Made my move….

Last weekend my brother and BIL came in from Indiana to help my move out of my apartment and back into my parents place. We got all the big stuff and some other things. I’m still not fully moved out yet. Still a few things left and I’d like to give the place a bit of a cleaning before turning in the keys, but essentially I’m moved into my parents’ condo.

This move has prompted me to consider all the times that I have moved in my life. Of course for the first 19 years of my life I lived in the house that I was born into in Warren, Michigan. My parents were not the type to move. Once they got settled in they didn’t want to change things.

After a failed attempt at engineering school at Lawrence Institute of Technology (LIT), as it was dubbed back in 1986, (now it Lawrence Technological University, I think((LTU))) I did a semester at Macomb Community College (MCC) and then began then began the next Fall at Central Michigan University (CMU) in Mt. Pleasant, MI. Last there about three weeks.

Moved back home.

After a couple more years at MCC I moved to Ypsilant, into Jones Hall on the campus of Eastern Michigan University (EMU).

Moved back home at the end of the school year.

Then back to EMU the next year. Lived there through the school year and summer and through the next school year before moving back home again.

After a year at home, working at B. Dalton’s Bookstore in Universal Mall, I moved to Kalamzoo, where I attended grad school at Western Michigan University. I lived in on campus apartments my first years. Moved to another on campus complex the second  years. My third years moved to a brownstone at Rose and Vine in the downtown Kalamzoo student ghetto. And for my last few years lived in an apartment complex, the name of which escapes me now.

Moved back home. Lived with folks in Warren house.

Moved into Troy apartment with girlfriend (now ex-wife).

Moved to an apartment in Ypsilanti.

Moved into a condo in Madison Heights with now ex-wife after she got pregnant.

Moved to a house in Birmingham. Lived there about 6  years.

After separating from wife, moved into Royal Oak apartment at Thirteen and Coolidge. Stayed approximately 5 months.

Moved back into Birmingham house.

Divorced and moved back in with folks in their new condo in Sterling Heights. Stayed a few months.

Moved into Troy apartment, which was actually same complex that I lived in with now ex-wife who was girlfriend at the time. Lived there a year.

Last weekend moved out of Troy apartment and back into condo with folks.  Plan to be here for awhile, to save money, so I can buy my own house, where daughter can have her own room and space. Not sure where, though. I don’t have a house to sell since ex got house in divorce. So once I save enough money I have my pick of places. Needs to be close enough to my daughter and her school but not too close to the ex.

Seems like a lot of moving to me. Is that normal for someone of my generation?

 

Back to school: the sequel

What does it mean when your when your life feels like an ill-advised sequel to an 80s movie? It can’t be good.

So I guess that it makes sense that it is a cold gray morning as I am about to head out to the campus of Eastern Michigan University, where I did my undergrad back in the lat 80s/early 90s. I’m going to look into a graduate certificate program in Technical Writing. If I lose my job I can go back to school with money from the Michigan Works program. At least, I think that I can. They don’t just hand out money to anyone. In any case, I figure it’s a good idea to explore all my possible options.

But as is probably obvious I’m feeling conflicted about going back to school. I mean, I already tried once this year when I took a class at Macomb Community College, and I ended up dropping that class. What makes me think this will be any different? And it’ll be even more money down the drain if I bail this time.

I have to do something, though. I can’t just do nothing, can I? I know: even not choosing is a choice. But that always struck me as a cop out. And besides I’ve done my share of not choosing in  my life. The biggest problem with not choosing is that if you don’t choose your life someone else will choose it for you. And then where will you be?

I suppose in a way it is easier to let someone else choose your life, to let someone else make all the decisions and just follow along, but it fails to provide a certain satisfaction. Plus, if the day ever comes that you want to choose something it’ll be a struggle, perhaps even a battle.  I think it makes people uncomfortable when someone they know as a non-chooser suddenly wants to choose. They fight against it. But that’s just this bloggers opinion [insert sound effect of two pennies hitting a table top].

First class: postmortem

Any nervousness that I had about returning to school quickly disipated when the instructor, while taking attendance, pulled the Beuller gag from Ferris Beuller’s Day Off when he came to a name that no one answered to. (awkward sentence, eh):

Beuller…?  Beuller…? Bueller ?

I nodded, snickering. And I wasn’t the only one either. There were a few others, seriously. I mean, they still regularly show that movie in reruns, right.

In any case, the class seems like it will be interesting, because the instructor is interesting, and interested in teaching. That makes a big difference.

It was hard to sit still, although considering I sit all day at my job you’d think I’d be used to it.

On my way to class, I couldn’t help wondering if I’m doing this for a confidence/ego boost. It’s like when I took that communications class down at Wayne State and actually got more than 100% on a test because I also answered the bonus question correctly. And my review of the book we had to read was probably much better than most — it was a freshman course. I pulled an easy A. Of course, this is a science class, which is not something I studied very little after high school, only the minimum requirement.

Anyhoo….

After class, walking across campus in the dark I was reminded of my days in undergrad, not at MCC but at Eastern Michigan, when I’d wander campus late at night or when I’d be coming back from a late night class. I loved that feeling, when the campus was quiet and dark and the air was cold and crisp. I guess I miss it. I was good at school. Not so much in the real world.

It was driving home that I was reminded of my MCC days some 20 years ago. On a Thursday night, I’d be leaving campus at 10pm, when the library closed, and I’d head for my buddy Mick’s place for pre-bar beers before going out. We’d be out late, sometimes untile 3 or 4  in the morning, even later. Often Thursdays would run into Fridays would run into Saturdays would run into… Suddenly it was Monday morning and time for school again. I could do that then. Not anymore.

Check out these blogs

These come from a fellow Eastern Michigan alum, whom I read about in my recent alum magazine. His name is David Donar and he has two blogs.

The first one is political graffiti and it features his political cartoons. I dig political cartoons.

The other one is donklephant, a political blog for those “tired of rhetoric, bomb-throwing, and political hackery” which sounds like a refreshing idea to me.

The weather yesterday…

…was strange, wasn’t it? In this part of Michgan it was anyway.

I don’t think it got warmer than 68 degrees and that didn’t last long. Plus the skies kept toggling from partly cloudy to gray and overcast. It rained off and on. It was cool and breezy and didn’t seem at all like early August in Southeast Michigan weather, which always makes me think of stifling heat and humidity that makes it seem as if you breathing through a wet wool blanket. I got that description from a Lorent D. Estleman book, one of his Amos Walker PI novels.

The weather yesterday made it seem more like the first weeks of the new school year in September. That’s what the cool breezes wafting through the screen door made me think of anyway. And for me that meant Ypsilanti where I attended undegrad at Eastern Michigan University and Kalamazoo where I attended grad school at Western Michigan University. And to a lesser degree Ann Arbor, which is of course right down the road from Ypsilanti.

I always really liked that time of year, especially when I was in college. Classes had just started so there wasn’t that much work that you had to do yet. Even if you were already slacking off you couldn’t be that far behind. Besides, you knew that winter was coming up soon and with it a lot of time to catch up. Until then you just wanted to get outside, out on campus, into town or whatever.

At Eastern we’d hang out on the front steps of Jones Hall, the sister dorm to Goddard Hall. Together they formed the Community of Scholars, housing mostly the University Honor’s Program. Jones was an older dorm buidling, which meant instead of one big room we had two seperate rooms, a bedroom and a study room.

Sometimes there would be impromptu touch football games on the front lawn of Jones Hall. Or people would toss around a Frisbee or something like that. At the end of the school year, when it got hot, the front lawn of the dorm would turn into a kind of beach, people laying out, soaking up the sun. It was pretty cool.

The Jones-Goddard complex also had a courtyard. It was lined with bushes and there were a few larger trees. There was also a sand volleyball court. Sometimes people would linger in the courtyard until after dark and even late into the night. You could hear them talking, even the slightest of whispers through your dorm room window. Occassionally, couples had sex out there. You could hear that too.

At night, I liked to wander around campus, sometimes alone, sometimes with a group of people, sometime with a girl. I liked to sit up behind the library and smoke cigarettes and watch people stumble back from the bars on Cross Street late at night. You could do that even in the middle of winter because the big grates behind the library would blow warm air.

I have no idea why I am babbling about this, except that I am susceptible to nostalgic reminiscing, for good or ill. Something as simple as the weather can set me off. Often it is a smell.

I do wonder if my dauther will enjoy the same kind of college experience. I hope she does. She says that she doesn’t want to go away to college, that she wants to live with Mom and Dad forever. Of course, she is only 7 years old. I’m sure by time she hits, oh, say, 12 or 13, that will change. I hope it does anyway. I don’t want her to miss out on things like going away to college, living in a dorm, meeting new people and making new friends.

Perhaps I am just tired of spewing about the election. I don’t know.

Another review/interview with Jeff Gordinier….

…author of X Saves the World. The article is from March but fuck it!

http://thetyee.ca/Books/2008/03/25/GenXNow/

I dig Jeff’s explanation of the Gen X viewpoint:

HO: What is the Gen X viewpoint?

JG: “I think the Gen X viewpoint is indirection. The boomer and millennial viewpoint is “I want to be in the fucking spotlight.” Gen Xers are uninterested in the spotlight. They’re more interested in dodging it and doing good work quietly. I think there’s a sort of comfort in the margins. Our influence on American culture has been in the shadows. It has been from the margins, even if we’re talking about something as macro as Google. Its genesis was microcosmic.”

Jeff gives credit, in part, to punk rock for this the Gen X sensibility:

“And, let’s be honest, punk rock has a lot to do with it. It just does. Not just the music but the sensibility. That attitude is so different than the boomer attitude. The attitude of people like Jello Biafra and Johnny Rotten, so scabrous and questioning and unwilling to be pinned down, unwilling to be lumped in. That seems to be so much a part of the Gen X sensibility.”

And I like his argument against the slacker label:

I’ve been a slacker. I wasted my time. I drank beer, I played chess with old guys, I sat around, I wrote a couple pieces, but, you know, so I slacked. Who hasn’t? It was good times. But for the most part, I was just unemployed, looking for work. I mean, I wasn’t slacking. I wanted a job, you know? We had a hard time finding work. That’s different than not wanting to work at all.

I dig how unapologetic he is about his slacking initially. I agree. So what? I’ve fucking slacked too. Shit, my whole grad school career was one long slack for the most part. I mean, come on. I got an MFA in fucking creative writing. Shit, I didn’t even have to hand in a finished thesis for crying out loud. It was part of a novella. I like grad school so much that I stuck around Kalamazoo, where to WMU, for a couple more years and taught part time as adjunct and worked doing maintenance and cleaning at a Hot Tub spa. It was way cool. The owners of the Hot Tub spa threw rocking Christmas parties!

I was never in a hurry to graduate from college. I took my time at community college — three years. I’d go to class during the day, study until I got booted from the library, then hit my buddy Mick’s house where we started drinking just to get tuned up and then hit the bars and clubs or went to a gig for somebody’s band that we knew. After three years of that I took off for Ypsilanti and EMU for ungergrad. I was in no hurry to get my degree. I was an English/creative writing major. I was having fun. Then I took a year off before grad school and worked in the bookstore in the mall — hey, it was full time — and partying some more.

I guess I just always had this impression that there was nothing all that great about the “real world” as people say, like it was a threat or something. And you know what? I was fucking right. I got my first “real job” in corporate publishing and it sucked ass. Especially my fucking gumpy ass, pear-shaped boss with the square head and bad fucking hair and creepy child hands who practically cracked the concrete floor she was such a hard-walker. Of course, the most annoying thing about her was that she “just loved her job” and “just loved being your guys’ team leader.” Yeah, I learned that your boss isn’t called a boss, she’s a team leader. By age she wasn’t a Boomer — she was younger than me — but by obnoxious corporate cog standards, oh, they just didn’t come any Boomer.

And anyway. Isn’t slacking what everyone aspires to anyway? Isn’t that what retirement is? Slacking around in the sun by the pool? Sleeping in. Going to Denny’s and hanging out for hours just drinking coffee and talking about pointless shit. Wandering around the mall or whatever. Listening to music. Going to movies. No real order to your day. Just doing whatever.

But of course you’re supposed to earn the right to slack. That’s the American way. And I think what pissed off a lot of people — Boomers, I mean. Is that we, Gen Xers, hadn’t “earned” it. We just fucking did it. Why hadn’t they fucking thought of that? Oh, that’s right. They were too busy planning the revolution. Sorry. Maybe in your next life a-hole!

But like Jeff says, we weren’t slacking. We were mostly just unemployed or under-employed. The job market sucked. Nothing else to do. Why not drink beer, smoke cigarette, and hang out in coffee shops?

Slacking is a much maligned, much misunderstood endeavor.

First of (hopefully) many musings….

Recently I started a MySpace page. It began strictly as a whim. I wanted to message Diablo Cody after seeing the movie from her screenplay, Juno. I wasn’t exactly ga ga over the film, though I liked it. It was cute, but a little too clever by half, until about maybe twenty minutes in when it seemed to turn, became more human and affecting (or is it effecting? I can never keep those straight). Anyhoo… I simply wanted to tell her that I really dug her reference to The Runaways, the all-chick, 70s metal band that features Joan Jett and Lita Ford — Oh baby, what I wouldn’t give to have those two tag-team abuse me for a couple of hours! Well, if you know anything about MySpace, you know you have to have an account to send message etc. So I did that. Sent my fawning message to Ms. Cody as well as adding her to my friends. But after some time had passed and she did not respond or add me as a friend to her page, well, my poor, star-struck little heart just broke into 3.76 pieces. But I figured as along as I had the MySpace page I might as well fuck around with it. I mean, it was either that or actually do my job. And who wants to do their job. Pa-leeeze. That is so 80′s yuppie it makes me want to gag myself with a Ginsu. Aacck!

So I’ve been keeping a blog on my MySpace page (myspace.com/junkdrawer67), which is cool, but the problem is that people can’t comment on it unless they have a MySpace account. And for some reason my Gen X constiuency seem to have an aversion to joining MySpace. I don’t know why. Unless they’re afraid of having their feeling hurt by a former Minneapolis stripper come hot shot screenplay writer hurting their feelings by refusing to respond to their messages or add them to her friends list, because I can totally relate to that, dude. Totally. Or, maybe it it is simply a generational (X, that is) aversion to joining, except, I was under the impression, for online social networking thingies which allow one to join a little group while maintaining a distanced autonomy/anonymity, but then there is that whole irrational/rational loyalty/prejudice for one’s own thingy and against another thingy. My point being that here on wordpress one need not join to comment. And really what’s the point of blogging of people cannot (or will not) comment. I mean, otherwise you’re just blathering into the cyber-ether.

It’s sort of like standing behind the library on Eastern Michigan Universities campus late at night with your pants down around your knees, jerking off into the darkness. (Not that I’ve ever done that. I’m just sayinng, you know, posing a scenario or whatever). Sure, it feels good but what’s the fucking point? Not that I want my blog to have a point really, because that is the last fucking thing that I want. Having a point smacks too much of having a purpose, which sounds suspiciously like a mission statement, which is something that Boomer’s invented when they realized that the revolution they were staging wasn’t going to happen and they sold out and became yuppie sell-out, bleeding ponytail, corporate shills. And fuck if I want to be that. I mean, the reason I work in the basement of a library for less than 30k a year (although the benefits are pretty descent and there is a okay pension plan, I mean, if you stick around for 30 years or so, so I got that going for me) is so that I can rail against such vermin.

Anyhoo… here I am. And here I hope to stay for awhile. I mean, at least until society collapses and daily life in America become like living in a George Romero zombie movie, which I’m pretty much expecting to happen any day, but that’s cool, I dig George Romero’s movies.