what i hate most about the whole thing is becoming a goddam statistic

.

so today before i even have time to drop my shit and sit down, the phone starts ringing--display tells me it's the office manager.

hmm.

"hey connie, how are ya?"

"mike, can you come down and touch base with susan [human resources] and me for a minute?"

"sure."

uh oh.

i take a deep breath, head downstairs, walk into connie's office.  she and susan have each chosen black ensembles for the day's wet work, which strikes me as funny.

"this one's a closed-door, i presume?"  they nod in unison.

i close the door and then spend most of the next half-hour reassuring these women, both of whom i love, that it's ok--i knew it was coming.

[which is true: for way too long, i've been paid insanely well for doing little more than showing up--if it hadn't been for connie and susan standing up to chicago on my behalf, my talented-yet-lazy ass woulda been gone at least a year ago, and we all know it.]

once we get past all the condolences and paperwork, i ask, "who else?"

they give me the names, and i'm shocked:  five key people [but then after three rounds of layoffs, all that's left is key people, so what did i expect?].

the severance package is unexpectedly generous--gives me a few months to plan my next move.

i spend the rest of the afternoon packing [five boxes--who the fuck keeps five boxes' worth of useless shit at work?  everybody, the guy who helps me down to my car tells me later], burning stuff onto cd's, consoling my fellow shell-shocked layoff-ees and saying goodbye to the spooked survivors [of this round, anyway].

and all the while [and unlike so many of my fellow americans to whom this shit is happening with increasing regularity] thinking to myself, "thank god i was at least halfway prepared."

the whole fake-prom thing

.

as regular readers know, i don't spend much time on gay-rights issues here--there are lots of bloggers out there who do that kinda shit better [and, frankly, care more] than i do--but constance mcmillen's story caught my attention early, and i've been following it closely.

because i can't help but admire her--not only for mustering the courage to buck the status quo in her backwoods little corner of mississippi, but for the quiet maturity, grace and restraint she's shown throughout what has become a very public spectacle.

brief background for those of you who haven't been paying attention:  constance wanted to bring her girlfriend as her date to her prom, and, rather than acceding to her request, her school district ended up cancelling the prom altogether, infuriating everybody and making constance the bad-guy pariah of her high school.  the ACLU got involved, tried to force the district to hold an all-inclusive prom anyway, was denied.  the parents of the heartbroken prom-deprived kids banded together and vowed to throw a private prom, to which constance and her date were putatively invited.

and this is where it gets interesting.

see, on prom night, constance and her date showed up at the country club as directed--and found, to their surprise, that there were actually two proms that night.  from constance's account in the advocate story:

"The one that I went to had seven people there, and everyone went to the other one I wasn’t invited to."

as for constance's prom? again, from the advocate story:

Two students with learning difficulties were among the seven people at the country club event, McMillen recalls.

"They had the time of their lives," McMillen says. "That's the one good thing that came out of this, [these kids] didn't have to worry about people making fun of them [at their prom]."

and that last quote is why you gotta love constance--but here's my favorite quote from the article, and the reason for this post:

Her school principal and teachers served as chaperones, but clearly there wasn't much to keep an eye on.

you get the implication here?  everybody was in on this cruel little hoax--every parent, every kid, every school administrator, the principal, every teacher, every country club employee, every employee of the venue where the "real" prom was held--everybody.  a perfect conspiracy of hundreds, and not one of 'em broke.

my question:  who was on the committee of supposed grown-ups that picked the five other clueless retards and rejects who were deemed sufficiently worthless to join the lesbian and her girlfriend at their private prom?

*     *     *     *     *

back when i was in high school, my friends and i did a lot of crazy shit, but i think the thing that allowed us all to have faith in the future was the unspoken but universally-held belief that at some point we'd abandon all the petty, mean-spirited bullshit of youth and morph into responsible, do-the-right-thing adults like our parents and teachers.

shame the kids of itawamba county, mississippi no longer have that illusion to cling to.

the early-warning windex test

.

contrary to what a casual observer of the seemingly random landscape of mkf's cluttered domain on the 26th floor might believe, the dusty half-empty bottle of windex that's been sitting on the back left corner of mkf's credenza for the last five years is there for a good goddam reason, and it served its purpose admirably today.

see, whenever the building starts to move [as it often does], mkf's eyes always flash straight to that windex bottle--if the level of the blue liquid stays mostly calm [as it mostly always does], then so does mkf.

if, on the other hand, mkf is all alone on easter sunday on the 26th floor and the building starts to move and the blue liquid in that bottle suddenly starts to slosh wildly back and forth as it did today...

whatever--whether or not bracing myself in the reinforced-steel doorway of my office woulda really saved me had it been the big one, it was kinda nice hearing from virtually every non-californian i know today asking me if i was ok, ya know?