Back to My Future: The Life and Times at Purdue University

Chapter 1: The Song and the Women Remain the Same
I might be the first guy ever to attend Purdue as a student in four different decades. I took a course at sixteen in Basic programming in 1988. Then, the campus held about 25,000 students, mostly dudes here for engineering a better mouse trap or the optimal keg flow mechanism for Fridays, Saturdays, and for final exams. I can remember my first roommate, Alfredo Portales, a pre-engineering student from Texas. We became fast friends, hung out a lot, played euchre, and tentatively hit on the 17 year-old girls that were nerdy enough (then) to attend a Purdue summer camp not specifically designed for cheerleaders as that was what we (or I) noticed everyday going by the Co-Rec to our 'basic' class.

Decade Two. After high school mercifully came to a close, I came back to the only place I felt at home in Indiana. I traveled back to Purdue painfully virginal, and with a crush still on a high school cheerleader, who I do not blame for not giving me the time of day, or millennium. She, even then, deserved a better engineering egghead. As rejection brought out the worst in me, college women (loosely 18 -22 years of age) did not bring about better at-bats. A tired baseball analogy: if you can’t hit the slider in the minors, then major league pitchers will throw you a steady diet of the same. Can you say, “caught looking,” yep, I thought you could, as my ass caught more splinters than Pinhead has acupuncture marks. I was ‘riding pine’ all right.

You probably get the feeling this is all there is to talk about: women. There were things called lectures I failed to attend on a better than 50% rate. I found drinking was right up the alley of a Scots-Irish-Cherokee family tree of lushes led by lead lush Sam Houston of Texas fame. The Co-Rec was a place to take on the best b-ballers, even a few name Robinson, Miller, Martin, Waddell, Painter, or Ms. Basketball Jennifer Jacoby, or ‘JJ’, when I played her frequently in the summer, or took her buzzed, two-in-the-morn order at Taco Bell for a spell. The ‘Brick Dick’ fell while I attended in the 1990s, as the ‘Clock Tower’ came to be an alternative way to find your way home while drunk – and suddenly too dumb to walk back to some shitty apartment, or jail cell-sized dorm room with a homemade loft made in a weekend move-in on a sticky August night. And a roommate with a nagging, big-boobed existentialist girlfriend, or just a bad case of beating himself blind. Yep, those are good times.

Decade Three. I took a class in 2000 in Indianapolis on Constitutional Law at IUPUI. “Ooh-wee-Poo-wee,” sounds like a babies’ sound upon letting you know they made caca or pooed themselves. This time I didn’t crap the course, getting the highest grade in the class, and a recommendation to attend law school. (From a lawyer!!! So you know that counts – ha!) I sat for the LSAT – got a 157 which sounds good until it is known it is out of 180, and you get 120 for signing your name. A woman would again trip me up (Bill Clinton syndrome, without any of the successful West Wing wet cigars) – same name as the cheerleader a decade before! – but then again, an entirely different scenario of life and loveless loquaciousness. I was still a rebel without a Rough Rider…and a head seriously clouded with alcohol, daddy issues, and all the crap I didn’t ooze out accordingly while still closer to diapers than adulthood.

Decade four. By now, you’d think going back to school was beyond the scope of this life’s course. Prerequisites and post-grads taken, interviews and epic fails done, and launchings and leavings a worn out path. In point of fact, this is the only time I am in it for the education. I actually read more economics now than industrial engineering ever. Now, I left once again for college with an unrequited love in the rear view. Different name (well…their middle names all happen to be Marie) and a penchant for ie(s) at the end of their first, like Industrial Engineering, IE. This time I make no declaration of love, or interest – she too happened to be a college cheerleader, is an elementary education teacher, and now, has had two DUIs, and is not even 25, yet. You might say why are you even interested? Or what did you do really different? What are you looking at, or for?

I am interested because when she isn’t trading in guys like a day trader on the NASDAQ, or doing three jobs (bar wench, teacher, cheer coaching) and drinking to boot, she is actually a really sharp egg. She is ‘damaged’ (flawed as we all are) – her brother told me she got pregnant a few years back, aborted the fetus (argue to yourself), and got a tattoo on her spine ‘TRUST’ – but all in a really psychologically, understandable way. (Ok...)

I can relate – but she puts up a WWI Western front I have yet to maneuver around. Plus, I am closer to 40 than she is 30, and financial security and coolness is likely her sort criterion for all men. Spend money on her, impress her flaky, fake-in-more-ways-than-one gal pals, and things happen, I suppose. But nothing that lasts. Thus, this soon-to-be college-poor guy that isn’t pulling down six figures will not get into that ballpark. I just get a ticket to watch BP, and see some flaws in the swings. (All those minor league cuts…now help.)

While I can write about my reality, talking is not so easy – when you actually are unable to cut through your crap and her crap, in unison. And “people always assume,” or presume you have no understanding of how you got from “there to here.” Even I presume with her...and for that, a hypocrite.

Doing different was easy: I just did not tell her I cared directly, nor did I make any overt play. She knows full well - but I stopped short. With the line of metro-sexual, quasi-biker troubadours playing a (VD) beat to her bedroom or bar door, I’d never get in that line anyways. I felt like the only thing I could do was give her a drinking lecture (yes, I do see the inside of bars – self-control and self-knowledge corrects that Kryptonic issue), but how would that help? She ain’t gonna listen – can’t name an alcoholic, or a woman, that has listen to any advice given by me in all of my years, sober or not. And goes backward to, “people always assume…”

So while I do actually have consideration (and attraction) for her, once again, I am not the man she desires presently, nor am I in the position to become that while she either: wrecks forward; or straightens out for someone much better than I. (The latter I hope does happen.) Instead, I just wished her good luck. She is indeed out of my league....
 
Decade Four and Beyond. The answer is two. Move on to my objective – create a ‘good bank’ of grades for admission to further education – and – creatively express myself in the mode you see here. There is no real point in pursuit of the ‘P word.’ Success has never followed; and I just get older, barely wiser, and generally poorer, due to inflation.

I have a ton of goals down to get at – and the female companionship was listed on that bucket list. But like all lists, you work on that which provides a window of opportunity quickest first. Short to long-term in sorting out a life – the day by day work put in. A 1,000 words a day, if possible. A friend a day, if God willing.

Looking at the future, I am trying for the idea of knowledge of a lot of things so I can always write about something. Maybe, make a lasting legacy. At least attempt that course. Like a hero, Ben Franklin, he did not get stuck on what he was doing for too long. He had probably 30 different titles and jobs in his life. And did about five or six, really, really well.

So while the song of women remained the same, this juke box hero needs a new joint to pump out to the clubs. 

Stephen Speaks: Out of My League.

Or: Jump Jump Dance Dance – 2.0.

Just Another Day: Musings from An Ethical Wallaby by me

I started out my paper route at 2AM listening to a talk series on Ethics as it applies to human rights and legal ramifications. As this Australian/Canadian author, Margaret Somerville, titled the first in her series An Ethical Wallaby – a ‘wallaby’ is a ‘walk about for enlightenment’ – it certainly caught some of my attention amidst throwing papers in boxes or in driveways.

With Scooter Libby getting his prison sentence commuted, the idea of ethics involving the highest office in the land comes to mind. When is it just to pardon or commute a sentence handed down by a judge after a jury of your peers found you guilty? Certainly this smacks of political favoritism – especially so close to Bush's front door – but why doesn’t it happen more often, in clearer instances of miscarriages of justice? Isn’t a pardon/commutation supposed to be reserved for those we are assured after the case was decided were innocent of the crime they were accused of? The fine Scooter will pay is small ($250,000) in relative terms to his income and probation will likely will not be a burden to him – likely a phone call, at best, from a disinterested parole officer.

Beyond that recent political intrigue, I was thinking back to college. Yes, those grand times when I did not do outstanding work or make any headway in putting behind the past.

I graduated with a 2.07 GPA and missed tons of classes, more than I attended in some semesters, while not getting to know my classmates in my major. For some reason, I found people in other majors more appealing to know. Liberal Arts, Management, English, Elementary Education, Philosophy and Poly Sci were all more enjoyable to talk with than a bunch of Engineer brainiacs.

Life was pretty Greek at Purdue. 25% or more were in those organizations. I was a GDI – and not ashamed of it – but I did not join any other organizations, aside from a semester of Pre-Law Society. Course, that did not go far…until later on in my life...

Somehow, I lost interest in learning and being after high school. Classes, socializing (unless just bullshitting) and giving back did not seem relevant. Sure, I knew it could be important, but then again, many of those flaky, superficial Greeks made situations very unimportant out to be the raison d'être to all of their (and their “brothers and sisters”) worldly ills.

My situational ethics later on would include people shown little sympathy today: Mexican Americans. I worked in a Kroger perishable warehouse as an Industrial Engineer for nearly two years. One of my major responsibilities was the setting of fair labor standards based on MSD (A Time Standard Method) using a labor system developed by Gagnon (Red Prairie.)

This system worked in concert with a fairly complex WMS (Warehouse Mgmt. Sys.) and Kronos (Time tracking system.) With that said, it did not work well at all when I got there. (Soon another Purdue Engineer and I were fixing this situation…at least from a technical aspect.) We also used an incentive program, up to 25% of an employees’ take home pay, to get workers to produce at the desired level, according to safe practices, OSHA standards and various other procedures.

However, this did not take place usually. And it was often a case of supervisors ignoring dangerous problems or chastising the wrong people, Mexicans most often, because many were illegal.

So, I did my own informal, if realistic study of people. I took the entire workforce and broke them into 4 classes: white, Mexicans that speak passable English, Mexicans unable to speak English well, and African Americans. I did not do this to support any report; nor to generalize for the sake of justification to a superior, but to know if there were any tendencies.

From memory, the breakdown out of 380 employees was:
35% white
19% Passable English
28% Non-English
15% African American
3% Other
Once trained (90 days selecting cases) the best performers were:
1. Mexican Passable – 117%
2. Mexican Non Passable – 109%
3. Other – 105%
4. African Americans – 101%
5. Whites – 98%

No one knew I did this. But it does reflect many who are here illegally are working much harder for the American Dream than our current legal population does. Upton Sinclair’s 'The Jungle' is alive, to a much lesser degree, as we hear about our non-English speakers getting screwed a great deal. Human Rights go out the door where the goal is to make a buck - even in 21st century.

I once tried to stop a Spanish-speaking supervisor from chewing out a Mexican illegal. He thought I could not understand Spanish – I did not have to know that much to know what he was saying was wrong – but for that interference the Operations Manager was none too pleased. He didn’t quite snap; but he wanted to, on me. (But he knew I had a point too.)

The point of this meandering diatribe is we are not all born to Ethics. Maybe I should have been more aware of what my future would be, if I had taken the time to involve myself in good causes, student organizations and cared about my major, then concrete Ethics might have took sooner. (To little too late if you've read other posts of mine.)

But then again, if I had Scooter Libby’s pull, the ideas of ethics and treatment of information vital to America’s safety, could be pardoned away by an Op. Manager not in charge of his mental faculties.