Call Me Cautious

I realize that a high percentage of my posts end up to be about music. I guess that's kind of like the way Eskimos are supposed to have so many words for snow, or fish tweet all the time about how the water is today. Not that I claim that level of expertise, but I seem to be surrounded by music so it seems to be on my mind more often than not.

It's not the same as it once was, I have to say. Actually in a way it is, because I seem to be immersed in the same music now that I was then... but what I meant was, in my younger days when there was something cool and hip and happening, I was aware of it (even though I was constitutionally unable to be hip) more or less right away.

Now when I am... less conclusively young... I am reminded of that fact over and over, because the new hot song comes to me through my children. Ouch, by the way. Quite often they say, "We heard this song and it's really cool and can we have it on our iPods?"

It is my intent as a parent, of course, to exercise a certain amount of quality control over what's going into their heads, so my answer is always "Let me look at it." I then head directly to Google (pretty often right that very moment, with some encouragement).

I know I have no grounds to be all that superior -- "She loves you yeah yeah yeah" is not precisely Shakespeare, and no one will proudly hail the ascension of "My Ding-a-Ling" to #1 in October 1972 as a cultural touchstone. But I also can't say that I've been overwhelmed with the literary quality coming out of top-40 radio these days either...

Maybe "literary" is the wrong angle. Now that I'm coming at it from the parental standpoint, I'm actually more interested in the message than the turns of phrase. Sometimes I can sort of get around "adult language" by making them get the Kidz Bop version, since it's sanitized for your protection (shades of Pat Boone), but other times it's more of a conceptual struggle, particularly in the way current music deals with male-female relationships.

With that in mind, I'd like to submit the following proposed lyric:

Hey, I just met you,

But I'm not crazy,

Can't have my number,

So let's meet for coffee sometime in a neutral and non-threatening public place where I can be completely sober AND see you in the light of day AND be able to hear what you're saying so I can figure out whether you're a normal guy or some kind of stalker,

Maybe

One for the Money, Two for the Show

There were over a thousand students at my high school, so my verification was surely not exhaustive, but to the best of my knowledge I was the only one around who ever wore blue suede shoes to school.

I'm also relatively certain that this removes the last vestige of doubt about whether I was ever "cool" or 'hip", as if that ship hadn't sailed well over 100 posts (not to mention well over 40 years) ago.

Here are the two things you really need to understand about that: first, I was probably 13 or 14 when I got them and surely can't be held accountable; and second, given the opportunity, I'd do it again tomorrow. Maybe tonight, even.

They were Hush Puppies and you know I just checked the website but they don't seem to have them these days. Those shoes were comfortable and I really loved them... and yeah, I also felt like I was really styling as well. It may be just as well that I can't get my hands on them any more, since there have been two major changes since those days -- Hush Puppies are now crazy expensive, and I am also now a married person.

I haven't thought about those shoes much in the past 30+ years -- although I must admit that they do tend to get mentioned at my high school reunions! -- but recently I actually found myself in a situation when a pair of blue suede shoes was exactly what I needed.

During our 25th anniversary cruise this summer, I fell victim once again (as, let's be honest, we all knew I would) to a more serious cruise-related virus than even Legionnaire's Disease (or the compulsion to impress your girlfriend by sailing too close to the coast). It must have been lying dormant in my system ever since October of 2005.

As I reported in one of my first blog posts ever -- in which I believe I established a precedent for being transparent about myself -- I was rather mesmerized that first time around by the opportunity to perform karaoke. I went in this time hoping that a bit of foreknowledge, and self-knowledge, would help me keep things in perspective.

Then I discovered that not only could I take a whirl at conventional karaoke, but they were also offering Superstar Live -- karaoke with a live band including backup vocals. I definitely relished the opportunity to perform, for the first time ever, with an actual rock band.

Despite all of that, I felt like I kept my infection pretty well quarantined; I sang a bunch of songs, in both formats, but I didn't feel like it dominated my life. That might have been the Great Trivia Contest Quest, but that's another story. I had another brief bout of worrying about which song would make me look good... but then I realized that if this was only going to happen once every 7 years, I'd better focus on singing songs I enjoy singing. And after that it was awesome.

Hanging around karaoke off-and-on for the week, I kept hearing about the "Carnival Legends" show featuring passengers performing on the main stage... as the week went on, however, I concluded that I must have no shot. After all, no one said anything to me -- until suddenly, the day before the show, I passed the karaoke host in a doorway and he said, "Oh, Mark, I was meaning to talk to you..."

And seemingly before I knew it (yet at the same time, after hours of stewing, re-listening to the audio, more stewing...) I was standing on stage in front of an audience, and a full band... dressed in full Elvis drag. At that point things are moving thisfast, and it can get away from you in a hurry.

The Elvis Legends number is a medley of "Jailhouse Rock" and "Hound Dog", and what I found immediately after starting to listen to the practice track they gave me is that despite the fact that "Jailhouse Rock" is older than I am and a certifiable 'rock classic'... I sure didn't know the words. And I worried about that non-stop till I got on the stage.

Sure enough, I got to the fourth line and "went up". All I could do is keep my mouth moving till the words came back, which they did (only to depart again briefly a few lines later) -- but I actually believe, or perhaps delude myself, that some of the crowd didn't even realize I had lost it. Hey, you can't always understand Elvis either...

And you know what? I got to sing on stage with a full band in front of hundreds of people... happily the house lights were off AND the spotlights were in my eyes AND I didn't have my glasses on, so I couldn't see past the band anyway. And I screwed up in front of all of them, and I will never never not remember that. But I had a great time, and the rest of my performance was pretty awesome :-), and given the opportunity I'd do it again in a heartbeat.

My other big regret was that, since I didn't pack for a stage show, all I had to wear on my feet was my old sneakers, which didn't totally fit the Elvis image, of course. Turns out that Mars Blackmon was right; I'll bet if I'd had those blue suede babies, everything would've come off without a hitch.

These Are the People in Your (Floating) Neighborhood

Quiet. Solitude. Contemplation.

These are just three of the words that will never be used to describe the cruise ship experience. Yes, my wife and I recently returned from an 8-day eastern Caribbean cruise -- the longest by far we had ever been away from our children. As I recall, we have two of those, and while I'm a little hazy on the names, I'm sure they will come back to me while I'm writing this.

This was a (slightly early) celebration of our upcoming 25th wedding anniversary, a romantic getaway for two marred only by the presence of over 2500 strangers... many of whom seem bent on affirming the worst stereotypes of residents of the Greater New York/New Jersey Metropolitan Area. I really had thought going in that the trip would include long stretches of quiet conversation, but to be in virtually any public area is akin to sticking your head in a jet engine.

From a sociological standpoint, there's fun to be had in observing your fellow cruisers and discerning their primary motivation for booking. There is a major cohort, for example, that spends every waking (at least) hour in the casino. These are easily identified on the rare occasions they emerge by -- in addition to their eyeballs rolling vertically before coming to a stop -- keeping their room cards on a lanyard around their necks. This affords convenience for sticking the card into a slot machine for hours/days at a time, which in turn supplies a neat visual metaphor for the hold the machine has on them.

A second group of cruisers is never more than a few yards from the pools. Mind you, they’re not often found in the pools, which are pretty small. This group spends their days sprawled on a lounge -- you can't get up if you want to keep your place -- catching some rays and, I suspect in many cases, angling to be seen and admired.

A similar group doesn't care about the rays, particularly, but can also be found in a lounge (often in what shade avails) stretched out with a book and/or snoozing. These people have clearly concluded, and I guess I can't argue strenuously with them, that vacation consists largely of doing, and moving, as little as possible. While this philosophy appeals to me somewhat, it only works for me in short bursts before something sounding very much like one of those old-fashioned alarm clocks with the double bell on top goes off in my head. Then I have to go find an Activity, lest I while away the precious hours of my vacation without Accomplishing Something Vacationy. OK, you got me, I'm struggling with all of that.

Incidentally, when it comes to reading material, even in tropical climes accustomed to bold colors, there were a lot of Shades of Grey to be seen.

Perhaps the largest cruiser group, certainly by mass, is the Buffet Enthusiasts. I suppose if you say "cruise" to someone who'd never been, the instant reaction might be "unending food"... and they wouldn't be off by much. The first problem with pizza and ice cream available at 3 a.m. is that the vestigial reptilian/teenage brain says, "Aha! If I can eat it, then I must eat it"... but that way lies madness, not to mention raging indigestion and ill-fitting clothing.

The dirty secret, of course, is that when cooking for a couple thousand people of varying backgrounds and palates (I don't think I'm being unfair to say, skewing toward unsophisticated), between sheer volume and least common denominator, it's almost impossible to put out excellent food. It's a Denny's that floats, is what it is.

OK, that's (marginally) harsh, but while they clearly aspire a bit higher for dinner service in the formal dining room, most of what you get wouldn't be out of place at your local neighborhood Golden Corral -- which operated on a similar charter for giving large numbers of customers acceptable food that really doesn't put anyone off.

I'm completely OK with that; I've made no secret that I'm no gourmet, so as long as I go in with the expectation that it's going to be hot and plentiful and pretty good, it's filling the bill. Note -- when discussing cruises, it is never advisable to use the phrase "get what you pay for".

Apple: Not Falling Far Enough

I guess everybody wants to see a little of themselves in their kids. I don't have the biological thing going for me, of course, so I do tend to study them closely to find those small reflections.

I've written before about my son and how I started out looking in all the wrong places for connections with him. It turned out he was not much for elaborate wordplay, and didn't care much about baseball -- but when we're riding in the car he always wants the oldies station playing, and pretty often he says, "Dad, do you have that one?" So we have a fair amount of overlap in our iPods. And I was happy to get him hooked on the finest in visual entertainment as well.

My daughter and I are pretty close in general, but the thing that we talk about the most (well, the thing I talk about with her; she talks about anything and everything with anyone and everyone) is baseball. Now that I'm helping coach her team, I like to try to teach her about the game... yeah, she's not really any more inclined to listen to dad when I'm wearing a maroon baseball cap than any other time. But even though it's somewhat frustrating, we can always connect on some level around the game.

Naturally I can't really expect them to share my preoccupation with the past... or least that's what I was counting on recently when I was able to recapture 8.5 oz. of my childhood.

I've seen a lot of those photos that look like posters on Facebook recently talking about how our lives were simpler when we were kids -- we didn't have seat belts or sunscreen and we stayed outdoors from dawn to dusk without posting armed guards -- but I can certainly testify that one thing was in fact way simpler, and that was breakfast. In my day it seemed as if nutrition was optional; the proper response to "Sugar content?" was "Yes, please!"

So it came to pass that in the fullness of time, and bowl, I started nearly every day with a heaping bowl of Quisp cereal. Like his cousin, Captain Crunch, Quisp was a jolt of sugary, sticky, corny goodness and I loved it. And I believe it was no coincidence that as I got a bit older and was slowly induced to eat a higher proportion of breakfast foods found in nature, Quisp was actually taken off the market.

In the 90s Quaker brought it back as an Internet-only product, and from there it gradually crept into scattered stores. You won't find it in your average Price Chopper or Hannaford, but it is perhaps ironic that I found it when browsing the more upscale Fresh Market (perhaps the only time "fresh" and "Quisp" have shared a thought).

Since it's such a "boutique" cereal now, and since the Fresh Market is so... well, I kinda want to say "snooty", but I'll try "esoteric"... an 8.5 oz. box of Quisp actually set me back more than a normal-size box of a normal cereal (for a real eye-opener, check this out). I was OK with that, though, because I figured one box would get it out of my system.

I bought it on a Friday night and basically wedged it into the back of the pantry shelf, then I went to bed. Saturday dawned bright and sunny and, as basically the only prerogative of the parent, I slept in a tiny bit. As I came down the stairs yawning and stretching, my daughter greeted me cheerfully, "Dad, this new cereal is really good!"

I had already planned bagels for the weekend and the Breakfast Blast from the Past for Monday; I decided to stick with that despite my feelings of foreboding...

... and so it was that on Monday morning I poured the last of the Quisp into my morning bowl. It was pretty good, but not as good as an entire box of Quisp.

Lost in the Pages

I'm sure that from the standpoint of most retailers, I'm probably not the ideal consumer. I'm pretty good with the coupons, I'll drive across town to save 20 cents on a gallon of milk, and it's not uncommon for me to "visit" a product multiple times before I buy it (if I ever do). When stores use "loss leaders" to get me in the door, I love to go in and grab just those sale items and not get sucked in to any of the surrounding regularly-priced merchandise. I'm a trifle on the frugal side, is what I'm getting at.

There is one commodity for which I am the target audience, however: books. I know that when I'm writing one of these, all I really want is for "all of you" to read it and enjoy it -- whether that's engaging with my premise, nodding in recognition, or just getting a laugh. The one thing I can promise from the other side of the reading experience is that I will throw my whole self into it. Sure, I have the tendency -- exacerbated by years of blogging -- to reserve a corner of my mind for the metacritical, "am I really enjoying this? why or why not?" sort of evaluation, but on some level I'm still able to disappear into a book.

I'm also extremely brand-conscious; once I've enjoyed your book, I'm camping on your doorstep waiting for the next one. So last week I got my hands on Faye Kellerman's 20th Decker/Lazarus mystery (OK, I should probably admit that as usual I got it at the library, so in that sense I'm probably not entirely what an author is hoping for) and, having read probably the previous 19, I was ready to dive in.

I was interested by the mystery but it was the 2nd plot, the love story, that really absorbed me. I found myself rooting, trying to anticipate where it was headed next, worried that something was going to go wrong; even when I was finished I found myself wondering what would happen to these characters after the book was over (am I the only one who does that with fictional characters?).

Now it's possible I was influenced by the fact that the romantic couple were... a 15-year-old boy and a 14-year-old girl. When you combine my ability to pull a book up around my ears with my ceaseless fascination with my youth, I might have over-identified just a little.

Because when I started to come out of my tunnel, I started to think, wow, this is really sticking with me; I wonder what the rest of the world thought about it...

...and discovered that the world as a whole thought that the book wasn't that great. That the mystery wasn't that mysterious, and in any case got kind of short shrift. That the mystery story and the love story intersected in all too convenient ways. And all the more that maybe it wasn't too awesome to have a love story between a 15-year-old and a 14-year-old that... ah... perhaps took on more adult aspects than were strictly necessary. Not that I depend on the opinions of others to know what to think, but it was useful to get a little more rounded perspective (and maybe get my head out of my... book, a little).

We all bring our personal Stuff to whatever we read or hear or watch, even relationships with others -- or so I've heard from people who have relationships with others. But in retrospect I probably should have stayed sort of outside the book a little more. And by the way, if you happen to read the book: kids, don't try this at home.

Housework

I’m fascinated by the jobs people do. I mean, I know I have friends who are secretaries and teachers – and ministers, of course – but an awful lot of people kind of just “work in an office”. I wonder what their days are like; do they spend their time sending emails or typing documents or just thinking? Do they have a lot of control over what they do, or are they given a list of tasks to carry out today? And on top of all that: are they really good at their jobs, and how could you tell?

I guess I think about this in part because I don’t believe anyone really knows what I do. My title is “software engineer”, which is a euphemism for “programmer”, and I think most people who see that would probably think that I write computer programs all day. Put aside for the moment that I firmly believe that a lot of people (I won’t say “most”) really don’t even have a clue what a program is.

My own family is completely mystified by what I do. My mom used a 3-word title to "label" me in a Christmas letter one year; she got all 3 words wrong. My wife looks over my shoulder once in a while, and is convinced that I basically type random gibberish all day long. Not to mention the periods I spend staring at the screen, not moving at all... I don’t guess that looks much like work either. My daughter has said she wants to grow up and take my place when I retire, but I suspect she mostly wants to sit in a recliner all day in front of a screen while wearing slippers.

I tried to calculate it today, but I think it's quite possible that I spend fewer than 20 hours per week wearing shoes.

The truth is that while I write code now and then, my job description – or at least my job practice – is kind of all over the place. One of my major responsibilities is learning about some of the new software my company produces; at times that means I end up handling questions from colleagues and problems from customers. So quite often my day is spent poking through program code to try to figure out why things are behaving the way they are.

I work from home, also, and in some ways that doesn't work well with my personality. I can be easily distractable -- I like to think of it as multitasking -- and with easy access to a kitchen full of food and an Internet full of... everything but food, let's just say sometimes my concentration level is not a horizontal line. If all else fails, I can always take time out to pet the cat.

(Partially) as a consequence, my workdays lately have felt like episodes of "House"... I seem to stumble around for the first 49 minutes of the program, or even 53, but then right before the last commercial (or in my case, at the Outlook reminder that I have to do the Bus Stop Trip), I finally pinpoint the disease. Sometimes I even have time to start treatment before I go off the air, but a fair amount of the time I end up with a special 2-part episode, continued next time.

However, with "House" about to go off the air, I have to choose a new role model. I'm trying to decide between Martha Stewart, the Amazing Racers and the dudes on Project Runway.

Family Resemblance

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.