September 2005
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Archive for September 1st, 2005

New School

Posted in Life on September 1st, 2005

Tonight we had an orientation pot-luck dinner down at Peninsula Park for my daughter’s new school. Having given up completely on the regular public schools’ ability to teach anyone anything, we have enrolled the Pookster at Trillium, a magnate school here in Portland that takes education more seriously. The school is smaller, so each child gets more personal attention from the teachers, allowing them to actually learn something.

The other parents there fit a fairly narrow typeset, in that they are almost 100% Urban Yippies – Yuppies who are trying to be hip, cool, with-it or whatever they call it these days. The kind of people who really want to be like the cool kids in Hawthorne, but can’t give up the Volvo. They don’t eat American food (everyone knows all the good food came from somewhere else), and most of them ascribe to one form or another of herbivorism.

Which means, of course, that there wasn’t a shred of red meat within a three-block radius. Hell, the only meat-like substance I could recognize was a tuna casserole. And just what exactly is in ‘vegan wheat-free pumpkin bread’? I so wish I had had the cash, I would have run down to 7-11 and cleaned out the hot-dog stand just to watch ’em twitch.

Urban Yippie: Those are tofu dogs, right?
Me: Help yourself!
UY: Wait, this doesn’t taste like tofu…is that meat? Oh My God! I have eaten a poor cow!! Aaauuugghh! the horror!
Me: Muahahahaaa!

I understand idealistic people, but don’t have much in common with them, and it’s amazing how differently we see things. Case in point: when it came time for everyone to sort themselves out by grade level (and we’re talking about the parents here), instead of just pointing off to one side and saying “K through 2nd grade please gather over here”, they told us all to make a siren noise, while the 3rd-5ths were to make an “ahem” noise and so forth, and we were supposed to sort out the din and gather by sound.

Yep. Idiocy at it’s finest.

Warning signs that you are dealing with an Urban Yippie:

The man you are talking to is…
Carrying the youngest child of the brood in a front-mounted sling-type whatsihoosits,
Goes on about this great quiche he made the other morning, smiling in that “I’m whipped and I love it!” way,
Is not wearing a beard, but still hasn’t shaved in at least 4 days.

The woman you are talking to…
Has either rimless or black-framed glasses,
Is wearing baggy clothes that look like they may have come from the Gap or L.L. Bean,
Isn’t wearing a bra.

Toss into this mess myself, the EMC and her husband TS. The EMC fits in, as long as you don’t look too closely at her piercings and tats – she wishes they had a Volvo. TS, however, is a tech support geek and a solid introvert. Then there’s me – the guy who’s looking around for a proper branch to use to spit one of these idiots and toss ’em onto a fire.

Hey – the herbivores eat the vegetables and then the carnivores eat the herbivores. It’s the Circle of Life. Deal.

While walking out to the cars to get Pook’s backpack, TS says to me “whenever we come to these things, I always want to put ‘Hi! I’m TS. I’m a Xenophobe.’ on my nametag. Then when they say ‘what’s a xenophobe?’ I can say ‘it means I want to fucking kill you’ and smile at them in that really-I-was-joking…-or-was-I? kind of way.”

Thank DoC the EMC is the one who has to deal with them the most.