The Twilight Report

Your Home For Snappy Repartee

cracker

Backyard barbecue, warm fire and I suddenly thought to myself: SMORES! Then I remembered no graham crackers in Australia. Pity, except I hate graham crackers anyway.

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if all else fails, go with b from now on. b is the new c

Today for mum’s day we brought grandma home for a family barbecue. In this case “home” is Gosford, where nobody actually lives anymore. Anyway, mum was running late as always and so while Don and aunty Rae were picking grandma up from the nursing home, mum and I went looking for a mum’s day card for grandma. Pretty much all of mum’s day cards had been taken, and the only one with “grandma” on it was too frilly for me to take seriously (there were “nana” and “gran” cards but I have never called grandma anything but grandma, so they seemed particularly unnatural). It suddenly struck me as slightly absurd that I was standing there in the newsagency looking for a mum’s day card with my mum standing right next to me.

“Happy mum’s day, by the way.” I said.

The other lady in the store also looking for a last minute mum’s day card thought this was pretty funny. Anyway, I think that mum and grandma know how much I love them and how important they are to my life. That the Hallmark Greeting Card Cartel sponsors the day is rather beside the point. It was nice bringing grandma home for the day.

Aunty Rae and mum were looking through some of my great grandfather’s old WWI records and stuff. His given names were “Fredrick Graham”. Seeing his name on one of the papers, it reminded me that I am really named after him. I always think of myself as being named after my uncle Graham (and I am), but my mum actually called me Fred for the first few days of my life. Thankfully mum and dad agreed on Graham instead.

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I Cannot Be Hurt by Anything this Wicked World Has Done

What was 2004? It was a year of stolen and disputed elections in Georgia and the Ukraine, the rise and fall of Howard Dean and John Kerry, the first private space flight and the end of the "X-Prize," disaster in Darfur, prisoner abuse in Iraq, expansion of the European Union, the death of Ronald Regan and a month of flags at half mast, the return of Greek Olympics and a very smug presidential victory. In less political but tragic terms, the worst natural disaster in my memory has occurred in Asia as Tsunami death tolls top 135,000 according to CNN.com.

For me, the year started out as a bleak one in the coldest New York winter I have ever experienced. My mother came to visit me for her birthday. We stayed in Manhattan and it was bitterly cold.

Lowel and Johanna
I took a lighting class at Dutchess which was a blast. Some of my friends from Black and White II were taking the class and I met some other cool people. It was so much fun working with those people, including the teacher, Lowel Handler.

(Read more...)

In Short, 2004 was A Great Year and I have high hopes that 2005 will be even better.
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Flashback

Because the writers guild is on strike, today's episode of The Twilight Report will be a flashback episode. I am going to tell you about a legendary former employee of The Company. To protected this person's identity, I will refer to him using the pseudonym "Bill." For those of you who already know this story, please forgive me if I get any of the details wrong. I didn't know "Bill" well, but I did meet him and talked to him a few times.

The first time I met Bill, he was giving me a ride to West Point so that we could watch Army get beat by some Christian private school. He was telling me that he really didn't want to work for the company, and would rather go back to school to study Art. He also wanted to visit Australia, and since I am from Australia originally, we had something to chat about. He was a moderately big guy, and he drove an enormous green station wagon. We got to the tailgate, had some BBQed food, played a drinking game and made our way up to the football stadium to watch the game. Army was playing some private religious school (as mentioned) so I dubbed the game "Army vs. God." Needless to say, Army has a terrible team and lost a close game. When I got back to where the cars had been parked for the tailgate, I discovered that Bill had left without me. Fortunately one of my friends gave me a ride.

Bill wanted to get laid off from The Company so that he could get the juicy severance package and go back to graduate school. Keep in mind that this was a few years back when The Company was having these big massive layoffs every six months, so you would think it wouldn't have been that hard for him to arrange it. However, Maintaining employment at The Company is never a logical affair, and try as he might he could not get them to fire him. His approach was to dress more and more casually every day. Very gradually, until (I am told) he came to work in his pajamas, when allegedly, Nobody said anything about it.

Back in the day The Company had a reputation formality and suits, those of you who know which company I work for know this. Things have changed. Today, our work environment, especially for those of us who are engineers, the dress code is very lax. Usually I come to work with a nice casual shirt, although today I was feeling especially casual and so wore my University of Arizona Math Nerds T-Shirt, which was given to me when I graduated as a Math major. So although I can't say that I was there, I can say that Bill's story is not so far fetched.

Since dressing down didn't do the trick, Bill decided to just go ahead and move to Australia and go to graduate school to study Art. Without telling management. He wanted to see how long it would take The Company before they stopped paying him. If you have seen Office Space and know about the bureaucracy of Corporate America, you know that this could take years. In Bill's case The Company moved at the lightning speed of several weeks to terminate Bill's employment.

Sometimes, I sit in my office (here is where the Flashback fade effect brings us back to the present, you can see me sitting at my desk typing this into my computer as I wait for another timing run to complete), and wonder whatever happened to Bill. But mostly I wonder what Australia is doing with him. He seems like the sort of person who would do well there.
high freak @ nx1 commented:
"bill is still in contact with certain individules at the
Co. I am not, but I do know of one person who exchanges
emails infrequently with him.
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Nothing of Interest Here

On Friday, I was doing the laundry and they were playing the Beetles song "Hello, Goodbye." This made me laugh after the previous entry because this song reminds me of another old friend from my past. I won't go into the details, but in elementary school my best friend (at the time) "gUe" and I performed a skit to this song for the Aspen School talent show. It was by far the most creative performance that day, although I can't really take credit for that... the idea had been gUe's mom, who seemed to like the idea of putting us in the talent show.

I thought this was funny, because earlier in the day the song Ruiner had reminded me of another old friend (see previous entry), and I have been thinking about old friends a lot lately. Old friends in this context meaning anyone I was friends with before I moved to New York. I had been thinking also about how I don't keep in touch with anyone from the Los Alamos period in my life to talk to them about these thoughts, but then I remembered that I was going to Philly to see my friend Mike, who goes all the way back to my junior year at high school.

Just last year, he married a nice girl named Sarah who is also from Los Alamos; although I'd never met her until I went down to see Mike this weekend. So I had a bit of Home Town Overload, although it was surprisingly nice. I was pleased with myself because I recognized their wedding photographs as being taken at the White Rock Overlook, which incidentally was also featured in the film Silverado.

Mike was having a summer BBQ/party and I got to meet many of his friends and coworkers. A few of whom I had met the couple of times I have seen Mike since I moved here. He has very nice friends. They are all of the married/have young children age group... which I don't quite relate to yet. I only know one married couple who plan to have children, and that is still some time away. Anyway I was glad to go down there.

Next weekend I go to Maine!

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