CSotD: Start Your Week by Overthinking
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Time in cartoons tends to be vague. Some strips are forever in place, some move glacially, others keep up a relatively realistic pace.
Readers accept, for instance, that kids get out of school, have a summer vacation, and then return to the same classroom, same teacher, same curriculum. But they can also follow, on the same page, a strip in which kids grow older, go to college, get married and have kids.
Where it gets dicey for overthinkers like myself is when a particular landmark gets placed. Baby Blues has a degree of glacial progress: Wren has begun to talk, but Zoe and Ham seem to be in the Peanuts universe where you hit a certain age and stop growing.
Which makes today’s strip a stopper in which you can’t help but start doing math. Assuming kids graduate from college at 21, that would mean Wanda and Darryl were at least 30 when she was born.
I can live with that. When my kids were born, I was 23 and 26, so a third kid might have come along at 30.
And I definitely agree with the penniless part.
Zits is a strip with somewhat glacial progress. I remember when Jeremy didn’t have a car, and then he had the VW van, and now he’s got a more average car and a steady girlfriend, and Hector has a sensible haircut.
And he’s a senior, which doesn’t mean he’s about to graduate and that we’ll start seeing college strips in September, because with proper glacial pacing, he could be in this time frame for several years, though it makes summer vacation and back to school a little problematic. But we can take it.
I’m a little more concerned with his helicopter mom, because I can’t tell if Scott and Borgman are purposely depicting her as a pain in the ass or just as a typical mom.
Also they gave her a job as a counselor at Jeremy’s school but we haven’t seen her show up for work very often, though it’s a rich opportunity to see how her over-involvement in his life would match up with her ethical obligations as a counselor to not know all the things she’d be privy to.
My over-thinking involves the future, which may be years from now, because in terms of keeping the gang together, it makes sense for them to all go to the local college, whether they live on campus or at home.
But as the son of an orthodontist, Jeremy has the resources to go anywhere he wants, and if my mother were as up in my business as his is, I’d be applying to the University of As Far Away as Possible.
Meanwhile, Caulfield has it right. High school glory ends at graduation, and, if you don’t think so, go to your 20th reunion and see how the tides have shifted.
I spent the summer after high school pretty proud of being headed for a name college, but the first day of classes, I realized that everyone in the room had gotten into that school, and most of them hadn’t been wait-listed.
There was actually a rule that we weren’t supposed to wear our high school letter jackets on campus, but no need: As Dave Kellett pointed out in his pre-Sheldon, pre-Drive campus cartoon strip, everybody at Notre Dame had lettered in something and saying so only looked foolish.
And they were all valedictorians, so don’t bother with that, either.
Shifting from over-thinking to under-thinking, Sunday’s Barn made me shudder because it reminded me of an XGF who was usually fun to be around, but with whom I learned not to play poker because she’d go into Poker Talk and become absolutely unbearable.
She wasn’t all that good at the game, but she had the dialogue nailed. One more click of the dial and she’d have started belching and chewing tobacco.
My current dog has not gotten used to the idea that people might walk down our driveway, including the ones who live in the same building. Fortunately, she just raises hell without making contact, and, after all, it’s only been five years so maybe she’ll adjust.
My previous dog had learned that letter carriers also carry dog biscuits, as do UPS and FedEx drivers. This despite the fact that I had a PO box so the letter carrier never came to our door. Didn’t have to. If the dog spotted a delivery van, in front of the house or in a totally other neighborhood, he’d yank my arm out of its socket to get there and beg for a treat.
I’m sympathetic to carriers who’ve been bitten, and would add that, since they show up at roughly the same time every day, there’s not much excuse for the dog to be out at the critical moment.
But there’s no excuse at all for letting your dog write poetry. That’s the point at which they can stop delivery to your house.
Damn straight. Give the dog credit, because who knows how many people jerked on their dog’s leash and made him heel instead of looking to see what was so fascinating.
I prefer the stories of the dog who stays with the lost kid until searchers come. Timmy never fell in a well and neither did Jeff, but the stories of dogs sticking with a lost kid are genuine and even if it happens often enough not to qualify as news, it’s heart-warming enough to rate coverage anyway.
I’ve told this story before, but it’s a favorite: When I was in college and living in a very tough neighborhood, I was out in the yard and saw a three- or four-year-old girl walking down the alley, sniffling and quietly crying to herself.
But she had her hand on the collar of a large American bulldog and when I asked her if she was lost, he looked up at me like, “Back off, jack. I’ve got this.”
So I did and they continued on down the alley. I have no idea how that little girl got out there alone, but clearly, she hadn’t.
Probably safer with the dog than she’d have been with her parents.
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