Today is a beautiful Sunday afternoon and I’m sitting in my air-conditioned house trying to think of a topic for today’s blog entry. I can’t. I think I have run out of ideas.

The only reason I thought of this title was because last night I saw Risky Business with my sons, and I recalled the other Chicago movie that I sometimes watch with my sons: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

Lately, my sons have been asking me about famous paintings. I hope that it’s because I have been a positive influence on them. Anyway, in the movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Ferris and his friends go to the Chicago Art Institute and look at the painting by Georges Seurat titled “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.” And in the painting, everyone is all dressed up and at the park.

However, there isn’t much activity. Everyone seems to have gone to the park to see and be seen. Well, that’s what it looks like in my head right now. I have all these ideas in my head, all dressed up, but they’re not doing anything. Try as I might, I can’t think of anything to write. I’m just sitting here waiting for something to trickle out of my head and flow to my fingertips so that I can type it up. But no such luck!

I really love personal computers. Of course, that’s because I really loved typewriters. I mean those old mechanical ones whose keys would get all tangled up if you typed too fast. Not that I could type that fast, but I loved to jam them up on purpose so I could figure out which letters to pull down first in order not to bend the arms.

Then, I bought an electric typewriter with self-correcting tape. Now that I think about it, that was truly my first word processor! I used that typewriter to publish some of my first articles and I wanted them to look perfect before I submitted them. The correction tape made editing so much easier so long as I caught the mistakes before I went hit the carriage return to go to the next line because the typewriter’s memory was only good for the line on which I was typing.

When the first PCs first came out at about $10K, I couldn’t afford to buy one. I used to visit my friend Jim and use his. However, typing any kind of text was still actually easier with an electric typewriter. And typewriters produced better documents than those early dot-matrix printers. The PC word processors required you to learn the operating system and all these arcane word processing commands.

When WordPerfect eventually came out with their 5.0 version, I finally bought an IBM computer. This was back when IBM mass-produced IBM-compatible computers. They were the number one computer manufacturer back then. My IBM computer used IBM-DOS. This was before Bill Gates had the power to rule the computer world. His evil empire may be slowly eroding, but the competition is constantly watching him covetously.

I remember always upgrading my computer because obsolescence was the main component of every PC. I loved opening that beige box and taking everything apart and putting it back together every time I upgraded my PC rather than buying a new one. As a teenager, I used to build electronics kits and I became quite an expert solderer.

When I joined the Marines, I could solder up to NASA Class 1 specs, the highest rating. I learned electronics in the Marines, but when it became a job for me, I lost all interest in electronics.

I remember all this now because my laptop crashed. I could have fixed it myself if I had had all the right diagnostic equipment. However, I had already paid for the extended warranty so I Fed Ex-ed it to get repaired. All they did was replace the motherboard, something I could have done, but not as cheaply as they.

I have an old computer that I kept upgrading until not one of the original components remained. It reminded me of the knife that Socrates (or it was Aristotle or Plato) described. If you replace one half of the handle, then later replace the other side of the handle, and then finally replace the blade, is it still the same knife? Well, to me, my upgraded computer is still my original computer, at least in spirit, if computers can have spirits not projected onto them by their owners.

Chris is another memorable Spanish student of mine, but not for the reasons you might think. “Chris” is merely a sexually ambiguous pseudonym that I’m using in order to hide his identity. Oops! I revealed his gender. Okay, he is a he. This blog entry would be so hard to write since we don’t have a gender-neutral pronoun for people in English. Anyway, he was in my Spanish class for one whole semester, but I only saw him exactly six times during the entire semester that consisted of 58 total days. I never saw him before, nor since, that semester. In the beginning of the semester, he e-mailed me that he was having personal problems and that’s why he was missing so many classes. In fact, he never even showed up to class once. This was the third week of the semester, and I still had no idea what he looked like. Then, he e-mailed me telling me that he suffered from anxiety, and he was taking prescription medications. He attached an image of the letter from his psychiatrist asking me to excuse his patient’s absences, which I did. When the first exam came around, I e-mailed Chris reminding him to come to class in order to take the exam. I normally don’t do this for students, but I was concerned for him since he was in counseling. He responded by asking me not to ask him anything about his absences when he finally showed up to class on exam day for the very first time of the semester. He didn’t want to create a scene in front of the class because all the attention would cause him emotional stress. He came to his first class late and I handed him the exam, but he avoided eye contact with me, and he was forced to sit in the front row because all the other seats were taken. I could tell that he was extremely uncomfortable. He was tall and thin and extremely pale. His hair was dyed black even though it was naturally black and when he bent his down his hair would fall over his eyes. His lip was pierced, and he had tattoos on his arms. Oh, yes, he was dressed completely in black. Well, he finished the exam before the other students and left without a word. I only saw him five more times: on exam days. He would e-mail his compositions and tell me about his ongoing therapy and how he didn’t feel comfortable sitting in classrooms with other students. His exam grades suffered because he was missing all of my wonderful Spanish lessons. Then, one day, he e-mailed me thanking me for being so tolerant with him. Every e-mail that I read from him always implied that he would soon start attending class regularly. But one e-mail absolutely floored me! He told me that he wanted to be a teacher! But I wondered, “How?” He didn’t feel comfortable sitting in the classroom as a student, so I couldn’t imagine him as a teacher when all eyes would be on him. And that reminds me: we never made eye contact the entire semester. Well, he finished the semester with a D, but he would have gotten a much better grade had he actually shown up with a little more consistency. I wonder if he ever became a teacher.

When I think of the IRS, I think of death and taxes, in that order. Thank you, Benjamin Franklin for pointing out our only two certainties in life. So far, I’ve been staving off the Grim Reaper, and I’ve been paying my taxes every year, in an attempt to avoid appearing in the radar of the IRS. Or at least, I try to avoid the IRS as much as possible.

However, I had to call them up today. It seems that there was an error on my tax return this year. I wouldn’t have noticed, but my tax refund was significantly smaller than I had anticipated. I was counting on that money for my vacation this year. I waited for the letter from the IRS in which they explain their adjustment and I immediately spotted the error:  They had me listed as Single instead of Head of Household.

I put off calling them for about a week. Everytime I think of the IRS, audits and federal prisons come to mind. My mother and I panicked when she once received a letter from the IRS to go to their office for an audit. We just expected the worst. We dug up every receipt we could find in the house for the previous year. When she came back home, she was extremely relieved. In fact, after the audit the IRS increased her tax refund because she didn’t claim all of the expenses to which she was entitled!

Years ago, I received an ammended tax return from the IRS, but they actually tripled my tax return because I didn’t properly apply the income averaging formula to which I was entitled after working for minimum wage while I was in the Marines.

But I wasn’t expecting to receive one penny less this year on my tax return. So, I called the toll-free number they provided and I couldn’t get through to a live person. The automated voice message gave me another phone number and extension to call, which I did. Another voice message at the new phone number told me to call the next day or contact them through their website at http://www.irs.gov. Of course, I couldn’t find how to contact the IRS on their website.

I called today and I was suprised to actually talk to a live person, although I did have to wait about twenty minutes on hold. But the woman with whom I spoke was very calm, professional, and understanding. She had a digital copy of my tax return on her computer screen and it turns out that it was I who made the mistake of filing as Single instead of Head of Household. She made the proper adjustment to my tax return and I should have my full refund by next week! Apart from the waiting on hold, the whole experience was quite painless!