tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33367757223889795622024-03-08T13:49:10.313-08:00Box of PantsBox of Pants is happy to be here.Alan Billerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14807938947731062560noreply@blogger.comBlogger11125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3336775722388979562.post-59499956925056331252008-03-09T11:34:00.000-07:002008-03-09T11:59:00.937-07:00Daylight Saving TimeEach spring, when the clocks change, I always seem to lose my hour at the most inopportune time. While officially the 2 AM hour disappears each year, the time change usually sneaks up on me in a manner that causes it to take me by surprise when I show up an hour late for something. I had one year where I was trying to get to a gig a half-hour early and wound up being a half-hour late. The worst was the year I was in Paris during the spring semester. Each Sunday, I would go to the latin quarter and watch The Simpsons at an anglophone bar that had a British satellite TV hook-up. I have since then broken my dependence on The Simpsons, although at that point it had a pretty powerful hold on my life. Each week, I would get a "sandwiche grecque" and a Coke and get my Simpsons fix. On that particular day, I was planning on watching at least some of The Simpsons at 6, and then going to a dinner party at my friend's fantastic Parisian duplex apartment by around 7. When I arrived at the bar, I found out that not only had The Simpsons ended, but I was also late for the dinner party. I remember calling my friend up from a pay phone, since my cell phone had been stolen a week or two earlier, and asking her what time it was. Everyone on her end was laughing at how ridiculous this question was. The worst part was that I had essentially wasted the entire day sitting around my apartment on a beautiful spring day.<br /><br />Recently, there has been lots of warning for daylight saving time. Apparently, the media found it necessary this year to do multiple stories about why we have daylight saving time, and also to point out that there is no "s" at the end of "saving." This is a common mistake that I have always made, as well as everyone I know. It's not something that has ever bothered me, as opposed to the "s" some rogues feel they need to attach to the end of "anyway." But now that I have been informed, and I am beginning to train myself in this arbitrary correctness, I'm sure I will begin too feel annoyance whenever someone refers to it as "daylight savingS time." Or perhaps I'll simply rebel against the oppressive language establishment at make it a point to always us the extra "s." Either way, I've had no problem remembering the time change, although I do miss the occasional displacement that I feel when I realize that I've been walking around in my own personal time zone while everyone else is in a totally different hour and thinks nothing of it at all. It makes one wonder how arbitrary time is and how as humans, maybe we are better adapted to sleep and wake with the sun. But then I remember how inconvenient it is to wear a sundial around my wrist. Might as well drop it and just focus on getting to where I need to go on time, whether or not I have any idea what time it actually is.Alan Billerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14807938947731062560noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3336775722388979562.post-21549885493855159382008-02-29T18:14:00.000-08:002008-02-29T18:42:14.490-08:00Elementary School and the 1988 Presidential ElectionIn 1988, I was in 2nd grade. I didn't know a whole lot about presidential elections, but I knew I supported Michael Dukakis over George Bush. I didn't know why I supported Michael Dukakis. I got this opinion from my parents. To this day, I don't know exactly why I feel the way I do about certain things as opposed to the way I do about other things. I wonder how arbitrary it is to have the opinions I have, and if I had just been born in another part of the world, how normal it would feel to believe, say, and do things that I currently find unthinkable. In fact, what if I had been born up the block and around the corner, in a similar symmetrical suburban-style house, to the parents of a kid I knew quite well growing up. I had a political discussion once with this strange, awkward kid named Michael where I tried to espouse my belief that Dukakis should be the next president of the United States of America. He informed me that if Dukakis were to be elected, he would "cover the sidewalks with poopie and pee pee," and that George Bush should become the president.<br /><br />I was jealous of my sister, who was in 5th grade. Her entire class made campaign posters and buttons. They also came up with catchy, and inflammatory, slogans. For some reason, most of the kids were Bush supporters. I come from an overwhelmingly liberal area, so I find it hard to believe that everyone got their positions passed down from their parents. Maybe it was because Bush was leading in the polls. Or maybe it was the slogans. The Bush supporters were chanting "Dukakis is a duke, and dukes make me puke." All the Dukakis supporters were able to come up with was "Bush is a bush, and who wants to vote for a bush." So of course, Bush won the mock school election.Alan Billerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14807938947731062560noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3336775722388979562.post-56255657400634800262008-02-21T19:50:00.001-08:002008-02-21T20:08:01.515-08:00A Minor AccidentOn one stormy summer afternoon, I was rear-ended while driving on the highway. The traffic was stop-and-go, and heavier than usual. We had just entered a tunnel, or maybe the overpass directly before the tunnel. Either way, the rain was coming down hard, but we were protected by a concrete umbrella. I've never been in a major accident, and this one did not change that fact. We pulled over to the side of the road and a large man wearing a ratty t-shirt and paint-stained jeans stepped out of his Dodge minivan and ran over to me. With his hand on his head, he repeatedly shouted "I'm so sorry," but in a way that seemed more like an accusation than an apology. He took a good look at my bumper and saw that it was all torn up. The bumper had pieces of black plastic and white styrofoam protruding with jagged edges, and calculated looking scrapes along either end. I was somewhat embarrassed to explain to the bombastically apologetic man that all the damage had been done over 10 years ago, and that my bumper had looked like that for almost as long as I could remember. I don't know what sort of retaliatory action I would have really taken for damages to a car that is old enough to get its own drivers license and drive itself. The man was so relieved that he frantically offered to buy me a pizza, or maybe a 6-pack of beer for the road. And had I not been in a rush, I might have taken him up on the offer.Alan Billerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14807938947731062560noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3336775722388979562.post-6179877663219778692008-02-11T17:16:00.000-08:002008-02-11T17:18:02.926-08:00Sometimes I drop the soap in the shower. It's those times when I'm thankful that I'm not in prison.Alan Billerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14807938947731062560noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3336775722388979562.post-41439180043300058022008-02-09T22:22:00.000-08:002008-02-09T22:34:49.288-08:00poetryAs a child, I wrote poetry. I'm not sure why. In retrospect, some of the stuff I wrote could be construed as poetry, even though it was not intended that way. That's partly my parents fault. In preschool, I used to love hammering wood together with nails. My parents couldn't accept that maybe I had a great aptitude to become a carpenter. My wood creations became "artworks." Just like the words I wrote in a thin marble notebook became "poetry." It might not have been any more than some well-spaced scratchy words that I thought of as stories about how Min loved Mon. I think I was Min and Mon was that girl with curly hair who sat next to me who had her jaw wired shut for 6 weeks that spring. Or how a bear put a bucket over its head and then went to the grocery store. In fact, that one got published in a book which might still live in my elementary school library. But it was poetry, and no less than the high art of a 6-year old.<br /><br />Later, in 5th grade, I actually did write a rather substantial volume (maybe 10 pages) of cheesy rhyming poetry. In one of them, the words were in the shape of a christmas tree. I think another was just some sort of a list. We published them into a book, which was called "Circles, Squares, and Many More." Seriously. I don't think I could make something up like that. I'm not sure why I didn't continue down this path. I might have discovered that not all poetry needs rhyme. I might have figured out how to use language to evoke emotions that can't be reproduced be merely poking someone with a stick. Either way, maybe I would not be reserving my main literary output for blogs and emails.Alan Billerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14807938947731062560noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3336775722388979562.post-10481488241940552382008-02-08T16:33:00.000-08:002008-02-08T16:54:23.961-08:00I guess I have to write in this now...The 80s were awesome. Not at the time I'm sure. Of course, I was only 9 when they ended. But in retrospect, its like, there's a whole culture based on material with no real idea that it is destroying itself. On every level, its like watching an animal play with something, having no idea what it is really doing or what are the consequences of its actions. Musically, they had all this electronic equipment that just came out and all they can do is make these cheesy sounds. And they have all this money flying around and all they can do is pour it into their cars and the fashion and entertainment industries, and they don't have a clue. I only like the 80s to laugh at them. Oh, and I'm a sucker for any girl with leg warmers. But don't tell anyone I said that. Seriously.<br /> - from an email, sometime in 2004Alan Billerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14807938947731062560noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3336775722388979562.post-60977513716190454612007-01-14T22:14:00.000-08:002007-01-14T22:15:11.352-08:00DonutsWhen I was in preschool, I used to scribble on a piece of paper and say that it was a drawing of a donut. I think I knew that it didn’t look anything like a donut. It was roundish, at least, but thats where the similarities ended. It didn’t have a hole. It was all squiggly with crayon lines going every which way. It was tree green or sky blue or whatever color I pulled randomly out of the box. But it captured at the time what I must have felt when I thought of a donut. And sometimes, when I’m in Dunkin’ Donuts or Tim Hortons, I still think of those squiggly crayon donuts I used to bring home.Alan Billerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14807938947731062560noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3336775722388979562.post-557306023961175172007-01-07T10:27:00.000-08:002007-01-07T10:28:45.240-08:00KikiKiki was my sister’s hamster. She got this pet for her 8th birthday, making me 5 at the time. I always had the habit of calling Kiki “he.” I guess little boys tend to assume that all animals are male. But since it was my sister’s pet, we assumed it was female. We didn’t find out that Kiki was actually male until we took him to the vet. He had gotten some fabric caught on his teeth, which were badly in need of a trim. Of course, by this time, I had finally accepted that Kiki was female, and it would take some time thereafter for me to get used to calling him “him” again. The name Kiki would be awfully traumatic for a male hamster. This might have been the root of his emotional problems and subsequent misbehavior. <br /><br />Hamsters are funny animals. They sleep all day. They can be moody and bite people. I guess that makes them pretty similar to professional musicians. They have this little useless half-inch of a tail. Kiki couldn’t get the hang of the hamster wheel. He would never actually get inside the wheel and run. He would kind of get next to it and climb up the side and spin it around, a little like that big wheel on “The Price is Right.” He was pretty resilient considering the abuse he faced. One time my sister stuck Kiki in a plastic toy airplane, and we had a hard time getting him out. He bit all of us at least once. If you got him riled up, he’d let out this pathetic little hamster squeal and then bite your finger or whatever body part was closest to him. Maybe he thought we were sticking a carrot into the cage when we stuck our hand in. He also bit the annoying neighbor girl a couple of times.<br /><br />One time Kiki just got fed up and ran away from us. I guess my sister had him out of the cage, and he ran down into the basement. Our basement was, and still is to this day, a hopeless mess of a junk storage space, with lots of places a hamster could hide. We were never sure exactly where he went. There was a little hole in a corner of the basement wall, and we think he spent most of his time there. We got one of those humane traps meant to catch small rodents without killing them. It was the kind of mechanism where the animal would walk in and step on a trigger, causing the door to close behind. Each night, we would put a hamster pellet on the inside, past the trigger. Each morning, we would come back to find that the hamster pellet had been taken, but that the trap remained open. Finally, after about a week, we used peanut butter. We put it on a coffee filter or some little piece of paper, and put that in the trap past the trigger. That kept Kiki there long enough to trigger the trap. So after a weeks vacation in the basement, we had are cuddly, beloved little pet back, safe and sound.Alan Billerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14807938947731062560noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3336775722388979562.post-41594562985087257442006-12-26T14:34:00.000-08:002006-12-26T14:49:00.310-08:00TopperMy friends in high school were kind of strange. They were members of the drama club. They were also the majority of the scrabble club. In fact, I think they started that one just to have a club just for themselves, though they were pretty open-minded when other people would want to join. They had a locker cluster which they named "topper." It was named after a local weather guy on the news, Topper Shutt. I think the idea was that when all the lockers were open, it would be "Topper Open" but when they were closed.... They had a website dedicated to topper. I don't know if I was ever considered an "official" member of topper. I never had my own locker in the cluster. I was assigned one once, but it was before I was friends with them, and I was ousted. I did have honorary membership by senoir year, and my own page on the website. The name they gave me was Bobq, and my animal was "mynabird from the planet zork." I don't know how I feel about that. I've always felt that Zebulon was a better name for a planet. Its also a town in North Carolina, I think. The Bobq part was my own. I would always joke that my name was Bob, spelled with a silent q at the end. It was French. They like strings of silent consonants at the end of words. My friend even made me a bobq the mynabird email address to try to get me to use Yahoo personals. She had recently met some people that way and thought I should too. As it turned out, she met her husband that way and became the first in our group of friends to be married and, not surprisingly, the first to be divorced. Frankly, I was appalled at the time, and the email address got little use until I decided to use it as my extra, anonymous email address that had no connection to my real life. I still use the email occasionally, when I want to remain disconnected from whoever I'm talking to. Usually, at some point I'll migrate them to my real email address. But that email is pretty much the last remnant of much of my high school life.Alan Billerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14807938947731062560noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3336775722388979562.post-66392556844530503862006-12-21T23:17:00.000-08:002006-12-21T23:18:42.058-08:00GoateeI had long hair and a goatee for a long time growing up. I kept the goatee for almost 10 years, and the long hair from middle school until my second semester of college, one semester too long. To make matters worse, since it was the late 90s, I had one of those Kurt Cobain, shaved underneath, overgrown bowl cuts. I grew the goatee a few years after growing my hair long, when I was 15. There are a couple of reasons for this decision. In middle school, I would occasionally meet people who were unsure of my gender. I wouldn’t meet them as much as respond to their vocal “criticisms” as I walked down the halls of my school. I was a few years past the age where the telemarketer on the phone would ask if I was the “lady of the house,” and I had no desire to relive those experiences.<br /><br />The main catalyst in my decision to grow a goatee came when I was 15. I was playing in a jazz group that met and rehearsed at an assisted living group home housed in an apartment building in northwest DC. The people who lived there would come to watch us each time we met. They’d saunter or limp in to the best of their ability, assisted often by a walker, or sometimes they’d be wheeled in by one of the nurses. They brought with them the smells and sounds and complaints of old folks. They thought it was a concert, and would clap when we stopped in the middle of a tune. They must have wondered why we often played tunes several times in a row. It must have been about the second or third rehearsal that we had an especially crowded room and the only available seat was next to an elderly woman. After a minute or two, she turned to me and said, “Are you a boy or a girl?” in her thin, raspy, old lady voice. I was pretty used to this kind of question, so I said, “I’m a boy,” and she replied, “Then show me.” I was shocked, and decided to point at my somewhat shaggy sideburns. I didn’t realize at the time what I might have shown her to prove my masculinity. The thought didn’t even cross my mind until at least a few hours later. Instead of dealing with these questions, I decided to grow a goatee.Alan Billerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14807938947731062560noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3336775722388979562.post-22378708741513818212006-12-18T12:58:00.000-08:002006-12-18T13:26:25.397-08:00Box of PantsI had a friend tell me once that he doesn't wear a pair of pants for more than 8 months. He wouldn't drive a car that's more than three years old. This blog is dedicated to the idea that pants are just pants. I'd like to open a store called Box of Pants, or maybe register a boxofpants.com, where for 7 dollars, you can buy a box full of pants. Assorted pants, different colors and styles. Maybe you pick a size and get to choose between mens or womens, maybe not. But there's bound to be something you like. And if there isn't, you can send it back. <br /><br />This blog is kind of a random assortment of my life. I don't intend for it to be flashy. It is not supposed to be opinionated, full of rants and raves on various political issues that I may or may not know anything about. I'm not here to tell the world how it should be. This is just a window into who I am, or who I choose to present in a web forum open to everyone. No rants, just pants.Alan Billerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14807938947731062560noreply@blogger.com0