Wit & Whim

If I wanted to oversimplify things grossly, then this is the part where I would tell you there were two kinds of conservatives; the right kind and the wrong kind, my kind and their kind. I could tell you that there is only one kind of conservative, and then proceed to shock you by telling you that the trademark of a true conservative is conservatism. Not all those, I would say, who stand under the banner of the VRWC are actually conservatives. I would be going somewhere with this, and I might even ask you to bear with me. I stake my claim to conservatism on the grounds that my philosophy and outlook on the world might actually be described as conservative. My worldview is two nuanced and multifaceted--ok, so its a Hydra--to say that there are just one or two elements which define my world, but there are a couple dominant threads in my political thought. In the first place is a healthy respect for things received. Being the thoughtful student of history that I am, I understand that th...

Last night, I got home, I ate, and I crashed into bed about 2 hours earlier than I am accustomed. What rendered me inert? What brought such a fine specimen as myself to total exhaustion? It might have had something to do with work. Yesterday was the last day before Fort Wayne Community Schools went back into session. It was all but guaranteed to be a pretty wild ride. From the time I got there I could see that it would be a long and busy night. The tops of the tables had already been reduced from neatly folded piles to heaps, and I did not see nearly so many coworkers as I had hoped. To make matters worse, the two guys who were supposed to arrive at the same time as me were not there yet, and the lines were long enough that I could forget about helping customers or cleaning up: I would be running register. The situation did not get better from there. We continued to be crushingly busy until about an hour and a half before close, at which point we were still busier than we are on ...

Every year, about this same time, the unwashed masses descend on my place of work, and trash it righteously. They are not buying presents this time, oh no, buying presents would not make them quite this angry, or not all of them. The seething masses are angry because they are spending their money on their children (again!). That's right, all of this money, all of this clamor, just so little AJ--gender unconfirmed--can be ready for school. A great number of them are incensed that they have to buy to fulfill uniform requirements, of all things, and that AJ can't just wear his Nike shorts and tank tops. Many of the rest of the parents are enraged, because their AJs have a preference for Nike gear, which is so derned expensive. AJ's and AJ's parents agree on one thing, however: it is almost worth it, since that little rugrat will soon be out of their hair. I wonder how many of this actually feel this way, or whether it is all the same false, callous, bravado of 13 yea...

I fail at pretension. Oh, yes. I know that may be hard to believe, but I definitely lost this round. There I was, innocently sitting at Starbucks,trying to kill a couple hours and a half dozen shots of espresso before I left for work, studiously working my way through German adjective conjugation--gotta keep sharp, right?--when a flight of madness struck me. I put away my German and snatched up Foucault's Pendulum out of my bag. Eco. Good Author. Entertaining book. Such were y thoughts as I settled in to read. Forty odd pages in, I had realized my grave mistake. The book reads like it was written by the hand of an eccentric eighty year-old Italian academician-philologist-semiotician with an endless amount of literary knowledge and no editor. I could keep up through the references to Borges and Nietzsche and St. Paul and other such, but exotic obscurities kept popping up, and by the time cabala came up--and I was still not sure what the story was--I resigned myself to never ...