Well, this was an interesting year, was it not? If Stanley Kubrick were alive today, he'd be rolling over in his grave at the divergence of reality from speculation as he realized it 30-plus years ago in the 2001 movie. Instead of semi-sentient insane computers running spaceships, we have semi-sentient insane terrorists flying planes. The end results are equally inconclusive, and pretty much equally impossible to comprehend. I read a lot of science fiction, and although I'm extremely skeptical of recognizable intelligent life existing anywhere close enough to us to matter, it would seem in light of recent events that some alien cultures and thought-processes exist a lot closer to home than we'd like to think. Isn't the kind of mindset that allows someone to fly a plane into a building essentially, to the vast majority of humanity, alien? Rather than knee-jerk bashing of anyone who breathes the slightest hint that terrorists are people too, it seems we'd stand to be better prepared and better defended if we could try to understand exactly how they think the way they do. Just like I watch "Survivor" and think "Why would anyone drink cow blood?" or stare at my inbox and think "Why doesn't anyone respond to my e-mail?"
Oops, that just slipped out. So with any luck I've enclosed in your envelope a recent picture of the family, or at least the kids, looking somewhat cleaned up and more or less in the same direction. And for the office-folk among you a business card, because they come in boxes of 500 and by the time the 'Cats return to Pasadena I still won't have used them up. This way you'll have two different versions of my address/phone number/e-mail to lose.
As of about two weeks after mailing last year's Christmas letter, I left Fleet/BankBoston/Bank of Boston after almost 15 years and went to work for State Street Corporation, doing basically the same thing but for more money and with somewhat more responsibility and largely with the same people. My former manager at Fleet had left to go to State Street last October, and immediately started calling me and some of my co-workers to hire us away, knowing that none of us were particularly smitten with Fleet or Fleet management since the
So what else is new? The kids are fine, Beth is fine. Chloe started Kindergarten this fall, and turned six shortly thereafter. She's trying to figure out this reading thing, hoping to eventually understand the attraction of books without pictures. In her spare time she'll sit and stare at the tv for as long as she can get away with (if it's actually turned on, so much the better), but otherwise can't keep still. Lately she's even wanted to run with me on Sunday mornings. Justin was 3 in August and started 4 mornings a week preschool in the public schools to help him catch up on his speech. He started talking late, and has consistently dropped off the beginnings of words (like in the Python sketch, where one guy says "Ladies and Gentlemen, a man who speaks only the ends of words, Mr. Ohn Ith", and then another guy comes out and says "Ood Ing"? That's Justin). When he was only speaking three word sentences, it was a bit of a challenge to understand him. Now he can string a lot more words together, which helps, and impresses the relatives to no end when he rattles off a sentence to me or Beth that we can respond to, but nobody else got a word of it.
Girls Chloe's age now can belong to some pre-Brownies form of Girl Scouts called Daisies, and Beth signed up to be a troop leader, which turned out to mean also organizing the troop, and although that sounds awful it ended up to be not so bad. Chloe's given up ballet for a while, and is marginally interested in learning piano, and while I'd always said I'd never give my own kid lessons, now maybe I'd think about it. Saturday mornings I've been taking Justin to a gymnastics class in Hudson. He's a chip off the old block in that he showed no athletic ability or inclinations whatsoever, but after a few months of enforced gymnastics, he's much better at it. Back in our day, if you didn't like to jump or run or whatever when you were three years old, you just grew up to become a geek who plays the piano and watches Doctor Who and doesn't like to jump or run or whatever. Nowadays they actually try to do something about it while you're still too young to be picked on. Same thing with the speech, you'd just get to Kindergarten or first grade and nobody could understand you and the other kids would make fun of you and the teachers would assume you were just being difficult and that was that. Now the assumption is that any three-year old who's behind in anything is just a future axe-murderer waiting to happen, so they're more inclined to try to fix it now.
I don't want to give the impression that everything is idyllic here in the far western burbs. The furnace just gave out a couple of weeks ago. London called at 4:30 in the morning last week to complain that trades weren't coming through from Reuters. Every time I go for a haircut there's less hair to cut. But by and large no complaints, except for some of the losers on this mailing list. Which brings me to my favorite topic: Let's hand out a few Crave & Douche awards:
Crave: Lee & Nancy, a prime candidate for the Crave Hall of Fame, even though they moved deeper into the bowels of New Jersey we still managed to find them on our way back from a long weekend trip to Cape May and Atlantic City back in May. The annual Chicago pilgrimage wasn't until August, so we were looking to go someplace for a few days in the spring and ended up on the Jersey Shore, which I'd never been to before. Got to see their new house (which is not on the Jersey Shore, but still more or less between there and here), and Lee made us lunch from table scraps, and the kids ran around together like long lost friends. They even have a pool, maybe we should have the next reunion at their house instead.
Douche: Anyone who changed e-mail addresses and didn't tell me, namely Amy, Doug, and of course Tony. I don't write letters any more except for this one, I almost never pick up the phone (although you'd think I'd be motivated to call Tony as some past phone conversations with him are legendary), so it's come down to e-mail is just about it.
Crave: Dawn, who got up early on Labor Day to drive into Philadelphia and meet us for breakfast on the last day of the Worldcon, having just returned in the middle of the night from a trip to Oregon. Hadn't seen her I think since '94 on the way back from Charlotte, but she still looks the same, and divides her time between flyfishing and giving piano lessons, and now drives a truck and has taken up hunting. We speculated on whether the number of female church organist hunters was greater or less than the number of Java programming piano-playing Doctor Who-fan runners, but reached no definite conclusions, deciding that further study is needed. The Worldcon (World Science Fiction Convention), my third, was in beautiful downtown Philadelphia, which turns out to be a very nice city in spite of what I'd been led to believe. Beth managed to take the kids to just about every place that they would care about in the space of five days, and we dragged them to lots of different restaurants that we knew they wouldn't like and just let them eat rice while we partook of the Mexican or Indian or whatever cuisine.
Douche: Jeff, who in spite of his brush with death last year by a crazed rhino in Tanzania, still shuns all human contact. My latest speculation is based on a watching a lot of Mystery Science Theater 3000 videos over this past year. Although our college days predate the show by several years, a number of lines that we used to use a lot crop up in MST3K, too, from the commonplace (responding "Gesundheit" when someone says "tissue" or "fissure" or whatever) to the obscure (Sting's classic line "I will kill you!" from the Dune movie). This could only be explained if one of us ex-Willardites were involved in the show. As it turns out, Kevin Murphy, the voice of Tom Servo, kind of looks like Jeff (or at least Jeff as I last saw him in '96). So forget the rhino thing, my new theory is that Jeff has been leading a secret dual life for the last 10 years, which, considering Polarsoft is in Colorado and MST3K was produced in Minnesota, must have left him with zero free time to respond to e-mail. Then again, maybe he's just a loser.
Crave: Steve, who randomly sends me e-mail asking me odd questions like "Why is Veterans Day not a Monday holiday?" or "Where can I find sheet music to songs by some Japanese pop star?" like I'm AskJeeves.com or he's Andy Rooney. But he was also the only one of you post-September 11 to send a message asking if I and my family were ok. I'm sure bestowing this award will mean he'll cut off all communication for awhile to try to make a point, but I would expect no less from an uncontrollable nihilist.
Crave: Nate, who took time out of his busy schedule of being homeless, jobless and woman-less to go to San Antonio for the Alamo Bowl. Sure we lost big (66-17 ouch! Now we know how the sheep in Nebraska feel), but except for the three hours of the game, it was a great weekend. It ended up being just him, me and the Cohens, as even Mr. Smith wouldn't go to Texas. Unlike the Rose Bowl and southern California, the Alamo Bowl is pretty much the only thing going on in San Antonio at that time of year, and it was awash in Nebraska fans, most of whom had driven down from their home state in their campers, and most of whom weren't actually alumni of Nebraska, just from Nebraska. Everywhere you turned was an abject lesson in just how much further NU has to go to consider themselves a football school. San Antonio itself is a great city, even during the last weekend of the year, with the Riverwalk and the missions and the Alamo. We even had trouble finding a restaurant on New Year's Eve, just like in a real city.
Crave: Adam, for behaving himself, and for responding to e-mails even though he never copies the original or replies to more than one recipient, making it somewhat of a challenge to keep a thread going. And even though he didn't go to the Alamo Bowl because he didn't want to see the 'Cats lose (like that never happens). I'm driving down to meet up with him this Saturday so we can see the 'Cats basketball team play at Madison Square Garden against Fordham. Look for us on MSG-TV.
Douche: Everyone else, for failing to distinguish themselves one way or the other. And myself, for spending five days in Chicago and not getting together with anybody. My sister Jill just had her second baby in July, so we flew out to see the new arrival in August, stopping first in Springfield to parade the kids around to all the relatives and workplaces we could. It was like a celebrity tour, flashbulbs popping, people crowding around, presents being handed out. The kids loved it. Plus it was Justin's birthday, so Mom threw a party and all these relatives he never knew he had showed up and gave him stuff, and then hours later when they were leaving one by one, we'd say something like "Say goodbye to Aunt Joyce, Justin", and he'd turn around a couple of times, looking around and trying to remember which one that was. Then it was off to Chicago, where not only did we see baby Ashley, but I went to the Chicago Comicon, which has gotten to be a bi-annual event for me. So between the comic show and visiting the relatives and the relative brevity of our stay since we didn't want to impose for too long on somebody with a four-week old, I didn't even try to line up anything with anybody else. Next year's up for grabs, though, and I'm making the Rebstocks my #1 target.
There, that wasn't so bad was it? I want to get a color printer, maybe next year I'll make up certificates. Hope this letter finds you wherever you are, hope you read this far before Labor Day. Maybe you'll all tear this letter open as soon as you see it, and stop everything no matter where you are or what you're doing and read it over several times, then sit down and put pen to paper in response, or fire off an e-mail or pick up the phone. After all, they keeping saying on the news and in the papers that "Everything's changed" and "It's a different world now". Well, that would certainly prove it. But just in case you get a busy signal, best wishes for a Happy and peaceful New Year!