

It was. . .I mean, I was practically speechless by then.

But there’s more.  My friend VL-W sent me a message which said, “Come in and see me when you can.  I have something for you.”  We were super busy, so it took me about an hour and a half, but when I was finally able to make it in there, I found that she had a super-cool black bowler hat waiting for me, which was the same one she let me borrow the other night at the IrishBand show.  She said that I could borrow it until I got one, but then wrote back right afterwards to say, “You know what?  I always think I look like a dyke in that hat, and you totally rock it.  It’s yours.”  Again. . .oh my GOD.

So I got home and there were two copies of the new Susie Blue CD waiting on my doorstep for me.  I’m in her band, and on this CD, which looks great and sounds great.  The other copy is for GuitaristDavid, my neighbor and friend, who also played on the CD.

Oh yeah.  The Susie Blue CD’s were resting on top of a box from my mom, which I didn’t even know that she’d mailed!  It  was full of new towels and kitchen stuff that she just randomly got just because she’s nice that way.

So. . .between the 75 new 80’s metal CD’s, the Susie Blue CD that I’m on, the hat, the box of housewares, the fact that Barack Obama is president now, AND I have an IrishBand show-slash-Obama-celebration tonight which is gonna frickin’ RULE. . . could today be any better?

I suppose that if I didn’t have to work (and work overtime at that) it would’ve been better.  But then again, if I hadn’t gone to work, I wouldn’t have the 75 CD’s or the hat.  So there you go.  Pretty damn good day, if I do say so myself, and it ain’t even close to being over yet.

When I was younger, I used to have this unstoppable urge to correct peoples’ grammar.  Thankfully, that impulse seems to have dissipated as I’ve gotten older, but I found out yesterday that it’s not entirely gone.

I walked over to FamousCoffeeCompany for a bit of the old you-know-what, and I was wearing my dark brown corduroy jacket.  The barista commented on it, saying that she loved it and that it was very teacher-esque.  My first thought was, “I think you mean ‘profesorial,’ ” and if this encounter had happened when I was twenty, I’m quite sure that’s what would have come flying out of my mouth.  With age comes dementia wisdom, however, so I said, “Thank you.”  Smile.  “Yeah, it even has patches on the elbows.” I raised an arm in front of me to show her.

“Nice,” she said, smiling back.  “Well, it looks great.”

I’m learning.  Slowly but surely, I’m learning.  Flirtation is much better than pedantry.  Or should that have been ‘pedanticism’?