We were watching the Olympics last night and Becky fell asleep on the couch. It was probably 9:30. Not that I was really watching either. I had "Lenin's Tomb" and was reading until I heard some kind of crowd reaction and then I would look up to see what was going on. Last night was kind of drab.

Anyway, by about 10:45, I'm sprawled out on the floor with my book and Becky's completely spread out on the couch snoring. Sudenly she sits up and blinks, looks down at me and says, "You know what we should do?"

I put my finger in my book, look up and say, "What?"

She pulls on the back of my shirt, half exposing my back and replies, "We should give you a back massage with oil."

I start to laugh and she then says, "But we only have cooking oil and that could be messy."

She then lays back down and is sound a sleep. Every so often she talks in her sleep and its usually pretty funny. She's completely coherent, you'd think she was wide awake. And then when you ask her about it the next morning, she has no memory of it. She laughed pretty hard when I told her this morning she was offering to rub me down with cooking oil.

The funny thing is, usually, when she talks in her sleep, its just abstract words. It's never anything that you could have a two sided conversation with. Until last night. That was pretty funny.

Becky and I took Claire to meet her preschool teacher today. The teacher was kind of old. But that's beside the point. It was kind of a surreal experience. I guess like everyone else who takes thier oldest kid to their first whatever, I don't feel old enough to be doing it. Yet at the same time, it felt kind of natural. So explain that.

Claire was in her element. She hopped from station to station, playing with markers and play dough and dolls and kitchen toys. She'll start class on Monday. Then she'll actually be with kids her age and that's when the spam will hit the fan. She likes to boss her friends around. In fact, she keeps telling this poor kid Jason that he will marry her when they grow up. But Jason is already sworn to one of Claire's friends who moved to Seattle last spring. They fight about it every time they see each other. Jason will, however, still hold Claire's hand. So he gets points for that.

Parenthood, while still one of the most statisfying and gratifying things I've ever done, is one of the wierdest experiences I've ever had. And I lived in Mexico for two years.

Well, I did the unthinkable today. In a spare moment I Googled "Skutch." Interesting side note, there's an Australian punk band named Skutch. But sure enough, the MSN Communities page for the Skutch guys pulled up and I went and checked it out.

Aside from seeing that Garrett apparently got married, it was about what I expected. I suppose the regretable thing, either in a fit of nostalgia or self-pity, I applied for membership. I always swore when I left high school, I'd leave it for good. Partly because that was the "cynical" thing to do and I desperately wanted to be cynical in high school. It made me aloof and grown-up. Ironically of course I was neither.

So let me explain. Skutch was the name for our group of friends at Davis High. I don't even know if I dare say "our." I was accepted into the group at the end of my junior year -- the year I began attending Davis and many months after the group officially formed. Most of the guys that originally made up Skutch had been friends since kindergarten or before. But a few outsiders were able to slip in because of the high school's demogrpahic. Students at Davis either lived in Farmington or Kaysville. Skutch was the melding of two groups of boyhood friends -- one from Farmington, the other from Kaysville. So if you weren't from either, you could just kind of slip in through the cracks.

At the time, I loved Skutch. The group was atypical for high school. The guys in the group had yet to have their first kiss, sarcasm and dry wit were the most important traits to embody and most important they bucked the trends, the fads, the trappings of high school life through bizarre and attention-getting stunts at assemblies and in the hallways between class. Having moved from a high school in Colorado where the in-crowd was the only crowd, I lived for mocking and sending-up the status quo.

But for the same reason, many despised Skutch. The group was seen as arrogant and preppy -- you know, too cool for school. And in a lot of respects we were. But Skutch allowed us to be cool without having to bandwagon with the in-crowd.

Anyway, the group survived graduation. We had a newsletter of sorts that cirrculated while we were all on our missions. I ended up attending college at BYU and few of the Skutch guys were there. So I kept in touch. But when I finally graduated from college, that was it. I had heard that some of the guys had started the MSN page, but I never joined. It was a lot of hassle, but deep down I think it was because I always felt like I was never truly a part of Skutch because I hadn't grown up in Farmington or Kaysville. Some of my best friends in high school ame out of the group, but the Skutch ringleaders I never got close to.

And yet, coming across that same MSN page today, I felt compelled to sign up. I'm 10 years out of high school. In fact, I missed the 10 year class reunion -- in part because I wanted to maintain that aloofness I believed made me cool 10 years ago. But I think I missed it because I was nervous I'd show up and realize I'm not that close to the Skutch guys, which means the good friends I thought I had in high school, I didn't really have and in the end I was just a geek, a wannabe. so maybe joining the Skutch community is my way of testing the waters, finding out if I really do have a place or not with these guys. The most distrubing thing to me is realizing 10 years out, I'm still feeling compelled to find that acceptance. How strange.