The Aerie
Been down and grouchy today and I haven't known quite why. But part of it, I think, is that this is the first Father's Day when I'm flat out of Fathers.
Now, other people have to deal with losing the one, but I had two - my adoptive father, and my birthfather. In quick succession (20 months) they were both gone - the latter on my birthday last year. That's just wrong.
So I know one of the things making me moody is just the understanding that I haven't got any fathers left. Oh, there's my father-in-law, but that's not the same at all.
On the other hand, well, I get to BE a father to three extraordinary kids, so rather than looking back, look forward. As for what we're going to do on my Father's Day, that one I am not sure of yet. Maybe hit the beach, maybe go for a drive, maybe get some breakfast. It's my day after all!
Okay, something is seriously wrong with time today.
Got up planning a big, productive day at work. Work has given me a useless, thankless makework job, taken from someone more skilled Fortunately the guy I'm helping out is an excellent chap, and I'm happy to make his life easier with this crappy task.
So I planned to go to work and do that, but instead my wife asked me for our household paycheck.
Agh! It's the 16th already! I had to send out bills, write checks, pay taxes, etc. Somehow I'd lost track of what day it was, and now my bills were all due.
In the midst of all this I was reminded that my printers stopped working after I rearranged my office on Sunday. I was reminded of this when I tried to print one of the bills, reports, or invoices and I started to try to print them and nothing came out.
Now, this is me trying to be all cool and hip and use Linux as a desktop machine, and let me tell you, Fedora Core ain't ready for prime time (not that most would say it is, but...) Example, I found myself rooting around, up to my elbows in Python code in the queueTree subroutines, trying to get my printers working. When you're trying to print a mailing label and you find yourself debugging code, you've gone badly astray.
But even with that waste of time, the day unaccountably vanished like a zephyr in a hurricane. Suddenly it's 6:00 p.m., and time to take my youngest out for the evening. So today will probably be the first (and only?) day this month that I miss going to the gym.
Meanwhile the work didn't get done - but it's not due til Tuesday, so that's not too bad. Meanwhile, I've got a job interview tomorrow, and somebody from my current contract workplace just called to offer me even more work.
Crazy!
Well, off for Dad 'N Kid day with the youngest. We'll probably go see Batman and catch some dinner....
[later]
Well that was interesting. Offered the opportunity to see the new Batman movie, the boy chose instead to see "Howl's Moving Castle" for the second time. A lad with discriminating tastes!
We had a very nice time at the movie. On second viewing it was a lot better, the plot hints were all more visible, although some were astonishingly subtle. The coming war is hinted at, for instance, when a woman returns from the future enemy city with a fancy hat, decorated with gun-turrets. "It's all the rage!" she exclaims.
The lad is amazingly perceptive. He leaned over a couple of times during the film to inform me that the score - of which I was entirely unaware - was very similar to that in "Spirited Away," or that a certain voice was the same as one from "Princess Mononoke". He's 10 and he's a film critic.
As we were leaving "Howl's" in stylish Uptown, we waited at a red light and from the left along comes this fellow, maybe 22 years old. He's rollerskating wearing nothing but a pair of shorts and of course the skates.
He's 20 yards from the light when it turns yellow. He accelerates.
He's five yards from the intersection when the light turns red. I reach over, slap my hand over my boy's eyes as this cretinous moron defies Darwinian law by barreling through the red light wearing nothing but a pair of shorts. Four lanes of cars were driven by attentive drivers that day. Four lanes of cars watched patiently as this idiot skates arrogantly by. Nobody happened to be chatting on a cell phone and accelerated into him.
But it'll happen.
Went to Yucky Cheese, only to learn they were closing. The boy blew through $10 of tokens in lightning speed - I hope he never takes up gambling! I practiced ski-ball, best score only 450 but I don't claim to be any good.
Then we grabbed some Arby's and now it's off to bed!
Well, they got her.
We periodically (ha! I kill myself!) get phone calls from the Star Tribune, that bastion of left-wing ideology that publishes James "Screedblog" Lileks and Katherine "If I Had My Way I'd Be Chattel, Barefoot and Pregnant" Kirsten. Knowing how liberal we are, they must have figured we'd be an easy mark. "Bring 'em into the fold!" (ha! I kill myself!)
Unfortunately despite everyone who whines that they are Left, they were right.
It's not that I don't like the paper. Heaven's no, I enjoy reading it. What I don't like is... the paper.
Traditionally we have received only the Sunday paper. There's nothing more pleasant than sitting down on Sunday morning with a toasted bagel, a cup of coffee, and the Sunday paper. Of course, I'm only after the entertainment, so I start with the Funnies, then I read the Opinions section, and I round that off with Variety.
I used to start off with Opinions, but then I had kids. If I want to read the Funnies now, I have to camp on the front stoop and catch the paper as it is hurled towards the house. Then I have about fifteen seconds to skim "Dilbert" (Ha! That Wally, he doesn't do a lick of work!) before the children descend upon me, and I'm left holding that colorful strip of advertising that they have added to the right side of the front of the comics section. (Apparently I'm more likely to buy a product if I read about it while tearing in half the end frames from six differnet comic strips... who knew annoyance could so drive purchases?)
Unfortunately, for every word I read in the Sunday paper, there are at least 100 I don't. The paper (when it hits me in the face Sunday mornings) weighs about 70 lbs, 60 of which are classified ads and glossy perfumed inserts.
I like classified ads. They're great. They go very well with this thing called a Search Engine. But DELIVERING the printed classified ads to me every day makes about as much sense as printing everybody's phone number in a billion big thick books and sending it around to everyone's house every year. Imagine how stupid THAT would be?
The glossy inserts, of course, are terribly necessary. Why, would I have gone to Office Max today except for the glossy inserts? Of course not! Because one glossy insert makes it about 10% likely I'll visit the store... therefore SEVEN identical glossy inserts must make it 70% likely I'll visit the store! That's the logic that must exist behind the fact that I usually get about seven identical glossy inserts from at least one of the merchants.
Finally, there's Sports. I have a problem with Sports. See, when I was a kid, I was that nerdy guy with the glasses, the one who got punched out in gym all the time? I have a bone-chip in my spine as a memento of the day I was beaten unconscious for catching a fly to right... that the first baseman missed. The first baseman of my own tenth-grade gym team beat me unconscious for catching, not missing, the ball. Right field nerds shouldn't upstage first-basemen, even if it's just in gym.
So for some reason, I don't read sports. Yeah, yeah, I know, "Get over it!" But I have plenty of stuff to get over, and I've decided to put "Learning to Appreciate the Beauty of Doped-up Spoonfed Multimillionaires as They Screw Me Out of my Tax Money" down on the bottom, right after "How to Stop Having Nixon-era flashbacks and Learn to Love the Neocons." So maybe I'll learn to love sports enough to read that section of the paper someday... but not soon.
Out of a 70 lb paper, therefore, I read about 5 lbs of it. Maybe 2.
Now, I just checked the calendar, and it's 2005. When I was a kid, I was promised Moon Cities, Flying Cars, and Girls in Spray-On Clothing by the year 2000, and what I've got instead is Mars Robots, Hummers, and the Return of Peasant Blouses. Only one of the three even show up on my Nerd Radar of Cool, and it's NOT the Hummers.
But by 2005, one thing that I would think would have happened by now would be Customized Newspaper Delivery. You can complain all you want about the dire state of the Fourth Estate, but I think it would boost circulation greatly if I received ONLY THE SECTIONS I WANT with my paper. I also think it would be nice if I could get a $5 refund every year and not receive a printed phone book, but that's another story.
What benefit can there be in sending me all this excess paper? Oh, sure, if the nation were overrun with Evil Pine Trees, I'd be all for receiving all this printed crap. "Ha! Encroach on MY sunlight, will you damned trees? How do you like being ground up and soaked with soy ink, hm?" But the nation is NOT overrun with Evil Pine Trees - despite what the Bush Administration will suggest in next year's environmental initiative entitled, "Save the Forests" and written by the timber industry. In fact there are shortfalls at both the fore and aft - a dearth of trees, and a dearth of landfills in which to store them.
So why do I need all this excess paper? Wouldn't EVERYONE benefit if I could receive a very slim, efficient paper: World News and Opinion, Metro News, Comics. That's it! That's all I need! One sapling could provide me all the paper I require in order to mosey through a cup of coffee and a bagel in the morning.
But no... with each delivery an entire grove is dumped on my doorstep, most of which clutters the kitchen for two weeks and then gets recycled.
And now, into our already chaotic, hilariously messy household, we have QUADRUPLED the number of deliveries. Apparently my spouse could not resist the offer - quadruple the number of deliveries... for just FIVE CENTS.
Okay, you people at the Star Tribune gotta be kidding me. Five cents? Come on, you're not making any money off of this, just drop the price to Zero Cents and face the facts. All you're trying to do is boost circulation numbers so that you can charge the advertisers in those daily editions a bit more money. It's true, come on, I can tell by the look on your face! So just skip the whole "Five Cents" thing, and send us the papers for free.
So for five more cents a week, we're now neck-deep in newsprint. Today I tried to read the Sunday paper, and I couldn't find my Opinions section. Why? Because the Sunday paper had somehow gotten entangled with the Saturday paper, and the OpEx section, as it's called, is undoubtedly buried in the Perfume Scented Inserts, or swallowed up whole by three hundred classifieds advertising the availability of Only Slightly Pee-Stained Mattresses (204), Kittens I'd Rather Not Drown (315), and Cars That Might Work (407).
Or, as I think likely, it was stolen by those bullies in the Sports section. Not satisfied with incalculable wealth and unwarranted fame, they've fallen back into their old habits of picking on the nerds. And I learned back in high school not to respond to such provocations. I really don't need another bone chip in my neck.
No, I'll let them have my copy of the OpEx section. I'll get another tomorrow anyway, and meanwhile, I'll just read it on line...
My twins had their "recognition" ceremony yesterday for leaving eighth grade. I'm dubious about such things, but at least the school was constrained by its administration from calling the process "graduation."
It's a good thing I declared June "F* It Month" at my present contractor. After they ate me alive in May, I decided that for the month of June, my needs are going to come before those of my client. So when it was time to go to graduation, I didn't beg off that I had to work... I went. I taped AND photographed, all at the same time.
The "recognition ceremony" was interesting. One of the most notable things was the proliferation of boobs. I was accustomed to seeing groups of gangly girls giggling all over the place: yesterday there were all these young women with boobs giggling all over the place. Eighth grade must be when all the hormones kick in.
There was a wild array of dress. One young woman showed up in a sequened blue evening gown. Others showed up in jeans and a T-shirt. And there was a proliferation of those awful Peasant Shirts. The boys likewise showed up in suits, jeans, a wide variety. However I don't believe I saw any shorts.
It was interesting to put faces to the names I've been hearnig about for so many years. My daughter's nemesis had been selected to perform "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," much to her consternation. I didn't say anything to my daughter, but sure enough the girl got up and did a poor job. Later I explained to my daughter the meaning of the word schadenfreude.
We said goodbye to grandmas and grandpa and had a break which I used to hit the gym - maintaining my unbroken string of visits this month. Then my wife wanted to take the kids to dinner at Figlios, a real grown-up restaurant.
Dinner was okay, but Figilios was crowded. The five of us go seated at a round table big enough for maybe three. It was so noisy that we had to shout at each other to be heard. Then I ordered something called a "Surf 'n Turf Tower," only to have it arrive on, well, a tower... who knew!? Three kebab skewers - one with vegetables, one with beef, and one with shrimp - hung from a two-foot high wrought-iron stand, topped with a plate full of garlic mashed potatoes. Three sauces in plastic cups were grouped around the base of the tower amidst a tangle of bitter lettuce.
It must have taken me ten minutes to take the tower apart and return the skewers, tower, and extra plates to the server so that I would have enough room on the table to eat. The food, when I got to it, was okay - the shrimp were forgettable, but the beef and vegetables were pretty good.
We cruised around Borders for a while to let dinner settle, but I resisted purchasing anything at Borders because I'm trying to preserve my custom for Uncle Hugo's, which is suffering badly as the roads all around it are torn up for construction. If you are in the mood to buy science fiction, please order from Uncle Hugo's and help save the US's oldest surviving science fiction bookstore...
Finally we went to Izzie's for Ice Cream, and afterwards home. By the time we were finished, I'd spent ten hours on the kids' "graduation" from 8th grade that I was supposed to spend working. Or writing my novel.
But whatever, it was fun. And I enjoy spending time with the family and kids. It's just disconcerting to think you're going to spend an hour videotaping a ceremony, and ten hours later discover that the whole day is passed.
Okay, the new "Blue Bunny" ad is worth it just for the phrase, "Scared the livin' peanuts outta me."
Just thought I'd say that.
Well today was pretty nice. The weather was fabulous of the warm and sultry variety - definitely summer, not spring. I think the meteorologists said it was the seventh nice-Monday-following-a-rainy-weekend in a row.
Today was the first challenge to my vow that "June is F* It Month" at my current employer. I pretty-much sacrificed May upon the altar of keeping my job. I worked an overnight, I put in extra hours almost every week, and I didn't get much done in the way of exercise or even my writing.
So as of June First I decided, "F* it." There is no way I'm doing that again in June. So I decided that I'm going to blog every day, and also work out every day, and I'm not going to let anything get in the way of that. Of course, it helps that I finished up both of the huge, earth-shattering projects that I was working on last Thursday...
Well, last night I went to sleep at a decent hour, but after dozing off for about 20 minutes my wife woke me up reading in bed. This is always a disaster for me: the edge taken off my sleepiness, I frequently have a hard time falling asleep. Additionally I was anxious because I've been looking for other work, and having very little success - something that I'm not accustomed to experiencing. I'm looking for particularly challenging work, but still I need more practice in patience.
So as my spouse boarded the barque for Lethe, I tossed and turned waiting for my own ticket to be punched.
After half an hour I got up and came down to the office to work. I got some stuff done, and went to bed again in another hour. No luck, so another round of work later I tried again.
Finally at 3:00 a.m. I fell asleep.
So instead of getting up at 6:00 and hitting the gym, I woke up at 8:00.
Now, last month I not only wouldn't have gone to the gym, but I wouldn't have gotten my work done. It would have been a disaster. But today I said "F* it!" and went to the gym anyway. And THEN I ran my errands. And THEN I went into work.
Nobody noticed.
I can't make a habit of it, but it worked out today, and so I got to the gym instead of missing it.
And since my limbs un-rusted themselves on Sunday, I was able to actually do a pretty good job on the weights.
So six days down, 24 to go. But so far, so good...
Another weekend, come and gone. The weird weather continues - intermittent blazing sunlight followed by a torrential downpour that might soak your right shoe and leave the left one dry.
We attended my new nephew's baptism today. As I have moved farther and farther away from the Catholic church in which I was raised, the whole business seems stranger and stranger.
I listened to the priest - some fellow from Bangladesh or Lahore who somehow found himself preaching in Minnesota - go on about how the oil of catechumens frees the babies from "original ssssssin". That's how he pronounced it, "Ssssssssin," putting the same kind of loathing into the first consonant that Rush Limbaugh puts into the "L" in "Liberal," and ending on a period so sharp it was almost a glottal stop.
And I sat there, wondering why people would want to believe that babies are born something other than completely pure?
But I have to admit there was a tangle of stuff involved. Not only am I a fallen Catholic and atheist, but I was also in the suburbs, so there were class-differences involved. Many of my prejudices came to the fore. My own bigotry told me that each of these people was a shallow hypocrite, with oversized faux mansions, $30,000 SUV's purchased on credit, perfect lawns and showcase living rooms, spending their empty days working contentedly at middle-management jobs and returning home to television and hobbies. Holding unquestioned views of religious and moral conservatism, and each husbanding some inner weakness, a deeply repressed pain that manifested itself in some different private perversion for each person, whether that was bulimia or depression or sexual acting-out.
So clearly I was in a pretty judgemental mood.
And I tried to get past it. And if this were some kind of literary posting, I would be able to tell you how the little babies redeemed me and I found new insight into myself. But I didn't. For a while I examined the private pains that led me to such a judgemental place, how I had always felt in conflict with the church, how my arrogant prejudice towards "shallow suburbanites" reflects my own insecurity regarding my place in the world and the way I live my life.
But eventually simple boredom set in. And after a while my nephew Andy, all of two, showed up in our pew for us to tend while his parents went through the baptismal rituals.
I cannot help but identify with Andy - with his bright blue eyes and blond hair he looks a lot like I used to. As an adoptee from Russia, he shares my adoptive heritage. And unfortunately he seems to be getting labelled as "difficult" because he, like my own youngest son, is a very high-energy child. I wasn't "difficult," but I was certainly labelled as an outcast as a youngster - my parents called me "the little old man" as a sign of how they just didn't understand me.
Bracketed by birth-siblings fore and aft, labelled as difficult, I am anxious about Andy's future. I hope that he'll be accepted and cherished. I wonder what the world will look like for him when he's older. I hope that he'll be happy.
And because I identify so strongly with him, I realize that these are simply the things I have always wanted for myself, that I'm just projecting my own problems into his world.
So I find myself back where I started, looking at all my prejudices, fears and anxieties, projecting them out on the world, and then finding the world a fearful, anxious place. Babies don't do this. Babies don't arrive in the world full of anger at their treatment and fears of judgement. Babies show up full of need and hunger and ideally find contentment and love. And if we all didn't project our legacy of fear and judgement onto them, they might just grow up perfectly happy and kind.
So I don't think babies are born with Original Sin. I think the Sin is out here, waiting for them. It's in our twisted hearts and broken minds. It's in the unquestioned prejudices and our unchallenged fears of their elders. The oil of catechumens shouldn't be applied to cleanse them, but as a warding and a repellent. If these babies today are lucky, they will not be saved from sin, they will be preserved from it.
Now I know how the Tin Man felt. Every joint in my body is squeaking "Oil can!" as loudly as it is able. Fortunately my joints aren't too capable of squeaking, or I would be unable to think for the cries.
As it is, I am almost unable to think for the pain. I started back at the gym, and I am suffering the Just Punishment of the Damned for slacking off. I tried to go easy on myself, but despite that my back and arms are almost completely crippled by stiffness.
Oh, sure, I try staying hydrated, I stretch, I flex, I even went to the hot tub today and got loosened up enough to swim a few laps relatively painlessly.
But then I had to sit for about 90 minutes during the kids' piano recital, and like rain on the Tin Man, I rusted right back up again.
It was nice sitting there, however. The recital was horribly crowded, with many more grandparents showing up than was expected. When we arrived at the home of the volunteer host the living room was already packed, with hot locker-room air wafting past my head in the doorway. I turned around and looked back at the inviting three-season porch where I had just removed my shoes. In the corner, by the open window, a chair with rich cushions waited invitingly - and no man could resist THAT invitation.
Unfortunately, I think the hosts must have been Swedes. I don't say that because they had a "Valkommen" sign hanging in by the door. I say that because the cushion-covered chair was one of the most painful things I've ever sat in that was supposed to be sat in. The seat was canted slightly forward - a trick they use in the food court of the Mall of America to keep patrons from staying seated any longer than it takes to eat. Or maybe they do it so people will eat over the table instead of dropping food on the floor. Or both. All I know is I tried writing in the food court once, and quickly became aware of the hostile ergonomics shared between those chairs, and the one on this porch.
The back cushion was hard enough that I wondered for a time if someone had carved it out of pumice. The seat cusion felt like a dwarf-box-spring. And beneath the cushions, elaborately lathed dowels waited to indent the most delicate and least padded portions of one's anatomy.
Still, I sat, and it was pleasant enough, no doubt because I unfortunately bring my own padding to such things nowadays. The kids played - the rain fell. The kids played - the rain stopped. The kids played as the sun struggled to shine on the ivy-covered wall and purple crocuses of the neighbor's house. The kids played as the sun came out, and the other neighbor's roof started gushing steam so hard that I was afraid that the house had caught fire. And then, while the kids played, the rain poured down again.
The weather's been doing this for six weeks now, and most of us are ready to go postal.
When the recital ended a man with a crowbar had to come to get me out of the Swedish seat of death, while several others pulled on my arms. As I was levered up, I groaned "Oil can!" as loudly as I could, but nobody seemed to understand...
June first. The rocket-sled to Hell continues to accelerate. The entire month of May went by like a long feverish nightmare: 24-hour working stints, 14-day stretches without a day off, and an entire spring month of gray rain.
And with no end in sight, I've just decided I've got to say the hell with it all and let the powers that be at work become displeased with me. Today I was a millisecond from walking off the job, so why should I care if I get canned?
So after a month of wasted time, this month it's journal entries, and trips to the gym, and walks and time with the kids, and if I don't make any deadlines and everyone has a shrieking fit, I don't care. I'm getting to old for this crap. And for a contract position no less.
I've got a book to finish writing, I've got sunlight to soak up, and my kids won't be 13.8 and 10.5 years old again, ever. So I've decided to take the Homer Simpson approach - he regularly gets fired from his job,takes another job, gets his old job back, etc. If it can work for an ageless fictional cartoon character, why not for me?