Six Things I Should Really Keep to Myself, But What the Hell:

Wendy tagged me with this meme (which, at this point I actually have to register my formal complaint at the use of the term ‘meme‘ when used in reference to this game we play. Saying ‘I’ve been tagged with a meme’ is like saying ‘I’ve been deliberately infected with a belief.’ I do like the game, and no, I don’t have a helpful alternative term to suggest. It just strikes me odd, is all.), and since I have been entirely illiterate unable to read or write for several months (due to being preoccupied with other matters, is my claim), I’ll be a sport. Actually, I have a vague memory of having done this exact meme before. The sensation is more one of déjà vu than of explicit memory, but since I don’t feel like digging through my own archives, I’ll just jot down a few things which I think most people wouldn’t know about me.

1. I never graduated high school. In fact I never even finished the 10th grade. In fact, I hold the honor of having been the first person in living memory to have been kicked out of the alternative school which I was attending at the time (you can let your imagination run wild as to what could possibly cause an intelligent youngster to get kicked out of a school where attendance, academics, and reasonable behavior were pretty much optional).
2. I have a terrible memory (you can let your imagination run wild as to what could possibly cause a young man, in otherwise good health, to have serious memory loss). The sensation of déjà vu which I mentioned earlier is one I feel quite often. I couldn’t tell you the last name of a single person I went to grade school with. For me, every trip around the fishbowl really is a new experience.
3. I have ironic vanity regarding my appearance. Ironic, because I have no fashion sense, am not classically good looking, and am endowed with a sort of pelt-like covering of hair on only those parts of me which would be covered by a tee-shirt.
4. I’m sort of hippy averse. Chalk it up the fact that many of the hippies I’ve known have been morally bankrupt in that special sort of way which is particular to heroin addicted wife beaters and child abusers. I don’t know. These characteristics may very well occur with equal frequency in other populations. I have only anecdotal evidence to support my fundamental distrust of hippies, but it’s good enough for me.
5. I really, really don’t like to go to Mexico. Even though I live a little more than an hour’s drive from the border, I prefer not to be faced so undeniably with the stark reality of my own privilege. My level of opportunity has not been particularly high by American standards, but in the presence of such intense poverty and desperation as is typical in Mexico, I feel extremely uncomfortable. White guilt is not my idea of a fun vacation.
6.  I prefer a high degree of organization. For example: on my desk, there is a pen caddy which always contains exactly three (3) medium point blue Uniball pens, two (2) fine point blue Sharpies, one (1) mechanical pencil, and one (1) yellow highlighter. And yet I am extremely lazy. Lazy to the point that it might take me a week to put away my laundry after taking it out of the dryer (if I even take it out). This unhappy combination of personal characteristics often leaves me very frustrated with myself.

I’m tagging Chag, Crouton Boy, and Kristen.

Update:

Chag, since you just did this one last week (I’m somewhat embarrased to admit that I didn’t know that, but hey! I haven’t read anything for four months!) I’m detagging you.

Brent is a man of few words, but what he does say is always timely and intelligent. Today, for example, he told me (very, very concisely) that scientific studies have shown that today is the most depressing day of the year. Prior to having learned this fact, I had been feeling pretty good. Now in possession of this bit of knowledge, however, I feel quite a bit better.

It’s not that I enjoy the idea of other people being depressed. I think it’s more that, at a very basic level, I feel that the fact that I feel good on the most depressing day of the year is a validation of my self-image as a contrarian. What can I say. I guess I like being the odd man out.

Still, I’ll take the good doctor’s advice, and list three things that I’m grateful for. It’s supposed to make you feel better, so what the hell:

1. I’m grateful to my wife Emily for loving me despite my difficult nature.
2. I’m grateful to Emily for giving birth to, and being a great mother to our daughter, The New Baby, and our son, The Voice.
3. I’m grateful to Emily for loving our children despite the difficult nature which they both seem to have inherited (in spades) from me.

So, I think I’ve been having a midlife crisis or something. Or a prolonged, languorous nervous breakdown; a petit mal seizure which lasted for roughly three months. I’ve been entirely dissatisfied with everything I’ve been doing, and have basically stopped doing everything. But finally, my urge towards deconstruction and existential bulimia has me feeling like I should maybe start blogging again.

Update:

Wow, that was depressing. Welcome. Welcome to my wonderful foul temper. Please slap me and tell me to snap out of it.

Anyway, I was saying I hadn’t been feeling too good, which is true. But it was more of an itch than anything else, though I did injure myself and miss the marathon I’d registered for (non-refundable fee of course). Oh yeah, I also was more sick than I’ve ever been in my adult life for an entire month (a month which included both Christmas and New Year’s). Thankfully though, I feel better now.

How’ve you been?

Lucky looked at the boy, and the boy looked right back at him. He looked about eighteen. The boy bounced a giant superball too close to the other shoppers, and pointedly ignored his mother as he stared into Lucky’s eyes. Lucky found something of interest to look at near the floor. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the slight look of satisfaction on the boy’s face, but he didn’t mind having been stared down.

Glancing up from the floor, he met the mother’s eyes. Her face seemed profoundly sad. She smiled briefely, then her smile faded too quickly back to a listless frown. Lucky felt as if he had missed some breif window of opportunity in which he might have responded to her glimmer of happiness thereby affirming it. He felt in that instant that he had failed her, this stranger, this basset hound of a woman. He was irritatated with her for having such a brief moment in which joy was possible. But he also suspected that his reflexes may have suffered from heavy use. He felt slow.

Why should it bother him to be stared down by a eighteen year-old boy, living a safe suburban lifestyle, well fed, and wearing clean clothes. He probably attended school, and drove a Toyota Cressida with bad seals on the front windsheald which whistled at 50 miles per hour and which he’d bought with his own money, earned working at a regular after school job. Lucky always compared his own eighteen year-old self to these kids, and he always came up short. They had all the things he’d never wanted. They were better than him.

Lucky had not had a positive experience of teenagedness; the prime of his life was by far the worst time he could remember. By the time he’d been this boy’s age, he had a long list of felony convictions. Eight, he thought. He had been kicked out of all the worst schools in his town, until no other school would have him. He had held a job for two years or so which required him to work 60 to 80 hours per week digging huge holes by hand through asphault, sandstone, and clay, durring which he and the other maintenance workers would drink beer, and snort coke off the lense of a huge flashlight while standing in muddy water up to their hips. He remembered his time at that job fondly as the last days of his childhood. Lucky had stared down the barrel of a shot gun, aimed at his face and held about two inches from his nose by a man to whom he owed $250. He had gone to Hollywood, where he lived on the streets and had a contract taken out on his life for having stolen $20 from a transvestite prostitute.

Looking into the boy’s eyes, Lucky had seen bright-eyed innocence. He had instinctually recoiled from the boys challenge, partly because he would never want to be responsible for squelching even a minute fraction of somebody’s childhood. He did feel that the boy was better than he had been, but he also felt that that was good. The mother had looked haggard, but she had no idea how good she had it with this normal teen-aged boy and his normal challenges to her authority. Lucky could tell her some stories that would make her want to hold her baby tight.

Dear Islamic protesters all over the world. I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, but it needs to be said that your extremely low threshold of offense, and your pyrotechnic ways make it difficult to get along with you. I don’t care in the least what you or anybody else believes, in terms of personal faith. I don’t know if you feel the same way, though I’m fairly certain most of the Western world would agree that personal beliefs are just that: personal.

I can understand the anger which is fueling your protests. You feel that imperialism was a raw deal for the Middle East, and though America clearly had nothing to do with the overt forms of imperialism practiced by European nations up to the mid twentieth century, you feel that the economic policies (not to mention certain clearly misguided attempts by the U.S. intelligence services to shape the region by erecting dictatorships in key locations) of the United States have existed as a more subtle, perhaps more insidious form of imperialism. I understand this, though I could point out that the policies of the East, namely the Cold War Soviet practices of arming and propagandizing groups in the region against Western folks did little to help the region recover from more than a century of European imperialism; in fact, nations in the Middle East were pawns in the Cold War and suffered as a result of policies on both sides. I could argue that the current economic depression (the objective existence of which is the subject of some debate) and general disadvantage of the region is due to a series of long-term global events and that it would be illogical to single out one nation, or even one hemisphere, as the root of all the region’s troubles. I might point out that you are being short-sighted with regard to history, and that your tendency towards black-and-white thinking is not helping either.

It is difficult to think clearly when one is angry. And it is clear to me that this undigested anger is behind the burning of the U.S. flag that has been taking place all over the world so often over the past several decades. As a U.S. citizen, I could simply react with blind patriotic rage at the symbolic affront against my nation, but you may have cause to be somewhat irritated with the U.S. (though to be fair you might want to look into some other flag burning opportunities), so I’m not too mad.  I understand. My parents are a Leninist and a Trotskyist (the Trotskyist has now become a Stalinist). I actually have no gut-level reaction whatsoever when I see an American flag being burned.

The flag burning doesn’t bother me too much (hell, I could look out my window on Saturday and see a burning flag. That’s nothing special), and sometimes even gives me a certain nostalgia for the era of my youth in America. The burning in effigy of the Danish illustrator a few months back, however, bothered me quite a bit. That was an entirely unreasonable level of reaction on your part to a simple artistic expression. So he offended you. Big deal. Everybody gets offended sometimes; it is ridiculous to expect that nobody should ever offend you. Nobody’s burning your symbols in the streets. In fact, people are going out of their way to accept you all over the world. Yet you burn us down. After the Dane, I feel your protests against the West are personal. Although I’m neither Danish, nor an illustrator, I feel blatant de facto censorship of people all over the world has taken place, and I don’t like it.

The latest piece of business with the Pope burning takes the cake, though. Think about it. You’re accusing the Pope of attempting to revive the old-timey crusader sentiments of the West, while in the meantime, you’re burning the likeness of Catholicism’s highest office. Does this strike anybody else as the height of bullshit hypocrisy? On the one hand we have a theologian lecturing in German to other theologians, and who during the course of his lecture quotes a Byzantine emperor who’d made an unflattering remark about the nature of Islam. On the other hand we have insane mobs burning the likeness of the Pope while accusing him of inciting holy war. By the way, I haven’t heard anybody disputing the truth of what the Pope said; as I understand it, the argument is simply that nobody may ever say anything bad about the Prophet whether it’s true or not.

Islamic protesters, you really need to calm down. The Pope is very even handed when it comes to bad-mouthing special interest groups, and if you have a gripe with this guy, take a number. The Pope made a speech at Auschwitz in which he implied that the Jewish people had been bystanders at their own extermination, and that the real victims of the Nazis had been Christianity and the Christian people. Over the top? You bet. And yet, I haven’t heard a single report of a Jewish mob burning the Pope in effigy. I don’t know, you may even agree with him on some of his points, but I want you to consider the following list of quotes, and think very carefully about the spectacle you’re making of yourselves in the context of all these other offended parties:

More from Pope Benedict (1)

On homosexuality
"Although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil; and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder. Therefore special concern and pastoral attention should be directed toward those who have this condition, lest they be led to believe that the living-out of this orientation in homosexual activity is a morally acceptable option. It is not."

On Buddhism
"Auto-erotic spirituality."

The ordination of women
On the excommunication of seven women who called themselves priests: "… the penalty imposed is not only just, but also necessary, in order to protect true doctrine, to safeguard the communion and unity of the church, and to guide consciences of the faithful."

On same-sex marriage
"Call[s] into question the family, in its natural two-parent structure of mother and father, and make[s] homosexuality and heterosexuality virtually equivalent, in a new model of polymorphous sexuality."

On rock music
"[A] vehicle of anti-religion"; "the complete antithesis of the Christian faith in the redemption."

On cloning
"[A] more dangerous threat than weapons of mass destruction."

Best regards,

freezio

Tags: flag, burning, Pope, Prophet, Islamic, protesters, homosexuality, Buddhism, ordination of women, same-sex marriage, rock music, cloning

I just ran seven miles and I felt really good. In fact, after maybe the fourth mile or so, it seemed like I started feeling increasingly good. At 7.03 miles, I felt fantastic. I felt like I could do it again. My running partner James had had enough, though, and we’d done the run we’d set out to do, so we stopped. To be fair to James, the first time I did this route, I had to basically force myself to put one foot in front of the other for the last three miles. This was his first time running this kind of moderate distance in quite some time. It takes some getting used to.

This feeling of physical well being while running moderate distance is something new, and I have had to manage several minor physical problems in order to get to this point. Well, OK. I’ll Share.

1. In the beginning of my current attempt at an exercise regime, the first thing my body did to stop me from fixing it was to develop anterior shin splints. I’m pretty sure I over did it on the jump-rope for a while; I was jumping for something slightly under an hour several days per week, and on Saturdays I’d do a total of about four hours. All the jumping put undue strain on the arches of my feet, and since the tendons which run down the anterior side of the front of one’s shins support the arches, viola: Shin splints. I can tell you, they hurt like hell.  They also make it difficult to run.  James put it well when he said that running is, in large part, pain management. Pain management is exactly what had to be done about the shin splints; After a run, I’d ice the tendons, and eat analgesics. I also got shoes with better arch support, and a better fit. That’s it. The shins got better.
2. My body’s next resistance tactic, was to develop some tendinitis in the iliotibial band of my left leg. What this feels like is an ache in the side of the knee; sometimes, after a run, they’d stiffen up to the point where it was difficult to bent the knee for a while. Like the shin splints, the cause is weak supporting musculature / overuse. In this case, the I-band runs from the side of the hip, down to the side of the knee, and plays into stabilization of the body, and alignment of the legs. To manage the symptoms of this problem, I found heat (and analgesics) to be the most effective, but to actually fix it I just had to strengthen the tendon: I wrap a bungee-chord around both legs (while at my desk at work. Everybody actually thinks I’m working, the fools), and spread my knees apart against the resistance of the bungee. It’s worked like a charm.
3. Then, of course there was the consistent problem of feeling like I couldn’t get enough oxygen to actually take another step. This is a problem which seems to solve its self. I haven’t been following an exact training program, but I’ve been doing two or three miles per day, five days per week, and trying to push my pace up on these runs. I try to do a longer, slower run on day six. As I mentioned, today I felt great; I actually had the cardio-vascular wherewithal to be able to carry on a conversation for the entire run, though it was a bit of a one sided conversation.

Anyway, I’m feeling pretty pleased with myself. I’m actually so enthused (I know, it’s not a word. So what) that I’m considering training for a marathon at some point in the (probably distant) future.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to be normal. Not wholeheartedly, but in a part of my heart and mind I’ve always wished that I could change my name to Bob; I always wished that I actually liked football, or baseball, or even hunting; I’ve always wished that there was some way for me to prefer dogs to cats. When I was very young, I realized that I could never do any of these things because the cat was already out of the bag, as it were. To change my name to something more ordinary than Swan, for example, would be to admit defeat, guilt, shame and error. I could not bear the shame of the admission that I had been wrong. I could not join the crowd. I learned to take a perverse pride in things which set me apart from the mainstream. I was probably six when I knew that as much as I wanted the easy path of the normal boy named Bob, the strife and romance of the iconoclast named Swan was my lot.

Still, I’ve been considering getting a beagle for a while now. The boy-and-his-dog archetype is just too powerful; I cannot, in good conscience, continue to deny this to The Voice (he doesn’t even care about dogs yet, though. But that’s kind of my point; he needs to start caring about dogs, m’kay?). How could I? It’s simply a part of childhood for all but the strangest outcast children. Besides, maybe if I get a dog, and I really love him, maybe then I’ll finally be accepted by my peers.

Thinking that TV’s probably getting to be old enough, I started asking around. I know some actual regular guys who enjoy things such as sport hunting, and sure enough, they know hounds. So I got in touch, and began a short-lived correspondence with a local breeder. Alright, here, read the correspondence, and I’ll explain after:

freezio to David:

Hello,

I am writing because I and my family are seriously considering getting a beagle. My neighbor suggested that the … Beagle Ranch would be our best bet. As far as a time frame is concerned, we’re thinking in terms of around Christmas time. Is it too early to discuss, or do you have a good idea of what availability will be like at that time?

Best Regards,

freezio

David to freezio

I expect to be breeding Mara with Dustbuster sometime later this month.  If successful, the next litter here would be 8 weeks old and ready to go to new homes around the beginning of February.  False pregnancies and small litters are not uncommon, so in reality I never have a good idea as to future availability until pups are born, and even then, not all pups survive the first few weeks.  I will keep you on file and let you know what happens when it happens.

Thank you for your interest! Dave …

… Beagle Ranch

freezio to David

"I and my family are seriously considering getting a beagle. "
Are I considering learing some grammar skillz? IandI?
New post up on my blog, btw.

Maybe you find it strange that I wrote back to David, a man I don’t know at all, and from whom I hope to buy a beagle, to criticize my own grammar in an extremely overly familiar way, and to tell him that there’s a new post up on my blog (a blog of which he almost certainly has no knowledge). I’m sure he found it strange as well. I have had no contact with him since this happened; I don’t know how to explain it to him without sounding like a total jackass. So, I’ll just explain it to you: The third letter is one which Emily wrote and intended to send to me in order to point out my grammatical errors. This is one of the stranger aspects of sharing an email account with Emily; it’s almost like sharing an identity, and really deserves its own post. But really, Emily, are I considering getting some email skillz? I and I?

I’m never getting a beagle. I’m never going to gain the acceptance of mainstream society. As you dine in your fancy restaurants, my family and I will tread the dusty margins of the sidewalk outside. Because we will never have a beagle.

The ironic thing is that Emily now agrees that the grammar in my email, though admittedly unconventional, was technically correct, and she forbade me to post this out of absolute humiliation until about two weeks had passed and she finally could start laughing about it. This is formerly forbidden fruit.

Party - (This is a Party) Soundtrack   click these for actual clear photos

An explanation? That’s easy. The Voice created the latest piece in his conceptual art installation series. It’s called "Party". The series centers around the transient nature of beauty, life, love, and all material things. He works in play-dough often, though typically it will be interspersed with "found objects". The series is entitled "I Wish My Life Was Like a Circle (Because Circles are Pretty)".

Tags: conceptual art installation, Party, beauty, life, love

Sometimes I think it’s my highest calling to just record the things my son says. This sort of thing might be mildly amusing for others, particularly other parents, but for me, it’s as if each time I capture a moment of my life with him, I’ve saved a precious jewel. Today, for example, while nobody was looking, he’d gone and gotten out some kit with melt-able / mold-able plastic beads, casting molds, and all manner of assorted tools and accouterments, and made a huge mess all over the kitchen. This is nothing out of the ordinary, so we were all kind of working around it; I plated up some food and was reading a bit amongst the chaos, while Emily left for the gym. The Voice started reaching his hand into a glass full of water in which was floating some reddish plastic beads from the kit. He said "Daddy, these are so sticky. They’re like magnets."

He looked down into the glass for a moment. ""Daddy, they’re so small. They’re like miracles. Are miracles small like this?"

Resisting the urge to reflexively foist my jadedness and disillusionment upon him, I said "I don’t know. What’s a miracle, Voice?"

TV, held the forefinger and thumb of each hand together forming an OK with each hand, and joined the two hands before his eyes so that they looked like a pair of very silly glasses. With the two fingers and two thumbs pressed together and against the bridge of his nose like a little pink four-leafed clover, he said "miracles are this small."

He held his arms before him in the manner of a man praying, with his forearms level and his hands joined palm to palm, fingers rigid and pointing to the heavens, he slid his palms against one another as one who is making a play-dough snake would do. He said "miracles are this small. Miracles are teeny tiny."

"Oh…" I said "I don’t mean to be rude, but is there any chance you’re talking about molecules?"

"Yeah, molecules. Daddy, tell me about molecules." Then, he insisted that we watch the entire McNeil / Lehrer NewsHour before he would go willingly to bed.

Watching the news with The Voice has had some interesting results. He still talks about "Kip-trina" and anything related to hurricanes / tornadoes / dust-devils on an almost daily basis, when he sees someone in uniform he talks about either "Kip-trina" or Iraq, and he knows that all news is bad news.He sees footage of President Bush speaking before an assembled mass of uniformed veterans and asks "is that a class about how to be a pirate?" I do wonder, though, whether he might be young for this sort of business yet. I’m against sheltering kids from reality any more than is absolutely necessary. I believe kids can understand much more, and at a much younger age, than many people give them credit for. I believe kids can process difficult things, with the help of an understanding adult, and that it is better for it to be done sooner rather than later. Listening to the voice process the stuff he sees on the news, however, can sometimes be unnerving. Last night, for example, out of the blue, he said "daddy, if somebody gets their head cut open, what happens?"

"Um, well, I guess it would depend on the severity of the wound. It’s not good in any case."

"Yeah, daddy, and then, sometimes, when it won’t stop bleeding, the glue they put on it…well, it’s bad, because it doesn’t make it feel better. It just hurts still, and the glue gets inside the intestines in their head."

Well, admittedly, he probably didn’t see too many head injuries on the McNeil / Lehrer NewsHour. What I’d like to know is who’s the bastard who left Law and Order on in the family room while I was reading blogs? Oh yeah, that would be me. Bastard.

I’ve been running with my neighbor in the early mornings for the past nine days, and if there’s one thing I can tell you, it’s that running with a partner is great for my motivation. Motivation, however, should only be taken in moderation.

I haven’t missed one morning run, and I’ve been sick the whole time. At first it was just a nuisance kind of sickness, with some sniffles, and a slightly sore throat. This quickly progressed to the stage of illness in which I would wake up with raw, bleeding sinuses, and a nose full of unsavory greenness. I kept running in the mornings, though I did begin to notice that I was feeling progressively shorter of breath (this, by the way, is the opposite of the desired result of running every day); the sensation of running with a respiratory infection is like partially drowning over an extended period of time. But my buddy was counting on me; I figured that, to the same extent that my running with him motivates me, his running with me motivates him. I wasn’t about to let him down, so I didn’t even mention that I’ve felt like I was slowly drowning for the entire time we’ve been running together.

In fact, in the interest of not letting anybody down, I haven’t mentioned my sickness to anybody, not even Emily, until this morning. Normally, my alarm jolts me out of sleep instantly. This morning, I felt like I was struggling to the surface of the dark waters of coma. My cough was bad. It was time to cop to it.

I staggered outside to tell my buddy that he was on his own for today’s run. I needed more sleep. I called in to let my office know, not that I wouldn’t be coming in, but that I’d be late.

I always go to work. Part of the reason is that my desk is littered with time-sensitive documents and, again, I don’t want to let anyone down. However, probably most of my perhaps unreasonable level of motivation to work work work is habit. I’ve mentioned before that in my industry, absences are quickly filled. Particularly back in the days when I was working as an actual carpenter, if somebody didn’t show up to work for any reason, the employer would have to replace them. I never missed a day for many years; I’d show up injured, vomiting, feverish, etc. Nothing could stop me. This was how I learned to work.

So as I was puttering around the house this morning, The Voice was enjoying the novelty of seeing me before he went to preschool. I’m usually gone well before he wakes up, so he was curious about what was going on. Emily explained "No, daddy’s not staying home, he’s going to work even though he’s sick. Daddy’s just tough."

"What’s that mean, mommy?"

At this point I had to interject "In this case, tough probably means dumb."

Now that I’ve handled the more pressing affairs at the office, I’ll be going home. But how about the rest of you working stiffs? Work when you’re sick? Yes? No?

Update-

Of course, today would be the day I get a blowout on the freeway on the way home. Look on the bright side: I haven’t had a blowout for roughly ten years, so I was probably due; I didn’t burn myself too badly on the muffler (I am so unsuited to being a mechanic. If I get anywhere near metal objects, I get injured); and I got to sweat out some illness along the shoulder of I-10.

Tags: unsavory greenness, running, work