Always Something to Remind You

I have a couple of email subscriptions that do me no good down here.  More specifically, I get emails from Binny's Beverage Depot, Peoria Packing Company, and the Polish Museum of America. I could easily unsubscribe from all of them (except the PMA because they are luddites and you to email them) but I choose not to.

I also get emails from Zillow, Redfin, and other Real Estate entities that tell me my house in PP is worth X more than when I bought and sold it.  

Finally, I get the Book of Faces Memories, which used to be called On This Day after they bought it from TimeStamp.    

Those hurt.  

I really miss my Chicago house.  Yes, it had some warts.  No Central Air conditioning, the bedrooms were small and the bathrooms needed some work.  But I had finally got my garage the way I wanted it.  

But I'm trying to see a positive or at least something to hope for.   In the late 80s, my mom took me out of college because she fell into financial ruin, and instead of making the smart decision to apply for what was then abundant financial aid, she decided to just take me out of college.  There's more to that, but I won't go into it now.  

 And I wasted spent a lot of the 90s trying to get back to that life.  I seriously, naively, believed that some of the people I went to Northeast Missouri State University with actually cared about me.  

Somebody that I use to know

 It was brought to my attention the other day that a friend from college died of cancer earlier this month.  Obviously, this sucks.  But what I'm finding strange is how I'm feeling about it.  Lily Hung and I were good friends in the early 90s.  We were at UIC together and our group would meet in the cafeteria before class and grab coffee or breakfast.  We would often have lunch together too.  I had my first Guinness with her at Hawkeye's.

Lilly also introduced me to volleyball and the Lincoln Park Volleyball club.  She was a far better player than I and she often played in tournaments, which is where she met her husband, Andres.  And that is when we started spending less time together.  A few times over the years, she'd make a half-hearted attempt to get together but our schedules never jived and it fell flat.

Again, I'm not sure why this is causing me so much confusion.  We had our Season in the Sun but then grew apart.  No big deal, really.  But perhaps my neurodivergent mind is telling me, while looking through the Lens of Time, that we could have had a different type of relationship.  

Could we have had a romantic relationship?  She often pointed out that I was good looking, but I guess I never made a move.  Could she have helped me navigate the Mysteries of Life better?  What would be her motivation to do so?

My short answer is that I guess I missed the lunches and dinners and good conversations we use to have and that they went away only because the dynamic changed.  She needed something more and I couldn't provide it.  

Some Random Thoughts

My cats seem to have an implicit agreement between them not to cuddle with the same human being at the same time. This was not always the case and I definitely remember it not being the case with our previous cats.  Elsa has become more of a cuddy cat than she used to be but still isn't a heavy snuggler like Ryder.

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You meet the same people in different forms throughout life.  In college, I met a guy named Troy on the first day of moving into the dorms.  He seemed like a good enough guy but there was something that my spidey sense said don't get too close.  In retrospect, I should have hung out with him more.  

20 years later, on my first day of orientation at a new job, I met Greg W.  We became work friends and there are definitely some similarities between Greg and Troy.  

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I have a related strange theory.  The light at the end of the tunnel we see when we die is actually us going through the birth canal and being born into a new life (or C-section or whatever form we are born unto).  

But here's the thing: we get to take a tiny portion of our knowledge, experience, wisdom, or whatever.  but really tiny.  that's why some people are naturally good at math or writing, etc. and maybe you can trade for looks and athletic skills, I don't make the rules.  it's just a theory.

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 I often wake up in the middle of the night and remember some random memory and it is so cringe.  I really was born with two strikes and played against people born on 2nd and 3rd base.  

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In case it's not obvious, I am not a fan of #elfontheshelf.  When I was a kid, if a doll moved in your house, you cut that Fucker up before it could multiply and burned it for good measure.  luckily, we only have a week left of this nonsense.

We didn't have EOS when I was growing up.  And until we had children, I only had an obtuse cursorial understanding of what it was.  It seems it started out innocently enough: you moved a doll around the house after putting your kids to bed (instead of doing anything that might lead to more kids) and each morning they would try to find it (instead of getting ready for school).  

But someone, I suspect the mommy bloggers (what we currently call influences) had to take it to the next level.  They came up with elaborate concepts and designs and you are a lesser parent if your kid doesn't have a good story to share at school.  

I didn't get the choice to opt-in or out of it.  But this year Nightingale has decided that I have to come up with some ideas.  The thing is, there are no Easy Elf On The Shelf ideas.  If you google and find an article with 25 ideas, each one just has that one thing you don't have in house to make it work.

Same as it Never Was

In the late 80s, I attended NMSU, a liberal arts college located in Kirksville, Missouri.  It took me a while to get any traction but eventually, I was getting good grades and had an active social life.  My mother took that away from me.  She lost a job and had a car accident and couldn't afford to keep sending me there.

But here's the thing.  back then, financial aid was more abundant than it was later.  we could totally have been able to send me back but my mom wouldn't allow it.  Because she knew the longer I was away from home, the more I would realize how dysfunctional our life was.  and she was jealous that I might meet someone who would be competing for my attention.

I tried to rebuild what I had in Kirksville in Chicago but a neurodivergent 20-year-old wasn't gonna be able to do it.  Many of my high school friends were away at other college campuses and the ones who went to city colleges didn't have the free time one does at a college town.  and a part of me thought I'd find a way back to Kirksville or after college move to St Louis where my so-called friends lived.  

There's a lot of complexity but it wasn't until I gave that up that I truly created a life in Chicago.

Fast-forward to 2021.  Nightingale decided we needed a change and she moved us to Mississippi-stan.  Not out of malice.  But because she hated her job and wanted to be closer to family.  The only reason we are in this particular city is because her younger sister set down roots here and as the baby of the family, she needed help once she had children with Confederate Jethro.  

Almost Daily, I get an On This Day from Facebook showing me some memories of our Chicago house.  I miss it terribly.  But the truth is, Chicago isn't perfect, and moving back wouldn't be the panacea I want it to be.  Just like moving to St Louis wouldn't have been the magical solution I wanted it to be.  

Voting Against my best interest

For some reason, this story from deep within my memory banks rose to the surface recently.  One semester at NMSU, I was in a Differential Equations class. This was a class that was mostly comprised of Physics Majors like my friend B-Gill, and Engineering Majors like myself.  There might have been a math major or two, although I don't think it was a requirement.

Anyway, the Prof decided to let the class decide how the final exam would focus: Physics problem heavy or Engineering problem heavy.  I think that meant that more questions would be Physics-oriented than straightforward Engineering problems.  

I was struggling with the Physics type problems but doing fine with the Engineering ones.  Most of the Physics students could go either way, including B-Gill.  When it came time to vote, I don't remember how close it was, if we were told at all, but B-Gill chose Physics.  

That our exam was Physics Heavy cost me an A.  Meanwhile, B-Gill, who had missed some exams because of sickness, had a chance to score an A for the semester just by getting an A on the last and most important test of the class.  

I don't know why this came up in my MindFeed upon waking up in the middle of the night as I often do.  I'm sure I displayed some disappointment at B-Gill for not casting a vote to help me out.  He was gonna get an A no matter what the questions were.  

The Polish Calculus

This beats any Chem Test

In the Spring Semester of my freshmen year at NMSU, I had a solid B going into my Chemistry Final Exam.  As long as I got a few questions right, I would get a grade of B for the semester.  To get an A, however, I would need to have scored 46 out of 50*.

It was a three-hour test and only the TA was there.  On the first pass, I answered all the easy, soft questions 101 exams are often peppered with.  On the next pass, I knocked out a few more tougher questions.  At about the 1-hour mark, I determined that I had comfortably answered 40 out of 50* questions correctly, give or take a question.  In other words, my B grade was secure.    

But I also realized that there was no way I was gonna get 8 more questions correct in the next two hours.  If I hadn't learned it by now, there wasn't gonna be a Finals Miracle.  I probably did my best to make educated guesses and then just picked random answers which might have given me 1-2 lucky guesses but still not getting my A.

I could have sat there for two more hours pretending to work on the problems and maybe, maybe I'd get one or two more, but I wasn't getting the eight I needed to get into the A zone. 

I turned in my paper and went back to my dorm room and loaded up my mom's car, allowing us to leave 2 hours earlier on the 7+ hour ride back to Chicago.  

People don't like to hear stories like this because they feel you are giving up or taking the easy way out.  What they fail to understand is that is how a Greedy Algorithm works.  You make the best decision/select the best choice based on the information/options you have at the moment.  You cannot hope something will change down the road or expect a last-minute miracle.  

* I'm going off very old memories about the exact point differences.  Suffice it to say, I was sufficiently out of range for an A that nothing less than a perfect test was gonna convert my B into an A.

Organizing, cleaning, and cleansing

After a few false starts, I finally got the attached garage clean enough to install the overhead hanging racks I purchased back in December.  I tried to install them myself but found quickly that it is a two-person job and it is best if the other person is someone who is very good at installing things in a straight line.  Even so, my handyman, Mark made a goof or two (quickly resolved) that vindicated me that this isn't the easiest thing to do.

The thing about these racks is you can either put a lot of light stuff or a few heavy items on them. Each rack can hold 500 lbs.  Optimally, you want to put things you don't need to get to very often, like the Christmas tree.  I could put a couple more things on these shelves, but for the most part, that's about all I can do for now.  There are some plastic crates that need to go away, some stuff for goodwill, and a Farm Table that no one in the family needs but we are not allowed to get rid of for sentimental reasons.  


Update from the future:  I managed to find the invoice for this purchase I thought I would put it here for posterity.  

Product	Quantity	Price
4' x 6' Overhead Garage Storage Rack - Hammertone, 24"-45"	2	$359.98
Subtotal:		$359.98
Discount:		-$36.00
Shipping:		Free shipping
Payment method:		Credit Card
Total:		$323.98

I've been working on clearing a lot of the clutter as well.  I have this box called Memory Vault.  it contains a crapload of stuff from my early Emo years.  I wish I had the good sense to just chuck it but I have to look through it first.  I've already thrown out my Jr High memorabilia.  that wasn't a good time for me and most of the people I knew then had no redeeming values.  I also chucked most of my Alpha Phi Omega service fraternity stuff.

Now I'm in the process of scanning a lot of documents that I haven't looked at in years so they can live, unread, in electronic format.

Take this photo.  I'm connected to about 20 of these people on Facebook (not including the ones I deliberately defriended over politics) but only interact with 3-4 per year.  I didn't do a stellar job of staying in touch in the pre-internet days, but keeping in touch is a two-way street and they certainly didn't do much either.  And that's okay.  Not every friendship or relationship is meant to last an eternity.  I just wish I had realized that sooner.  

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At Least We Tried

Cindy and I were what I thought were good friends in college. We kept in touch post-NMSU then suddenly she stopped writing letters or returning emails. Through the grapevine, I heard that she was mad at me for some reason. I asked mutual friends to see if they could find out what I had done to earn her wrath but no one knew. She wouldn't talk about it. I made one more attempt in the mid-90s to see if she was up for re-connecting and as I understand it the response was no thanks.

For some reason, I friended her on FB a few years ago. I was surprised when she accepted. We don't comment on one another's posts too often, though we sometimes wish each other happy birthday and occasional congrats on major life milestones, assuming the FB algorithms comply. I think this is probably as good as it gets this late in life.

The other day I reached out to Cindy because she was going to be in Batavia, IL for a few days. 


hey, I would love to see you since we will, in all likelihood, never be in a closer proximity....but I also get that the logistics are not in our favor. Perhaps Chance will favor us some other time and best of luck with...


At first, she said there was no chance of being able to get together.  Then she said there might be.  But after examining it more closely, the window was just too tight to try to get together.

Still, that she tried says a lot.

I love seeing the pictures of your wonderful kids. I’m so happy for you and your beautiful family.

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Why am I doing this again?

One thing I’m working on, I have this box of snail mail letters received while in college and early adult years when people still wrote real letters. Initially I was going to re-read them, keep a few and pitch the rest. However, many of them have memory nuggets and other tidbits that despite my jaded and cynical self, I cannot bring myself to do so. Sentimental old fool that I am.

I started scanning them and then I got the idea to send the originals back to some of the people whom I’m still in touch with if they are interested (sadly I did pitch a few letters before making this offer). The project will take some time, probably longer than it took to write and read those letters in the first place.  It doesn't help that I pitched a few of the letters after scanning them, only to find that they went to google drive as zero byte files.  I'll go through the trouble of re-scanning the ones I still have, but considering I could just as easily pitched the whole pile I'm not too broken up about it.


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Right-Wing Stereotype Bingo

The other day I jumped on a thread that I probably should have avoided.  It's not that I cannot handle myself.  It's just that it's obvious that it was an Echo Chamber and no amount of reason or logic was going to penetrate.

Look, if you support Trump and think he's doing the right things, that's fine.  But no president is or ever was perfect, not even George Washington.  You would gain a modicum of credibility from those on the opposite side if you couched your praise with phrases like "he did the right thing but should have followed established process" or "it does suck that he didn't think it all the way through."

But when you give him a free pass with no fault behavior Carte Blanche, you sound like the kid whose favorite team is already out of contention for the playoffs the first month of the season and you blame the refs instead of the coaches and players.

And then there is this:

What does any sane, rational person say to someone who doesn't consider New York and California part of America?

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Decluttering physical and symbolic clutter

When ever we drive up to Michigan, I start to think about all those road trips I took in the 90s back to Kirksville.  There wasn't really anyone here who I could carpool with so it was just me.  Driving for 7+ hours.  

Leaving NMSU back in my college years was somewhat traumatic for me.  While I did initially struggle in college, by junior year it had finally seem like I was making positive forward progress navigating the world that is higher education.  I had a good group of friends.  I was doing okay academically and repairing the damage to my GPA that my clueless freshmen self inflicted.  I even had a girlfriend.

Alas I had to leave because of finances and also because there were no more classes for me to take unless I changed majors.

For years I tried to get back there.  To Planet Kirksville and the life I had to leave behind.  I would visit Kirksville while my friends were still there and later St Louis even semi seriously considering relocating there to be with them.

I spent a lot of my 20s struggling because I didn't have the support structure here that I had there (or thought it had there).  It wasn't until I built something solid here that I was finally able to let go.

I spent a lot of time and energy holding onto something that didn't exist anymore and probably didn't really exist in the first place.  And had I been able to let go sooner, I probably would have had a better 90s and 2000s.

Cleaning out my closet of past ghosts

Last summer I had the opportunity to bring a carload of boxes from my mom's house to mine. I wrote up a post about what was in those boxes on the ChicagoNow blog.  This past summer I was able to go through it a little more thoroughly and I whittled down the boxes to a more manageable size.

I feel I did a pretty good job of clearing the clutter on this second pass. This stuff followed me around because it was significant twenty years ago but has little relevance now.  I suppose if I had done this exercise in 2008 when I was first on Facebook,  I might have used some of these notes to look up people.  But I have no desire to really do so today. 

You'll do better in life than we ever will for reasons we are too young to grasp right now.

In particular, I have no desire to interact with anyone I went to grade school or junior high.  Sure, I'm Facebook friends with some of the people from the old neighborhood, but only the handful that were decent and nice to me.  Those other people were collectively not very nice to me.  It might have been culture (I'm white, they were Hispanic), it might have been economic (I was poor, they were poorer), it might have just been that I was a nerdy odd-ball and they were presumable cool or at least mainstream. 


Whatever it was, I could not care less if most of them are dead right now. 

Looking through the autograph book the recurring theme seems to be hey you are a smart but goofy kid who even the teachers don't like enough to protect you from us. 


Still I did see some things today that I didn't notice back then.  Though inappropriate, I probably invited more of the abuse than I realized.  Something I definitely have to watch out for to protect Moose & Squirrel better than anyone ever tried to protect me.


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NMSU memories

I'm really digging this song.   It's called Photograph by Ed Sheeran (in case the link ever breaks). It's obviously not the most original song title nor would you guess that was the title from the lyrics but it is an appropriate title nonetheless.

We keep this love in a photograph
We made these memories for ourselves
Where our eyes are never closing
Hearts are never broken
Times forever frozen still

It makes me think of Freshman Year at NMSU and Kimberly.  And Michelle.  And the heartbreaks we caused each other.  When I got home from college, I never really talked much about my time in Kirksville,  mostly because to backfill in all the necessary details would have required reliving it and I was still going through my own version of PTSD.  I was really ill-prepared for college and serious relationships and I paid the price.

So you can keep me
Inside the pocket
Of your ripped jeans
Holdin' me closer
'Til our eyes meet
You won't ever be alone
Wait for me to come home

When I first started blogging, it never occurred to me to mine those stories from college for content because I was working under the early paradigm of blogs = online journals going forward, not backward.  I certainly wasn't going to re-read all my personal journals either.  By the time blogs arrived, I had finally worked through all the drama, angst and pain of college and replaced it with the drama, angst and pain of my 30s still trying to figure things out.

When I'm away
I will remember how you kissed me
Under the lamppost
Back on 6th street
Hearing you whisper through the phone,
"Wait for me to come home."

   

Speaking of NMSU, I found this in a box of old stuff at my mom's house last summer.  It was given to me by Michelle.  She was a blonde-haired, blue-eyed sorority girl.  The prototype girl that I would meet many more times in life but never quite understand why this type liked me but the brunettes I chased after didn't.

Michelle was a hot mess in need of more therapy and love than she could ever hope to receive.

Kimberly broke my heart, and I broke Michelle's.

Something changed somewhere during my time at NMSU.  When I first arrived I had confidence and the ability to win Kimberly over and steal Michelle from a guy named Jeff.  But by the end of my time there I lost my confidence.

One thing that comes to mind is that the majority of the people I hung around with freshmen year were gone from my circle (and even campus) sophomore year.  I still saw a few people but most of my time was spent with Alpha Phi Omega.  

I think what I'm trying to say is that about the time that I lost/stored away this pendant, is about the time I struggled with getting girlfriends.  It's like I forgot how much someone once was into me, and that it could ever happen again.

Obviously, I found the power somewhere else.

Some thoughts about my College Days at NMSU

While I do a lot of my blogging over at ChicagoNow, I've decided that this space will be used for much more personal entries and stuff that I'm fleshing out here and might appear there once the kinks are worked out.

My first year at NMSU, I was in a three person dorm room.   My two assigned roommate were very different from me and from each other, at least as far as three 18 year old white guys can be.   I don't have the energy to come up with aliases for them so I'll just use their initials.

CH was taller than me and from a well-to-do suburb of St Louis.  In fact, almost everyone there that came from St Louis actually came from a suburb of St Louis, usually in St Louis County.  CH came up with a bunch of friends from high school so he basically already had his social infrastructure established.  He was a nice enough guy and friendly, but any chance we had of bonding was circumvented by his friend MM.  MM lived one floor up and was from another well-to-do suburb of STL.  The story was that these two went to the same high school even though they were in different suburbs.  I'm not sure how it all worked out.

Anyway, MM was in no way, shape or form interested in making new friends at college.  He had his high school friends here, and his girlfriend back home (they both had GFs back home and went home as often as they could since it was only a 3+ hour drive).

The other roommate was MW.  MW was essentially a hick from Southern Missouri.  I had no idea at the time but Missouri south of STL might as well have been a separate country.  This is where the rednecks who supported the Confederacy apparently lived and inbred.

Like I said, we got along alright but didn't spend too much time together relative to our time there.  MM was in the army reserve and gone at least one weekend a month.  CH went home every chance he could get.  They both transferred elsewhere after our freshman year and we didn't even try to keep in touch.  I've googled them on occasion and checked LinkedIn and Facebook.  However, they have common enough names and apparently no immediate Internet Footprint for it to be an easy find and I'm not curious enough to devote more than 5 minutes on a dull afternoon to the task.   

Not even by a Long Shot

Forgiving and forgetting are not skills I over excel in.  Quite the opposite, unfortunately.  I'm just not wired to forgive people who have dicked me over and I'm afraid to forget least it ever happen again.

Back in college during my last semester at NMSU (now Truman State University) a couple friends were not getting along. What they were fighting about isn’t important, but it is amusing so I’ll share. Cindy was pissed at Linda because she made out with Jane’s boyfriend. Jane and Cindy were BFFs and felt Linda’s indiscretion was, I don’t know what exactly since a few years later, Cindy and Jane’s ex-boyfriend did the horizontal mambo themselves.

Also, although they broke up, Jane’s boyfriend got off (no pun intended) relatively Scott free. And was rewarded with sex with Cindy a year or two later.  The make out session occurred in late December and it was after that semester that I came back home and was out of school for 9 months until I went to UIC and finished my bachelors.  I'd hear bits and pieces of the saga in letters and phone calls and have pieced together the following.

Cindy gave Linda the cold shoulder for the entire Spring semester. She did everything she could to make Linda’s life uncomfortable and unpleasant. We were all in a service fraternity together and the requirements -- besides the whole in friendship, leadership and service thing -- would force them to be together on various projects.  The funny thing is, Jane didn't really care especially since she was gone.  She transferred to another school because she completed her program at NMSU.

Then at the end of the semester, Cindy had an epiphany or something because she apparently apologized for how she treated Linda. I wasn’t there so I don’t know if it was one of those fake apologies or a sincere one.

I asked Linda about it once, and she said something like -- keep in mind, I'm going off more than two decades of old memories here: 

It's nice that Cindy apologized but it doesn't really undo the sixteen weeks of hell she put me through to get here especially since this is my last semester.  Linda was transferring schools as well. 

FWIW many of the curriculum at NMSU were two year pre-programs designed to get you started and then ship you off to a school with a full program.  I was ambitiously attempting to become an electrical engineer and failing miserably at it.

I checked once and could have sworn these people were all friends on FaceBook, except maybe Jane and Linda or the ex. I checked recentlyand found that Linda isn’t friends with Cindy or the ex, so I don’t know if there was de-friending involved or if I imagined the whole thing in the first place.

I was thinking about Linda's declaration the other day and the story that goes with it.  Over the years I've had perhaps more than my fair share of falling out with friends.  Sure, I'm the common denominator so that's my demon and I face it more often than I like.  Still, in most conflicts, rarely is one side 100% to blame.  Today there doesn't seem to be a point in the future when my catholic friends and I reconcile our differences.
Still with enough time, anything is possible.

Cindy and I were what I thought were good friends in college. We kept in touch post-NMSU then suddenly she stopped writing or returning emails. Through the grapevine, I heard that she was mad at me for some reason. I asked mutual friends to see if they could find out what I had done to earn her wrath but no one knew. She wouldn't talk about it. I made one more attempt in the mid 90s to see if she was up for re-connecting and as I understand it the response was no thanks.


For some reason, I friended her on FB a year or two ago. I was surprised when she accepted. We don't comment on one another's posts too often, though we wish each other happy birthday and congrats on major life milestones. I think this is probably as good as it gets this late in life.

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