Thanksgiving

Yes, I now have less respect than ever for the little third grade boy who left the "s" out of Thanksgiving and thus lost the elementary school spelling bee to me, a second grade girl. Sore losers just don't deserve any respect. After all, Thanksgiving is a plurality. It is not just all about one person, him. Neither is it about me alone. It is about all of us. We have many things to be thankful for and there are many of us who have cause to give thanks to God. And why would my parents not be proud of me or expect me to hand the trophy that I rightfully won over to him? No, I will keep my trophy sitting on my shelf because it meant something to me even if it is only a little piece of wood and metal, or maybe plastic with metallic paint.

The story is not all about boys. Even our high school valedictorian Leland Bement had to graciously share the platform with co-winning valedictorian Huei Nin-Liu because apparently their gpa's were identical. We do not want to hear any nonsense about our salutatorian Amadeo gunning down either of them. What's fair is fair.

That said, what's fair is fair. Kathy and I should have left The Rover column alone to avoid all this confusion as to who said what. In reviewing it I see there are plenty of typos in there anyway so what was the big deal? Just some nonsense about how we singers should not reach too high or we will get "fly away," which in Spanglish might have been "volado." Whatever. "Volado" is no big deal either, just a slangy use of what should be a verb. Used in the slangy sense as an adverb, the word "volado" does not really mean to fly away. It only means, sort of, "to feel as if one is flying."

So, no, she is not saying that we are going to take flight. She is only saying that we might be tossed aside once we have slipped and fallen. In the thesaurus, this might also be interpreted as getting dumped or set aside.

In a previous column we see this term "sliding away." That also might have been a mistranslation but I don't remember. Was she saying they would end up "volados"? The column was talking about people stepping in a puddle of water and sliding forward as if skating or flying, something that was perhaps done by some people when rain left lots of water on the hall floors but it is very dangerous because you could slip and fall and end up landing on your butt on the wet floor. I think that is what she was talking about although I really do not remember. But if the word "volado" was used, she would have been referring to the feeling of exhilaration that one gets when one is sliding at an accelerated speed on the wet floors.

Did I do that? I do not really remember. I only remember that her Spanglish slangy terms sometimes got removed by us. I'm not sure why. Looking back, it does not seem like such a big deal. It was just that if we made mistakes in our editing she was most unforgiving in going over our heads to complain to Beth and others but that really does not excuse us from compounding the situation with more dirty tricks. Anyway, she got me banned from editing her stuff. I think Kathy might have made the final changes. Kathy hid the original copy somewhere. I really don't remember anything specific. You could always ask Kathy.

Bomb?

My mother always did own an electric vibrator. It is an electric device that vibrates and is used to scratch one's back. Well, you could do it the manual way using any old stick or purchase one of those doohickeys that some people once showed me that has a sort of claw on the end of it and you hoist it over your shoulder. Persons who are extremely overweight often use these back-scratchers because their arms cannot reach that point right in the middle of the back that so often needs to be scratched. Anyway, what else could it be, you dummies? Did you actually think it was a bomb? Really. Did your mother never teach you anything?

Choir

As a senior in high school I performed in a musical play, "The Visitor," presented by the choir. Upon reviewing the school newspaper, "Trojan Times," I see that our columnist, "The Rover," did not fail to take a few swipes at us. I am not surprised as that was the tone of her writing most of the time. Carolina Gonzales says, "If my guess is right, the voices of the performers will go higher and higher and higher but be careful, if they go too high they might get fly away... "

Well, I was one of those voices, a soloist in fact, and her comment sounds almost like a warning that I should not set my aspirations too high. Sure, I must be realistic about my vocal prospects. Just one voice of criticism is not going to make me or break me but an avalanche of negativity certainly would derail any future career prospects in that field.

Nevertheless, it is also true that Carolina's column was characteristically negative about pretty much everything and, besides, people who live in glass houses should not be so eager to throw stones. Your writing voice is just as important as the written word and mightier than the sword, as some writers have said, and should be cultivated toward positive and constructive ends, not merely to shower with bitterness and resentment the ones you fear might outshine you.

To summarize: Your voice stinks.

Shameless Racism

I was talking to Trina Tinker and she was asking me why I was not taking advanced science classes and I said something about how I did not feel comfortable taking that from a Hispanic male teacher. So yes, that was a very racist thing for me to say, something about how I did not want a Hispanic man teaching me, I am not sure exactly how I said it. Anyway, nothing personal against any particular teacher, all of our school's teachers were very good, but it was bad enough being hated in biology by a white teacher for being a redhead. How much worse could it be in chemistry, especially when I only got a B in biology anyway so obviously I am never going to shine in science. Besides, it is so annoying to be used by the Hispanics as a pawn in their racial warfare against white people. Ha! I know what they are doing, pretending to be the victims of white people when actually it is or can potentially be the other way around and we could potentially end up as their slaves, but no one else seems to care so whatever.

Theater

I really have nothing to say about the theater, meaning of course Jan McArt's dinner theater in nearby Boca Raton. My editor Steve talked about them a lot and seemed to have some connections there and might have written some things for them but I do not know anything about that. I am really not interested in that type of theater.

Felix

During my first year at SCC in Costa Mesa, Calif., I sang a duet with, I think her name was Becky Olsen. It was a song by Felix Mendelssohn. Becky seemed to have dropped out of college during the first year possibly to get married and I never saw her again. I do not know what happened to Becky. So why this bizarre rant about Felix Mendelssohn? We are talking about 19th century people who are now dead, very dead, and anyway it was only a song, an assigned song. That would be like Miss Pilarinos of Louisiana ranting about Abraham Lincoln. Why get so puffed up and peeved about people who lived so long ago and things that you cannot change and maybe were not so bad? Mendelssohn is not even a part of our history here in the United States. It is all about Poland and Germany and all those places that we Americans left behind a long time ago for something better than to live off the laurels of a faded 19th century European glory. Anyway, it is all just a matter of history. It has a place in the history books but really it should not be confused with current events, hopefully.

Receptionist

Yes, the City Hall receptionist always seemed to have something to tell the reporters who stopped by City Hall to pick up the agenda packet for the next City Commission meeting. Usually she was not very specific but she seemed to have the pulse of something going on around there, something about the chaotic environment of activists warring with city commissioners. Her precise connection to the activists was not clear to me yet she seemed to be speaking their language. It was usually nothing that you could quote word for word and anyway how authoritative would it sound to quote the city hall receptionist who has no power? Not very. Yet as they tell you in journalism school, we always should pay at least some attention to the little people as well for they also have stories to tell and I am sure there is a lot more to her story than I told. I am sure that I only scratched the surface of that. Stories are not told only by people who are in positions of power. I might have explained this to my editors Steve Ricci and Rick Haydan. Anyway, they wanted to know who was the source of a certain reference and so I told them.