HUH?

As I go through my daily life living up here in the beautiful, yet completely insane Pacific Northwest, I have to scratch my head and wonder what is wrong with the world.

Today, my family and I went to the outlet mall and as we were walking around, we saw something that is becoming more and more prevalent. A woman had a baby stroller with her as she was walking around. It is always fun and heartwarming to look at little babies but what we saw brought a chuckle instead. We saw that she had given birth to a fuzzy little non-dog. We have seen this several times around the Portland. People treat their little yipper non-dogs like kids and stroll them around market places and parks. I could be closed minded and dead wrong, but I think dogs like to walk around and they don't get lower self-esteem when you put a collar around their necks. When our dog sees her collar she starts jumping up and down in excitement as she gets ready for a WALK.

The freeway is another place where the devolution of society is ever present. I was driving home from work yesterday and Friday traffic was getting thick. I decided to exit the freeway and take a back road home so I started looking for an opening in the right lane that I could squeeze into. There were some breaks but I couldn't speed up enough to get in front of the car next to me and I would have needed to slam on my breaks in order to get behind him. I was finally able to speed up enough to get into position to merge. I looked in my mirror, looked back, turned on my signal, looked in the mirror again and started to merge. It was a little tight but I had plenty of room to get over. Well, apparently that really ticked off the person driving the Land Cruiser. He decided that instead of letting me complete my merge, he would hit the gas and nearly rear end me or distract me enough so I would rear end the person in front of me while looking in my rear view mirror trying to figure out what on Earth he was doing. I was able to avoid hitting the car in front of me while staring him down in my mirror and at the last second he decided that breaking was a better idea than rear ending. It is amazing how many people do this on the freeway because they are too mocho to let anyone in front of them. "UG, I A MANLY MAN, NO ONE GET IN FRONT OF ME!"

Then, there is what goes on in school. I have the honor of sitting in on the School Intervention Committee's. The first thing they did is create a 30 minute detention period for kids who are failing. That was fine but they called it ASP (Academic Support Period). When you say it the long way it is fine but when you abbreviate and call it ASP Period, (ASP being pronounced as its own word and not A-S-P Period) it makes people laugh. Especially teenagers. Then, to make things better, the committee was trying to figure out a way to solve the problem with students coming to school late due to missing the bus. They came up with the idea of running a "late" bus. The idea here is that kids would have a second chance to get to school. What they didn't understand (and these are people who deal with kids every day) is that if a "late" bus was available to take you to school for missing the bus, every kid would "miss" the bus turning the "late" bus into the bus and the bus into the "early" bus. I almost started laughing at that idea. Then they came up with another idea that blew me away. Two years ago the gave each student a planner. They were charged $5 on their registration fees but to the kids, this planner was free. The students didn't care about the planners so after about a week, only a handful of them still had their planner. Because the kids were unorganized and the planners were not working, the committee suggested that, rather than buying planners, we buy two 3-ring binders for each student. Again, I almost started laughing. Why is it the school's responsibility to buy everyone binders? Again, they have no idea how kids operate yet they work with them every day for 9 months. If a kid wants a binder, they already buy them. If a kid doesn't want a binder, they will not use a "free" binder given to them by the school. How about we say that they are required to keep a binder. Send a note home that the parents need to head down to Target, or the Dollar Tree, or Staples, and buy them a binder. If they don't get a binder, they lose points and will ultimately fail if they don't do what they are required to do.

I really don't get some people.