Advice Column : Ask A Junkie

Dear Junkie -

As an MADD advisor and TOEFL instructor, I need a nice counting song for my immigrant friends that doesn't rely on liquor use, as say the 99 Bottles of Beer song that helped my family on road trips. Any ideas?
Respectfully,

What Did Jesus Drink?



Dear WDJD -

Implied in your signature is an important lesson we must share, and we want all readers to know the answer to that. As for learning to count in English so that you understand what the state trooper means when she tells you that your Breath-a-lyzer result is 223, let's go back twenty years to the children's band, the Violent Femmes. They wrote a catchy ditty called Kiss Off that emphasizes the metric system (counts to 10) and uses association techniques to help remember the numbers. Life's special devasting emotional events are ranked and then sung about as a memory aid for the numbers. Great for teenagers too.

On needing to share the intimate details of my uniquely fascinating life

A month or two back or forth an NPR show (Talk of the Nation ??) addressed issues of perceived privacy and anonymity on the net and how those perceptions influence the nature of on-line relationships. The chat rooms, discussion boards, etc., help unite people who would otherwise have had trouble finding each other. The internet offers a special, distant, protected kind of intimacy that can foster the development of rewarding relationships, ideally more often than it exploits naively revealing behavior. Internet dangers can range from being successfully stalked or losing one's financial identity to the more likely event of simply making an ass of one's self. The pictures you posted of your nude body draped in the flag of the Third Reich won't likely subject you to identity theft, but may disturb your employer, or the guy interviewing you after the first web surfing boss fired you.

Remember kids, freedom of speech is the law of the land, but it isn't without consequence. I personally wouldn't want to employ someone who hated cats, and appreciate my freedom to hire people I like to mow my lawn. But I wouldn't hire someone who had posted hizzelf lawnmowing a cat. (I mean, it's not like I'm Enterprise Cars, or even a small business owner).

Like a friend of mine who has endured a colleague sharing too much in hi,no her narrative of his/her drunken, promiscuous exploit last Tuesday, (unaware of, say the fact that the same sales rep in his/her story has tried to establish a sexual history with everyone else in the department already except my friend). A tad obtuse there and just a tad hungover, or early in the learning curve of life is how my friend described the goof. The fault of frequently proferring T.M.I. is, mercifully, frequently outgrown,and forgotten.

My own excuse in blogland here is that nobody reads this shit, or is forced to overhear it unwillingly.

But on the radio, talking crazy talk, they told of a Wayback machine (hence the Peabody and Sherman cartoon - didn't they time travel?) that maintained every incarnation of every web site that ever existed, so that by picking your point in time you could time travel the net, or at least the web as it once was.

Being overheard in the next cubicle is one thing, being the jerk mocked 'round the world is something else, and is potentially possible with the miracle of technology.

Which brings me to a downside of the internet - that what I (hypothetically) posted in public areas, maybe as a (hypothetical) sixteen year old, or then later as a serious job seeker with a (hypothetical)graduate degree - might always remain for all the world to see. That "Permanent Record" we've all been threatened with arrived last month while we were waiting to see what happened to Mr. Soprano.

One improbably soothing conclussion of the NPR show was that the internet is in its adolescence, that users are still negotiating a proper social code to cover the new kinds of e-relations out there. I must remember not only that what I post could be seen by potentially anyone, and interpretted in almost any way besides the way I meant, and I might want to learn to forgive and possibly tolerate folks who forget that discretion is the better part of valor.

I checked out the wayback site and was thrilled to find a web site that disappeared several years ago. The site is chock-full of technical data, its author promoted a mildly progressive point of view, and at the time the site went down, I wondered if it was because he was trying to get a straight job, join the establishment sort of thing. The site advocated nothing illegal or violent or even mean, but might possibly sound heretical to some. The guy seemed to be a young Ph.D. so I supposed the employers he sought might fear him as to be a(hypothetical)fiery eyed radical.

The picture is of a depiction of a flu strain of 1918 that helped end the war to end all wars.