Posts Tagged ‘Haverford College’
Carol-terror, decoration-angst
Posted December 5, 2008
on:Some people are born to curmudgeonhood (curmudgeonness? curmudgeonity?), some people achieve curmudgeonhood, and some have curmudgeonhood thrust upon them. While it now all seems to have come so easily, I suppose I’ve worked hard to achieve my current position atop the Curmudgeon Pantheon.
When I was a kid, way back in the middle of the last century, I guess I kind of enjoyed the “Holiday Season.” I remember first being profoundly annoyed at all things Christmas in my second year at Haverford College. I lived in a suite with 3 other guys, and one of them, Ned, took out a tape of Christmas carols and started playing it a couple of weeks before Thanksgiving.
What’s so bad about that, I can hear you asking. Everybody starts playing Christmas carols (and putting up Christmas lights, and ringing bells at you outside of stores, and sending you letters asking for money, . . .) around Thanksgiving. But Ned had a single, 60 minute tape of Christmas carols, and he played it continuously, over and over again, more or less around the clock.
How many times can you be expected to listen to Gene Autrey singing “Rudolph the Rednosed Reindeer” before you start to lose it? So after the first few days, I very politely suggested to Ned that he take his f*^%ing tape and shove it up his f*^%ing a^%#. (As you can see, I’ve always been a patient person, sensitive to the feelings of others.)
Ned was, and I’m sure still is, one of the world’s professional sweet guys, and patiently explained to me that Christmas carols are something deep and meaningful that he grew up with, and not being a Christian, I just couldn’t understand. I got no support from my other two roommates, one of whom had disappeared into the library in early September and didn’t emerge until graduation 3 years later, and the other of whom was another professional sweet guy who had grown up with Christmas carols, and why couldn’t I understand just how important it was for both of them, anyway?
The tape continued to play 18 hours a day, 7 days a week, and by the time school closed for the holidays, I’m not sure whether I was closer to suicide or homicide. But I was certainly relieved that my ordeal was over. Right! On our return to school in January, out came the tape again, and Ned played every waking hour for another two weeks. He was just so sorry to see the Christmas season end, he had to listen to those wonderful, nostalgic songs another 3,000 times! Even then, he couldn’t bear to stop cold-turkey, but tailed off gradually, playing the damn thing off and on until Easter.
Is it any wonder I’ve never been the same since? Believe me, the steps were deceptively small and easy to take from carol-terror to decoration-angst to “You know what you can do with your ‘Ho, ho, ho,’ you red-suited weirdo!”

Sinterklaas. Looks different from the other red-suited dude, doesn't he?
As you may know by now, I left the U.S. in 1974 and didn’t return for good until 2004. During those 30 years, my mania was mostly dormant. Christmas celebrations just weren’t all that big in Iran or Israel. And Western Europeans take a much less overt, less time-consuming approach to the holidays. In Holland, preparations start about December 4th, and the whole thing is over on the 6th, the day after Sinterklaas comes riding through from Spain on his white horse. That’s right, there’s nothing universal about celebrating the 25th. In the U.K., nearly nobody puts up Christmas lights. You see a few decorations in the stores for about a week, and on Boxing Day, the 26th, everything mercifully disappears.
But after I moved to Colorado in 2004, all that anxiety came rushing back. Two weeks before Thanksgiving that first year, my new favorite radio station — a country music station, for crying out loud — started playing Christmas carols 24/7. A week later, 11 of the 13 houses in my cul-de-sac put up Christmas lights, and didn’t take them down until mid January.
Fortunately, I seem to be getting over my little problem. Last January, I even volunteered to help my next door neighbor take her lights down.
“Here, you shouldn’t be doing that alone. Let me get it for you. Oh, that’s too bad, I seem to have broken that string. And there, I’ve broken another. I’m so sorry. How clumsy of me to step on those bulbs like that. I’ll just get those strands now. Oops!”
Heh, heh. Sometimes, it’s all worth it.
How I Became a Crusty Old Fart
Posted November 26, 2008
on:My family was upper middle class, and although we lived in the bleeding-heart liberal left Washington, D.C. suburb of Chevy Chase, Md., my parents never had much interest in anything other than saving for retirement. So although I was vaguely aware that my schoolmates were more sensitive, caring, and politically involved than I was, I was too wrapped up in being horny 24 hours a day to be bothered much about it.
Somehow, I ended up at the even more bleeding-heart liberal leftist Haverford College, just outside of Philadelphia. A few days after I arrived, I was at a mixer with Bryn Mawr College, and I ended up sitting with two Bryn Mawr freshman who spent the better part of two hours talking about how they were going to be, well, sensitive, caring and politically involved. All I was interested in was getting into their pants, and they were talking about whether they were going to volunteer with “Amnesty International” or “Medicines Sans Frontieres.” By the time I graduated I was more than vaguely aware that I was not as concerned as most my peers, but other than participating in one anti-Vietnam protest march — hey, everyone else was going — I’d managed to avoid being bothered much about it.
I left the U.S. in 1974 and spent almost all of the next 30 years living and working overseas — Iran, Israel, Germany, Holland, and the U.K., with extended periods of time commuting Monday through Friday to assignments in Italy, France, Belgium, and Spain, among other countries. (When people ask me about it I tell them that I was just trying to stay ahead of a parking ticket I got at the Philadelphia airport in 1972.) There was a lot of moving in those years, in all of those countries other than the U.K. I was speaking languages other than English, and I was traveling 48 weeks a year. So not becoming too involved with anything other than my family and my career was pretty easy.
From reading the “International Herald Tribune” and “Newsweek” in the early 1990s, I knew that something called political correctness was sweeping the U.S. and would eventually make it over to Europe (as most American cultural fads seem to about 10 years after they hit the U.S.). Then, in 1995, I was working for a computer company which had just ended its “special relationship” with a particularly Evil Car Company and I was leading a team that was supposed to develop a methodology for competing for their I.T. business. A hot-shot process lady was sent over from the U.S. to work with us. Before we could start each meeting, she insisted that we all “check in” first. Checking in apparently meant: 1) that we all had to tell each other something personal and revealing about ourselves; 2) that we each had to talk about our expectations for the meeting; and 3) that we had to talk ad nauseum, usually with tears streaming down our faces, about how we felt about our co-workers and the process. (“Thank you for sharing.” “Thank you for caring.”) Checking in usually took about half of our work time. I was astonished and absolutely appalled.
On the second day I suggested that maybe it would be a good thing to actually start work. The process lady looked at me very seriously and said, “Do you mean you don’t want our company to become a Learning Organization?” Obviously “Learning Organization” was a reserved word with which I was not familiar. My reply was swift and brutal. “Call me a crusty old fart, but we’ve got 3 months to do a shit-load of work. If the boss comes to me in a month and asks, ‘How’s it going?’ and I tell him, ‘Well, we haven’t actually started work yet, but we’re all feeling really good about the process,’ he’s going to kill me! We’ll keep doing this over my screaming, bloody corpse!” For 30 seconds, her mouth flopped open and closed, but no sound came out.
It was lucky for me that we were not in the U.S. She later told me that if we had been, she would have submitted a suit against me on the spot for sexual harassment. What the things I had said had to do with sexual harassment I never could figure out, but obviously touchy-feeliness and political correctness are like secret societies. You have to work your way up to the appropriate levels of knowledge over a period of decades.
In any case, my self-proclaimed designation of “crusty old fart” seemed to fit and, greatly encouraged by me, it has stuck with me ever since. So much for my budding career as a touchy-feely political correctnik!
When I was getting ready to retire, I made a list of 20 things I was looking for and a list of places and compared them. Boulder, Colorado came out way on top, and I moved there in 2004. Boy, was I in for a shock! Commonly referred to locally as “The People’s Republic of Boulder,” the city has more massage therapists per capita than any place else on earth. You don’t own a pet in Boulder, you are the pet’s “guardian.” The city has spent years debating how the prairie dogs, which are epidemic around here, should be controlled or whether they should just be allowed to take over the city. Seminars on things like, “Living a Sustainable Life,” and “Opening the Circle” are well attended daily occurrences. The first couple of years drove me absolutely crazy!
Don’t get me wrong, I am concerned about the arts and the environment and spend a significant amount of time working with a number of non-profit organizations. It’s just that I don’t wear it on my sleeve and spend most of my time trying to keep from crying because it’s such a big, tough, unfair world.
At this point, I’m kind of numb and, other than an occasional curmudgeonly outburst which deeply offends the locals, I control myself pretty well.
Well, enough for my opening salvo. If I don’t get deported, I’ll be back with more.