Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded: A Decade of Whatever, 1998-2008 Read online

  The problem has always been that humans have picked bad ways to note that passage of time. The biggest culprit has been the moon. It has a cycle, of course, about 29 days from new moon to new moon. Alas, that cycle has no real relation with the earth’s position in its orbit. So while creating months relative to the moon (the word “month” is in fact etymologically descended from the old English word for “moon”), is perfectly fine for recording subjective blocks of time, it’s rather less helpful in keeping track of when the seasons are coming. Sooner or later you’d get snow in July. And that would just wreak havoc on your baseball schedules.

  Some of your smarter civilizations switched to a calendar in which the year was demarcated by the path of the sun (in the case of the Egyptians, they used Sirius, the Dog Star. Those crafty Egyptians). This was better, as there was, in fact, a direct relation of the sun’s path and our year. But the rotation of the earth does not correspond exactly to its revolution. There’s an extra quarter of the day (but not exactly a quarter of a day) thrown in for chuckles. Give it enough time, and your seasons and your months will still get away from you.

  So you keep fiddling. Our current Gregorian calendar deals with it by inserting a leap day every four years, except in years that end with double zero, except those years which are cleanly divisible by 400. Like 2000. Don’t worry, scientists are keeping track of these things for you. Be that as it may, there’s still slippage. Calendars aren’t an exact science.

  Enter the Mayans, who, it should be noted, were the kick-ass mathematical minds of the pre-computational world (they used zeros before zeros were cool!). While everyone else was looking at the sun or the moon as a guidepost for the passage of time, the Mayans looked a little to the left of the sun and discovered…Venus, which as it happens, has an exceptionally predictable path around the sun that takes 584 days. Five of these cycles just happens to coincide with eight 365-day years. Thrown in a couple of additional formulae, and you can keep time that’s damn near perfect—The Mayan calendar loses a day about once every 4000 years. Consider we can’t go four years without having to plug in a day, and we’ve got atomic clocks and everything.

  So why don’t we switch to a Mayan calendar? Well, this is why:

  First bear in mind that the Mayan kept track of two years simultaneously: the Tzolkin, or divinatory calendar, which is comprised of 260 days, demarcated by matching one of 13 numbers with one of 20 names (13x20=260—you can do at least that much math), and also another calendar of 18 months of 20 days, with five extra days known as the “Uayeb,” for Days of Bad Omen (probably not a good time to do much of anything).

  These two calendrical systems linked together once every 18,980 days (that’s 52 years to you and me): this period of time was known as a “Calendar Round.” Two calendar rounds, incidentally, make up another time period in which the Tzolkin, the 365-day calendar, and the position of Venus sync up again. Think of this as a Mayan century, if you will.

  With me so far? Okay, because, actually, I lied. There’s another calendar system you need to keep track of as well: The Long Count. Here’s how this one works. You start off with a day, which in Mayan is known as a kin. There are 20 kin in a unial, 18 unials in a tun, 20 tun in a katun, and 20 katun in a baktun (so how many days is that? Anyone? Anyone? 144,000—roughly 394 years). Each of these is enumerated when you signify a date, with the baktun going first. However, remember that while kin, tun, and katun are numbered from 0 to 19, the unial are numbered from 0 to 17, while the baktun are numbered from 1 to 13. So if someone tries to sell you a Mayan calendar with a 14 in the baktun’s place, run! He’s a bad man!

  And thus, combining our Long Count calendar with our Tzolkin and our 365-day calendar, we find that today (12/16/1999) is 12.19.6.14.6, 6 kan, 12 mak. Now you know why we don’t use the Mayan calendar. And the next time you plan to cheat on a math test, sit next to a Mayan.

  What happens after you reach the 13th baktun? I don’t know, but it’s going to happen pretty soon—the Mayan calendar rolls over on December 23rd, 2012. Maybe then we’ll get a real apocalypse. Until then, let’s all party like it’s 12.19.19.17.19.

  THE STUPIDLY

  OBVIOUS PHRASE

  OF THE DAY

  “The Poor Suffer the Most”

  Used, for example, in this news header today in a story about food shortages: “As a brutal convergence of events hits an unprepared global market, and grain prices go sky high, the world’s poor suffer most.”

  Really? The poor suffering the most? It’s hard to imagine. Because, you know, usually when there’s a major global crisis of any sort, it’s the poor sitting there on the sidelines, going whew, dodged that bullet. How strange that the people the least economically, socially and educationally able to deal with wrenching change should suffer the most. How odd that the rich should so often be able to shield themselves from the ravages of events. It’s almost as if they have some advantage over poor people, although off the top of my head what it might be escapes me.

  Which is not to say that the rich always get off scot free: who among us can forget The Great Davos Lobster Bisque Inconvenience of ‘04, in which the victims, none with a net worth of less than $15 million, suffered a small amount of gastric distress due to too much heavy cream in the soup? The poor escaped that with hardly a cramp. Good for them. The poor did have that tsunami that year, though. Killed a couple hundred thousand of them. But in terms of aggregate worth, it all evens out, you see. Intestinal discomfort for the rich, death by wall of water for the poor. Seems fair.

  A tip for news writers: it’ll be news when the poor don’t suffer the most. “As the mysterious Billionaire’s Virus decimates Aspen, the world’s stinkin’ rich suffer the most.” That’s a news head worth writing.

  TEN YEARS

  AGO TODAY

  In February of 1998, my wife and I decided that it was time that we take the plunge and perform that quintessential act of Great American Dream-ism and buy our own house. At the time I was working at America Online as its in-house writer/editor, and we were living in an apartment in Sterling, about three miles from AOL’s corporate offices. We liked the area and most of our friends lived nearby; it was a good place to put down roots. So we started house hunting and near the end of the month found a place we really liked. Back at work I told a co-worker that we were likely to make an offer on the house the next day.

  My immediate boss, who had the cubicle next to mine, suddenly popped her head up and asked to talk to me privately. “Don’t make that offer,” she said.

  “Why not?” I said.

  “I can’t tell you yet,” she said. “Just don’t.”

  Two days later the reason became clear: The group I was in at AOL was being disbanded, and while everyone else in the group was transferring into other departments, no one wanted me. The reason for this was somewhat ironic: As AOL’s in-house writer/editor, I was used as a company-wide resource—but no one wanted someone who was a company-wide resource on their department budget. I wasn’t being fired, I was told, I was being laid off. It was a layoff action of precisely one person. Also ironically, the layoff was coming about a week before my two-year anniversary at AOL. In one of the nicer things they could have done, AOL decided to make the termination date one day after my two-year anniversary—which meant I could vest stock I had in the company. My official termination date: March 10: Ten years ago today.

  How did I take the layoff? In a word: badly. Up to that point my professional career had been fairly charmed: I helped pay my way through my senior year of college by writing music features and concert reviews for the Chicago Sun-Times and the New Times, and then got a very sweet job as a full-time newspaper movie critic at a time when most newspapers weren’t doing much hiring. Then at the very upswing of the 90s Internet explosion, I was hired by America Online as their first in-house writer and editor. Basically everything was going great, I had no reason to think it wouldn’t continue to go great, and if I hung around AOL long enough my stock would mak
e me a millionaire and then I really wouldn’t have to worry about much. So, yeah, charmed career, and I was pretty cocky about it.

  Given my high opinion of myself and my career, the layoff was a smackdown of monumental proportions. Because my career had been so charmed, much of my self-worth was invested in my work; not to have that work anymore left me spinning. Adding insult to injury was the fact that Krissy and I had been planning to buy a house; in the space of a day we went from young people who had the means to get a nice house in a nice area to people who couldn’t get a house on their own—no bank would have lent us the money with me being laid off and Krissy, who worked part-time, making the income that she had.

  While I was literally stunned into immobility, Krissy took control of the situation and did the smart thing: She started to downsize us. We looked at the jobs in the area that I could get; none of them at the time seemed likely to pay what AOL had been giving me. That meant not only was a house out of the question, but the apartment we were currently living in was probably too expensive. Krissy started looking at cheaper places for us to live, made appointments for us to view them, and dragged me along to look at these new places.

  And thus it was, standing in the living room of a cheap apartment that we were being shown in Leesburg, Virginia, I had what I expect was the lowest moment of my adult life. I was standing in the living room with gray walls, gray carpet and gray window blinds, on an overcast day, listening to my wife ask about the much reduced amenities relative to the apartment we lived in at the time, and it felt like my life had hit some sort of rewind—that I had managed to come so far, and now this was the bend in the curve, where things started their downturn.

  Note, if you will, the possibility that in my depressed state I may have been being overly dramatic about this. But I’m telling you how I felt, and this is how I felt: Low, depressed, and like all the forward momentum I had had in my life—and especially in my personal life—had smacked up hard against a wall. And it had landed me here, in this crappy apartment that I might be living in from now on because it’s what we were likely to be able to afford. How low was I about this? Let’s just say that on our drive back to our soon-to-be ex-apartment, Krissy was vaguely concerned that I might open up the passenger side door and toss myself into traffic.

  I spent another couple of days being blackly, blackly depressed, and then something interesting happened, which was that I had one of those epiphany moments you hear about people having. And the epiphany was this—that how I and Krissy reacted to what was happening to us right now was going to echo through how we faced the rest of our lives, individually and together.

  In this case, there were two ways this could play out. We could play it safe, take that depressing-but-affordable apartment, live within our reduced means and grind it out. Or we could say screw this, go back to house hunting, buy a house, keep moving our lives forward, and have faith in ourselves that we would find a way to make it work.

  Now, I’m sure you think you know what I was going to choose. But I want you to remember two things. The first was that for the very first time in my professional life, I was hit with a setback, and it hit me incredibly hard. Not only in the ego department, but my decision-making. I’d never even considered that I would ever be laid off for any reason at all, and I was clearly wrong about that. What else could I be wrong about? I was uncertain and I was gun-shy. The second thing is that it would be one thing if it were just me going for broke. But I was married, and whatever happened to me would happen to Krissy, too. If I screwed up, I would take her down with me. It was bad enough I was already laid off; this added another layer of complications to things.

  So despite what you think you might know about me, you should know that my decision could have gone either way. This was a time in my life that I was really and truly without a compass. I didn’t know what to do. So Krissy and I sat down to talk about what we would do next.

  And it was Krissy who said, “Well, I want a house.”

  Which was enough for me. Because while Krissy wanted a house, I didn’t want to live in that damn, gray apartment. So we called our real estate agent and told her we were ready to look at houses again.

  “You got a new job!” our real estate agent said.

  “No,” I said.

  “Oh,” she said. “Well, that will make things difficult.”

  “Let us worry about that,” I said.

  Here’s how we did it: With help. I called my Uncle Gale and Aunt Karen asked for their trust and their signatures as co-signers on our mortgage loan. They gave us both. And like that, we were back.

  And we were back in more than one way. Krissy and I decided to have faith in ourselves and in each other and to find a way to make it all work—to live the lives we wanted to live, not lives dictated by circumstances outside our control. And almost as soon as we made that decision about our lives, things suddenly got better. Krissy’s job, frightened that she would leave and they would have to hire two people to do what she was doing, put her on full-time status with health benefits, replacing the benefits I’d lost at AOL.

  On my end, it turned out that people at AOL suddenly realized that when I wasn’t around, their writing wasn’t getting done; all the various departments that didn’t want me on their head count were happy to hire me as an outside contractor. That started happening almost as soon as people realized I was gone. Shortly thereafter I was hired by Media-One—an early broadband company—to write music reviews for their online portal. And then I got a phone call from a marketing company; I had been recommended to them by a friend at AOL for a project. Would I take it on? Sure I would.

  In sum, very quickly I was making more than I had been making at AOL, and actually working a bit less. And from home. Home being the house we bought shortly thereafter; on the day we closed, Krissy and I took the keys, walked into our new home, turned on a boom box, and danced around the place to Madness’ “Our House.” Because it was, and because we could.

  Would have all this stuff happened if we decided to play it safe? Oh, probably, minus the house portion. But the point of it was how we reacted to it. When this good fortune came in, we didn’t feel like we had dodged a bullet and had gotten lucky. We felt that it justified our belief that we could make it work, and that our faith in ourselves was not misplaced. And, yes, that made a difference in how we viewed the world, going forward. It still makes a difference now.

  And this is one of the reasons why I tell people that being laid off from AOL was one of the best things that ever happened to me—because as much as it knocked me for a loop, it made me ask myself who I wanted to be in control of my life—and it made me make a choice about how my life would be. It was the right crisis at the right time; it was something I think was necessary for me. In a very real way, it’s the moment I can point to and say “this is when I knew I was a grown-up.” It’s maybe a silly way to put it, but it was important all the same. So: Thanks, AOL, for laying me off. I appreciate it. It’s done more for me than you know.

  Oh, and there’s one other reason to thank AOL for laying me off. On March 10, 1998, the actual, official date of my layoff, I was feeling understandably a bit low about it, even though by that time things were already beginning to look up. But still, waking up and thinking “I have no job to go to” was a little off-putting. So Krissy decided to cheer me up. Nine months later: Athena. So, yes, this day ten years ago was a life-changing day in more ways than one.

  FRED THE

  CULT LEADER

  Consider Fred. The unquestioned leader of the Scooby Gang, he’s the one that directs the investigations (“Let’s split up”) and is therefore the one who explains the mystery at the end of each episode, pulling the rubber mask off Old Man Withers and explaining how he was trying to run everyone off the farm disguised as a banshee in order to dig for the pirate gold (or whatever). No one ever questions his supremacy or his diktat—he’s like a Teenage Stalin in a red cravat. One wonders what would happen to, say, Daphne, if she we
re ever to note to Fred that his plans almost always caused her to be snatched by the latex-faced villain. I see Fred turning an apoplectic red, quickly regaining his composure, and then making sure Daphne “falls” down a well. She’s replaced by Janet, redheaded, spunky would-be mystery writer. None of the other Scooby gang members makes mention of the switch. None of them dare.

  Why do the Scooby gang follow Fred in the first place? These are supposed to be teenagers, after all, and in terms of teenage dynamics, the Scooby gang is all wrong. Fred and Daphne make perfect sense, of course: Prom king and queen, quarterback and cheerleader, student body president and treasurer, take your pick of teenage upper-strata clichés. Daphne and Velma likewise make sense; from the top of her butch bowl cut to the bottom of her sensible shoes, Velma’s relationship with Daphne screams “unrequited crush”; poor Velma’s probably been carrying Daphne’s books and writing her school reports since the second grade without ever quite figuring out why. As for Shaggy and Scooby, well, come on; stoner loner and his talking, possibly hallucinated dog. A perfect match.

  But there’s no way on earth that they should all get along. In the real world, Fred would barely tolerate the presence of Velma, whom he would intuit, in a dull, instinctual way, as a competitor for Daphne’s affections; likewise Velma would be a gushing font of passive-aggressiveness regarding Fred, subtly talking him down to Daphne whenever he was not around (now you know why Fred takes Daphne with him whenever the gang splits up). Neither Fred nor Daphne would be seen near Shaggy or any of his ilk; we all know the natural antipathy that exists between high school royalty and the teenage equivalent of the raving homeless. Velma would hardly be a better match for the boy and his dog. While Velma’s natural social standing is closer to Shaggy’s than to Daphne’s, as Daphne’s minion, she’s required to ape her social opinions. Put these five in a room, and you don’t have the Scooby Gang, you have the Breakfast Club, minus the happy ending where they all sign a joint declaration to the music of Simple Minds.