Timothy Geithner is resigning as Secretary of the Treasury and it makes me sad. You see, we were in this together and now he’s leaving. Let me explain.

In January 2009 after I’d had a headache for 10 months straight, I finally decided to visit a headache clinic in Michigan. On the coldest day of the year. Literally. I drove up the night before my all-day appointment, dragged my suitcase through the snow, and checked into my hotel room. Then I decided to go out to eat. My nose hairs froze on the way to the car and it took the heater several long minutes to warm up as I drove around an unfamiliar town.

It’s easy to get lost in a city you don’t know and even easier when it’s pitch black out. I didn’t have a GPS or a smartphone because this was 2009 and the iPhone wasn’t that much older than my headache itself. I remember driving around Ann Arbor looking for somewhere to eat, not knowing the name of the street I was on, just trying to remember how many turns it would take to get back to the hotel. I had NPR on the radio and it was so dark that it felt like I was in the same room with the reporters but with the lights off. And Timothy Geithner’s confirmation hearings were going on. The economy had recently crashed, so Secretary of the Treasury was a pretty significant gig. We were all getting a good laugh out of the fact that the man who’d have a big part in steering our economy had improperly filed his taxes in 2006. Congress was giving him grief about it.

So there I was in Michigan about to take a major step in the impossible health crisis in my life, and Timothy Geithner was in Washington about to take a major step in the impossible economic crisis in all of our lives. And I’ve always remembered that, driving through the dark, cold, night with Timothy Geithner, not knowing where the hell I was going. I don’t know why some things get stuck in my memory like those itty bitty pieces of lint that I can’t get out of the lint trap in the dryer. But this is one of them.

And now he’s leaving! How dare he! I suppose his battle is over. He’s done what he can with the economy and he’s off to make much more money doing something else, I’m sure. His part is over, and I’m still here with the same headache I’ve had for almost five years. It makes me sad that Timothy Geithner gets to leave the part of his life that started that January night and I don’t. It makes me sad that that part of my life is moving further and further into the past, making this part of my life stretch longer and longer. My memories will no longer be of current Secretary of the Treasury, Timothy Geithner, but former Secretary of the Treasury, Timothy Geithner. And on and on and on until I’m telling this story to someone who wasn’t even born before the iPhone came out.

But that’s how it is. I managed to find my way back to my hotel that night and to the headache clinic the next day and through a thousand other steps that got me here to this moment now. My headache is not nearly as bad as it was back then, and the economy isn’t as bad as it was in 2009 either. I’ll keep on taking small steps, on and on through my life, but Timothy Geithner will no longer be my imaginary comrade on the journey.

If I want to watch an episode of The West Wing right now all I have to do is turn on my Playstation 3, connect to the Netflix app, and select an episode. That’s it! So simple! So easy! Alas, it was not always this way. Boys and girls, let me take you back in time to…

The Year 2000

By the fall of 2000 I had heard good things about this show called The West Wing which had already aired its first season. I tuned in for the season two premiere and was instantly drawn in by the fallout of an assassination attempt and the flashbacks to how the characters originally met. I wanted to watch season one so I could catch up and figure out why this Donna person was so devastated that Josh had been shot. Alas, in the year 2000 we did not have Netflix streaming. Nor did we have box sets of television shows available to purchase the year after they’d aired. We did have the Internet, but when I wasn’t at college all I had was dial-up. (Remember the SCRREEE-EEE-AAAATCH!! of the modem?) And even when I could use the fast internet at school, video compression techniques weren’t that great and YouTube didn’t even exist, so if you did manage to find a video online it was probably a blurry Real Player file. (Remember Real Player? No? Be grateful.)

So how was a girl supposed to catch up on a TV show? I went online and posted a request on a forum for the show. Then someone in California, my fairy godmother perhaps, sent me a box of VHS tapes of the first season. I was never charged for these tapes or even for the shipping, which was bizarre. I think the person who sent them wanted to be sure she couldn’t be sued for profiting off of the show, so she wouldn’t accept any payment. What she sent weren’t even the original tapes. I don’t think they were even copies of the originals, but copies of copies, and one episode had five minutes missing because of a severe thunderstorm warning in a state I didn’t live in. But I was so happy to have them! I was in procession of rare precious treasure! After I’d finished watching the tapes I paid it forward by giving them to a friend, who also felt special for acquiring such a rare commodity.

This must be how my parents feel when they tell stories about using record players.

Anyway, it is now ridiculously easy to catch up on TV shows, and most ways are even legal. There’s Netflix, Hulu, iTunes, Amazon, and more. I definitely prefer this world to the one where I had to post on forums and usenet and lurk in IRC channels while waiting in queue to download the banned season three finale of Buffy the Vampire Slayer from a bot. However, I do miss that feeling of accomplishment I got. I felt proud when I was able to locate a copy of something that was not easy to locate. I felt like I was in a special club of people who loved a show so much that they’d spend hours copying it from one VCR to another for a fellow fan. You don’t have to prove your love of a TV show that way anymore. You don’t have to cut through a briar patch to kiss Sleeping Beauty or climb up a tower to see Rapunzel. You can just turn on Netflix. You can watch it in widescreen too, which I find particularly impressive because it meant someone behind the scenes was planning way ahead. It’s better that way and I wouldn’t go back, but I like to look back and remember how it used to be and all the things I used to do to prove my love for a TV show.

I had already taken off my jacket and placed it in the plastic tub for the x-ray machine at the airport when the TSA agent told me I could leave it on. Ok, weird, I always thought I had to take that off, but whatever. Then I started to take off my belt and my shoes and the TSA agent told me that no, I could leave those on, too. All I needed to do was put my suitcase and backpack on the conveyor belt.

“I don’t have to take my laptop out to be scanned separately?” I asked her.

“No, this is pre-check. Just put your bags through the x-ray machine and walk through the metal detector,” as if I was the person acting totally cuckoo here. I wanted to say, “Don’t you want to scan my liquids separately? Don’t you want to check my shoes for explosives? Don’t you want to take naked pictures of me with your backscatter machine?! WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?!?! ” But I did not say these things. Instead, I gleefully sent my bags through the machine and then walked through the metal detector and that was that. It was a crazy, beautiful post-Christmas miracle.

As I waited for my flight to depart, I went online and discovered I’d been filtered into one of the new pre-check security lines at approximately 35 airports in the US. I did vaguely recall Delta asking me to check a box authorizing them to share information with the TSA when I’d booked my flight. And I had wondered why the TSA agent who checked my ID also scanned my ticket, something I’d never seen them do before. There was also an agent standing next to the person checking IDs who was asking people in line random personal questions like, “Who were you visiting?” or “Are you in a rush to get home?” which in retrospect was probably a behavior screening technique called SPOT (Screening Passengers by Observation Techniques).

Regardless of what it was, it was TOTALLY AWESOME. It is ridiculous how joyful I was not to be treated like a criminal on my way to my departure gate. I was still buzzing on happy at least 30 minutes later. It was especially nice because in the security line before my flight a few days earlier I had remembered to take off my belt, my jacket, and my coat, to empty my pockets, and to pull out my liquids and laptop for individual scanning, but as I walked toward the nudie-picture machine the TSA agent had to remind me to take off my shoes. D’oh! I’d felt like such an amateur. And this time it didn’t even matter.

I hope this pre-check program gets rolled out everywhere and that I always, always, always qualify for it. It’s kind of sad that I live in a world where not being examined like a bug in a dish before a flight is considered a luxury, but I’ll take my luxuries where I can get them.

If anyone was wondering what happened in regard to that Indianapolis house explosion I blogged about last month, three people were arrested today for intentionally setting the blast that killed two people and has led to 31 houses having to be demolished due to irreparable damages. The owner of the house had serious financial problems and had recently increased the home insurance policy to $300,000. Then she, her boyfriend, and her boyfriend’s brother allegedly tampered with the fireplace so it would release gas into the house which was sparked to explode several hours later by a microwave on a timer.

I was relieved that they finally made some arrests. It’s been over a month since the explosion, and it was beginning to feel like no one was going to go down for the crime. Every government agency possible seemed to be involved in the investigation: the police department, the fire department, the Secret Service, the ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives), and Homeland Security. And those are only the ones I remember. Anyway, it looks like the perpetrators are going to get their asses nailed to the wall for this. It could even qualify as a death penalty case or life without parole because of the two deaths.

A guy who works at the same company as my younger brother lived in the house next door, which has been marked as a crime scene for at least a month. He said he was in the living room when the explosion happened. It blew him all the way into his kitchen where he woke up with a cookie sheet wrapped around his head. Crazy.

Anyway, there’s a lot to be grateful for this holiday season. I’m glad the worse thing my old neighbors did was smoke pot.

I’ve only known two people who have been murdered.

The first was Ms. Aqua, my school bus driver. I lived in the suburbs but I attended a magnet high school downtown, so I got there by taking a bus to a middle school across the street from the projects which served as a transfer hub. Then I hopped on Ms. Aqua’s bus for the 5-10 minute ride to my school. Her bus had a sign in the window that said “AQUA” spelled in capital letters, but I didn’t realize that was her last name at first. I thought it was a color guide so the younger kids could find the right bus. What color bus do you ride? I ride the aqua bus! But no, that was actually her last name.

It was her first year as a driver and Ms. Aqua wasn’t quite cut out for it. She got lost on the way to school that first day. We had to give her directions. She seemed overwhelmed, but she was doing her best, and there was something sincere and friendly about her that made us like her. She either quit or was fired after a month or two. But before that someone learned her birthday was coming up, so they secreted a cupcake aboard the bus that day. On the way to school we started shouting, “Fight! Fight! Fight!” to get Ms. Aqua to stop the bus, and then we sang her happy birthday and handed her a cupcake and she cried happy tears.

A few years later I was watching the news and Ms. Aqua’s face appeared on the screen. Her ex-boyfriend had broken into her apartment and shot her to death.

The other person I know who was murdered was Sixfredo, who was my friend Kathy’s younger brother. Kathy and I got summer passes to Kentucky Kingdom one summer during middle school and took lots of trips to ride the roller coasters. Sixfredo sometimes came along, and I’d see him whenever I visited Kathy’s house. He was the typical kid brother, full of energy and occasionally annoying in that kid brother way that you don’t really mind. I attended a birthday party for him or Kathy or their little sister once, and I remember him taking several blindfolded swings at a piñata hanging from a tree in their backyard and bursting it wide open.

A few years ago there was an altercation at someone’s trailer about money or something and Sixfredo was stabbed. He died later at the hospital.

There are a few other people who were murdered that I know of second-hand. In middle school a teacher at a another school that one of my friends knew was killed by her son who then put her body on the curb in a trash bag. My younger brother knew a girl who was murdered by her boyfriend a few years ago, who then cut her body into pieces and left the parts in different dumpsters around town. Right before I moved into my old apartment complex, the maintenance man was shot execution style with the rest of his family during a home invasion. Then there was Quinton, a kid at my high school who was shot at the bus stop on the second day of school for no apparent reason.

I can’t help thinking of these people since the Sandy Grove school shooting that took place last Friday. Everyone has to die eventually, but it seems rather unfair when someone else gets to decide when “eventually” is for you. It’s sad and a little frightening to think that your life could be taken away from you at any time and there’s not necessarily anything you can do to prevent it.

I don’t remember the names of the people who shot Ms. Aqua or stabbed Sixfredo, but I remember that cupcake and that piñata. I think that’s all I can do, is remember the good times and appreciate them as they happen, because you never know when this bus ride will be over.