A predicament.  Most of the clocks, cellphones, and computers produced nowadays are smart enough to reset themselves when daylight savings kicks in.  So when I woke up this morning, I had no idea what time it really was.  I suspected that my various clocks around the house—my cellphone, my computer, and so on, had reset themselves in the night—they were all in agreement as to the time, as they had been the night before—but something told me they'd all secretly reset themselves without telling me.  But I wasn't absolutely sure. 

If they're going to go ahead and do it for us, I don't see the need for us to make a big fuss over it every fall.  All of our various little devices quietly adjust themselves, and we're none the wiser.

But as far as having more daylight, wouldn't it just be smarter to shorten every hour from nine to five to, say, thirty-five minutes?  So that we would actually end up having twice the hours of daylight, and twice the time to enjoy them?


They just opened a Best Buys at my beloved South Bay Shopping Center.  They've got something new in there called the Geek Squad.  You can take your PC in, if you're having trouble with it, and for an outrageous, exhorbitant cost to you, some pimply-faced little prick will push a couple buttons and make everything OK again.  They're worse than car mechanics. 

Well, I've been having a little trouble with my laptop lately (loaded up with too much porn, probably), and I wanted to see how much they'd charge me to get it up and running like new again.  I went in with Itchy, and we talked to one of the geekiest geeks we could find there.  The problem with geeks is that they want to show off all their expertise, because by definition they're social retards, and they overcompensate for this weakness by lording their strengths over others.  But because of this, if you have an IQ over 40 yourself, you can sort of get the clues you need to fix your PC yourself from them, without having to resort to paying them for it. 

So the geek was trying to sell me all kinds of shit I already had.  It's like sixty bucks or something for an actual consult—for them just to boot up your PC and take a look at your porn collection (I mean, they should be paying you!)—and, get this, to reload Windows XP would cost, like, a hundred and ninety bucks (but they refund your consult fee, so it turns out to be a hundred and thirty in the end).  This is to pop in a disc.  

I knew I had my reinstallation CD, and if that's all it was going to take, I could do it myself.  So I thanked the geek for his help, and we were about to walk away when Itchy pointed to the guy's crotch.  

"Do you know your fly is open?"  Itchy asked him.

I cringed.  

The geek looked stricken.  I mean, I'm sure he was having a flashback to high school.  He started to look down and then checked himself—I'm absolutely sure he expected one of us to say, "Ha ha!  Made you look!"  He looked at Itchy like, "I beg your pardon?"

Itchy was like, "I wasn't sure if it was part of the geek shtick, or what."

As we walked away, I thought (a) even if I had noticed his barn door was open I probably would not have said anything, and (b) what was Itchy doing looking at the guy's crotch in the first place?  Does he look at everyone's?  I mean, I had no cause to notice.  Geek's like him might as well be levitating bodiless heads.

Or, once I was at lunch with The Itch, and our waiter had a booger.  Itchy couldn't let it go.  He was afraid it would end up in his entree.  And I guess it could be a public health issue (more than the barn door).  But how do you broach the topic with tact?  

It is a good question, and I'll pose it here for the hell of it (no one ever answers my QOTD)—who should you tell when their fly's open?  And how?


Speaking of tact.  I got the following very tactful comment from Michelle the other day on a recent Dot-oriented post:

Just had a quick question: Were you born and raised in Dorchester? In your "About the Blogger" it doesn't say where you're from....not sure if you grew up there. I am from Dorchester and was curious what part and if you lived there your whole life or moved around a bit.

First off, for those of you who've just joined us, welcome.

No, I am not from Dorchester.  In fact, this month I celebrated my first full year in Dot (woo-hoo!).  I have lived in a lot of cities and towns, and in a lot of different kinds of neighborhoods.  Northwest Gleason in Portland, Oregon was probably the quaintest.  Old Moosehill in New Hampshire the most rustic.  Jozsef Varos in Budapest was definitely the Dickensianest.  But Dot has been the murderingest, by far.  Not a judgment, just a fact.

I understand that when you grow up somewhere you have a sort of sentimental attachment to that place.  It seems very strong in these parts, where some people's people have been around since the 1600s.  I don't happen to have such an attachment to one particular place.  I grew up a military brat, and I've moved around a good deal in my life.  There are many, many places to which my memory travels in moments of reverie, depending on my mood, and lots of places my fancy flies when I think about my future.  

One thing I realized when I moved to Dot is that a lot of people, when they live somewhere all their lives, learn to live with things they shouldn't.  Like the little park here at the end of my street.  Why is it in the state it's in?  Because that's just how it is.  Neighborhoods need new blood like religions need converts, because it's the converts who go all fanatical and point out the obvious and demand fidelity to dogma.  People who grow up in a religion take it for granted.  Same thing with a neighborhood. 

Not that Michelle said anything about any of this in her very courteous comment.  But I have a feeling she may have taken something I wrote about "Dorchester's leading export" the wrong way.  I understand.  You spend your whole life here and then the only thing you ever hear about your hood is how this or that murder happened there, or this or that murderer happened to be from there.  You know there's more to it than that, but that's the story.  Unfortunately, as they say in the biz, if it bleeds, it leads.

I would hope that anyone who has joined me on this little leg of my journey, who's maybe read some of my editorials or followed the thread of this blog, or t-rage.com, would know that my concern for my neighborhood, and others like it, is more than skin-deep.  Where you live can't be just the butt of your jokes, after all.  So I go out and get my hands dirty whenever I can. 

Do I know what it's like to grow up in Fields Corner and grow old there?  No. Absolutely not.  Do I plan to stick around and spend my golden years here?  No.  Do I want to see Dot improve?  You bet. 

Unfortunately, what I see in a lot of neighborhoods in the area is a kind of learned helplessness.  Enough already.  If you want people's opinions of Dorchester to change, then get to work changing them.  But you're not going to do it by denying there's a problem.  Or by blaming it on someone else.