Month: December 2002

There’s this feeling today of waiting for the other shoe to drop, the sort of feeling that I guess always comes right before a big vacation, when we look around and wonder why we’re here. I almost feel like I’m pressing my luck; the rest of the week went quickly enough, but it’s always calmest before the storm. I just want to give my boss his mail, get him to initial my time card and agree that there’s no reason for me to come in to the office on New Year’s Eve. Then I want to go home.

It’s like Wil Wheaton said yesterday:

I am ready for the “sitting around the fire with friends and family while drinking egg nog” part of Christmas to begin.

Are we there yet?

Seven more hours of work seems like an awful lot of time for something unexpected to happen…

For those of you keeping track at home, here’s “Trousers Talk”, take eight (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7):

Do you wear a lot of hats? I know I do. Too many, some might say, although I’ve tried to never let public opinion dictate my behavior. It’s not like I need a special room for all my hats or anything. It’s just easier that way. I was starting to run out of boxes.

I think, all things being equal, the fedora is probably my favorite type of hat. Famous people around the world have worn fedoras, and although I can’t think of any of their names right now, it’s comforting to know that they’re out there. Hiding. In the dark. Probably with knives. Incredibly sharp and comforting knives.

Hats, too, should be comforting, and they should fit snugly atop your head. I’m sorry, but that’s just the way I see it. Whatever else you might say about them or whatever plots you might secretly suspect them of hatching late at night in the closet when you aren’t looking, even if they are just hats fedoras are certainly capable of that much. They can fit easily atop a person’s head, as if they were designed for that very purpose. I don’t know much about the history of hats, or of fedoras in particular, but I’ve seen people wear them and I’ve even worn a few myself. So believe me, I know what I’m talking about here.

You can walk down the street wearing a fedora and people will say, “there goes a man (or a woman) who knows what he (or she) likes, a man (or a woman) for whom comfort is important, a man (or a woman) who even now is wearing a soft felt hat with a fairly low crown, creased lengthwise, and a brim that can be turned up or down, depending upon his (or her) mood.”

And that’s just nice to know.

Also nice is the pith helmet, but I seem to run out of room.

Just for the record, I almost never wear hats.

A is for atom that burns off your skin.

B is for bunker, which we hide in.

C is for cancer. A tumor’s your friend!

D is for deterrence. Drop that ol’ A-bomb again!

E is for everyone loves death from the skies!

F is for fusion! Ouch, it’s burning my eyes!”

G is for ‘Get down!’, which we foolishly shout.

H is for hair. Look! Mine’s fallen out!

I is for irradiate — it’ll make your skin glow!

J is for jaundice. I think the cancer’s starting to show.

What can I say? I was alone briefly in the caption gallery, and this was running. I’m wondering if I should bother trying to finish it.

Another day, another essay. This would, of course, be number 7 (1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6):

The other day, I saw an ad in a magazine that said, “The future is here!” And I thought, oh crap, maybe I had better put on some pants.

As it turns out, the future isn’t here just yet. It is, as they sometimes say, yet to come. But while we’re on the subject, this week marks the end of Daylight Savings Time, invented long ago for reasons I could probably look up, but which, quite frankly, I find quite boring and therefore best left to people who never got any dates in high school. Not that I dated much myself — I spent most nights throughout high school happily chained to the radiator in my parents’ basement, begging for scraps and occasionally barking like a wild dog when company came over — but I think my underlying point, whatever it was, is still valid.

Whether or not Susie Jenkins, the homecoming queen, took a restraining order out against me our senior year is no longer strictly relevant, and I think we do ourselves a disservice by constantly dwelling on the past like that. My wife says that I’m just avoiding the issue and that my barking is starting to frighten the neighbors, but I’m a little confused as to what that has to do with Daylight Savings Time in the first place, and so I tell her she’s just being silly.

The upshot of all this, however, is that, because of Daylight Savings Time, you’ll be reading this column an hour earlier than you would have last week. If you think about it as much as I have — since, chained to a radiator, one has plenty of time to reflect — this is a little like time travel. Except of course it isn’t. With time travel, I’m sure there’d be flashing lights or glowing things or flying cars. There would be some sort of physics or weird-ass, complicated math out of a book or something, and it would probably involve more than just turning your clocks back an hour once a year. Call me crazy, but that’s just how it seems to me.

After all, the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary on my desk defines time as “a nonspatial continuum that is measured in terms of events which succeed one another from past through present to future”, so you can imagine that travel through it would be more than a little wacky. Probably not Three’s Company-style wacky, but pretty wacky nonetheless. Daylight Savings Time, on the other hand, is pretty boring stuff, but at least it means we get to sleep in an extra hour once a year after all those late nights of barking at the neighbors.

Oh, and Susie, if you’re out there — call me, okay?

It’s probably the only one of the lot that’s at least marginally topical, since it was first printed on Daylight Savings Time weekend. That doesn’t mean anything, but I just thought I’d point it out.

For the past month or so, I’ve also been writing weekly horoscopes for Completely Different, the Monty Python Society newsletter, an idea I basically lifted from The Onion, who this week pretty much sum the entire thing up with the following:

Virgo: (Aug. 23—Sept. 22)

Certain shortcomings in your education and upbringing cause you to read meaning into the relationships among various celestial bodies.

I really could not have said it better myself. Eventually, though (and hopefully before the month is out), I will have updated the Monty Python Society website, and you’ll get to see what the stars have told me, if you’re so inclined. In the meantime, it’s not like everything we wrote last year is complete crap, you know.