2001-01-25 - 7:58pm

Who's Who Cheat Sheet
Who I Read

On the internal soundtrack: "Waiting for the Night", Depeche Mode

GREAT news about my grandfather: He's moving into the assisted-living facility down the street from my parents on Monday! Woooooo! He's very excited about it, particularly about having some "peace and quiet" after having a roommate in the nursing home he's been staying at temporarily. It'll be really great for him -- he'll have his own furniture and his own space, he gets his typewriter back, and he requested to be seated "with the ladies" at meals. I think he'll do really well there. Poindexter and I are planning to visit in two weeks and check out his new digs. Having him so close is going to be GREAT.

The nice thing is, if he keeps up with his walking and is in good shape when the warm weather comes, he can go to the deli nearby and get a cup of coffee at 7am, the way he used to do at home.

My grandfather has kept a journal for years and years and years. He types up a short paragraph almost every day, something very sparing. "Grandchildren came to visit. Went to Dimples for breakfast and out to the boardwalk at Seaside Heights in the afternoon." Or he'd write briefly about what he did around the yard that day. Nothing very personal at all. I'll have to ask him, next time I see him, why he chose to keep it.

So, I heard that in the White House the departing Clinton staffers played a few tricks on the incoming administration. Rob reported that they took the Ws off the keyboards, and I'm hearing elsewhere that people switched the faceplates on the phones. Stuff about trashed offices in the Old Executive Office Building, too.

Now, I can see the humor in stealing the Ws, and would laugh if someone wished aloud about doing it. It's a funny idea.

However, It is NOT something that should actually be carried out. If some individual(s) actually DID these things, I am beyond appalled. No matter how much I disagreed with or disliked the incoming administration, I would NEVER retaliate in such a juvenile, disrespectful manner.

If you have the "alcoholic gene", or whatever it is, but you have never drunk an appreciable amount of alcohol, are you an alcoholic?

There are quite a few alcoholics in the Irish part of my family. I could, conceivably, have an alcoholic's genetic makeup. Yet I have had, if I recall correctly, the collective equivalent of about five alcoholic drinks in my lifetime. I never had one whole drink in one sitting. (You remember from "health class" in high school -- 12 ounces of beer, 8 ounces of wine, 4 ounces hard liquor, whatever the hell it is. I forget.) The closest I came to doing this, was a hot chocolate with flavored liquor in it, but I don't think I finished it. I remember feeling a little tired, but that wasn't necessarily because of the alcohol. The expected dampening of inhibitions never happened.

When I turned 21, we went out to dinner, and my mom told me to order the alcohol separate in the fuzzy navel I was planning to order. (Don't you laugh at me -- I drank a lot of Orange Peach Tropicana Twister in those days so a fuzzy navel was the obvious choice.) I did, and when it arrived, she told me to close my eyes and hold out my hand. I did, and opened them to find a brand-new medicine dropper in my hand. So I could ration out the alcohol myself, y'know. I happened to find it while cleaning out a box a couple weekends ago. Cracked me up.

My reason for never drinking is, in a nutshell, "What for?" People assume I'm doing it for religious or moral reasons, and they say lamely, "Oh, that's good" when I refuse a drink that has been offered four times and have to explain why I'm refusing. I used to say, "I don't drink," but have amended in recent years to "I don't like alcohol", which is true and doesn't sound hoity-toity. It tastes horrible. I would really, really like to like wine and beer -- I love the smell of them -- but I just don't. I suppose I could hold my nose and force some down, and see what happens, but that sounds sorta silly, really.

In high school I was all self-righteous about drinking, and in college I just never got the urge to try drinking even though I was surrounded by falling-down drunks wherever I went. It's like skydiving, I guess. People who do it REALLY like it, but I'm just not interested.

The best part of this disinterest, by far, is that whenever I go out, there is always a designated driver and nobody feels like they're missing out on the fun.

Meanwhile, I still get to entertain Poindexter as a drunken wife might, because when I get really, really tired, I will laugh uncontrollably at the dumbest stuff. Poindexter cracks a lot of jokes, some of which would ordinarily only merit a chuckle. But if I'm really tired, one of those jokes will set me off and I'll laugh hysterically for quite some time. I'll finally calm down, then, five minutes later, I'll remember the funny thing, and start laughing again. This happened to me once when I was a kid, when Stacey was sleeping over and she let me use her Sea-Breeze astringent on my face. She blamed it on the alcohol in the Sea-Breeze.

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