Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, which came out on video today. I wandered around the store searching in vain for the DVD before giving up and grabbing a tape. Once I arrived back at the office, Fred told me Lucas isn’t releasing any of them on DVD ’til they’re all made. Would’ve been nice to know! Who’s the Einstein who decided it would be a good idea for Diane Sawyer to interview Elian Gonzalez? And further, which Einstein on the Gonzalez side allowed her access to the poor kid? Why don’t they just send the kid back to his father and be done with it, for crying out loud. Diane Sawyer is so uncomfortable around kids, it’s laughable. What, she’s a woman so she’ll have a good rapport with kids? Anyone who’s seen her with the Dilley sextuplets knows how untrue that is. Those Dilleys sure are cute, though. So, can someone define middle-class for me? Fred swears up and down that the neighborhood we live in is a lower-middle-class neighborhood, and to me that’s far from correct. We live in an almost 3,000 square foot house, and while we have the largest model the builder offered at the time, the houses around us are far from tiny. To me, it’s an upper-middle if not lower-upper class neighborhood; everyone who lives around us has two or more vehicles, and they’re nice ones, too. The car I had when we moved into the house – a ’90 or ’91 Ford Tempo – was far and away the only crappy car in the neighborhood. And, besides: we have a POOL. I’ve always thought I grew up in a solidly middle-class home and neighborhood. There were four of us kids, and we may not have always had every single thing we wanted (unlike a very spoiled spud), but we never came close to starving or going around in ratty clothes (unless we wanted to, of course). My father kept a strict eye on the thermostat in the winter, and we had a wood stove in the basement, so if you were upstairs in my room you’d be cold, but if you were in the basement, you’d be sweating your ass off. We didn’t go without, but my parents didn’t buy unnecessary things, either. They didn’t have a snow-blower the entire time I was growing up, because – hell – they had kids to shovel, didn’t they? Not that I remember doing all that much shoveling; I think my Dad took care of most of it. When first we moved into the house where I lived from sixth grade on, the driveway was a dirt driveway. My parents had the driveway paved eventually and didn’t we think we were the shit, skating back and forth on that driveway. I recall my cousin Kim spending the night once, and our parents went out to eat, so Debbie, Kim and I skated around on the driveway in our nightgowns and struck hitchhiking poses as cars drove by. The house we moved into had three bedrooms, one bathroom, and an unfinished basement. Debbie and I shared a room for a few years. Eventually, my father finished the basement with pine wood walls, and Debbie and I had our bedrooms down there. Tracy, being the oldest (six years older than I, eight older than Debbie) was responsible for watching us while my parents worked. For the first year we lived in that house, now that I think about it, my father was finishing out his last year of service in the Air Force. So it was the four of us and my mother. Ah, I’ve rambled off the point once again; I do that a lot, don’t I? I don’t know what my point was supposed to be actually, maybe a simple comparison between what Fred considers middle class and what I consider middle class. Of course, his father lives in a huge house on the mountain and was able to retire at the age of 55, so what does he know? 🙂 I think I’ll probably be putting most of my archives back up this weekend; I don’t want to wait until the end of April. People are coming to the site and not finding old entries to poke through, so they aren’t staying long; I don’t like that. So I’m going to toss the old entries back up (the cd was behind my desk, under a stuffed Coke reindeer; told you I’d find it! – and almost everything not backed up to disk was on my computer at work. Let me tell you, I was RELIEVED.) this weekend. ]]>
04/04/2000