random stuff

Leave Yourself Behind

A quick note: This piece originally appeared on an old blog of mine in July 2004. I’ve edited and updated it.

My only regret is that I did not stay longer. I would have loved to experience more, go deeper into some countries and learn more about other cultures. However, being a Student Ambassador has opened my mind even further, as I am forced to think on a global scale about my life, and the lives around me.

That is the final paragraph of the journal I kept during the summer of 1994, after I had spent 23 days touring France, Germany, Switzerland, and Spain as a People to People Student Ambassador. Written on a flight back from Paris after my fellow “ambassadors” and I had exhausted the plane’s supply of coffee and soda and had annoyed all of the other passengers, it’s a statement typical of a 17-year-old. At the time, I thought that the program changed my life. Of course, at 17, it had. Being on the verge of my senior year of high school, I was making earnest statements like that on a regular basis. Still, I cannot discount that those three weeks were a turning point in my adolescence, the result of a program whose educational experience was more well-rounded than intended.

Can You Really Get There From Here?

The mission of People to People International and its Student Ambassador program is: “to bridge cultural and political borders through education and exchange, creating global citizens and making the world a better place for future generations.” I received their brochure in the fall of my junior year, right around the time my guidance counselor was drilling into my head that I was in the most important year of my academic career, perhaps even my life. As a result, I went looking for the type of opportunities that would look good on what eventually became a rejected application to Dartmouth — Anchor Club historian, student journalist, and mock trial lawyer. “Student Ambassador to Europe” was something that college admissions officers were impressed with. Europe was where great art was born; where history took place; and where entire generations of disaffected young Americans fled to find themselves.

I convinced my parents that not only would I make it into the program, I would somehow come up with $1200 of the trip’s cost. Not that I knew how I was going to pull that off — this wasn’t exactly like the time I hoarded my $25/week from JillMatt Cards & Gifts so that I could save enough money to visit my friend Chris in Fort Lauderdale. But after some creative publicity, including a story in The Suffolk County News and a talk with the Kiwanis Club (where I made a never-fulfilled promise to come back and speak to them), I had my tuition. On June 24, I set off for Kennedy airport, where I met up with the rest of the Long Island delegation. We had our flight to Washington, D.C. canceled and were forced to cab it to LaGuardia where, in a move reminiscent of a bad Amazing Race moment, two of our group members were dropped off at the Delta terminal and not the Delta Shuttle terminal.

Don’t Smurf an International Incident

Ultimately, my People to People delegation arrived in Washington intact. The entire group of 28 hailed from Long Island, Connecticut, Virginia, Tennessee, and California, and was lorded over by three advisors — the LaMers of Connecticut and Mary Nolan, who had run the Long Island pre-trip meetings. They were all nearing senior citizenship (if they weren’t there already), and I have to admit that I admire anyone that age who is willing to travel for three weeks with a group of unruly teenagers. They had some help during those first few days while we stayed at George Washington University, where People to People’s representatives laid down all of the rules. Essentially, they wanted to avoid three things: the “ugly American” syndrome, an international incident, and a babysit-the-rich-kids summer camp. I mean, that’s why the Student Ambassador program director stood on the stage in a university lecture hall and told us that we weren’t allowed to drink, smoke, do drugs, have sex, or even form cliques.

I honestly thought that last one was insane. Not that I wanted cliques to form, but it seemed that with 28 teenagers in close quarters, cliquing up was inevitable. In fact, small groups of friends formed on the very first day and would get even more defined as the trip went on. But when up against Papa & Mrs. Smurf (named so for Mr. LaMers’ beard) and Punky (Mary Nolan wore a spiked femullet), we were a single group of 28 students who annoyed everyone on the National Mall, the Metro and in the Crystal Underground. I guess all the things that annoyed me about D.C. when I was living and working there, then, were come-uppance for my acting like an asshat at 17. But anyway, I wrote about our initial camaraderie: “We started as … two groups of people from different states. We left as a group of Americans wearing stupid shirts and name tags.” (more…)

June 17, 1994: The Most Important Day of the Nineties

The cover to the 1994 Regents exam in English.

Had the events of the evening of June 17, 1994 not proceeded the way they did, i am sure that I would have remembered the day anyway. It wouldn’t have had the national significance that it does; still, it’s not every year that the Rangers get a ticker tape parade because they won the Stanley Cup. In fact, that day wound up marking the end of two significant periods of my life hours before O.J. and A.C. managed to take the Los Angeles Police Department and every television station in the country up the 405 for 50 miles and a few hours.

At 8:30 that morning in the Sayville High School gymnasium, I sat down to take my English Regents. This was both the culmination of three years of novels, plays, literary essays, and compositions at the hands of my English teachers as well as the very last Regents I would have to take. That may not seem like much, especially to people who did not grow up and attend public school in New York State, but those who did know exactly what I mean when I say that I considered the end of my Regents-taking career to be a cause for celebration, if however minor.

Regents were what kept us in school until late in June (well, that an starting after Labor Day and having a week off in February) and were a ritual for high school students since the New York State Department of Education started them way back in the 1930s (a quick look at the archives, shows tests on homemaking in the 1950s and 1960s). Coming sealed in plastic and bearing titles like “The University of the State of New York Regents High School Examination Comprehensive Examination in English,” the tests were more than a rite of passage–they were one of the most important rituals of our academic careers. Starting after Easter, our book bags were further weighed down with Red Barron’s books full of old tests, which we’d take and then pore over to see what we were doing right and what needed improvement.

A Barron’s Regents review book, courtesy of Amazon.com

And English wasn’t particularly hard, although I’m sure my students would blanch at the sight of it. Whereas current students in Virginia take SOL exams in reading and writing that are passage-based and have one simple five-paragraph prompt-based persuasive essay, my generation had to endure spelling, definitions, two essays (a literary analysis piece and a composition), and a listening section. That’s right–a portion of our test required us to sit and listen while our teachers read a passage and we had to answer multiple-choice questions based on what we heard. I’m sure that such a concept would send today’s average anti-testing advocate/expert into a blood-vomiting rage. Personally, I never thought twice about it, but then again I was one of those students they’d accuse of having Stockholm Syndrome or something because I dutifully took my Regents exams and did well in school.

Anyway, I remember chugging through the multiple choice, choosing one of the two literary essay prompts (which have both made their way onto my 10th grade advanced English final in recent years) and writing a composition that I think I titled “Notes From a Rest Stop on the Information Highway.” It was my attempt at wit, I guess, and it seemed to work because I did well enough to continue on my path to graduating with honors a year later.

A page from the spelling section of the 1994 Regents English exam.

I wasn’t thinking of any of that while taking the test, of course, because the Rangers parade was going to be on television and the Regents exam was the only reason I hadn’t asked my parents if I could take the train to the city that morning (same could be said for my friends as well because we all had to take the Regents). So like everyone else, I watched it on television. To this day, the Rangers hoisting the Cup as they drove through the Canyon of Heroes followed by the presentations at City Hall seem surreal. I wasn’t wearing my jersey–I had finally thrown that in the laundry after superstitiously refusing to wash it throughout the playoffs–but I was glued to my television set the way I was eight years earlier when my dad taped the 1986 Mets parade for me.

The Rangers hoist the cup on Broadway.

Of course, the television would be more important later that night. But I didn’t know that; did anyone?

Stone Temple Pilots were supposed to appear on Letterman. I don’t think that’s why I stayed home, but at some point in the afternoon, I made a mental note to stay up late and turn on The Late Show after I was done with whatever Friday night plans I had made–which, knowing my life in 1994 was probably renting videos and watching them in the basement–so I could see one of my favorite bands. But of course, that didn’t happen. Well, the STP performance actually did because Letterman taped his show in the afternoon, but it never aired.

At some point–I don’t remember when–I turned on the television and saw live footage of a white Ford Bronco speeding down a Los Angeles freeway followed by police. The news reporters said that driving the Bronco was Al Cowlings and his passenger was O.J. Simpson. (more…)

Classic College Memes: How to Mess With Your Roommate

The Internet is full of memes–lists, gifs, videos, and other things that often go viral–and that’s been the case since, well, since the Internet was invented. A couple of weeks ago while cleaning out some old files, I found a few things and decided to spend a few weeks talking about memes that I first encountered in 1995.

Here, I take a look at a favorite of ours, which is several ways to mess with your roommate.

It sounds weirdly sentimental, but when looking at memes like the ones I have dug up for this series of posts, I can picture the dank room in Wynnewood Towers and smell whatever lingered in the air for most of my freshman year–a combination of pot smoke, stale beer, rancid pizza, and b.o. It’s a memory that amazes me with its staying power, especially since to this day I’m amazed none of my roommates and I died inadvertently at the hands of our habits (or each other, for that matter).

This was one of the first email forwards that went around in the fall of 1995. I think at that point I was getting along with my roommates, although some of their habits were starting to work my nerves, but that’s partially because I wasn’t used to sharing a bedroom with someone for an entire school year and I hadn’t made that clean break from back home, so I was kind of stuck in two worlds in a sense.

So it was almost a relief that lists about ways to mess with your roommate landed our collective inboxes in the fall. And I think that since the novelty of email and forward lists hadn’t worn off, we found ways to bond over them, as absurd as they could be. There were several versions of this that floated around with different numbers of things to do and at one point I took all of them and put them into one huge master list which had about 250 items. Unfortunately, I lost that list years ago and had to hunt this one down on the Internet. I found this on an old, not-yet-deleted Angelfire site that was probably from the late 1990s or early 2000s, and though I would love to give credit to the original author, his or her identity remains a mystery.

100 Ways to Mess With Your Roommate (more…)

Classic College Memes: Fun Things to do in a Final That Does Not Matter

Final exams at Ridgemont High, circa 1983.

This one is about 50 Fun Things to do in a Final That Does Not Matter

My academic record during my freshman year of college was less than stellar. My first semester was a nightmare, as I earned a 2.5 GPA, the highlight of which was a D+ in Calculus II. My second semester was significantly better, as I earned the 3.5 GPA needed to maintain the 3.0 for my academic scholarship.

I had two amusing moments happen during finals that year. One was in the spring when I overslept my Politics in Literature final by 45 minutes. I remember waking up, looking at the clock, and then jumping out of bed and grabbing whatever clothes and writing implements were available, all the while saying, “Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.” I ran across campus, was admitted to my exam and was riding such an adrenaline high (I probably smelled horrible too) that I was the first one done. It paid off, though–I got an A- in the class.

The other happened during the fall semester. As I said, I wound up with a D+ in Calculus II. Why was someone who would go on to major in writing taking Calculus II? Well, I had scored a 3 on the AP Calculus exam in my senior year of high school and Loyola had told me that if I took Calculus II I would also get four credits for Calculus I. Not having the wherewithal to see that I didn’t need this and also not having the common sense to drop the class the minute things got tough (especially since I knew it had nothing to do with my major), I toughed it out and flirted with academic disaster through December.

That final exam was the hardest test I would ever take in my life. I knew this going in and did what I could to get help from my roommate, Rich, who was studying chemistry and understood this way more than I did. I then holed myself up in a study lounge. That is, until I ran into him during one of my study breaks and he told me that he ran the numbers and I could get a 0 on the final and pass the class. That was good enough for me and I made sure I got a good night’s sleep.

To this day I don’t know what my grade was on that final exam. That I passed the class was enough and I never took math again. In honor of that final, I give you another popular forward from the fall of 1995. The author is unknown but I wish I had followed his or her advice.

50 Fun Things to do in a Final that Does Not Matter
(i.e. you are going to fail the class completely no matter what you get on the final exam) (more…)

Classic College Memes: You Know You’re in College When ….

Beatty Hall at Loyola University Maryland (formerly Loyola College in Maryland). I took quite a number of political science classes in this building.

First up: You Know You’re in College When …

So the fall of 1995 was a particularly weird point in my life. It was my first semester in college and I wasn’t used to being on my own (few are when they’re freshmen), I wasn’t used to sharing a bedroom with someone for an entire school year and I hadn’t made a clean break from back home (read: I was still with my girlfriend, who was still in high school). Plus, starting college in 1995 meant that Facebook was simply the book of senior portraits that you received at freshman orientation and most of us got our very first email accounts.

And since email was such a novelty, we’d be excited when what we referred to as “forwards” made their way around our social circles. Most of them were chain letters–forward this to five people and receive good luck–but some of the more memorable ones were in list form. This particular list got forwarded around early and employs a common trope of forwards, which is the “You know you’re _____ if/when …” During my four years of college, I’d encounter “You know you’re a Loyola student when …,” “You know you’re from Long Island when …” and would actually create a “You know you’re from Sayville when …” list (that at one point actually was forwarded back to me), but this particular list was the very first one of these I received.

“You know you’re in college when …” is perfect for the type of person who has spent two or three months in a place that beforehand was only spied in 1980s comedies or admissions office brochures. And while it seems weird to make it seem like “college” is a foreign land that I’ve been sent off to, when you think of the life you lead when you’re away at school and the place you came from, a lot of this makes sense.

I do not know the identity of the original author of this list, just that a friend sent it to me during the fall semester of my freshman year and at one point I decided to copy and paste it into MS Word and save it to a floppy disk. Somehow it made it onto my current hard drive with the rest of my college stuff.

YOU KNOW YOU’RE IN COLLEGE WHEN. . . (more…)

Bowling, Burgers, and Birthdays

The interior of Sayville Bowl. Image courtesy of MapQuest. Year unknown.

I went to a kid’s birthday party a few weeks ago. Normally, these are held at one of those huge playland places that have ball pits, inflatables, kiddie habitrails, and that have names like Bounce and Play or Adventure Central. This party, however, was at the local bowling alley, and as I watched my son bowl (well, more like drop the ball in the lane and rush back to the chair so he could see the computer animation), I couldn’t help but think of the number of bowling birthday parties I attended as a kid.

My birthday parties–and most of my friends’ birthday parties–were pretty standard back in the 1980s. We’d go to the birthday kid’s house, play a few games, eat pizza or hamburgers and hot dogs, drink way too much soda, and finish off with Carvel cake. Then everyone would go home with goody bags that matched the decorations–cups, plates, paper tablecloths, etc–for Star Wars, He-Man, or whatever the party’s theme was. Sometimes, the party would be a sleepover and we would put the parents through hell because hours of fun and hours of soda and candy equals no actual sleeping at the sleepover. The parties were straightforward and always fun.

But bowling parties were a reality and we considered them some of the most memorable at the time, even if they don’t measure up to the standards of today’s epic theme parties and play apparatus. Bowling at a birthday party in the early 1980s was some of the most fun you could have as a kid for a few hours, and Sayville Bowl was the typical AMF bowling center whose decor would remain so unchanged for years that when I was in high school and college it seemed like 1979-1983 were being preserved for posterity. I don’t remember being a particularly good bowler–it was a lot of gutterballs and not enough Superman III–but I remember having an enormous amount of fun anyway.

Sigh … it’s never Superman III. (more…)

Show Me That Panarese Smile

The portrait studio section of an unknown Sears.

My sister and I cannot smile.

Okay, that’s not entirely true–we have the muscle function that is necessary to smile, but if you ask us to sit for a picture and smile for the camera, it’s likely you won’t get a genuine smile out of either of us. Instead, you’ll get what we refer to as “The Panarese Smile.”

A smile that is not so much an expression of happiness or delight as it is a grimace of discomfort or pain, The Panarese Smile has been a constant presence in family pictures since around the time the two of us were teenagers. Any time we got together with our extended family–usually a holiday like Christmas or Easter–all of the cousins would be corralled into one area of the house and have to sit for pictures. And when those pictures came out, you’d see that nancy and I looked like having our pictures taken was the absolutely last thing we wanted to do. In fact, in some of the pictures taken when I was in high school or college, I not only look like I’m in pain but my expression is downright hostile, as if I were saying, “You dragged my ass all the way out here and now you want me to pose for a picture? How dare you!”

I have no explanation as to why I was such a bitchy teenager. My life wasn’t hard and I had no reason to truly rebel. But I was just moody and bitchy half the time, and it would be especially so among my family during picture time. More than likely, I was annoyed that taking pictures meant that I had to put my book down or that I had to stop watching whatever game or movie I’d parked myself in front of to endure what seemed like endless torture at the hands of my mother and aunts.

Until I had to endure the portrait sessions of weddings, I had no idea how painful a photography session could be, but at fifteen or sixteen I wasn’t there yet so there was nothing more annoying than being asked to sit on the front porch of my grandmother’s house with the sun shining directly in my eyes while people with cameras yelled “Over here! Tommy! Look over here! Now over here!”

Actually, that’s a lie. There was one thing worse than several of those sessions put together. The Sears Portrait Studio. (more…)

First and Best for the Rest

A quick note: Today is my tenth wedding anniversary. To honor it, I’m reposting what I wrote ten years ago on my old blog, Inane Crap. Bits and pieces of this have been edited for spelling/grammar, but it is that post from November 2003.

To use a cliché, it was a blur. Most great days usually are. A beautiful, 12-hour blur that ended with our eating doughnuts in a suite at the St. Regis hotel at 1:30 in the morning, amazed that we had pulled it off. I thought we should have printed T-shirts or something. “I survived planning a wedding.” Hey, if they can print them up for a 3:30 ride on The Big Bad Wolf, we can print them up for the end of 18 months of wedding planning. And in the end, all of our anal-retentiveness, insistences, weeknight meetings, and stress paid off completely.

I didn’t know if it was going to go smoothly, to be honest. I mean, we’d done everything that we possibly could, but as I headed into Thursday night, when Tom and Denise–my best man and his wife, both of whom deserve mad props for helping me keep my shit together all weekend–showed up at my place, I kept hearing Princess Leia’s voice in my head:

“The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.”

Yeah, I never understood why Carrie Fisher has a British accent in that scene, either. But she’s right–one of the best lessons I learned the weekend of my wedding was that you can only be so anal-retentive, and sometimes you just have to allow things to happen in order for them to go well. You know, along with the plethora (yes, a plethora) of other lessons that are valuable to any stress-crazed groom.

You will learn more about strange medical conditions and quick forms of death in the two weeks leading up to the wedding than you did in four years of college.

Not that I, having been a writing and political science major, would have learned anything about disease while in college outside of Wynnewood Towers dorm plague. Anyway, what happens the last week of your engagement is that not only does your celebration begin–your fiancée meeting your co-workers and finding out that some of them went to her high school is always fun–but your stress hits its zenith and begins to manifest in strange ways. I mean, yeah, there are the usual nightmares, pimples, and panic attacks that have you and your bride sitting awake at night wide-eyed and wondering if you are going to make it to Saturday, but there are also headaches that have you standing in the shower and wondering what an aneurysm feels like. You spend your days at work researching the symptoms of a stroke on Web MD, and actually make trips to the public library to see if there are any documented cases of spontaneous combustion.

I’m serious when I say that on the day before the wedding, I was wound so tightly that I could have put Cameron Frye to shame. In fact, I was so uptight that I missed most of the point of my groomsmen’s surprise–at lunch on Friday, three of the idiots I had asked to keep guard as I walked down the aisle showed up at lunch sporting some of the most ridiculous facial hair I had ever seen (although Drew’s mutton chops were quality). My response? A pretty hostile, “You’d better shave that shit.” I think it’s because when you start counting down hours, you start thinking from moment to moment. What is next? Did it go right? Good. Okay, what can go wrong next? How long before that happens? You start missing funny little things like that as a result. So, maybe my having a stroke in the middle of Fuddruckers wasn’t completely out of the question. (more…)

Two Liters With a Pie

The flat remains of a two-liter bottle of Diet Pepsi. Yes, that’s my kitchen in the background.

A couple of months ago, I was at a work function where food was being served. We had a few tables of fried chicken and some sides as well as a table of two-liter soda bottles. As I poured myself a cup of Diet Pepsi, I couldn’t help but think of how ubiquitous the two-liter is—it’s a party and holiday industry standard and has been ever since I was a kid.

I suppose that is not something to get really nostalgic about, especially since it’s a plastic bottle. It’s not the iconic 6.5-ounce contour shaped glass Coke bottle that is the “nostalgic” Coke bottle and it doesn’t have the personality of the 20-ounce bottle, which is easily accessible and personal, plus it’s shaped like an old classic glass Coke bottle so it calls back to images where people from the 1950s or so pop a top of a glass Coke bottle. The two-liter has never had that. When you buy one of those, you twist off the metal or a plastic cap, and don’t think twice about it.

Which is indicative of the area and time period that constitutes my youth. Having been born in 1977, I have this attraction to the shopping mall, the multiplex, and everything else in the suburbs. It is an era that is by and large disposable and I think on some level, even though nostalgia has turned its eye a little more toward my formative years, that nostalgia is selective at best—it’s the music, the movies, the fashion. Nobody is going to look at suburban life in the 1970s and 1980s with the same rose-colored glasses our culture uses for the 1950s. Because the decades of my childhood are the rose-colored 1950s’ unfortunate afterbirth: Levitt homes and small towns gave way to shopping malls, gated communities, and McMansions, especially where I grew up. You cannot go anywhere on Long Island without seeing shopping malls or multiplexes.

But then, there’s the pizza parlor. (more…)

“Generation X” is … (a post from 1994)

Before I get to the meat of this, I should provide some preamble. The post that will go up later in the week is titled “Being Michael Grates,” wherein I take a look at Ben Stiller’s character from Reality Bites from the perspective of someone who is in his mid-thirties and see, much like Mr. Vernon in The Breakfast Club and Lloyd Dobler in Say Anything … how much that perspective has changed. As I was writing that piece, I thought of a piece I wrote in my high school newspaper where I referenced the movie in some screed about then-current stereotypes about teenagers and twenty-somethings of the day, who were labeled collectively as “Generation X” (taken from the Douglas Coupland novel of the same name). I thought of quoting an excerpt from it in the post and then I decided, why don’t I just reprint it?

So, this is from the November 1994 (Volume 4, Issue 1) issue of Voices Inside, the then-student newspaper for Sayville High School. I was seventeen years old, and it was the first in a regular “column” I had (read: gave to myself since I was made editor-in-chief) called “@#$&!”, which is an early precursor to this blog. Perhaps one day I’ll write about that and “From the Nosebleeds,” the column I had in college. But until then, enjoy this and come back later in the week for another all-new post as well as next week’s episode of the podcast, which also touches on Reality Bites. Until then, here is the original column in its entirety (with a few punctuation errors fixed). (more…)

Pop Culture Affidavit

The Sworn Testimony of a Dork