Follow-Ups

Often I tell a story to show a snapshot of an idea, but since these are all real people they have continued their lives. Here's what happened to a few of them:

My friend from Jump is in a happy relationship which has lasted over a year. He bought a house, and they happily live together in it.

The man from the fruit stand in Better People never even called me back to say he didn't want to hire me, but I did get a job with one of the better respected computer-related companies in the world. Go figure.

I did in fact almost fail my background check, but not because of all the moving, but because it was a little tough to prove I ever worked for the feds. Crash sorted me out, he's the man.

The bounty hunting team lost. We were carrying the robot live (long story) and the motherboard shorted literally as we placed it on the competition field. We lost the competition but wound up with lots of interested sponsors. Pippin and I lost track of the team after that, he's still being completely absurd and enjoying it.

I'm no longer homeless. My first housemate I lived with for a year. He has a little dog, but it's well trained and well mannered. Now I live in another crazy community, but thankfully I don't have to run it, so I never feel like I have to stop anything from happening.

Being barefoot at my new job is much better tolerated.

I did call Nexus once when I needed a hand. He hung up.

Scavenging never goes out of style, the Torii and my new home both have furniture from the adventures with the feds.

Joat had a baby.

Magpie and Gilby lived together for a whole year. Impressively, nobody wound up getting punched, though there were a few close calls.

Gadget is still the politician, and is happily doing grad research.

Mime got her life together and is now getting licensed to do real estate. She's still boy-crazy, but I feel her taste has improved significantly.

My new meds cause me to bruise all the time now. Hilarity ensues. Related: I did lose the weight again, but I never managed to get my little plant.

3Stack runs the program I ran with the feds now. He's grown a lot in some ways, but is still a little silly.

My grandmother from Rice is fairing poorly, and has trouble remembering a lot now. She's scared, and we're trying to be comforting. My other grandma is comfortable and as happy as she can be, given the circumstances.

I do less breaking and entering now, and mostly scheme about taking over the world with varied success.

The project from Up is put on hold more or less indefinitely but has been absurdly educational.

Drummer's geographical challenges haven't prevented him from getting an extraordinarily respectable series of software jobs.

My friend from Las Vegas and I realized the situation was a little impractical but we're both still good friends and remain in touch.

Vex runs his own company now, where he makes tools that suck less.

Arbor totally still is bitter about that damn burrito. He ran into PJ recently and brought it up.

Professional

"Tuck up," she says, "we're going to get hit with the sprinklers."

I turn in the sleeping bag and pull the edges up, tucking them under my feet. Through the holes in the mesh I can see the wood-chips on the ground about 8 feet below me, although I can't feel the mesh through the sleeping bag.

We must be quite a sight: three college students and one graduate camped on a children's playground. We could see the lights from the road and hear the cars shuffle past. Most of the noise came from the unevenness of the road.

Drummer was sprawled across a bridge between two of the sections, Jesh had yet to settle down but was enjoying running along the tops of the structures in the dark. Tiffany was curled up next to me. I could almost see the smile on her face in the dark.

At dawn we awoke to a rosy sunrise and two dogs running in the park. The husband and wife walking them had obviously seen us and were skirting the entire structure. My bare feet could feel the grain of the rivulets which made up the structure surface and my blue plaid PJ pants ruffled slightly in the morning breeze. Oh well, this isn't going to get a whole lot weirder no matter what I do...

"Hello!" I called, "Good morning to you both!"

The husband looked a little baffled and puzzled on how to respond but the wife grinned widely and waved to us.

"Can I pet your dogs?" I asked.

"Of course," the wife answered.

In seconds I was down the fire pole and across the mulch into the grass which licked the hems of my pants as I ran, leaving them wet with dew.

"What are you doing up there?" the wife asked as I arrived.

"Camping out," I smiled as I worked to extract a bright green tennis ball from the mouth of an excited golden retriever.

"Why?" her husband asked.

"I don't know," I replied, winding up and chucking the ball as far as I could. The golden retriever streaked out in pursuit, front and back legs together in a bounding gate, "Why not I guess?"

"I know how that is," the woman said turning to me, "you wouldn't believe the half of the crazy stuff I did in college."

The husband's eyebrows crashed together like waves for a moment before he raised one in puzzled alarm and looked at his wife.

***

They weren't in front of the iron gates of the school we had selected. They weren't in the subway station. They weren't picking up their cell phones. They weren't anywhere I could figure out.

The day was cold enough to see your breath, and I was wrapped tightly in a baby blue coat. An equally bright and clashing orange piece of poster board with the words "Free Hugs" written on it in foot high all capitol black letters was rolled up in my hands.

This had seemed a simply grand idea in a group, but standing alone I felt nothing short of absurd on that street corner. I stood alone for nearly half an hour, sign half unfurled in one hand, looking somewhat dejected.

"You're giving out free hugs?" a voice asked me. It belonged to a girl who was probably still in highschool. Black lipstick, black skirt, dyed black hair, some sort of intricate black shoes, and even the obligatory hot topic spiked bracelet made me feel like I had just met the walking personification of people who need to prove their uniqueness by all acting the same.

"Uh...yeah," I said non-commitally.

"I love that video," she grinned, "can I have one?"

"Uh...yeah!" I said a bit more brightly.

I'm never going to be able to explain what exactly happened in that moment when the girl who I was so busy looking down on came up and hugged me, but like so many other endeavors in life, the first step was the hardest and the expression of confidence is often what makes you succeed. I held my sign high above my head, grinning at incoming pedestrian traffic. The people came in streams, they would see one person hug me, and then another person would follow suit, but at no point did interest hold strongly enough to form a line.

"You're doing a psych project?" a man asked tenitively, pointing back to the gates behind me.

"No, just for fun."

"Oh," there was a long pause before he produced a rather nice camera from his coat and extended his hand once more toward the intricate iron gates, "I go there. I need an art project. Can I photograph you?"

A street preformer came up to me at one point and said that everybody walking from my direction was smiling, hugged me, and left. I hugged the photographer, but sadly I never got to see the result of his project (if you're out there Mr Photographer Man, I'm rather curious how that turned out), as a matter of fact I'll never find out if I made much of a difference to anybody that day, and honestly I don't expect I did. It was, however, one of the most heartwarming and rewarding experiences I have ever participated in. People in groups are miserable creatures, but from time to time if you can manage to take them and yourself our of the daily environment you'll find something in them which makes you both smile. It was also really healthy of me to get over my self-consciousness about the absurdity of it all and just enjoy myself.

***

The big lab with the best toys in it, naturally, is the one which I must share with a variety of characters. One of them is standing in front of me wearing a suit.

"You have to wear shoes in here,"

I want to ask him why, but I already know why, and its not something he's likely to say out loud. There is no heavy machinery here, no serious danger, Florian just believes its unprofessional to not wear shoes at work. Nothing has changed since I started doing this more than two years ago, Florian is just new and believes he can help me by teaching me to grow up. Maybe he can.

I find this interesting. Personally I define "being unprofessional" as "not doing a good job," but in reality the act of "being professional" in this day and age seems to have taken on a significant amount of unrelated baggage. I understand that sometimes we need to put our best foot forward to impress guests and potential sponsors, but why must we keep up this facade with one another? Why are we trained to be so fearful of the judgement of total strangers we will never see again and will have no impact on our lives, and of our own teammates who are suppose to be our allies? Perhaps this insistance on stupid and trivial childish behavior is stupid, but this other option of a culture just slays me.

***

"Punch buggy green, no punch back," I tap Corey on the shoulder. Corey is a professional, both in my eyes and in Florian's, and ten years my senior. If I am where he is when I am his age I will be very proud. He looks at me for a moment slightly bewildered, then smiles and shakes his head.

"Pika, are you ever going to grow up?"

"I was considering maybe starting on that in like 10 years..."

...In Sin and Misery

I never cared much for the oldies station.

Far prior to the hubcapless wonder of my high school years our family made its way about in a beaten up blue ford station wagon. It was shorter, and I was shorter, and the combination of these facts meant that looking out the window wasn't a terribly efficient pastime unless I wanted to view the slightly fuzzy blue interior material which covered most of the door and the knobby top of the door lock which broke the otherwise soft level horizon of the interior material.

"There is, a house, in New Orleans..."

The man in the radio howled the next line and I jumped at the noise. My mother glanced over at me and laughed a little.

"You don't know this song, Pika?"

I shook my head.

"Its a very old and famous song, normally sung by a woman."

"And its been, the ruin, of many a poor boy. Dear God, I know, I'm one."

"What's it about?" I asked.

"A brothel."

My pause indicated my vocab didn't quite cover that word.

"A whorehouse," my mother said.

"Oh," I said. I was aware of the world's oldest profession at that age but, being about nine, I didn't really understand the emotional ramifications of it.

"Its a very sad and desperate thing," my mother said. She seemed a little agitated at the whole conversation.

I was completely in my own world staring out the window listening, "I like it."

"What?"

"I like this song."

"Oh," she responded, slightly relieved.

"I like the way it sounds, I like this band."

"The Animals? They are not very good. Nobody liked them when I was your age. They are fake, put together by a business. They couldn't even play their own instruments when they started."

There did not seem to be very much to say to that. It wasn't until many years later that I would find any other version of the Animal's history but at the time I was too busy enjoying the music to question further. I wanted to sing along, but I didn't know the words. There was something about the utter misery and desperation in the singer's voice which held my attention, something beautiful. That same something remained with me for days after as I hummed the tune, slightly nervous to sing it aloud for fear I'd upset mom with the "brothel" talk.

***

Somewhere in the Mojave desert the moon watched a beat up little Ford Tarus of college students slide along the highway.

We have a rule that you know you are in the middle of nowhere when all you can get on the radio are Jesus stations and music featuring accordions. I was spinning through stations in the passenger seat at two in the morning when I came across the beginning chord progression.

"Ohmygod," I slurred the words together in my haste, cranking the volume, "I haven't heard this in forever."

"There is, a house, in New Orleans, they call the rising sun..."

"Heard what?" Drummer looked at me quizzically from the passenger seat.

I didn't respond, head tipped back, as I howled the next line with the radio, "And its been, the ruin, of many a poor boy...dear God, I know, I'm one..."

I haven't the least idea how bad or good it sounded, but Drummer kept glancing at me sideways as we tore through the night. From time to time I'd catch him humming along bits of it with me. I think he would have sang aloud with me, but he did not know the words. The song eventually died and there car was filled with a content silence.

"What's that song?"

"House of the Rising Sun, its really old but pretty famous. This cover is by The Animals."

"Alright," he smiled, and his voice trailed off something about "when we get home." I found myself humming snatches of it for the next few weeks after hearing it, and it seemed to make him smile.

***

I hadn't talked to Tina in ages but somehow when I randomly IMed her we wound up in the most bizarre and complicated conversation I think we had ever had.

"...and so..." I said, "I started the blog to practice because I can't write well enough yet to finish the book..."

"You're writing right now?"

"Well yes, but I'm not pleased with the first draft I wrote for a chunk of the book. None of the characters are believable. Nobody really talks like the Gillmore Girls, its alienating when everybody in a book does."

"I don't know," she replied, naming a new TV show she was actively watching which I had not heard of and now can't remember the name of, "All the characters in that are sexy and clever, by your standards they should be very alienating. However, they are still very real because, for whatever reason, they are all very messed up and miserable inside, even though on the outside it looks like they shouldn't be."

"So you think everybody can identify with these people because we're all miserable inside too?"

"That's harsher than I would say it, but yes."

***

I've gone through the lyrics several times now in search of the whorehouse that upset my mother all those years ago. I understand that sometimes other people have found reference to it but that others never do. I don't think the lyrics are what are important to it though: not now, not however many hundreds of years ago it was first sung, and not in 1964 when it brought a little band from obscurity into wild fame. Its the empathy for the singer.

Oh Mother, tell your children,
Not to do what I have done.
Don't spend your lives in, sin and misery,
In the house, of the rising sun.

	The Animals - The House Of The Rising Sun
	Found at skreemr.com

Con Man

The white rails of my bunk bed are cool to the touch. My palms are pressed against them, laying on my back staring at the ceiling not four feet above my head.

"Get up," my mother said. A pair of khaki pants I normally only wore for photos and formal occasions flew over the edge of the bunk and landed with one leg across my face. A nice shirt similar to the ones I had seen my high school peers wearing followed. Previously I didn't think I owned such an item.

"Put these on," my mother said.

"Wha..." I said, picking up the shirt by the collar in one hand and holding it in front of me gingerly as if it might be roadkill, "what's going on, are we going someplace special?"

"We're going to a neurologist," my mother responded, flicking on the lights and causing me to cease to regard the shirt as wholly undesirable, as it now made an excellent cover for my face to block the light. It still smelled like a store.

"So, why do I have to wear these?" I asked, but my mother was already gone.

I repeated the question shortly after as I wandered out the front door and pulled open the dented hubcapless minivan which was my family's primary mode of transportation during highschool.

My mother put the car into reverse and looked backwards between the seats to back out of the driveway, "We have to convince the neurologist to take your case, he's very important and doesn't have to. I want him to like you, so you have to remind him of his daughter. Better yet, if his daughter is a brat, I want you to remind him of who he wishes his daughter was."

"And this?" I pulled at the back of my shirt so it came around to let me see the tag. It read 'Abercronbie and Fitch.'

"Neurologists are rich."

There was a long pause interrupted only by the jostling of the car over the bumps in the road. My mother broke it, "What shoes are you wearing today, Pika?"

"My sneakers," I replied, fairly aware that if that question was asked this answer wouldn't be right. It hadn't seemed too unrealistic at the time, I had seen girls who wore shirts like this also wear sneakers.

"You're incorrigible," my mother sighed, reaching into the back seat to grab another pair of shoes and put them on my lap, "put these on."

The neurologist was definitely of my mother's generation. I sat with my hands folded and ankles crossed that day on the exam table. I spoke when spoken to, and I smiled the whole time. This was not the model of a modern teenager, but this was something that looked like a modern teenager and acted exactly the way the baby-boomers had been expected to behave as children.

"Seems a shame," the neurologist said, "you seem to be a nice girl. Lets see what we can can do to help you." He reached out and patted me on the head and smiled. I obediently widened my smile and looked up at him with big eyes.

***

The eight and a half mile trail Panorama trail had taken considerably more time than we had anticipated between the elevation changes and the fact that we weren't use to the elevation yet. Dusk was falling and we had four miles to go with an elevation change of 3,200 feet to get back to the cars. Pacem and had run ahead and tried to hitchhike a ride while Joker did the same thing nearby, both to no avail. The whole time the sky was getting darker.

"We're going it anyway," Bobby said. Five of them piled into a shuttle bus and I turned to follow them.

"Pika, stay here," Joker said. I scowled at him. Arguably I was not as strong as the boys and might slow them down, but any reminder of this made me more than slightly cranky. If an adventure was afoot, I sure as hell wanted to be part of it.

I watched the doors shut and the bus pull away.

"FUCK!"

Bane tried not to roll his eyes, "Calm down Pika."

"It doesn't bother you, to be left behind, when they are going to have an adventure?"

"If by adventure you mean pretty shitty time," Duckling replied. The words were not meant to be a challenge or overly sarcastic, he simply stated his opinion calmly through half-open eyes.

"Lets try another path...Bane, you have a spare set of keys?"

"In my glove compartment."

"Lets break into your car."

The four of us were on the next shuttle. In my hand I held a stray bobby pin I had picked up from the platform. Now all I had to do was convince somebody to drive us an hour out to the car.

Two grimy men were sitting in the seat of the shuttle in front of us wearing backpacking gear. They were in their late 50s and chatted idly with one another. I could see the wedding band on the one sitting to the right as he braced himself against a pole. Men that age either have children or adopt strange people often treating them like children.

"Ok," I said as if already mid conversation with Bane, "we're going to be alright, all we have to do is get to the car. I still can't believe this happened..."

It wasn't terribly long before the two men were sucked into our imaginary conversation and it wasn't too long after that before they made arrangements to take us to our destination.

"Call Bobby," I told Bane, "bring them all back."

Its fully dark two hours later. Pacem and Joker are up with our new friend Bob getting the car and the rest of the group is waiting by a bus stop. Drummer walks back with a bag full of s'mores in his arms. I'm carrying beer for our new friend Bob and a chocolate bar.

"I thought you didn't have your ID," Bobby looked up and asked as we approached the group.

"I don't," I replied, shoving a flashlight and some water bottles aside to find a place to sit.

"And they didn't card you?"

"No," Drummer said, "they did. They gave it to her anyway."

Bobby shook his head, "How the fuck do you do this?"

Memorize

"17 squared is...?"

"Erm..."

"Oh come on Pika, you need to know this."

"Not with a calculator..."

"You should really know this, its not like you will carry a calculator everywhere with you during life."

I have a calculator in my backpack, but normally I just use the one integrated into my cell phone. I carry this phone everywhere, and I have not seen a phone in the last 5 years which doesn't have such a calculator on it.

***

They call us the search engine generation. We are storing less and less knowledge in our minds and have come more and more to rely on our ability to rapidly locate data than our actual knowledge of it.

***

I'm thumbing through yet another applicant's exam, first for the easy short answer questions before I even begin working out if the code they wrote is correct.

"What pins," the exam asks, "do you need to drive in order to put a number on the four 7 segment displays on the Nexys II by Digilent?"

"I have no experience with this display," the response reads.

Its a shame we don't have paper applications anymore. Crumpling up the application and trying for a two point swoosh into the trash can might be strangely gratifying. That particular board was chosen to be obscure, the question was meant to be one of character. If the applicant so much as pulled up an image of that board on Google he would find the numbers he requires have physically been printed on the front of the board. I find the concept that you would expect anybody to have memorized everything he needs laughable.

***

"Did you know," the priest asked, "that when paper first became widely available in ancient Greece that the older philosophers had a fit about it?"

The art of being in high school seemed to lie in pretending very hard that nothing a teacher could ever say would be interesting. After pause sufficient enough to indicate that he didn't plan to continue until we responded I shook my head.

"Yes," he said, "they thought that students would never learn anything because they could always just write it down instead."

***

"Your language skills are terrible, you'll never pass in any social context" my mother said, "you can not even recite poetry."

"Most people don't even read poetry anymore let alone memorize it..."

"This," she pointed to her bookshelf, "is what educated adults know. Some day you will grow out of this childish phase and want to pass as an educated adult you know."

Somehow I remember feeling distinctly like I wouldn't.

My mother was irritated and persistent, "Recite! Poe!"

"Whose woods these are I think I know / His house is in the village though,"

"Its that's Frost. I said Poe."

***

Meet Drummer. Drummer scored the best of the applicants on his technical exam, attends an ivy league school, and currently has an internship with a fairly respectable federal agency. He, in a similar previous episode of distraction, once named all 151 original Pokemon on a sheet of paper. He's a phenomenal coder and I have no issue with his performance or raw intellect.

"Could you name all 50 states?" he asked me.

I laughed, thinking he was being funny.

"No, seriously, if we printed blank maps of the United States do you think you could put the right titles in all the states?"

"Yeah, and I am sure you could too."

"I'm not..."

"Lets try."

Sys was up for the challenge too. The states were easy enough, and with enough discussion we got all of the capitols (although Sys contributed significantly more to that list than I did.) Drummer, partially from his mind and partially from random eavesdropping exclamations such as "oh yeah, Kentucky is a state!" managed to fill in most of his map.

Here's a photograph we took of it. It is worth noting that the two states Drummer has lived in are Georgia and New York.

After a merry round of below the belt comments about Drummer's education and general intellect he started looking slightly sad.

"How did you even pass 5th grade?" I asked.

"Well," he shrugged, "I knew it all then...I guess I just...forgot."

"Forgot?"

"Some of these states...aren't even important," he says.

"Of course they are all important!" I snap, "this is the country we live in. You should know at least all the parts of it..."

"Actually, I think its defensible," Gadget joined in, "I mean...he can always go look up the gory details if he wants them right?"

"No," I insist, "there is a basic minimum that you need to not look like an idiot in any historical or political discussion. This is fundamental knowledge for an educated adult."

Educated adult? I am slightly creeped out to hear my mother's words come out of my mouth. Is my insistance on what I consider basic geography as outrageous as I found her insistence on poetry? It might be possible. If the ancient greeks thought paper was a scandal, my parent's generation loathed handheld calculators in favor of Poe, might it be possible that in a few years memorization tasks like basic geography be rendered obsolete? Throughout the whole progression of human history we have slowly kept less and less in our heads and more and more in our tools. Where do we, as a generation, draw our lines of dependency?

***

I'm walking across the lab. Drummer's on break at his desk, sandwich in hand, staring at his screen.

"Penny for your thoughts," I say.

Drummer takes another bite of his sandwich and tilts the monitor so I can see it with his other hand. Across the whole screen I can see a map of the United States, completely labeled this time.

"Ahh, you're studying?" I asked.

Drummer nodded.

It warms my little heart.

The More You Know

Sys sits at his computer behind me looking puzzled, "When did XKCD start getting dirty?"

"What are you talking about?" I asked "XKCD has always been like this..."

"No, its always nerdy...not dirty."

"Nerds tend to be pretty dirty..."

Sys shakes his head.

"No, here" I said as I started searching for previous less than family friendly editions and rattling them off.

Sys shakes his head but views the evidence I present. Sys has been the designated high school bitch of my lab for just over a year now, but realistically he's treated like any college intern in my lab despite being only 17. Since he can handle the workload of a college kid he has earned all the privileges that come with it. I sometimes wonder how it is for him to return to the real world where his underlings, the designated high school bitches of other labs at my work, are his classmates.

We're expected to mentor our high school students in exchange for the coffee and copies. On a technical level Sys has probably gained more education than any other student. However, most of the life lessons I hand him are, normally completely inadvertently, more than a little unconventional.

Sys clicks quietly through the links and nods, conceding the point made. I hear the mouse fall silent as he tilts his head and stares at the screen for a moment.

"Pika, I don't get this one."

"Huh?"

"What's a furry?"

Across the lab Bobby chokes a little on his water bottle laughing. Drummer looks at me wondering how I'm going to handle this.

"Well," I said, "this is one of those things that if I tell you it won't make you any happier a person...but you do have an Internet connection so if you're really determined you can look it up yourself."

"What kind of an answer is that?"

"You ever heard the story of Pandora's box?"

Sys sits for a minute and then returned to his work. He typed for a good 120 seconds or so before his typing slowed and he stared at the screen. Then suddenly, he leaned forward and the tempo of the strokes quickened. There was a very slight pause before he leaned back again and shouted to the room, "Ohhh NASTY!"

The whole lab bursts out laughing.

Sys is pretty irritated, "Why did you show me that?"

"Dude," I said, "we totally warned you."

The lab trolled him briefly with a discussion of furries and then the laughter died down. Eventually work resumed. It wasn't until several hours later that I caught Sys shaking his head out of the corner of my eye.

"What's wrong man?"

Sys shakes his head again, "Fuzzies are so nasty."

"Man," Bobby laughed, "at least get the title right."

"There really are many worse things on the internet," Drummer offered cheerfully.

Sys opened his mouth for a moment to ask a question then shut it again and went back to work.

Academia will tell you that the pursuit of knowledge is the pursuit of happiness. The Internet has taught me that there are rare sets of circumstances where I beg to differ.