This article is about the book. You may be looking for the actual glove.

Courtesy Lore Sjöberg and the Slumbering Lungfish Dybbuk Hostel and All-Night Boulangerie, I hereby present the geekiest web page ever:

THE GLOVE OF DARTH VADER (wookieepedia)

Yes, Darth’s accessories have their own story lines, and some poor sap got the job of writing the entire novel about the glove and its fate.

no swimswim witem ol meme pool

Two recent topics (list of high school cliques and defining the internet/watercooler news story) resulted in another phenomenon. Certain topics present the nearly irresistable urge to respond personally with an opinion or experience, even if that’s not the original intent of the discussion.

In these cases: The mention of teenager social cliques caused almost everyone to deliver their personal clique membership experience: claiming one, resisting them, etc. This accidentally proved my point about the power of that experience well into adulthood. The discussion of bloggable watercooler news stories got a lot of responses opining about the particular story that sparked my interest. In short, a watercooler was formed.

In both cases the general wasn’t nearly as attractive as the opportunity to share the personal and specific.

I think I hit the “talk about the weather” organ again. I wonder where that thing is? I’m sure as hell not “above” it; mention the weather and I’ll discuss it at length, and I’ll bet I’d do the same on the other topics if I hadn’t been the one with the less magnetic general questions.

So the next question is; what is the list of those topics? My first guess is that a lot of things about food, sex, and sleep would cause a similar response.

…what are we gonna do NOW?

Let fury have the hour

Anger can be power

D’you know that you can use it?

The Clash – Clampdown (mp3, 5.6M)

Most days London Calling is my desert island disc.

…and I’ve given away no secrets…

you know that some day I’ll walk out of here again

It has come to my attention that I need a vacation. Alone. In the desert or up the Central Coast. I usually do this twice a year and it’s one of the things that keeps me from completing my transformation into Howard Beale.

It doesn’t have to be long or cost a lot of money. A long weekend, two overnights in a cheap motel, and a digestible series of patty melts will do if the scenery is okay. That’s great news, because I’m completely broke, too.

The Fix My Damn Brain project ate everything for a year, starting with my time. Neurofeedback, which ends at least temporarily on Tuesday, will have lasted almost 11 months straight with no breaks, twice a week with some extra days. Forty-seven weeks! No leaving town or taking time off. Plus shrink lady once a week and doctor once a month. Plus doing enough of my job that I didn’t get fired. I’m a little surprised thisl happened at all.

And it ate all my money too. In theory I’m getting reimbursed for some of this stuff at least, but out of pocket for the period since NFB start includes

Neurofeedback: $8930 <- !!!!!
Shrink: $6815 <- !!!
Drugs: $2200 (est) <- !

Oh hey look, it's almost $18,000. No wonder I'm in the hole. Must defeat ADD and get that paperwork done. If I can get even half of that back…

didja hear didja hear didja hear

There should be a word for news items which you know, the moment you see them, will be all over your LiveJournal and blogroll and feeds for the next 48-72 hours and will then become part of the permanent library of events referred to in these media.

Not “meme” but something that is more specifically limited to stories reported in mass media. Examples have varied in real-world importance from gigantic world-changing disasters or triumphs of good over evil down to pointless “oddly enough,” but there’s some characteristic quality that I can’t identify here that makes me say “well, I’ll be seeing this shit on my friends page for a while now” when I see it.

My guess at the moment is that certain stories flick a switch that makes us say “I must tell others about this and talk about it” that is independent of any judgment about the importance of the story or the likelihood that you’ll be the first to tell anyone about it. I bet if they ever localize this thing in the brain it’ll be in the same nerve bundle as whatever makes us talk about the weather.

The item that sparked this line of thought was of course today’s death of a minor celebrity, which is almost entirely at the trivial end of the scale, only escaping the “oddly enough” silliness because it involves one actual death of a human.

Where we sat at lunch

What were the cliques at your high school or equivalent (ages 14 to 18)?

Clarification: This isn’t a request for your particular affiliation or lack thereof; there’s loads of quizzes and “memes” where you can relive that for good or for ill. I’m fishing for descriptions of the social groups from your teen years as you observed them, whether from the inside or the outside. It’s a survey of environments: what were the groups you saw? If you weren’t at anything like a school with social groups then, none of this really matters.

I went to an almost entirely white public school in a Southern California beach resort town from 1979 to 1983. Think Fast Times at Ridgemont High. So, mine were, in roughly hierarchical order:

Preppy/”Sosh” (rich pretty kids or those who could pass for rich, anyway): pink and green clothing, lots of chinos and khaki, cashmere sweater knotted around the neck, penny loafers.

Jock/Cheerleader (sports and beauty competition winners in the classic American vein)

Surfer (specific to my locale; not quite the same as jock: they were too obsessive about surfing to participate in much of anything else or deal with the hierarchy at all)

“Band-O”: marching band members as obsessive social phenomenon

Theater club: actors singers dancers and technical theater types and wannabees

Pop Music Lifestyle Subculture: at the time this meant rockabilly revival kids, metalheads, and some of the new wave stuff.

Mods and Punks: this was the early 1980s, so a Mod Ska/The Jam flavored revival was going on, and punk was a seriously transgressive style that set you apart. the two groups were pretty interchangeable because they were scarier than the other pop music identities. The mods were always high on black beauties and the punks burned things and put safety pins in their noses.

Academic/geek/nerd. You know the drill. The straight A’s crowd plus anyone who liked computers or Dungeons & Dragons and science fiction.

Stoner

Total outsider of some kind (doomed).

I’m interested for a few reasons. Subculture identities are multiplying, for one thing, and most of the pop music-related ones that have appeared in the last 20 years became permanent options on a kind of menu. And high school has a huge presence in American life. Some people spend their whole lives rebelling against the slights they got in their teens. Others don’t ever move beyond the subculture they found then. If you know what clique an American middle-class person claimed at age 16, you know a lot about them right away.

we get letters

Actually, anon comments. It looks like a failed spam attempt, since it was on a post about pharmacies and prescriptions and is typical blogspam, but without the payload: where’s the link to the spammer drugs site? Perhaps an extremely earnest Indonesian teenager really does admire my LJ this much!

Subject: hello
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