Random Access

Family Resemblance

2012-01-23T23:02:00.004-05:00

Both of my parents are the youngest of their siblings, by a notable margin, and I’m the youngest of my generation as well. As a result, even my cousins have 10 years or more on me; we basically were strangers until well into my adulthood.

However, the arithmetic is bringing us together in recent years – we cousins seem to encounter each other at funerals. The rest of my immediate family has fled south, so I am the uncontested Northeast Regional Funeral Representative for the family.

Despite the fact that we were virtually unknown to each other, all the cousins knew who I was pretty much instantly, because they knew my parents – and I am a walking testament to the power of heredity. I look pretty much like what you’d get if you added my mom & dad together and divided by 2.

My hands and feet are definitely my dad’s, and they said that even as a toddler I walked like his father, even though he died before I was born. My face is mostly from my mother’s side, although I think a little of the paternal side sneaks in there, and my sense of humor and much of how I think is strongly reminiscent of mom as well. I’m sure there’ll be a future guest blog entry where she refutes that in the strongest possible terms.

I’m dwelling so much on Mendelian matters because it occurred to me recently that I also inherited something from my sister – a large swath of my iPod playlist. I’m not sure that there have been any scientific studies establishing music preference (or obsession, if you prefer) as hereditary, but the evidence is pretty strong in my case.

My sister was four years ahead of me in school, so she left for college as I reached high school… and started getting interested in music. And when she left for college, she left a tiny slice of herself behind: a really cheesy, beat-up record player – maybe not even worthy of being called a “hi-fi”; more like a lo-fi – and a small stack of albums (insert obligatory self-deprecating yet somehow simultaneously condescending crack about how some of my readers won’t remember large vinyl platters).

Fast-forward mmmmppph years – OK, 35, give or take – and here I am building a music library. Anyone who’s read any of my stuff, let alone my past music-related posts, will be unsurprised to learn that a lot of my collection comes from a long time ago. The backbone of the list is all the LPs and cassettes I bought all those years back, but thanks to a number of contributing streams (yard sale LPs & cassettes, cheap CDs, my somewhat winding emusic.com odyssey, and some gift iTunes cards), I’m slowly filling in the blanks.

Let me see if I can remember what was on that record player spindle: the Beatles’ “Yesterday and Today”. Gordon Lightfoot, Glen Campbell, and Peter, Paul, and Mary’s “Ten Years Together”. John Denver – “Poems, Prayers, and Promises”. Was the Carpenters’ “The Singles: 1969-1973” in there too? I think so, but I’m not 100% sure. I know there was an extremely warped copy of James Taylor’s “Sweet Baby James” that made me seasick to watch when I tried to play it. She also gave me an 8-track, for you archaeologists in the crowd, of some of the earliest of what would come to be called Christian Contemporary music; I kept it, later copied it to cassette (we didn’t “rip” in those days), and still listen to it in 0/1 format even now.

Further, in my never-ending quest to haul Yesterday into Today, I’ve bought the PP&M and Carpenters albums second-hand. I grabbed a nice Gordon Lightfoot selection at emusic, and I developed an unhealthy obsession with finding the actual Glen Campbell tracks I remember in their “original” state. It looks like the album she had might have been this one, but the cuts I got from emusic are live cuts recorded much later (*cough* ripoff cough). I finally grabbed the most recent Greatest Hits, when Amazon was basically giving it away for $5; this has allowed me a kind of “ahhhh… finally” moment, although at least one of the songs has been remixed almost till you can’t recognize it any more.

I started buying James Taylor in my first batch from Columbia House, way back in the day, so although I don’t have the SBJ album, I do have 40 JT tracks in my collection. And somehow, I ended up with the original John Denver LP, so that became part of Project Digitize.

I bought the Beatles’ Revolver some time back as a second-hand cassette, thinking that was the album I’d heard so many years before. But Beatles albums are an odd commodity; the same track often shows up on multiple LPs. Eventually I did a bit of research (can you claim it as “research” if it’s really just Wikipedia?) that I discovered that the actual record was “Yesterday and Today” and that it basically contained half of “Revolver” and half of “Rubber Soul”…

… but fortunately, the arrival of the Beatles at iTunes coincided roughly with the arrival of iTunes cards in my Christmas stocking, so I was able to snatch up “Rubber Soul” digitally to finish off that dream. Although I have to admit that I’m now trying to figure out where the most significant holes are in my Beatles collection, currently numbering 66 tracks.

I can’t in good conscience blame the whole thing on her, although I may still send her an invoice – a large percentage (I’m waffling between “impressive” and “disturbing”) of my acquisitions in recent times have been focused on the time period when I didn’t have to cook my own meals or do my own laundry. At least 1200 of my songs, or over 20% of my collection, are dated before 1980.

I find that for many of the really old tracks I have a memory, or at least a “memory”, of when I heard them first – and actually many of those have sisterly associations as well, like hearing “Hey Jude” for the first time at The Tower Restaurant in Lake Pleasant, NY (where the older kids hung out), or being instantly hooked on “It’s Too Late” by Carole King when I heard it in a car one late night in downtown Troy. And don’t get me started on “Indiana Wants Me”, which to be honest I haven’t bought yet because it’s hard to find the authentic one, plus I’m still a little bit conflicted about it.

Meanwhile I continue to get Facebook friend requests from high school classmates, and I made a few purchases several months ago to get my collection of 1973 Topps baseball cards within 9 of completion. My Today often looks a lot like my Yesterday, except with more TV networks.

Enjoying the View from the Third Row

2011-12-07T22:26:00.003-05:00

When I was dating the young woman who was eventually convinced to become my wife, I wanted to impress her with my good taste, my worldliness, just my overall Catch Quotient. So in the finest tradition of the dandy who would invite a lady to see his etchings, I would at times bring her to my place to view… The Muppet Show.

I may be a little different than most Muppet fans of my approximate vintage because I didn’t catch the bug on Sesame Street; I don’t remember ever seeing it before my own kids were small (not only was I 7 by the time it debuted, but when I was a kid it was not a trivial matter to tune in a UHF station). In my teens, however, I was casting about for funny stuff, and that’s how I discovered Monty Python, SCTV, Benny Hill, Dave Allen, Saturday Night Live, Letterman… and The Muppet Show.

Sadly, when it comes to one’s own children, introducing them to Letterman or Python, to say nothing of the late Mr. Hill, is not usually considered exemplary parenting. So in an effort to entertain them, as well as in search of common ground, a few years ago I bought Season One of the Muppet Show.

I was mainly aiming at my son, who almost literally loves nothing more than watching a TV show that makes him laugh. Maybe watching it while eating Peanut Butter Pandemonium and having his feet rubbed, but still. At first he didn’t seem to care at all, then suddenly – maybe because he was just a little older – he wanted to watch one or two episodes a day.

He loves it. He loves it all, musical numbers, slapstick, one-liners, the whole deal. So when he saw there was a movie coming out (you might have heard about that), he began almost vibrating. Each time he saw the ad, if I was in the room – even if it had just run during the last break – he’d say, “We have to see that, Dad.” Even though I already saw my movie for the year!

I knew that if we didn’t get there on Thanksgiving weekend, he’d be vastly disappointed, so on Sunday we squeezed into a matinee… I didn’t even know it was possible to have seats behind the screen. Fortunately, the proprietors considerately provided 20 minutes of previews so I could get used to looking up everyone’s nostrils.

As much as I was looking forward to it, I was also a little bit worried. I have a healthy respect for the genius of Jim Henson, but this one was of course coming from a different source. Plus, I knew a new Muppet was being featured and I was skeptical about how that might affect the “group dynamic”, if you will. And I had read the articles raising some questions about whether this movie was truly in the traditional spirit of the Muppets.

When it was (finally) time to play the music and light the lights, I felt like I was holding my breath a little bit. But before the movie was more than a few minutes old, I found myself literally unable to stop myself from grinning from ear to ear. And since I can’t do anything like this without also monitoring my brain to see how I’m reacting, I was conscious that my second emotion was gratitude… to Jason Segel. It was immediately clear to me that he totally got it, that he understood what makes the Muppets funny and awesome, and that all he wanted to do was honor and carry on the Muppet legacy.

The secret of the movie, and in fact the secret of the Muppets themselves, I think, is that they don’t care about being cool, or even really about “doing comedy”. They just want to entertain you, whether with a laugh or a cheer or a musical groove or even a cry. And I’m happy to say that the movie absolutely delivers on that; it’s funny and touching and nostalgic and just totally likable. I’m not claiming that it’s the best or even the funniest movie ever… but I don’t remember ever leaving a theater just feeling any better than I did that day. Maybe it’s just easier for a movie to be heartfelt when it already has the felt going in.

Every Cloud Has A ... Lining

2011-11-22T23:28:00.004-05:00

In one of my several previous lives, I taught math part-time at a bunch of different colleges, in both Upstate New York and Ohio. I was what’s known as an adjunct instructor; “adjunct”, as you may be aware, comes from the Latin meaning “to do what the real professors don’t want to”. So as a consequence, there were two separate instances when I taught a 7 am class.

It was annoying enough that I had to be awake at all, much less standing up in front of a class pretending I wanted to be there and there was nothing at all amiss about working at that hour. But since they were fall semester classes, for several weeks we were all* arriving at school when it was still dark – which just emphasized the middle-of-the-night feeling for me. *I say “all”, but certainly we did not set any records for attendance at those classes.

I’ve recaptured that feeling these past 2 autumns, because middle school requires our young scholar to be at the bus stop at about 7:20 am – which admittedly is much different from 5 am, but at the beginning of November is still all-but-dark and made me feel like I should still be in bed.

So it occurred to me that there’s actually something good about November: the time change means that it’s no longer dark when he & I are getting around in the morning, which makes it a tiny bit more tolerable. And I get an extra hour of sleep for that one night, which I always waste staying up doing nothing because there’s no hurry getting to bed.

Then I thought, surely someone with a sunny, optimistic, look-for-the-silver-lining outlook such as myself can find more than one good thing about November. Dark, damp, dreary, chilly November. So following is my attempt to redeem the month. I was going to say that it’s the kind of month no one ever writes songs about, and I’m still not 100% convinced that this guy is not making this stuff up.

>> The fact that it’s chilly means that I can swap out my spring/summer clothes for my fall/winter wardrobe. That mainly means corduroys in hues ranging all the way from tan to black – all the colors of the rainbow, if you live next to a steel mill. Of course, I have to bid au revoir to my summer pants in shades of electric blue, grass green, yellow and white (I’ll keep the red ones out in case I can find a Christmas-related application)… although it probably is safer to keep them somewhere my wife can’t see or get at them.

>> The colder weather also means the end of lawn mowing, and hopefully a respite before snow shoveling. I do have to admit I probably need to at least knock down the lawn at camp one last time; it’s a little brisk for that, though.

>> It should mark, as well, the end of the prime allergy season for me. At least that’s what I thought until I woke up Monday sneezing constantly. I couldn’t remember whether I had missed my allergy pill, or perhaps it was just that Sunday’s relatively mild weather had awakened something dormant like in a bad 50s sci-fi movie – so I took more drugs just to be on the safe side. Don’t worry, I’m

>> Gravy. I don’t really bother to make either a whole turkey, or gravy, very often during the year, so it’s not a bad thing that it’s compulsory on Thanksgiving (yeah, I know some of you are doing some other kind of menu, but just for the record, you’re wrong). Think about it: gravy is basically fat and salt, with a bit of flour to make it socially acceptable. Mark me down in the affirmative column on that one.

>> If nothing else, it marks the calendar period when it’s the longest time before Halloween, about which my sentiments are already on record.

Since I'm still me, all this sunshine and lollipops has not induced me to forget about frost on the windshield, the kids having five days off this month, radio stations playing all Christmas music starting two weeks before Thanksgiving, or the creeping pestilential scourge of invading marauders that is Black Friday – all the things that make November feel a bit like a prison sentence – I’m just saying that, while I still believe every cloud has a bunch of other clouds behind it, it’s possible that one of them has some shiny mineral content in there somewhere.

99 Cents Worth of Quicksand

2011-09-26T20:11:00.005-05:00

I don't know if you'd say I've ever actually had a life. When I was in high school, on Friday nights when my peers were out... I don't know, hanging out at the malt shop or dropping acid or whatever it was the cool kids were doing in those days, I was home. In my bedroom. Watching The Rockford Files, or more precisely counting the moments until The Rockford Files came on. You can have your George Clooney or whoever, there's never been anybody cooler than Jim Rockford.

And don't get me started on the genius of Chico and the Man.

When I started to date the young woman who would later become my wife, it looked like I might have some sort of life; of course, most of our dates consisted of walking around the mall. Every once in awhile we'd really cut loose and I'd take her along when I did my grocery shopping. So let that be an answer to everyone who wonders why she married me.

Nowadays I have a job and 2 kids and plenty of stuff to do around the house, so it's not like I've got lots of time left over to spend at the discos. Generally once the kids are in bed, I can sit down... watch some TV, read a library book or one of the 8000 magazines I subscribe to, surf the web a bit. Once upon a time I even used to write a blog, which you might remember if you've been taking your ginkgo biloba.

So, you know, if it's not exactly a life that's going to be the subject of an Oscar-winning documentary or something, it's a decent semblance at least. Until that fateful email...

I wrote a while back about my experience with emusic.com, an online mp3 store that enticed me in with a lavish introductory offer with a somewhat more complicated reality. At that time it seemed like I might never extricate myself, but I was eventually able to get out with a pretty good haul of songs with regard to quantity, quality, and value.

Since then I've been mostly puttering with my iTunes cards, forever building lists but never buying anything, and also taking advantage of a deal from the library that allows me a small number of free weekly downloads from the Sony music catalog. I was concerned that I was getting a bit over-absorbed with all this music-mining, but I thought I had it relatively under control.

Then those devious folks at emusic sent me another offer: 99 cents for the first month, for credits that ought to allow me about 15 or 16 downloads (and the infamous "cancel at any time"). Less than 7 cents a song is a hard deal to turn down, and I would think it might be even for a person in full control of his faculties.

I jumped on it, and within minutes I had snatched up 9 tracks, many of which were already sitting on my iTunes wishlist. Now, however, I'm stricken once again with the dreaded paralysis by analysis. I've got maybe 6 or 7 bullets left in the gun, about 15 on the contingency list, and an infinite number more that I could add. There's not much logic in sticking around for a full-price month; even though it's not a terrible deal, it doesn't make much sense to pay money when I've still got iTunes credits, so it's this last handful and out. I promise.

So seemingly every day I go into emusic and wander the virtual halls, trying to figure out which of the songs on my list are the top ones -- then stumbling into a half-dozen more that I might enjoy slightly more. Or slightly less; who can say exactly? Music, money, OCD, and decision-making: a very dangerous cocktail for a guy like me.

I've seen this movie before and I already know how it ends: I take this 99-cent month down to the last possible second and click the mouse for the last song just before the clock strikes 12. Till then, you'll find me right here, clicking through the pages...

Tearing Down the MacGuffin

2011-09-18T20:23:00.003-05:00

I'm really hoping that I don't meet the clinical standard of OCD, but frankly I wouldn't be surprised if I showed up on the scale somewhere. Recently I've gotten myself hooked into a brand-new obsession. One of our local radio stations has branded itself as "Legends", with the tagline "The Greatest Hits of All Time"... which of course is mainly a candy-coated way to say "oldies". I do appreciate the subterfuge, however; whatever can help me sustain my self-delusions is fine by me.

The first few times I clicked on the station, I was fairly amazed & amused that their playlist looks a great deal like my iPod library, and even the songs I don't have would fit neatly in the spaces between my songs. But instead of switching stations, since this one is almost redundant -- and instead of reflecting deeply upon what it says about me that all my music counts as "oldies" now -- I have, perhaps inevitably, made it a competitive sport.

Each time I listen, I keep score of how many I have already. My baseline is 33%: I estimate that one of every three they play is in my library, and more often than not, I'm right on target. In fact, on my last hour drive I hit 6 for 15... 40%.

I do write a lot in this space (or at least "a high percentage", since it's been years since I wrote "a lot") about the past. At first I thought that was because I'm just sentimental, or obsessed with my personal history, or somehow dissatisfied with my present... but over time I've come to understand that doing so helps me comprehend my past and fully absorb the lessons that maybe I didn't actually get the first time.

This weekend there was an event I've looked forward to, and dreaded a tiny bit, for months: a Gaslight Village reunion. It was a good-sized group of people from different eras, many of whom never knew each other, but all had in common a history at that place (and perhaps their own measure of obsession with the past). In a sense it was like a college Homecoming -- alumni from across the years, tied to the same location but with different experiences. So we tended to drift into our own "class years", creating reunions within the reunion.

I was excited about it, but also a little scared. It's been almost 30 years since we worked together, so we might be very different people; maybe we wouldn't remember it or value it in quite the same way; maybe we wouldn't have much to say to each other. That's a basic part of my nature: I'm always conscious of building something up too high and setting myself up for disappointment.

Imagine my astonishment when The Old Gang reassembled and it was like the years disappeared. I don't mean to say I thought I was 20 again, which God forbid; the talk was of spouses and careers and kids, mixed liberally with the remember-whens. But if you closed your eyes... we were still the same people, enjoying each other's company as much, and in much the same style, as we always did.

Here's how it wasn't like college Homecoming -- our alma mater doesn't exist any more. At one point we all walked onto the grounds, now just a big vacant lot. We did a lot of pointing and figuring out what had been where; we even found a couple of pieces of the Opera House building where we had worked. And it was in some ways a sad moment, remembering what had been and seeing what it was now. Some people were getting quite emotional, almost angry.

Alfred Hitchcock used to have a term for a device he used in his movies -- he called it the MacGuffin. The MacGuffin is a plot device, usually literally an object, that sets the story in motion (for example, the Maltese Falcon in the film of the same name), but it's really just an excuse for the characters to do what they're doing. The essence of the movie, of course, is the interaction among the characters.

So it turns out that while they closed the gates and tore down all the buildings, the buildings were just the MacGuffin, the objects that set that part of my story in motion. I stood there surrounded by Bill and Cindy and Jeff and Kim, and I realized that my Opera House was still standing, right there in that group. I had the memories, and I had the people to help me keep them alive in my heart -- because they helped me make them in the first place.

The physical location is gone, so instead I'll keep the memories, and the friends -- whether by Facebook or email or future face-to-face meetings. And we can cherish and celebrate and preserve the past together... but more importantly, we have the here-and-now together, and you know what? That's pretty cool too.

A Bracing Experience

2011-08-18T20:57:00.006-05:00

I can’t say that I remember a lot from fifth grade – the first time around, at least. I do remember that Mrs. Willson seemed like she was at least 80 or something; I do remember getting in trouble for cheating (when all I did was turn around & ask the kid behind me if he was done with the test – is that a felony, or something???), and I do remember the red-haired girl that I was crazy about.

Never fear, however, since I get to relive each grade once more through my kids. My son is never going to be exactly famous for his study skills, so I spend a lot of time doing review with him. As a consequence I’ve become so expert on American history from pre-Revolutionary times up to the Civil War that I can almost help him study just from what’s in my head. At finals time I reviewed a list of 33 vocabulary terms with him without any notes, and he said, “Dad, how do you know all these things?” I refrained from asking him how it was that he didn’t know any of them, but I did let him know that, having reviewed it many times, I was pretty clear on at least that much of history.

He also spent much of his science year reviewing the systems of the body, which came in handy recently. Did you know that your joints can be classified into categories? Your shoulder and hip are ball-and-socket joints; the knee and elbow are hinge joints; the neck is a pivot joint; and the ankle and wrist are called glide joints. This last type is particularly complicated, because it’s designed to allow the bones involved to slide past each other. The wrist is especially involved, bringing a bunch of small bones together and permitting the hand to move in not-quite-but-almost-limitless directions.

In the ideal world, at least. If you ever want to be totally aware of all the marvelous things the wrist can do, one way – maybe not the recommended way – is to injure one and discover all the things you’re completely unable to do. I had been having soreness in my right wrist for several weeks – through hauling suitcases on vacation, and spending an entire day helping friends move – but then one night a couple weeks ago I was wrestling with something heavy when I felt a searing shot through it. I didn’t hear anything, exactly (apart from the sound of whimpering that seemed to come out of nowhere), but I knew right away I was In Trouble.

Now the injury was bad enough, but since then I’ve been subjected to something even more painful: Medical Care. This was complicated by the fact that I have historically done everything possible to avoid going to the doctor – or perhaps I should just say I’ve historically been male. I didn’t even have a doctor. So I chose a doctor (or actually, a nurse-practitioner; there are no primary care doctors any more) at the practice my wife has been using.

So I wrote my symptoms on the intake sheet, then I related them verbally to the nurse, which I guess is mostly rehearsal for telling the “doctor” all over again. You know, like preparing testimony. She had a notebook computer with symptom-digesting software, but in truth she diagnosed me as soon as I told her my job. As soon as she heard “computer”, she decided it was carpal-tunnel syndrome, despite the fact that the symptoms didn’t affect my hand at all and were the result of an injury.

Eventually I talked her down and she sent me down the hall for an x-ray. When the results came back, here’s the consultation I received: “It’s not broken. Buy a brace at the drugstore and see an orthopedist.” Thanks, symptom-digesting software, I probably could’ve figured that out on webmd.com.

The orthopedist they suggested said they could fit me in in a mere 12 days… but the more I thought about it, I wasn’t sure their recommendation carried that much weight. So I called another orthopedic practice and was able to get in just 2 days later.

I knew I was at home when the doctor (an honest-to-goodness M.D.) came in and said, “I’d shake your hand left-handed, but…” and held up his left arm to display his matching wrist brace. He poked my wrist and said, “It hurts right here, doesn’t it,” then took out his pen to draw a diagram of my wrist on the white paper cover. He showed me the ligament he believed I’d damaged and sent me right out to schedule an MRI.

Two days later I was in the MRI room wearing size XXL pajama bottoms (not mine, for those of you who haven’t seen me in awhile). I’ll admit I was naïve about the procedure; I’ve seen so many medical shows I’m at least qualified to operate symptom-digesting software, but I figured that since my body was fine – or so they tell me :-) – and it was just way out at the end of my arm we’re worried about, I could just… you know, sit in a chair and stick my hand in it.

Turns out they want you to be a tad more invested in it than that. So I ended up in the tube, flat on my stomach, with my hand straight over my head, for half an hour. And you know, as a professional computer programmer and a dedicated amateur reader and TV-watcher, I thought myself quite skilled at remaining motionless – but I certainly explored the limits of that when I was told not to move for 30 minutes. I was actually very relaxed about being in the machine, even with the cacophony, but I found that I had to concentrate hard every minute to keep from moving. Usually I have to concentrate hard to make myself move….

A couple days ago the results came back: I have an “injury”, which I took to mean a tear, to my TFCC (the ligament/cartilage in the ulnar, or outer, joint of the wrist). So now I have to meet with the hand guy to find out whether they’ll operate, or just stick me repeatedly with a needle.

Till then – and probably after then, and for almost 2 weeks so far – I am living the Braced Life. The injury has probably lessened by 10%per day, but of course that means my amount of progress has slowed. In its current state the wrist is pretty sound forward & back, but very touchy from side to side and rotation is not happening. The thing is, the wrist is designed to move all 3 ways more or less at once, and I quickly discovered that in everyday life there’s basically no such thing as moving on a pure forward/back axis. I can actually pick things up vertically – but as you raise the load, the wrist is always adjusting the angle… which, ow.

So I’m challenged in a lot of motions during the day: I’m learning to eat and brush my teeth left-handed, but nearly everything about driving is a minefield, and don’t even get me started about the shower. It’s possible my handwriting has improved, though.

The worst part, though, is that it’s probably going to be weeks or perhaps months before I’ll be able to serve as a parade Grand Marshal.

Putting Myself in the Picture

2011-07-26T20:24:00.006-05:00

My niece was telling me just the other day how much she’s enjoying her Netflix trial period; my response was that I thought it would be hard for me to find enough I really wanted to watch to keep a Netflix queue going. I know I’ve mentioned before that movies are not exactly our thing around here.

There was one recent movie that I absolutely insisted on seeing, however: Toy Story 3. Not only am I a huge fan of the first two films, and of Pixar in general – plus for me, Tom Hanks is one of those guys where if he reads the phone book, I’m in – but I got the message that this film was very intentionally pointed at me.

Well, perhaps not the rather narrow demographic of 49-year-old man who loves baseball, eats a lot of junk food, and can sing from memory almost every song Barry Manilow’s ever recorded… but the reviews I read indicated that the movie had particular resonance for parents.

The plot revolves around, or at least is set in motion by, the fact that Andy (the toys’ boy), is now going off to college. All the reviewers seemed unanimous: judging the movie entertaining, but also feeling an emotional reaction. And I, as a guy who occasionally chokes up at a well-done Hallmark commercial, felt myself squarely in the bulls-eye on that one.

Knowing that – and even at this late date, always mindful of potential blog topics – I monitored my reactions throughout. The critics were basically on-target; it’s a terrific and entertaining movie, although there was something I couldn’t quite put my finger on that didn’t quite totally hook me in the way that the first two did.

I was, however, a little caught off-guard by my reaction to the emotional set-up. I came in forewarned that Andy was going off to college and that that was really going to affect me as a parent. Maybe it’s because my kids are miles away from that scenario (or at least it certainly feels that way from here), or maybe it’s just the way I’m wired – as I’ve proved in this space over and over again – but I really didn’t identify with Andy’s mom all that much.

I identified with Andy.

When he had to box up all of his toys… when the toys themselves realized that their time with him was irreversibly over… when he got in the car to drive away… all of that hit me like a nightstick to the gut. I wasn’t flashing forward to that sensation of “losing” my children forever; I was flashing back to the sensation of losing my own childhood.

I have to say that I think I envy Andy a little, even though he’s a fictional character (or maybe because of that, I guess). I’ve had all these experiences in my past that I maybe didn’t really “get” at the time, and I rehash them in this space quite a bit in an effort to redeem them, or attach some kind of deeper meaning to them – whether or not there actually was one.

But in the marvelous final scene of the movie, instead of waking up years later to realize his childhood is gone and he doesn’t really know quite where or when, Andy seemed to recognize that moment for what it was. He took it out of its box and looked at it, celebrated it, intentionally passed it on… and then moved forward to embrace the next phase of his life.

And now I know that when I grow up, I want to be an animated, fictional teenager.

Parental Advisory?

2011-06-08T21:36:00.003-05:00

When I was in my 20s and 30s I knew everything about parenting, which made it even more unfortunate that we didn't have kids at that juncture. Apparently that brand of expertise comes with an expiration date, sadly, because by the time the kids actually arrived I seemed to know a lot less about being a parent.

As it turns out, it's like everything else in the world: you can't really be taught, you have to learn it for yourself. Of course, over my 12+ years of experience, I've developed a few theories... but I'm reminded of a baseball quote. Charlie Lau, on catching the knuckleball: "There are two theories on catching a knuckleball; unfortunately, neither of them work."

Each of my children has in their own way provided a well-equipped laboratory for research and development in the field of study, but I thought it might be interesting to submit a case study for possible peer review.

Our daughter is prone to report a new ailment every day -- I'm always prepared for a litany when she gets off the bus, and she rarely disappoints. And despite her apparent athleticism, she seems to get bumped & bruised on virtually any trip across a room that's not completely empty. I've heard it before, is what I'm saying.

So this morning I was not completely astonished to find her with a long gauze bandage wrapped around her hand and halfway to the elbow. When I inquired, she told me that her arm hurt and she needed to protect it. I don't have a lot of patience with her... well, I don't want to say "hypochondria"... let's say "hypersensitivity", so I told her she would be taking it off before school. She said no, she needed it because her arm hurt, and she was to say the least not impressed by my contention that since it was neither cut nor broken, it wasn't doing her any good.

I am aware that you can't really win a war of wills with someone who's determined to be unreasonable -- I have often said that parenting is the ultimate proof that you can't ever really make another person do anything -- so I decided to retreat to the shower to consider my next move.

I knew that gym and recess are highlights in her schedule, so I decided to tell her that if she was that hurt, she would have to sit out of both gym & recess for the day. Maybe I was just waterlogged, but I really believe in natural consequences: if you mess up, the result of that should be related to the offense. So I thought it was a logical way to squeeze her... but she just shrugged and said, "okay."

I certainly didn't want this to devolve into me chasing her around the house with a pair of scissors, and I couldn't very well threaten not to take her to school, so I decided to up the stakes: I told her that since she had been argumentative and defiant in not removing the bandage, her consequence would be to lose her privileges for the day -- no evening TV, no bedtime snack, no video games or any "special" recreation after school. Surely this would tip the balance...

... except of course if it had, I wouldn't be writing this. She said, once again, "okay."

And of course she had an awesome day at school because everyone was all curious/interested in her Serious Injury, so it appears she, well, beat me at my own game.

I did tell her that if the bandage continued, she would be too injured to play in her Little League game tomorrow, so she did conclude this evening that it was feeling better after all. But I hate to lose to an 8-year-old.

I suspect that if by some miracle I get multiple readers for this entry, the snickers will be inversely proportional to the number of kids per reader -- some of you have Been There, I'll wager -- but I'm certainly curious to know whether any of you would've handled it differently (I can ask that because I'm reasonably cure my wife won't read this; I know she would, ah, have an opinion). Warning: if you get all know-it-all on me, don't be surprised if your doorbell rings and you find her standing there with me peeling rubber halfway down the block....

Diamond Mind

2011-06-03T21:13:00.001-05:00

I never had any shortage of toys as a kid -- don't get me wrong, I wasn't pampered either, but I don't recall ever feeling like I was missing out on certain "stuff". I did my fair share of Sears-catalog surfing at Christmastime, and my parents will tell you that I always created an itemized list on lined paper with the columns carefully drawn in with a ruler: page number, item, description, cost. But I don't think I ever seriously expected to get three-quarters of the stuff, nor did I feel like I came up short when I didn't.

It was always kind of a moot point anyway; there were only a few possessions I really cared about. The vast majority of the time, I had a book in my hand (and it wasn't unusual for the other hand to be buried up to the elbow in a bag of chips, but that's another story), although I can tell you that may not be the best policy at times such as when riding a bicycle, for example. When it was dark, or there was snow on the ground, I was racing Matchbox & Hot Wheels cars. When I needed something portable that I could mess with for hours, I brought my baseball cards.

The rest of the time, anytime I could get outside, it was my baseball glove.

On my frequent trips to the drugstore down the street to buy baseball cards, I would also carefully evaluate the available rubber balls to find the ones that would give me the perfect bounce off the brick wall of the church next door, then off the driveway into my waiting glove. If only there had been a Little Brick Wall League.

Even as much as I loved baseball, as a small, skinny kid who (at least when away from the brick wall) did not demonstrate prodigy-level baseball skills, I was actually too scared to play Little League the first year I was eligible. Once I got started, however, I couldn't be stopped. I played 4 years of Little League, and when I graduated from that -- despite ample evidence that I had already, ah, peaked as a ballplayer -- I played 3 years of Senior League. Well, "played" is perhaps a little strong in the latter case, but I had a uniform, and I showed up for every game, and every once in awhile they'd let me out on the field until the good players showed up. There comes a point, unfortunately, when no matter how fiercely you love the game, it stops pretending it loves you back. Regardless, however, when I look back at my "career", what I mostly think about is the fact that I missed playing that first year.

As a parent, I have tried not to make my kids merely xeroxes of myself -- I want them to have their own interests and their own opinions. So my son is big on Legos, which I never cared about as a kid, and they both like Pokemon cards, which I find kind of weird. Still, I was certainly hoping that the boy & I could share baseball; when he turned out not to dislike it, but not be enthusiastic either, I won't deny I was a little bit disappointed.

I'll also concede I was a bit surprised when it was the daughter who started at a pretty young age to ask me to play ball in the yard, and before long to beg to play Little League. Life around here (especially in the evenings) can get a bit complex, so we held her back from playing for a couple years... but as she continued to ask, and I continued to remember that year I didn't play, it just felt like we had to let her play.

She's having a great time playing -- she shapes her whole week around games and practices -- and I'm having a good (although often nervous!) time watching. I try to be there all the time for her; I remember that in my later seasons, my dad would walk to the field... see that I wasn't playing, again, and turn & walk home. I want her to remember me there. And I resist as much as possible the urge to coach, although I do... ah... encourage her in very specific terms. Most importantly, I try really hard not to call her "honey", "sweetie", or "baby".

TFD: Holding Serve

2011-05-15T21:04:00.003-05:00

It’s been quite awhile since my last post – in fact, I don’t think I’ve ever gone quite this long without disgorging something. In that time I’ve had ample opportunity to think about my favorite subjects, including of course me.

While I was pretty busy in the intervening weeks – including all my annual tasks connected to my fantasy baseball league; the beginning of both major league and Little League baseball; Holy Week; and the yearly Income Tax Ordeal – I don’t know that I was honestly too busy to write. In some ways it felt mostly like I didn’t have that much to say… maybe that’s an indication that I’ve already said everything worthwhile (I have been at this for more than five years!), or maybe at a deeper level I’m just not all that interesting.

There is for sure one aspect of my cosmopolitan, jet-set, on-the-go existence that I ponder quite often; I’ve hesitated to write about it because there are so many ways it can come out badly, but maybe if I can cross it off the list, something else will take its place.

I think that, constitutionally, I’m as selfish as the average person. I can confess – since my family never reads this – that if I bring an especially delicious treat in the house, I tend to store it in the most inconspicuous spot I can find. I’m not saying hide, exactly – OK, I did hide that 3.5 lb bag of peanut M&Ms… but I swear that was for everyone else’s protection… sort of. But I’m big enough to admit that I don’t usually call attention to such items either. In fact, I’m big enough to do most anything, since I quite often eat all the treats myself.

So what I’m getting at is that I certainly don’t see myself as Gandhi or Mother Teresa or anything. But there is no getting around the fact that in the structure of my daily life, I take on the role of a servant as much as any other role.

I have written about this before, and I’m sure it looks from some angles like I’m sitting here faux-modestly and stretching up my neck to receive a reassuring pat on the head. Hey, I wouldn’t put it past me to be a trifle mixed in my motivations. But I think mostly I’m just holding it up to the light and turning it around and trying to understand what it is. If it’s an ego issue at all, it’s probably more related to thinking that I can make it interesting to anyone else.

In fact, I think that if anything I’m finally starting to understand just how not-applause-worthy it all is. If I sort of cross-reference my life with Scripture, what I think I understand is that far from being up for the Nobel Prize in the husband/father category, it may be that I’m just meeting basic expectations (if that, even). After all, it says in Ephesians that husbands and wives are to submit themselves to one another; while that passage is often taken to mean something more like “obey”, I wonder if it’s not closer to the idea that in a marriage each partner may at times, or frequently, need to put aside individual ambitions for the good of the other.

So when I get right down to it, I understand that when I defer -- or even extinguish, so to speak -- following my more immediate desires, I don't get to take a bow. I have to say, I find that... really annoying. I like getting credit for stuff, and I love looking like the good guy. Instead I'm supposed to pull a Joe Friday -- "Just doing my job, ma'am."

Carrying it a little further, of course, I run smack into Philippians 2:

⁵ In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus:
⁶ Who, being in very nature^[a] God,
did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;
⁷ rather, he made himself nothing
by taking the very nature^[b] of a servant...

So I apparently don't win the prize; all I get is the home version of the game...

House Arrest in HD

2011-03-07T21:40:00.000-05:00

I've never seen the movie "A Clockwork Orange" -- in fact, after a brief exploration of the movie courtesy of our Wikifriends, I believe I'm actually quite grateful that I never have. It's also really gratifying that I'm actually too young to have seen it the first time around. At my age, and I don't believe I've ever used that phrase before, being "too young" for anything is not to be taken lightly. However, the most famous scene from that movie has been floating around at least as a concept for a long time, so I got the reference when Lost used a similar scene. Let's just say, if you're not familiar, that too much TV can be not good for you.

On the other hand, consider the postulate advanced by a noted,ah, lifestyles researcher: "Too much of a good thing can be wonderful." I have to say I've already had cause to wonder about that on more than one occasion, usually related to expense account meals or some other form of free food.

So taken all around, I'm having a hard time deciding exactly how I feel about this. OK, I know you hate it when I force you to follow a link (or as my wife says, how come you're underlining random words?), so here it is in a nutshell:

Major League Baseball is conducting a casting call for a baseball fan’s dream job. The winner of this Dream Job promotion will move to NYC to star in a baseball web series and be a part of a live interactive experience for baseball fans that will include watching every MLB game over the course of the entire baseball season (simultaneously when multiple games are on at the same time), blogging opinions, interacting with fans through social media and appearing in video blogs. The web series will be distributed on MLB.com and through social media outlets.

Well, sure, if baseball is good -- surely that is a fundamental truth -- then mo' baseball is mo' better, and ALL of baseball has to be awesome. So that would be a hard job to turn down... except perhaps for a couple of pesky obstacles. The list of skill requirements is pretty daunting, but it really gets crazy when you check out the "Responsibilities" section.

Even before that, of course, it would be a tough row to hoe for anyone who already had a ... you know... life. Not that there's ever going to be an action-packed reality series based on my life, although I suppose it might possibly appeal to the Agoraphobic Channel. But I'm fairly sure that my employers would notice I was gone after, say, a few weeks. And at home the laundry would pile up and there's only so much peanut butter you can stock ahead of time. So I'm not sure I fit the target audience of No Friends, No Family, No Job, No Particular Reason Not to Throw All Your Possessions in a Liquor Store Box and Take Off for the Big Apple.

As a matter of fact, looking a little closer, we discern that they are not explicitly promising a suite at the Plaza; to be precise, "Must reside in a location picked by MLB in New York City for the entire baseball season." I think it would likely be relatively difficult to find a steam grate with high-speed wifi, so the "location" probably has walls... beyond that, who knows.

Here's the one that really got me, though: "Must be present in the location to observe all MLB regular season and postseason games during the 2011 season." I take that to mean you have to be in your chair any time there's a game on -- even West Coast night games that start after 10pm New York time. I'm hoping that they supply a wide variety of delivery menus; it would also help if there were screens in, um, some of the less typical rooms of the house.

But at least you won't have to worry about keeping your dignity intact. The promotion is co-sponsored by Endemol USA, makers of quality television programming such as "Deal or No Deal", "Wipeout", and perhaps most appropriately, "Big Brother".

A Different Annual Review

2011-02-16T20:54:00.008-05:00

Almost any website has the potential to ensnare me... I have to be very careful at baseball-reference.com, for example, because any player page or team page I visit always leads to 2 or 3 more, and so on, and so on...

Another fun read is at tvtropes.org. This site defines a "trope" as follows: "Tropes are devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members' minds and expectations." For example, in sitcoms everyone's familiar with the bumbling dad, the precocious kid, etc.

Practically every movie trailer is built around tropes, captured brilliantly here:

One you hear with some regularity in a movie ad, often quoted from the reviewer for the Cedar Rapids Weekly Shopper, is "If you see only one movie all year, make it this one." Of course, this is really relevant to me because the over/under on the number of movies I attend in a given year pretty much is 1, especially if you discount anything with talking animals and/or animated characters.

So when I do decide to go to The Cinema, particularly for the Valentine's Date, there's a certain pressure there... and as a result, I was particularly gratified to score an absolute bullseye with my choice.

I also found it interesting that the night after the movie date, I watched a movie on HBO that was the complete antithesis, and in fact the movie that serves as a virtual graduate course in tropes: Valentine's Day.

OK, I'm not saying it's not an entertaining movie. It's pretty fun in its own narrow genre, and hey, it's a romcom, it's really not meant to be a documentary. I am finding it slightly ironic that the ultimate disposable, forgettable movie has obsessed me for several days -- but as is so often the case, that may say more about me than it. You were ahead of me on that one, weren't you.

In the movie, there are a bunch of couples -- it's easy to lose track -- and along the way there are the usual misadventures and misunderstandings, but by the end every single couple gets their happy-ever-after moment; several Life Lesson Speeches are delivered. Each couple fits a particular demographic, of course, and somehow they all connect with each other in the course of the single day depicted in the film. But what struck me the most about the movie is that from start to finish, there's not a single instance of behavior that represents the way people actually behave in real life.

Try this: 2 high school girls, basically acquaintenances, are trying to find a time to have a meeting. One says, "I can't do it at lunch, I'm having sex with my boyfriend for the first time today."

Or how about this one: a man is visited by his fiancee in the morning; she's obviously having second thoughts but he's so excited he's oblivious to it. At lunchtime he goes home to find her moving out, and she breaks up with him; by midnight, he's kissing another woman who he realizes is his true soulmate.

Fortunately, that's not the movie we actually paid for*. And by the way, just let me say that I know I live in the past; it's true that in my head, you can buy a pair of Levis for $18 and a nice pair of shoes for $30, maybe even a new car for 10 grand. I fight against that kind of mindset every time I walk into a retail establishment... still, I was astonished to pay twenty-one dollars and fifty cents for 2 movie tickets.

* I have to admit that, with as little as we watch HBO, it probably cost even more than the one we "paid for".

I did have lots of time in the theater to recover from the shock, between the commercials and the coming attractions and the continuing harangues about not talking or texting (I'm no expert, but is it really impossible to text in a movie theater without disturbing anyone?), and then at long (long, long, long) last we got to see The King's Speech.

Just a lovely, lovely movie about relationships, with people who act like real people act. And filled with marvelous performances; it's a treat to watch actors who can show you what they're thinking and feeling just with facial expressions, communicating just as clearly as any big chunks of clunky dialogue.

I know it's already been around the block, and might even be difficult to find in the theater. But if you haven't seen it yet, it's worth your while to hunt it down, at least if you enjoy movies that are not explosion-based. Maybe I'll even be inspired to try to shoehorn a SECOND film into 2011.

You Kids Get Off My 50-Yard Line

2011-02-07T22:18:00.007-05:00

A few weeks back, my daughter was annoyed at me for some reason -- it's possible she didn't even know herself, of course -- so as she came down the stairs behind me, she made a disparaging remark about a relative scarcity of hair on a certain spot that was directly in her line of sight. Don't get me wrong, I'm aware of what's going on back there... but I am content to keep it behind me (much like some of my hairstyles from days gone by).

In similar fashion, I'm as aware as anyone who sees me that I'm middle-aged, but as long as I stay away from mirrors and try not to exercise too much, I don't have to face up to the grisly facts all that often. In my mind, I'm still... I don't know, mid-thirties?

So it's pretty annoying when it gets flung at me as it did yesterday. I can remember when the Super Bowl was the biggest football game of the year, rather than a national holiday. The first one I can recall watching was Super Bowl VII, when the Dolphins beat the Redskins. As far as I know, 100 million people were not online immediately afterwards, debating the quality of the commercials; just to see exactly how much things have changed, note the following, courtesy of Wikipedia:

The pregame show was a tribute to Apollo 17, the sixth and last mission to date to land on the Moon and the final one of Project Apollo. The show featured the crew of Apollo 17 and the Michigan Marching Band.
Later, the Little Angels of Chicago's Angels Church from Chicago performed the national anthem.
The halftime show, featuring Woody Herman and the Michigan Marching Band along with The Citrus College Singers and Andy Williams, was titled "Happiness Is".

As far as I could tell yesterday, Andy Williams did not appear in the halftime show -- although there's no way to prove he wasn't one of those people with the white suits and LED lights (if you can get a jumpsuit over one of those wintery sweaters he seemingly favored). I read Entertainment Weekly, so I know who the Black Eyed Peas are; while I don't have a vast collection of their music, I actually do have a will.i.am song, thanks to the kids -- his version of "I Like to Move It", from Madagascar. It's fun, and I was thinking the halftime show might be kind of cool...

Then they came on and in about 2 minutes I was transformed, against my will, into my father. I instantly became the "you call that music?" guy. "That's not singing, it's yelling!" I could almost feel my hairline receding as I watched. Plus there was a part of me that was crying out, "No! Please don't be that guy! You're still youthful (pay no attention to that hair exodus)!"

I have since regained a little of my equanimity, finding that I was not the only one who was, ah, underwhelmed. And I'm not really calling for a return engagement for the Michigan Marching Band, or even Andy Williams. It's just... I love my dad, and I respect him, and for someone to say I reminded them of him would be an honor. But this wasn't the way I had in mind. Fortunately, instead of blaming myself for What I've Become, I can blame the Black Eyed Peas for yanking it out of me involuntarily.

Be It Ever So Humble

2011-01-31T21:42:00.003-05:00

One of the topics I have mined pretty frequently for bloggish fodder is travel, both family and business trips. And in the case of the latter, I don't believe I've been very successful in keeping the secret that I look forward to business trips (and perhaps more so than vacations).

There's not too much to hate about it, really, starting with the fact that someone else is paying the entire tab, as well as hosting you at better hotels and restaurants than you would typically seek out on your own. Well, the restaurant thing not so much necessarily; when on the road and given a chance to choose the stereotypical Relatively Fancy Local Restaurant over the usual middle-of-the-road chain place, I go for predictable over chance for greatness basically every time.

I work harder, and longer, on the road than I ever do at home, but it's energizing to put your ability on the line in front of colleagues and clients. Or just to see colleagues and clients, since I spend 99% of my time isolated at home.

And I also have to admit that being away from home, and free from the domestic responsibilities that usually wrap themselves around work's demands, holds a good measure of appeal. Love my kids, love my wife, don't mind taking a break from it all once or twice a year.

This week I am on my first business trip in more than a year... and I am also clearly being punished for looking forward to it just a tiny bit.

If you are reading this more or less in real time, you're aware that travel throughout most of the country is in upheaval right now due to a severe winter storm covering almost all of the US that actually has a winter. Here are a few... ah... highlights of my trip so far.

* It's a 2-day trip from NY to MO, so I have to travel on Sunday to get there in time. It's hard to fly directly to Columbia, MO, so I have to fly into St. Louis, then drive more than an hour. I pick the latest possible flight so I can spend the most time with family... but I miscalculate the total length of the trip and there's no way I can get there before 11. Local time -- midnight body time.

* Southwest allows you to check in online 24 hours before takeoff, and I actually check in 23:59 before, putting me in the "A" boarding group. This allows me to get a really choice seat, but does not in any way prevent the mom with the crying baby from sitting across the aisle, one row back.

* Baltimore/Washington International is not known for even the level of cuisine I favor on trips. The best possible choice for fine dining turns out to be... Quizno's.

* I get to St. Louis and head for the baggage carousel; as I walk up, about 8 bags come tumbling out, none of them mine. I sit down to wait for the rest of them. I watch the carousel for probably 20 minutes until it dawns on me, with nearly lightning speed, that there ain't nothin' else coming. I go to the baggage office; they have no clue where it went but they take my contact info. They think they can get it to me sometime on Monday.

* Since I am delayed picking up my car by my absorption with luggage, by the time I drive halfway across the state to Columbia, I arrive mere moments before midnight. A good preparation for my 7:30 meeting the next morning. On the bright side, it won't take long to choose my wardrobe.

* We get to our meeting Monday morning, and practically the first thing our host says is, "There's an enormous storm coming tomorrow; if you don't get out today, you might not get to leave till Thursday." We stumble through the meeting till the first break, but instead of using the restroom, we all get busy trying to change our flights. I get a 4:15 out of St. Louis (and let Southwest know I'm coming to get my bag, so don't send it!).

* The meeting breaks up and our team takes off. I stop for lunch at the hotel, then I start out for St. Louis. As I get on the highway, my cell rings... it's an automated message from Southwest to tell me my flight's canceled. I circle back to the hotel but I can't reach the airline to reschedule; I can't even get through.

* It's pretty icy on the windows (the roads are surprisingly drivable), but the luxurious rental Toyota Yaris I'm driving has no scraper on board. I use a plastic bottletop. Oh, and here's a quote from right before I left the house on Sunday: "I'm not going to need a hat or gloves."

So here I am in St. Louis; I hope to be going out tomorrow afternoon (through Orlando, since at least there's no ice or snow there). In the meantime, here's a tiny measure of good news that struck me just a little while ago: I have no meetings tomorrow. I have no children to get me up tomorrow. I'm at least planning to travel virtually all day tomorrow, so while I intend to get some work done in the morning, there's really no schedule-based urgency.

In short, I need neither a mechanical nor human alarm, and I can basically get up whenever I want to. And I have absolutely no clue when that happened last.

The Best Kind of Sticker Shock

2011-01-17T22:44:00.004-05:00

I was a genius when I was a kid.

I was reading before most kids my age even knew their letters. School came easy to me; I was always ahead of everyone else, always got the best grades. Gradually my pervasive awesomeness overcame most of my native humility and I got a little arrogant about how brilliant I was – rarely (although I can't honestly say never) as an excuse to act superior to others, but sometimes as license to goof off.

Then came the day I had to go home & tell my mother I was failing reading. “How can you be failing reading?” she retorted. “All you ever DO is read.” That was a Scared Straight moment for me and after that I resumed my previous trajectory, continuing at the top of my class all the way through.

It was really when I got to graduate school that I grasped the essential truth: that I wasn’t that special intelligence-wise after all. I was blessed with the ability to pick up new ideas pretty quickly; I was always very successful in testing situations; and I was motivated to succeed and/or scared to fail. Bright “enough”, quick-witted maybe, definitely faster with a punchline than was probably healthy (in multiple senses)… but no genius. I met people in grad school who had the sheer brainpower, as well as the will, to tackle complex problems and just chip away at them until they got to the other end. That was not me; I made it through my Master’s just fine, but no one was throwing incentives at me to get me to shoot for a doctorate.

Still, as kind of a geeky kid, and then adult, who loves to use big words, has a fairly (um…) complex sense of humor, and knows a fair amount of trivia about a variety of subjects, I’m probably most comfortable around bright, educated people – not because I’m a snob, but because they tend to “get” me better. Literally, they speak my language. And I always hoped that when my kids got old enough, I could introduce them to Twain and Thurber and O’Rourke, we could discuss the intricacies of baseball analysis, then sit around exchanging all sorts of obscure wordplay.

Then our son was born, and we gradually learned that he had some intellectual and emotional challenges. Not the kind that get you a telethon or label you “handicapped”… just the kind that ensure you’re always going to start the race from the back of the pack. And while nothing we learned diminished my love for him even an iota, it did kind of make my heart sink.

Not because I was disappointed in him. Not because I couldn’t point to what an awesome success my kid was. Because I thought it meant we’d never “get” each other. The things that make me who I am, in a sense, are things that will never be a part of him at all; the things I love are largely out of reach for him.

Or so I feared. He’s 11 now, and as a semi-part-time stay-at-home dad, I spend more time with him than anyone else and I know him better than anyone else. What I’ve learned is that he loves music, just like I do. He loves a good joke – granted he doesn’t always know why it’s funny, but he often seems to be able to feel the funny even when he can’t quite spot it. He has a particular facility for a very odd trivia subspecialty: if he hears a voice on a cartoon, he’ll often point out that it’s the same actor who did a different voiceover. In fact he’s almost infallible at that and at, “Hey dad, we heard this song last year when we were going…”

I wrote before about some of his school struggles and the way he was overcoming them or at least persevering. At this point he’s classified as Special Ed, so while he spends part of his day in the general classroom, he also gets extra accommodations and small-group instruction with individual help.

I was standing at the bus stop waiting for him one day several weeks back when a car went by with one of those “my kid is an honor student” bumper stickers and I thought, you know, if my boy ever came home with one of those, I think my head would explode. A few minutes after that, he got off the bus and we walked up the street to the house, where he pulled out his backpack and said, “Hey dad, look what I got at school today…”

Turns out it wasn’t that essential after all – but it’s sure cool having one more thing in common.

Yet Another Christmas Review

2011-01-04T22:20:00.004-05:00

I guess I need to figure out (once again) whether it’s my life that’s out of whack, or my expectations.

Every year I have this vision in my head about how Christmas is going to look, and every year my actual mileage varies. By quite a bit, really. I’ve written about this before, enough times in fact that it’s probably time to wake up and smell the eggnog. I seem to be perpetually in danger of missing Christmas because our Christmas doesn’t look like the one I see in my mind’s eye.

After all, our Christmas is pretty entertaining in its own somewhat skewed way. But with three services on Christmas Eve, for example, and creating PowerPoints for 2 of them and providing all the music for the third, I may not ever get a profoundly spiritual experience out of it – at least not from sitting in church. Maybe, however, from incessantly cycling through over 300 Christmas songs on my iPod, or from sitting quietly in front of the tree, or from trying to help my own kids keep the meaning of the season front & center, or even from a paragraph in a Christmas letter – even if it’s my own.

Even though we may have fallen short, once again, in observing the rituals I’d like to see become our family-traditional Christmas, there are always events of the season that guarantee we won’t forget it. Such as:

· My son playing a Wise Man in a contemporary retelling of the Christmas story – in this case a Wise Man who was too busy at a conference to discuss “Celestial Signs of the Coming Messiah” to actually notice the birth when it happened.

· The kids deciding that the best way to give Santa a list is to wait till the last possible moment, and in fact revising the list as their last act before going to bed Christmas Eve.
· Dad hauling out presents to put under the tree, eating the cookies left for Santa (and a few more, just for the sake of realism), pouring the milk back into the jug, and then settling down – AFTER midnight – to compose the traditional Santa Reply Letter. Don’t ask me where Jolly Old St. Nick keeps the laptop and printer on the sleigh.
· In response to each child’s inquiries, the letter addressing subjects including (a) how the reindeer are doing, (b) what Santa’s favorite baseball team is, and (c) how exactly he can tell from all the way up there who’s been naughty and who’s been nice. Also, why you’re not getting any of the presents no one even knew you wanted because you just added them to your list on Christmas Eve.
· Watching on Christmas morning as the boy disappears in a blizzard of wrapping paper scraps, surfacing only to ask repeatedly, “Are there any more presents for me?”
· My daughter walking around the house all Christmas day in a ninja costume, playing a trumpet which someone with apparently a rather evil sense of humor has given her, while…
· Her brother spends most of his day trying to sneak up on people with a remote-controlled Rude Bodily Noisemaking Device that someone else with a rather evil sense of humor has sent us.
· The girl pausing in the midst of a soliloquy about all the cool stuff Santa brought her to look sharply at dad and say, “Wait a minute, did you…?” before stopping herself. “What were you going to ask me?” “Never mind…”

And of course there’s one other tradition that never misses – the hurried sprint out of town for vacation, since as long as she’s in the same town where the church is located, she can hear it calling her (this is the spot where I really wanted to include a sound clip of the slot machine in this Twilight Zone episode, but I couldn't find it as a standalone).

I have to say, this time it kind of worked for me too... once we got out of town, I forgot all about what was "supposed" to happen, and I just enjoyed my vacation. Maybe next year I can start that frame of mind before Christmas!

How Green Was My Mountain

2010-11-30T21:09:00.007-05:00

I suppose that if the only knowledge someone had of me came from reading this blog, it’s possible they would think I’m forever gazing into the rearview mirror. Now it’s true that while driving, I make it a practice always to be aware of my surroundings, fore and aft – you never know when an unanticipated lane change might be necessary. But in the larger, more metaphorical sense, I’d like to think I don’t spend any more time looking back over my shoulder than most people.

I won’t deny that it can be very enjoyable, if only in the same way that stretching a sore muscle or wiggling a loose tooth is… faintly painful, but simultaneously satisfying somehow. And since I have a real love for understanding the way things fit together, I puzzle over the meaning of what’s gone before. And since I’m insufferably annoying, I write about it. Which taken altogether leads to a high proportion of backwards-facing blog posts.

I really wasn’t looking for yet another one; they can be the trickiest kind to write, because understanding the past and making it both comprehensible and even potentially interesting to someone who wasn’t there is a tall order (I stumbled across a post recently in which a guy gave a complete review of all his fantasy sports teams, which was perhaps mildly gratifying to the guys who were ahead of him in the league, but not, I thought, a winning strategy for drawing in long-term readership). But as seems to be so often the case, circumstances pushed me where I wasn’t planning to go.

By the way, here’s MS Word’s take on that previous sentence: “If the marked words are an incomplete thought, consider developing this thought into a complete sentence by adding a subject or a verb or combining this text with another sentence.”

The first event, a couple of weeks ago, was the 13^th anniversary of starting my current job. Granted, I’ve shifted jobs within the company, and the company itself was absorbed by a Gigantically Extensive multinational corporation, but still it’s considered my corporate anniversary (as it turns out, the 13^th anniversary is “congratulatory email from your manager”).

I suppose in some ways it’s kind of a lukewarm achievement, but it’s pretty astonishing when you consider the 13 years previous to my start date, when I was teaching part-time and filling in with other part-time odd jobs (and I’m not choosing the word “odd” casually) and never went a whole year with exactly the same “mix” of workplaces. Then when my wife graduated from seminary and we moved to Vermont, I decided it was also time to graduate from perpetually semi-employed Adjunct Instructor to a Real Job.

As I was reflecting on that milestone, I was also reading a book by Chris Bohjalian that was set in Vermont – having discovered his writing because he was writing for the newspaper when we moved there. So I found myself in sort of a Green Mountain State of Mind, which I suppose is kind of like a New York State of Mind, except with cows and trees and plaid flannel instead of Billy Joel.

While I had a perfectly satisfying time living in Vermont, I was not seized by any agonies when we were asked to move back to Upstate New York, so I was a tiny bit surprised when I reflected on my New England sojourn and realized how pivotal – and I mean that fairly literally, in the turning point/change of direction sense – that time had been for me. Consider the following developments in the space of just less than 6 years there:

~ Most obviously, both my job and my career. For the first time, I had a regular 9-to-5 type full-time permanent job. In other words, it was the first time my job didn’t come with an expiration date. And once you’ve lived the semester-to-semester lifestyle, the “normal” kind represents an enormous weight off your shoulders. As a nice bonus, I discovered that I enjoyed my new career and I was also pretty good at it, not to mention that the word “salary” has a lovely ring to it.
~ It was also my transition back to Parsonage World, being the spouse of a minister with all that entails. Let me be quick to say that being married to the pastor doesn’t make me special in any way – it certainly doesn’t mean that anything I say or do should be treated as having come down from the mountaintop on stone tablets – but it does make me a lot more visible. I live in the knowledge that if I do something wrong or offend anyone or generally screw up, it can have a negative effect on her ability to do her job in a way that could never be true the other way around. As such, it was kind of a rocky transition for me because I became very self-conscious about the image I was projecting to others, and despite my experience growing up in a parsonage, it was a couple of years before I stopped taking myself quite so seriously and was able to really be myself (not that me trying extra-hard to be on my best behavior is entirely a bad idea).
~ It was the time period when my children were born, meaning not only the blessing of their addition to the family, but also the adjustment from being a couple to being… well, a family. I suppose that sounds condescending to couples with no children, but my point is really that it sounds and smells and tastes and feels so different. I’m only speaking for me: I knew in my heart that while I loved being the two of us, there would always be a hole in my heart until there were more. I may not know much about the will of God, but I have always been convinced that I was meant to be a dad – not making any judgments about my skill for same – and in Vermont I finally got to do it.
~ It was my return from The Exile. You see, if you don’t count college, for the first 32 years of my life, I lived in 5 different homes, and if you drew a line to connect them, it would be about 50 miles from end to end. The Capital District of New York State is in a lot of ways as much a part of me as my hair color (ok, what my hair color used to be; I don’t know what all’s going on up there right now) or my extremely long & narrow feet. Even my college was still in New York -- Western New York, but close enough that I could feel in my bones that I was just visiting and I could go home any time I needed to.
So when my wife chose a seminary in Ohio, it must have been sheer naiveté for me to think the adjustment would be simple. “A fish out of water” may be a cliché, but like almost all clichés, it got that way by being so true: from the moment I arrived in Dayton, I felt out of my element – no, I was out of my element -- and was quickly emotionally (and nearly physically) gasping for air. It wasn’t that I didn’t like Dayton, but it never for a moment felt like home.
Vermont isn’t upstate New York, and native Vermonters would often half-jokingly remind us that you’re not a real Vermonter till you’ve got six generations in the ground, but it’s geographically and topographically and culturally close enough that when we moved there I felt like I’d been thrown back into the water and could breathe again.
I understood much, much later that it was just as much a case of having been uprooted from my church home in New York, not really finding one for over a year in Ohio, and then getting a new start in Vermont, that accounted for my V-shaped trajectory… but in either case, whether Vermont was the cause of my recovery/rebirth or just the innocent bystander, it was certainly where and when it happened.

The churches of Vermont have now been officially separated from the churches of New York, so the likelihood that I’ll ever live there again is pretty close to zero. Somehow I kinda feel like I’ve already lived there for a lifetime anyway.

Practically My AARP Application

2010-11-02T20:53:00.002-05:00

Someone who knows me very well once said that I was middle-aged when I was 9 years old. That's probably not the most flattering thing anyone ever said about me... but nonetheless pretty hard to argue against. I mean, it's not like I was born wearing a 3-piece suit or anything -- but if you look hard at the sonogram you might see the outline of a tiny bow tie.

Given that, you can see what I'm fighting against as the years advance and the hair retreats, or at least redistributes itself to some unpredictable locations. I don't want to be the proverbial get-off-my-lawn guy, but I can't much help myself; even when I was a teen I was trying to keep the neighbor out of my yard, and she was gorgeous, so I clearly can't help myself.

Adding another layer to the issue, I have to confess that Halloween has never held much appeal for me. The costume takes something of a creativity factor (and/or a thick wallet), not exactly up my alley; the whole atmosphere of the holiday is built around a certain enjoyment of the macabre and creepy, which is completely incomprehensible to me; and what's up with walking up to a stranger's door and asking them for candy? I've been known to visit friends and be unable to ask where the bathroom is, so again this holiday is not designed for me. And, to complete the woebegone picture of the little kid as sort of accountant-in-waiting, as a kid I (somehow) didn't have that much interest in candy (now? Yes, please).

This doesn't really fit anywhere, but let's pause a moment to consider the genius of wearing one of those thin nylon bodysuit costumes in an area where the average low temperature on Oct. 31 is 35 degrees. Nothing says 'superpowers' like a parka and mittens.

Why do I go through this elaborate setup? Because I'm incapable of doing otherwise. Well, that, but also I know how this is going to sound. Complaining about Halloween Nowadays is going to come off like the usual Why in my day everything was fun and innocent and these kids today just don't know how good they've got it and whatever happened to simpler values and and and....

My real point, however, if I haven't already run out the clock on having one, is that while I've never really 'gotten' or especially enjoyed Halloween, it's way worse now than it was. It wasn't much fun then, and it's considerably less fun now.

I know I'm hopelessly square and old -- I got an excellent head start on coming to terms with that, as a child -- but what I see around me is mostly just disgusting. I get that the white sheet with the eyeholes is Charlie Brown-passe, but so many of the costumes I see now have to look like the wearer is actually bleeding, or decaying, or at least getting ready to kill a bunch of people. Several of the kids at the Cub Scout Halloween party -- Cub Scouts, now, say ages 6-12 -- had some sort of zombie-looking garb AND semi-automatic weapons. I suppose with as slowly as the traditional zombie moves, it pays to have something to even up the odds a little.

In that case, I guess I should congratulate the costumes that don't require a parental advisory sticker, except a lot of those aren't costumes at all. I saw a couple of young-teen girls just wearing what appeared to be kitty ears. Get your mind out of the gutter; I don't mean just kitty ears in the sense of 'kitty ears and nothing else at all', I mean it in the sense of, "Let's put on our coats and go out to scam some candy -- hey, look, put these on your head so we can say it's a costume."

But they make up for it with their charm and personality. A big clump of them comes up & rings the doorbell; when you open the door, they shove a pillowcase in your face and stand there till you come across. I have to say it does not exactly bring out the gracious host in me.

Sigh. I know. I KNOW. They're just kids, and scary can be fun, and they're just trying on roles as kids have done forever, and I shouldn't expect everyone to have perfect please and thank you manners, and I'm probably the last person in the world who should be criticizing others for leveraging opportunities for free food. And I should stop being such a study hall monitor already. I guess I was just hoping that we could get all excited, and drop money on costumes and giveaway treats, and tromp around in the cold and rain, for something a little more... life-affirming?

OK, I have to admit, it wasn't a total loss. We were still making the rounds when my daughter dug around in her pumpkin-shaped bucket and pulled out and handed to me... a tiny, tiny (TINY! I believe it was the 1.74 oz. size, or maybe 6 pieces) bag of Peanut M&Ms.

Atmosphere Is for Meteorologists

2010-10-05T21:31:00.000-05:00

Shortly after my wife and I were married, we mutually discovered that one of us had the interest, plus a little bit of experience, to do the grocery shopping. So began the process -- which continues to this day -- of dividing the domestic duties according to something other than standard, traditional gender roles.

Early in my tenure as the Potentate of Provender, I discovered something that put a light in my eye and a spring in my step: Edwards Food Warehouse. As it turned out, I needed all the light my eye could supply, for Edwards was a large, square, dimly-lit barn without a hint of ambiance; their purpose was to charge about 18 cents less than the other guys for each item -- passing the savings on light bulbs and shiny floor tile on to the consumer.

There are few more potent combos for me than food and saving money (see also the Entertainment Book), so it was almost a physical blow to me when Edwards went out of business. And as we moved about ourselves, virtually my first task in each new location was to scout out the grocery with the best value (in Ohio, Meijer was cheaper than Kroger; in Vermont, Price Chopper was usually better than Shaw's; back in Upstate New York, Price Chopper beats Hannaford).

I'm always diligent in tracking PC sales, especially their Buy One Get One (BOGO) and even on occasion Buy One Get Two, along with clipping coupons and using the Advantedge savings card. Of course, shopping like this means that occasionally... supply outstrips demand. So in recent years I've had a large shelf in the basement, and a small freezer in the garage to store the items that -- well, it's not that they're not needed; it's more that their time hasn't come yet. I don't think of them as "extra" or "surplus", but rather Bench Strength. Any good coach needs a deep and flexible bench. It should also be noted that in our house, we go through cereal, and peanut butter, and toilet paper like... well, like they're being used extensively every day.

One of the hidden hazards of moving was that I had to drain down the surplus a bit (plus pack a bunch of, ah, less-immediately-needed items, which itself resulted in a Spousal Advisory). So when the dust cleared in the new home -- oh, if only that were a metaphor -- I found myself feeling somewhat under-supplied to face up to the needs of the household.

The upside of the move, however (in my never-ending quest to find the silver lining for every cloud), was that I found myself a mile from BJ's Wholesale Club, which not only sells all sorts of things at a discount but was even having a sale on the membership fee! Why, it's as if they created the place specifically for me....

I am, as surely everyone who might possibly care knows, virtually unerring in my church attendance, but I find I attend BJ's scarcely less regularly. The atmosphere, if you could call it that, is reminiscent of Edwards (not to mention redolent of tires) but it looks like Shangri-La to me.

Here are some of the treasures I've unearthed on my voyages of discovery:

% 2 one-gallon apple juice jugs linked at the handle
% a package containing a dozen toothbrushes
% 3 jars of peanut butter shrink-wrapped together
% 3 one-pound bags of Goldfish, in a single box
% a huge cello-bag of juice pops that I can "pop" in the freezer a few at a time
% a two-pound block of mozzarella
% a jug of Windex big enough to keep all our windows clean until we move again
% a wall adapter for my iPod
% 3 cans of shave gel -- say it with me -- shrink-wrapped together

So my shelves are once again robust, which in turn has contributed to a feeling of being a little more settled and "at home". Plus, if there's ever a nationwide shortage of peanut butter or shave gel, or tortellini or AA batteries, I'm going to be sitting pretty.

Trees, Swaying in the Summer Breeze

2010-09-20T21:28:00.000-05:00

OK, I guess it's more or less over -- although they are saying we have some 80-degree days coming this week. Still, I've been wearing a lot of long pants lately, and even a jacket for the cool early-morning trip to the bus stop. Of course, that could be just because my temperature control hasn't had a chance to reboot.

But the calendar tells us that the end of summer is just days away. And it's already been a couple of weeks since I celebrated Labor Day in my traditional fashion: I sat at home and mourned the fact that summer had ended basically before it even felt like it started.

So it's perhaps emotional self-preservation that prompts me to look back more intentionally on my summer. Granted a lot of the carefree spirit was leached out of it by the move and all the attendant stress, work, and expenditure... but somehow we still managed to shoehorn our share of summery fun:

# We didn't spend an inordinate amount of time at camp, but we managed a handful of days.
# Thanks to one of our new neighbors, the kids were able to swim almost at will.
# There were a number of picnics, including one that served as a reunion for us with some friends from a previous congregation.
# I attended (and brought my daughter to) my first minor-league baseball game in a lot of years.
# We got to have a date at a fine local theater production of "On Golden Pond"...
# ... and also brought the whole family to a delightful, and absolutely free, outdoor production of "Annie Get Your Gun".
# You might already have heard about this, but it's worth re-emphasizing that the family vacation consumed about 15% of the summer all by itself.

While I am well-known from sea to shining sea for my generally sunny outlook on life, even a dyed-in-the-wool optimist such as myself can benefit from an effort to remember more of what goes on in my life than working and laundry and running the kids back & forth to childcare. Hope you also have some summer events that you can recall with satisfaction.

Classical Gas, I Know

2010-09-07T22:12:00.003-05:00

I still remember the first research paper I ever wrote -- I think it was in fourth grade*. We had to choose a state to report on, and since I had recently visited friends in Delaware with my family, that's what I chose. They helped out by sending me some brochures, and since I didn't know anything about research (and nobody taught me anything about it, either) I mostly cut out the pictures and pasted them on construction paper, then wrote a few sentences loaded with really basic facts -- you know, chief products, population, etc. Of course, I did have one really cool feature: since it was Delaware, the map I included was actual size.

*OK, I don't have to work too hard to "remember" -- I still have it.

I did a lot more papers over the years and it took awhile for me to get any better at it. I got pretty much called out for it in 7th grade when I wrote a paper about baseball. One of the problems was that the topic was baseball, and since I never narrowed it down from there, I never did get a handle on what to wrote. But again: I didn't feel like anyone ever taught me anything about writing papers, and it took me several tries to get the hang of it.

In college, I wrote a paper about lobbyists... which turned out not to be an awesome paper, due in part to my stupidity in being born too soon to use the Internet in college (and my college was so isolated that literally the only source available was the college library). But it was notable for the fact that it might have been the first paper I ever did where I picked the topic because it was something I wanted to know more about.

I didn't write too many more papers after that, and when I was out of school for good, I was actually disappointed, because I felt like I'd lost that chance to find out about more interesting topics. Nothing stopping me from learning, of course, but if there's no way to "present" it, it's like it's unfinished.

Now fast-forward 20+ years and I'm pondering creating a blog. I remember thinking at the time, hey, here's a place to write some research papers (although somehow I forgot to mention it)! That was until I discovered that merely writing the thing was plenty time-consuming enough, so more often than not I just make stuff up.

However, I still get curious about stuff, but this time I'm going to turn the research on its head: I'm going to ask the readers to supply the answers to a question that somehow got stuck in my brain this week.

I was reading about Aroldis Chapman, rookie pitcher for the Reds, who was clocked throwing a pitch 105 mph, fastest of the year and one of the fastest ever. There's been a lot of discussion about the theoretical limits of the human arm -- this on the heels, of course, of Usain Bolt and the parallel discussion of how fast a human can run.

From there, my mind made the leap to music, and I wondered how far you can push a particular musical genre -- like the Beatles did for pop and Miles Davis for jazz.

What about classical music? When I think of classical -- and I freely admit I'm totally naive here; it's not music that I actively seek out or think about much -- the names that come to mind are the guys like Bach and Mozart. While I could probably throw in Aaron Copland, I'm curious: if I were a classical music fan and were listening to the radio all the time or seeking out the hottest CDs/MP3s... would I be hearing primarily music that's 200 years old? Or are there current "classical" composers who are really considered in the same breath as the traditional masters? Contemporary classical seems kind of like a contradiction in terms.

As a rule, I don't get a lot of comments on my blog posts... but then again, when I read blogs, I probably comment 5% of the time or less, so that enables me to convince myself that I have a vast readership just waiting to be tapped. So this time there's no punchline -- I'm counting on you all for that.

Vacationpalooza Tour 2010

2010-08-23T21:27:00.007-05:00

The Family Summer Vacation is our annual phenomenon, and every year I attempt to make some sense of it in this space. But an experience so sprawling always proves elusive to summarize -- especially for someone like me who likes to be concise and brief and a man of few words and generally is not given to going on and on about something almost indefinitely until you finally are about to forget what the beginning of the sentence was.

Wait, what was I saying?

Oh yes... I was making the point that two weeks packed with adventures can even pose a writing challenge for someone such as myself, who is, you know, gifted with, like, words and stuff.

The basic structure of the trip does not change: the meat of the sandwich is several days at a beach house in North Carolina with "my side of the family" -- enjoyable despite the minor tensions inherent in putting 9 (related) people under the same roof. Every day we go to the beach, we read a lot, we eat, we talk and play cards, and at almost any given time someone is asleep. It's almost as close as any of us usually gets to turning off the main engines and simply idling for a prolonged period of time.

So it's doubtful that that portion holds any interest for anyone not related to me, or at least someone without an inordinate interest in sand castles (not that that's stopped me from the attempt in the past). But I thought it might be worthwhile to mention a few highlights from the "bread" of the trip sandwich -- the seemingly endless miles of interstate highway travel which we attempt to punctuate with Fun and/or Educational Experiences (and suite hotels with pools). The driving part of the trip was extremely grim, more than 1800 miles of travel split into not nearly bite-size chunks... but the Experiences seemed to be home runs across the board.

The first of these was the National Aquarium in Baltimore. As far as I can tell, they became the "National" aquarium essentially because they decided they would call themselves that... but they filled the bill and more. There were of course all manner of tanks full of beautiful or odd or scary marine life -- my wife was particularly mesmerized by the jellyfish -- but also a delightful and exciting dolphin show, and a couple of odd things: a rainforest habitat and a live show with native Australian animals. Come to think of it, I'm not sure they have any better grip on the concept of "aquarium" than they do of "national"... still, it was certifiably both Fun and Educational, and you don't see that every day. Frankly I have a hard time envisioning any visitor that wouldn't be captivated by a visit, and that's a pretty strong endorsement coming from me.

Since we were in such a rush to get to the beach, the second Big Adventure didn't arrive till the trip back: a visit to Sight and Sound Theater in Lancaster, PA. This was the trip my wife in particular had been yearning to make for several years. You might describe Sight & Sound as an attempt to bring the feel of the Broadway musical, mixed with a little bit of circus, to Biblical storytelling. The show we saw was Joseph, depicting his life from his conflicts with his brothers to slavery in Egypt to a respected position to prison back to a respected position to reconciliation with his family. It's a gripping story on the page... but presented on stage (multiple stages, actually) with scenery and costumes and music, and live animals, helps you understand and feel the story in a so much more visceral way. The show was thrilling and touching, one I think every Christian would certainly enjoy... and something I would urge on anyone who wasn't actively hostile to a story that revolves around faith.

The very next day saw Adventure #3, our third trip to Hersheypark (I should mention that we always start our Hershey day with a fun, and free, trip here). Hersheypark will remind you of basically every other amusement park: you've got rides, souvenir shops, shows, food... and you have to really keep busy all day long, not only to do everything but to keep yourself from thinking about the hurting they put on your wallet at the front gate (exacerbated this year by our 10-year-old being full-fare for the first time). Oddly, it was the one day of the trip that was not hot & humid, so some of the charm of the Intercoastal Waterway was diminished, but we still had a relaxing drift and also still hit the bumper cars and the Reese's Xtreme Cup Challenge and a bunch of entertaining shows. Our thrill-seeking 8-year-old daughter even ditched us long enough to get 2 roller-coaster rides and a trip on the Scrambler. It was a lot of fun even though we would have had to stay for another 3 weeks or so to get our money's worth out of it.

On the next & final day of the trip, dear old dad begged for a bit of Driver's Privilege. I've tried for the last couple of years to bend the trip to include the Martin Guitar factory tour but could never quite shoehorn it in with all the space Hersheypark takes up... but we were so close, and on our way home anyway.... I am a guitar player, and while Martin's a bit out of my price range, I appreciate them as wonderful instruments and works of art in their own right. The tour was an hour of walking through the factory with a guide who was once the plant manager (and should have invested a bit more of the salary in a better toupee). One of the neat features of the tour was that each person had their own headphones and the tour guide "broadcast" to us, which made it so much easier to know what was going on over the noise. Guitar-making these days is of course highly automated, but on the high end there is also a lot of hands-on craftsmanship -- to the point where it takes easily 3 months for one of their non-customized guitars to make it from pile of wood to finished instrument -- and we got to see both.

I now know much more about the guitar as an instrument than I did before, which was principally this: it makes no sense for me to buy an expensive one, because in my hands it sounds just the same as my (presumably non-craftsman-created) Yamaha that was $200 25 years ago. In fact, I think they disowned it because I can't find it on their website, although I did find it here and here.

We had other, smaller adventures along the way -- including coming home & then leaving the next morning for a camp weekend (including s'mores!) -- but these are the ones we'll remember when we look back...

... in a few weeks when the credit card bill arrives.

Breaking Up Is Hard to Do

2010-07-07T21:34:00.003-05:00

When I was in college, I had been dating a certain young woman for a matter of some weeks when she suddenly -- at least from my perspective -- broke up with me. Since I hadn't seen it coming, I asked to get together with her to discuss it; that began a series of meetings and intra-campus mails (and if you think you wait for an answer in these days of cellphones/texts/email, you ain't seen nothing. I think intra-campus mail was delivered by actual snails).

After the 2nd or perhaps 3rd face-to-face, my roommate -- he of the quiet demeanor and dry wit -- said to me, "So, are you guys done breaking up yet?"

As it turned out, that particular breakup didn't take, and we stayed together about 6 months more before the final exit ramp arrived...

That whole scenario came to mind once more about 10 days ago as our breakup (this time not a case of "it's not you, it's me" but rather Circumstances Beyond Our Control) with our previous home & church seemed to reach its own final exit ramp.

See, this has really been going on since March, when we got the call and first realized we would be moving on... then she had her interview with the new church and it began to be real; then we announced it at The Old Place. Then the process of saying goodbye begins in earnest, and everyone wants to know what the new place is like but on some level what they really want to know is, you're not leaving us for someone younger and prettier, are you?

Before you know it, everything you do is The Last Time I'll Ever Do This, and the process of packing hammers it home every day almost like the sound of a door being slammed. Then comes the goodbye party and a struggle to put into words what we mean to each other; the last service, with the last sermon; and suddenly, very much before you can come to grips with what's happening, you find yourself standing in an empty house as two big trucks pull out with all your belongings and you close that front door for The Last Time Ever. And you cry.

At that point you'd forgive us for feeling, "OK, that was horribly painful but at least that part is over now and we can at last get on with the rest of our lives"... right? Not so fast. Because The Master Scheduler had us first to move, she actually had to go back one more time for the annual service/picnic in the park -- which of course prompts a fresh round of goodbyes. And in actuality, even after the service is over, there are still 10 days left in the month, and she's still officially pastor there, even though they've promised not to call except for emergencies.

So the breakup -- or maybe legal separation -- drags on. We're not living together any more, but the divorce (annulment?) hasn't come through yet. The following Sunday we're back in town for a graduation picnic, which is more goodbyes but also, in a more healthy way, a chance for us to describe and make real for them and us Our New Life. Is it possible that the break is finally complete...

... except we have to go back to the church One Last Time, at least as "our church", to drop off all the keys -- anything we still have that marks us as connected to this place. That unspoken meaning hangs around us like heavy fog as we bring stuff in & write explanatory notes to people & put this here & pile that there: this is the end of the end. After this, the breakup is complete.

And as we get to the front door -- now locked, and after it swings shut we will no longer have any way in... in several senses -- my son has stood it as long as he can, and he bursts into tears. Now my wife is holding him and sobbing out her own sorrow and grief. And I........ I seem to have forgotten how to cry, I so rarely do so anymore, ever -- but I wish I could. It would be such a welcome release to expel this huge pulsating mass of wistfulness and loss and pain and yes, even fear. Instead it sits in my throat and chest and expands till I can't swallow or breathe or even think.

Neil Sedaka actually had two hits with "Breaking Up Is Hard to Do". The first was in the early 60s, and if you listen to that version, it's a really bouncy uptempo pop song. The mood of the song has about as much to do with the subject of the song as tiger lilies do with tigers.

He cut it again in the mid-70s, this time as a slower, more reflective and altogether melancholy ballad. That's the one that has always grabbed me; it's a very affecting song. I think it captures in a visceral way how a prolonged breakup can also prolong and intensify the pain.

Catching the Bug

2010-06-02T21:06:00.004-05:00

I'm living proof of the limits of heredity. My dad was in his day pretty good with cars. That was in an era when an actual person could look at an engine with just eyeballs and fix it -- and I don't think that's in any way diminished by the fact that in those days, "winterizing" meant "closing the rumble seat". As a teen, he worked in a garage; even when I was a kid, he could always ID anything on the road at a glance (often by year).

It may be just more pointless nostalgia but it seems to me that cars were more distinctive awhile back, and none moreso than the Volkswagen. The VW Beetle was responsible for the "punchbug" game (spot a Beetle and smack a companion). I hadn't even heard the term in years... but now despite the fact that most VWs are no longer in the insect kingdom, the company is trying to revive the tradition. Of course, since Bugs are now few and far between, they call it "punch-dub".

They can say what they want, but they can't control the people... so my son came home from school last week telling me about the Punchbug Game, and ever since then we've been playing each time we leave the house (One significant problem there is that, as I referred to earlier, all cars look alike these days unless you can zero in quickly on the hood/trunk ornament. Am I wrong about that? If so, feel free to correct me in the comments....).

It was only a matter of time until my daughter the competitor caught on to what was going on. Now she wants to play every second of car time. I'm finding that I'm up against a certain array of disadvantages:

> My sunglasses, which I have to use for driving, are at least 3 prescriptions behind my new glasses
> As the driver, I have a few other things to do
> My reflexes, shockingly, are not quite as fast-twitch as once they were

Maybe the biggest disadvantage in playing against my daughter is that she has always been from the school of "shoot first, ask questions later." Basically if it has wheels and it has a roundish insignia, whap. That doesn't take away from the fact that she seems to be able to spot one from the next block... so taken all around I'm flying with one flap down these days. But I'm determined to get back in the game.

In a completely unrelated development, I rear-ended the car in front of me four times on the way home....

Feeling a Little Lost

2010-05-26T21:03:00.004-05:00

I was reminded this week of something I wrote about a year ago, referring to the TV shows we make a habit of watching. Of the six I listed, ER ran its course last spring; Heroes, although valiantly protesting it wasn't dead yet, was apparently carted off a couple months ago; and we said a reluctant goodbye to our friends on a certain island (or maybe not) just days ago. So it appears that, on top of all the other landmarks I'm going to have to reprogram in a few weeks, I will also need to re-navigate the television dial (note to our younger friends: once upon a time, televisions had an actual dial! Leaving us with this charming anachronism).

As a longtime student of TV history -- not in an unattractive way, of course; as I have often pointed out, it's The Other Guy who gets obsessive... I'm an aficionado -- this has also caused me to reflect a bit on the nature of the series finale. As far as I'm aware, this kind of thing didn't happen in the early days of television. I Love Lucy was a beloved show, certainly, but I can't find any evidence that it had a finale in the modern sense. Same with Burns & Allen, Maverick, Perry Mason -- all popular programs I more or less pulled out of a hat and checked.

It's not like I'm going to really research it or anything ... but I believe the modern Finale Event dates to 1967 when The Fugitive concluded with a 2-part, cliffhanger finale. Part 2 was at that point in time the most-watched episode (by percentage of households watching) in television history... and it's still third among all series episodes behind the Cheers finale and "Who Shot J.R.?". Among other things, this points out the difference between the old-fashioned world of "You can watch anything you like, as long as it's on one of these 3 channels" world of true broadcasting, and today's environment where each viewer gets his own individual cable network.

Update: I just found these guys and they more or less agree with me on The Fugitive.

Of course, it's only an "important" show that merits a 'final episode'; others are just canceled. When I was a kid, the first big finale event I remember was The Mary Tyler Moore Show; I remember how highly anticipated it was, and of course it became the gold standard for final episodes. After that I tended to watch a series finale regardless of whether I ever watched the show much during its lifespan.... not really possible now with so many shows.

I guess part of what I'm getting at is that over the years, the concept evolved to where the final show was supposed to be a climactic event that summarized but also transcended the entire series; if you want to know how high the stakes have risen, recall the reception for the finales of Seinfeld and The Sopranos.

Into this environment comes the Last Lost -- a show that has specialized in raising its audience's expectations, an entire series based on an ever-growing pile of questions. I think you can probably take the expectation for Seinfeld and multiply it by the hopes for The Sopranos.

As it turned out, the show didn't exactly resolve every open question (of course, if they had really attempted to do so, the show would still be going on. Whenever you're reading this, still going on. Trust me on that one). It also didn't cure cancer, bring about world peace, or come close to satisfying every one of the people who have been blogging, and reading blogs, about it for the past several years. Yeah, I'm in that last group.

I'm also puzzled by all the speculation about what it really "meant"; was it not clear that everything on the island actually happened, and it was the "Sideways reality" that didn't really happen? Think about all the things that happened in the Sideways where we all said, "OK, wait a minute, that's really pushing the limits of plausible"... and it turns out that's because it didn't happen in the "real world".

And sure, I would've liked more "closure" -- although on the other hand, everyone dead is about as closed as you can get. While it was not everything I dreamed of, it did have some truly magical moments and afforded us a chance to say farewell to some beloved, and not all that beloved, characters, and watch them say goodbye to each other as well. I can't say that I felt like they owed me any specific outcome, so I'm not really "disappointed".

It's also worth pointing out that the Newhart final episode, which is widely considered to be one of the classics in the genre, was (at least in my opinion) interminable and boring, and is only remembered today for the brilliant final joke -- which may very well be the funniest moment in TV history; if not for that final sequence, I doubt the program would be remembered at all.

So what do you think the odds are that I can fill the the vacancies in my watching-list with even one new show that'll even have a series finale... much less one worth discussing?

Rolle with the Changes

2010-05-17T20:28:00.002-05:00

All around us are some of the traditional features of spring: the lilacs are blooming, we've had the windows open, both my favorite (real) team and my fantasy baseball team are floating gently to the bottom of the standings (note: this last has only been "traditional" for the past couple of years). Another common May sight is the new college and grad school graduates sallying forth on the job search, armed only with their most-recently-written work of fiction -- their resumes.

We have a young friend just getting her Master's who's in the throes of the struggle as we speak. I suspect that she, like others of us, is pondering how close she has to get to her degree-field so that the degree won't feel like a total waste!

Not that I'm in any respect qualified to give career advice. I've been out of college for 27 years (give me a sec to recover from having typed, and realized, that) and in that span of time I've worked full-time for a total of less than four years. The most recent period of part-time work has been totally by my choice; but still, from a resume standpoint that's a little scary.

As a hopefully ex-jobseeker myself (I realized today that my job, which started in 1997, has been around longer than my home or my kids or my cars... or anything outside my marriage. This is a good thing because, as challenged as I am with change in general, nothing highlights my shortcomings quite like looking for work), I've taken a keen interest in the trials of others -- but my attention was piqued by the story of Myron Rolle.

Myron played football at Florida State University and was a star defensive back, and was thought to be a top pro prospect, likely a first-round choice in the NFL draft. Like many college football players, he actually graduated before his playing eligibility expired, and like many players he enrolled in graduate school.

The difference in this case was that instead of taking grad courses in physical education, Myron went to Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar... and he didn't do it to extend his football career but instead gave up his last year of football to do it.

Rolle perhaps doesn't fit neatly into the football player pigeonhole. It goes without saying that he's very bright -- his ultimate goal is to become a doctor -- and that doesn't necessarily work smoothly with football culture, where the credo tends to be "tackle now, ask questions after you blow out your ACL". And in addition to his academic pursuits, he's also had some philanthropic achievements through the Myron L. Rolle Foundation.

So when he returned from Oxford after his time abroad and submitted his name for the NFL draft, there was a lot of discussion. Some questioned whether taking a year off from football indicated he wasn't sufficiently committed to the sport, and there were also fairly audible whispers that maybe someone that intelligent was not all that safe a bet in a coach-driven, follow-the leader world (where it must be said, there's virtue in taking orders, acting as one, not thinking for yourself).

And so it went that on draft day -- although because of the growing interest in the draft, and consequent TV-ification, there are now THREE DAYS of draft day -- Myron was actually chosen on the third day. In the 6th round, the 207th player chosen. In a spot where (and I'm asserting this entirely without proof, but also without much fear of contradiction), there were chosen ahead of him some guys with "records" of a less academic nature, and other guys who wouldn't have gotten into college at all without football, but very likely few with charitable foundations. Zero Rhodes Scholars, that much is indisputable.

For a lot of reasons I'm predisposed to feel like the guy got the short end of the stick; I flatter myself that I know what it's like to be looked down upon because of intelligence (although truthfully I suspect that my classmates might have seen me as odd for, ah, multiple reasons). And he clearly is a sort of Renaissance man (in a literal sense you don't see too often). I wonder, though, whether it isn't actually a wise move not to choose him higher. A high NFL draft choice is an investment of money, sure; but just as much it's an allocation of resources that can lead to disaster if it doesn't pay off in a long-term asset.

And of course, what you have here is the living embodiment of the cliche, "He can do anything in the world he wants to do." I can see why you might not want to bet the farm on someone who might decide in 2 years to quit and go to med school, or do charity work in the Third World, or... who knows? In fact, you could make the argument that the greatest good for the greatest number would be achieved if all the teams passed on him and let him get to work making contributions to more than just the Cover-Two defense.

The Now and the Not Yet

2010-05-02T20:57:00.005-05:00

I am on record in this space that I have long since decided that I'm not doing the Funny Kid Blog here. Sure, it would be easy enough to do when surrounded by kids (OK, not exactly surrounded by 2 of them... and anyone with more than two would certainly scoff at me... but a lot of the time it feels like it). I could tell the tale of my daughter -- who's been talking since she was about 4 hours old, and who carries around a pad and pen for amusement -- taking an hour to write 3 sentences for a school assignment. Or here's a son story: we've been inflicting Little House on the Prairie and The Waltons on the kids lately as part of the ongoing quest to instill Old-Fashioned Values. In one such episode, John-Boy had a crush on a girl and sneaked in for a kiss... whereupon Our-Boy remarked in a low tone, "Well, that was a good one."

And so it goes. I don't know that there's a big market appeal for that kind of blog, and in some ways it's way too obvious anyway. In the same way, since we got the news to which I alluded in my previous post, it would be easy to write the "We're Moving" blog; after all, we think of little else. We've got piles of boxes around (with the result that the van is now permanently out in the driveway to make room) and it's certainly a recurring topic of conversation. Of course, everyone in the church kind of wants to work through it with their pastor, so by the time I get to her she's often kind of "moved out"... so sometimes I'm left to stew in it. And so I do.

Consider the children of Israel, when Moses led them out of their Egyptian captivity (all right, stay with me here a bit)... they got out into the desert, and before long they realized they weren't really getting anywhere. Even though they were told they were going to the (original!) Promised Land -- which by definition ought to be pretty cool -- they weren't there yet, and all they could think about was what they used to have.

In case it's not immediately obvious, what they used to have was slavery. Beatings if they didn't work fast enough. The Old Testament even points out that they were making bricks for the pyramids, and the overseers not only raised the brick quota but also made them find their own raw materials. Think of it as No Brick Left Behind.

Still, I'm keenly aware that if you stretch a simile even a little too far, it can snap back and put your eye out... so let me be clear that I'm not escaping from slavery here (nor is it entirely clear that the Promised Land is the destination). But that's also kind of the point: if it can be a challenge to get from torture to paradise, I can perhaps be forgiven for being a little hung up on the in-between when I'm starting from a very comfortable spot.

It may also be quite clear already that I most certainly don't seek out new frontiers just for the sheer exhilaration anyway. I probably established that for good and all about 30 years ago, when I worked at the same place for 6 consecutive summers. Or perhaps when I spent 11 years in my first career despite having a full-time position for exactly one out of the 11. Could it have been when I bought my fourth Toyota?

For all that, however, what we do know is that it's coming up (and closer every day) no matter what we do about it. I wrote about this very sensation four years ago when I compared myself to Wile E. Coyote. My timeline was off by just a bit, but my conclusion was basically sound. So here's what we're doing:

(1) Last Sunday, we went to visit the new church -- just to say hello and let them start to think of us as something besides an announcement in the bulletin. We met a lot of people (though it is to be hoped that they don't expect us to remember all the names!) and everyone was very welcoming. That was in some ways a very important step in transitioning to a new reality.

(2) Then we took the kids to tour their future home. They got to see where their bedrooms would probably be, and check out the back yard, and generally begin to put a face on this thing we've been telling them is coming.

(3) Then I went around the place like a complete maniac with a tape measure in my hand, and for the last week have been translating the measurements into floor plans, complete with tiny scale-model paper furniture. There's so much about this that seems to undetermined & undeterminable that it seems to both of us like having a real concrete sense (pun not intended) of our new home will begin to smooth the way.

The tricky part, of course, is that we're not dead yet...

We've still got about 7 weeks to go; we can't just pack all the boxes today and wait for this part to be over, we still have life to live and ministry to do and a lot of people here we're connected to -- while at the same time recognizing that an important part of that connection is going to be amputated before too much longer. We are definitely trapped with one foot in the now and one foot in the not yet.

I've talked before about the fact that time-traveling to the past can be surprisingly painful... nevertheless, it may still be easier than traveling to the future and back, no matter how much it costs these days to fuel up your DeLorean.

Hired to Be Fired

2010-03-15T22:01:00.002-05:00

As is the case each year about this time (and mentioned in this space yearly as well), I have used an awful lot of time in recent weeks getting things prepared for the Fantasy Baseball league I administer. Really, though, once they begin tossing a ball down in Florida (and Arizona), everything in my world becomes kind of baseball-inflected. The fantasy season draws near; soon I'll be able to watch actual games; and even spring itself seems surely just about to round third base and head for home.

Maybe that explains why I'm identifying with baseball managers these days. It's early yet, but if some team gets off to a poor start, we may see our first managerial firing before too long. And if the victim is a particularly philosophical sort, we may even hear a popular line from the mythical Manager's Creed: "Managers are hired to be fired." That is, no manager lasts forever (well, Connie Mack ran the Athletics for 50 years -- spending most of the last several years napping on the bench -- but then, he also owned a chunk of the team); he knows on the day he's hired that the exit interview is already in sight.

Or maybe it's our more recent visit to the Mark Twain House & Museum that has me feeling like Tom Sawyer. As I recall -- it's been awhile, and I'm too lazy to research it -- Tom let the folks in his town think he was dead, and was gleeful at the prospect of attending his own funeral.

I suppose that all of that sets rather more of a foreboding tone than I really intended, so I should probably pause here to assure the reader that no one was fired and nobody's dead.

We have, however, been contemplating endings and transitions around here lately, because as was officially announced last Sunday, we will be moving this summer. We know that no pastor -- at least in our system -- stays forever in one place. It's not exactly "hired to be fired", but still the expectation is set from day one: someday you'll be moving on.

I told my wife that the announcement was a little like attending your own funeral, in that people are somewhat expected to say nice things about you... but I don't think she really wanted to contemplate her own funeral. I, on the other hand, would be burningly curious to know what's being said about me! As it turned out, several people were quite kind and gracious in ways that let us know that they weren't just "saying the right thing".

While the move is not unexpected, it bears some resemblance to the old joke about mixed emotions... we're moving with open hearts and open eyes, but at the same time it's wrenching to leave this place that has so much good about it. Had the call not come, we would've been happy to stay here in this place and minister among these people; in fact, I in particular have been pretty vocal about the concept that I wouldn't mind being "forgotten" and left here for the rest of my life.

Of course, that is only partly because I love it here and clearly some portion due to my general change-averseness (about which I have been equally vocal). And besides, the church here kind of brought it on themselves: they have become such a vibrantly healthy (emotionally as well as spiritually) bunch that it really made it possible for us to leave. If they'd been troubled, it would've been a lot tougher sell.

We're still in the process of selling to the kids, who've really never experienced this kind of move. Our daughter was 9 months when we came, and while the boy was 3 1/2, he doesn't remember it too well. I think he does remember viscerally how it pained him to lose his first home -- I know I do.

So we get the girl excited about the basketball court in the new church and the possibility of biking to school, and we tell the son that we'll be less than a mile from the mall AND ToysRUs. There will be a park nearby and some good friends living not far away. And I've stopped saying in Sunday night prayers, "Thank you God that we went to church and saw all our friends,".... because I don't want to remind them that (relatively) soon, we'll be going to church and seeing strangers. New friends, yes, but not that first week for sure.

We believe in our hearts that this new place is where God wants us to be at this time, although there's clearly a corner of my heart, at least, that has retreated behind a locked door. Can a "corner of your heart" put its fingers in its ears and go, "La la la I can't hear you!"? I guess I should have said above that we're going with mostly open hearts and eyes.

I have one little theological theory that I fall back on a lot, although no one else seems to much get why it's important to me. But I find it of great comfort: since God is beyond time and space, the concept of "today" is meaningless to Him. I am tied, at least physically, to today, no matter how tempting it may be to try to live in the past or obsess over the uncertainty of the future. God, however, is already there in that future. In God's world, it's "today" and "1983" and "this July"... so I don't have to be afraid even when uncertainty looms (although it seems that quite often I am anyway). I know there's already someone there who knows me and who's going to make all the pieces fit together somehow.

Giving, and Taking

2010-02-22T22:23:00.003-05:00

Even I would have to admit that I don't always project the sunniest of dispositions. I'm not necessarily 100% John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band, but I do tend towards the theory that not only is the glass half-empty, but the milk is probably spoiled anyway.

Regardless, I don't think I'm being unjustifiably negative when I say that one of the parts of the year that really puts me through the wringer is vacation. I'm not talking about the physical toll of travel, or the financial drain, or the difficulties of enforced togetherness/small spaces; it's probably more self-inflicted than that. And this has been very much on my mind -- pressing down hard on my mind -- since we just did our 3-day Winter Vacation Trip last week.

I don't know whether it's genetic (a Guy Thing?) or learned, emotional or strictly mental, or even pathological, but I take a huge burden on myself whenever we travel. I spend loads of time before the fact, planning and researching, scheduling Fun Activities for the Whole Family, looking for that hotel room that's 10% nicer for $5 less -- then, of course, getting everything mapped out to the last possible turn (this time, I had 3 pages of printed directions... which I basically ignored in favor of the more, you know, electronic guidance of the GPS).

The day arrives and I am, ah... not bubbly... as I'm trying to get the last details nailed down and get us out the door On Schedule. I do virtually all the driving -- not because my wife won't, or because I don't trust her to, but because it just feels right to me to carry the load. I am in general a pretty confident, and I believe competent, driver; but always in the back of my mind is that we could get lost or break down or have an accident.

If one of the stops doesn't come off, if the targeted Children's Museum turns out to be a ball pit and a card table with a box of broken crayons on it, if somebody gets a lousy meal... all of that feels like a personal failure to me.

I'm sure a lot of that sounds like egomania -- making it all about me -- or some kind of messiah and/or martyr complex. Rationally I do know that plenty of stuff can go wrong that I have absolutely no control over, and I recognize that nobody's waiting to point the finger at me just because the thermostat doesn't work in the hotel room.

But in the midst of all that burden I felt myself carrying the past couple of weeks, I also realized that there's a healthy lesson to be learned as well, and it's this: there are times that it's more blessed to take than to give. That is, I realized that what I was doing, at least in part, was living out the role of Head of the Household (now there's a term you don't hear much these days, at least in a non-census sense) in the way it's really intended: not giving orders, but taking responsibility.

The New Testament talks about the man being the head of the woman, which is a concept that got twisted so far in a particular (and particularly uncomfortable) direction that I think it eventually went SPROINNGGG! and flew off behind the couch or something. Or at least we'd like to hide it there. But I think the real point of being the "head" is that I can serve my family by being the buffer zone, getting out front, taking the blow if necessary.

As it turned out, the vacation came off fine -- a couple complaints from the GPS, but nothing that couldn't be resolved by circling the block. So I can look at it as a lot of worrying for nothing, or I can see careful planning and concern for my family's well-being paying off.

And isn't it interesting that God can take "character flaws" and use them for positive purposes?

Bloglet: As the Swallows to Capistrano

2010-02-16T21:06:00.004-05:00

I suppose I shouldn't feel so bad about it. After all, Robert B. Parker wrote 39 novels about the same character (is there a record in that category?), so obviously he wasn't afraid to revisit the same territory more than once. In fact, there were times in the later years where it wasn't immediately obvious that it wasn't just the same novel, with some of the words rearranged... but I may be undermining my own point. But even with all of that, he's probably my favorite up-until-recently-living author.

When I planned our honeymoon umpty-ump years ago (all right, it was 1987), I went to all the hotel chains nearby and collected their thick little books that listed every one of their locations. Then I paged through and found the most likely prospects and made a bunch of phone calls. After that, I sat down with my Rand McNally road atlas and plotted the route.

The final destination was Boston, and when we got there we found one of those tourist guides with a street map in it. At one point, my lovely bride said she thought it would be neat to put her feet in the ocean... so I looked at the little map and said, "OK, we'll go this way for a couple miles and then turn and we should be there."

And in 10 or 15 minutes, she had her feet in the ocean.

We're going on vacation in a couple days. I've spent hours on the Internet, Googling hotels, checking hotels.com, looking for reviews, and then actually making the reservation. Now I have to go to one of the map sites and print out detailed directions... of course, I'll still have my GPS running the whole time as backup.

So as you can see, I'm back around to one of my pet topics, as surely as the swallows (and clearly, the swallows have a better press agent -- not to mention better taste in vacation destinations -- than the buzzards): even as much as I've lived it and read about it and written about it, it still blows my mind how much the world has changed within my lifetime, or even half my lifetime.

I suppose in the case of the trip, it might be a change for the worse; I'm pretty proud that I put together a honeymoon trip basically just by my wits, rather than making The Computer do it for me. After all, somehow the swallows still don't need GPS.

Can You Hear Me Now?

2010-02-01T22:06:00.003-05:00

Although I probably qualify in most respects as a geek (I suppose I could conceivably be a dweeb or even a dork, but I strive for my full potential), I never reached the heights of 70s geekdom, total absorption in Dungeons and Dragons. In fact, I've never played at all and truthfully don't even know much about it, except that about 20 minutes after its invention it became an easy shorthand for all things geek. Ironically I think my fatal flaw from a DnD perspective is probably that I don't have enough imagination to live in a fantasy world... I have a hard enough time imagining my present world. I am quite good at recalling and obsessing over the past, but there isn't a 20-sided die in the world that's going to bring that back to life, except in the loop playing in my own head.

My own personal gaming obsession started in about 1971, when I got a copy of Sports Illustrated Baseball. This was a board game that allowed you to play baseball games between any two actual 1970 team rosters. I loved it immediately and forced several friends to play it (regardless of their level of familiarity/interest in baseball). I became so taken with it that I created my own version, based on the 1974 rosters -- written on lined paper (notebook paper, with all the little lacy edgy things hanging off it), drawing in my own (occasionally-)vertical dividing lines for the columns...

It just occurred to me, why didn't I just use graph paper? Certainly as a junior high student I was aware of its existence....?

In any case, I wore out several green & red colored pencils coloring in little boxes on batting/pitching charts (green for hit, red for out, blue for strikeout). And naturally, by the time I finished all that painstaking work -- and I did finish it, I'm proud to say -- the whole thing was obsolete anyway. I'm not sure what year it actually was, but it sure wasn't 1974.

Then a couple years later, I switched to APBA baseball. I probably would've stuck with SI forever... but since we didn't have internet access in 1977, I had to take what I could find, and I'm pretty sure I stumbled on an ad for APBA in the old Baseball Bulletin. And as with SI, I played with friends every chance I got -- and if I didn't have that chance, I played it "solitaire" and managed both teams.

The best part for me, maybe, was that while I was playing, I was also doing a constant play-by-play -- which as I have previously written, has always been a passion of mine. "That will bring up Dave Kingman, who homered in the fourth for the Mets' only run. He's also struck out in the first and sixth... Here's the pitch from Carlton and it's a HIGH pop fly in the air to short left field... Bowa drifts back onto the outfield grass and squeezes it for the third out. For the Mets, no runs, no hits, no errors and none left on..." Maybe you think you can't see all that just from rolling a big red die and a small white one, then checking the result from a 2"x3" card against a big cardboard chart -- but I could.

I've sort of convinced myself that that was when I got in the habit of talking to myself, although I'm sure my mom could relate tales of muffled paragraphs coming from in utero. One way or the other, I am a confirmed self-talker; almost anyone who's spent any time with me could share an instance of coming upon me engaged in an animated monologue.

It's not as if I can really help it at this point. I'm working 100% from home now, and I don't really have much personal contact with others -- at least till the kids come home, and that puts a whole new spin on "talking to myself".

I do have periodic conference calls and virtual meetings, but most of the time I'm on mute, listening, anyway. But of course I am seldom mute myself; it's certainly far from unusual for me to be commenting on the proceedings to myself -- and as you can imagine, always & only in the strongest possible positive terms O:-).

All of that ranked merely as something between a charming character quirk and a sign of low-grade mental illness... until a call not long ago. I was on with maybe a half-dozen others, sitting on mute, waiting for someone else to "arrive". Then the "real" (home) phone rang, and since I was just waiting anyway, I answered it and handled the call -- on and off in less than a minute.

Then one of my callmates said, "Uh, Mark... we could hear all that. Did you think you were on mute?" Well, I was on mute -- at least according to the switch on my headset cord -- but they could hear me anyway. Apparently my frequent use of the mute switch, along with my constant fidgeting with it when not in a call, had worn down a connection or something so that I was no longer mutable. Immutable, if you will.

Which was fine; the call was routine and I hadn't said anything controversial or rude or... but then I started to think. OK, "think" is an overstatement; "panic" would be more accurate. How long had this been going on? Had I been sitting around making, ah, less-than-affirming remarks about people that they could actually hear?

And:

Why am I a person who would say things on mute that he wouldn't say if he knew he were immutable?

Fortunately the PC phone software I use has its own mute button, so I can override the headset's mute or lack of same. Still trying to find a mute button that will shut off the sound of that last question, however...

Into the eVortex

2010-01-19T22:10:00.004-05:00

If there's one thing on which I pride myself, it's self-awareness. Granted, I've been vividly reminded just this week that knowing your shortcomings does not constitute a free pass for them... but that's a whole different issue. I've always seen myself as profoundly aware of my limitations (although, if I weren't aware of my limitations... would I realize it?) -- which shouldn't be news to anyone who reads this space "regularly". I haven't been too reluctant to share my foibles here.

For example, a few years back I wrote a prediction of what would happen if I ever got an iPod:

Perhaps more to the point, I just don't need something else that needs to be "managed". I'm sure it's supposed to be a selling point when they say how many zillion songs an iPod will hold, but all I can think is, "When will I have time to find the sites and find the songs and download them all?" And oh by the way, continue paying and paying. It used to be that if I wanted a collection of cool tunes, I'd go to Caldor or Ames and slap down $4.98 for the latest K-Tel album. A zillion songs times 99 cents is a daunting prospect.

Well, of course I did end up with an iPod, and I was able to distract myself for a year or more with all the music I already owned -- actually, I've hit 2 years of recording and I stillhaven't gotten everything I own digitized (although I've gotten all the good stuff, I think). But I've also been very intentional about not getting sucked into downloads; I've been afraid that I'd end up that alcoholic who just takes one little drink... and wakes up in the gutter 3 days later. I went for months not even spending iTunes cards, except to make CDs for the family. And frankly, right now I have $17.82 in my iTunes account and I've been a bit overwhelmed by the prospect of choosing 18 songs out of Every Song in the Universe.

So I guess I can't really explain what happened to me a few weeks back when I saw an ad in Entertainment Weekly for a free 7-day trial for emusic.com: 25 free downloads. Although I knew I would still grapple with the needle/haystack conundrum, there was something about the message that spoke to me -- it could have been the word "free". In fact, when I finally gave in and went to check it out, I even found that they had upped the offer to 35 free.

This would take planning on the order of the lead-up to D-Day. I painstakingly went through the database building a list of 35 target songs. I wanted to have the whole list plotted before beginning the 7-day term, so I could get in & get out with no danger of spilling into non-free time.

I started my quest with the songs I featured in that original pre-iPod post, and was delighted to see several of them listed; also a bit frustrated to see that some of the artists I sought were missing, or didn't include the albums/songs I needed, or the songs were there but listed as album-only. Nevertheless, with a little adjusting and scraping and resetting of sights, I was able to build a very enticing list of tracks.

So I found a 7-day window that I thought would afford me a chance to do the job before the clock ran out on me, and joined. Of course, I had to provide a Major Credit Card -- for identification purposes only. After the reg process was over, I started my shopping spree.

As I went back to the songs I had already scouted, I discovered that on top of all the other restrictions I had made my way around, some of my target songs were labeled, "We're sorry, but this item can only be downloaded using paid credits." I grabbed what I could and decided I'd better regroup... only to find that some of the songs I had already downloaded that claimed to be by original artists really weren't, and others were "rerecorded" versions that didn't sound much like the version I heard in my head that was the experience I was seeking to duplicate.

Brief pause -- make your own "voices in his head" joke.

So I went back through the database yet again, even more painstakingly. I reviewed my current collection to see if I was "missing" anything from my favorite artists, and I used the Genius feature in iTunes to suggest connections I might have forgotten (keep in mind, a lot of the music I was after is from what you might call Another Era -- although like most people my age, I prefer the term "classic" to "oldies").

Finally, I had a decent list of 35 assembled, but I also had a Shadow List of songs I really wanted that were closed off behind the "paid credits" door. So I concluded: what's the harm in one month of subscription music? The basic account provides 24 songs for $11.99 (i.e. 50 cents each, half of iTunes pricing). I knew I could make a very worthwhile list of 24 more, for a total of 59 for $12: basically 20 cents each.

So I finished off the free downloads, automatically triggering my first paid month. I had enough good stuff waitlisted that, even though I was still disappointed by some songs that were missing altogether, I was able to quickly knock off what I felt to be good value.

All that remained was the formality of canceling my account so I could be free of further charges, which I was planning to so "sometime this week"... until not long after, when checking my email revealed a message from emusic: "We've just added 10,000 new albums to our database! Click here to view..." etc.

In the immortal words of Carrie Bradshaw, "I couldn't help but wonder..."

So back I went into the database and, page by page, clicked through the entire list of recently-added, something like 900 pages, not counting my frequent detours into artist listings that looked promising (some of which were the very omissions that put me behind the 8-ball to begin with).

To make a long story almost exactly the same length, but maybe a little narrower, when the meter clicks over for 24 more songs (and 12 more bucks) in February, I'll be standing there with list in hand saying, "Please sir, I want some more."

No doubt there's some fresh sleight-of-hand awaiting me -- now you hear it, now you don't. Never fear, I'm planning to bring to bear on this problem the same resolve, determination, and strength of character that enabled me to join the Columbia House Record Club in 1978, and only stay in it until... last year, when the now-BMG club folded.

OK, technically, they really just transferred me to yourmusic.com, but I hardly ever go search the entire database. Three times a year, tops.

Toward a More Balanced Mii

2010-01-04T21:53:00.002-05:00

I've never been much of an ice skater. It wasn't something our family really "did", and I was 10 or 11 before I went the first time. So if I had to add it up, I might have skated 30 or 40 times in my whole life. I like it all right but I've never gotten any good at turning. Or stopping. Or, really, going in a straight line (and anything fancy is Right Out).

Despite my almost complete dearth of skills, I have always prided myself on one skating accomplishment: I never fall. I've gotten hurt a few times keeping myself from falling, but I never fall.

I've always used that to claim excellent balance... which unfortunately got blown away recently. I have to confess that, as part of our family's observance of the Holy Season of Christmas, I bought a Wii. And I attempted to justify it to my wife (not to mention myself) by also purchasing a Wii Fit Plus. You know, so I can do that daily workout that only lack of opportunity has prevented up to now.

So I busted it out Christmas night to get to work. First you have to be evaluated, which isn't way more fun than being evaluated in the doctor's office -- the only real advantage is you don't have to be in your underwear (although, on the other hand, nothing's stopping you).

According to the finest medical advice available via an anthropomorphic balance board, I lean a little bit to the left. My BMI was acceptable, although the virtual taskmaster pointed out that I could drop a point or so (i.e. several pounds).

But I really came a cropper when it came time for the balance evaluation.

The balance test works a little like a carpenter’s level: you lean to one side to keep the two bubbles, representing the weight on each side of your body, within a certain range. That is, there might be a rectangle representing 70-80% of your body weight on the left and a corresponding rectangle for 20-30% on the right. If you shift just so, your bubbles land in the target range, then you have to keep it there for 3 seconds.

I thought I was doing OK, but the target ranges got narrower and further unbalanced, and I struggled. The clock ran out and the machine announced to me that it was calculating my Wii Fit Age (while my Mii, the avatar that represents me onscreen, squinted under a spotlight with a drumroll). The Wii Fit Age is supposed to represent the relative fitness of your body – or, in the words of Satchel Paige, “How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you was?” – and mine was revealed to be… 51.

While I was relieved not to come up 79 or something, I was definitely disappointed to be older than my chronological age; needless to say, I repeated the test immediately and got myself down to a more palatable 46.

Since the Wii Fit Plus provides games for improving balance, I thought that in the spirit of self-improvement I’d give them a try. The first was for heading a soccer ball – move your head from side to side to connect with the virtual soccer balls coming at you (while dodging the occasional shoe).

The onscreen instructions remind you to clear enough space and make sure you get warmed up first, but leave out the most important suggestion:

Have your spouse leave the room.

She wasn’t really paying much attention, but as I bobbed & weaved (wove?), seemingly always mixing up my zigging with my zagging, I suppose she couldn’t help noticing. I’d like to think that if she could have helped laughing out loud, she would have, but I imagine the sight of my ineptitude was too much for anyone to bear.

At the end of the round, the verdict, on a scale of 1-4 stars, was one star, officially designating me as: Unbalanced. Which I’m choosing to interpret in a literal sense, but which certainly leaves itself open to alternate explanations.

I wasn’t much better at the other games like slalom skiing, ski jumping, or floating down a winding river in a huge bubble. I did OK in tilting the table to roll the balls into the holes, which got me all the way up to 2 stars – Amateur! – but for the most part, I was certifiably Unbalanced.

Well, there’s two ways you can go with that: “Yeah, what do you know?” or “I’ll show you.”(Option 3, not being affected by a game’s opinion, is not available to an Unbalanced person). I’m going to keep at it in the coming weeks & months, and when I’m all the way past Amateur – or I drive my Wii Fit Age down under “Needs Bifocals”… trust me, it’ll be Stop the Presses news in this space.

TFD - Finding the Season

2009-12-20T14:15:00.001-05:00

As a preacher's kid, and a preacher's spouse, and a just plain regular churchgoer, I figure I've heard the story of Christmas -- not the one with the 8 or 9 tiny reindeer in it -- as many times as anyone possibly could in the past 47 years. So there is a danger for me of becoming like the fish who doesn't really think about water... it's just "there", you know? Then you add in all the stresses and responsibilities and peripherals of the season, and all of a sudden it's December 28 and, hey, what just happened here?

So I've made it something of a quest to find bits and pieces in all the Christmas I'm swimming in that bring the truth of Christmas to me in a new way, or maybe just the same old way but a way that somehow resounds for me. I thought I would share some of these; perhaps one will strike a chord in you as well.

I do have one powerful advantage: I now have over 300 songs (well, not 300 distinct songs; for example, I have 18 versions of "Silent Night") in my Christmas playlist and -- speaking of immersion -- have been listening constantly since the beginning of Advent. As I do, I listen for nuggets of truth in addition to cool tunes.

But the quest actually started with this phrase singing hymns in church: "where meek souls will receive Him, still the dear Christ enters in." Keep in mind that one of the highlights of my season so far has been that one Christmas wall decoration with a punctuation mistake in it didn't make it on the wall this year (and I was already a certified grammar/punctuation/spelling geek) ... so it surprises me a little that the point of this sentence hinges on punctuation, and I've been missing it. It is the end of the 3rd verse of a 2nd-tier carol, so I have a small excuse. Plus, the way the music is phrased makes it sound like this: "Where meek souls will receive Him still, the dear Christ enters in."

That makes it sound like all the perseverance -- the continuing action -- is on us. That is, we're still receiving Him. Good for us! Oops... look again: comma after "Him", which is to say it's Jesus who's still continuing to enter. It's not on us, it's on Him -- and He is faithful to fulfill His part of the bargain.

Two more seasonal truths come from my favorite Christmas album -- do I even have to say it? I've written it all before. Steven Curtis Chapman's "Precious Promise" tells the story of when first Mary, then Joseph, then the shepherds, then the whole world get the news of Jesus' birth. In Mary's verse, we find this line: "But her questions and her fears are met with an overwhelming joy that God has chosen her."

Like anyone, she had questions and fears; what made her special was not that she immediately reported for duty without questioning... but rather that she was able to question, and also able to let that joy permeate her to the extent that it pushed all the fear right on out. Maybe the key faith issue is: which voice do you want to listen to? Your own, or the still, small voice...

The other Chapman lyric which speaks deep truth to me comes from "Our God Is with Us": "And we will never face life alone now that God has made Himself known as Father and friend, with us to the end -- Emmanuel." The Christmas story is full of miracles, of course, but the central one is this. I'm not going to bother to look this up, but I'm pretty certain I've written about this before -- not because I'm short on ideas (or at least not solely for that reason) but because it continues to blow my mind. It comes down to this: God loved us so much that He couldn't just watch "from up there" as we struggled our way through life. He cared enough to send the very best: himself. Not science fiction, but the God of the universe fitting Himself into a newborn baby. If you can't feel the synapses in your brain popping like old-fashioned flashbulbs thinking about that, don't bother with the SyFy channel.

And if you do feel that popping, imagine how Mary must have felt. One of my favorite Christmas Scripture verses is, "But Mary treasured all these things up and pondered them in her heart". I can tell you what day it was when my daughter's teacher called to say she'd become a "leader" of her kindergarten class (in three days of school); I know where I was standing when my son's 2nd grade teacher made an emotional speech recognizing him as Most Improved Student; I can only imagine what it would be like to have shepherds and wise men and angels show up. But that's really what I'm striving to do in this season -- to treasure the story up in my heart anew, to ponder it all over again. And I pray you won't let the season slip by without doing the same.

TFD: A Transitive Verb

2009-11-25T22:19:00.000-05:00

I don't claim to be the most widely-read guy in the world... but I do read in a lot of different formats. From Facebook to the Internet as a whole -- from Sports Illustrated to TV Guide -- from Newsweek to Entertainment Weekly to the daily newspaper -- I get a pretty broad exposure to what's being written from week to week.

But even if you didn't, you'd probably guess that the subject (or at least the hook) for a high percentage of current writing this week is Thanksgiving. Everyone's talking -- throw in TV if you like -- about the things in their lives, or the movies or TV shows, that they're thankful for. Even the political stories are telling you what politician X ought to be thankful for in current events.

It seems to me, however, that in the majority of cases there is something conspicuously absent in all the ink/pixels expended on thankfulness: an object. Now I suppose I could be totally wrong on this semantically -- although it doesn't appear so -- but my gut reaction is that giving thanks is completely meaningless without someone to accept the thanks.

On some level, I believe most people get that. Because I read not only TV Guide but also Entertainment Weekly, I'm privy to many profound utterances by the Hollywood Crowd; not to sound like I should be chewin' tobacco & wearin' overalls or anything, but my experience is that Them Thar Fancy Showbiz Folks have a heightened tendency to be thankful to karma, or positive energy, or the universe. Not sure exactly where The Man Upstairs/The Big Guy in the Sky fall into that continuum, but I think it's all a way to backhandedly acknowledge the seemingly self-evident fact that blessings don't just materialize out of the sky; every gift has a corresponding Giver.

I don't know that I've done an awesome job in my life of Celebrating Thanksgiving; that is, we don't usually have an extended family time of rehearsing our gratitude as we gather for the feast. By the time I get the turkey on the table, mash the potatoes, whip up some gravy and accidentally leave the rolls in the oven too long, I'm not always welling up with an overwhelming emotion of thankfulness (and everyone else has long since forgotten what we're celebrating). I do try, however, to remind the kids from day to day of all the wonderful things we have -- even the beauty of the world around us, which God gives us as a completely optional gift... not because it's "necessary", but solely for the purpose of our enjoyment.

So as the day approaches, by all means take some time to reflect on all the good things in your life -- but don't forget to direct the message of thanksgiving where it really goes. Oh, and also, don't forget to take the rolls out of the oven.

Making It Official

2009-11-16T22:47:00.003-05:00

Over the years – and yes, my fourth Blogiversary is approaching; I’m thinking of registering at the Apple Store – I haven’t said much about the Ginormously Extensive corporation I work for. I mean, I could try your patience by Giving Extra hints and such, but I’m not really sure it’s worth Great Effort to see if I can, ah, make the light bulb come on for you.

Suffice it to say that my Generous Employer is also one of the sponsors of the upcoming Winter Olympic games; they have even provided me with a screensaver that informs me that it’s exactly 87 days till the Games open. You probably didn’t realize that unless you were either an Olympian yourself, or you had a pretty good idea where to get a bet down on luge.

This means, by the way, that if you’re looking for a gallon of paint between now and March, you might better try Lowe’s.

Another sure harbinger of an approaching Olympics – besides NBC putting on lousy prime-time shows so you won’t feel deprived when they’re pre-empted for two weeks – can be seen in advertising. For the next 3 months, you’ll be seeing glossy spreads for the Official Panty Hose of the Winter Olympics, and logos on the end of TV commercials for the Official Motor Oil of the Winter Olympics.

I was thinking I ought to declare myself the Official Blog of the Winter Olympics. A lot of times, they break these things up into market segments to, um, maximize revenue, so I’ll take either “(10 or Fewer Regular Readers)” or “(2 or Fewer Monthly Posts)”, whichever one hasn’t already been bought.

I’m pretty sure that if I made any Official claims, I’d get tracked down & sued, even way down here at the last off-ramp of the Information Superhighway, and I clearly don’t have the revenue to pay my way in (although I’m sure that the rest of the Official products were chosen because of their quality and not due to any financial considerations), so instead maybe I’ll turn the concept on its head.

I have already declared in blogs past the Official Airline of Random Access, as well as the Official Hotel, but I just felt the urge to declare a few more categories, as follows…

Official Auto of Random Access – I have hinted at this in the past, but there’s no question that it’s Toyota. Toyotas are safe, predictable and boring… I can’t imagine why that resonates with me. Of course, it's me, so I really pushed the envelope -- I got one of these. And it looks like this.

Official Snack of Random Access – Since I began working at home (initially part-time in 1999, but then permanently beginning in 2003), I have demonstrated with clarity that I am not discriminatory with regard to snacks. Candy, cookies, donuts and chips alike; if it can be held in one hand while typing with the other – or, failing in that, if it can be found in the cupboard – it has a treasured place in my daily schedule. However, my first love dating from my childhood has always been the salty/greasy food group… and the one that stands above the rest is Fritos. Fritos rank high on both the salty & greasy scales, of course, but they also have a satisfying crunchy substance to them, plus corn is also a vegetable, so they’re actually good for you (they're even vegan!). The Scoops are OK in a pinch, but not preferable, and naturally-- this is me we're talking about -- the flavored varieties aren’t really Fritos at all.

Official Store of Random Access – For those of you in the Upstate NY area, this will comes as no surprise; the rest of you may be mystified. I visit my nearby Stewart’s with almost unimaginable frequency. As of this writing, the last time was… 4 hours ago. Stewart’s produces their own milk, which we purchase roughly every two days, but they’re also excellent for their bread and eggs. And locals are amazed that I’ve gone this far without mentioning Stewart’s excellent ice cream, available both in half-gallons and OTC. Come to think of it, each member of the family can get one of their favorite things there, so I guess we really don’t need to go anywhere else.

Official Tech-Gadget of Random Access – Again, this one’s no surprise, for multiple reasons. I’m on record with multiple rhapsodies about my iPod Nano… plus the iPod Nano is basically the Toyota Camry of high-tech. We’re not talking Blackberry or iPhone or some awesome Windows 7 laptop, or even a Wii; just an iPod, and a last-generation one at that (don’t get me wrong, if someone leaves one of those others on the doorstep overnight, it’ll find a home). Honorable mention here goes to the Xitel inPort, the gadget that allows me to convert 20 years of vinyl and cassette memories to ones and zeroes to fill up (and overflow) that iPod.

Official Beverage of Random Access – When I was a kid, I drank a good amount of soda, particularly Coke (and just as particularly, not Pepsi). As time went on, I found that carbonated drinks very often have a harsh effect on my stomach... and also discovered the wonders of iced tea (always with sugar & lemon). The instant versions are easy to replenish, which is a huge advantage; one of the reasons I don’t drink alcohol is that when I have something to drink, I often drink in quantities that would be pretty unmanageable in an intoxicant. Later I progressed to home-brewed versions, but nowadays if I have to choose one drink, it’s this one – which is, much like my blog entries, sweet and tart both, and Made from the Best Stuff on Earth.

Official Blog of Random Access – I do like to read and re-read my own stuff, I cannot tell a lie. Well, I can, but there’s no advantage in this case. And at the rate I publish, it would be a lot more re-reading than reading. So I do enjoy others, but the best is Joe Posnanski, who recently left the Kansas City Star for Sports Illustrated. Yes, he writes a lot about sports, but also about music, people, writing,… as I find myself saying a lot when I read someone really talented, his writing is basically what I wish mine were. Also -- despite having an actual job writing -- he posts a lot more often than I do.

It occurs to me now that, rather than having to pay to be an Official Blog, I've actually just endorsed a bunch of stuff, so I guess I can sit back and wait for the checks to roll in. Or I'll accept in-kind donations (although a "lifetime supply" of Fritos would probably doom me to a pretty short life). I promise if I do get the cash, I'll plow it right back into the business; maybe I can even scrape together enough to pay to be the Official Blog of Biathlon or curling or one of those sports nobody cares about anyway.

Ready... or Not

2009-10-27T21:53:00.006-05:00

Not long ago, one of my Facebook friends celebrated her 21^st birthday – believe it or not, not all of my friends remember black & white TV and rotary phones. Of course, I had to remark on this milestone from the lofty perspective of my double-21-plus, so my response was: “You’re an adult now… go pay some bills or something.”

Ah, if only it were that simple.

The adult part, not the paying bills part – that never gets any simpler. The fact is, I’ve found myself continuing to struggle with all that’s involved with the word “grownup”. And there’s no question that it’s getting pretty late in the day for that; there aren’t too many places I go any more where I’m the youngest person in the room! It’s probably more common for me to be the oldest.

My daughter is in 2^nd grade and she’s told me several times that she’s worried about multiplication, i.e. 3^rd grade. I always tell her: don’t worry; when it gets here, you’ll be ready. I figured that growing up was the same way -- I just assumed that when you got to be an adult, with adult responsibilities, you’d feel somehow ready for it. When I was a kid, the adults around me (and I actually spent a lot of time, with many different adults in my life) seemed so grounded and serious and, you know, grown-up. They went to work every day because that’s what adults do – dressed in very serious grown-up clothes — and they made decisions without seeming to wrestle much with it, and just generally appeared to me to be in charge… masters of their domain, if you will. And really, really old, too, of course, but that’s just the default kid perspective.

I get this thrown in my face frequently, in a lot of different ways. Parenting is the daily one; being a parent is a constant series of “Is this allowable? Is that a good idea? Is the other necessary?” kind of decisions, and of course unrelenting responsibility… you need to come up with the Right Answer, quickly, and in a way that at least leaves the illusion that you’re in control!

Over the last 6 months or so, I’ve had several trips for work: flights, rental cars, hotels, business meetings. It seems like especially in the airport, I’m conscious that I want to look like a smooth, confident, well-traveled businessman… but inside I’m pretty sure that I’m going to trip over my shoelaces or have my briefcase fly open or something.

I still have a little video playing in my mind of the time I was rushing to the gate because boarding had already started, slipping into my place in the moving line just in the nick – only to realize that my flight was boarding at the gate across the way. Got almost to the agent taking boarding passes before I figured that one out, and as a result just barely made my (correct) flight!

And I’ve mentioned before that our camp is something of an ongoing project; recently we’ve concluded that there are some things we need to do that we can’t really do ourselves. So we need to hire someone to do the work… and I realized: I have no idea how to do that. Doesn’t it seem like a grown-up would know how to find someone and how to evaluate whether they’re fit for the job?

For that matter, a mature adult would probably know better than to write 600 words about how he doesn’t feel very competent.

I suppose this probably sounds like the typical mid-life crisis – a guy gets halfway (oh, all right, a little more than halfway) through his life, assesses the cards he’s been dealt, and asks for a new deal. But I want to make clear that’s not really what I’m talking about. I like my cards; I like being a husband and a dad and having a good job and owning cars and the like. If this is the hand I’m dealt, it would be hard to imagine a much better one.

I just can’t shake the feeling that everyone knows how to play their hands but me…

Running the Four Corners

2009-10-06T21:25:00.003-05:00

When I was a kid -- you know, in the days before ESPN -- I'd end up watching whatever sports event did show up on TV, and I enjoyed most of what I saw. Somehow, though, in those days I never got too interested in college basketball.

One big reason was named Dean Smith. He was the coach of the University of North Carolina basketball team, and he was famous for a strategy called the Four Corners. Basically, whenever his team got ahead late in the game, every time they got the ball they'd hold it as long as they could. Eventually.................. I'm sorry, did I doze off? eventually someone might get open for a layup, but if not he was content to just let all the time run off the clock.

At some point, everyone realized that this tactic was really against the spirit of the game (and boring), and a rule was passed that the team with the ball had to shoot within 40 seconds (later 35).

Stall tactics were back in the news recently with the story of Roman Polanski, the film director who pled guilty to a rather unpleasant crime in 1977, but fled to Europe before sentencing. A couple weeks ago he was captured in Switzerland and the process has begun to have him extradited to the US to face justice.

I don't generally comment too much on the news in this space; this blog doesn't exist for the purpose of antagonizing people or shoving my views down their throats. But there has been much blather (oops, did I tip my hand there?) in the press, much of it prompted by the Moral Compass of Our Nation -- Hollywood celebrities -- about how we should leave the man alone because he's suffered enough already. One French official even chimed in that America should stop persecuting such a gifted artiste.

Now I can see how it would be difficult, even wearing, to move to the country of your birth. And continue pursuing your livelihood without interruption. And travel around Europe to various film festivals to receive applause and awards. So perhaps we can agree that reasonable people might disagree about how much Monsieur Polanski has suffered; then let's add in one more inconvenient fact:

He's still a criminal.

Most crimes have a beginning point and an ending point, but since he's a fugitive from U.S. justice, every day he didn't surrender himself to authorities was itself a felony. Remember, no "innocent till proven guilty" like your common street criminal: being a fugitive proves itself.

In that sense, he's piled up over 10,000 crimes since he was convicted -- so I'm afraid I have to come down on the side of "No, he hasn't suffered enough". I still don't believe it's fair to run out the clock.

Nostradamus and Me

2009-09-21T22:11:00.000-05:00

When I was a bit younger, the National Enquirer and Jeane Dixon had a little thing going. It seemed like every week -- and I am measuring this from checkout-line exposure, not actual reading; the NE is perhaps the only English-language publication I've never subscribed to -- there was a big headline touting Ms. Dixon's latest revelations of what lay ahead for us all.

It also seems that whatever else happens in the twice-yearly reorganization of the local newspaper, the horoscope column is a cornerstone of the local News Dissemination Effort (not sure why you need a subscription to the paper if today's edition tells you what happened yesterday and what's going to happen tomorrow).

It turns out that you've all been wasting your time, although hopefully not your money; I can't quite imagine a reader of this space going to a palm reader (although I'll probably find I'm woefully naive on that score).

All you have to do is read this blog.

All The Rage these days is the discussion of "public civility", due in large part to our friends Rep. Wilson, Ms. Williams, and Mr. West. But you know, if you are a regular visitor to this very page, you should have seen this coming -- almost four years ago. Because some of you hate links, and because I can make an entirely new blog entry out of something I already wrote, I'm going to reprint the post here in its entirety. Below, my 12/21/05 entry (my third post ever!) entitled "Motivational Speech":

I belong to an e-mail list made up of a number of ministers and laypeople in my area. Most of the time (like most people, I suspect) I just lurk. A couple of years ago, however, a topic came up I couldn’t stay out of… no matter how hard I tried.

Never mind what the issue was; as the mails & responses progressed, it became clear that the Majority Opinion was at odds with mine. This did not surprise me – and it also eliminated any temptation I had (at first) to get involved in the discussion. I know I’m in the minority, so I saw no need to “out” myself as an oddball.

Gradually the tone shifted from “we’re right” to “they’re wrong”. After that there were assertions that anyone who disagreed was trying to take over the church for their own nefarious purposes.

Can you see what happened here? It’s not enough for me to be right; my position has to be the one that any right-thinking person would take. In fact, it’s not enough for me to disagree with your conclusions – even your motives must be called into question.

I got a strong sense of déjà vu not long ago, watching the news: the President and some of his administration began accusing anyone who dares to criticize the war policy of being unpatriotic and of aiding the enemy. I notice that they backtracked from that position pretty quickly, but it’s clearly not an accident that several people close to the Administration said pretty much the same thing at the same time.

In the case of the e-mail thread, I finally did post. I didn’t bother trying to defend my position, or even explain it – I’m sure everyone drew instant conclusions as to what “side” I was on. My point was, I may disagree with you 100%, and I may battle tooth and nail to see my viewpoint become the accepted wisdom… but I will not commit the error – the sin, if you prefer – of assuming that anyone who disagrees with me has questionable motives. A civilized society, not to mention a church, can’t survive that way.

Behold, the Power of Cheese

2009-08-24T21:27:00.001-05:00

This past school year, as our daughter conducted her ongoing first-grade-inspired seminars, I was most distressed by her lecture on The Food Pyramid. I liked it better when we only had to keep track of The Four Basic Food Groups: Pasta, Cheese, Meat, and Potato Chips. These are the staples around which my Cuisine is based... well, I don't generally cook with potato chips, but I do have seven different kinds of cheese in my fridge right now.

Of course, my daughter isn't the only one who relishes illuminating my ignorance. Maybe 18 months ago, I bought something at Best Buy (I should never be allowed in Best Buy unsupervised. Even though I'm far from an impulse buyer, nearly every trip in there plants a seed for a future purchase). They had a deal: join Reward Zone and get a short-term subscription to a magazine. Since I already get most English-language publications, I decided I'd give Entertainment Weekly a try.

Don't get me wrong, I'm no stranger to the Free Introductory Offer. I figured I'd let it go a couple months, then cancel; unfortunately, I didn't fully account for my voracious thirst for printed material. At this point, in addition to the daily newspaper, I have no fewer than six weekly subscriptions... including, of course, EW. I say "weekly", but somehow several of them tend to print a lot of "double issues" and then take a week off.

EW provides coverage of all forms of entertainment media -- TV, movies, music, books, even video games -- and while I enjoy keeping up-to-date on all those topics, I sometimes feel their primary purpose is to reinforce something I've known for a lot of years: I ain't hip.

The articles and especially the reviews usually tout the band that's stretching its genre, the movie that is an intricately crafted work of art, the novel that is unflinching in its portrayal of blah blah blah... even the TV shows are most often the ones more noted for Critical Acclaim than for, you know, viewers.

It seems like human nature, or maybe just the nature of criticism (or a bid for job security), but it's frustrating that seemingly the only Worthwhile Art is obscure and challenging and difficult -- almost as if something that's actually enjoyable is somehow less worthy.

As for myself, I find that in almost all matters of taste, and not just the literal one, that I have a deep-seated appreciation for cheese.

I've read and enjoyed Shakespeare and I'm familiar with at least the most obvious literary classics, but I'd probably say my favorite author is Robert B. Parker. At least statistically: he's written 68 books and I know I've read well over 50 of them. Is he a master literary stylist, constantly breaking new ground? 68 books in 36 years -- you do the math.

Wikipedia helpfully links my favorite musical artists to the Star-based Music Critics, so I'm painfully aware that they range from tolerated (Billy Joel) to widely panned (Styx) to downright laughingstocks (Barry Manilow)... but if the iPod dials up "Until the Night", or "Come Sail Away", or "Can't Smile Without You" and no one's around, I'll be singing along at the top of my lungs (my daughter caught me singing AND doing air guitar to "Rockin' the Paradise" the other day, which was... awkward). Incidentally, "Can't Smile" is the single best karaoke song in recorded history -- sure, "everybody hates Barry", but I've never failed to get an ovation with that one.

While I don't see much more than a half-dozen movies a year, even in the DVD/PPV age, I like movies that make me laugh.. although I'm not opposed to a drama, or even a tearjerker if it doesn't totally insult my intelligence. I guess you'd say I'm more "Stripes", or "Rocky", or "The Incredibles" than "Leaving Las Vegas" or "Trainspotting". I'd rather watch "Sixteen Candles" once than a whole pile of auteurs producing finely-observed Works of Art about despair and depravity.

In television, I think the critics look for "raw" and "gritty", or maybe "quirky/offbeat". Now I believe I rank pretty high up on the Quirkymeter, but if you've read anything I've written about my favorite shows, you'll note they are for the most part pretty general-appeal. Exceptions that prove the rule: the critics and I agree wholeheartedly on Hill Street Blues and Sports Night.

I've gone to two art galleries dedicated to a single artist, both of those for Norman Rockwell -- also the only artist featured on the walls of my home. He ranks roughly as high on the coolness scale (not to be confused with the Quirkymeter) as myself, but -- not meaning to flatter myself -- I think of his art in the same kind of terms as my blog: take a moment that's familiar and see it in a slightly different way, or perhaps take another moment that's personal and try to find the universal in it.

And of course, coming full circle to the literal cheese theme, I've made no secret of my preference for simple foods cooked well: steak, BBQ ribs, fried chicken, lasagna, pizza. And although I'll always watch Top Chef and Next Food Network Star with interest, I'll never understand or appreciate the culinary approach that produces a slice of this and a dollop of that, and something smeared around the edge of the plate. Suffice it to say that if there's anything on the menu you can't pronounce or define (or tablecloths on the table, for that matter), you won't run into me there.

I suppose that in some respects this makes me appear Ignorant and Proud of It. Don't want none of that Art 'round here! But if there's a grand moral to the story, it might be that I don't want my dining, or any entertainment, to be like taking vitamins. I'd rather have a big ol' tasty hunk of cheese.

Just Forward My Mail to 1981

2009-08-10T21:45:00.002-05:00

If it were up to me, we wouldn't need much more than one TV channel. But after a period of time (that is, a span of time about as large as the average punctuation mark) my wife can't take any more baseball -- and this is only on once a week. So we end up over at HGTV a fair amount of the time. Often, they are talking about real estate values... and of course, when you turn off the TV and pick up the newspaper, the big story is the economy and people just trying to make ends meet. Well, I've found a place to live where the cost of living is a lot lower...

The past.

Last fall, of course, I visited Homecoming at my alma mater; this spring and summer, under the influence of a group of my Facebook friends, I've been thinking and talking quite a bit about my days at Gaslight Village -- which culminated in my most recent post here. Then to complete the trifecta: this past weekend, I had the opportunity to attend my 30th high school reunion.

Now, even though I've proved I have a rose-colored rearview mirror, I remember plenty about high school that would not lead one to want to revisit it. So why is it that every time there's a reunion, I'm there when the doors open? I'm 4-for-4: 10, 20, 25, and 30.

Well, for one thing there's always the chance I'll get to see someone I've really missed. OK, that actually doesn't happen -- in reality, it seems I spend a lot of each reunion talking to all the people who never talked to me on the first go-round -- but still I live in hope.

That's one of the reasons I find reunions pretty interesting -- if only in the sociological sense. And it has gotten better over the years; I think at least at the 10-year reunion we were all a little preoccupied with how the others saw us, trying to impress each other with all we'd accomplished (which for me was a little dicey since I had only a part-time job, no kids, and was living in a one-bedroom apartment). Now we've all more or less come to terms with who we are and what we've done -- and even if we're not, we're far enough away from high school that none of these people are really our primary peer group any more. Or is that just me?

As for the actual event, it was enjoyable enough. We ate a lot; I did connect with 1 or 2 people I'd lost touch with; and I did get to do not one but two karaoke numbers. Surely any day with karaoke is not a total loss. And I was at least able to collect a few oddities to take home with me (and, you know, post on the World Wide Web).

- One of my classmates asked me if I was “still really smart”. I suppose if I were really all that bright, I would have had a brilliant riposte to that, so maybe the question answers itself. Even I (not at all desperate for an infusion of self-esteem) would be hard pressed to answer that one, “Why, yes – yes, I am.” Instead, I opted for, “Actually, I’m much dumber than I was then; back then I knew everything,” which I thought struck the right reunion-oriented note of light-heartedness, crossed with wisdom born of the passage of years, seasoned with just a sprinkle of good-natured self-mockery. I do wonder in hindsight whether someone who would even ask such a question is capable of perceiving that level of nuance, of course…
- Given that the ticket price included all-you-can-drink beer, it was perhaps inevitable that someone’s thirst would outstrip his capacity for self-restraint. The crowd as a whole was very well-mannered, but at least one guy had over-refreshed himself: in the midst of my karaoke number he decided to come up, wrap his arm around me and start to sing along. I’ve already noted my wife’s flair for persuasion; she came forward and very clearly pantomimed that she was supposed to be the one I was singing to, which distracted him enough that some others were able to peel him off. Given the effect that karaoke usually has on me, it’s perhaps predictable that my main concern was whether my performance would be spoiled.
- Heading out to the parking lot at one point, I ran into one of my classmates who asked whether I was headed out to “smoke a bowl.” Pretty sure he was just ribbing me there… but there were those in attendance who confused a high school reunion with a re-creation – on a later trip to the parking lot, I did discover there was a group out there in the dark somewhere having a non-tobacco-related group smoke.

In similar fashion, I’m just as much of a stick-in-the-mud as I ever was, so we left pretty early. Later that evening, as I was absorbed in my usual never-ending rehash, my wife in the fashion of wives everywhere asked the question that cut to the heart of all the underlying issues: what is it that makes me so enraptured (I’m not sure if she used the word “obsessed”, but it was more or less implied) with all these journeys back into the past?

There might be a hundred answers or there might be no good answer at all. High school reunions for me can serve as a chance to do it all again – an opportunity to relive it and get it right this time, a chance to connect with people that I always felt somehow separated from. Not above or below, but rather just apart. But at this juncture so many years later, I have the feeling that we’re more alike than different.

I think my interest in all things Gaslight Village is probably partly an effort to recapture a simpler but also more exciting time. I could name a half-dozen incidents from those days that I recorded in my journal with a joking “Dear Diary” because they seemed So Very Momentous to me. Probably because it’s the first time for many different experiences, or perhaps just because when you're young, there’s not such a thicket of real life to lose them in. Either way, it's pretty awesome to recapture even a little of that excitement.

I’m not sure why the college homecoming trip was so important. I think it started as nostalgia for a wonderful period in my life, but eventually became a realization that it wasn’t really as wonderful as I like to remember… but that there's nothing wrong with that. I felt like I came out further ahead by working that out than just reliving misty watercolor memories.

And Facebook, which honestly is just another side of the same coin… while I have Facebook friends that I also see in person, it’s also a way for me to integrate all the parts of my life: the slightly odd kid from high school; the rushing-to-be/afraid-to-be grownup from the Gaslight Village days; the young married guy trying to figure out how to be a grownup; and yes, even the middle-aged guy with a wife & 2 kids, a good job and a lot of gray in his hair (but less actual hair).

I’m not always crazy about all the me’s I run into as I observe myself in all my time-travels. Still, just as I’m richer for all the experiences I’ve had and the people I’ve shared them with, I believe I get a benefit from keeping in close touch with all my prior selves… and perhaps even learning something about my present self into the bargain.

BOFOH Bits

2009-07-21T22:15:00.007-05:00

Amid all the reams and wads and stacks of information (and "information") available on the World Wide Web, there's relatively little written about a topic near and dear to my heart: Gaslight Village. I suppose that's only natural; nobody really remembers Pete Best (forget about Stu Sutcliffe), no one writes scholarly biographies of Shemp Howard, and good luck finding someone who's heard of the DuMont Network.

All of these, of course, were in some way overshadowed or even made obsolete by contemporaries (unless you're one of the four people in the world who believe Shemp > Curly, to which I can only say this: no). It was Gaslight's fate to be the ugly corporate stepsister in the empire of Charles R. Wood -- now fondly remembered as a philanthropist, but for us the man who employed most of the teens in the Tri-County area and screamed at a significant percentage of those -- to the legendary Storytown, soon to be known as The Great Escape and eventually to become a part of the Six Flags universe.

The conceit -- the shtik -- the premise of Gaslight Village was a "Gay Nineties" theme. I think I'm safe in saying the concept predated the use of "gay" to mean something else entirely... but in either case it's kind of a hard theme to carry through in an amusement park. There is something vaguely old-fashioned (maybe even musty) about T-shirt shops and skee ball and bumper cars, but maybe more '50s than '90s.

I landed at Gaslight in the summer of 1978 more or less by accident: our high school did The Music Man for our spring musical, and 2 of the guys in the show's quartet decided that was a great path to a summer job (that didn't involve too much work), but the other 2 guys weren't interested, so I was invited to join.

The revised quartet was hired, and a couple or 3 times a day we'd put on red vests and straw hats and belt out "Lida Rose" and "You Gotta Have Heart" and... a bunch of other barbershoppy stuff. However, if you do the math, that's only about a half-hour a day, and Charles R. Wood wasn't about to pay 4 teenagers a day's wage to sit around for all but a half-hour a day.

So Jeff & Steve ran rides, and Kevin & I became grounds boys. I was always assiduous about my duties; there were several spots scattered throughout the park that were polished almost to a gleam. It's possible that, in an effort to be polite, I might have made conversation with young ladies that might have been located in the vicinity of those locations.

As dedicated as I was to keeping my corner of Lake George popcorn- and cigarette-butt-free, my ambition was always to make it to the Opera House, the park's "dinner theater" (okay, snack bar theater). The theater featured 7 shows a day -- the old-fashioned mellerdrama, with a clean-cut hero rescuing the innocent heroine from the dastardly villain, 4 times a day; and a full-fledged ice show, performed on an ice rink about the size of your dining room table, 3 times a day. Seriously, I have about half that much ice in my drink right now. Anyway, suffice it to say there was always a very clean spot in the Opera House doorway.

In the course of time -- lots of time; I worked at Gaslight for 6 summers, so that's more than one calendar year -- I was to weasel my way into the Opera House, bit by bit. Towards the end of my second summer when everyone quit, I joined the cast of the mellerdrama. The show, which narrowly missed a Tony Award nomination for Best Amusement Park Parody/Ripoff of a Recently-Popular Movie, was entitled "Star Squabbles"; I played the character role of Kindly Old Okee Dokee. A character role, if you're not theater-savvy, means you don't get any funny lines and you don't get to do anything in particular; you're there mostly to give the hero somebody to talk to. Occasionally you get to do Exposition, meaning you say something like, "Look, Fluke (the hero's name was Fluke Skycrawler), we're on a spaceship!" so the audience can figure out what the scenery's supposed to be depicting.

The acting... um, performing?... no, stage gig only lasted about 2 weeks, but I got to wear stage makeup and a wig made of the finest yak hair (and from the smell of it, the yak was using it on my day off), and get paid, and not sweep any grounds, so I felt myself Quite the Big Cheese Indeed.

Overall, during those three long summers of custodial servitude, I had the opportunity to fill a lot of other roles that even today lend my resume a madcap air that would otherwise be lacking:

- opening cages, backstage, for the tiger show
- onstage announcer for the performing bear act
- actor in the Keystone Kops pie fight

But I may be proudest of my lighting work for the ice show -- which started while I was still working grounds; eventually, the show's impresario/skating magician, Ron Urban, came to trust me sufficiently that he handed me the show's running order and asked me to devise my own light cues. Not to mention that I ended up dating the girl who ran the other spotlight, for over a year!

But it wasn't till my fourth year at Gaslight that I reached the apex: Singing waiter in the Opera House (incidentally, we always called it the Big Old-Fashioned Opera House, or BOFOH -- hence BOFOH Bits). I've been asked this a lot: you don't sing while you're waiting on tables, but from the bandstand between customers. I featured those well-known Gay Nineties standards, "I Get a Kick Out of You" and "All the Things You Are". We were, as I said, basically a snack bar -- pizza, pretzels, soda, and beer -- so the combination of an average check under $10 and my own uniquely winning personality meant that I sometimes made as much as double figures in tips.

This is when it gets tricky to write. I did have a great time in my three Opera House years; we became in a lot of ways a family, or at least a team, in a fashion that just didn't happen in the rest of the park. In fact, I was really prompted to write this by recently reconnecting with a bunch of my old OH pals via Facebook (hi guys! love ya...).

I also know that I'm unusually susceptible to the Good Old Days virus that makes (almost) 30 years ago look like a lot more fun than today, and perhaps than it did then. Plus I have to be unusually careful about accuracy with a group of fellow survivors auditing me.

And... I'm afraid I'm not wholly up to the challenge of capturing what it really felt like: to be on the doorstep of adulthood, taking my first real steps toward independence, trying to figure out -- painfully at times -- who I really was, experiencing the exhilaration and devastation of my first truly adult romantic relationship.

I do remember a lot of snapshots, flashes really, like in the old prison movies when the spotlight sweeps across the darkened prison yard:

... a lot of laughter, feeling like we were banding together against a mob of surly and cheap tourists

... going out dancing with the gang after work, and on top of "having a great time", feeling that swell of "hey, I'm a grown-up"

... timing my trip past the side of the ice cube so I could do my "special cheer" just as our star skater, Kim, was finishing her routine

... sitting on the bench outside the kitchen door crying because someone had said something like "Hey, why do you have to be so sarcastic all the time?" -- and thinking Big Thoughts about "Who am I really?"

... feeling jealous when new people came to the Opera House and acted like they belonged there, when it felt a little like they were horning in on My Thing.

... driving away from the last time we were all together, in September of 1983, knowing in my heart (and the pit of my stomach) that something important in my life had just come to an end, something I'd never get back -- and getting stopped by the cops on the way home for running a red light because I was in such a daze.

I realized suddenly while writing this (although to be honest it's taken me almost 2 months to write) that I'm actually glad Gaslight's closed. Like I said, I'm jealous: the place was special to me in a variety of ways, some obvious and some not so much, and somehow to have it go on without me doesn't seem right. I know that's a Mark-centric view of the world... but hey, it's my blog.

So to CD and O'B and Kim and Jeff and Leslie... and to Amy... and Steve, Ron, Bernie, Chucko, Warren Boden, Anne Bishop, and Bob Carroll (but not to Fred Dufel) -- thanks so much for being part of my life. I promise not to blame you for any of the less-desirable aspects of who I've become, and I leave you with this thought:

Just remember that sunshine always follows the rain,
So wrap your troubles in dreams, and dream your troubles away.

Upholding More Than One Tradition

2009-07-13T21:35:00.002-05:00

For some reason when I think of doing a travel piece, my mind always goes straight to Kerouac. This despite the fact that I've never read On The Road (but if you're a Frequent Reader you know that my titles, in particular, trend toward the pretentiously literary). It's also true that there is a long and honorable tradition of the Comic Travel Piece; I myself have read such essays ranging from Twain, to Benchley, Perelman, and all the way up to P. J. O'Rourke (but perhaps my favorite example of Travel Literature is Jackson Browne's "Running on Empty"). I have it on good authority, however, that none of those worthy creations mention children's museums, zoos, or amusement parks. Of course, they're most likely more entertaining too.

I decided to forgo the obscure road-related puns in this title; I refer rather to the fact that each summer we go on a family vacation, and each summer I write about it. I'm not offering any warranty that this will be in the same league as any of the guys mentioned above.

Vacation doesn't inspire coherence, so instead of a linear narrative, consider this a series of snapshots. Maybe I should have titled it "Postcards from the Edge".

$ For any trip, I marshal the full resources of the 21st century: Internet research, including directions from destination websites; full turn-by-turn directions, calibrated to 0.1 mile, from Google maps; and, starting this year, GPS as well. Despite all that, I still had several moments of (if not outright lostness) at least uncertainty. North Carolina in particular has a disturbing habit of combining & then re-dividing their numbered routes. So I asked my dad; he told me that in the late 40s he made three round trips from New York to California. They did have basic roadmaps, but no "interstate highways", and no way to really know what was up ahead; they drove until they found a "tourist cabin" where they could stay the night.

$ We passed some of those developments bulit practically in the interstate breakdown lane. It's too bad nobody still bakes pies & leaves them on the windowsill to cool, because if they did, you could snag yourself a good snack from the right-hand lane. They had that sign that says, "If you lived here, you'd be home now"... but I couldn't help thinking it should really read, "If you lived here, you'd be wondering what on earth possesed you to spend all that dough on a place where cars are always going through your front yard at 70 mph."

$ With regard to E-Z-Pass: what took me so long? Some of these highways now have Express E-Z-Pass -- you don't slow down or even drive through the cattle chute; just keep on rolling, they'll get your money. What's more, you can even pick up an e-z-pass transmitter at the grocery store!

$ Parents traveling with relatively young children do well to deploy several weapons, including extra snacks, electronic games, and a portable DVD player... however, the two most important words to keep in mind: suite hotel. For me, it would be difficult to survive a vacation where lights-out was at 8 every night -- so the separate bedroom is indispensable. Caution: for some chains, "suite" means "has an armchair and a mini-fridge", so don't be fooled by cheap imitations.

$ Best thing about crossing old Mr. Mason & Mr. Dixon's stripe: Chick-Fil-A. It turns out that there are some in the northeast; the nearest one to us is only 150 miles away. But they're easier to find in the South -- in fact, when I finally got a chance to enjoy my visit, it was here. I don't understand why I can't get a chicken sandwich that good without paying my way into an amusement park.

$ Twice in a row while visiting Baltimore, my wife pulled off one of those deals only she can, to get things people don't want to give us. We went for the stadium tour at Camden Yards: first she got the parking guy to let us park (in the "wrong" lot) for free, even; then when the tour was sold out after only the other three of us got in, she met the tour guide and talked him into letting her come along after all. I don't know whether it's "feminine wiles", or "selling ice to Eskimos", or The Power to Cloud Men's Minds... but I'm sure glad she's on our side.

$ Later on in Baltimore, I was going to put my credit card in the parking meter when a guy slipped in ahead of me, stuck in a card, and pulled out a $2 ticket. He said, "I'll give you this $2 ticket for $1 cash." I had about 4 seconds to think about it, so I said, "OK, sure." As I walked away, I decided it must have been some kind of scam -- stolen credit card? -- but I'm still not sure exactly what happened there. In any case, I was able to park all day long in a major American city for $4!
$ It's good that my literary ambitions are basically drained away by this blog (and, of course, all my Facebook masterpieces), or I would be tempted to write the definitive guide to Children's Museums of the Northeast. This trip brings me to 5, lifetime, I believe -- plus at least 5 other museums with varying degrees of family-friendliness. There is a Children's Museums association, but I'm starting to suspect that the certification process is mostly a formality...
$ The sequel would be a compendium of hotel pools -- as soon as my fingers un-prune enough that I can hold a pen.
$ One of the charms of the road trip (or indeed, of getting out of bed each day) is the chance to see something you've never seen before. Quite often it turns out to be something you never imagined wanting to see, but that's another story. For this trip, my nominee for Eighth Wonder of the World was: a restroom hand dryer that actually dries your hands. It's called the Xlerator and after seeing it in action, I can only conclude that it's powered by the same engine as the Boeing 737. The only downside is that every time I use it, it sets my watch back about an hour.

Ten days, 1800 miles, 6 states, 4 hotels, 4 visits to the beach, about a dozen visits to souvenir/gift shops, and all the fast-food cheeseburgers you can eat. Actually a few more than you can eat. In any case, it sure is good to be home. I think I'm going to stick to the roads that are too small to have numbers for awhile.

Papa Song

2009-06-21T22:07:00.000-05:00

I suppose it's possible my sense of humor has changed over the years -- although this is never not funny:
but I recall a song that, when I was in college, always had me & my roommate in stitches. It was called "Papa Song", by Phil Keaggy, and what made it funny was the voiceover at the beginning of one of his small children saying "Papa!"

Yeah, I know, I just read that over & it didn't make much sense to me either. The kid did kind of sound like he was weaned on helium, and we always giggled -- in fact, many nights we'd just play that few seconds of the song before we went to bed. I suppose "you had to be there, and also then, and maybe even me" doesn't quite cut it in print.

In any case, as a companion piece to my Mother's Day post (there's still time to send the link to your mom as a special post-Mother's-Day remembrance, if you haven't already!), I'm thinking about dads as the big day arrives. You know, the day where everyone makes a big deal out of dads and there are gifts and dinner out and... well, maybe not. I'm not sure Father's Day is quite as much of a big deal; sometimes it seems a bit like an afterthought to me. I already wrote about this a few years back in my trademark snarky/whimsical style, but since it's summertime I'm in reruns.

I was out shopping for the card for dad this week (observing my own card rules & regulations as laid out in the Mother's Day post), and I noticed a curious theme. Mother's Day cards, of course, are all about "Mom, we love you so much and you're so wonderful and you bring joy to our lives".... all very valid & commendable sentiments.

Many of the Father's Day cards, on the other hand, seemed to cluster around this idea: "Dad, even though you find it hard to say how you feel, we know you really love us." In fact, the ones from sons read more like this -- "Dad, even though we never talk about our feelings, I hope you know I love you."

I've always led the charge against this kind of male stereotype -- and I'm well aware that "Hallmark" comes from the Latin, meaning "cliche" ... but I'm a little hesitant to start painting the picket signs just yet. I'm also aware that cliches get to be cliches from a basis in fact, and maybe I've just seen this scenario actually happen too often in real life to automatically dismiss it as slander.

All I can do is work against it in my own house. I make no claims to parental excellence; I just try to control what I can control (which, believe me, does not always include any of the other residents here): I try to make sure I know my kids better than anyone else in the world, and I let them know every day, a bunch of times a day, exactly how I feel about them.

And, you know, probably 73% of the time or more, that's a good thing.

Public Enemy (Grade) 1

2009-05-20T21:37:00.002-05:00

I have probably mentioned that my daughter has possibly more than the standard allotment of personality. As my son is fond of saying (when he’s not shrieking her name at jet-takeoff decibels), “Dad, she’s a rascal, dad.” He has in some ways keen powers of observation, but you don’t have to watch her for long to figure out – if not how her mind works, exactly, definitely toward what end.

The first weekend after she started kindergarten, we received a phone call from her teacher. When she identified herself, my heart sank and I immediately imagined all sorts of issues my girl had gotten into in her three-day educational career. But the teacher immediately put my mind at ease: “She’s already become quite a leader. Some of the other kids are timid about trying new things, but when they see that she’s willing to try anything, it puts them at ease.” So I was relieved and only a bit surprised to find she was using her superpowers for good, rather than for evil.

Since then, the teacher reports have been generally quite glowing… although there have been the occasional incidents of Interpersonal Clash (I may have mentioned as well that she is a junior member of the International Society of Frequently Wrong, But Never In Doubt). In any case, we always experience that delightful jolt of uncertainty when it’s the teacher on the phone – as was the case last week.

This time it was not a plaudit, but instead the news that she had been overheard using… colorful language. It would be impolite of me to specify the color, but suffice it to say it was not a word from her spelling list, not to mention one she hadn’t encountered at home.

And yes, I know that’s what they all say, but although all of us in the house are capable of expressing ourselves with force and clarity, I can say with some assurance that she didn’t hear it here, or at the church.

The teacher hastened to add that she had had a visit with the principal and that she seemed visibly and almost violently remorseful. This is as good a time as any to mention that, especially as former teachers, my wife & I make a practice of backing the teacher to the hilt; we told her that we appreciated her dealing with this swiftly and firmly (this is not a girl, if I have not already made this clear, who does well with a long leash).

When she got home, I waited to see if she’d betray any hint of her ordeal, but when her lips (for once) seemed sealed, I confronted her directly with the Stern, Solemn Talk. I told her that these were not words that she learned or heard or would be permitted to use at home, and that we expected her to behave in a respectful and correct way at all times. I impressed on her the embarrassment attached to going to the principal and having the teacher call home; I know she’s sensitive to being embarrassed. She told me that she was just “repeating” the words – which apparently doesn’t count as “saying” the words – and that she wouldn’t do it again.

When mom arrived, we went through the drill once more – this time with a trifle more, um… emphasis. And this time she revealed something I didn’t know: not only had she employed the word I’d already heard (a relatively junior officer in the Colorful Language Army), but had in fact let loose with the Head Honcho, the dreaded F-bomb. In fact, to prove it, she set one off right then & there in the living room.

My wife was looking at my face when our 6-year-old girl launched it, and she said the color completely drained from me. I have to admit, that was a milestone experience for me, and not in the best possible sense.

Well, washing her mouth out with Clorox seemed inadvisable, so we had to settle for a just-short-of-unhinged lecture and withdrawal of Electronic Privileges (Game Boy, videos, CD player) for one week. And as we all know, there are few more stringent sentences in the modern world than to be unplugged.

I’d like to think that for a normal kid, that would’ve been the end of the story. But in the midst of this, she also slipped in, “By the way, dad, you need to send in money for my cafeteria account.” I knew I’d just sent in money recently, and she’d brought her lunch every day since, so I couldn’t imagine what had happened. I quizzed her: “You’re just getting milk every day – right?” “Yeah, dad, just milk!” When I looked at the check register, I realized I’d sent in $10 one week prior. All I could figure is that maybe the check didn’t make it all the way to be deposited somehow, so I grabbed the phone book to look up the bank’s 800-number so I could find out whether it had cleared.

That’s when she said, “Um, dad, I think I need to tell you the truth about something.” She had been buying a lunch every day, in addition to bringing a lunch with her. I asked her why; was it to be cool or like the other kids? “No, I just like it.”

So in addition to her Electronic Grounding, she also was lunch-grounded the same day: her account was closed, and she was told all she could buy for the rest of the school year was white milk.

Seeing how much she’s testing our parental ingenuity at age 6, it seems to me like I ought to go on amazon.com or eBay or some such place and find out what it takes to pick up an electronic monitoring ankle bracelet. Ought to come in handy right about 2nd grade.

M Is for...

2009-05-11T22:17:00.000-05:00

In American culture, there are all sorts of traditions around Mother's Day. For those of us in geographical proximity to mom, brunch seems quite common, and the local restaurants oblige with high-priced spreads (I saw one place that advertised Mother's Day Brunch and Drink Specials, just in case your family tradition includes getting Mom hammered). Hallmark, of course, is founded upon this kind of occasion -- and it's important to go for the real thing. If you send Mom an American Greetings card, all you're doing is saving yourself the ink for writing inside, "Hi Mom, I threw this in the cart while I was at the grocery store!" And if you use one of the "funny" American Greetings, you weren't at the grocery store, you were at the dollar store (Don't even get me started on those 99-cent cards... which send the clear message: "You haven't changed my old bedroom into an office yet, have you, mom??").

When in doubt, go for Hallmark: the ones that are about as big as a manila envelope, with a flower on the front and that translucent "cover page" on the front. If it has a paper insert inside the card with the words printed on it, so much the better.

Anyway, those of us in the church will recognize another Mother's Day tradition: the mom-centered anthem (this was not quite what I had in mind, but apparently it was for Google). They are usually, let's say, not quite as musically exemplary as the anthems for the week before and the week after. This year's selection here was probably a cut above the average: Honor Thy Father andThy Mother, from a composer I generally enjoy.

It got me thinking about what that phrase -- well, it's not just a "phrase", I guess -- really means. Obviously first it means exactly what the casual reader would suppose: be respectful to your parents. Treat them with honor, and even assume that they know what they're talking about (this is one I'd especially like to impress on my daughter; her default response when I say anything factual to her is "No!" This is age 6, so I'm not really looking forward to 14 or so). Twain said it a long time ago... or maybe not.

But especially for those of us who have gotten past the Teenage Retort stage, I think there's a wider view: honoring your parents also means bringing honor to the name they passed on to you, making sure that the way you live your life and the decisions you make reflect well on them -- even if they're not really getting the credit/blame any more.

And even if you can't fit it into a manila envelope.

Face the Virtual Nation

2009-05-02T20:58:00.003-05:00

Some time back, I mentioned to my niece -- as I have to virtually every living creature I encounter -- that I was writing a blog (this was way back when I was actually, you know, posting something once in awhile). She said, "Oh, on your MySpace page?"

I had to admit that I didn't have a MySpace page; I didn't add that I felt I was being pretty hip just to have a blog. Now, I'm not going to beat into the ground the extent of my non-hipitude; I've been over that ground before and it may fall pretty well into the dog-bites-man category anyway. But I've always been at least a wee bit (sometimes less wee) behind the times, even on techie-related stuff. I'm certainly not a rusher-into-things by nature.

I had actually been thinking a bit about Twitter recently. You can't turn on the TV or pick up a magazine without encountering a Twitter reference -- even the sports mags are talking about who's Tweeting (and sometimes when). And it did kind of appeal to me because there are times I have something brief I'd like to say; it doesn't seem quite like a whole blog post, but it would be nice to put it out somewhere (usually it's a joke or maybe something that strikes me weird on TV or in the newspaper).

Still, I was kind of waiting it out; I wasn't sure if I could keep two Webby things going and I was a little worried about that little touch of OCD I have: would I be Tweeting every hour on the hour?

As I pondered, I got a comment right here on this blog from a friend I hadn't heard from in 25 years. I wanted to contact her back and catch up, so I googled her & discovered she had a Facebook page. Well, since Facebook has more or less been supplanted by Twitter in the public consciousness (I'm sure that Entertainment Weekly would call it "5 Minutes Ago"), that really makes it right up my alley.

So I got myself a Facebook page and started hunting down people from my life both past and present. One of the really difficult aspects of Facebook, especially when you're a newcomer, is that you have to ask people to add you as a friend, and then wait to see if they do. I made sure to add a little personal message, in some cases almost a "hey, I'm not really stalking you" kind of vibe. Nevertheless, sometimes you don't hear back so you have to ask yourself: did they decide to Ignore me, or are they just not very active users?

Then after I connected with a few people from college, I started to hear from their friends -- often people I'd recognize, but not necessarily close friends even back in the day. Then I was on the responding side and had to decide: do I accept people I don't have a close connection with? It was a lot like going to a reunion and trying to decide where to sit.

On the other hand, at the reunion, if I sit down I'm obligated to make small talk... in the online reunion, we've essentially all agreed that we'll eavesdrop on each other but we don't necessarily need to speak directly to each other. So sure, if you want to listen to me on those terms, come on aboard! And I quickly realized as well that I could potentially pick up a few new readers for the blog.

The bad news: I'm every bit as compulsive about checking my page as I feared I was going to be. Several times a day, most days, I check to see if anyone's posted something of interest, or has commented on one of my Major Pronouncements. It's a little like hanging around the ballfield waiting to be picked; at least I can't see anyone else's home page and discover they've hidden my posts.

I suspect I've probably repurposed a few of my formerly blog-dedicated brain cells (although not to tremendous benefit so far -- I'm not sure I've really advanced the cause of online literature with my contributions to date). But you know I'll keep trying to find the groove; first of all, I'm a sucker for connecting with my past, and the majority of my Friends so far come from my prior experiences. But mostly it's another chance, just like this is, to talk and hope that someone out there is actually listening.

The Landlord

2009-04-24T21:56:00.004-05:00

A veteran baseball executive was asked some years ago (on live TV, no less) why there were so few black managers and executives in the major leagues. He answered that blacks lack the "necessities" for management; despite fervent testimonials from his friends of all races, and a sneaking suspicion that he had probably meant "prerequisites" (i.e., experience), he was essentially out of a job before he finished the sentence.

I am pretty sure that I lack the necessities, in this case probably related to a second X chromosome, to explain the wreath on our front door. Let me hasten to clarify: it's not a Christmas wreath. That, actually, I could explain with ease -- it's not entirely unheard-of that a Christmas decoration might be left a tad out of season by our Outdoor Decor Management staff.

I can't honestly say the wreath is particularly spring-y either, although clearly my genetically-impaired opinon can't be fully credited. To me, it's... well, it's a circle made up of twisted-up plastic stuff. You might not want to use that description when you visit your local wreath retailer in search of a duplicate.

I tolerate it because first of all, you have to pick your battles (and could there be any more inspiring marital advice than that?); but mostly because what little time I spend on the front steps is generally facing away from the door. It's not like it's hanging over my desk or anything.

At least one local resident has expressed unqualified approval, however. One morning as I stepped out to grab the newspaper, I found a handful of dead grass and leaves half-nestled in the middle; other times, opening the door has precipitated a flurry of wings and avian grumbling, as a little feathered construction worker is interrupted mid-task.

Every morning we've been checking for building progress, and throwing away whatever we find there in the hopes that the prospective tenant would give up and try one of the trees nearby. Regrettably, the epithet "birdbrain" does have a basis in fact, as it appears he can't take a hint. And he even got some small measure of revenge one day as I came abruptly up the steps and scared him off -- he nearly parted my hair as he went.

A couple of days ago when I checked for twigs, I found instead a signed lease: there was a perfectly symmetrical and complete nest tucked in there. And while I could try to disrupt construction progress, I didn't have the heart to demolish a completed dwelling. Before we knew it... there were eggs in the nest.

So if you're planning to come see us over the next several weeks, you'll have to either come through the garage... or wait till summer.

Going Through a Much Rougher Spell

2009-04-12T20:41:00.001-05:00

I read a quote not long ago that really stuck with me. I'm sure I'd heard it before, but this time I guess it just hit me right. It's from Faulkner -- and you have to admit, that's a lot classier than quoting, I don't know, "Stripes" or something.

The quote is, "The past isn't dead. It isn't even past." I find that to be particularly true for the parts of our past (or my past) that didn't play out the way we wished the first time around. While I have little enough imagination that I occasionally repeat myself... I find that I have already made a couple of previous references to something that happened to me a mere 36 years ago. So at least that part of my past certainly isn't past, but I'm really hoping that another 36 years will do it.

I'm going to just close my eyes and plunge into this. When I was in 6th grade, I represented my elementary school in the city-wide spelling bee. At that time I viewed myself as a budding genius, always in heated competition with Bridget Witbeck to determine which of us was the smartest in the class (of course it's completely possible someone else entirely was actually the smartest, but we were clearly the two most successful students). And while I must admit I have learned the limits of my not necessarily gargantuan intellect, one thing at which I have always been really excellent is spelling. Couple a fanaticism for reading with a just slightly obsessive-compulsive personality and what you end up with is a decent speller.

While I was nervous about performing, I was fairly confident that I would do well, and I started strong enough... I guess. While I must've won the school-wide contest to get there, and must've gotten something right once I did, I can remember absolutely none of that. I do, however, recall with Technicolor clarity the immensity of my eventual failure.

I've been willing over the life of this blog to humiliate myself a bit here and there in the pursuit of a laugh or a lesson, but all I'm willing to say is that it was a word I knew well but for some reason it didn't sound right to me. Somehow I couldn't make sense out of it and... well, if the contest had been for coming the farthest from the correct spelling, I would've had a decent shot. I'm just hoping that I will understand and/or come to terms with it before I die (the good news is, it's only been 36 years so far).

When I heard that our local library was co-sponsoring a spelling bee for adults, my heart leapt. I thought it sounded fun, I believed I had a shot at winning -- and I sensed an opportunity to undo one of my life's disappointments. I steeled myself ahead of time against the possibility of losing, but I promised myself I would not lose on a word I knew.

Arriving at the library at the specified time, I figured I might be in the wrong place: there were maybe a dozen people in an auditorium that seats 140. I quickly identified my principal rival, a tall, gray-haired woman who looked like one of those people who's always carrying around a big thick book in a sensible tote bag. I was soon to find that in our entire "metropolitan" area, there were only eight souls brave/geeky enough to show up for a spelling bee.

They lined us up in the front row, and I ended up quite by accident in the "coveted" lead-off position. Each of us stood in turn, got a word, had to repeat it and then spell it. The first round was clean, but two bombed the second round and three crashed & burned the second time around -- so there were three of us left. The first three rounds, with my words in bold and the misspelled words in italics:

cumulative, acoustics, precipice, blasphemous, sophisticated, tuberculosis, vaudeville, stenographer, affiliated, decadence, grimace, furlough, clientele, overwrought, conglomerate, silhouette, harangue, scuttlebutt, vociferous, symbiosis, bailiwick, toxicologist.

I was frankly a little surprised that the words weren't harder -- although I was thrilled to note that I knew how to spell all of them.

I kicked off the fourth round with facilitate; I noted that the middle of the word was a little tricky with alternating vowels/consonants, so I carefully negotiated it and made ready to sit down... only to hear, "I'm sorry, that's incorrect." The moderator said, "it's f-a-c"; I looked at him in complete shock and said, "That's what I said!" He replied, "No, you said f-e-c". I looked around and people were nodding -- yup, you said "f-e-c".

I was completely dumbfounded. As I said later, I would have testified in court that I said f-a-c. All I can think is that I was concentrating so hard on the middle of the word that I wasn't paying attention to what I said at the beginning and just misspoke.

The competition went on: facilitate (F-A-C-I-L-I-T-A-T-E), derelict, ikebana (both remaining contestants got this one wrong), fledgling, epidermis. The winner: the tall, gray-haired woman. I was appalled to note that I actually knew how to spell every single word in the entire contest, and still finished third.

I think, however, I might have cheerfully finished last (well, OK, maybe not last) -- if I had only met my single, solitary stated objective for the day. But of course, in making that my focus, I probably made it inevitable that I would lose focus on the words themselves.

What I can say for nearly certain is that in about 11 1/2 months -- or only 37 years from the original precipitating event -- I will be back in the same auditorium to try it again. In fact, I may just plant my sleeping bag in the hallway now.

Under the Spell

2009-03-31T21:34:00.000-05:00

Just this past weekend, I was faced with an agonizing choice: take my son to see a high school musical (no, not the High School Musical), or spend the afternoon cleaning the basement.

I'm not sure how long the Jeopardy theme lasts, not that I'm planning to pay royalties to Merv Griffin's estate... but let's just say the decision didn't take that long.

Start with the fact that I am myself the veteran of a number of stage musicals -- anyone who knows me even casually would probably guess that. Add the twist that the show was being presented by my alma mater. Plus, the wife is not so much a fan of the melodic arts (and besides, she was On Duty for the school project we've been trying really hard to pretend was not coming around again via child #2), so if one of us was taking the boy, it figured to be me. In addition, I kind of "collect" classic musicals, and this was one I'd never seen... and for the clincher, it was Godspell.

When you put all of that together, what you end up with is yet another of those perfect storm situations -- or as I often say, if nothing else, I'll get a blog out of it.

I'm probably fortunate that they've redesigned my high school to the extent that the interior is pretty much unrecognizable; there's only so much sensory input I can process at once, and nostalgia all by itself tends to blow my circuit breakers. Still, the auditorium hadn't changed much, so I got an instant zing walking down the aisle.

Before the show, we got an orientation from the director, pointing out that the basic book (script) is meant to be supplemented with more current cultural references (it was written almost 40 years ago, after all). And indeed there were enough extra "bits" that it threatened to veer into Monty Python territory at times, but it mostly all worked as part of the atmosphere.

You can see that, as usual, I was dealing with the Curse of the Blogger -- the affliction wherein I can't really just experience anything for itself. I'm always a little bit outside myself... asking, "Am I enjoying this? Is this really good? What's it like for the people involved?"

I should note, this didn't come about as a result of the blog; if anything, it's the cause. I like to think, at least, that it helps me develop more of a unified 'storyline' to the topics I write about, and maybe even dig out the essence or most important/interesting aspects of an event. However, it can also be kind of a pain in the keister to never quite be all the way in the moment.

I could almost feel the different parts of my brain firing simultaneously as we reached the show's climax. I had been wondering throughout: what's it like for a bunch of "random" high schoolers to be in a show based on the words of Jesus? Did any of the words get through? Were any of them more curious about discipleship than before they started?

At the same time I was also mindful of the experience of putting on a show, keeping an audience's attention, getting applause -- the rush of entertaining; but also the sort of foreboding that comes during the last show, as the intense experience you've been sharing for so many weeks is about to come to an end.

The emotional high point of the show is when Jesus is crucified -- symbolically, not violently, but it's still a wrenching moment. And much of the cast was crying or near tears. I wondered... are they just really good actors? Maybe some of them are painfully aware that in 10 minutes the show will be over forever. Or... could it be that one or more of the kids up there is being overwhelmed by the truth of the gospel?

Hard to say from my vantage point. But it's kind of ironic that keeping myself "outside" the show really worked to draw me in, to really feel what the cast members must've been feeling -- both the performance experience and the true majesty of the story. And as the triumphant conclusion unfolded to the strains of "Long Live God", and then the cast returned laughing and crying at once for the encore, I paused for a moment (choking back my own tears) to pray for the hearts of a group of kids, that they would always contain all the words they had spoken and sung.

Tell Me What I Want to Hear

2009-03-16T22:44:00.000-05:00

There's something about political season that always brings out the curmudgeon in me. Last fall I made a sardonic comment, if you can imagine me doing so, about how the political season would be resuming in mid-January. I thought at the time that I was only indulging my penchant for amusing, yet harmless, hyperbole... but then our U.S. Senator got kicked upstairs. So we went through weeks of search, only to have our Congressperson promoted in turn.

Now we're engulfed in news stories and ads leading up to the special election in a couple of weeks. And of course, the new reality of political advertising is that it's all about burying the other guy. So we've been treated to the heartwarming spectacle of the young guy saying the old guy is just another political hack (and a liar), and the old guy saying the young businessman is too inexperienced and greedy (and a liar).

Let's see, what's missing from this picture? Nowhere along the way have we heard anything much about what we can expect each guy to do; the theme is, whatever you do, don't vote for the other guy. Strangely enough, the American electorate seems to be heeding the warnings. I think it's true that negative advertising works: when faced with the constant barrage of don't-vote-for-the-other-guy, voters have seemingly resolved not to vote at all.

I'm not kidding myself that much has changed throughout the nation's history. From what tidbits I know, political campaigns have been brutally personal since day one. But I still believe that a candidate who stood up and was truthful with the public, who talked about what can realistically be done, who shared real ideas, could get elected.

I don't want to hear that everything can be fixed in a couple weeks, because I know it can't. And I don't want to hear that the other guy's an idiot or a criminal, because (at least for the most part!) it's not true. I want a candidate to say: my opponent is a good person with the best interests of the country at heart; still, I believe s/he is mistaken about "X", and here's my better idea. At this point it's highly possible that I may vote for whichever guy comes out first with a positive message about himself.

In a way it reminds me of my favorite business philosophy. Another frequent news feature over recent months concerns businesses that have cut corners or even made up stuff in an effort to make more money. Of course, I've been part of the corporate world for more than 11 years now, and while the cynical view of corporate America is very popular, I have to say that I've never seen it. I work for one of the acknowledged top countries on the integrity scale; one of the proudest days of my career was a meeting with an executive several years back (before my little company got swallowed by the gigantic one, actually).

The exec stood in the front of the room and said, "We want to make a lot of money, and we need to continue to grow our income. The best way for us to do that is to produce the best product we can, and give our customers excellent service."

I suppose I'm starting to sound like next I'll be summoning the woodland creatures to help clean the house, but doesn't it seem like it ought to be possible to succeed in business, or politics, just by being yourself really really well, and doing it with integrity?

Now if you'll excuse me I have to run -- if I hurry, I can still catch that turnip truck I just fell off.

Nothing But the Tooth

2009-02-27T21:36:00.000-05:00

One of the many stark and sobering realities of parenthood is that you never know when you're going to be ambushed by a question you can't, or don't want to, answer. Even when you dodge a bullet, you can be pretty sure the next chamber's loaded.

There must have been a logical trigger, but it sure seemed random to me when my daughter asked me the other day, "When you're the president, can you smoke?" I should probably note that, in our zeal to inoculate the young'ns against sundry vices, we seem to have created a state of affairs where they recoil in horror when they see a smoker -- or someone with a "needle tattoo" (not to be confused with the rub-on kind).

I told her that the president, or any adult, is free to do more or less what he wishes... which brought the unexpected follow-up, "Well, it's a good thing at least Barack Obama doesn't smoke."

Of course, 21st-century campaigns in the 21st-century media leave few vestiges of privacy, so I was aware that although he's been trying to quit, the Most Powerful Man in the Free World has been known to sneak an occasional butt. So I said, "Well, actually he does smoke a little, sometimes..."

OK, in hindsight I probably should've let that one "lie", so to speak; I know it had some kind of consequence because within hours my wife was asking me, "Why did you tell her the president smokes?"

Fundamentally, I believe in telling kids the truth. Age-appropriate truth, yes, but truth. But it sure is hard when you consider how many built-in lies we're already stuck with. We briefly considered trying to get around Santa, since it's a really high priority for us to emphasize Jesus as the Reason for the Season... but it turned out that sealing them in Tupperware for the last 2 months of each year was impractical and interfered with homework. Then there's the Easter Bunny -- a fondly-remembered staple of my wife's childhood -- and of course the Tooth Fairy.

On top of the strain of maintaining a series of fictions year-round, it can get pretty darned expensive. I am sure that we buy more presents when accounting for Santa than we would otherwise. And they both have a mouthful of teeth.

My son made the tooth fairy thing relatively easy on us. After a couple of rounds of a dollar under the pillow, he said, "Dad, can the tooth fairy bring me stickers instead of money?" In fact, he didn't even figure out that he wasn't getting new stickers. Since he caught me off-guard without an opportunity to contact the tooth fairy, I slipped him some stickers out of the existing stock in the Sticker Box... OK, I'm not proud of that one. My daughter, however, is (as always) a different story, a tougher nut to crack.

She is gleeful each time a tooth starts to wobble, and she will worry it continually till it's out. This last tooth was only a little bit loose when she came home from school with a tale of having been knocked down and getting the tooth knocked out; there's a chance that some or all of that is actually true. And that -- don't hate me for saying this -- is where the story really begins.

But it really gets sticky about 4:30 the following morning, when I am awakened by my daughter's piteous wailing in the hallway: we have forgotten to put the tooth under her pillow, and All Is Lost tooth-fairy-wise. Apparently she completes her rounds in the Northeast US before 4:30am EST.

No, no, baby, of course we'll take care of it... I'll go get the tooth right now and I'm sure we can still catch her. So I stumble downstairs in the dark, leaving the lights off so as not to overpower myself with the glare -- and while I'm there, I snatch a bill out of my wallet. Then I return upstairs to put the tooth under the pillow (did you know that the school now supplies a tiny plastic 'treasure chest' to store the tooth in? wonder what the annual budget for that looks like), and I slip the bill to my even less-conscious wife to plant under the pillow, so I can rejoin my regularly-scheduled coma, already in progress.

In the morning -- or as I like to call it, about 39 winks later -- I notice that she is surprisingly closed-mouthed about the tooth fairy's visit. For one thing, finding a penny on the ground is for her a major occasion for gloating to her brother, and for another, "closed-mouthed" is not her natural state by any stretch of the imagination. Something is nagging at the corners of my brain (and yes, my brain is a perfect equilateral cube), so I check my wallet.

I am a math major by training and a computer programmer by profession, so while I'm not exactly a 'neat' person I am in many respects orderly. The bills in my wallet are always faced identically and arranged from smallest to largest... and the smallest remaining bill is a $20.

I share my growing sense of dread with The Mom, so a little later she asks, "Hey, did the tooth fairy come? What did she bring you?" At first reluctant, as well as practiced in the arts of dissembling, she eventually comes clean: "Yeah, um, I got $20." My wife was able to convince her she owed us $10 from an earlier toy purchase -- but since she did owe us $10, I don't feel like I got anything "back", exactly.

So I'm thinking that from now on, the tooth fairy may be bringing an itemized invoice that shows her account status against an advance for the next 19 teeth (although she doesn't even have 19 to go, so I guess the rate's going up in any case). Knowing my daughter, it won't be long, since she will probably contrive to be "knocked down" weekly now that it's proven to be such a lucrative scam.

Picture Window on the World

2009-01-31T22:17:00.008-05:00

There was a time when I used to make a schedule for weekly TV viewing. Don’t get me wrong; while I enjoy TV, I don’t really plan my life around it. If we have places to go and things to do, we go and do. But there are always certain shows I look forward to more than others.

Now it seems like the more channels we get, the less there is to watch. I know that’s not profound or original (Springsteen, among others, said it back in 1992), but don’t forget why it’s a cliché to begin with – because it’s largely true. At this point, in the average week, there are approximately six shows we make an effort to watch: Heroes, Lost, Top Chef (or Project Runway, whichever’s current), Grey’s Anatomy, ER, and Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.

Several of those are more “mine” than “ours”, although she at least tolerates them; and some seem more like remote-control muscle memory than a conscious choice (ER in particular has kind of turned into the classic movie zombie that keeps walking around, never realizing it died some time ago).

The last one, however, is definitely my wife's. I enjoy it OK, or at the minimum it only bothers me when Ty's screaming (there are 16,400 results for "ty pennington scream" on Google), but she gets a "fix" from it: a little burst of heartwarm. Still, it's always pretty interesting at the end when they show the results, especially for an inveterate HGTV watcher. What's always amazed me in those tours was all the flat-panel TVs scattered throughout the house... just always seemed so high-tech and extravagant to me. Then our non-flat TV died.

Actually, it died quite a while back and we've been making do with another old (and smaller) set. Strangely enough, however, as I (we) get older, that smaller set wasn't getting any easier to see, so at length I faced the fact that we were going to have to begin the search.

Our last major TV search was about 11 years ago, and in that instance I really dug deep: we had friends who were getting a new TV, and he was Doing Research, so I waited for him to give me his results and I bought that TV. And it did last about 10 years...

This time around what turned the corner for me was the Annual Magazine Subscription Scam, out of which we decided to get Consumer Reports. And almost instantly they came out with their most current TV ratings. I got a bit of a shock when I realized that a flat-panel TV is no longer something out of one of those HGTV shows where somebody spends a million on their house -- it's almost the only kind of TV there is any more. I felt a little like I went to buy a new car and all they had at the dealer was hovercrafts.

I was going to claim that the CR ratings were all I needed to pull the trigger -- but since I rarely get anyone reading this who doesn't already know me well, I don't think I'd get away with that little white lie. Of course I dithered around, went from store to store, couldn't even decide on the size... but then in the end, I just went for the one they'd designated their Best Buy (although, of course, as soon as I bought it, they came out with ANOTHER set of ratings in which my set was still "recommended" but no longer Best).

So now in my den -- maybe 10'x12' -- I have a 40-inch flat panel LCD TV. And yes, it's a trifle overwhelming at 7 or 8 feet away... but believe me, I am getting used to it. I can tell you that this week when I watched Lost, I gasped for a reason that had nothing to do with the mysteries of time travel, or Ben's pure creepy evilness, or even Jack's beard. But the sight of the

Mysterious Island (OK, Hawaii) in wide-screen, hi-def, big as life, was quite literally breathtaking.

So at least for 6 hours a week (well, 5 actually -- Bravo doesn't broadcast in HD yet, at least on our cable) we'll get to watch our favorites in rather vivid fashion. The rest of the time... I may just leave the set on anyway. A picture like this could make Knight Rider and According to Jim worth watching.

On second thought, I'm really regretting the demise of the test pattern.

TFD: On the 17th Day of Christmas

2009-01-10T21:41:00.002-05:00

I made a lot of noise last time about how Christmas was over... but truthfully, there are still little vestiges of the season left around. I can't really say a lot of it is conscious, of course; the Christmas tree is still lying on its side in the side yard because I dragged it out just before we left for our Christmas-break vacation stay at camp. There are miscellaneous decorations here & there that just didn't get put away. The wrapping paper is still piled up in the corner of my office (although I did finally fold up the worktable a couple days ago. Some time soon I will take the folded table out of the office, too).

And despite all my protestations to the contrary, all the Christmas music is still loaded up in my iPod, as well as iTunes. Before Christmas, I was doing a constant shuffle of all the holiday songs; now, at least, I've returned to the full list shuffle. As a result, the Christmas music acts like a little punctuation -- I could say that it's the nutmeg in the eggnog, but that's a holiday-only metaphor. In any case, instead of the whole dish, it's just the spice, which in its way makes me "hear" it a little more.

I tried through the season (the "real" season) to rate my songs using the iPod's 1-5 star system, and it may be that I decide that the 4- and 5-star songs are worth keeping year-round. That will probably almost automatically include most or all of Steven Curtis Chapman's two Christmas albums.

It seems like every time I mention Christmas music, I come back to SCC. One of his songs hit me in a special way this year, to such an extent that I convinced myself that it gave me a fresh insight. I've had some time to think about it, and I guess it falls a little short of, you know, C.S. Lewis-level inspiration -- but I'll share it anyway.

The song that brought Christmas home to me this time was "Our God Is with Us":

Our God is with us
Emmanuel
He's come to save us
Emmanuel
And we will never face life alone
Now that God has made himself known
As father and friend, with us through the end
Emmanuel

(You can hear the song, and in fact the whole album, if you go here and click 'play' next to The Music of Christmas)

It's always been one of my all-time favorites, but one day it hit me at a new angle: he's come to save us. And instead of the conventional sense of the word -- those who believe in him don't have to go to hell -- I took it quite literally. I imagined myself in a lot of trouble, maybe even being held captive, when suddenly the SWAT team arrives to rescue me. OK, I guess in this case it's more like the SWADDLE team, but the image of Jesus coming because it was the only way to bail me personally out of danger made Christmas a little more, I don't know, urgent -- not just another Silent Night.

Don't get me wrong, I love the Silent Night. I love Joseph standing nearby trying to keep his head from exploding with everything that's happened to him. I love the shepherds saying, "Wait -- you're telling us the most important news ever?" I love Mary watching it all wide-eyed, "treasuring all these things up in her heart" (there's a blog I'd pay to read). And I saw one of my favorite Biblical phrases on a Sunday school bulletin board this week: it was a Birth Announcement for Jesus, and on the line for "When:" it said, "In the fullness of time". I wish I could say that's why this post is so "late" -- I'm just trying to achieve the fullness of time for it.

But alongside all that we have the image of Jesus arriving at just the right time -- albeit not in the most powerful or glamorous fashion -- to save us from a crisis... and that, much more than shepherds or wise men or donkeys, is a piece of Christmas I can take with me all year long.

Is It December Already?

2008-12-26T22:34:00.009-05:00

At long last I might be able to say that all is more-or-less calm and/or somewhat bright (the children are even nestled all snug in their beds); it seems that the Christmas Marathon has passed the finish line. I find to my astonishment that I haven't posted during the entire month of December, but it's really just a byproduct of my seasonal strategy -- I even decided to postpone my much-loved Christmas letter till sometime around the New Year.

I'm not telling anyone anything they don't already know; I'm pretty sure that if you need a sketch of my December to-do list, you need only consult your own. But as busy as it got, I really made an effort this time not to try to jam 10 pounds of Christmas into a 5-pound Santa sack, so this had to wait... even though I ended up missing my own Third Blogiversary (traditional gift for the Third Blogiversary is apparently "forgetting to post").

One reason December is always hectic for me is that I'm incapable of being Christmasy before its time. My wife did almost all the shopping by November; much of the wrapping was done in (very) early December (The wrapping is also complicated by the fact that -- having done zero of the general shopping -- I'm obligated to pitch in. But her philosophy is: cover each object with paper as quickly as possible. On the other hand, I'm about hospital corners, and creative packaging to disguise the gift, and getting the maximum number of packages out of the minimum square footage of wrapping paper. In keeping with one of my core tenets: The Wrapping is Part of the Gift).

I can't even think about planning to start making a list of things I might later buy until Thanksgiving has passed and it's time to crank up the Christmas music. I have semi-famously written about this topic before, of course -- still one of my favorites, though I have to admit that the Waitresses selection was at least partially an intentional effort to be provocative, somewhat hip, and an out-of-the-box thinker. That was before I demonstrated to everyone's satisfaction that the quickest way to locate me was to look inside the box.

Seriously, drop everything and watch this version of the Waitresses piece...You'll thank me.

The holiday music experience, like everything else in my frighteningly circumscribed existence, was revolutionized this year by my iPod. In fact, I maxed it out several weeks ago, at almost 2000 songs, transferring the over 200 Christmas songs in my CD/cassette/LP collection. And I've been carrying it around with me every chance I get.

In my original post on Christmas music, I concentrated on the traditional (secular) "seasonal favorites" you might encounter, or be assaulted by, in any mall... although admittedly it would have to be a pretty New-Wave mall to be playing the Waitresses. I sometimes have somewhat mixed feelings about Christmas music that does have spiritual significance, however.

Almost every Christian artist has a Christmas album, of course; not to record one would be a little like a baseball player deciding to take a sabbatical while his team played in the World Series. I've collected albums from many of my favorite artists, but it leads to a bit of a conundrum.

Nobody really needs 9 different versions of Silent Night -- as I find from my iTunes that I have (actually, that's from an alphabetical sort; I'm pretty sure I have at least 2 more in there somewhere as part of medleys). Even the artists themselves know this and often end up putting a new spin on an old classic... with not always predictable results. Audio Adrenaline does a version of Little Drummer Boy that is, ah, not for the faint of heart. Rebecca St.James did an entire Christmas album in a rather alternative style, and it's not bad but I often get the feeling when listening that I'm just not quite hip enough to get it. Albeit that might be said about me for anything on the far side of Perry Como.

So I find when looking at an album that I shy away from it somewhat if it's just the Same Old Titles. But on the other hand, it surely doesn't need to be reiterated that I am traditional right down to my argyle socks (not kidding, it's a great wardrobe day when I find a way to work argyle socks into the ensemble) -- so I get kind of scared about an album with mostly unfamiliar titles (i.e. new original Christmas songs) as well. I can't say I'm entirely paralyzed, since I do have over 200 Christmas songs... but as with every other decision in my life, I'm given much pause before triggering the buy.

I am one of the most ardent living fans of Steven Curtis Chapman, so I was able to overcome my reluctance and purchase both of his Christmas albums -- and I find the first one, The Music of Christmas, to be the absolutely flawless combination of classics, reworked classics, and originals. It's probably the only holiday album I own that makes me wish I weren't so completely inflexible that I can only listen to it for one month a year. Technically, as a Christian Jesus' birth and all related topics are relevant to me all year long, but I'm pretty sure a Christmas album in May or June would be a shock to my psychological foundations from which I wouldn't soon recover.

Other songs that are hard to wait for till late November: the first 2 cuts of this album, one of which is Al Green's funky "First Noel"; and a couple of real obscurities, My Christmas by Brett Williams & In Reach, and "Tonight" by Benjamin (The only place I could find this to have you listen to it -- other than, you know, having you all over to the house -- was at Rhapsody, which can be a bit annoying to negotiate but does have the advantage of allowing you to hear not just the whole song but the whole album, which also includes "My Christmas").

Sadly, I sense the statute of limitations expiring on how long I can continue shuffling Christmas... I think I can stretch it through Epiphany without enduring a prolonged and painful personality transplant (or implant, as the case may be).

Postscript: the pieces I've written at past holiday times tend to be my favorites, so I invite you to think of them as holiday specials; you've watched Charlie Brown more than once, haven't you? If you don't mind repeats, these are my absolute favorite pieces...

House of Mouse

2008-11-30T16:25:00.001-05:00

As a parent, I spend many, many hours weekly immersed in the antics of animated characters. I've been quite upfront in this space about my lack of regard for Mickey, so I won't rehash that opinion here.

I will concede that he ranks higher than he once did, since I got forcibly exposed to Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, which is at least cheerful and attempts to engage the kids -- and features some of the catchiest music.

It's also worthwhile to note that Mickey's and Minnie's houses -- note carefully, houses; no hint of impropriety in this relationship -- were among the highlights for the kids during our Disney Visit, and they were genuinely pretty thrilled to meet the Great Mouse in, um, person. Mickey made a big deal out of my daughter wearing a Mickey t-shirt... however, both kids were a mite puzzled by one thing: on TV, Mickey is chatty to the point you'd like to stuff a sock in his snout (?) on occasion, but in person he resorted to pantomime and could not be induced to squeak out a single word. Disney should have pamphlets available with advice on how best to handle those types of questions.

Seemingly of a different species altogether is the rodent half of the Tom & Jerry comedy duo. I have to say that I've always harbored a real prejudice against these two as a result of childhood exposure to a lot of Hanna-Barbera dreck such as Magilla Gorilla, Quick Draw McGraw, and Huckleberry Hound (aka the Not Funny Crew), and it's only in the past year I've really studied them closely, albeit involuntarily, every night on Boomerang from 7:30-8:00 pm ET.

I'm compelled to admit that even after repeated (and repeated, and RE-repeated) viewing of Boomerang's Tom & Jerry repertoire, rare is the evening that I don't admit at least once (sotto voce), "OK, that's funny." I do sometimes wonder why Tom sings at times, but seemingly can't speak; Spike the dog, and Nibbles the other little mouse, and that little Yakky-Doodle fellow rarely shut up, but T&J remain resolutely silent.

Of course, hardly anything in the cartoon world makes any less "internal" sense than almost any episode of Heroes (or for that matter, the fact that "According to Jim" is still on), so I suppose it's pointless to quibble.

Animated hijinx aside, I haven't found our last few trips to camp all that amusing. Since our camp is only sporadically occupied, and not exactly hermetically sealed, we've been aware that we're at risk for four-footed visitors. It hasn't been that uncommon to find upon arrival a scattering of very tiny droppings; once we found that a jar of peanut butter had had its top gnawed. Mostly, however, I've been successfully pretending that we're doing a kind of woodlands timeshare where they leave long before we arrive.

A couple of visits back, just after lights-out, we heard dishes being bumped around, so I stepped out into the kitchen to find a frightened mouse scurrying back and forth in confusion. No, wait -- that was me. Anyway, as we both scurried, he dove off the counter behind the stove and disappeared. All I could do, really, was to plug the gap with a big mug and go to bed -- but before we left the next day, I set out 2 traps loaded with (what else?) peanut butter.

The next time we returned, my wife went ahead earlier, and when I arrived with the kids, she said, "Remember the, um, things on the counter? Well, they were, uh, you know... but I took care of them." And having claimed two victims enabled me to return to my deluded state.

That night after lights-out, we did hear the pitter-patter of little feet (and I knew it wasn't my daughter, because she just lies in bed and yells, "DADDY!!"), which we eventually concluded was inside the wall and hence not fixable in any case.

This last time when we went back, I moved some throw-pillows on the bed... and found an acorn. I'm not sure whether the mice are getting bolder, or whether they're inviting the squirrels to party with them, or what. I am a bit concerned, though, that the next time we're going to find red shorts and a pair of white, 4-fingered gloves in the laundry basket, though.

Bloglet #1: Chickening Out

2008-11-22T23:10:00.001-05:00

It has also occurred to me, to resume my previous thought, that not every post has to be War and Peace... in the old days when I was very concerned about my stats, I tried to make every post 'legitimate'. I think I may experiment a bit with smaller posts, although the real issue for me is the time it takes me, not the number of words I put out. So here goes...

This evening, my daughter & I had a little "date"-- her brother was at their grandmother's, and mom was out for the evening, so we decided to have a little adventure. We took advantage of one of the great inventions of recent years: the fast-food location with two franchises. I suppose it's mostly that the food business has consolidated lately, but I sure wish they'd had this when I was a kid. In our area we have an A&W/KFC, a Taco Bell/Long John Silver's, and a KFC/Taco Bell, so plenty of fat & calories available in many varieties.

We chose the latter tonight; Taco Bell has a 99-cent taco that qualifies as a feast for her at a price it's not hard for me to love. And I am all about the fried chicken... ok, I know it's not really fried, it's Pressure-Cooked. With zero-trans-fat oil. So really, it's almost health food. You probably know that they don't use "fried" in their name any more -- it's just plain KFC -- but I really enjoy the way they get the subliminal benefit from the Implied Fried while at the same time sort of disavowing it.

When you go out for fast food, it's probably better not to think about the nutritional angle, and frankly I probably wouldn't have except in visiting the KFC website to see whether they really play up the pressure-cooking angle (I couldn't find a mention), I discovered a nifty nutrition calculator.

Here's the scoop on my relatively modest meal (2 pc thigh & drumstick, extra crispy; mac & cheese, a biscuit and a Pepsi):

1110 calories
87% of the recommended daily value for fat
51% for cholesterol
113% for sodium
5% for dietary fiber (that's almost all the biscuit, of which I only ate about half)

I should probably pause here to request that if I die before I finish this post, please tell my family I loved them...

After eating and before my arteries hardened all the way, I took my daughter to the rest room. Rather than turning her loose in what I'm sure was an absolutely pristine ladies' room, I took her into the men's room. As I opened the door, I was confronted face-to-face with the "men's products" vending machine. I got her settled into what she needed to do and sort of sidled over to the machine to begin to prepare the spiel for the inevitable... she always notices everything and wants to know why and how and who and where.

Here's what KFC thinks every man needs: (1) a small pack of Tylenol (2) a pack of temporary tattoos (although the label was actually spelled 'tatoos') and (3) a pack of glow sticks. By the way, the glow sticks had a disclaimer: should not be taken internally. In case you were feeling really literal about trying to get that 'inner glow'.

And of course, since I was prepared with an answer to "Daddy, what's that?" (although I would have been absolutely stumped by the inevitable follow-up, "Why do they have glow sticks in the bathroom?"), she didn't even notice.

I'm pretty sure the conversations are going to get worse anyway...

Time Keeps On Tickin' Tickin' Tickin'

2008-11-10T22:32:00.006-05:00

My wife loves to make lists. There's almost always a legal pad lying about somewhere, covered from top to bottom with all the things she wants to get done in the next day/week/lifetime. Quite often there's a second column with my name at the top with a separate list. Sometimes it's actually the first column.

I don't tend to write anything down, but I do make mental lists as well. Of course, one problem with a mental list is that it's pretty painful to try to cross something off. For me, in any case, a lot of the list is taken up with standing items anyway... stuff I always have pending and that never gets crossed off. Things that hang over my head like the anvil over Wile E. Coyote's.

Many's the evening when, after finishing off my daily tasks -- and that's a whole different list, by the way, and sometimes it's pretty late before they're complete -- I sit down on the couch and think to myself: how should I pass the rest of my evening? Should I read, or watch TV, or simply spend time with my wife? I could surf the net, or rip some of the music I have recorded on my hard drive to my iPod. There's always e-mail to catch up on...

As I run through the options, I always bump into at least one item on the master list: the blog. I can tell you that it's a very rare day when I don't stop and ask myself, "How long has it been since I posted?" I do feel an obligation to post often enough that anyone checking in semi-regularly won't have to wait too long to find something new. I'm well aware that if someone tries a couple times and comes up empty, they're probably not coming back. And I'm not so swamped with visitors that I can spare any.

Here's the rub: it won't be worth bothering if I just write something to fill up a date. As I've said before, I've only had like about a half-dozen original ideas in my whole life -- so considering I've got what, 130+ posts, I may be in danger of repeating myself.

On the other hand, I don't want to shut the thing down. I do still have things I want to say, at intervals, and I've put too much effort into this -- too much of myself -- to just walk away.

So this is what I want to do. I want to keep the blog going, and I want to post when I have something to say. But I want to declare independence from the notion that I need to post on schedule 'X'. Frankly I feel it pulling me toward writing crappy stuff. And I certainly don't need any extra push in that direction.

I hope you will keep coming back to visit when the spirit moves you, but I hope you will give me the grace to be somewhat erratic in my schedule. I do have some ideas for some things I want to write, which I believe will be better if I take the time to write them as they sort of ripen in my head rather than because oh no it's been 3 weeks and if I don't post something now no one will ever come read me again.

After all, I do have well over 100 posts and I would bet good money that no one but me has ever read all of them... so browse the back issues while you're waiting to be served! Kind of like the doctor's office.

Decisions Decisions

2008-10-21T22:18:00.000-05:00

Possibly no one makes more decisions in quite such a transparently public manner than a football coach. On each play, he must decide which players to use and which play to run, so every game is something of a referendum on the wisdom of his choices.

On the other hand, in modern football, the head coach has a phalanx of faceless assistants who share the responsibility -- in fact, a head coach is often thought to be a bit of a megalomaniac if he calls the plays himself (it's all about 'delegating' and 'managing', you know). Besides, even once the play is called, the quarterback may still change it if he has what he thinks is a better idea based on the defense he's looking at.

Contrast that with baseball -- as we know, the only true, pure sport and frankly the only one worth talking about or even giving much thought to -- where the manager holds the keys, or I suppose the steering wheel, solely in his own hands. He may consult a small group of advisers, but the manager makes out the lineups and carries out the pitching changes and determines the strategy.

Unfortunately, the inescapable flaw in his Master Plan is that he is then dependent on other, imperfect humans to carry out his will. If the pitcher throws a bad pitch, or a ball goes through somebody's legs, or a guy pulls a hamstring as he's rounding third, it's quite possible that a genius blueprint will fail to add anything to the 'win' column.

As a consequence, smart baseball people don't really judge a manager on whether he wins or loses (at least not on a day-to-day basis). You'll often hear the losing manager say, "Well, we had the gun loaded." Meaning: we got our best hitter to the plate with the game on the line, or our best pitcher against the other team's slugger; if our guy pops up, or the other guy hits a tough pitch out of the park... we can't control for results, just the process of making the decision.

And... may I suggest that that's a pretty good model for evaluating decisions in general -- our own, or others such as in the case of evaluating a political candidate (to choose a less than random example).

For me, the question is not, "Did the decision 'work'?" but rather, "Did the decision make the most sense given the available facts?" I might feel a wave of regret from a bad outcome... but I ought to be able to forgive myself if I made the decision the right way.

Likewise: in voting, we're choosing someone essentially to make decisions for us. It would be great to find someone who agrees with us in every respect, who would make all the decisions we'd make ourselves. Assuming we were smart enough to do so, but if I've been hearing the political rhetoric correctly lately, we should trust good ol' Joe Sixpack to be wiser than, you know, actual smart people.

Anyway, I've never found anyone running for office that I thought had the 100% perfect plan -- so the way I'm trying to evaluate now is to get a sense not of what decisions someone would make, but how he or she would make them. I'm looking for someone who's willing to surround himself (allow me to be pronoun-specific for the sake of simplicity) with smart people, people who don't necessarily agree with him down the line, listen to all their opinions, then put it together and make the call decisively.

I feel that a person of integrity and intelligence who's capable of using information to reach conclusions might be more valuable as a public servant than a person with nearly any defined set of convictions you could name -- left, right, or center.

Of course, even if worse comes to worst -- and you have to define that for yourself-- at least in two more weeks this 'election cycle' will be over (I could certainly write reams more about the political process... but on the other hand you could argue that I already have). Then we'll have 6 to 8 weeks of Christmas ads and Christmas specials, then about 10 days of vacation (or if you prefer, Bowl Season)... so that puts us to at least the middle of January before the first candidate declares for 2012.

Something to Sing About

2008-10-09T21:08:00.000-05:00

I sometimes suspect that if I were Superman, my Kryptonite would be nostalgia. Any time I take any part of my past out of its lead-lined box, I begin to get weak in the knees. I must say that, unlike Superman, I am still able to speak in complete sentences; nevertheless, my romance with the past has undeniable power.

I should have noted the faint green glow emanating from an envelope I got a couple months back, announcing that the 125th anniversary of my alma mater would be celebrated during this fall’s Homecoming weekend. As further catnip – and now I have mixed my metaphors beyond recognition – the weekend would feature a reunion of the College Choir, singing with the current College Choir under the direction of the director who left at the same time I graduated. Or “was graduated”, if you’re the stickler for grammar I just got done telling you I was.

Despite my known weakness, I’m not a total dupe; it occurred to me that my time-machine experiences in general have not been all I had dreamed of, so I did hesitate before saying yes. But at the same time I had the distinct sense that, whatever the weekend turned out to hold, I would regret it intensely if I missed it – so at pretty close to the last moment, I sent in my registration.

This past Friday morning, I set out on the 300+ mile journey into my past; I drove through clouds and drizzle all day to arrive at a sun-drenched, picturesque campus right out of the college's promotional materials. There was a full schedule of activities planned, and I decided the best way to get a good experience out of the week was to participate in as much as I could.

As I roamed the campus alone, I realized that part of what made the whole experience feel so familiar was the loneliness. Allowing the rosy haze of nostalgia to lift a little, I remembered what a lonely place college had been for me. The difference now was that mine was the loneliness of someone temporarily separated from his loved ones... rather than the loneliness of a kid trying to find a place in the world and wondering if there would ever be a place he'd fit in.

I came to terms early on with the idea that it wasn't going to be a storybook reunion for me; instead I asked myself, why did I come this weekend? First, this is a place that was important to me, so just being there is a treat; second, to enjoy the experience of the choir event -- working under my old director, singing challenging music with a high level of skill. And as it turned out (largely due to managing my own expectations), I had a wonderful time.

One thing I had forgotten is just how chilly it gets out on the Southern Tier this time of year. It was pleasant and sunny during the day, but really plunged after sundown. Of course, it could have something to do with the fact that I have a bit less insulation on my roof than when I lived out that way.

I also realized along the way that, having left teaching 11 years ago, it's been awhile since I spent extended time around a critical mass of college-age kids. It was a little odd to be immersed in that force field of energy and hormones and interesting fashion/hair choices. But the good news is that it's a Christian school and the vast majority of the kids are well-behaved and pleasant to be around.

The centerpiece of the weekend for me was rehearsal and performance with the current College Choir kids and my old director. I found out for one thing that I've really been coasting for the last 25 years. Nothing against the church choirs I've sung with over the years, but nobody's expecting us to be pros. I immediately noticed that I couldn't sustain my notes as long as a bunch of 20-year-olds! I was gasping like I'd been punched in the stomach.

It was a privilege to work with our old director again, and a thrill to sing with the choir to a packed house; I felt like we really did a terrific job with very little preparation -- and almost all of us 25 years or more away from our last truly high-level performances.

But the experience I'll never forget came before the concert, after we old-timers had had our group photo taken. We were still standing on stage on the risers, with little knots of conversation here & there. Then someone started to sing one of our old numbers (and again, remember, none of us had sung it in at least 25 years!). Within seconds the entire group was singing along; underneath the music you could hear the faint sound of aging brain cells straining to access the long-locked-away brain-file that contained the song.

Then our old director looked up and, with a look of amusement, walked over and started to direct us. We got some notes wrong, I know, and we forgot some words, but when we got to the big finish -- sforzando, a strong initial sound, then instantly very quiet, then surging to full voice -- it was like all the years dropped away and we were back in the moment, feeling the joy and pride of making a beautiful sound with great skill together. It was a sensation of pure exhilaration such as I rarely have a chance to experience.

So while the weekend as a whole was not generally the Perfect Nostalgia Experience, the little voice in the back of my head was right: if I'd missed it, I would have felt a great regret.

Let a :-) Be Your Umbrella

2008-09-25T21:00:00.000-05:00

Our family spends a lot of time, particularly in the summer, at garage sales and book sales. Garage sales are popular at least in part due to the availability of cheap second-hand toys -- often the "guys" of which I wrote some time ago -- but we're all always on the lookout for books as well. I'm afraid the kids are more enthusiastic about owning books than reading them, but I'd rather go way overboard in the quest to make them lovers of reading.

And yes, I did say "we're" always on the lookout; I rarely buy a book that I can't get for free at the library (unfortunately, we have some trouble with due dates around here, so even the library ain't free, but then...), but on occasion I stumble across a gem I know I've got to have for keeps. Such was the case recently when I found a used copy of Eats, Shoots, and Leaves.

Since I have a somewhat unusual sense of humor and a love for language -- and I'm a bit of a pain in the keister -- this is unquestionably the book for me. She writes with what is called, in almost every review (and there are over 500 extremely assertive reviews, both pro and con, at amazon.com), "biting wit" about the use and misuse of punctuation.

I admit that blogs as a whole are not thought of as bastions of grammar, syntax, spelling, or punctuation -- and my blog punctuation may seem a tad idiosyncratic. In point of fact I am so OCD about such issues that I've even leveraged it into a part-time role in my other gig (the one I'm actually paid for (should that be "the one for which I'm actually paid"?) ); I'm the editor for one of my department's newsletters, so my word on commas, dashes and semi-colons is law.

Scary, huh?

So anyway, I was reading along chortling the chortle of the guy who knows he's on the right side of the battle against the punctuation evildoers. Then the smug rug got snatched out from under me when she turned her scorn laser upon... emoticons.

Forget the idea of selecting the right words in the right order and channelling the reader's attention by means of artful pointing. Just add the right emoticon to your email and everyone will know what self-expressive effect you thought you kind-of had in mind.

Don't get me wrong; I know emoticons aren't cool. My problem is that in my business life, I conduct an enormous percentage of my interpersonal exchanges are via instant message or e-mail. And for better or worse, I don't consistently suppress my sometimes-inscrutable wit.

I find that my variety of humor, if I may be permitted to describe it as such, is extremely oral -- dependent upon emphasis, pacing, volume and the like... every possible nuance of spoken language. Emoticons can be helpful in that regard, along with all the other tricks I use such as boldface; italics; and, as already confessed, my somewhat quixotic punctuation.

At work I have frequent recourse to emoticons (and delight in collecting new varieties ), not least because I spend a lot of time conversing with casual acquaintances. And for some reason, I have a particular genius -- I like to think of it as genius, at least -- for saying/typing things that are very funny... unless you interpret them a little differently than I intended, at which point they make you angry.

The irony that struck me not long ago is that I use emoticons much more in my IMs than I use smiles, or maybe even expressions, on my own actual face. Boy, I've said some unflattering things about myself in this space, but that's gotta be in the top 10!

I'm working on balancing that ratio... I'm trying to use fewer emoticons . But I think it might also be a good idea for me to be a bit more expressive; I can point to at least one person who'd appreciate that. In fact, I'm pointing at her right now.

So if you're out and about, and you run into someone who looks like this , stop by and say hi.

Happy New Year

2008-09-10T22:04:00.001-05:00

I spent an astonishing proportion of my life in school... all the way through high school & college, then graduate school, then teaching at the college level for lot of years. Now, of course, I'm in 3rd grade -- OK, my son's in 3rd grade, but since I am such an active participant in the homework I'm really hoping to get credit for the year.

So in a lot of ways, the academic calendar strikes more of a chord in me than the one hanging on the fridge. It's only reinforced by the church calendar; even though we have church all year round, there's certainly a sense that a certain portion of the church family, let's say, is on vacation for the summer months, and then we restart in September.

It also represents a different kind of new beginning; it was in September, a number of years ago, that I made one of my first steps toward applying the faith I said I had toward my actual, you know, life.

My life at the time: junior in college, but since I had lived at home for the first 2 years of community college, setting out on my own for the first time -- a good time, if not a bit tardy, to really mull over what my own values were. Also, and of course this is pivotal to the story, I had a girlfriend.

She was also in college in another state, but we'd been dating for over a year and it felt pretty solid. We had had the boat rocked a few times, but overall it seemed reasonably happy.

When I got to school, it was made clear to me in a number of ways that faith was not something we took out of the drawer on Sunday morning and then returned to its cotton-batting-lined box once the service was over. We had prayer before classes, and chapel services 4 times a week. There were special speaker series, and even the entertainment was faith-based.

I have to admit that, as much as September prompts this look back, I was also prompted by my recent music-recording efforts. I was recording one of my favorite old Christian artists, De Garmo & Key, when I realized I was missing an album: "No Turning Back", which was recorded on the same tour they were on when I saw them that September.

It was the sort of raw, hard-charging faith message they presented (and rocked out with), along with a few pointed comments by one of those visiting speakers, that made me think back over a few things in my life. Such as this: why didn't my girlfriend & I ever discuss faith matters?

We had spent a lot of time together -- in fact, we worked together that summer; we'd had innumerable phone calls and dozens of long, long letters. And while it's easy for me to sit here and note that she didn't talk about faith, I also had to realize that I hadn't either.

This isn't a TV movie, it's a slice of my past... but nevertheless you probably know how the next scene goes already. But honestly, I guess I hadn't seen enough movies at that point, because I went into it with a sense of excitement. I wrote her a long impassioned letter about what I was learning and feeling, how I was changing, and I invited her to tell me about her faith experience. I promise you that what I was expecting was to open up a whole new level of communication and closeness...

... but somehow that's not what I got. I've long since lost track of the letter I got, so there's a chance I'm not portraying it accurately, but here's what I remember: she felt like I was accusing her of not being spiritual enough, and she told me that her faith was too personal to her to discuss.

Well, of course I backed & filled, and tried to repair the damage... but what I didn't understand was that I hadn't caused a breach, I'd merely revealed one I didn't see before. We struggled on till Thanksgiving break, keeping in touch and trying to find common ground, but I think we both knew that it was over. When we both got home, I went to her house to talk to her, and before I left we broke up.

I guess 'broke up' isn't quite the right term; we really acknowledged to each other that we were already moving in opposite directions, and affirmed the wisdom of continuing that way. When I left, she told me she was sure we'd get back together someday, and I did get a couple letters from her in ensuing months, but it really was over.

I can't honestly say I learned the lesson all the way that first time, but I'm thankful that our God of second chances gave me enough opportunities so I could finally get it right.

Going for the Gold

2008-08-28T20:24:00.004-05:00

There was a TV show in the '60s called The Outer Limits -- or so I'm told; clearly I'm far too youthful to have first-hand knowledge -- a kind of knock-off of The Twilight Zone, with less imagination and 50% less William Shatner (not that that's necessarily a bad thing). The opening narration said, "There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission," then at the end of the episode they "returned control" to you (a power coveted by today's advertisers).

You may recognize that sensation from the just-concluded Olympics. Thanks to the far-flung tentacles of the NBC-Universal octopus (in turn, part of one of the solar system's largest conglomerates... yet one near and dear to my heart, and bank account), you could turn on your TV pretty much any time day or night and find a channel with an event being contested -- or at least a feature on Michael Phelps, Michael Phelps' diet, Michael Phelps' mom, Michael Phelps' mom's dentist....

I was pretty well invested; by my rough count I watched at least 15 different sports, though I still felt like I was missing out a bit on the Constant Variety of Sport that Jim McKay was always spanning the globe in search of. There were actually many hours of preliminary rounds for swimming, diving, gymnastics, track, and beach volleyball... rumor has it there were even some events happening in other sports where the athletes were fully dressed!

And I know for a fact that they missed out on a number of events that may not involve world-class athletes -- and a bunch of people from tiny islands you never heard of who get to go to the Olympics by virtue of being better at a sport than the other 2 people in the country who play it -- but which are contested every day right here in this venue (a certified Olympic Word). For example:

Weightlifting. Every other night my son says to me, "Dad, will you carry me to bed, dad?" and I get to heft his angular yet nearly 60-lb. frame up the stairs to his room. During times of misbehavior, on the other hand, if he will not willingly repair to his room for "quiet contemplation", I get to perform the Clean and Jerk.
High hurdles. It takes a finely-tuned athlete to make your way from one end of the playroom to the other.
Figure peeling. One of my latest obsessions: see if you can peel an entire apple in one continuous piece.
Individual medley. A solo competition to determine whether dinner can be assembled from the previous week's leftovers.
2-meter dash. It's time to go; let's see who can get to the door first. Although this is a land-based event over a relatively short distance, it's actually a cousin in spirit to the open-water swimming competition, which as I understand it is in turn akin to floating roller derby.

I could, as I have proved many times, go on and on. I am concerned that if I keep at it for too long, I'll give in to the obvious "wrestling" joke, although around here that event's usually held in conjunction with the Synchronized Shrieking competition. This is just a taste of the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat as it's experienced here daily... you may scoff, but some of this stuff is way closer to being a sport than rhythmic gymnastics.