Parenthetical Asides

Programming Notes

2012-01-31T14:30:00.002-05:00

I am switching things up a bit this week, as follows:

Usually Tuesday is my wild-card day on the blog wherein I allow myself to post about whatever I please. With sporadic regularity, Tuesday often becomes Book Day, whenever I feel the need to hold forth about the latest book I’ve read or possibly my newest plan to organize what I want to read into some kind of thematic project.
Wednesday is Geek Out day around here, and a lot of comic book and video game and other nonsense-inspired thoughts wind up getting aired out midweek. I also recently indicated that my entries for the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die Blog Club would go up on Wednesdays because that whole enterprise is pretty geeky, in the film-geek sense if not in the classic arguing-hypothetical-orc-versus-Klingon-battle-outcomes-geek sense.

(Incidentally, the main portal for the 1001 MYMSBYD Blog Club updates once a week, usually late Thursday night, so as a practical matter it makes sense for me to post my review on Wednesday so I can send the link to the review to the portal-runner so that he has it for Thursday. This is also why I didn’t link my review of Gangs of New York back to the portal, because at the time that post hit the blog, the portal would not have shown any other links to Gangs of New York reviews, nor any indication that I existed, since it was my first Club review. I’ll be linking back to the portal more in the future now that we’re past my initial debut. If you want to go check out other people’s takes on Gangs of New York Now, knock yourself out.)

You may have noticed that today, Tuesday, has already featured a Club review for the movie Daisies. The reason for this is because I’m saving tomorrow for … a book review. Which may seem to completely contradict my initial premise above, but trust me, the book in question is uber-geeky and in fact concerns itself with uber-geekiness in both plot points and themes, on top of which (if all goes well and I can find the time) I will be writing the review in a particularly geeky way. So it belongs on Wednesday.

Thursday as always will be devoted to my maniacal little moppets.

You may now return from the edge of your seat.

Flowers of youth (Daisies)

2012-01-31T10:08:00.002-05:00

When I resolved to participate in the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die Blog Club, it was partly to make sure that I stayed on-target with my movie consumption in order to justify my continuing Netflix membership, but it was also a conscious effort to broaden my horizons, or more specifically to match my actual consumption with my horizon-broadening intentions. Because of course there have always been Japanese films and French films and old black-and-white Hollywood classics and whatnot on my Netflix queue, it’s just that they always seem to get leapfrogged by the latest comic book adaptation that I didn’t quite manage to catch in the theater. A little structure and a few deadlines for specific reviews really does wonders for my efforts to be a little more eclectic in my viewing habits.

Which brings us to Daisies, which is about as far from my usual brain candy as you can possibly get. In fact an equally apt title for the movie might be Lima Beans, to continue the (already overwrought, I know) metaphor that some movies are the equivalent of mental junk food and others are akin to eating your vegetables, good for you but not necessarily inherently pleasant. Although, of course, some people like lima beans. Including me.

Lima Beans might also be a good alternate title for the movie because it’s a bit nonsensical, as is Daisies, an experimental avant-garde surrealist experience, a product of 1966 Czechoslovakia self-described (in the post-script dedication) as a trifle. Also a great deal of Daisies revolves around food – granted, not lima beans specifically but a wide bounty nonetheless. Enough about my attempts to re-title the film, though.

Daisies, in the early going, seems like the artiest of art films, a pile-up of scenes that are disconnected except for being contained within the movie (and starring the same two actresses), like discrete exhibits in a themed wing of a museum. But gradually something like a narrative evolves, and despite all the camera tricks from colored filters to stop-motion, what takes shape becomes all the more realistic. The story of Daisies is the story of two young women giving up on trying to make sense of a world gone mad (which is of course the world that all of us live in) and indulging in their whims and worst impulses, all the while fighting without much success against the fact that it’s kind of an inescapable element of the human condition to constantly try to impose reason and order and meaning on life. That conflict gets literalized on-screen, and what else would it look like? The average person’s life does not usually have a well-defined character arc; much more common is a life that seems more like random accumulation of experiences. Instead of well-sketched supporting characters, we have people who drift in and out of the frame, unnamed, and if you’re not sure if by ‘we’ I am referring to the audience watching Daisies or all of us living our lives, then you are taking my point.

If you went your entire life without watching a subtitled New Wave film, the lack represented by that fact would be pretty slight. What truly makes Daisies worth watching, I think, is the historical geopolitical context. It was created within a Communist state-sponsored film industry shortly before the director, Věra Chytilová, was banned from further work because her films were too inaccessible and depicted wantonness. This of course sounds to me like something out of a sci-fi allegory: “Your art is too difficult to understand! Also it gives people the wrong ideas!” It’s a little too easy to forget, some two decades after the Cold War effectively ended, that things like this actually happened all the time in Eastern Europe in the second half of the twentieth century. (It probably still happens today in places like the Middle East, even if the proof won’t come to light until years from now.) Chytilová was (is, as she’s still alive as of this post) a proud provocateuse who believed in the inherent power of all art that forced people to think for themselves, which of course made her dangerous in the eyes of dictatorial state apparatus. It’s always worthwhile to expose yourself to the forms and ideas that make tyrants nervous.

Same old, same old, same obsolescence

2012-01-30T13:47:00.001-05:00

I have a pretty standard routine for settling into my workday, almost all of which of course I do in the same order every day primarily so that I don’t forget anything I’m supposed to be on top of. Drop my workbag, hang my coat up, start my computer, take chargers out of my workbag for anything that needs charging (cell phone, Kindle, portable DVD player) and get them plugged into an outlet and hooked up to the device, sign in on the emergency contact sheet near the department secretary’s desk, stow any perishables I brought for lunch in the communal fridge, hit the men's room to bid farewell to my extra-large morning coffee, brush my teeth (which I couldn’t do at home because I was, as always, finishing the last of the extra-large morning coffee on my way out the door), back to my cubicle, record my voicemail greeting for the day. Another benefit of going through all of those activities first thing in the morning is that, generally, the computer has finished booting up and/or unlocking by the time I’m back in my chair. Because, yes, it takes an inordinately long time for my machine to wake up when I arrive at the office every day, which you may add to my previous laments about the GFE.

By the same token, once the computer is receptive to the notion of performing actual tasks, I have yet another virtual set of routines I go through every day. Fire up Internet Explorer, (which defaults to the Army intranet portal), launch Outlook, Excel and Word, open the documents I’ve recently been working on, then usually wait a couple of minutes and see if the GFE decides to crash because four whole programs are running at the same time. If everything seems stable, I can go ahead and open my coding and database management software.

The intranet portal is fairly useless to me but I do log in every day because I more or less assume it’s expected of me. This does afford me the opportunity to verify that I don’t have any stray messages inadvertently delivered to the redundant webmail account in my name on that system, and it also allows me to take a quick look at the announcements and make sure there isn’t anything crucial or vital being promoted there. Since I tend to skew wildly one way or the other, if I didn’t check the portal every single day I would probably never check it at all, and inevitably at some point I would miss an important deadline that had been touted on the site for the previous six months.

This morning when I logged into our portal – which, I hasten to point out, has both its technological underpinnings maintained and its content managed by the DoD – I did not see any earth-shattering announcements with future deadlines or the like, but I did see a system message in a banner across the top of the page informing me that “To improve performance, it is strongly recommended you upgrade to Internet Explorer 8.0 or higher.” I wish I were joking. You might recall, if you read the post from earlier this month I linked to above, that I bemoan that laughable fact that our standard browser around here is the severely deprecated IE 7. I assumed that was because the DoD did not officially endorse any of the higher versions, but apparently IE 8 (or higher!!!) is not only vetted but recommended by those in charge of the DoD-wide intranet. So having IE 7 on my computer just became even more laughable. I am half-tempted to submit a work ticket to the Information Technology Help Desk requesting IE 8 just to see what happens. But I’m afraid I already know the answer.

Anyway, the IE alert on the intranet got my morning started in a bit of a grumpy mode, but then I did some image searching for Internet Explorer logo variants …

… and this made me chuckle. So the day wasn’t a total loss.

Mass transit manners

2012-01-27T15:08:00.001-05:00

I’m not sure if it was the rain, the fact that it’s Friday, a combination of both of those or something else altogether, but the VRE car I boarded this morning had significantly more empty seats than was the case every other day this week. Which is a nice surprise, but unfortunately had the effect of reminding me once again of a pet peeve that’s been gnawing at me for a while.

Here’s the thing: I like to sit in the upper level of the car, where there are single seats against the windows. I just prefer the feeling of having that little bit of space to myself, without someone right next to me and the accompanying inevitable dancing if I’m on the inside and need to get off the train before them, or I’m on the outside and they’re detraining before me, and it’s an incredibly minor thing, but there it is. I suspect a lot of my fellow commuters feel the same way.

So if you climb the stairs to the upper level you find yourself on a narrow walkway that can only physically accommodate one person at a time. No big deal considering everyone boards the train fairly calmly (as opposed to my old nemesis the Orange Crush of the Metro) and those of us heading upstairs can proceed single-file with a minimum of hassle. And there are certain ways one can reduce the hassle even further, if one is self-aware. Suppose, for instance, that you are the first person to board the car, or at least the first person to head up to the elevated seats. You have three choices as far as settling into your seat is concerned:

Option 1 You can head towards the far end of the car, away from the stairs, bypassing empty seats. That way, anyone else coming up behind you can get to those seats you walked past, and you can feel free to take your time getting out of the aisle walkway (meaning you can take your coat off, stow your briefcase in the overhead rack, lower your carcass into the seat at your own pace, &c.) This is perfectly acceptable.
OR Option 2 you can sit closer to the stairs, in the very first available seat if you like, provided that you never stop moving. Walk forward down the aisle, turn around and sit down fast with your arms and legs completely removed from the aisle, and allow anyone else coming up behind you continue walking without breaking stride, so that they may reach the farther seats as quickly as possible. Then, once no one else is trying to get down the walkway, you can lean out into the aisle to take your coat off/stow your briefcase, or even stand up in the aisle for any other settling-in reason. This is also perfectly acceptable.
OR Option 3 you can stop next to the first available seat and block the aisle so that no one else behind you can get past and get a seat of their own, and futz with your coat and briefcase and whatnot, and in your own sweet time sidle into your seat and allow the flow of fellow passengers to resume. This is RIDICULOUSLY RUDE.

I prefer Option 1 above for myself, but a few months ago I stopped spending so much time standing on the VRE platform in the morning. I still leave the house at the same time to get a parking space in the garage, but then I sit in the relative comfort of my car, shielded from the elements, listening to the radio, until about 3 minutes before the train is due in the station. By the time I reach the platform there’s a considerable crowd waiting where the doors will open after the train comes to a stop. So I’m never the first one to board anymore. And I have to admit, another reason I started hanging out in my car (in addition to not really liking the cold) is because there’s another rider who always got (gets) to the platform before me AND always made (makes) damn sure he’s the first one to climb onto the car. He hasn’t been riding the VRE as long as I have (or at least hadn’t been taking it from my stop or riding my usual car until last fall) which makes it all the more irksome, but not worth trying to outmaneuver him. I’ve completely ceded first-boarding privileges to him.

But as you’ve no doubt sussed out by now, he is an obnoxious Option 3 type. Every. Freaking. Morning. Every once in a while he might make a token gesture toward Option 2, but not all that much. And it makes me scream inside my head. Especially on a day like today! I’m well aware that some mornings there are only two or three seats left in the upper section, one very close to the stairs and one very far away, so when this fellow chooses to block the aisle it’s a choice made with a stark contrast of how much further he’d have to go plus how much further he’d be from the stairs/door when it’s time to get off the train (and yes, I’ve noted that I detrain before he does, and I’ve never ridden in all the way to Union Station, for all I know maybe it’s a bloodbath scrum to get off the train if you’re not well-positioned) (but also, for the record, the gentleman in question is in his late 50’s or 60’s but doesn’t walk with a cane, isn’t morbidly obese, and doesn’t show any other signs of how a little extra walking would be a hardship). Today, though, there was practically no one in the upper section, and literally the first four or five seats up there were totally open, the time/distance difference to reach them was negligible and yet he STILL BLOCKED THE AISLE WHILE CLAIMING THE VERY FIRST SEAT.

I know this is an incredibly trivial thing to get worked up about, but I’ve been holding this one in for a while so today’s the lucky day it became blog-fodder. After this my only recourse is going to be to stab the guy, so I hope it doesn’t rain in the mornings because I’m not sure I trust myself to carry an umbrella peaceably.

The Island of Unfit Toys

2012-01-26T14:33:00.003-05:00

One evening earlier this week I was cleaning up after my children, putting toys away, and I had to stop chucking things at random into various receptacles in order to find a specific toy and fit a small piece back onto it. Again.

This is mostly my fault, of course. There really shouldn’t be any toys in the house which have small, loose parts. The little guy can handle them but his sister is deeply entrenched in the “grab everything and shove it mouthward” phase so we must be vigilant against choking hazards at all times. I accept that responsibility and would even go so far as to assess myself at being pretty good at its enforcement. The mitigating factors which might make it not entirely my fault lie somewhere in the gray area between children’s toys and grown-up collectibles which I am still (constantly) learning to navigate.

The toy in question is Red, who is the fire engine character from the Pixar movie Cars (depending on how often you read this blog, at least some portion of that previous sentence no doubt could have gone utterly without saying). Being a firetruck, Red (the character) is a little bigger than most of the other denizens of that world, and thus Red (the toy) is not standard sized, either. When the little guy said he wanted Red, we incorporated it into the reward system as a goal to work toward and I set about tracking Red down online. When I found him, the picture of the toy looked exactly like what I expected based on the dozens of Cars toys the little guy already owned, and I order it unhesitatingly.

Then the toy arrived, and instead of coming on a modest cardboard and plastic blister backing, it was mounted in a Lucite cube and marked as a Disney Store Exclusive or something like that. I didn’t really pay that much mind until the day came to actually give Red to the little guy, at which point he opened the cube and … we discovered that Red was screwed down on the little replica stretch of asphalt under his tires. Unfortunately I presented Red in the car, on the way to the pediatrician’s, so we had to wait through the appointment and all the way home before I could liberate the firetruck from its base with a screwdriver. But I did, and the little guy was pretty psyched.

But even more unfortunately, not long after that, things started falling off Red. He has a ton of tiny-fiddly delicate sculpted bits, his itty-bitty rearview mirrors and brittle hose nozzles and so on, and it gradually dawned on me that we were not simply dealing with some semantics used as justification for jacking up the price of a toy. Red really isn’t a toy. He really is a collectible intended to sit on a shelf, permanently affixed to his display base, not to be touched and certainly not to be played with. He was neither designed nor constructed to stand up to the rigors of actual play. He might very well shatter if you looked at him funny (which I admit is very in keeping with his characterization in the movie).

Even if I had realized this when I spotted Red online, I probably still would have gone ahead and clicked my way through the transaction, because I am firmly committed to the principle of letting playthings be playthings. I admit, there are a couple of action figures in my Green Lantern shrine which remain in their original packaging, and I even know that if I ever listed them on eBay it would be as MOC, not MIB (“mint on card” as opposed to “mint in box”) but those are far outnumbered by the toys which are loose. And while I am content to pose those loose action figures amongst my books for pure aesthetic enjoyment, I’ve never stopped the little guy from grabbing them and putting them to what I believe is their intrinsically correct purpose. So anyone telling me that a toy (or at least something that looks like a toy, sounds like a toy, and hangs out with other toys) is actually a collectible, well, that rankles a bit. Disney in particular occupies this very strange area where they seem to be expressly and almost exclusively in the business of entertaining small children, yet there are so many adult Disney fans that it’s actually (arguably) kind of hip to get a Tigger tattoo or have a Maleficent snowglobe out in the living room or whatever. But be that as it may, grown-ups (non-geek) aren’t supposed to buy themselves toys, so Disney has to market “collectibles”.

All well and good in the abstract, but dealing with the reality is something else. Apparently sometimes a toy truly is not a toy, those times being when treating it like a toy results in dangerous fragments breaking off on a regular basis. But of course in the time it has taken to figure that out, Red has become a beloved part of my son’s Cars collection, so it seems cruel to take it away now. Of course it also seems cruel to willingly let my daughter gag on a stray firetruck ladder, so some kind of compromise is inevitable. And henceforth I will be significantly more cautious about restricting myself to the designated toy aisle.

Blessed to repeat (11/22/63)

2012-01-25T13:51:00.001-05:00

Stephen King’s latest novel (a phrase with an onrushing expiration date if ever there was one) also happened to be one of his best received and reviewed; 11/22/63 made the New York Times 10 Best Books of 2011 list, for instance, which put it in some highbrow literary company. Which is not to say that it is highbrow literature in and of itself, because after all we are talking about Stephen King here. And I’m allowed to downplay his technical merits, I think, because I am a fully geeked out hardcore SK fan who semi-stoically bore the interminable wait between 11/22/63’s release in November and a copy coming into my possession as a Christmas gift from my wife. I finished reading it early last week, on the quieter of the two sick days I spent at home with the little guy.

It was pretty amazing. The height of the brow is debatable, but it is a very honest, very human book. Honesty and humanism have always been traits that SK has brought to bear on his best works, although sometimes they get lost amidst elaborate cosmic mythologies or horrific explorations of supernatural violence and madness and so on. 11/22/63 hinges on the trappings of time travel and alternate history, but it’s really a story about second chances, and about good intentions with bad outcomes, not to mention a well-observed period piece that deconstructs a fair amount of nostalgia along the way with the benefit of temporally-displaced hindsight. Much like one of my other all-time favorite Stephen King novels, Bag of Bones, it’s told in first-person by an SK surrogate, which is really the best approach for what I think is SK’s greatest strength as an author: the ability to make you feel while you’re reading as if you’re actually listening to someone talk, someone relating a juicy tale as you hang on their every word. One of the more interesting things about this go-around’s protagonist, Jake Epping, is that he’s a school teacher. King has written about teachers plenty of times before, of course (as SK main character professions go it’s probably tied with doctor for second place, behind author in a landslide), and that makes perfect sense since SK was a teacher before he hit the publishing jackpot, but Jake is no frustrated writer forced to eke out a living on whatever wages the Board of Education allows; Jake approaches teaching as a vocational calling, loves it and is really good at it. It’s almost as though King was finally getting around to making amends with all the teachers in the world, whom he no doubt deeply respects, for continuously implying that all of them work in second-choice positions.

Anyway, if you want to find more in-depth analysis of the broad merits of 11/22/63, I’m sure you could search them out elsewhere. What I really wanted to dig into is something I re-realized in the early going of 11/22/63: Stephen King has not only created a universe of continuity that rivals the major superhero comics, he’s become utterly comfortable having fun with it in ways that don’t smash you over the head.

Because 11/22/63 deals with the assassination of JFK in Dallas, the action moves into Texas for the majority of the book, but of course everything starts in Maine, just like most of SK’s other books. And SK makes references to those other books, sometimes in only the most fleeting ways. A janitor Jake knows from school is established as originally hailing from Derry, before moving to Haven after a childhood trauma. Both towns are fictional. Derry is the setting of SK’s infamous novel IT (as well as the lesser-regarded Insomnia), whereas Haven was the setting of The Tommyknockers. Whenever Jake travels through time he can only go backwards and only to one fixed point in 1958, and every time he emerges in the past he notices a red and white Plymouth Fury. SK’s automotive nightmare Christine was, of course, a ’58 Fury.

There’s no deeper understanding of 11/22/63 to be gained from having read The Tommyknockers beforehand, it’s just a neat little Easter Egg for the deepest devotees (like myself). IT plays a bigger part, however, as Jake picks up on the vibe of unnatural evil in Derry that forms the spine of IT, and eventually Jake meets a couple of the young protagonists from IT (Richie and Bev). The Plymouth Fury also has a part to play in Jake’s own story, which I don’t want to spoil. Suffice it to say that SK picked absolutely the right story in which to indulge in self-referential antics like these. Not only does travel into the past allow a fairly literal venue for revisiting classic (or not-so-classic) SK novels, but a theme emerges over the course of 11/22/63 about how time harmonizes with itself, and how déjà vu takes on all kinds of maddening forms for a time traveler, particularly one intent on changing history. By alluding to himself, SK sets up those harmonic echoes as if he had planned it that way all along.

But, again, the thing that really struck me was that SK is confident enough to namedrop George Denbrough or the Kitchener Ironworks but not Pennywise the Clown, e.g. If you get the connection, you get it, but if not, there are no metanarrative footnotes to point the way. And of course in my ever-humble opinion that’s the way it should be. Even though, I strongly suspect, there may have been even more cool little self-shout-outs than I managed to catch, and I’m someone who’s been reading Stephen King books non-stop since about 1990. But I wouldn’t want the in-jokes I missed pointed out to me, necessarily. Maybe I’ll catch them myself next time.

Which brings me, at long long last, to one of my pop culture resolutions for 2012 that I’ve been hinting at for a while now. The next Stephen King book due out is an eighth volume of The Dark Tower series, the unexpected expansion of which is something I’ve touched on before. Of course there’s no question in anyone’s mind that I will read said book, but I am strongly questioning how resonant it will be to me at this point, a few years after having read the supposedly final seventh volume and around fifteen years since I jumped on board the series with The Gunslinger.

See, it’s not just the passage of time in the abstract that worries me, it’s a trend I’ve noticed in my own ability to recollect books I’ve read. Namely, that ability is lousy and getting lousier. Maybe my brain is graying, or I’m reading too much overall, maybe the books I read aren’t that memorable to begin with, most likely some combination of all those factors, but it is distressing nonetheless. Even moreso when I go out of my way to recommend a series to someone, or a friend just happens to stumble upon something I’ve already got under my belt, and then in an ensuing conversation about said books I find myself wishing I had notes to refer to.

Hence, be it so resolved: this year I am going to devote ample reading time to re-reading. I have a very specific plan for this based on what I consider fairly relevant circumstances. To wit:

1. I introduced my wife to Patrick Rothfuss’s Kingkiller Chronicles when the first book finally came out in paperback. (One of the very few differences of opinion between us: I love big old hardcover tomes, but she’s not a fan of that format.) The second volume comes out in paperback this spring, and she is eager to devour that as well. I will not be as unprepared to discuss its intricacies with her as I was when she read part one! So I have between now and late March or so to re-read The Name of the Wind and The Wise Man’s Fear.

2. Also this spring, A Game of Thrones comes out on DVD. Then at the end of the summer (hopefully right around the time my family will be heading Carolina-ward for a week at the beach) the fifth book of the source series, A Song of Ice and Fire, comes out in paperback. (In this instance I got into the series late, started collecting it in paperback, and am committed to assembling a matched set for my bookcases.) I’d like to re-read A Game of Thrones before watching the television adaptation, and keep going refreshing my memories of the series before finally taking on A Dance With Dragons.

3. Finally, the aforementioned The Wind Through the Keyhole is my prompt to re-read The Dark Tower series in its entirety. Funny enough, I originally read the first three books in the series by checking them out of the library. I think I knew that they were part of an unfinished series and for some reason I thought they might never be finished? Also I was in college and flat broke back then? At any rate, I bought the fourth book in paperback and the last three in hardcover, then proceeded to loan the last three to an acquaintance and haven’t seen them since. So whereas with Rothfuss and Martin I can pull those books off my shelves at home and re-read them for free, I haven’t quite worked out all the logistics yet of re-reading The Dark Tower. But it’s on the list.

So there it is. A series I want to be able to talk about with my wife, a series I want to see on the small screen (and also discuss with my buddy Clutch, at that) and a series from the heart of one of my oldest obsessions. 13 books total to re-read, 15 books altogether when you factor in the new Dark Tower and new (to me) Song of Ice and Fire. I reckon it will take me pretty much all of March through July, and no doubt I will give intermittent updates on the progress here. Hopefully my employer won’t suddenly re-assign me to a different contract that I can’t mass transit to.

Going to the Show

2012-01-24T12:01:00.001-05:00

After the New York Football Giants’ improbable victory over the Green Bay Packers in the divisional round, pretty much everything else this season is just icing on the cake. (I’m half-tempted to say that the only thing that could have been sweeter would have been an improbably victory over a hated rival like Dallas or Philly, as opposed to a team I have absolutely no beef with, but the win-and-in Week 17 game against Dallas did satisfy that scenario in a big way already so I’m not going to get crazy greedy here.)

I was, therefore, somewhat ambivalent about the NFC championship game this past Sunday. I mean obviously I wanted the Giants to win, and thought they had a good shot, but I didn’t need them to win. They were already NFC East champs and had won two playoff games to convincingly prove their post-season appearance was no fluke. A historic Super Bowl win for the G-Men is also within recent memory. I could hold my head high as a fan no matter what the outcome against San Francisco, and as I’ve mentioned before, if the Giants weren’t going to Indy in February then at least I could enjoy an anxiety-free Super Bowl party with my friends.

Plus the NFC championship was scheduled to be televised at 6:30 Sunday evening, which in my household is right about when the concerted nightly effort begins to transition from post-dinner playtime to pre-bed bathtime with a minimum of screaming all around. I wasn’t about to alter the routine, and I was perfectly content to simply have the game on (both tv’s, in the den downstairs and the master bedroom upstairs, plus the satellite radio feed on the stereo in the dining room) as part of the background. My wife, superlative-sweetly, tried to excuse me early and take over story-reading between baths and bed, but the little guy put his little foot down and demanded that I stay, and I declined a protracted battle over that. (The little guy has been slowly but surely ramping up his sibling jealousy, still not acting out with anything overtly negative towards his sister but definitely pushing for more and more attention commensurate with the amount we give the baby, which is of course is more than a three-year-old technically requires, but try telling him that when he wants to be picked up immediately because you just set the little girl down for a moment.) When the little guy was finally tucked in for the night and my wife turned her attention to getting the baby to sleep, I finally joined the game in progress, watched the back and forth for about five minutes (real time, not game clock time) and then ran back upstairs and offered to sub in on the rocking chair detail. I explained to my wife that the game was tense and tough to watch, which was absolutely true.

But eventually both kids were down and I braced myself for the game which – all expectations and wants and needs aside – was a roller coaster. I tore myself away to walk the dogs when regulation ended, at which point my wife advised me not to dawdle because (as Denver had shown her Steelers a couple of weeks earlier) even with the new overtime rules the game could be decided in just one play. I missed a bit of the first OT possession but was back in plenty of time to see NY’s special teams come up huge and the offense set up a field goal attempt without disaster and Tynes do his job and one of the two teams with a booster in my immediate family advance to the Super Bowl for the fifth time in seven years.

Of course earlier in the day the Patriots had edged the Ravens, which was a bit disappointing. In my wildest dreams as Sunday dawned I had been envisioning a New York/Baltimore Super Bowl. Either way, if the Giants made it, there would be a Super Bowl rematch, but it’s been over a decade since Giants/Ravens and the line-ups are almost completely different now (except for the disturbingly ageless Ray Lewis), so that just struck me as more interesting. Not to mention the fact that the Ravens crushed in XXXV, the only times the Giants made it to the Super Bowl and lost, and the possibility of payback was tantalizing. And, fine, I admit it, I’d rather see my guys go up against Joe Flacco than Tom Brady. But it was not meant to be, and Belichickzilla Vs. Megacoughlin 2 is gearing up, and it could be a really classic showdown or it could be a blow-out in either the exhiliarating or demoralizing direction, but I am looking forward to it. Not necessarily looking forward as much to the obligatory trash-talking face-off with New England-aligned guests at the Super Bowl shindig, but I’ll just have to roll with that one. (Oddly enough in this particular social circle there is one woman who is a Patriots superfan but there’s also another woman who is a Ravens superfan, so I was bound to get caught up in that one way or the other.)

In the mean time I probably won’t have much else to say about football for the next couple of weeks (barring off-the-field scandals erupting) so enjoy the reprieve!

Annual Existential Dilemma

2012-01-23T11:53:00.001-05:00

I had my face-to-face annual review at work last Friday, which is just one of many milestones throughout the overall annual review process which takes something like 3 months of real time total, and in and of itself it went absolutely fine. My contracting manager continues to appreciate my contribution to the gig (however little he himself may understand exactly what technical wizardry I purport to practice in fulfilling my job duties) and he gave me relatively high numerical scores and positive comments. The strangest aspect of the whole experience was that my boss had swung by my cubicle on Thursday to ask if I was planning on being in the office on Friday, because if so we could grab some time for the face-to-face. I agreed I would be around and that sounded good. So on Friday he buzzed my cubicle again and said “Ready to talk?” and I confirmed I was and started to get out of my chair to follow him to an empty conference room … at which point my boss said, “Or, like I tell everyone, you can just skip this part if you agree with everything I wrote about you and don’t have anything to add.” A problematic lob to volley back for the following reasons:

- My boss has a notoriously dry sense of humor and plays his cards very close at all times, as I’m sure I’ve mentioned a time or two before around here. So was he serious about skipping a mandatory part of the corporate annual review process? Or was he joking? Virtually impossible to tell!
- If he were being serious, though, was there some kind of test hidden in the ostensible offer? Is my seriousness as an employee and team player (particularly one who recently expressed interest in potentially moving up the management ladder within the company) something which would take a hit if I opted out of the face-to-face?
- But at the same time, I really did agree with everything my boss had included in my review and had little if anything to add myself. So there was at least a hint of plausibility to it as well.

But then again, I was already out of my seat. So we proceeded to the conference room and went through the review very quickly, mouthed some platitudes about job performace at each other, and spent a few minutes actually talking about, if not substantive matters, maybe the anti-substantive? Basically I caught him up on projects I had picked up but then been specifically asked by my government boss to abandon, the kind of stuff that would never make my weekly status updates because they ceased to have any official status. And before we finished my boss let me know he had been keeping an eye out for potential project management tasks he might be able to steer my way, so if nothing else that made me glad I had taken the time for the actual sit-down, at that.

Still, there was a weird bit of cognitive dissonance for me with the whole rigamarole, simply because it’s strange to be praised (however formulaically) in one area of my life when I feel like a gibbering idiot in another. This would be the home maintenance area which I alluded to late last week, and which I will further now specifically identify as a plumbing problem, or rather the culmination of several plumbing problems. The litany goes like this: when my Little Bro and sister-in-law visited a couple weeks ago, he alerted me to a dripping leak in the basement Dork Room which was serving as their guest accommodations. I had noticed some water evidence when I was replacing ceiling tiles in that room, but I had assumed it was leftover damage from the ol’ dishwasher malfunctions of late ’11. Not so, apparently, and some eventual testing revealed that the leak was only noticeable when the main floor half-bath toilet was flushed. Only a few drops at a time, but still, kind of unsettlingly gross. Meanwhile, the toilet in the upstairs hall bathroom was prone to running at odd times due to a slight flapper leak which let the tank empty just enough to need intermittent refilling. Fixing that was on my to-do list, but shutting down, dismantling and reassembling a toilet even for a minor repair requires more child-free time than I’ve had access to in a while.

Now on top of that the same upstairs toilet got a little bit clogged, some time mid-last-week, which I noted and resolved to attend to … sometime … soonish? The issue was forced, however, when the fill valve in the tank simply expired Thursday night, causing water to run incessantly, even though the clog prevented it from rushing down the pipes, and thus there was a minor flood which covered the bathroom floor and ended up coming through the main floor ceiling in the foyer. You can imagine the ensuing scramble: water shut off, towels sacrificed, mops fetched, pots placed strategically beneath steady drips coming through light fixtures (circuit breakers turned off, for that matter) – and the next day, of course, the services of a plumber beseeched with all due haste. The plumber came out on Saturday morning and the good news is that everything is fixed (at the moment) – or I should say all of the plumbing is fixed. The main floor toilet had a bad wax ring under its base, that’s been replaced, no more leaking into the basement. The upstairs toilet got snaked and needed almost every moving part inside the tank replaced, all of which was handled as well. The outstanding issue at this point is the foyer ceiling which was seriously saturated with water and needs to be replaced – something we had been meaning to do anyway because there had been some minor damage pre-existing when we bought the house, and now we just can’t put it off any longer. (Well we will probably put it off another two weeks or so for scheduling purposes but you get my meaning.)

The total cost of all the plumbing repairs was pretty minor, especially in comparison to the hardwood floor replacement and the HVAC replacement both still fresh in my mind (my in-laws very graciously gifted us with the HVAC funds, and the hardwood was mostly covered by homeowners insurance, but still). But the fact that it was the third major calamity in a row rankles a bit, as did the specifically earthy nature of it. A while ago I joked around to a friend of mine in an e-mail about how between two kids in diapers, two dogs that get walked every night and cats whose litter boxes need frequent changing, a disproportionate amount of my time is spent dealing with biological waste matter. Ha ha ha, just a little potty humor there, love my kids, love the pets (mostly), don’t mind me. But last week the toilet misery was actually coming on the heels of an incident in which one of the cats (we think? Though we don’t know which one? Possibly a sign we do have too many pets?) peed all over the bedclothes of my wife’s and my bed, plus the little guy’s recent bug-induced gastrointestinal distress which also caused him to undergo a bit of backsliding in having daily accidents even after the illness had passed … it’s a strange span of days indeed that make diapers, doggie-doo bags and litter boxes the paragons of longed-for simplicity. And you can see why on Friday I was a bit too shellshocked for regular posting. Aren’t you glad you asked?

Unbegun

2012-01-20T14:34:00.004-05:00

"Begun" and "finished" are opposites, and yet "unbegun" and "finished" do not mean the same thing at all.

Sorry for the non sequitur but it's about the best my brain can manage at the moment. All I'm thinking about is how glad I am that this week is just about over. It started out well enough with a federal holiday but since then its been a sick little guy, unplanned days off from work that proved maddening in how little I managed to accomplish with them, a long day finally back at work trying to make up for leave time I didn't really have in the first place, and then late last night yet another unfortunate incident which will necessitate a considerable amount of Professional Home Repair. (Said incident - which I will elaborate upon after putting some temporal distance between myself and it, as is my wont - has nothing whatsoever to do with the last two recent major incidents involving the dishwasher leak/floor warping/hardwood replacement and the HVAC near death/replacement. I'm honestly not sure whether to be relieved or appalled.) Trying to shift mental gears from stewing over the constant stream of cruddiness and into summoning forth some kind of amusing anecdote has proven untenable. Hence, the week is all but finished, which is good, yet the weekly blog capper remains unbegun, which ... well it's annoying but I suppose it's not the end of the world.

If I were a meditatin' man I might try to take advantage of this opportunity of circumstance, wherein I find myself not contending with an endless flow of boisterous thoughts, and just fully empty my mind in order to ... do whatever it is you're supposed to do with a mind emptied of thoughts. I've never really gotten the hang of it, obviously. But more than likely I'll just seek the solace of pizza and a bottle of wine with my wife tonight and try to do what I can over the weekend to set up a more positive week come Monday.

Baby bootstraps

2012-01-19T14:10:00.004-05:00

She will never be second in my heart (as I love both my children with a fervor identical to the millionth decimal place, just as a good parent should) but the fact remains that my daughter is the second child born into our family and I am constantly discovering new elements among the myriad ways in which her brother’s precedents affect her.

For example, when the little guy was getting close to his first birthday, he owned some toys, but really not that many. It wasn’t hard to tidy up the townhouse by tossing a few plastic animals in the playpen in the living room and chucking a few more into his bedroom. Now, of course, another couple years on and he has amassed loot in literal heaps, while at the same time progressing from ultra-safe teethers to vast fleets of choking hazards on wheels. And my wife and I have dealt with the choking hazard issue pretty well, I think, between drilling into the little guy’s head the idea that he has to keep his tiny cars and trains up off the floor (either in one of several plastic bins doing toybox duty or on the top of his train table) and insisting that certain toys must be kept in his bedroom at all times, plus following in his wake ourselves regularly picking up the playthings he may have missed.

The plastic bins full of toys, though … I was pretty proud of myself for seizing on those as a good defense against Total Living Room Chaos. They’re big enough to make scooping and dumping toys into them reasonably easy, but squat enough to slide out of sight under the train table when we need to clear as much floorspace as possible (and lightweight enough that the little guy himself can drag them back out again whenever he takes a mind to). They make a ton of sense for managing the epic fallout of living with an energetic three-year-old. But, again, they weren’t necessary until he had acquired about three Christmases plus three birthdays plus a couple random holidays and vacations worth of toys. They weren’t necessary when we counted his age in months, and we didn’t have them then.

So it was just the other day that I got to see for the first time what an energetic (and, no joke, remarkably strong) nine-month-old does in the presence of those toybins. Which is, of course: she grabs the lip of them and tries to pull herself up. Emphasis on “tries”, extra emphasis on “at the moment” and I have no doubt that within a week or two at most she’ll be succeeding in pulling herself up. Oh noes.

Granted, I don’t think it’s actually physically possible to drown in toy trucks even if one’s head is fully submerged under a mound of plastic construction equipment. It’s also far more likely that the bins would simply tip over and spill toys everywhere while also causing the little girl to fall awkwardly and maybe at worst bump her head. Still, it’s a hazard that should be minimized as much as possible, though I confess I haven’t quite figured out what that will entail. Latching the lids on the bins at all times? Stacking them someplace weird and inaccessible like behind the end table beside the couch (which negates some of the little-guy-plays-well-on-his-own advantages I outlined above)? Weighing down the bottoms so they stay flat on the floor and wrapping the corners in Nerf-foam?

I’m sure we’ll come up with something. And at the rate we’re going, it’s entirely likely that by the time our daughter is a little over three years old our entire house will be furnished entirely in Early 21st Century Daycare with every available surface covered in nothing less yielding than ethylene-vinyl acetate and every three-dimensional object hollowed out for maximized storage space.

Also a lot of those 19th century gangs reminded me of The Warriors, and I mean that as a compliment

2012-01-18T20:27:00.003-05:00

Just a few nights ago my wife asked me if I had seen Gangs of New York, in a manner that indicated she wasn't sure whether or not we had just talked about it recently. (When you have two small children who are highly unreliable about sleeping through the night, conversations with that imprecise quality about them are fairly common.) I indicated I had not seen it, and she followed up by confirming that I was going to see it soon (as I had alluded to hereabouts). I, in turn, asked if she had seen it, and she said she had and was also prompted to ask if I had heard anything about it. I felt like I had, although I couldn't really put my finger on any specific sources, but told my wife I was under the impression that it was ... not as good as it should be? She agreed wholeheartedly with that assessment.

(Incidentally, the context in which Gangs of New Ypork came to the forefront of my wife's mind was watching the Ravens in the playoffs, as she believes Joe Flacco's current, semi-goofy facial hair gives him an uncanny resemblance to Daniel Day-Lewis as Bill the Butcher. It's a fair point. Also I haven't had a chance yet this week to bring up the NFL but HOW BOUT THEM GIANTS!!!)

So, prejudicial assessments aside, was Gangs of New York worth watching, two hours and forty-seven minutes across two DVDs and all? Most definitely. There's some virtuoso work from Scorsese there, which is pretty much to be expected, I suppose. Every shot is composed and considered, as is every juxtaposition from one scene to the next. I was especially taken with one long, unbroken shot that tracks along a line of immigrants getting off a boat in New York harbor, filing past a table where the able-bodied men are heavily recruited into the Union army, moving on to the area where uniforms and rifles are handed out, panning across boys in uniform standing in line waiting to board another ship bound for Tennessee, then rising up off the ground to sweep up the gangplank only to be intercepted by a wooden coffin being lowered by ropes and pulleys down to the docks where it will join dozens of other identical pine boxes. I'm a sucker for elaborate displays of technical proficiency like that (not to mention practically comicbook-like tapestry storytelling).

And of course Daniel Day-Lewis is just genius as William Cutting. I remember reading once that a melodrama is a story that locks its dramatis personae into well-defined roles from beginning to end - the hero always behaves heroically, the villain is forever villainous, the damsel perpetually distressed, &c. I found myself thinking of that quite a bit during the course of the movie (no doubt many people would dismiss the whole period costume epic as "melodramatic") particularly in the case of Bill the Butcher. He has a certain monomaniacal point of view in the prologue, which never wavers from the time the action picks up again sixteen years later to the very end of the film. He does not, as they say, demonstrate any particular character growth. And yet he's the most watchable thing up there any time he's on screen. Maybe it's just that the bad guys always seem to be having the most fun, maybe it's the hypnotic combination of his exaggerated lower-class native accent and his propensity for flowery turns of phrase which altogether sound like no other human being's speech. Whatever the underlying cause, he's worth the price of admission.

And yet despite a fantastic director and a fantastic heavy, it's not quite a fantastic movie. It's very good, but that can be true without contradicting our initial premise here, that it's just not as good as it should be. I don't really think that it's the fault of young Leo DiCaprio's unsteady Irish accent, or Cameron Diaz playing slightly out of her league (or not entirely those things, at any rate). I think maybe it's the sense that the whole movie feels somewhat overstuffed, combining a classic tale of an orphan son returning to his home after years of exile to avenge the murder of his father with a detailed history lesson about Civil War-era New York City. There's a lot of explication to underline the social studies coursework, between stilted dialogues and even more stilted overdubbed interior monologues and intercut newspaper clippings and so on. And the entire movie builds up to the Draft Riots, which certainly make for an interesting resolution to the tale of gangs and power struggles and corruption and such, but ... in order to set up the personal enmity between Bill the Butcher and Amsterdam Vallon, while at the same time establishing the Conscription Act and the immigration issues and the pervasive sleaze of Tammany Hall and so forth, the movie is really serving two masters. Yes it all comes together tragically and brilliantly at the end but it is a long trek back and forth on parallel paths to get there.

Combining two movies into one requires some stitching at the seams, and I think the seams become pretty visible in spots, and once that happens all the amazing tracking shots and historically accurate recreations of the architecture of Five Points seem like so much artifice, and the film ceases to be something transcendant that can sweep you up in it. But I suppose there are worse cinematic crimes than being overly ambitious and coming down just short of awe-inspiring.

Lest I go silent for too long

2012-01-17T15:42:00.002-05:00

The three-day weekend went by way too fast, as all weekends inevitably seem to do. It further seems tha the longer the weekend, the faster it goes, like a heavier freight train with more momentum behind it or something like that. In any case, my wife and I set ourselves a fairly ambitious to-do list for the Saturday-to-Monday span, and still didn't get it all done.

Of course, things were complicated somewhat by the little guy getting a touch of ... the flu? Some other, unnamed bug? It started out as an isolated upset stomach Sunday afternoon-to-evening, then he seemed better on Monday morning, only to backslide last night by adding a fever into the mix. So today I took a day off from work in order to nursemaid him, and it's encompassed both extremes of toll-taking; on the one hand, he's been pretty easy to watch over because all he wants to do is lay quietly and watch DVDs, but on the other hand, that's very hard to contend with emotionally because I know how he must be suffering if he's so listless, and it just about breaks my heart.

He's napping right now so I figured I could spare five minutes to update the blog with an explanation for the lack of posts since Friday. (I mean, y'all probably could have pieced it together given my track record with federal holiday weekends, but I didn't want to skip today as well, even if I haven't got all that much to say about how we got here.) I hope to have a meaty post for 1001 Movies tomorrow, but it all depends on how the next 12 to 24 hours go, so no promises.

Let's pretend all these meandering thoughts qualify as a "random anecdote"

2012-01-13T14:22:00.002-05:00

Last night was superlatively uneventful, the only pseudo-excitement coming in the form of a drawing room mystery, or I suppose technically a tv room mystery, as for the longest time my wife and I couldn’t figure out why the den where we were watching (3/4 of) our usual Thursday night programming remained so stubbornly cold even with the fireplace blazing. Eventually it dawned on us that when I had gotten home from work I had opened the garage door, but not pulled in because the little guy’s push/ride Tonka truck was in the middle of my side, and I came straightaway inside the house with the intention of going out again a little later to rectify all of that, but I never did. Amazing how drafty an open garage can be.

Anyway, for the past few years my wife and I have been diehard devotees of Community, Parks and Rec, 30 Rock and The Office (in approximately that order of relative affection) and last night The Office and Parks and Rec returned from their December holiday hiatus, and 30 Rock rejoined the lineup for the first time since late last spring, but Community was nowhere to be found. This, in contrast to the previous paragraph, was no mystery at all, since I follow more than enough entertainment news on teh interwebs to have been warned well ahead of time that Community was going on indefinite hiatus (a specifically different thing from cancellation, I continue to hope) in the spring, to make room for 30 Rock’s return. I may even have mentioned it around here somewhere. Weirdly, a terrible new sitcom called Whitney was on Thursdays in the fall but got shuffled over to Wednesdays, which you would think would mean Community could stick around after all, but instead another new show called Up All Night got the fourth sitcom slot, and that’s definitely an improvement over Whitney, but still disappointing. My wife and I had been enjoying Community tremendously and faithfully ever since it premiered three years ago, and we each got each other Community licensed merchandise for Christmas, so not being able to watch the show as we’ve been accustomed to amounts to a dark timeline indeed.

And I relayed all of those things in a letter I wrote to the entertainment chief at NBC. I am not even a little bit joking. The news about Community not returning in January broke before the final episode of the fall aired, and in one of the online review write-ups for that episode the reviewer advised his readers that the best thing they could for the show was to write a letter to Robert Greenblatt, and proceeded to give out his business address. I thought about it for a month or so and ultimately realized that if I couldn’t spare twenty minutes and a 44 cent stamp then I was nowhere near the superfan I claimed to be. Granted, I also had to do a little bit of online research to refresh my memory as to how to properly format a business letter, because I wanted my plea for a stay of execution to be taken seriously, but that was still time well spent. Though it did make me wonder how middle school teachers these days expect their students to pay attention to anything when they know they can always Google or Wikipedia it later. Adulthood truly is one long open-book exam.

That wasn’t the only opportunity I had this week to reminisce about my old teachers this week, either. I’m in the middle of Stephen King’s latest novel at the moment (yet another awesome Christmas present from my wife, and it’s fan-freaking-tastic, so expect a longer post on it when I finish it next week) which is about a teacher who goes back in time to prevent the assassination of JFK. The protagonist’s profession in and of itself didn’t necessarily evoke high school memories, but at a certain point in the narrative he directs the school play, which is Of Mice and Men, and that did remind me of my junior English Honors teacher, who not only assigned Mice and Men on the syllabus but put us into groups for projects wherein we wrote our own playlets which were alternate endings to the story (like Lenny being put on trial for murder). Funny enough, King develops a running theme in the novel about the past and present harmonizing with one another with coincidences and repetitions, and that got into my head along with the events in the book harmonizing with my own life, which was a pretty trippy feedback loop. I haven’t fallen asleep once on the train this week; I’m not entirely sure which timeline I would wake up in.

Wit and Wiffdom

2012-01-12T10:37:00.001-05:00

Our children are both still young enough that bathing them together seems like very much a non-issue, so much so that it’s our default approach for getting from the sticky end of dinnertime to the finish line of bedtime. If anything has the potential to convince either my wife or myself to deviate from that pattern, it’s the caprice of our son on a day when we’re carefully picking our battles with him (which, let’s be honest, is most days).

Somewhere along the line, my wife (perfectly capable of capriciousness herself) asked the little guy if he wanted to take that night’s bath “Wit your sister? Or not wit?” in a hilarious Pat’s King of Steaks accent (or approximation thereof). Unsurprisingly, the little guy found this blatant mispronunciation of simple English appalling and unacceptable, which was hilarious enough in itself to virtually guarantee that would be the way my wife would always ask him the same question every night.

What’s even funnier, of course, is when the little guy tries to correct mommy, complete with his own three-year-old speech peculiarities: “No, Mommy! It’s not ‘wit’! It’s ‘WIFF’!” Gets me every time.

A book and a movie and a bunch more movies

2012-01-11T14:06:00.002-05:00

Last week I spent a chunk of my commuting time reading a book entitled “Fire and Rain” (exhaustively subtitled “The Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, James Taylor, CSNY, and the Lost Story of 1970” and please note that about one-fifth of that is severely abbreviated) which was an enjoyable but not really life-changing slice of American pop culture history. The premise was moderately interesting, hinging as it did on the fact that the break-ups of the Beatles, Crosby Stills Nash & Young, and Simon and Garfunkel all happened within the same year. Sweet Baby James shot up the charts that year too, which is how James Taylor gets in the mix, a star on the rise at the same time all these legends were blowing apart. On the one hand that’s kind of a weak connection, but then again the three break-ups aren’t really connected, either. It’s not as if there’s a meaningful throughline, something in the political or cultural essence of 1970 that caused those acts to break up; they all just did, coincidentally within a short span of months. So ultimately what we have is an author for whom 1970 was a personally significant and noteworthy year, who remembered getting into James Taylor and saying goodbye to some big names of the 60’s, and who wanted to write a semi-scholarly book about that year so that he could both research and relive it. Thing is, I’m totally fine with listening to people talk about things they’re extremely passionate about, even if I’m not so passionate about those same things and even if the other person’s passion causes them to overreach in terms of placing judgments of importance. I just find other people’s excitement endearing and entertaining. So reading the book was far from a total loss.

One side effect of reading “Fire and Rain” was that I realized that while I take for granted that I know basically everything there is to know about the Beatles or CSNY or whathaveyou, it’s all fairly superficial stuff. My dad was a huge Beatles fan and big into CSNY (and Buffalo Springfield and other various predecessors and spin-offs) and Simon and Garfunkel, and played the classic rock radio station all the time when I was growing up, so I knew who he was talking about. But of course the classic rock station would play the one or two biggest hits of those bands, whereas author David Browne goes into each and every deep cut on albums like Déjà Vu and Bridge Over Troubled Water and it’s all new to me. Which of course makes me want to go back and actually listen to those albums instead of just the singles – yet another project for when I have a lot more time.

When I finished “Fire and Rain” I turned back to the eternal make-use-of-Netflix cause and watched a recent movie I hadn’t caught yet: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. It’s based on a series of indie graphic novels and it got mixed reviews from both comic book nerds and the general film-appreciating community. I was amused by it, in my typical fashion (meaning I could see a lot of the flaws that might bother other people but I either didn’t mind them or actively liked them for what they were) but perhaps the greatest part came in the first few minutes, when protagonist Scott introduces his high school girlfriend to the other members of his band Sex Bob-omb. The lead singer is named Stephen Stills. There is also a kid named Neil who hangs around as a roadie and emotional support, but while the rest of the members of the band are in their mid-20’s, Neil is just barely 20 himself, and so his nickname is “Young Neil”. I’m fairly sure I might have completely missed the Stephen Stills/Neil Young joke if I had not just finished a book chronicling some of CSNY’s misadventures the day before. But of course once I chuckle at a sly throwaway joke like that, a movie has pretty much gotten on my good side for most if not all of its running time.

Speaking of movies, though … as one of my pop culture resolutions for 2012, I’ve made the momentous decision to join a blogging club: the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die Blog Club, to be precise.

What this means is that every couple of weeks I will watch a movie which has been included in at least one edition of the namesake book, and a bunch of other bloggers will be watching the same movie (many of them will be doing a different movie every single week, but I’ll be pacing myself), and then I’ll post a review of the movie, as will everyone else, all linked from a portal site for the club. I’ll try to remember to link back to the club so that you can see what other people have to say (if you’re so inclined). The 1001 Movies book includes a pretty broad range of films – American and foreign, from 1902 to the present – so I look at it as a good way to broaden my horizons beyond my usual fare. Since this is a typically geeky thing to do, the reviews will likely go up every other Wednesday, starting next week with Gangs of New York – mark your calendars accordingly!

(I know, I know, Gangs of New York is pretty mainstream and pretty recent, but trust me, the next one after that will be a Czechoslovakian headtrip from the 60’s. Good times.)

Amazingly still talking about sports

2012-01-10T14:39:00.003-05:00

So how about the football, huh? Bit of a mixed bag this past Sunday with the first round of playoffs results, and my wife was understandably bummed when the Steelers’ season came to an unexpectedly quick end. Well, maybe not entirely unexpected; the Steelers are a great team but by the time wildcard weekend rolled around they had a ton of starters on injured reserve (and Big Ben so banged up you could make the argument that maybe he shouldn’t have gotten the start - I’m not making it, mind you, I’m just saying you could) and they had to play on the road … I’m not offering excuses, nor was my wife, I’m just … saying, is all?

The good news is that Pittsburgh’s playoffs departure forestalls for yet another year the possibility of marriage-testing showdown in the Super Bowl. The other good news of course is that the Giants won, and my wife very sweetly has committed to jumping on the NY bandwagon for as long as it keeps rolling. That may not be very long, of course, since the G-Men have to play in Green Bay this weekend. There are some bright spots to note: the Giants won their last two regular season games (they pretty much had to in order to get to the playoffs) and their victory over Atlanta was totally solid (no crazy new playoffs overtime rules, ahem ahem) and even over the course of those sixty minutes hosting the Falcons, every aspect of the Giants’ play only got stronger as the game went along. So tons of momentum, in other words! And all that the Packers have going for them are a 15-and-1 regular season record, a bye week’s worth of rest, home field advantage, and the fact that they are the reigning world champs. Sounds like a good match-up to me.

There was a stretch there during the regular season when I was rooting for the Packers to become the next team to have a perfect season all the way through the Super Bowl, but of course that was also a stretch during which the Giants were kind of foundering and I wasn’t sure they’d be playing in the post-season at all. Now I admit I am somewhat relieved that the Packers already lost one game, so that I don’t feel any lingering conflict of interest about the Giants potentially spoiling something historic. If the Giants continue underdogging their way toward the Super Bowl I will of course be excited, but if they falter along the way I will console myself with the fact that it is exceedingly difficult to enjoy the Super Bowl in and of itself – the socializing with friends over junk food and beer, the critical evaluation of million-dollar commercials, the anticipation of movie trailers, the snarking over the halftime show, the appreciation for a good close game with lots of lead changes and crazy plays on both sides of the ball, all of it – when your team is playing and you just want them to WIN, COME ON. That’s my silver lining, being able to look forward to a Super Bowl party as just a party, not a crucible of agony and/or ecstasy.

But let’s not jump the gun, I haven’t given up on the Giants yet, despite the long odds, and I’m looking forward to this weekend. My viewing experience last weekend was interesting, in that the Giants’ game started right about when the little guy was sequestered in his room for Quiet Time, and also when my wife had gone out to do some grocery shopping. That left me and the little girl alone together, sharing the couch in the den as I kept one eye on the tv and one eye on my daughter. She was in a very good mood and perfectly content with the amount of tickling and knee-bouncing and whatnot I offered her. I tried to return the favor by not scaring her into bursting into tears, but it wasn’t easy. I’m naturally given to extraordinarily high-decibel outbursts related to the aforementioned agony and ecstasy, and there was plenty of cause for both frustration and elation as the game in the Meadowlands went down. But every angry shout of protest became a swallowed growl instead, and every in-your-face war whoop became a gentle “Yay!” and a smile and a noiseless clapping of the hands, a gesture the little girl has just recently learned to imitate. So we sat together and delicately clapped our hands and had a grand time. So I look forward to all of that again this Sunday, too.

Wrong tools for the job

2012-01-09T14:00:00.001-05:00

Hey, it’s the first Monday of the New Year! At least, it is if you don’t count the 2nd, when New Year’s Day was observed, but it should be fairly self-evident that this her blog is not going to count a day like that. We all know I tend to blog almost exclusively during downtime at work, and not so much when I don’t go in to the office, and Mondays are supposed to be the days when I blog about work, to boot. So a federal holiday on a Monday is, for all intents and purposes, a Monday that never happened.

So what is there to say about work at this point? Not much, really. There was a bit of holiday hangover last week, but it’s all but dissipated now (the too-tall-for-our-office-drop-ceiling Christmas tree notwithstanding, as it’s still watching over the elevator lobby with no signs of going anywhere anytime soon). The standard grind has reasserted itself. But if I may, I’d like to say a word or two about that standard grind, which is at least tangentially topical. To wit:

OH MAN OH MAN DO I LOATHE AND DESPISE MY GFE.

As a courtesy to the latecomers, I’ll explain that GFE is contractor-ese for “government furnished equipment” and almost exclusively refers to the desktop computer in one’s cubicle on which one is expected to work. And my work computer is old and slow, much like the government itself (hiyo!). I actually prefer multi-tasking throughout the day, but trying to keep multiple programs running simultaneously on this box taxes its physical memory a great deal. Having the entire system freeze up is a distressingly regular occurrence.

And in addition to its physical limitations of memory and processing power, my GFE is running Windows Vista and my web browser (the only one I am allowed, by administrator proxy settings, to have installed) is Internet Explorer 7. Lots of sites do not render correctly in IE7, as the world has moved on several iterations past that and most sites take full advantage of the more robust features of latter-day browsers. Of course the web applications for which I am nominally responsible were coded and deployed almost a decade ago, and they still look just fine in IE7, so I am referring to websites which I would visit at work for personal reasons, and I am well aware of how this undermines my case for complaint. Still, there is a wide range of personal internet use which people engage in at work (especially if we consider the broader work world, well beyond the heavily-guarded walls of government contracting) and I would consider personal webmail and MSM news websites to be on the really-not-that-terrible end of the continuum, as opposed to the Flash games and gossip sites and true timewasters at the arguably-terrible opposite end. And all I really want to do is check my Gmail and skim through USA Today, but unfortunately those are some of the most unforgiving sites in terms of backwards compatibility with yesteryear’s IE.

The government is almost always averse to change and a very late adopter of technological innovation. The general regard of the government for the internet, I’ve observed, tends to be totally Wild West, an attitude that cyberspace is some lawless and untamed frontier, and only by firewalling the bejeezus out of the government servers and networks can national security and stability be guaranteed. Nothing will ever be adopted or allowed when it is in beta testing, or even immediately after launch; only programs which have been around so long that all bugs and vulnerabilities have been fixed, accounted for, or rendered extinct can be utilized. I will pause for a moment to allow the fact that the DoD essentially pioneered what would one day become the backbone of the world wide web, and now is utter crap at taking full advantage of what they unleashed, sink in.

So (here’s that timely tangent) if I had the ability to make my employer make and stick to one New Year’s Resolution for 2012, I would without question insist on new computers for one and all, with something like Firefox 9 installed on every last one of them. Though to be honest if I simply found out I was getting an upgrade to IE 8 on my current machine, I’d probably whoop with joy. And then feel very sad and ashamed for a long, long time.

Indelible images

2012-01-06T14:12:00.002-05:00

My Little Bro recently has always been interested in art, from when we were both little enough to squabble over rights to the most valuable, and therefore inevitably scarce, crayons in the box (red and black). He was also a huge fan of Bob Ross on PBS, and even tried emulating the Great Fro-ed One a few times after he (Little Bro) came up with the idea of asking for paints and blank canvasses for Christmas one year.

Anyway, Little Bro recently returned to painting as a hobby, and shook off the rust pretty quickly. Among other things, he painted a blue dragon in flight on an abstract background and gave it to the little guy as a gift, and said painting now hangs over the little guy’s dresser (and goes pretty well with the bedroom’s beige-and-blue color scheme, at that). So it occurred to me a month or two ago that I might commission a painting from my brother for myself.

Some other quick background facts to help this all come together: I am a fan of the classic “Dogs Playing Poker” painting, on levels both ironic and genuine. My fandom extends so far as to include other configurations of “X playing Y” that pay homage to the originator (which I just now realized is kind of like a pre-interwebs meme). As an unabashed geek who has devoted inordinate amounts of time to tabletop roleplaying games, it has crossed my mind more than once that “X playing Dungeons & Dragons” would be something that, should I ever run across it, I would be compelled to buy immediately. Little Bro, while never quite as consumed by it as I inevitably was, has also logged some time at D&D tables now and then and is certainly familiar with the tropes of the Tolkienesque fantasy adventuring game genre.

Hence, I asked my brother if he would paint me “Monsters Playing Dungeons & Dragons” on commission. He agreed, but insisted on making it my Christmas present rather than taking payment. And when he and my sister-in-law visited this past weekend, it was partly so that he could hand-deliver the finished product. Which is GLORIOUS. It’s the most detailed picture my brother has ever even attempted to paint, dense with game-specific details and a fair number of inside jokes, and he nailed all of it. It is an exceptionally nice addition to my dorked-out basement.

It also gives me a nice segue to tell another random anecdote that I’ve been meaning to share for a while. I’ve tried once or twice on this blog to explain how D&D and similar games work, what their appeal is to me, and so on. I may have even mentioned that I got into D&D at a young age, around sixth grade. What I haven’t necessarily highlighted is the fact that not all of the charms of pencil-and-paper RPGs were readily apparent to me as an eleven-year-old, which I have to believe is a fairly typical response. Specifically, the idea of inhabiting a heroic character’s identity while exploring ruins, fighting creatures of darkness, and generally experiencing an epic action story from within was greatly appealing and drew me to the games in the first place; on the flipside, I wasn’t too keen on the idea of running a game session myself, knowing ahead of time how the story was going to unfold, playing the parts of the villains and obstacles and exposition-delivering-gibbering-fools-who-might-actually-be-on-to-something, and so forth. Nowadays, I think I actually prefer game mastering over playing as a creative outlet, but back in my pre-adolescence it wasn’t so much that I preferred it less as that I wasn’t interested in the slightest.

And neither were any of my friends (told you my response was typical) which presented an interesting conundrum, because a Dungeon Master is really a crucial element to a game of Dungeons & Dragons. Furthermore at age eleven, not only were none of us interested in taking on the less fun, more demanding aspects of the game, but none of us were mature enough to suck it up and do it anyway despite the disinterest. It therefore took a minor miracle for us to be able to play at all. And that minor miracle was my dad.

I give my dad a lot of grief, both here and in real life (including talking to other people and talking to the man himself directly), about the many ways in which he made my childhood difficult and continues to be a constant worrisome presence in my mental landscape day in and day out (because I am a Gen Xer and that is what we do) but I have to admit, he did have his moments. When my friends and I wanted to play D&D in middle school, but none of us wanted to be the organizer and arbiter of said game, my dad could have reacted in one of three ways. He could have freaked out about devil-worship and whatnot and forbidden me to speak of it again. He could have blown it off as too bad so sad for me and suggested my friends and I figure it out ourselves. Or he could have volunteered to be the Dungeon Master, and that was in fact the option he chose.

It wasn’t really that huge of a stretch. I’ve alluded previously to my dad’s love for fantasy paperbacks, which is a big source of my own interest in the genre, and he was a big fan of Tolkien as well (because he’s a Boomer and he went to college between 1969 and 1973 and rediscovering The Lord of the Rings was what they did). He also, I’m guessing, had just enough of the thwarted writer/English graduate school dropout to enjoy the opportunity to mastermind a story-game. He got really into it, too. I will always vividly remember sitting around the dining room table with three of my classmates and my dad, the dimmer on the chandelier dialed down low, tall candles lit for ambience, as our very first gaming session began. My dad facilitated all of that, not because he had to, but because I really wanted him to. I gotta give him credit for that.

Cherubic chaos

2012-01-05T14:28:00.000-05:00

I was kind of looking forward to writing today’s entry, reveling in and marveling at all the wondrous joys of my children. And then they went ahead and turned today into a bit of an epic debacle; as per pretty much every Thursday they are home with their mother while I am at work, and I have already fielded multiple WTH phone calls and texts in regards to their mass insanity. (Said combined mass being only about 22.3 kg yet still capable of yielding surprising amounts of insanity.)

Pros: The little girl still crawls on her belly like a snake but has also become quite adept at pulling herself up on things like the edge of a toybox or the tub, demonstrating remarkable upper body strength. I remain happily convinced that she will be cruising in no time and walking shortly thereafter, and soon enough she and her brother will be able to run around together and wear each other out. The little guy got a box of 24 crayons for Christmas, expanding his repertoire of colors beyond the usual 8. Adorableness ensued, including rapt fascination that a gray crayon even existed, assertions that they were “tiny” crayons (when in fact they are what I think of as standard-sized; I also think his prior-experience crayons are “gigantic” so, you know, it’s all perspective), and disappointment that a white crayon was “dried out” because when he applied it to white paper it didn’t make a mark. (I produced some blue construction paper to use the white crayon on and he was suitably impressed.)

Cons: A baby who can pull herself up on things is one that needs to be watched with constant, utmost vigilance. She is also teething yet again, which is disrupting both her eating and sleeping schedules, all of which together makes her a little clingy and needy (insomuch as such terms apply to nine-month-olds). Her brother has not failed to notice how much attention she has been getting and has been demanding equal shares, especially insisting on being picked up by whoever is already toting his sister around. I can just about manage to pick him up with my free arm and hold both children for about twenty seconds before I need to give both arms a rest, so clearly I need to work out more.

So it goes, ups and downs, good days and bad. I still feel that their charms far outweigh their challenges, but I’ve been caught at a bad moment here. Hopefully next week things will have settled down a bit (a new tooth will have crowned, the holiday overstimulation will have faded) and I’ll be back to the worshipful marvelous revelry.

Resolution revolution

2012-01-04T12:57:00.000-05:00

This morning I looked back at the post I made one year ago tomorrow, which was all about how many of my 2010 pop-culture-oriented resolutions I kept and how many I whiffed on, as well as which whiffs would become 2011 resolutions alongside new ones, and which would more likely just be indefinitely delayed. Of course it seemed like a good time to do so because I’m on the verge of doing the same thing again, and I have to admit it’s times like this that I’m actually grateful just for the mechanism of the blog which gives me a window into my own thought process fifty-two Wednesdays ago, because pantheons know I can’t be relied upon to actually remember such things myself.

One thing that struck me was the way that I shifted a lot of responsibility onto the lack of certain physical resources. Every year I say I’m going to sell a bunch of stuff on eBay, and I never do. Last January it was because first I didn’t have a scanner with which to create electronic copies of physical items before putting them up for bids, then I had the scanner but the computer itself was dying. I’ve had that whole situation rectified for months now, but of course not a single online auction going as of yet. And I swear this is not some kind of passive-aggressive self-undermining, where I say I’m going to part with old comics and unopened toys because I know that’s what everyone expects me to say as a responsible adult, despite secretly wanting to hoard every relic of my childhood until I die. Seriously, no. I do not want to be a hoarder, I want to get rid of some stuff and it seems silly to shove everything in trash bags and leave it on the curb when arguably a lot of it has value I could potentially recoup (even as I’ve never denied I would probably channel a lot of said recouping right into other bits of self-indulgent junk). So the main obstacle to actually making scans or taking digital pictures and setting up eBay auctions and whatnot is just my own laziness.

That’s the other thing that jumps out at me when I look at my year-end resolution scorecard: I tend to do a lot better at the things which by their nature require me to work on them more or less constantly, and I tend to fail miserably at the things which are smaller and more self-contained. That may seem fundamentally counterintuitive, but that’s just the way I roll. If I’m going to read X number of books over the course of the year, or watch Y Netflix movies, or whatever, then I calculate up front what my overall pace needs to be and I get started on it because I hate feeling like I’m falling behind. So I dive into that first book right away, or make sure I set aside an evening (or a couple of train-rides) for a certain flick before the end of January, and I get into a groove and build momentum and maybe stumble a little along the way but either hit my goal or come pretty close when all is said and done. But if I just say “I’m gonna sell some stuff on eBay” and give myself all year to do it, there’s no reason to do anything at all in January or even February if I can just put it off until April or May (or June or November …)

So, I’m still grappling with that one. For 2012, should I resolve to “Sell one thing every month on eBay”? Or “Sell a bunch of stuff in March (or whatever month I think will give me a lot of free time and few distractions)”? Or just be aware of my own tendencies and leap over the pitfalls of the past in whatever way seems appropriate at the time? When (and if) I figure it out, I will undoubtedly let you know.

But other than hopefully finally overcoming my anti-eBay inertia, 2012’s pop consumption looks to be a lot like 2011. I did, in the past year, go to the movies a handful of times, and I consumed a subscription-justifying number of Netflix DVDs (because, I note ruefully as I look back at last year’s installment, I never was able to take advantage of Netflix streaming video after I got my computer situation settled, due to Netflix raising their prices if you wanted both and me opting to stick with physical DVDs only) and those were never intended to be starting points for building somewhere, so if I can hold steady at similar levels I will be utterly satisfied. I’m probably not going to be playing more video games any time soon, but after the fun I had making my Christmas iTunes playlist, maybe I’ll be downloading more new music in the new year.

The biggest resolution change from one year to the next has always been my reading habit, going for sheer quantity one year and more quality the next (I only ended up reading 9 classics of literature last year, not 12, but still felt good about the experience) and in 2012 I will be going at it from an entirely different angle – but that of course is fodder for another post, coming soon! Because I have to admit, yet another resolution this year is likely to be an endeavor to break the 250-post mark I set back in 2010.

Changing of the seasons

2012-01-03T13:15:00.001-05:00

I.

The NFL regular season ended on Sunday, and with it, the Pick’em Pool for this year. All in all, everything went out on fairly high notes: the Giants beat the Cowboys to claim the NFC East title and a spot in the playoffs; the Steelers (my wife’s team) and the Lions (my Little Bro’s team) are also wildcard-round-bound. (None of us happen to be rooting for teams that managed to get a first-round bye, which arguably matters more than any hair-splitting about how the Giants finished with a weaker record than either Detroit or Pittsburgh yet are higher-seeded overall, somehow …) Ideally in a few weeks there will be at least one team still standing that the family can rally around! Or possibly a looming showdown. Either way it should be exciting (unless we end up with two weeks to coutn down to yet another Packers/Patriots Super Bowl, which would be a drag).

In the Pool, my grandmother ended up winning the grand prize for the entire season – which, funny enough, she managed to do by being consistently good week in and week out, despite never claiming the prize for most correct picks in any single week. More power to her, she is adorable. My dad finished all alone in second place, and then there was a six-way tie for third, which I managed to snag 16.7% of. (That comes out to a little less than 10 bucks, which honestly just amuses me.) It will be strange to go back to watching football with zero vested interest in certain games, but that arrangement is at least less stressful, and more conducive to enjoying crazy unexpected upsets and whatnot.

College football is almost over, too, and of course our household is looking forward to the University of Michigan’s bowl game appearance tonight. Hopefully the high notes will continue! If they do, they may actually succeed in keeping my wife and myself awake until the end of the Sugar Bowl. I miss football when it’s not around, but I have to admit that I am looking forward to a few months devoid of grappling with the temptation to stay up and watch a gridiron battle to the final whistle of the final play. It must be some combination of getting older and yet having a months-old daughter who can still interrupt a good night’s sleep pretty authoritatively, but man, I am wrung out.

II.

And here’s another example of fatigue’s overall effects on my brain: I knew that this morning it was going to be significantly colder than it has been so far this winter, so I made sure to grab my heavier winter coat as I was leaving the house. I also remembered to reach into the side pockets of my lighter-weight jacket that I’ve been wearing lately and retrieve my wallet and keys (granted, I wouldn’t have been able to leave the house without the key to my car) before heading off to work. It was only when the train was about one stop away from the station where I get off that I realized I had failed to check the inside breast pocket of my autumn coat, which of course was where my government building badge and the magnetized keycard to my office suite happened to be. I know I’ve talked before about the general inconvenience of bumpy transitions from one jacket to another, &c. so suffice it to say it’s all come up once again and winter is still my least favorite season. Too many jackets too many pockets blurgh.

Fortunately, the whole forgetting-my-badge thing is not as bad as it could have been. I’ve done it before (though this was a first since the office move to the new building) which means I at least know the process for going to the security office and obtaining a temporary visitor pass and so on. I also happened to bump into one of my co-workers in the lobby and asked her to hang out a minute while I got the visitor pass, since it requires me to be escorted throughout the building. But once that was done, it became a day at the office like any other. The old office building was excruciatingly difficult to work in for eight hours with a visitor pass, because even the restrooms were in the hallway, outside of the secured suite, so you made use of those facilities at any point you ended up locked out of the cubicle farm. Luckily the new office is much more self-contained and I’ve been able to hunker down and not bother anyone as I go about my day. All I need now is to remember to grab my badge as soon as I get home tonight and make sure it joins me on the way to work tomorrow.

Before and after

2011-12-28T14:29:00.002-05:00

Getting closer and closer to Christmas brings out the little kid in me, the one who thrives on constant overstimulation in the form of animated tv specials and seasonal music and department store holiday displays and never-ending food &c.

Getting beyond Christmas, on the other hand, brings out the grouchy yet responsible grown-up in me. I don't think this was always the case, but it seems to be the way of things now, as evidenced by last night, when I spent a large chunk of the evening hauling garbage and recycling up the driveway to the curb, including a bargeload of cardboard boxes, the large containers in which various gifts (both given and received) were shipped to our house and the smaller bits of packaging for individual toys and electronics and whatnot. And the strangest part was that the overwhelming feeling I was left with was one of relief. As in, it was really troubling to me on some level that the garage was so chockablock full of empty cardboard boxes and properly disposing of all of it at once brought me tremendous satisfaction and took a weight off my shoulders.

Anyway, sorry to have lapsed into low-content mode here but the post-Christmas exhaustion has been pretty profound and going back to work was not exceptionally inspirational. I'm sure things will be feeling back to normal soon, but until then I'll just pop in and out occasionally when opportunity is coincident with motivation. The randomness should keep everyone on their toes.

Cookies

2011-12-23T12:08:00.003-05:00

It’s getting close to noon on the Friday before a federal holiday weekend (and a major one at that) so I am hopeful in a fashion that borders on over-entitled expectation that very soon I will get an e-mail announcing exactly how early the office will be closing. Mostly I’m hopeful; a tiny part of me is genuinely worried that so many people, including high ranking bosses-of-bosses, have taken off already for Christmas vacation that there is no one left in the entire Big Gray complex who is properly empowered to authorize the mystical 59 Minute Rule. We shall see!

But in the interest of getting a fifth and final (probably?) post in on Christmas week, I did want to mention something from last weekend. On Saturday I went to a cookie swap party, hosted (and almost exclusively attended) by old college friends. The party is an annual tradition and I spent the better part of the last year planning on baking something special for the 2011 edition: a Krampus Cake. I like cake, I think the Krampus is one of Christmas’s most insanely awesome lesser-known bits of folklore, and I had a notion of how I could fairly easily convert a round cake into a shape approximating the ferocious horned visage of Santa’s terrifying disciplinarian minion.

It turned out to be a little trickier than I expected but I did manage to get the cake baked, carved up, reassembled, frosted and detail-decorated in time for the party. And then, en route to the gathering, I started feeling shame and remorse. What was I doing? The cake was too weird, the reference too obscure, everyone at the party would look at me askance and wonder (possibly out loud) “What is wrong with you?” A Krampus Cake? Seriously?

I got to the party and headed straight for the dining room table with my cake (and with four dozen cookies, too, because I wasn’t trying to weasel out of the whole party concept altogether) and saw some of the offerings already on display, which caused the first words out of my mouth to the hosts to be, “Dude, are those gingerbread ninjas?” Because of course they were.

Clearly between my long commute, my house upkeep, my two small children, my wife whose work schedule is staggered from mine by design, and sundry other things, I don’t get to hang out with my college friends very often, at least not often enough to always remember that they are all as weird and geeky as I am and the strange things I do to entertain myself do not constitute outlying behavior among the group. (It turned out about half the people at the party knew what a Krampus was, and the other half were moderately amused to be introduced to the concept.) In fact, the gingerbread ninjas (or ninjerbread, if you prefer) were the least of the dorkiness on display at the party, which had been stealthily given a Star Wars theme including Wookiee Cookies and Yoda Soda. I only wish the theme had been publicized earlier – with minor modifications my Krampus Cake could have been a Wampa.

Gonna build a toyland all around the Christmas tree

2011-12-22T14:16:00.002-05:00

For all the truth there is to the notion that every child is different, the flipside is that when you have your second child there are a lot more things you are reasonably well-prepared for than things which truly catch you by surprise. And as far as our daughter goes, most of the surprises she has given to my wife and myself have been of the pleasant variety, mostly centering around her overall mellowness and affability (in comparison to her brother, of course).

Still, there are always going to be little things that pop up as the little girl’s formative years unfold along their own path, distinct from the little guy’s. Gender issues leap immediately to mind, although considering the little guy loves baby dolls and was enchanted by an episode of My Little Pony just this morning, and his sister is remarkably strong and fast and making every effort to catch up physically to her car-collecting, monkey-dancing older sibling, presumably to participate fully in tomboyish horseplay, maybe that’s not such a biggie.

More unexpected, somehow, was how the kids’ different birthdays end up impacting Christmas. Because the fact is, even as semi-veteran parents at this point, my wife and I have never before lived with a (formerly) live Christmas tree and an eight-and-a-half-month-old simultaneously. Christmas 2008, we had a three-and-a-half-month-old, beloved for his reliability in staying right where you put him down every time. Christmas 2009, we had a fifteen-month-old who could walk and talk a bit, but we also had just moved days prior and ended up getting an uncharacteristically small tree for the new house. Now for the first time we have a full-sized tannenbaum and an army-crawling little one who likes nothing better than grabbing and pulling brightly colored objects, who also likes second-best putting stray plant matter in her mouth. (Seriously, the dogs have never tracked in a fragment of a dead leaf that the little girl didn’t immediately try to ingest, and she’s recently developed the fine motor control for a pincer grasp that allows her to pluck individual fir needles off the floor.)

For that matter this is the first Christmas my wife and I have shared with not one but two kittens, who also love knocking around bright sparkly dangly objects when they’re not wrestling each other in the dramatic environment of the low-hanging boughs and Christmas light wires. I have little to no doubt that the 2011 Yuletide will go down in family history as simply “The Year We Tied The Dang Christmas Tree To The Wall.” Because, honestly, we had no choice unless we wanted to pick up a toppled tree at least once a day for most of December.

The best thing about the past few days is that enough presents and packages have been delivered to the house that we have been able to erect a barrier wall of boxes around the base of the Christmas tree. But soon enough it will be Christmas Day and instead of an impediment to approaching the tree, we’ll have a whole new wave of unwrapped toys with which to distract the children (and the pets) from messing with it. Which, granted, may only work for an hour or so, but I’ll try to enjoy it while it lasts.

My Inappropriate Christmas List

2011-12-21T14:42:00.002-05:00

It’s no secret that I’m something of a pop culture omnivore or that I enjoy things from up and down the spectrums of objective and subjective quality, good and bad taste, and general worth. Normally I’m not even terribly apologetic about this, but there’s something about Christmas (a very obvious something, along the lines of the Reason for the Season and all that) which makes me feel that certain entertainments and diversions that I have no problem giving a place in my life are nonetheless non-ideal candidates for inclusion on my list for Santa. Still, if for no other reason than to mock myself a bit while keeping Christmas Week going, I’d like to present Five Things from what would be an awkward-at-best Christmas list if I were suddenly devoid of my usual filters. (Hopefully the fact that I am riffing on this four days before the holiday will lend more credence to my assertion that this is not a passive-aggressive ploy to persuade certain blog-readers who are gift-giving relatives to seek out the items in question. I’m just talkin’, here.)

1. God, No! by Penn Jillette – My own personal hippy-dippy take on spirituality is not so much “complicated” as “willfully unorthodox” in that it mashes up various bits of secular humanism, Christian morality, Zen enlightenment, common-sense rationalism, Jedi mindtricks and whatever other philosophical insights strike me as particularly relevant or helpful at any given time. I don’t think any particular organized religion has got it all figured out. I don’t think atheists have got it all figured out, either. I’ve always been more of an all-of-the-above kind of guy than none-of-the-above, and I feel like I get something out of most stuff I read, especially when the author is coming from someplace interesting that he also happens to be personally invested in. Plus Penn Jillette is smart and hilarious and I’m a big fan. But asking for an impassioned defense of atheism for the celebration of the Savior’s birth? Not a bridge I’m going to cross.

2. David Comes to Life by Fucked Up – This one is much more prosaic. David Comes to Life has been showing up on tons of year-end Best Albums lists including ones whose opinions I generally groove along with; it’s also a hardcore punk concept album, which means it hits both a genre and a format I am typically enamored of. But while I have absolutely no problem with the band’s name, I still would feel weird putting them on a Christmas list for elementary reasons, specifically that the list would then be NSFMG (Not Safe For My Grandma).

3. Secret Identity by Craig Yoe – The subtitle of this book is “The Fetish Art of Superman's Co-creator Joe Shuster” which should pretty much render it self-explanatory. Am I curious about the lesser-known works of one of the foremost legends of superhero comics’ golden age? Yep! Am I puritanically uptight about erotica and having same in my house? Nope! Do I think it’s appropriate to slip this onto my Christmas list? Nosirree. (Funny, maybe, but not appropriate.)

4. Gotham City Impostors – This video game is actually only just barely a contender for this list of excisions. Sure it’s a first-person shooter where you play a member of either a vigilante gang who idolizes and dresses up like Batman OR a member of a criminal gang who worships and emulates the Joker, and then you try to kill everyone on the other side, and that’s a little bit disturbingly violent, but I do celebrate American Christmas after all and was getting GI Joe toys from the time I was eight or so. And “murder simulation” video games are pretty mainstream these days, at that. But take the slight thematic dissonance and combine it with the fact that I have a well-documented absence of time in which to play video games and either I’m planning on being a lot more neglectful of my family or I’m just asking for money to be wasted on a gift I’d never make use of. Then add on top of that the fact that it’s a download-only video game and I’m uncertain what a gift-giver would even wrap and put under the tree to indicate I was receiving it, and those kinds of gifts are a pain. Then add on top of THAT the fact that the game doesn’t even get released until January of next year and you can see what a total boondoggle the whole thing would be. (Having said all that I gotta admit whenever I hear this game is coming I really really want to check it out.)

5. Southern Comfort Fiery Pepper – There was a brief period in my family holiday celebrations (on my father’s side of the family, specifically) when my aunts and uncles and grandparents would buy one another booze as presents, not just bottles of wine but 1.75 L handles of Jack Daniels and such. And I remember getting old enough to think it would be cool when I turned 21 if I started getting included in that tradition, and then turning 21 and discovering that by then the practice had fallen by the wayside. (Utilizing the Retro-Spect-O-Scope I have to assume this coincided with one of my uncles, who has since gone through AA, becoming more and more of a problem drinker.) I had no problem obtaining alcohol for myself in my college and immediately-post years, of course, and Southern Comfort was always in heavy mixology rotation. Now they’ve recently begun marketing a spicy-hot version of the old 70-proof knock-you-on-your-ass liqueur, and given my sentimental attachment to the original and my insatiable appetite for all things Scoville-rated, I’m moderately curious to sample it. But if I didn’t already feel like a degenerate wallowing in godlessness and foul-mouthed punk and dirty comics and gory video games, the bottle of hooch in my stocking would no doubt put things over the top.

The Holly and The iPod

2011-12-20T13:10:00.001-05:00

For the past week or two I’ve been working on compiling a playlist of Christmas music MP3’s, and my iPod has been shuttling back and forth between the dock on the PC where I’m downloading songs and the auxiliary cable of the stereo where I can crank up the tunes (whilst doing something else like folding laundry or baking cookies or whatnot). The playlist itself is still a bit of a work in progress, and no doubt will continue to be right up through the 25th and beyond, since it should end up getting some use every year. Sometimes it seems like my whole life is a ramshackle chain of works-in-progress both literal and metaphorical, but at least the Xmas-Mix 2011 has been fun. Insanely fun, really, like to the point where my wife came home from work one night last week to find me listening to it, cleaning the kitchen, and in a bounce-off-the-walls good mood.

I love Christmas music, really, I guess I always have. My parents had several vinyl Christmas albums of which I have inordinately fond memories, as none of those records were classics, exactly. No John Denver and the Muppets, no Bing Crosby or even Vince Guaraldi. We had stuff like Sing the Songs of Christmas with Guy Lombardo or The Wonderful World of Christmas compilation from Firestone Records which does include a track by Bing (but it’s the relatively obscure What Child Is This/The Holly and the Ivy medley) and a track by Nat “King” Cole (but NOT The Christmas Song(!), instead it’s A Cradle In Bethlehem) but perhaps more importantly features the greatest holiday song of all time, Little Heads In Bunkbeds as laid down by Tony Orlando. (By “importantly” and “greatest” here of course I mean, respectively, “to me and my brother who grew up with that album in heavy rotation” and “related by the scantest of bizarre tangents”.) At some point late in my middle school years, right about when my parents got themselves a CD component for the family stereo, they also obtained a Reader’s Digest two-disc 50-track Christmas compilation which encompassed a lot more of the standards. But even before that, I was always the one pestering my parents about when we could start busting out the Christmas records on the weekends several weeks ahead of the holiday itself.

I was also in the school band as of fourth grade and I remain convinced that when the school puts on two music concerts per year and one of them is a holiday concert in December, one of two things will happen: you will learn to love all kinds of Christmas music or you will quit the band. I never quit, but I didn’t really have that far to go to love the songs of the season, either; I just had it all reinforced on a very fundamental brain-pattern level. (And to this day I get a weird little thrill or reminiscence when I hear orchestral versions of Sleigh Ride or when the horns come in midway through It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year.)

Anyway, I had started trying to make a Christmas playlist a couple of years ago and never really got very far on it, primarily because I was trying to give the entire playlist a very unified throughline. Specifically, I wanted every single track to be one which I absolutely loved in my heart of hearts; special bonus points for consideration if it were a song which is usually underrepresented in the airplay this time of year. Unfortunately, all told that only amounts to maybe six or eight different songs. And honestly, the necessity of a custom Christmas playlist seems to be obviated by the omnipresence of satellite stations over in-store sound systems and the local lite adult contempo FM station that goes to 24-hour Christmas music every Thanksgiving around here. Do not misunderstand, I am grateful for the FM option! But I can quibble with it in two ways:

1, there’s a lot of repetition of the same songs, not just year-to-year and day-to-day but sometimes even hour-to-hour. I am nothing if not a huge fan of deep cuts, so I get a little weary of Gene Autry’s Rudolph the seven hundredth time I hear it in a given month (or evening). And even certain artists get played to death in the format; this year’s big offender is Michael Buble, who just put out a Christmas album. (He also, for reasons I will never fathom, put a cover of All I Want For Christmas Is You on said album, which to me is about as inessential as anyone after Nat Cole covering The Christmas Song to begin with, but this also in the same year that Justin Bieber covered All I Want as well, as a duet with Mariah Carey, whose version of the song I genuinely do consider a fantastic piece of Christmas pop which I almost neve get sick of, but ALL THREE VERSIONS alternating every thirty-eight minutes or so? That is a bit much even for me.) One of my cardinal rules for playlists (going back to the days of mix tapes) is to avoid repetition of all kinds, so that gets tough to take.

2, in addition to the aforementioned select group of Christmas songs I love beyond all reason, there’s all the rest of Christmas music which I merely really really like, and then there’s another small grouping of Christmas music which I don’t care for at all. And of course all of those songs get a lot of radio airplay (which is probably why I dislike them so; if they weren’t so overplayed I wouldn’t feel such animosity).

So my own custom playlist neatly avoids these problem areas. No repetition of different versions of the same song, no duplication of artists, no Little Drummer Boy or Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer or Wonderful Christmastime Blue Christmas (I know dissing that last one is a little bit blasphemous, but honestly the whole sub-genre of sad Christmas breakup songs is not my cup of candy-cane tea).

And once I allowed myself to open up my custom list to all the songs I simply like a lot instead of only the ones I can’t live without, it became much easier to fill up an hour or two even while following my self-imposed anti-dupe and anti-dud rules. I’m very amused by the results, which include everything from Bing and Nat and Andy Williams and Darlene Love to Bruce Springsteen and the Waitresses and Run DMC to Weezer and MxPx and the Mighty Mighty Bosstones and Stephen Colbert. No Tony Orlando as of yet, if only because I can’t quite decide how much replay value my childhood nostalgia and adult sense of irony can truly support.

The only major disappointment I’ve had (these being inevitable even in this glorious golden future of iTunes and Amzon’s MP3 store and all, because those e-vendors put great effort into convincing us that they can provide anything we might ever imagine, even though that’s not 100% the case) is that I really wanted to include an interlude in the mix for Eddie Izzard’s stand-up bit about how nobody knows all the words to The Twelve Days of Christmas yet everybody goes bananas for the “five go-o-o-o-old rings!!!” part. Dress to Kill is on iTunes but it seemingly only has like six tracks, so not only is the Twelve Days bit not isolated but I don’t even really know which longer riff it is a part of (I haven’t seen Dress to Kill in like ten years). So close, and yet. Maybe I’ll get it sorted out in time for next Christmas. And then, I can only hope, someday twenty or thirty years from now my kids will approach every holiday season feeling a vague imperative to listen to not only alt rock Christmas carols but also ancient British transvestite stand-up. I can only hope!

Christmas Week!

2011-12-19T13:08:00.002-05:00

It would be completely understandable if everyone expected me to slack off this week on the blogging due to the imminent holiday, but on the contrary, I find my spirits rising as the big day approaches and my energy level seems to be following suit, and combining that with the fact that I’ve already been totally slack for this whole month which produces a foundation of guilt and piles atop it a backlog of odds and ends to talk about (I could seriously do an entire grab-bag style post about various office building seasonal decorations alone – see below) – the bottom line is that I am confident in declaring this Christmas Week here at PA and committed to churning out a full Monday to Friday slate of semi-sensical ramblings. My gift to all of you!

It occurred to me this morning that Christmas being observed on a Monday, as it will be this year, is pretty rare; an equal amount of the time it falls on a Friday, with the remainder breaking up the middle of the week in various ways. I know that’s pretty simple calendar math, but it’s significant in the workaday world of the Big Gray because, for example, when Christmas falls on a Wednesday then by and large the two days on either side of it are a wash, as some people take the days leading up to Christmas as personal leave and other people take the days immediately after and the paid-time-off hoarders take the entire week, so the buildup is actually fairly anticlimactic. And the prior week, in that same case, feels too far away and disconnected from Christmas to be part of the official lead time. Contrast that with this year’s configuration (as you are wont to do when you overthink things the way that I compulsively do) and you realize this is not just the optimal but the only way to get a full five days of workplace Christmas run-up. Which I happen to enjoy, so that works out well for me.

As if to emphasize that point, this morning my government supervisor handed out her Christmas gifts to the staff (personalized travel coffee mugs – classy!) so, yeah, I’m pretty sure this is Christmas Week sanctioned by the appropriate authorities and everything.

Since we’ve already had our office holiday parties (both small and large) around here really the biggest work-related impact of Christmas Week is which Christmas ties I’m going to wear between now and Friday, the answer being “all of them”. Granted I don’t own a tremendous amount of holiday-themed neckwear, but oh by golly I’m going to be holly-jolly and give each one a turn. I have one fairly understated red tie with tiny green Christmas trees on it which has already gotten a wearing last week at the office potluck, which leaves me with another red tie with white snowflakes, a black tie with large stylized Christmas trees, and a tie patterned with green, red and yellow smiley-face ornaments. I have listed the remaining ties in order from least to most gaudy, which is not coincidentally the order in which I will be sporting them from Tuesday through Thursday. (Today I’m wearing a boring striped tie because it was either that or wear red-ties-with-slightly-different-snowflakes two days in a row.)

On BizCasFri I will of course go tieless, and probably just wear a green sweater and khakis. I kind of wish I had a truly obnoxious Christmas sweater; I also kind of wish I had the ability to say to some of my coworkers, who made the transition to holiday-themed fashion statements earlier in the month, “Wow, where did you get that sweater?” without betraying that I covet the item in question for 70% ironic reasons.

+++

OK, really just two items of craziness regarding office decorations:

- Someone on this floor but outside my department put up a full sized artificial Christmas tree which must be about nine feet tall. It is, in fact, taller than the ceiling clearance of the office. So the drop ceiling panel above it has been removed to allow the very tip of the tree to stretch into the space between floors. I find this almost unbearably hilarious.

- Down in the building annex that contains various delis and convenience stores and whatnot there are some very nice Christmas trees as well. One of them is decorated with fake birds which, no problem, my Christmas tree at home has some of those too, little plastic animals with real feathers strategically attached. But the trees in the building annex have peacocks on them which are (a) life-sized and (b) dyed red, I guess because Christmas? Possibly these are Santa’s peacocks? I’ve been seeing them every day for weeks now and they still don’t make much sense to me.

Santa Report

2011-12-16T15:09:00.000-05:00

Much, much better Santa last night, not at the mall but at the local nursery and garden center, of all places. Said nursery also happens to have a dog park where we’ve taken our mutts for a romp before, which means at this point I think we’ve been there more often just to hang out and do stuff for free than to actually buy stuff (though secondarily last night my wife did manage to pick up some ornaments for a work Secret Santa exchange, so we’re not total freeloaders I suppose).

The little guy enjoyed having a more leisurely conversation with Santa, although there was a bit of frame of reference disconnect. When asked what he wanted, the little guy replied (as he has been consistently for a while now) that he wanted “two cars and a race track”. Santa then started asking what color cars he wanted but that threw the little guy for a loop, because of course he was referring to Pixar Cars and the colors are really beside the point as it’s the names of the characters that allow you to differentiate one from the next. But then on top of that my son has been consistently referring to the character “Tex” as “Text” (which I suppose shows how utterly addicted to our phones his mother and I are) so I’m not sure at this point if anyone who doesn’t live with the child can readily understand his inside references anyway.

Our little girl sat willingly enough on Santa’s lap, too, and didn’t even come close to getting freaked out. No tears, just lots of fascinated staring. So all in all it was a side trip well worth making. Tonight I’m going to do some Christmas baking and give the iTunes Christmas playlist I’ve been assembling a test spin. Hopefully all of that will make me feel suitably seasonal while distracting me from the sheer mountain of to-do’s I still need to scale in the next eight days.

The heat is ... off

2011-12-15T14:28:00.002-05:00

As you have no doubt guessed, yesterday was hooky day. Within ten minutes of putting Tuesday’s post up on the blog, I got a call from the heating repair company saying the part had arrived and they could send someone out the following day, so I made hasty arrangements to take off Wednesday and await the technician. Long story short, the new circuit control board was installed but the system still wasn’t working properly, and the subsequent node on the decision tree was “well we could try replacing this other thingamabob” but said thingamabob cost about five times as much as the previous part and that definitely represented some unacceptable veering into good-money-after-bad territory. We had already resigned ourselves to getting a new system before the summer since the A/C side was more or less shot, so rather than apply more patches to the heating side (with no certainty as to how many patches would ultimately be required to get through the winter) we called off the attempts at resuscitation and have started the process of getting quotes for a new system. It looks like we’ll probably have the replacement installed before Christmas, so we just have to make it through the next week and a half or so with some fireplace-warmed nights and chiller-than-usual mornings. All in all, not the end of the world.

It does, of course, reinforce my low opinion of the previous homeowners as skinflints who approached every maintenance job around the house in the most slapdash manner possible. The technician made no bones about hiding his disdain for the low-end, cheap, prone-to-breakdowns model of heater in place (repeating almost verbatim what I had been told by the technician who came out in the summer to prop up our ailing A/C). So if there’s a silver lining in this sudden development it’s that we now have the opportunity to get something upgraded in place, which should cause fewer problems and maybe even save us in the long run on energy costs when you factor in higher efficiency and so on. We shall see.

Anyway, it’s an aggravating development but, then again, it’s Christmas. This past weekend was somewhat neatly divided, with Sunday being the day we realized the heat was fading and dropped everything to deal with that situation head on. Saturday, on the other hand, was more low-key and fun as we took our kids on an excursion on the Santa Train. It was well worth the time and the cost of the tickets (and even the stress of trying to order them online weeks ahead during the scant eleven or so minutes between the website opening the sale and all the seats being sold out) and that worth lay entirely in the fact that it was the little guy’s first train ride, ever, which is kind of remarkable considering his love for Thomas and Chuggington and whatnot. The train rolled a couple of stops down the line at what I considered a leisurely pace, but the little guy sat right next to the window and looked down at the rails and ties and enthused “Look how fast we’re going!” It also occurred to me that this was the first time he had ever been on a moving vehicle without even having to wear a seatbelt, which I’m sure added to the thrill.

So fortunately we had anticipated a lot of the entertainment value being derived from the train itself as a concept because I thought the Santa part of it was a bit lacking. There are Santas who are older and have natural white beards, and Santas who wear fake beards; there are Santas who really get into character, and Santas who have a marked lack of old elf jollity. The Santa on the 12:00 Donder Express was fake-bearded and uncharismatic, and the train was packed with so many kids that interactions between Mr. Claus and each child was limited pretty much to “Hello, what’s your name? Merry Christmas! Movin’ on …” I don’t think the little guy was too put out about all that (clearly not as much as I was) but of course his mother and I still want him to have the proper sitting on St. Nick’s lap and asking for a specific gift and whatnot. So there’s a chance we will try to make that happen tonight, schedules and temperaments of the children permitting. Update forthcoming!

Still clocking in

2011-12-13T15:06:00.001-05:00

No hooky today, not formally anyway. Informally I’ve been barely-here since about 11:20 this morning when the holiday luncheon was being set up, and my hereness has become even more threadbare in the food-coma aftermath.

Some fun facts: the departmental party last week was something we had to pay for ourselves, because getting food and roomspace at a hotel in Crystal City is too expensive to be covered by our office budget, apparently. So in addition to the cash bar, we each had to front $28 ahead of time in order to get a seat at a table, a plate of mediocre sirloin and potatoes and string beans, a slice of pumpkin pie and a cup of coffee. And so it goes. But today’s potluck festivities were practically infinitely larger in terms of meal portions. Fried chicken, buffalo wings, crock pot meatballs (which, truly, are one of those foods that evoke the holidays for me like few others), macaroni salad, crudités, chips and guac, pot roast on potato roll – and that’s just what I personally ate off a buffet that probably included three times that many choices total. Plus I had about 19 different desserts. And what nominal fee was I charged in order to attend this in-house luncheon? $2. A stark contrast, indeed.

Anyway, the threatened absence from work did not materialize, but is still looming, maybe. Long story short, the heating system in our house is starting to shuffle towards the major appliance graveyard, unsurprising really considering the air conditioner was death-rattling this summer and no doubt the two are of an age. My wife and I came downstairs Sunday morning to find a thermostat set at 68 but showing a current temperature of 66, with coolish air blowing out the vents. So we called the same guys who fixed the A/C and the technician (who impressed us to no end simply by coming out within a couple hours on a Sunday) spent some time going over the system and found a malfunctioning circuit control board which needed replacing. We were hoping they would get us a quote on Monday and maybe do the work of replacing it on Tuesday, but that’s not how it went. The quote did come in Monday evening, but once we verified we were willing to buy the part and have it installed we found out that the part needed to be ordered and wouldn’t arrive for 3 days or so. Thus, we wait. Maybe they will be able to do the job on Thursday when my wife will be home on her day off. Maybe I will need to play home-maintenance hooky on Friday. Maybe the work will be done over the coming weekend or next Monday – who knows?

In the mean time, worry not about our relative ability to stay warm with a soon-to-expire heat pump in the basement. We also have a fireplace, and recently received our annual cord of wood to feed it, and when that sucker gets a good blaze going it does a remarkably good job of keeping the house so warm the heat doesn’t even need to kick on. At the very least we can be comfortable in the evenings and a little beyond bedtime; then the fire dies out overnight and mornings are a bit chilly, but only a bit, and I’m so fundamentally anti-mornings anyway that a little extra nip in the air at 5 a.m. doesn’t faze me all that much more than simply being conscious does.

The fullness of time

2011-12-12T14:01:00.002-05:00

This past Friday was my work Christmas party – I should say “was one of several” but really it was the only one that mattered. Tomorrow there is a party-esque luncheon here in the office space for everyone who works on my floor, thus encompassing several different agencies and directorates (including the bomb-collectors on the other side of the building, so that should be fun) and the larger segment of the Army to which my agency belongs also has a holiday party at the Pentagon itself which I would be entitled to attend, but I don’t plan to (and don’t even know the date on which it takes place). But Friday was the party just for my agency, attended by the people I consider my day-to-day co-workers.

And it was fairly uneventful. There was a cash bar (I did not partake, mainly because I had no cash on me than for any other professional consideration) but no one got memorably stupid, and the food was fine, and the innocuous games passed the time all right. I won a door prize again; last year it was a gift basket of snacks and beer, but this year it was a pedicure kit which the party organizers hoped my wife would like. (I’ve worked in lots of female-dominated offices in my day but my current gig is really pretty 50/50 so I was a little surprised by non-gender-neutral door prizes … but, eh.) There was also old-fashioned numbered cards bingo with black and white M&M’s to be used as markers and later eaten (though they tasted a bit off, probably due to being black and white, clearly custom ordered but why would you go with those two colors … to match the ink-on-paper look of the bingo sheets?) and of course the dreaded gag gift yankee swap, which I always decline to participate in. There was an early attempt at implementing some interesting rules such as “only allowed to steal once” but it was a little unclear if a gift could only be stolen once or if a person could only steal once and any other time they were empty handed on their turn would be required to go to the pile of wrapped presents, and then whatever the rule may have been it was not enforced with any kind of consistency as an animatronic bell-ringing Snoopy doll pretty much incited total anarchy. At least half of the other presents, it seemed, were scented/decorative candles, which I will grant are fairly utilitarian and inoffensive but exceptionally boringly so, which to me means they are the worst possible submission to the “game” being played. It’s one thing to convey the timeless message “I don’t know you very well but it is Christmas! Have a candle!” and another thing altogether to put the dullest thing imaginable in a gift swap pool, willfully ignoring the fact that no one is ever going to steal a candle and each one represents a wax dead end for the premise.

So the gift swap was plagued by rampant inequities but there was a nice moment after it was over when I saw two people trading the gifts they had each ended up with. One had a bottle of regular wine and one had a bottle of gluhwein, and the person with the regular wine wanted the gluhwein, and the person with the gluhwein had no idea what it was, so they exchanged bottles and all was well. And after that I hustled away early because the director told us all to go straight home after the party and I am certainly never going to be accused of disobeying direct orders in that vein.

Now it is Monday and (tomorrow’s in situ luncheon notwithstanding) I am looking at a full, uninterrupted five-day workweek. Which seems a bit odd according to all of my internal timekeeping senses; usually by the time holiday parties and early dismissals come along the actual holiday in question must be right around the corner, but no, Christmas is two weeks away and those two weeks are a couple of rows of basically blank squares on my office calendar. That’s the official business as usual schedule, at any rate – it’s entirely possible I might be forced to take a personal day at some point this week for the ever popular “supervise workmen in my house” reasons but I will get into the backstory on those developments at a later time. (Probably tomorrow, unless tomorrow ends up being the day!)

Snark and release

2011-12-09T10:52:00.002-05:00

Last night, over a week into a month that feels foreshortened because the 25th is a major finish line unto itself, my wife and I finally got around to bringing out the Elf on a Shelf, which is either a slightly creepy-looking toy, an adorable holiday family tradition, or a merciless tool by which parents can terrorize their children into good behavior through constant threat of Santa-employed snitch-pixies. Or all three! Yes, it’s time to really, seriously start getting serious, for reals, about Christmas. Which means I should be opening my heart to peace and goodwill, and I’m totally going to … I just gotta get this out of my system first. (Even though elves are watching … everywhere.)

Yesterday I was walking through the Underground and I passed by a bank lobby with big glass walls, and I could see one of the big flatscreens where they ran their in-house ads and news-ish factoids to alleviate the boredom of customers waiting in line. The item on-screen as I happened to glance at it was under the heading of Entertainment and announced that the divorce of Pete Wentz and Ashlee Simpson had been finalized.

Does this news qualify in and of itself as “entertainment”? I’m sure for some people it does, but I’m not one of them and I might even go so far as to say it probably shouldn’t be classified that way by anyone doing anything approaching official categorization. Divorce sucks, it’s an awful thing to go through, exponentially moreso if there are kids involved (as there are for the celebrities in question) and the only good thing about divorce is when it puts an end to something which is even worse and allows for the possibilities of better days ahead. But the notion of a marriage’s dissolution being entertaining, that’s pretty screwed up.

OK, so obviously I’m being unfair and whoever copies-and-pastes together the third-hand Newz-Nibblez on the bank’s lobby feed didn’t mean to imply the divorce was an entertaining spectacle when they slapped an “Entertainment” banner on it. They were just acknowledging that Ashlee Simpson and Pete Wentz are, themselves, entertainers … and then reinforcing the cultural assumption that anything and everything that happens to people who derive some degree of fame from working in entertainment, no matter how personal or painful, is newsworthy to the rest of us. Which is super-irritating. It’s not like the 72-day trainwreck of a Kardashian wedding or any other implosion of two attention-whores who couldn’t sustain their combined critical mass. If it weren’t for the fact that Pete Wentz and Ashlee Simpson were famous, the fact that they were married for nearly three years and split up due to irreconcilable differences wouldn’t merit a mention at all. Neither of the two of them, as far as I know, has done anything egregious enough to hold them up as a cautionary tale (assuming you don’t count naming their child Bronx Mowgli Wentz but hey, man, the kid’s parents are getting divorced, so cut him some slack).

(I have to admit that the ungenerous parts of my heart/soul/brain complex feel that even the presumably intended connection between this divorce announcement and the “Entertainment” category is tenuous at best because … are Ashlee Simpson and Pete Wentz actually entertainers? Do they entertain anyone now, seeing as neither has put out an album in a few years? Did they ever? I have only ever found Ashlee Simpson annoying, and I say that not as someone who is vaguely aware of her existence but ignorant of her oeuvre, as I had plenty of its excrescence rammed down my earholes when I used to belong to a gym and was subjected to their pop music playlist whenever I worked out. The closest Pete Wentz ever came to entertaining me was when there was a viral video floating around some time in 2005 where someone had set the song “Sugar, We’re Going Down” to some crude MS Paint animations that mocked how indecipherable the emo lyrics were and also made a lot of gratuitous dick jokes. My point being if you are reading this thinking “Who the hell are Pete Wentz and Ashlee Simpson?” believe me I am right there with you only moreso.)

I’m not outraged or disillusioned by this, it’s really just a tiny sliver of gristle stuck in the teeth of my mind. I suppose I’m also fixated on it because of other things I’ve been reading lately, various internet columns where people do what I’m kind of doing here: taking large and faceless entities to task for misusing terminology or mangling concepts. Of course I would also posit that there’s a crucial difference. When I read something bemoaning the fact that Starbucks has a holiday campaign going which leans on the phrase “Let’s merry” and the author sniffs that “merry” is not a verb, the part of speech clearly required by the “let us [X]” construction, I find myself siding with Starbucks. That is not a situation where you should find yourself wondering “Did a human being even bother to think about that before putting it out for the world to see?” because of course someone did, someone consciously violated the rules of grammar in an attempt to do something memorable in its newness and whimsical enough to create positive associations because THAT’s WHAT AD CAMPAIGNS ARE FOR. You can call it transparent and hokey and declare it a failure for trying too hard, but to peer down your nose as you whip out the prescriptivist snobbery and say “Perhaps you cretins don’t realize this but adjectives are not something one can be advised to do” strikes me as particularly pointless. Whereas inquiring “Did a human being even bother to think about whether or not the final divorce decree of a couple of minor, forgettable pop music blips was Entertainment headline worthy ?” might, arguably, get near the heart of something worth thinking about.

OK, venting accomplished. Life is good and the world keeps spinning and it’s the most wonderful rant-free time of the year … starting now.

Resumption

2011-12-08T14:06:00.000-05:00

Clearly things are way, way off schedule around here.

When last I checked in I was about to leave work early to head down to Williamsburg with the family so that my wife could attend a veterinary conference without leaving her little brood behind. The good news is that my wife successfully completed the credit hours of Continuing Education she needed, and everyone and everything survived – everyone being the four family members and everything including the car, the stuff we packed, the bonds of holy matrimony between my wife and myself and our respective sanity (though maybe just barely on that very last one). Other than that, though, it was a little brutal. Our little girl went from having some sniffles likely related primarily to teething straight on into a nasty case of bronchialitis, and between that and just not being thrilled about sleeping in a Pack-n-Play with a very thinly padded floor, she hardly slept more than an hour or two at a time at any point over the course of the weekend, including the wee hours of each night. And since we were in a hotel, it wasn’t as though one or the other of us parent-types could scoop her up and go to a far corner of the house to tough it out while the other one got some uninterrupted sleep. So that was trying.

One thing for which I was exceptionally grateful was simply the fact that the conference was in a town I used to live and know my way around fairly well. If we had been in some other random place three hours from home, in West Virginia or Maryland or the like, I can’t imagine how enervating it would have been to try on short notice to find the closest Urgent Care (as I did on Saturday afternoon) or, from there, the closest pharmacy for the little girl’s prescriptions. (I suppose anywhere we would have stayed would have been a hotel, probably with a concierge, but who wants a concierge judging them for not going straight home when an infant child is showing progressively yucked-out symptoms? Not this guy.) So the old stomping grounds from the college days were a comfort, at that.

Anyway, we got home exhausted and sleep wasn’t much easier to find there, unfortunately, but I dragged my carcass to work on Monday nonetheless, caught up on what I had missed Friday, and never found the time to check in here on the blog. Meanwhile my wife was taking the kids to the pediatrician and it was confirmed (whether or not it needed to be) that the little girl should probably take a few more days off from daycare. So I stayed home on Tuesday in order to let my wife get back to work (“let” may not be the best word there considering the somewhat adversarial position my wife’s job is starting to assume in her mental landscape but that’s a rant for another time) and we all know my track record for blogging on days when I’m playing hooky.

I was back at work again yesterday, after a night when the little girl finally started to turn the corner and sleep more soundly, but man was yesterday a miserable rain-soaked mess, which nowadays has the additional effect of stressing me out as I worry whether or not my train home will be delayed two or three hours by flash flood warnings or leaf oil soup on the rails or whathaveyou. The weather did not, as it turned out, have any effect on the VRE schedule at all, which was great, but it had tremendous negative impact on what should have been a simple drive from the station to daycare to fetch the little guy home, which was a drag.

And I’m in the salt mines again today, with the rest of the fam at home, little girl well on the mend and resumption of overall normalcy right on the cusp (insomuch as anything is ever normal during the Christmas season in our house). Tomorrow I’ll be back here again, for a little while at least until it’s time to head across the street to a catered departmental holiday party, so who knows if I’ll have time for a quick post or not. So rather than let a week and a half of radio silence go by, I wanted to check in. Still breathing, however belaboredly!

Holiday harbingers

2011-12-01T11:51:00.001-05:00

The other day my wife and I were talking about Christmas with the little guy, specifically discussing Christmas dinner. Somehow, in the lead-up to Thanksgiving, the little guy learned the word “feast” and decided he loved the sound of it (which I mean in every sense, from “that sounds like a concept I can get behind” to enjoying the very mouthfeel of it as he repeated it over and over and over again) and after coming down from Turkey Day he asked when the next feast would be. We told him that Christmas was the next major holiday and while we wouldn’t be putting together anything as elaborate as Thanksgiving dinner, we’d still have something special for our evening family meal. And in point of fact, we went on to explain, since we weren’t going anywhere for Christmas and we weren’t having any guests over on that day either, the possibilities were wide open for a dinner for three (since our little girl, family member number four, will still be highchaired and restricted mainly to liquefied legumes). Of course my wife and I then immediately shifted into the “talking over the little guy’s head” vocal register and said to one another “So, steak, right?” but that took no time at all and, just for fun, we asked the little guy what he would want for Christmas dinner if we could have anything at all in the whole world.

He thought about it for a moment or two and took a deep breath in order to give his answer all the power it deserved, then shouted “HOT DOGS!!!” Which is a marvelous answer, to be sure. (I really do like hot dogs, though. He is a boy after my own heart/stomach.)

Sadly, the little guy may end up disappointed in the actual fare but he is at the optimal age now for Christmas to be an exciting time of the year, so his mere presence makes it more fun for all of us. This Monday he and I stayed up a half hour past his bedtime to watch the animated How the Grinch Stole Christmas on ABC. He loves the story and I will read it to him any time he asks for it, year-round, but of course the cartoon expands it quite a bit with songs and extra comic business for Max (the best part by far in my estimation) so of course to a three-year-old it’s totally enthralling. We’ve got two Advent calendars in the house, too; one a felt/Velcro Nativity scene which the little guy can add to every morning and another a cardboard candy-window Santa portrait for bedtime. Religious and secular holiday associations – check and check!

Of course the little guy won’t have a chance to use either one for the next few days as the four of us are headed down to Williamsburg today for a conference my wife is attending over the weekend. I would say that I’m worried that the new toys we bought the little guy to help encourage (read: bribe) his best behavior during the trip would take away from the luster of the loot that will pile up on Christmas itself, but this is my son we’re talking about here. Instead what I am legitimately worried about is the fact that the little guy woke up this morning with an ear infection and needs to get on antibiotics immediately, and his sister has finally had a couple of new teeth breakthrough in the past day or so but there are more on the way, and all four of us are sharing a single non-suite room for the next three nights. It will no doubt be an adventure! The updates next week when regular blogging resumes should be a hoot.

Series ... es 2

2011-11-30T13:26:00.003-05:00

Almost a year and a half ago I was ruminating on the various trilogies and tetralogies and longer series of books which I have begun but not yet finished reading. I called out something like nine specific multi-volume works by various authors and I believe I had a notion at the time that if I forced myself to confront such a tabulation I would bear down and finish some of those series off before embarking on any new ones. Sadly here we are seventeen months later and – sit down, hold on, and brace yourself for the shock to your sensibilities – I have not finished a single one of those nine series. And, of course, equally shockingly, I’ve managed to throw a few more onto the pile as well.

It’s not entirely my fault! (By which I mean I can come up with some moderately diverting excuses.) I did read the second volume of The Kingkiller Chronicles when it was published, and had the third been released yet I no doubt would be able to cross that series off my list, but it hasn’t. Similarly, while I haven’t gotten around to the third installment of the Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the author hasn’t finished the fourth and final volume either, so no matter what that would still be hanging around. The third, last Millennium book by Stieg Larsson has been out for a while but I am obstinately waiting for it to be released in paperback like my editions of books one and two already on the shelf at home – but of course Larsson-mania fueled by both the European and American remake films of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo have kept the hardcover sales so brisk that paperback publication is still apparently a ways off. Ditto (more or less) A Dance With Dragons, which I await in cheaper format even as HBO’s A Game of Thrones mini-series has kept the hardcover a hot must-have. (And even then we’re still only up to the fifth volume of Martin’s proposed seven installments, so Dance With Dragons thwarts me for the cycle, I guess.) Tracking down Spelljammer D&D novellas and/or James Herriott paperback editions I simply haven’t forced myself to do the advanced legwork for after cursory scans of used bookstores haven’t yielded low-hanging fruit, and I must have for all intents and purposes given up on Adelia Aguilar and Spellsinger because at no point in the past year and a half have I felt especially compelled to even think about cursory scans for them. Oh, and I did read another Dresden Files novel recently, but that open-ended series is more like collecting comic books and probably didn’t belong in the discussion to begin with.

Meanwhile … not too long after that original post’s attempt at self-shaming I bought the first book of Harry Turtledove’s Worldwar tertralogy specifically to read at the beach (and since I haven’t been back to the beach since, I haven’t continued on with that series, but I plan to do both this coming summer). I also recently picked up the first volume of Robin Hobb’s Farseer trilogy based on its inclusion on these best-of lists. Plus just the other day it was announced that what I had thought was one of the book series I was already done with – Stephen King’s Dark Tower/Gunslinger magnum opus – was going to get an official eighth volume sometime in the spring of 2012, which amazingly pulls a series out of the Finished column and dumps it back into the Unfinished ranks. So instead of bearing down and crossing the finish line on any of my in-progress serials, I’ve seen their ranks increase, even when you factor in totally dropping a couple due to lack of interest. I’m the worst.

But book series aren’t even really the series I wanted to talk about today. Nope, I simply was reminded of the whole “start one series before finishing another” phenomenon because of what’s currently going on with me and the wonderful world of watching tv on DVD.

The Buffy project continues to hang out in its fallback position, which is fine, especially since that’s a re-watch. But there are, at the moment, three other television series I’m working my way through on disc: Smallville, Supernatural and Arrested Development. One of those (Supernatural) is still on the air and you could argue that I’m trying to catch up to the regular broadcasts. (I’m not, but theoretically, you could argue that.) One (Arrested Development) is widely considered to be a triumph that went shamefully unrecognized in its own time, was cancelled too soon, and has developed a staggering cult-following since. (I’m beginning to consider myself part of the cult.) One (Smallville) just wrapped up last year, was beloved by a small but loyal segment and derided by many more, and has been documented in this very blog as being bat-poop insane. All in all, other than the fact that two out of three are genre pieces starring pretty young people which air(ed) on the CW, they don’t seem to have a lot in common.

But there’s a shared time-warpiness to them, too, which I suppose stands out more to me because as a culture we’ve always taken our pop conversation topics more from the world of television than books. Arrested Development’s first season aired from 2003 to 2004, while Smallville’s sixth and Supernatural’s second (the very ones I’m working through now) were on air in 2006 and 2007. So I’m somewhere between four and eight years behind everyone who actually made time to watch these shows when they were intended to be watched, with a triple-reinforced mid-last-decade vibe humming in my brain. Not that this is a bad thing, as far as I’m concerned. Just odd.

And for some reason, tv series seem to occupy more mental space than books (for me, at any rate) to such an extent that I’m already starting to feel like three simultaneous DVD-facilitated intakes of tv series is verging on too much, while I could easily stumble into a few more prose pentads of a thousand pages per volume and not really bat an eye. There are lots of other series I very much want to get a hold of on disc and finally watch for the first time, from The Wire to Frisky Dingo, but I don’t see myself doing that until I finish (or take a break from) the three presently in rotation. An exception of course will be made when HBO finally gets around to putting A Game of Thrones out on dvd, because come ON people, I’m not made of stone.

Tuesday Morning Quarterbacking

2011-11-29T09:28:00.003-05:00

My wife and I find ourselves in similar straits at this point in the NFL season, with our respective teams both fighting to hold on to wild card slots in their respective conferences. Her Steelers are faring a bit better than my Giants, as Pittsburgh won (just barely) on Sunday night and New York got trounced last night, but with five games to go the fact remains that neither team can coast into the playoffs, but it’s not time to give up and sigh wistfully about next year, either.

I am also duking it out for something like a wild card berth in the pick’em pool, as I think I’m in something like fifth place overall (which is really a tie for third-best record). This week was helpful to my cause since I got 12 of the games right, including Sunday night and Monday night, which I feel slightly guilty about because I had bet against the Steelers and the Giants. In the Steelers case, I honestly thought they would win but not cover the 9.5-point spread, whereas in evaluating the Giants’ chances against the Saints I figured the Giants had been struggling too much lately to keep it close. But all of that worked out serendipitously because I always feel slightly disloyal to my life partner when I bet against the Steelers (though honestly the unbiased facts rarely give me cause) and if I’m also being disloyal to my one, lifelong team fandom at the same time somehow it’s a wash? Maybe the karmic punishment, such as it is, came in the form of not winning the week outright, because 12 correct guesses is pretty good but 13 is better and that’s how many the winner ended up with. But I’ll take my even dozen and keep breathing down the necks of the overall season leaders (which, yes indeed, still includes my grandmother).

My wife’s family has some (transplanted) roots in Michigan so they are Lions … not fans, per se, maybe sympathizers is the word I’m looking for? I was certainly sympathetic for all of Detroit when, after years and years of hosting Thanksgiving games but losing them all, this year the card they pulled said Green Bay, and that team is as you may have heard on a bit of a tear. (Oh, and did I mention the Packers are the Giants’ next opponent? Oy.) I forgot to mention yesterday, but apparently two of my co-workers had made a friendly wager over the Packers/Lions outcome where the loser of the bet would have to bake the winner a cake decorated in the victorious football team’s colors. So yesterday morning there was cake with green and yellow icing for everyone. No one can starve to death in the Big Gray between Halloween and New Years.

But really, of course, Turkey Day traditions and longterm pro sports affections paled in comparison to the most meaningful football exhibition of the entire holiday weekend as far as my wife and her family (including myself) are concerned: the Michigan/Ohio State match-up, which I personally was delighted to see the national media referring to as simply “The Game”. My wife and I have been romantically intertwined since about October of 2004, and the last time Michigan had managed to beat Ohio State in The Game was 2003. The closest thing to a bright spot in the rivalry was when I was on a trip to Vegas with a couple of buddies a few years back on The Game weekend and bet on the Wolverines on my wife’s behalf; Michigan lost but covered the spread, and winnings are winnings and dulled the pain a bit. None of which matters now, though, as Michigan prevailed in the 2011 edition and all is right with the world.

(Oddly enough, yet another co-worker was walking around yesterday morning handing out leftover candies from his family Thanksgiving. Chocolate covered peanut butter balls, specifically, colloquially known as … Buckeyes. I ate one and refrained from comment.)

Finally (in the same general category of hindsight in which I started out boasting of my own sports prognostication ability) I will explain my weekend illness alluded to at the end of my last post. When everyone had cleared out of our house on Thanksgiving after a pleasant day of overeating, my wife and I retired to bed only to be awakened by our baby daughter shortly thereafter. Repeatedly. With no method of soothing seeming to gain us anything more than a few minutes of light sleep followed by a distressed outcry for more attention. Since I had Friday off but my wife had to go in to work the next day, I decided the best thing to do was to take the little girl downstairs and out of earshot so that her mother could sleep. I decamped to the den and turned on some mindless late-night tv with my daughter sleeping on my chest. I drifted and dozed here and there but never for very long, since the little girl woke up every half-hour like clockwork. She generally fell back asleep again a minute or two later with the help of some gentle jiggling and shushing, but my sleep cycles were clearly wrecked.

And the next day, as mentioned, my wife had to punch the clock and I was home alone with two munchkins. I tried to take things easy but by late afternoon I was feeling decidedly run down and under the weather with cold symptoms like sneezing, watery eyes, coughing, fatigue (duh), etc.

Well, cold symptoms +/- allergy symptoms, and here’s where I kind of lost the thread at the time but may have picked it up in hindsight. The den has pretty much been the province of our two new hyperallergenic kittens since they arrived at our house, and I spent the entire night down there. I also didn’t take my allergy medicine on Thursday or Friday because that’s generally part of my morning get-ready-for-work routine. Both of our daycare-attending kids have had runny noses (and will continue to all winter, no doubt) so there’s at least some form of inimical microorganism culturing in our house at all times, but what I assumed was a straight up cold was more likely a combination of slight cold and good old major type I hypersensitivity freak-out. At any rate, I dumbly struggled through Saturday and Sunday taking a wide array of cold medicines but re-started my allergy regimen yesterday morning and I’m feeling much better. Live and learn.

Terrible petty things

2011-11-28T14:31:00.002-05:00

Last Wednesday we had a departmental pizza party for lunch as kind of a pre-Thanksgiving meal. I had been nursing some elevated hopes about the food at said shindig because there is a pizza place on the ground floor of the next building over from ours which does a passable NY-style pie, and I thought there was a decent chance my government boss would order from said establishment. Alas, no, it was Domino’s delivery, which I believe was the first time I have sampled the fares of that franchise since their much-vaunted “we honestly had no idea everyone thought our pizzas were cheap garbage but now we’ve changed everything!” advertizing blitz. My verdict: I’m pretty sure I still would have known it was Domino’s if I had participated in a blindfolded taste test. Domino’s is still terrible, as pizza goes, which as we all know means it’s pretty good, it’s just that I’ve had so much better.

So the food was a letdown but there were one or two bright sides in terms of the mealtime conversation in the conference room. A co-worker of mine shared a recipe with me for bacon-wrapped baked turkey breast which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like and which I am determined to try out before the end of the year. And another co-worker broached the subject of the new Twilight movie which gave me the opportunity to rant out loud a little bit about the series’ general terribleness. This co-worker, I hasten to add, was not the same co-worker who had aroused my ire the week before with her weird disavowal of personal agency in her Twilight fandom (she taken off a day or two early for the Thanksgiving break) but from my perspective that was a good thing, because if I had found myself ranting at that co-worker specifically I might easily have gotten so het up as to cross some inadvisable office etiquette lines, whereas the actual recipient of my uninformed disdain was not someone I would feel the need to turn it into a personal vendetta with, and I was able to keep it breezily sarcastic and hopefully a little funny. Bacon-Wrapped Turkey Lady laughed, at least.

And then the short, bordering on pointless work week was over and it was time for Thanksgiving proper, which was lovely, and the long weekend thereafter, which was unfortunately marred by some ill-timed illness, but post for another day and all that.

Short-timers

2011-11-22T14:17:00.003-05:00

I haven't quit my job, no no no, calm down. I have the purely pre-vacation variety of short-timers, is all. With this being a three-day work week, and several other cube-denizens spending personal leave time to make it a two-, one-, or no-day work week, I'm finding that almost nothing can hold my attention long enough for me to focus on it. Not my assigned contractor duties, and not even my self-imposed blogging schedule.

So no new content this week, I guess, unless you count this very post today - which I probably wouldn't. But come on back on Monday and I am sure I will just be overflowing with posts anew.

Ownership

2011-11-18T15:10:00.001-05:00

In honor of the intersection between Random Anecdote Friday and What’s Up With Work Week, here is a little vignette from the cube farm which played out just this morning.

The woman who sits in the cube adjacent to mine is not someone I work with very often, but she seems to be competent in her role at the agency and perfectly nice human being as well. She has some interests which might preclude us from being best friends (e.g. she’s a diehard Dallas Cowboys fan, though at least I can respect how against-the-grain that is here in Redskins country) but really, bottom line, I have nothing against this woman. So there was no baseline pre-existing annoyance to start with when she and a couple of other women in the office got to conversing before settling in for the daily grind.

What they were talking about was Twilight, because my cube-neighbor had gone to the Thursday night showing of Breaking Dawn Part 1. I do have a standard level of animosity towards all things Twilight, for reasons which I am going to huffily assume are self-evident in order to get on with the story. Personal antipathy aside, though, it’s a big whatever and other people can talk about it within earshot and I will do my best to tune it out. Which is more or less what I did, so I kind of missed the part where they segued into talking about Harry Potter movies. (Maybe it was the whole splitting-the-final-installment-into-two-movies parallel, maybe it was how the original books in both series were written for 12 year olds, I really don’t know.) My eavesdropping kicked back in, though, when my cube-neighbor started very adamantly saying “no, no, no” to the very concept of Harry Potter. She said, “I’ve never seen those. And I never will. Because, you know. It’s too much against what I’m supposed to believe, wizards and all that.”

Now, granted, I also knew before today that my neighbor is a serious Christian who’s not above a little casual testimony in conversation. I probably could have extrapolated that she’s more sympathetic to people who think J.K. Rowling promotes an unhealthy laxness about suffering witches to live than, for instance, I am. But I still thought that admitting she dismisses Harry Potter out of hand was thuddingly lame. And yet before I could even mentally draw the “hypocrite much?” card, my co-worker went on, “Of course, I’m not supposed to be into Twilight either and all that occult vampire business but I sure got sucked into that!”

Ordinarily that would have scored some mitigating points in my estimation, at least being self-aware enough to acknowledge inconsistencies and contradictions, even if that doesn’t prompt an immediate re-evaluation of how loudly you’re going to declare yourself pro- one thing and anti- another. But set all that aside, and seriously? Seriously. People. OWN YOUR OWN SHIT.

I am as usual paraphrasing slightly because I don’t have a recorded transcript of the conversation, but I think I’ve captured the spirit of it. Specifically, my neighbor’s curious formulation of how she’s “supposed to believe” certain things, that the question of whether or not she really believes them or not is secondary to the fact that they’ve been imposed upon her by authority and she accepts them and abides by them. And on the flipside, she “got sucked in” by Twilight somewhere along the line and going to see the penultimate film adaptation was never in question. So it’s nothing personal that she’s not into Harry Potter, it barely has anything to with her at all, she just rejects it because her church tells her to. And it’s not her fault she loves Twilight, because she no longer has a choice now that the story has gotten its hooks into her.

I’m not entirely convinced that the world would be a better place if everyone enjoyed the stuff that I love, and everyone found equally insipid the stuff I abhor. It would probably be a little boring. But I am fairly certain that the world would be a better place if people owned their opinions, instead of foisting them off on external loci of control. It doesn’t even matter if someone genuinely hates something and uses a doctrine of condemnation to justify it and distance themselves from it, or if the person wouldn’t have hated it to begin with but allows someone or something else to dictate their feelings, or if the person really secretly likes something but has to put on the false face of disapproval to fit in with the larger culture/institution. All three of those possibilities are terrible. Just formulate your own opinions and then acknowledge them as your own when called upon to express or defend or act upon them. Imagine what the discourse would be like if everyone could do that.

TV Plug

2011-11-17T15:26:00.003-05:00

We interrupt a solid week of posts about my life at work to lament the fact that Community, which is my favorite show currently broadcast on network television, is going to be replaced by 30 Rock at the post-holiday mid-season resumption of original Thursday night programming on NBC. And I love 30 Rock, too, but I will be supremely sad if Community goes away forever. Supposedly it won't, because supposedly the network is still committed to shooting and airing the rest of this season's full order, but ... these are grim portents.

I wish I had a Nielsen box on my tv, but I don't. I'm the ideal viewer: male between 18 and 49, and I don't DVR the show and fast forward through the commercials, I actively faithfully reserve 8:00 p.m. as sacramental time to bask in the sitcom's magnificence. If you aren't watching Community, catch it while you still can! And for the love of Philo Farnsworth, if you are part of the Nielsen ratings sample, give the Greendale gang some love!

Triple Whammy Averted

2011-11-17T14:21:00.001-05:00

I mentioned the other day how everyone was freaking out about the e-mail migration this week, which officially went down after COB yesterday. It turns out not to have been that harrowing of a transition, and I give the IT department all the credit in the world to dedicating seemingly 100% of their manpower today to being physically present and visible throughout the office, checking and making sure that everyone’s new e-mail configuration is working as it should. No fewer than three different people stopped by my cubicle; I let the first one sit at my desk and run through everything and pronounce it correct, then told the next two I was good thanks.

I would in all honesty say that the transition wasn’t significant enough, because alone the way I had developed the impression that we were going to now use a web-based interface all the time for e-mail, when that turns out not to be the case at all. There’s some cloud-based storage going on at the back-end, and there is totally a website that I could go to and check my work e-mail remotely and see all the same saved messages in my Inbox I would see on my cubicle box, but Outlook the Office Suite program is still the de facto client, and I still hate it. Oh well.

On top of the e-mail freak-out, though, my government boss had decided late last week to finally start pushing everyone in our agency to make use of the online library which has been my long-term project just about forever here. That push, unsurprisingly, has been the source of more freak-outs aplenty, which I’ve been navigating as best I can. I expect the fallout will continue for weeks if not months to come.

And just to pile on atop all of that, we were supposed to have a safety drill in the office this week, too. We had a lot of fair warning about it, because it was going to be a little more elaborate than the standard fire drill or whatnot. All the employees at my agency are supposed to stock their own “go kit”. The government springs to provide a large clear plastic bag but it is then incumbent upon the employee to fill said bag with certain supplies that might be necessary in an emergency, including a change of clothes and comfortable shoes, bottled drinking water, non-perishable food, etc. To spell it out more explicitly, here is the hypothetical “go kit” scenario: terrorists set off a dirty bomb at Reagan National Airport, which I can literally see out the office window. The area including our office building would immediately go into a weird state of simultaneous evacuation and quarantine, and we’d grab our go kits and be herded out of the building and into some centralized field hospital where we’d probably have to surrender everything we were wearing and get some kind of decontamination chem-bath, then dress in our emergency clothes, put those comfortable shoes to use hoofing it to someplace far away where trains and cars were still allowed to run, and fortify ourselves en route with stale granola bars. The bags carrying these provisions are govt. issued and clear presumably for security reasons so that MPs at the field hospital could make sure no one was smuggling contraband.

I don’t know about you but that freaks me out an order of magnitude or three more than the possibility of losing some e-mails or adopting a new process for document management. But the drill ended up being cancelled (technically rescheduled but the future date remains TBD) so there was one less thing to worry about this week, which I suppose has been action-packed enough as it is.

A Train Story

2011-11-16T15:17:00.000-05:00

So I promised you all a story about how my long federal holiday weekend was nearly derailed before it could properly start. (Derailed! Pun intended!)

Last Thursday I took the same train that I always take, which is one of the earlier westbound-commuter services but which was nonetheless fairly crowded with government employees who had all been dismissed early in advance of the holiday. I did manage to get one of the last seats on one of the last cars, though – verily luckily, indeed.

Thursday around here was a little rainy and a little windy, I should mention before I get too much farther, and one of the few downsides of the VRE rails is that they are entirely aboveground and thus susceptible to disruption due to the elements. (On snowy days, for instance, they only run about half as many trains total throughout the day. A day where everyone takes the train in to work in the morning and then it snows in the early afternoon turns into a real nightmare as a result. But I digress.) I’ve experienced slow rides home on days when it rains heavily, because there are several waterways that either run alongside or under the train tracks, and there is a risk of flash floods in spots, but as I say, Thursday was only a little bit rainy. So when the train decelerated to a mind-boggling .5 miles per hour, I was a little confused as to why.

Apparently I need to do a little more research into the VRE’s communication initiatives, because either everyone else on my car had a smartphone, or some of them have signed up for some kind of service updating text messaging program. The point being, while I sat on a train progressing at a geriatric snail’s pace, people around me started talking about what was going on and why we were moving only in terms relative to the earth’s rotation at best,. And the story as I began to piece it together was this: the day’s weather had combined just enough rain with just enough wind to knock off almost all the leaves on the trees lining the less built-up sections of the rail route. And those leaves were at just the right stage of autumnal turning, not green and healthy enough to hang onto their respective branches, but not desiccated and brown enough to essentially turn to dust upon impact after falling. Instead, all that eye-pleasing foliage had fallen from the trees and stuck to the rails like pre-chewed Fruit Roll-Ups. And then the afternoon trains had rolled over those leaves and pulped them, coating the steel wheels of the cars and the rails themselves with leaf oil. LEAF OIL. I did not know that was a thing, but apparently it totally is.

And also apparently, when a train has its wheels lubed up with leaf oil and tries to turn those wheels against similarly greased rails, the likelihood of the wheels simply spinning in place is progressively higher (a) the faster the train is going and (b) the steeper the incline the train is trying to climb. With regards to (b) this becomes a factor at any incline whatsoever above “dead flat” and there are a couple of sections on my route home that climb something like a 1 or 2 percent grade.

So, physics! The answer to everything, and the reason why it took 3 and a half hours for me to get home on Thursday. It was kind of a drag, but at least I had left early enough that three and a half hours of travel time put me through the garage door of my house by 7:30. At which point I could crash and relax and enjoy the long weekend. Well, except for the predominantly sleepless night that followed due to neither of the children being able, for various reasons, to stay happily and quietly abed for more than a couple hours at a stretch, but that is yet another post for yet another day!

Migration, Your Gration

2011-11-15T15:06:00.003-05:00

Super-short, better-than-nothing post today on what is apparently becoming All About Work Week, of which I will reveal more tomorrow &c.

My government agency office is undergoing an e-mail migration from your usual Microsoft Office Outlook software and Exchange Server set-up to a web-based, cloud-oriented model. This is the kind of thing I do for a living, on a different scale, and theoretically I'm all for it (especially because I really hate what an inefficient resuorce hog the Outlook client is). But everybody in the office, confronted with major changes to something as fundamentally indispensible as e-mail, is FREAKING THE HELL OUT. And of course a lot of them are coming to me for help, even though I am in no way officially affiliated with the agency's IT department, simply because I am "a web guy" and I "understand this stuff and can get it working, right?"

So, it's been a fun day. More tomorrow, assuming the internet connections don't all spontaneously melt down under the weight of the collective mind-losing.

Super Secret Day Off

2011-11-14T13:53:00.002-05:00

Last Friday was Veteran’s Day, and my wife and I had a wonderful liesurely afternoon together. I alluded last week to the somewhat non-standard way in which it became a work-free day for me. Not a company holiday, not a day on which the government office was closed (although all of the government employees had the day off as an official holiday), yet not a day where I had to utilize any paid leave time or floating holidays or anything. Just a day I get to charge as if I had shown up for a full day of work, even though I emphatically did not, with the accounting side of who gets charged for the billable hours handled somewhere up above my paygrade.

One thing I didn’t mention about all that, though, is how the overall awesomeness of my boss’s gestures (he has done stuff like this for the contract team before, in the two-plus years I’ve been on this gig) is so often muted or marred by everybody being exceptionally squirrelly about it. It always goes down the same way, too, with one person saying “Hey, did you hear the boss is getting us Friday off?” and someone else hissing “Shhhh!” because apparently it needs to remain this totally secretive thing. I have no doubts whatsoever about my supervisor’s integrity, nor my employers, and while I snark about the bookkeeping mumbo-jumbo required to let us all play Veteran’s Day hooky on the company dime, I remain convinced that the whole paying-for-extra-time-off-out-of-discretionary-contract-funding is a legit move. And since the government folks have the day off already, I can’t imagine them being horrible distraught that we contractors are taking the day off en masse as well. I think maybe it has something to do with the sub-contractors, over whom my boss does not have the same degree of control and therefore cannot just blanket excuse for a long weekend? And how it would be bad form for us to crow too loudly about our good fortune when they all have to either come to work or use personal time off to stay home?

The colleague I work most closely with on various projects is a sweet matronly woman who strikes me as not super-bright and just kind of riding out the contracting equivalent of tenure until she can retire. She took the whole secrecy thing to another level last Thursday, as she swung by my desk to ask something on her way out the door, and as we were saying good bye to each other she said, “OK, see you …” and then she MOUTHED the word “Monday”. I just nodded because I really wasn’t sure what to say. Did she think if no one heard her say that in effect she wouldn’t be in on Friday, that then no one would notice when she didn’t show up? And what difference does that make either way? It wasn’t as though she were covering up an attempt to express “Enjoy the free day off the boss gave us!” Just saying “See you Monday” could imply she was taking her own personal day off Friday, or I was, or any number of non-controversial things. But old habits die hard, I guess.

A little later on Thursday afternoon I headed out myself, and there began an epic adventure in getting home which seemed more akin to what happens around here during blizzards, but I think I will save that recap for tomorrow.

Chickens and Eggs

2011-11-10T15:06:00.000-05:00

My contracting manager has given all of us the day off tomorrow for Veteran’s Day, so I’ve had a lot to get done today in anticipation of that, which means this post is going to be shortish. I know earlier in the week I was reflecting once again on how my current boss is one of the least touchy-feely supervisors I (or I expect anyone) has ever had, but sometimes that is an unreservedly good thing. There’s a certain amount of money associated with our contract which is discretionary, and our boss could use it to take us all out for ice cream or do other little morale-building things on a regular basis, but usually what he does is save it up until there’s a federal (but non-company) holiday and pay for each of us to get a bonus vacation day that day. It’s not very personal and doesn’t involve the whole team sitting around bonding with one another, but I still say it’s frighteningly good for morale.

Anyway, my wife normally works Fridays but she has some extra vacation time to burn before year’s end, and she was planning on taking November 11th as a personal day before I found out my fellow contractors and I were being so gifted with free time. So that means we find ourselves with a weekday off together AND both of the kids scheduled to go to daycare, so it’s going to be like a six-hour staycation and we’ll have to see just how much decadence we can cram into the time between dropping the kids off and picking them up. (Lunch, then Buffy the Vampire Slayer on dvd, then nap? Or Buffy-nap-late lunch? Oh the possibilities!)

Speaking of the kids, the little guy has been amusing me lately as he expands his repertoire of conversational techniques. He still asks “why?” a lot, as much as you would expect any inquisitive three-year-old to, I reckon, but recently he’s begun to incorporate “what would you say (or do) if …?” Much like its predecessor “why”, the “what would happen” seems to be split almost 50/50 between genuine requests for information and set-ups to hear an answer he already knows perfectly well. I just find it interesting to see him flipping around and looking at things from the opposite direction. He used to see effects and express curiosity about their causes; now he imagines hypothetical causes and wonders about what the resulting effects would be. Not that he thinks about things in remotely those terms, I’m sure, but as I said, it’s amusing to me.

Weddings and Fight Clubs

2011-11-09T13:41:00.002-05:00

Last week I watched a bit more Smallville, so I’m down to four more episodes to go before the end of season 6. What a strange storytelling beast this season is. I went on at length earlier about how the writers clearly wanted to do a Superman/Batman story, couldn’t, and settled for doing a Superman/Green Arrow story. But as the season rolls along, it becomes apparent that they really only had about a half-season’s worth of those kinds of episodes in mind. So while a good chunk of the overarching storyline is about Clark Kent learning about whether heroes should be proactive or reactive from a fellow costumed adventurer who is a stark contrast to him in every way, another good chunk of the storyline is about Clark hunting down superpowered monsters who escaped from the Phantom Zone due to the events of Season 5’s cliffhanger and Season 6’s resolution thereof. Cocky rich dude with a bow and arrow on one side, alien embodiments of evil from a prison dimension on the other – it’s a weird combo.

But there’s a third ingredient, too, and arguably it’s the most important one of all. One thing I’ve been almost constantly surprised by over the past decade since Smallville premiered is how many people fervently despise it. And the theory that I’ve developed is that they hate it for not being what they want it to be, although the reason it fails to be that is because it was always intended to be something else. These “people” I am strawmanning are of course comic book geeks who heard “Smallville” and “Clark Kent” and thought “Right on, an action-adventure tv series based on the early days of Superman from the comics I know and love, bring it on!” But Smallville is actually a teen soap, which uses a couple of sci-fi elements (the protagonist being a human-looking alien with powers, and various other bits of mad comic book science) to propel plots and give it a distinct flavor. As a faithful adaptation of the source material, Smallville fails miserably. As generic action-adventure, it’s hit or miss. As teen soap, though, it’s almost always firing on all cylinders. But teen soaps aren’t everyone’s cup of tea. I don’t think Smallville ever meant to fool the hardcore comic book geeks into thinking it was aimed squarely at their sensibilities. (It was broadcast on the WB for crying out loud.) But, geeks latched onto it early and then came the immense, inevitable backlash. So haters gonna hate, what you gonna do.

So, right, that third element, the teen soap stuff. This is where season 6 gets completely insane, as Lana Lang (who was introduced in the pilot episode as the object of Clark’s affection) becomes more and more emotionally estranged from Clark (they got together and broke up in season 5) and ends up in the arms of … Lex Luthor! And impregnated by him! And engaged to him! Clark for a long while is convinced he and Lana can never be together because she would never be safe considering how dangerous his life is (and the geeky haters can suck it on that point, because that is straight out of the original comic book playbook) and when he belatedly tries to see if love can really conquer all, Lana gets manipulated into marrying Lex via complicated blackmail coming from the direction of Lex’s father. And then it turns out she was never pregnant, and the explanation seems to be that Lex orchestrated a chemical pregnancy with a shady doctor to trick her into marriage! This is all unapologetically bonkers, of course, but I watched a lot of Days of Our Lives in college so I’m taking it in stride.

It’s interesting to me, though, from a story-crafting perspective, how the showrunners structured this patchwork season of Forbidden Romance plus Monster Hunting plus Contrast of Champions. It’s a little bit easier for me to see some of the seams as I watch back-to-back episodes on DVD, but I was especially struck by the wedding episode itself and its follow-up.

The wedding episode is 110% teen soap, wall-to-wall people monologuing about their feelings and discovering secrets and making threats and it all culminates in the exchange of vows between Lex and Lana and then a sad ballad while the bride and groom leave the church and Clark watches from the crowd and Lana looks back at him regretfully &c. There is no Villain of the Week. Clark barely uses his powers, and then in the most mundane way possible (detaching and then repairing a stuck door when his friend gets locked in a walk-in freezer) which really only happens so that Lana FINALLY (after six years!) sees incontrovertible proof that Clark is a little more than human. This would be one of the “miss” episodes on the action-adventure front, and it’s a huge deviation from the source material as Lana and Lex never had any relationship, let alone a (sham, only-in-soaps) marriage. It’s pretty unequivocally a chick-oriented episode.

The episode after that, to its credit, builds off Clark’s feelings of utter betrayal stemming from Lana actually going through with it and marrying Lex, so there isn’t a total disconnect. But it seems like an episode of an entirely different series. Clark finds out (from Ollie Queen, off-screen pre-opening, seriously where was the actor who played Ollie/Green Arrow during the second half of the season?) about a fight club that streams live deathmatches on the interwebs. Their star performer is clearly a superpowered Phantom Zone escapee named Titan – and is played, I’m 99% sure, by the professional wrestler known in the WWE as Kane. (Frankly, considering one of my good buddies used to watch Smallville a lot and is the biggest Kane mark on the planet, I was shocked he had never mentioned this episode to me before.) The emcee is a hilariously over-the-top huckster, and the ring girls are hot and scantily clad, as is one of the fight club’s security guards who is practically a parody of all bad girl imagery, combining snakebite lip piercings and strippertastic schoolgirl outfit. Lois Lane, who is now working for a tabloid as a reporter, somehow gets wind of the fight club and investigates it, and for some reason her undercover investigation requires her to wear a red vinyl catsuit. Basically I am saying this one episode had more fanservice in it than the last five or so I’ve cited combined. And the final five minutes are special-effects heavy with Titan and Clark just whaling the holy hell out of each other. It is pretty unequivocally a dude-oriented episode! And it’s plain to see that it was totally intended to directly counteract the gauzy romanticism of the episode that aired one week prior. Watching the pair consecutively makes for a nasty case of tonal whiplash, though.

But I guess that’s one thing I do so love about Smallville. It may be a teen soap that borrows (and abuses) tropes of the Superman mythology, but it recognizes that a multitude of different kinds of stories can be told within that framework, and dang if it isn’t trying to tell at least one of each kind before it’s done.

Tiny pawprints

2011-11-08T14:50:00.000-05:00

Over this past weekend, we were forced to say farewell to the most recent addition to our menagerie, due to a nasty case of feline infectious peritonitis. I am not the veterinarian in the family, obviously, but my wife informed me that there was nothing that could have been done to prevent the kitten from succumbing to the virus, as it’s one of those things which just happens to some cats. It is also incurable and fatal. Notwithstanding all of that, euthanizing the kitten wasn’t an easy decision and elicited no small amount of sadness. The kitten was lovely and sweet and will be missed.

The one silver lining, arguably, is that the slow progression of the disease allowed us not only the mental space to prepare for the inevitable but also time to line up … not a pet replacement, exactly, because that doesn’t just sound fairly mercenary but is mostly inaccurate. Let’s just say we knew we would soon have the logistical room to adopt another kitten if we so chose, and if the old kitten-shaped hole wouldn’t precisely be filled, at least it could be distracted from.

So somehow we ended up with two kittens, who were essentially a package deal, a brother and sister, one mostly white (the boy) and one predominantly black (the girl). They were being given away as the previous owner belatedly discovered a severe allergic reaction to them. I admit I was slightly paranoid upon hearing that, since I used to be ragingly allergic to cats before my relationship with my wife forced me into habituation, which might for all I know only apply to certain cats while leaving me still vulnerable to certain other long-haired and fluffy breeds. But so far, so good. The new pair of kittens came home the very day we put the sick kitten to rest, which was Saturday, and we’re all acclimating well enough so far.

Still, astute readers no doubt cannot help but notice that instead of getting any closer to our professed ideal configuration of one dog and two cats, we are moving ever farther away from it, with the current pet-census standing at two dogs and three cats … and counting? One never knows.

Careerism

2011-11-07T15:00:00.000-05:00

So last week I actually had the gumption to e-mail my contracting boss and ask for a few minutes of his time to discuss the upcoming goal-setting cycle of the annual review process. (Just as a quick sidenote: when I was in high school I had no idea what I wanted to be when I grew up but I knew I didn’t really want a desk job in an office, and although I didn’t know the corporate jargon-speak at the time I’m quite sure anything that involved ‘goal-setting cycles’ and ‘annual review processes’ or even ‘contracting managers’ would have been right out. Yet twenty years later, here I am.) My boss, as I believe I’ve mentioned in the past, is pretty hands-off and not terribly expressive on those few occasions when he deems it necessary to be hands-on. So when he did not reply to my e-mail immediately I almost took it as some kind of a test. I didn’t pester him or even follow up with him at all. I bumped into him a couple of times but didn’t mention my request for a face-to-face. Then a few days later he e-mailed me back and suggested I stop by any time that day. Which I did.

Basically the point of meeting with him was to tell him that, after much thought, I had decided to start steering my career with our company in more of a project management direction than a subject matter expert role. And my boss’s response was … muted. On the bright side he seemed to understand why I would be interested in going that route and he essentially agreed that I could do that. I wouldn’t characterize his response as supportive, really, as there was no “yes, you’d be great at that, I’ve bene waiting for you to show some interest in it!” or anything like that. It was more in the “yes, that’s fine” vein but, you know, I’m not a Millennial so I don’t need constant praise to feel like I’m doing the right thing. And having worked for a variety of different bosses over the years, I’m legitimately grateful that my current boss’s reaction was neither to knock me down a couple of pegs by questioning what made me think I could handle the management side of things, nor to get weirdly defensive and interpret my desire to expand my work horizons as a need to get away from him personally by blazing a new trail on my own. (Yes, both of those potential negative reactions have actually happened to me before.)

All in all, then, it was good to get that out in the open with my boss and he provided me with some rudimentary info on how climbing that ladder from where I am now would work in the context of both our current contract and our employer at large. I expect it’s going to be a slow process going forward to remake myself, but thousand miles and first steps and all that.

Of course the journey almost crashed immediately upon embarkation as the end of the week saw me actually getting called on to troubleshoot a showstopper of a technical error on one of our web applications (in other words, to do the job they pay me for currently). And this error would have to crop up at about 2:30 in the afternoon, and not have an immediately obvious solution. I scratched at for an hour or so (and also e-mailed the help desk for the server center, because when I haven’t touched an application in a long while and it suddenly and inexplicably breaks, I always suspect someone’s been mucking with the server) and then I had to leave for the day. I didn’t really believe that staying late would accomplish anything in terms of resolution of the errors … but it might have accomplished something in terms of showing how dedicated I am and how ready for a leadership position I might be. But I work an early shift so that I can get home to either pick up my kids from daycare or give my wife a break after her full day home alone with the munchkins, and I wasn’t willing to deviate from that.

Fortunately, I was able to go in early the next day and fix the error almost immediately, having noodle out the likely cause overnight. So hopefully I salvaged a bit of my reputation that way. Not that anyone, including my boss, had given me any guff about leaving the afternoon before anyway, which again is one of those elements of having a buttoned-up non-demonstrative manager in the first place, and one for which I am grateful.

Delayed anecdote

2011-11-04T13:02:00.001-04:00

So in the summer of 2001 I found myself an unemployed victim of the tech-bubble’s bursting, a situation which exacerbated pretty much all of the fundamental problems of my marriage, and by Labor Day I had moved away from Virginia and back to New Jersey to live with my mother, ostensibly because I had made no headway in the DC-area job search and perhaps would have better luck in the NYC-area market, but tacitly (and more importantly) because separating from my then-wife was a good idea given how things were deteriorating on the home front. Come the dawning of 2002, I was at least gainfully employed (though just barely) and also, with no small relief, no-fault divorced.

I ended up staying at mom’s for a little over a year, which was good for me in a lot of ways, but the hardest part was being geographically separated from my social support network in Virginia. I visited VA a couple of times, including Halloween 2002, on which occasion I attended a costume party (wearing an extremely low-budget homemade costume of the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons) and ran into an old college acquaintance who found out I had little love for my current lousy job and offered me a much better one. I also had the license plates on my car reclaimed by the police – they were VA tags which had expired, because I had never gotten around to registering the car in NJ – and that struck me as a sign that I should take the new job and get back to Virginia, which I managed to contrive within a week or so.

And I very quickly got back into my old social circles, which included the gaming group I had played with on a weekly basis earlier. The group had changed somewhat in my absence, incorporating some new faces, but all were positive additions. One of those new guys (who truthfully was only new-to-me, since he had gone to high school with several of the other gamers and then drifted away for the better part of a decade only to re-emerge and be welcomed back into the circle during my year of exile) was actually such a hardcore geek that one night per week of gaming was not enough for him, nor was one style of gaming. While my old group was still gathering on Wednesday nights for pencil/paper/dice roleplaying games, the new guy was attending those sessions and also hosting Xbox HALO parties at his house on Friday nights and also setting up impromptu tabletop miniatures games at his place on other random weeknights. And since I am something of a hardcore geek myself, and much of my motivation for moving back to Virginia was to be able to hang out with peers with common interests again, and I wasn’t necessarily yearning to date or even meet romantic prospects yet (not to mention little did I know that I had already met the person I was really supposed to be married to, years before), I gleefully got on board with the expanded gaming schedule.

The tabletop miniatures games are the ones that feature multiple levels of addictiveness because they are also hobbies of acquisition. You buy an Xbox, you buy a HALO game, and you can play all you like and get the complete experience. Pretty much the same deal when you buy the core rulebook for a roleplaying system, though they offer periodic supplemental materials as well. But minis (some of them, including the ones featured in this anecdote) are like baseball cards, sold in small sets where you don’t know what you’re getting until you’ve bought and opened a pack, and you have no guarantee against getting duplicates or of ever getting every last piece, and collecting and trading becomes just as much part of the game as actually playing. When I first started attending these games using the minis (all of which were based on comic book characters, as if the whole concept needed another barbed hook to sink into my brain), I didn’t own any myself and would borrow from the vast collections of others, especially the host. But of course I started buying my own soon enough.

At that point there had been a core set of minis released when the whole game was launched, plus one expansion set. It wasn’t long after I started playing before a second expansion set was announced. And on the heels of that announcement came another, that before the nationwide retail release of expansion #2, limited quantities of packs would be available at a comic book convention in Orlando, Florida. The latter announcement soon became the subject of a great deal of speculation, rumination, and wild-ass blue-sky fantasizing.

The mini-gaming host, whom I have just now remembered I once christened “Clutch” for blogging purposes because he has always been there for me in tight spots, was and is a family man, happily married with … well now he has three kids but I believe at the time this story takes place, early 2003, he only had two. But part of his domestic bliss seemed to be an understanding between himself and his wife that they should each be allowed a great deal of latitude and freedom in following their own bliss, within the bounds of their wedding vows and other laws of the land. So his gaming nights were never a source of conflict, nor were her girls’ nights out, and if one or the other wanted to do something really outlandish every now and then, which didn’t bankrupt the family or anything, so be it. Therefore it quickly came to light that Clutch could, conceivably, go to Orlando for a comic book convention if he really wanted to. And I had no reason not to go, myself, since I had no significant other, no kids, nary a pet or houseplant. For the three years or so of my mistake-marriage I had felt decidedly not-myself, and getting laid off and taking a crappy job when unemployment ran out and living with my mom didn’t do a lot to ameliorate that. Getting back to Virginia had been helping, but I was still susceptible to thinking along the lines of “the old me was always up for anything, even eager for poorly-planned adventures, and generally defaulted to saying YES to things when there was no good reason to say no.” So when Clutch said, “I’ll go to Orlando if you’ll go with me,” despite only having really known each other a few months, I agreed to share the drive-through-the-night roadtrip.

It was a bit of a mad dash, since we both worked on Friday, met up that afternoon at his place, threw duffel bags in his Mustang convertible, and set off down I-95. We took turns behind the wheel (my turns may have been foreshortened because Clutch was always slightly agitated at my tendency to take my hands off 10 o’clock and 2 o’clock to gesticulate while I talked) and arrived at the convention center just before dawn, slept in the car for maybe an hour, changed our shirts and got in line so that as soon as the convention hall opened we could dash in and head straight to the booth where the new mini figure packs were on sale, because the only way the trip could be a failure would be if we drove all that way only to find the limited supplies had been depleted before we could pick any up. We may have been a bit overzealous but I can report the trip was not a failure. After we had obtained our new minis we enjoyed the rest of the day in a much more leisurely fashion, headed to bed fairly early, and then hit the road the next morning because it was already Sunday, we were 863 miles from home and we both had to be at work on Monday morning. We did, however, make time to stop at South of the Border on the return leg of the trip.

Anyway, before we roadtripped to Orlando, Clutch and I were acquaintances with common interests who were willing to take a chance going on an adventure together that neither of us could have pulled off alone. The trip itself was what really cemented our friendship, as we passed the time in the Mustang exchanging life stories more or less in their entirety, partly because there was nothing else to do, partly to stay awake (not that that tactic would work now; it’s astonishing what my 28-year-old self was physically capable of), and partly because everything’s connected. Clutch didn’t really know the details of my recently-ended exile, only snippets he had heard from the rest of the gaming group, so I told him how I ended up making the mistake of marrying the wrong person, which I felt only really made sense if you knew how my childhood view of my parents set my expectations and how my life unfolding messed with them. Clutch didn’t have his own divorce sob-story to relate, but he did get married fairly young, after a childhood and adolescence overflowing with cautionary tales, and I was fascinated to hear all of those details. Not to mention I’ve always found that asking someone “so how did you get into comics/roleplaying/pick-your-geek-poison?” will usually wind its way around their entire life story along that whole we-are-the-things-we-love (especially when the things we love are outside the mainstream) axis.

But good bros with a tight bond and at least one insanely impulsive shared experience between us or no, Clutch very nearly strangled me to death while I was driving (my own car this time, at least) and recounting to him how mind-numbingly awful the movie Hackers is. And he would have been totally justified, too. Live and learn.

After the gauntlet

2011-11-03T13:52:00.002-04:00

My two children are really pretty much champs when it comes to rolling with whatever comes along. The little guy still sometimes loses his cool altogether during actual moments of transition, but as long as we inform (and repeatedly remind) him ahead of time what to expect, he hangs tough, three-year-old style. His sister, meanwhile, is simply one of the most mellow babies I’ve ever met.

So we took things to the limit over the course of last weekend. On Saturday we visited friends at their house for dinner, which entailed a half-hour car ride out, three or four hours of hanging out, and a half-hour car ride back. There were no waste-elimination accidents, happily, and despite getting home well past bedtime the actual process of getting the little guy ready for and into bed was not seriously derailed. Sunday the whole family went warehouse-shopping (at a warehouse store, not for a warehouse) in the early part of the day, then visited different friends for dinner, in D.C. no less. Same results: no accidents, got home after bedtime but dodged the off-schedule tantrum bullet, all was well. Monday was of course Halloween and I got home from work (I can’t legitimately claim to have “raced” home because the train moves at constant speed no matter what I personally have got going on) and gathered everyone into the car to head over to yet another friend’s house, because they live in a neighborhood that takes trick or treating seriously: almost all the houses are elaborately decorated and residents take pains to be home throughout the evening to give out candy. It also doesn’t hurt that it’s a new-ish development where all of the houses have very small yards and are built right on top of each other, which is exceptionally handy for the short-legged walking door-to-door. The little girl was underwhelmed by riding in her umbrella stroller in a strange place in the dark, so she ended up only accompanying her brother to the house next door to our friends, but the little guy gamely knocked on eight or ten doors (when he wasn’t spouting dialogue from Cars and running around like a racer on the track because he was, inescapably, dressed up as Lightning McQueen) and got his handful of candy and then luckily was just as ready to go home as we were. That still put us home after bedtime, though, and right about then came the unsettling realization that we had really put the kids through the ringer with driving around and staying up late for three nights in a row.

Now of course I’m firmly resolved to not take the kids anywhere requiring automotive transport this coming weekend. We can play in the yard or walk to the park but that’s it for what should be a car-seat-free couple of days, I hope. To their credit, though, the kids seem to have taken it in stride and after just a couple nights showed no signs of being reborn as unrepentant night owls or anything. Just last night the little picked out as his bedtime story “Head to Toe” by Eric Carle, which involves all manner of body movements emulating animals, and I sat with the book in one hand and the little girl on the opposite knee while we both watched the little guy imitating monkeys and buffaloes and crocodiles and elephants, and the little girl was entranced and delighted, and the little guy had a blast showing off, after which he got in bed (twenty minutes early!) and didn’t make a peep the rest of the night.

So really the primary toll was taken on my wife and myself, because of the hecticness of all the driving and kid-wrangling and, let’s be totally honest, the relentless socialization. It’s not like we don’t like our friends and have weird toxic relationships propped up by mutually assured social destruction or anything crazy like that. Ordinarily we’d be pleased as proverbial punch to spend time hanging with our respective peeps and/or homies, it just was a mistake to dogpile so many get-togethers one on top of the other, because no matter how amazing those people are it just gets to be too much with no break. And then compound all of that with no small amount of guilt because we’re lugging our kids around hither and yon rather than spending quiet restful time at home with them … there was a certain overheated smoke drifting from our braincases by Monday night, is all.

The strange thing about it, though, is that it’s all self-correcting. Soon enough the kids will be old enough to actually express whether or not they like visiting mom and dad’s friends, or riding in the car, or staying up late, or whatever, and we won’t have to fill the void with imaginings and projections and such. And not too long after that, we (my wife and I) won’t even logistically have the ability to overbook ourselves socially, because the kids will have sports tournaments or recitals or scout camps or whatever which take precedence. So maybe we’re just trying to squeeze every moment of opportunity out of these days of small accessory-sized children that we can? Maybe so.

Wanted by no one

2011-11-02T13:51:00.004-04:00

Right, so last week I was bemoaning the 90 minutes of my life I would never get back after watching the movie Wanted, and I stopped short of explaining exactly what made it so execrable in my opinion. I shall hold forth on that subject … now. I had said last week “spoilers follow!” but then spent all my time just babbling about how various movies came into the orbit of my awareness and never got down to narrative breakdowns. This time, though, for reals, spoilers. Also be forewarned that I’m going to have no choice but to use some NSFW language along the way, partly because it’s an actual plot point in Wanted, and partly because I can only wallow in garbage but for so long before I curse like a barge captain.

So here’s the biggest flaw with Wanted, in a nutshell. The story starts with a protagonist who is absolutely pitiful, working in a thankless white-collar cubicle-rooted position for a stereotypical harpy of a boss, having panic attacks for no reason which require prescription medication to deal with, living in a tiny crappy apartment with a girlfriend who is cheating on him with his own best friend. Clearly this is meant to be emblematic of modern life in general and the crap we all swallow daily, if slightly exaggerated for effect. The story ends with the protagonist having found a way to rise above his humble beginnings and take control of his life by transforming it into something grander, namely embracing his destiny as a super-powered assassin. This is meant to be awesome, though I would argue that it’s not for various reasons (not all of which necessarily are about blanket condemnation of assassins).

Now the way the protagonist gets from the start to the end is, by and large, a bunch of nonsensical garbage, but as I’ve said before I don’t have a huge problem with that as long as the plot is irrelevant and the movie has something else to offer. Wanted tries to substitute comprehensible story development with its own swaggering philosophy that probably means to Say Something Important and a final line of dialogue that no doubt was intended to Really Make You Think. But the movie fails, and a lot of that failure can be attributed directly to the fact that the movie woefully undercuts its own supposed philosophical viewpoint at every possible opportunity.

When we meet Wesley, the aforementioned protagonist, and through at least the entire first half of the film, he is referred to as a “pussy” countless times: in his own interior monologue voiceover, in harangues delivered by the other assassins reluctantly training him in their arts, and so on. In the movie’s own estimation, ignoring evidence of infidelity rather than breaking up with one’s horrible girlfriend is a pussy thing to do. Never standing up to an obnoxious boss is pussy. Taking medicine is pussy. Basically any form of following the rules, going along to get along, and blending in is pussy. And the opposite of being a pussy is being a stone-cold killing machine. I actually kind of get that; I think it’s wrong-headed and trite, but I understand the impetus that would lead someone to say that almost every aspect of modern Western society is inherently emasculating and humiliating and soul-crushing for the everyman, and the only way to throw off the shackles is to completely opt out and stop following the rules, all the rules, up to and including bedrock fundamentals like Thou Shalt Not Kill. The only way to be your own man with your own righteous power is to say the hell with everyone else. Murder others at will, or the collective will of others will slowly kill you.

But that’s not where Wanted goes with it. Wesley gets introduced to a secret society of assassins because his father (whom he never knew of course) was a member but was recently killed and the legacy must be passed down and blah blah blah. Then comes the big twist: these assassins? They’re really the good guys! They don’t kill indiscriminately, or for personal gain, or for philosophical freedom or anything like that. They get orders from the hands-down absurdest Macguffin of all time, a magic loom that spits out people’s names in binary code (derived from out-of-place threads being over or under the weave) and those names are always people who will at some point in the future kill more people, so by sending the assassins after those fated murderers the loom is saving lives and preventing all of civilization from collapsing into chaos. Or something like that. There’s tons of contrivances and coincidences to back all this up, but the point is Wesley trades being a pussy who works at a computer under the guidance of an unpleasant human being for the glory of being a dude who works with a gun under the guidance of a loom which only communicates in cloth. Progress, I guess, but not really a revolution. He still has rules he has to follow, he’s still part of a larger group (the Fraternity of Assassins) he has to go along with to get along with. His existential situation hardly changes at all.

The irony here is that this is essentially the movie itself pussying out. It might have started as a really interesting examination of what power is and how modern society neuters people and only through extreme transgression can the self be reclaimed, but it ends up being the most bog-standard version of the hero’s quest, where the protagonist ends up fighting to save lives, a figure as noble as a soldier or policeman or fireman, just one who uses pre-emptive execution of scumbags to let the rest of the world sleep peacefully at night. Lame.

Actually, I know exactly where Wanted started: as a comic book miniseries, albeit one you would hardly recognize if you read it after seeing the movie. I read it years before, but tellingly I could only remember the premise and not how it all ended. (I have since looked up the ending on Wikipedia and said “ah, yeah, that’s right.”) The premise of the comic is that Wesley’s long-lost dad was not just an assassin but a deadly supervillain, and the Fraternity is actually all the supervillains in the world, who have conquered said world and eliminated all the superheroes without the general populace noticing. When Wesley inherits his father’s legacy, it’s not so that he can protect innocents by strategically taking out the worst of the worst. It’s not for any greater purpose at all. He just goes nuts breaking the law with impunity satisfying his every desire with the entire Fraternity’s backing, making sure he never has to face any consequences whatsoever. That is some ballsy anti-hero wish-fulfillment storytelling! I can at least respect it for setting up the law-abiding pussy/law-breaking rockstar dichotomy and following through with it no holds barred. The mini eventually got bogged down by an actual plot where there was a civil war within the Fraternity and Wesley had to pick sides and fight for his life and so on, but said side-choosing was never presented as the contrast between right and wrong, just between his wants and the desires of others, and ultimately his own survival.

Wanted, the movie, is only loosely inspired by this but does climax with internecine fighting in the Fraternity of Tablecloth Sewers, where it turns out the head assassin was deliberately mistranslating the thread-binary and sending the other assassins out after targets who were not tomorrow’s evil-doers but simply today’s income-generating rub-outs. (How exactly this worked as a one-man conspiracy, and where the hell the Fraternity got its money before it started taking on profitable hit-jobs, is never addressed, shockingly.) The most surprising thing about this cliché everything-Wesley-thought-he-knew-was-a-lie development is that it turns Morgan Freeman into the bad guy, so it’s slightly harder to see coming. But still stupid. After the big battle – where Wesley slowly but surely revenges himself on all the assassins who were hard on him when he was training to be one of them – Morgan Freeman gets away, which seems to set up the inevitable sequel …

… until the last few minutes in which Morgan Freeman reappears in Wesley’s old office, trying to get the drop on Wesley, but the guy in the cubicle is a decoy and Wesley, shooting from miles and miles away with an outlandish gun and his own super-assassin powers, blows Morgan Freeman’s brains out. Then the film runs backwards but follows the trajectory of the bullet (rather than Morgan freeman’s reverse-dawning realization of who’s pwning whom) and ends up back in Wesley’s gun, where he finishes the end of a tedious rant about how life sucks by looking directly at the viewer and asking "What the fuck have you done lately?"; so in its absolute last gasp, the film is still clinging to the completely false notion that it’s being provocative and edgy with its make-the-world-a-better-place-for-your-fellow-man-through-assassination attempt at having its cake and eating it, too.

Even setting aside the whole “murder is awesome! … but must be committed responsibly at the behest of a piece of fortune-telling medieval machinery” philosophical vapidity, the movie commits an even more egregious example of pussying out. The opening sequences are designed to leave no question in the audience’s mind that Wesley’s girlfriend is a bitch, his best friend is a dick, and his boss is a nightmarish monstrosity in human flesh. Wanted, the comic, does this too, by the by. You would think that when Wesley discovers he was born to be a superpowered assassin he would at a minimum shoot and kill his boss, shoot and kill his best friend, or shoot and kill his girlfriend. Possibly all three! And in fact, in the comic version, he does get some explicit revenge on those who have been wronging him. In the movie … not so much. He says some nasty things to his boss and hurts her feelings. He punches his best friend in the face, twice. And he kisses Angelina Jolie in front of his girlfriend. I guess these are supposed to be moments of triumph but they are such small potatoes it’s laughable. And in that film-rewind portion at the end where we see how Wesley made the shot that took out Morgan Freeman, we also see that the improbable path of the bullet (“bending the shot” is part of the quasi-mystical superpowers deal in the movie, just go with it) goes through the hole of a donut the boss is eating and also punctures the can of energy drink that the best friend is drinking while the girlfriend yammers at him about something. So beyond any doubt those characters make it through the movie totally alive, but … the boss is still fat? And the best friend now has to take on relationship drama with the girlfriend instead of just getting action on the side? Are those supposed to be gratifying components of Wesley’s ascension to pure awesome? Or is it actually a way of underlining, “Look, Wesley can shoot anything anywhere at anytime, he could have killed any of those three creeps, but he chose not to … because he’s the sympathetic hero” right before Wesley has the gall to suggest through the broken fourth wall that the audience doesn’t live in the same rarefied air of freedom that he does?

Wanted looks into the darkness in the human soul and not only blinks but runs away in the opposite direction at top speed to comfort itself with the familiar and the bland, then refuses to just shut the fuck up already about how awesome it was that one time it looked into the darkness, man. It calls its main characters assassins but really (and I’d love to think this is a clever play on the phrase “Wanted: Dead or Alive” but it’s probably just coincidence) they’re cowboys, living by their own code of honor and enforcing it with guns, and Wesley wears a white hat the whole time. The movie tries to have it both ways while pursuing neither one particularly competently, and that gets pretty annoying over the course of its running time. And apparently they are talking about producing a sequel; just the other day I saw the following direct quote from one of the screenwriters: “We're writing and basically picking Wesley up a few years after the events of the first movie and throwing him back into that world.”

But that world is a boring mush of contradictions that I can’t imagine anyone would want to revisit.

By the skin of my pig

2011-11-01T14:46:00.002-04:00

OK, that post subject sounds slightly perverted, but rest assured I am talking about football, narrow victories, etc.

It was a good weekend, this final Saturday and Sunday of October. The Wolverines won, the Giants won, the Steelers won, and there was much rejoicing. And, as is often the case, much satisfaction in the mean-spirited anti-rooting parts of the brain as well. The Steelers beat the Patriots and the last points they put on the board were 2 via safety, which was a fine coup de grace in the overall humbling of New England. The Redskins, playing in Toronto against the Bills – a scenario which the Bills participate in every year but which always managed to result in Bills defeats in the past – were goose-egged. And rounding out the NFC East (where my rooting interests primarily lie) the Cowboys and Eagles played each other, the only downside of which was that they couldn’t both lose. Best-case scenario was that the Eagles would win, keeping the Cowboys two games behind the Giants, and that is indeed how it went.

But funny enough, when the dust had settled from the Sunday night game, I realized that I had somehow managed to position myself in a four-way tie for the Week 8 lead in the NFL pick’em pool. I actually had a reason to care who won the MNF game; more to the point, I had a decent shot at winning the week outright. Of the four of us at the top of the heap, I was the only one who had taken the points with Kansas City, while my three opponents were betting on Sand Diego to cover the spread. If the Chargers won by 4 or more points, the prize money for the week would go to whoever of those three had come closest to guessing the total number of points scored during the course of Monday Night Football. But if the Chiefs won, or even kept it close, I would be the uncontested victor. I was glad that I had picked the underdog and my fortunes rode on them, because with absolutely no other rooting interest in the game it’s just more fun to cheer on the unlikely.

But even though I was quietly cheering along, I couldn’t even stay awake to the end of the third quarter, due to the cumulative effects of pilfered-Halloween-candy-coma and a slightly brutal schedule stretching back to Saturday (which I will expound upon at greater length later on). But I checked the pick’em pool website first thing this morning and saw that the Chiefs and I were both winners. (It wasn’t until I got to work, walked through the lobby past a tv tuned to ESPN, and read the ticker that I even knew the game had gone to overtime.)

It’s funny how my week-to-week performance in the pool rattles around in my head. I grew up watching football with my dad (and all the other adult male relatives on major holidays) and clearly I internalized it as an essential component of masculine identity, not just watching football but understanding it and being able to analyze it thoughtfully and converse on the subject critically. So if I got anything out of all those years of exposure, I should theoretically be able to predict winners and losers with something better than coin-flip accuracy, and when I do I feel vindicated and when I don’t I feel abashed. Part of my brain is telling me I just got luckier than everyone else this week with my wild guesses, but still, it’s kind of a relief to know at the season’s halfway point that I have something I can point to as justification for getting into the pool at all (namely the fact that my cash winnings will basically cover the expense of signing up in the first place).

Lest you think I’m being too hard on myself by downplaying my achievement as nothing more than emerging as the luckiest guesser, I should point out that I only got nine games correct when all was said and done, which marks the only time all season that the weekly winner has been in the single digits in the W column. A dubious distinction, that. It also means that everyone else in the pool had even fewer games correct, and it was therefore an unusually rough and unpredictable week in professional American football. I suppose that still doesn’t necessarily make the case one way or the other, so take it for what it’s worth.

The other nice thing (in addition to the money) about winning out the week is that it slightly improves my overall standings for the season. I was also aided by the fact that my godfather, who has been and remains in first place, finished with a low-end 5 wins this week, so I caught up to him a bit, though he still has a pretty commanding lead. At this point I am tied for seventh place overall – tied with my grandma, I hasten to add. The lady loves football and gambling, bless her.

Ruth’s Christmas

2011-10-31T12:58:00.001-04:00

It might seem odd to be looking ahead toward Christmas on the day of Halloween, but what can I say: not only is that just kind of the way it goes in the weird and wonderful world of government office life, but this morning when I arrived at the train station it was only 30-something degrees outside, so winter does not seem like all that foreign a concept. Not to mention Halloween gets pretty short shrift around here (the federal/DoD wing of The Big Gray, that is) with no one dressing up in costume or making much of an acknowledgement of the date at all, not even a wacky jack-o-lantern tie or unironic black cat appliquéd sweater or anything. (Personally, I did wear my Superman tie today as a very indirect Halloween nod, rendered even harder to read by the fact that I’m wearing a fleece over my shirt and tie, because see above about how it’s close to freezing around here.)

Anyway, yes, as of our staff meeting last week there was already significant time given over to discussing things such as departmental coverage for the holidays (and since those encompass Thanksgiving and that was only four weeks away at the time, I can understand that) and where exactly our office holiday party would be held this year, since we’ve moved and our new building does not have the cool top-floor conference room which was the previous default site. But as I’ve mentioned previously, one thing Crystal City has going for it is a superabundance of restaurants (and event-ready hotels, at that) so the off-site holiday party is not that much of a hardship. And in fact, since one of the possibilities mentioned was Ruth’s Chris Steak House, this year may end up being one of my favorite work-mandatory seasonal celebrations of all time. Of course if they end up going a different way and that was just a tease, I will be bitter.

Hackers Wanted

2011-10-28T09:10:00.002-04:00

Hackers and Wanted are both major-studio American movies released about 13 years apart (1995 and 2008 respectively), and they have a ridiculous number of things in common besides short, trochee titles:

- Both prominently feature Angelina Jolie
- Both focus on underground, outlaw anti-heroes
And I could go on by delving into the minutiae, but let’s cut to the chase
- Both are resoundingly terrible

Spoilers to follow as I really get into them, but trust me, I can’t ruin things that are already this bad, and if I prevent you from watching either I’m doing you a favor.

Funny enough (for Random Anecdote Friday, especially) another aspect both flicks have in common for me personally is that I can trace the reasons for watching both of them back to the same guy, one of my near and dear buddies. This would be the pal with whom I worked and carpooled for a few years, circa 2005 to 2007. One day at the office he and some of our fellow programmers were talking about the movie Hackers with the kind of slightly condescending nostalgia reserved for entertainments which seemed fairly cool at the time but might not 100% hold up after their moment had passed. I was left out of the conversation because I had never seen the film, but I added it to the top of my Netflix queue in order to remedy the situation.

And never having seen it before, watching it a decade later, plus having at least a rudimentary familiarity with things like internet security and whatnot (which was how Hackers came up at my place of business in the first place), I found it really, ridiculously absurdly bad. The attempts at (a) making hacking into a server look like a hyper-futuristic video game and (b) replicating the argot of this fringe subculture of quasi-anarchist kids all ended up as a perfect storm of nonsensical gibberish, and since I wasn’t buying any of that there was nothing to distract me from the fact that the fundamental plot of the movie itself is essentially incoherent and goes on and on forever. Taking it all in was a brain-bruising experience … and of course that meant I could not wait until the following day when I would have my buddy in the car on the ride to work, a captive audience whom I could regale with critiques of the film. Which is exactly how our morning commute began, and continued, until (in what I believe was the one and only time my friend ever said anything like this to me, including the time we took an all-nighter roadtrip to Orlando and basically exchanged life stories, though why we undertook that excursion is an anecdote for another day) my buddy told me in no uncertain terms to shut up. Not hurry up and get to the point, but stop talking about the movie immediately and change the subject or risk levels of violence usually associated with permanent injury. So yeah, Hackers is so bad that a portion of the explication of its badness could just about drive a man insane.

Wanted was one of three movies that same buddy loaned me on Blu-Ray so that I could have something to watch on the Blu-Ray player he gave me for my birthday. To his credit, when I asked him if it was any good, he pointedly said nothing more than “It looks amazing in hi-def.” I was therefore still skeptical but my buddy had made a deal with me on my birthday, since he knows I have a tendency to build up huge backlogs of entertainment I keep meaning to consume: all I had to do was watch one of the three movies in the next month (which happens to end on Halloween) and I would continue to enjoy access to borrowing Blu-Rays in the future. Otherwise I would be cut-off. So since my wife was working late Wednesday night and there wasn’t much on tv and both kids were asleep early, I watched Wanted. And yes, absolutely the best thing I can say about it is that it has a certain visual appeal during various setpieces. But it doesn’t make a lick of freakin’ sense.

You might recall that not too long ago I was praising the G.I. Joe Rise of Cobra movie even though, or perhaps because, it makes no sense, so this may seem like an abrupt reversal. But G.I. Joe at least had the decency to embrace its own cheesiness and allow itself to unfurl as a gloriously philosophy-free series of improbable events which looked really cool and blew stuff up. My major beef with Wanted is that it tries to infuse its ultraviolent kaleidoscope of kewl and its pseudo-plot connective tissue with some kind of commentary on modern life. And it fails miserably.

One more difference between Hackers and Wanted is that I watched the first one before I had a blog, and the second one after. So whereas in the past the only way I could grapple with the storm of thoughts which truly terrible cinema can set off in my brain is by talking it to death with a friend (and testing the limits of said friendship in the process), now if I really need to pick apart a celluloid debacle I can do it right here and when people get bored they don’t even have to be confrontational about it, they can just blithely surf away. And given that freedom, I’m deciding at this point to hold off on over-analyzing Wanted until some time next week, because I really think it’s going to be a longish post in and of itself and this one’s pushing a thousand words already. So be forewarned!

Two thoughts

2011-10-27T13:11:00.001-04:00

Last week, immediately after I blogged about our traction-gaining efforts to housebreak our son, there were some setbacks which caused my wife to accuse me of jinxing the enterprise. And yet I am going to tempt fate and have at the subject once again (and once again I will hopefully be sparing enough with details on effluvium to avoid the gross-out). I’m justifying this continuation upon a theme because matters have advanced quite a bit and I may not have cause to comment on the subject at all fairly soon (at least until it’s our little girl’s turn, though at the rate she is aggressively playing developmental catch-up with her brother that could be in about eleven months).

So, thought one, it’s really amazing how serendipitously everything came together. I mentioned that, as always, my wife and I were not above bribing the little guy; now let me elaborate a little on the logistics. For almost as long as he’s been collecting Cars, the little guy has wanted the gang of hot rods who terrorize Lightning McQueen’s faithful tractor trailer Mack (and thus set the main plot in motion, so really who am I to argue with being drawn to such pivotal players in the narrative). He’s had Lightning and Mack forever, and he had taken to using four Matchbox cars as proxies for re-enacting the scene of highway shenanigans. I went on eBay and happened to find one person who was selling all four of those hot rods, so hey, combined shipping and all that. And so we made up the charts, one per hot rod, with increasing (yet arbitrarily pulled out of our collective parenting butt) numbers of stickers required to earn each one, awarded for successful trips to the potty … and then, amazingly, by the time the little guy had finished the fourth chart and earned the last member of the gang (which happened Tuesday) he had pretty much been fully trained. Which was all to the good, because if he had needed more incentives to keep going with the training, I would have been fine with that in principle but unsure which random toys would keep the little guy on task. So it all worked out, huzzah.

Incidentally, the excessive celebratory songs and dances seem to be no longer required, either, although we never run out of those and they haven’t even stopped being amusing to the little guy’s mother and me. Nonetheless, I’m grateful that the little guy was over them long before we were.

So thought two, of course, is now we’re getting cocky enough that we have a ton of geographically wide-ranging stuff planned for the near future. Dinner with friends at their place on Saturday afternoon, dinner with different friends at their place on Sunday afternoon, and trick-or-treating with yet another set of friends on Monday night, all of which will take the little guy out of his home base comfort zone and into situations with lots of distractions, not least other (usually older) kids. At the moment I’m optimistic that he can run that gauntlet without anything going disastrously wrong (which still allows for the incidental accident here or there).

And assuming we do make it all the way into November with things continuing in the right direction, then the really bonus aspect of it all will be that the little guy will, as previously noted, be able to hang out with the other 3-year-olds at daycare instead of the 2-year-olds (some of whom are still in the communicate-primarily-via-biting phase) and generally be in a more brain-stimulating environment. He’s been slowly pre-transitioning already, and in fact spent something like the middle five hours of the day in the next-up classroom yesterday, so I think he’s essentially ready to dive in permanently (and I know for a fact my wife and I are more than ready to stop signing “accident reports” stemming from aforementioned bitings). So, here’s hoping.

Serious playthings

2011-10-26T14:14:00.003-04:00

The other day my wife and I were talking about winning the lottery, as we sometimes do (and as I’m sure just about everyone whose economic existence hovers somewhere between “barest subsistence” and “lap of luxury” sometimes does as well). We long ago established that a windfall of millions of dollars would be more than reason enough to quit our jobs and pursue lives of leisure, but in the conversation in question we were discussing such flights of fancy as owning our own businesses, which might somehow combine recreational pursuits (we’d be entirely disposed toward spending time on anyway) with the income tax writeoffs of losses and expenses that the uber-rich are expected to claim.

My wife wondered if I would have any interest in owning and operating a comic book store, with the onus of requiring it to be profitable essentially removed from the equation. I was unhesitating in answering in the negative. I’ve never even briefly entertained the fantasy of owning a comic book shop, with or without the whole be-my-own-boss/make-a-living aspects, because it always struck me as kind of a grind, as most retail jobs are. I’ve never worked in someone else’s comic book shop, either, but I did hold down a gig at an ice cream parlor in my high school days and I imagine the similarities would stand out: I like visiting those establishments, I enjoy consuming what they sell, but laboring on the employee side of the counter day after day after day isn’t a ton of fun.

Nonetheless, I understood the logical appraisal of my interests implicit in my wife’s question, and that got me thinking about how I could incorporate all of the geek trappings I love surrounding myself in with something vaguely resembling a job, without all the clock-punching drudgery. And then it hit me: curating a toy museum.

From what I understand or can imagine, managing the stock of a comic book shop is mighty boring: every month you order a certain number of copies of the latest issue of the currently-published titles and/or the new releases of graphic novels and trade paperback collections, as well as a certain amount of related merchandise largely determined by the physical size of your store and the type of customers you tend to draw. And you hope that you sell everything you paid for, without running out so quickly that you lose customer loyalty, but also without overstocking so much that you are hemorrhaging profits. Some comic book shops also pride themselves on stocking much older back issues of comics, or out-of-print books, or vintage merch, or whatnot but that’s almost always a secondary concern at best. If the hot, high-sales-volume items right now are nine different series featuring Wolverine, or bookends shaped like Twilight characters, or whatever, then that’s what you become a vendor of. And the process is even more mechanical by virtue of the fact that there are very few distribution channels for comic book shops, so you basically get one catalog that tells you what the hot items are that month, and you order off that master list, and stock your shelves when the boxes show up.

Ah, but a museum is a completely different thing which traffics in the enduring past, not the fleeting trends of the moment. That’s more my speed. If I want to surround myself with Manglor toys in my museum I can do so whether or not there’s a Hollywood adaptation of the franchise due in a couple of months.

Of course, that’s assuming I can find any Manglor toys, but again that’s part of the charm. Instead of ordering formulaically out of a catalog I would have to hunt down the subjects of the toy museum exhibits, which undoubtedly would include some fierce eBay bidding and Amazon hunting expeditions, but also a fair amount of backroads wandering, independent store visiting and general plaything prospecting.

And once I had put together a retrospective’s worth of a certain toy line, I would still need to assemble a proper display area for them. Much as any decent natural history museum is likely to choose to build an entire fake Mauritian beach on which to situate its reconstructed Dodo family rather than simply stand them in empty glass cases, I would similarly while away the hours constructing elaborate diorama environments as backdrops for the toys, from sci-fi cityscapes to run elaborate loops of Hot Wheels tracks through to jungle planetscapes to (barely) contain Herculoids action figures. Granted, I kind of indulge in that already, since I usually open up toys as I buy them and position them on bookshelves, with some props and simple stage-dressing whenever possible. It would only be a matter of more elaborate and involved fake scenery, facilitated by unlimited monetary resources and free time.

Plus instead of being set up in a spare room in my basement, the toy museum would occupy an entire building unto itself (someplace adjacent to the horse farm where my wife and I and our family would live, as per her half of this lottery-winning dream) which would be much more accessible to the general public, who could gain access to its wonders during museum hours six days a week for a “suggested donation”. I’m no accountant, but I’m pretty sure owning and operating a repository of our shared culture is worth double tax-deduction points, at least.

Other time-saving devices

2011-10-25T14:24:00.001-04:00

There’s an old Hollywood trope which holds that if you visit an office building in the middle of the night, the people you are most likely to encounter are the cleaning crew. I call this a Hollywood trope because, in my experience, it is in fact something which is true only in the movies. I see the cleaning crew at my office building during normal, daylight business hours pretty much all the time.

And sometimes they kind of drive me nuts. I can see a certain wisdom in going around mid-morning to empty every cubicle’s wastebasket, I guess, but closing the men’s room for cleaning at 10 a.m.? That is some pretty prime post-morning-coffee time right there, isn’t it? There’s also frequent afternoon vacuuming in my particular cube farm, which rankles me beyond all reason. It only affects me to the extent of messing with my concentration and being generally annoying, but on behalf of my co-workers who actually have to interact with other people face-to-face or on the phone, and who end up raising their voices above the motor sounds (or giving up entirely until the vacuumer passes by) I take umbrage. I think everyone should be entitled to make a decent living with dignity and have a good life, and I get how part of that is working during the working part of the day insofar as that’s possible, but surely the vacuuming part of the housekeeping job can wait until after 5 p.m.

But funny enough I saw a member of the cleaning crew today with the industrial vacuum canister strapped to his back, and I smiled. Because, this past Saturday night, I took the kids over to their mother’s clinic after hours for a quick visit since she would be staying late to set up for Open House. As I mentioned yesterday, a thorough cleaning of the premises was part of the set-up agenda, and given how busy they are on a regular basis they really had no choice but to wait until after the doors were closed and locked for the night. At that point, out came the spray bottles and rags … and the industrial vacuum with canister backpack.

Nobody was using the vacuum cleaner while we were there, so it was simply leaned against a counter where it eventually caught the attention of the little guy, who wandered over to check it out up close. I asked him what it was, and he informed me that it was “a hot dog pump”. He then proceeded to show me how the hot dogs were made in the main cylinder and then pumped out through the attached hose, all explained without the slightest hesitation or doubt.

So of course now I very much want a hot dog pump for our house because I believe that would be incredibly useful. But barring that, at least I’m more amused than usual when I see the cleaning crew at work roaring my way.

Grinderation

2011-10-24T13:46:00.001-04:00

I’m going to cop out with an extremely short post today, owing to a couple of competing factors. This past weekend was dominated by my wife’s vet clinic’s annual open house on Sunday, for which my wife had to stay at work late on Saturday cleaning and setting up, and slightly longer than usual on Sunday to wind down the event itself. It all threw me for a strange loop, as this was the fourth Open House we’ve been through but the first one since the birth of our daughter, which meant it was the first time I spent the vast majority of a weekend wrangling both munchkins by myself. Generally either I’ve been at work utilizing different (if any) parts of my brain before running the dinner-and-bedtime juggling gauntlet in the span of a couple hours, OR I am home with the kids on the weekend while my wife works but she’s home again well before dinner time both days. I’d never done a marathon like this past Saturday and by Sunday evening I was depleted. (And also kind of in a self-induced food coma because my wife said “Let me treat for dinner!” and I said “OK, how about Chinese!” and proceded to eat entirely too much kung pao chicken. So that’s on me.)

So today is something of a recovery day but, as it happens, I have a meeting with my boss tomorrow to go over some actual application development which wasn’t quite finished this morning, so I’ve spent the majority of the day today doing actual coding and testing and whatnot. I am just as shocked as anyone, although not so much that the “few, tiny things” I thought I had left turned out to be problematically knotty and time-consuming; that’s just par for the course for me, really. I did get it done (or done enough to have the meeting and demo some stuff and if anything blows up I’ll just have to stare peevishly at the screen and scribble some quick notes about bug-fixes for the next go round) so I have a moment now to check in on the blog, but no major revelations to make or observations to ponder. Some days are like that.

Outbursts

2011-10-21T12:15:00.003-04:00

If my life were a movie and the trailer/poster for that movie needed a tagline, one that comes to mind is “If you push a man past his breaking point, he’ll finally break all the rules.” Of course, in my case that doesn’t refer to meting out harsh street justice with military surplus and mad kung fu skills, but rather to violating my personal code of behavior in online forums as I spend my daily dose of time in front of a computer as usual.

I tell myself with mantra-like repetition that it does little to no good to enter into an internet conversation with strangers in the interest of winning an argument, proving a point, or changing someone’s mind. The chances of success are virtually non-existent, there’s no other corollary upside, and the downside includes general frustration, wastes of precious time, and coming out looking like a jackass. So even when I read trolly comments and they really, really bug me, I try to ignore them. But I’m only human and sometimes resisting the urge to rebut is exhausting.

So earlier this week there was some entertainment “news” about how Anne Hathaway was cast as Fantine in the forthcoming big screen adaptation of the musical version of Les Mis. I must admit that Les Mis is a show almost embarrassingly near and dear to my heart. Not only did it probably peak in U.S. popularity at a time that coincided with my early adolescence, when I would be particularly vulnerable to the bombast and melodrama of the whole spectacle, but those high school years were also incredibly music-intensive for me. I was in the school marching band, concert band, chorus, show choir, jazz band, plays (which were almost always classic Broadway shows), etc. I spent all my free time on school property hanging out in the music wing of the building with other kids who were similarly obsessed with the performing arts, and as with any teenage peer group the things that were popular with us, like Les Mis, were insanely popular because we reinforced each other’s mania with group-think. So Les Mis became deeply imprinted on my brain. To this day, if I am flipping around on television and PBS is doing their annual pledge drive and showing one of the “Les Mis in Concert” specials I am drawn into it as helplessly as if I came across Goodfellas or A Few Good Men on cable. The last time this happened I left it on as background noise while I did some straightening and found myself singing along to Javert’s solo, “Stars”, and I still knew every word and that was from two-decade old second-hand memorization (because I was a tenor and Javert is a baritone so it wasn’t a proper piece for me Ibut listened to a lot of my friends practicing “Stars” for recital).

So. Les Mis. I am familiar, and I enjoy it, but I am not hyper-possessive of it. They are making a movie of it? Fine by me, and I may see it some day, or I may not. I’m trying to arrange my life these days around celebrating the things I like and not devoting mental energy to the things I don’t care for. And those are the ways I’ll contribute to the cyber-chatter, tossing the occasional “I dug this” into the mix. I absolutely won’t waste my time in negatively pre-judging things, since it combines unnecessary bad vibes with impossible attempts at future-seeing. But other people follow their own instincts, so of course I ran across a comment (on NPR’s site, of all places!) responding to the Hathaway casting by saying, “Um, is it wrong that I think she’s way too old?”

That just made my teeth clench. Just trying to parse that snotty objection-disguised-as-question, I came up with two possibilities. One, the commenter is exceptionally bad at math and/or judging ages. Anne Hathaway has been making movies for quite a while now, it’s true, but she’ll only turn 29 next month. I don’t know if Fantine’s age is mentioned in Hugo’s novel, but late 20’s seems perfectly reasonable, doesn’t it? Suppose Fantine was 16 when she conceived her daughter (any younger feels a little too creepy) and 17 when Cosette was born, and Cosette in turn is about 9 or 10 when Fantine’s part of Les Mis plays out. So 26, 27? How in the world is 29 “way too old” to play 26? The second possibility is that the commenter is mixing up characters and thinking of Eponine, who I will grant is supposed to be about 18 and thus, yeah, casting a perilously-near-30-year-old is a bit of a stretch. But also totally not what’s happening, so either way, the commenter is an idiot. And I really wanted to point that out. But what would that accomplish? So I navigated away before my indignation got the better of me.

Still, my defenses were weakened. And then like a day later I was catching up at a forum where I do post regularly which is all about genre fiction and has a long-running thread about Writing Tips. Someone had brought up confusion between the words “affect” and “effect” and someone else said “Keeping them straight is actually easy, and I teach my students this mnemonic for it: RAVEN = Right, Affect is a Verb and Effect is a Noun.” Which … ok, first off, that’s an inaccurate oversimplification. Sometimes “affect” is used as a noun. Sometimes “effect” is used as a verb. But maybe more to the point, that is a HUGE irritant to me, when someone interrupts discussion of a legitimately complicated concept and says “oh, it’s not so complicated” and proves their point with flagrant dumbing down of the idea. Like the rest of us are making things unnecessarily cumbersome because we lack the insight to see how simple the reality is. I will totally concede that the rules of English grammar are often arbitrary and bordering on nonsensical, and that there are far worse problems in the world than people who shortcut those rules while still managing to get their points across, but the rules do exist, and they can be learned, and they do aid clarity in certain situations, and … yeah, as you can tell by how het up I am about this, I actually was even moreso in the moment and I totally commented on that thread to correct the previous post. But I felt like I was slightly justified because it wasn’t something as subjective (and stupid) as whether or not a certain actress is right for a certain part that no one will see for a couple of years yet. In a thread dedicated to useful information and tips, when someone (who, note, claims to be a TEACHER! Of some sort. Could be a part-time Kaplan tutor for all we know.) tosses out misinformation there is an element of public service in not letting that go unchallenged. Right?

I’m sure I still came across as a pompous prescriptivist, though. Little would anyone on the anonymous internet know where I was coming from …

In a world …
where one man …
found the only way to shout down the ignorant …
was to SHOUT LOUDER.
Coming Christmas 2011 to a theater near you.

Happy dance

2011-10-20T14:52:00.002-04:00

While this blog does tend to run squarely into daddy territory at least once a week, and I have no problem acknowledging all the ups and downs from how I neurotically overthink the way I am influencing my offspring’s future happiness through my every action and inaction, to the rationality-pulverizing cuteness of little things my kids surprise me with, there is one element of parenting which by and large I tend to eschew in-depth discussion of hereabouts, and that is the near-constant contact with intimate biological functions. I’ve never tried to pretend that my children are ephemeral sprites, and I’m sure I’ve made passing reference to changing diapers or laundering spit-up stains or whatnot, but I try not to dwell on these things. The earthly muck comes with the territory, and I have no qualms with that at all, but I shouldn’t because they’re my kids. Even if you happen to be a blood relative of those kids yourself (and a large percentage of you reading this ona regular basis are) I don’t see the need to wallow in said muck, metaphorically.

However! Without getting too bogged down in details, as it were, I am stoked to report that we seem to finally be on the positive side of potty training the little guy. Arguably another reason why I hadn’t broached this subject before, aside from the unsavory subject matter itself, was that potty training seemed very much like one of those things that would be doomed by too much overthinking and stress and whatnot (I am speaking to the role of the parents here, of course) and yet I found myself overthinking it and stressing about it a lot, especially when we got to the point where the little guy was eligible according to calendar-age to move up a room at daycare but unable to do so because he was still in diapers. And our early attempts at changing the status quo were met by the little guy with indifference followed by stubborn resistance. So we had to resign ourselves to outwaiting him, but it still bummed me out, but I didn’t want to talk about how it bummed me out because … there are actually times when I just prefer not to talk about things, unlikely as that may seem. Anyway, it was a drag, but a drag that my wife and I were determined not to translate into trauma for the little guy, even as we read books on the subject and talked it to death after he had gone to sleep and so on and so on.

And then this past weekend we had reasonably clear schedules and decided we would give it one more try with a concerted push that walked the line between making the option available and very visible to the little guy yet not pressuring him in any way. That lasted about six or eight hours on Saturday and he was as unenthusiastic as ever, even with some really high-end rewards potentially on the table. So I made a desperation play and told the little guy that he would start losing privileges if he didn’t at least try, and that actually made an impression and he did try, and the timing must have finally been right for him to get with the program because he was hesitant but on-board on Saturday night, and then a little less tentative on Sunday, and then I went back to work on Monday and worried that alone with my wife he would slack off some but he actually got even better, and then Tuesday I worried again that going to daycare would throw everything off but he stayed right on course, and now here we are on Thursday and we know it’s too soon to say it’s a done deal and there may yet be some setbacks or other unforeseen difficulties but so far so good. And it really is a huge weight off my shoulders, to the extent that I’m realizing I hadn’t quite admitted to myself how down I was about not doing right by my child and being complicit in him falling behind, until I was out from under all that and I could finally appraise how heavy it had been (ridiculously so, sure, but what can you do).

Things are going so well, in fact, that the little guy has already used the system of cumulative rewards to get two new additions to his beloved Cars toy collection, which makes me laugh on various levels. He now officially has more of those little vehicles than he can possibly play with in any meaningful way, but I don’t begrudge him that of course, since I’m an inveterate completist/collector/toy connoisseur myself. I do of course wonder what’s going to happen if he realizes that there are still more characters from the movie(s) that he wants to possess after the point where his mother and I feel like his behavior is modeled more or less exactly the way we want. We got him to stop throwing delaying-tactic tantrums at bedtime, got him to stay put after lights out when he went from a crib to a bed, and now have him most of the way potty trained. He already is reasonably polite and helpful, and usually eats his vegetables. What’s left? I’m assuming at some point we can transition from “you get toys on a regular basis” to “you get toys on your birthday and Christmas” with nothing more than the authority of parental fiat, and I do hope I’m not underestimating the challenge of that shift. That’s another thing that makes me laugh, of course: my wife and I pride ourselves on being modern and open-minded and in all ways primarily concerned with raising our kids the right way, and yet time and again we have found the best way to get from where we are to where we want to be has been out-and-out bribery. So much so that I would without question or hesitation recommend it to all my friends who might have kids younger than ours and run into challenges. Cars or trains or Legos or Smurfs or My Little Ponies or whatever, find a child-appealing currency and pay them to do what you want. Which sounds terrible when I lay it out like that! But sounding terrible does not prevent it from working, I have found, and I am OK with that.

Also at some point I guess we’re going to have to stop hooting and whooping and clapping hands and doing a little dance whenever the little guy manages to make it to his potty in time to put there what belongs there? But I don’t think we’re at that point yet? Honestly, given the little guy’s track record with other ever-evolving rituals of home life, there may very well come a point where he tells us he’s done going to the bathroom and we start to sing and dance and he shakes his head and says “Guys, stop that.”

In the interest of a balanced approach to my two children I feel like I should also mention that my daughter now has two teeth juuuuuust poking through (both bottom front) and has also officially started eating solid foods in the form of a spoonful or three a day of rice cereal mush, and is therefore crossing into the realm where her own diaper contents go from “newborn-inoffensive bouquet” to “ugh whose turn is it?” but see, there we go into the icky business which I so conscientiously try to avoid. She’s doing splendidly in all age-appropriate ways, and perhaps I should just leave it at that.

Avidity

2011-10-19T13:30:00.003-04:00

SPOOKTOBERFEST 2011 UPDATE: I finished reading Frankenstein, and the thing I keep returning to again and again is how far away the original novel is from the popular conception of “the Frankenstein story”, by which I mean that most people think of the misunderstood, almost childlike, man-monster who only wants to understand the world and find his way in it but keeps getting rejected and/or attacked by a fearful world. I’m guessing by now most people know the bit of trick-trivia that Frankenstein is the name of the scientist and not his creation, but before the metonymy set in the book was called Frankenstein because it’s actually about the scientist, and specifically it’s a first-person account of his own psychological agony as he becomes obsessed with creating life, succeeds, is appalled by what he’s done, and has to live with the grim consequences as his rejected hideous progeny straight-up murders his little brother, his best friend, and his wife (all more or less “off-screen”). Interesting stuff.

I’ve moved on to reading The Fall, which is the second novel in a trilogy about biologically (semi-)plausible vampires destroying humanity in an epidemic parasitic plague, written by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan. After volume one, The Strain, I would have said it’s a pretty shallow action-adventure-horror jaunt with cardboard characters who are either Noble Tragic Heroes or Elementally Evil Demons, but in the second book there begins to be more focus on some tweener characters (like a former gangbanger, and a retired luchadore) who end up fighting in the war against the vampires (really in the service of other, less aggressive vampires who have their own agenda that runs contrary to wiping out all human life on Earth). What I can still confirm is that it’s a nice, zippy brain-candy read after the Victorian formalities of Mary Shelley.

I haven’t watched any more movies since Drag Me To Hell, but I did get an unexpected infusion into the Spooktoberfest smorgasbord over the weekend when my wife announced that she really wanted to get back to our old Buffy the Vampire Slayer Re-Watch Project. The coinciding birth of our daughter and beginning of baseball season had put Buffy way on the backmost burner since there’s almost always a ballgame on in the evenings and those are much easier to watch half-distractedly while dealing with frequent diaper changes and spitting up and walking/rocking/lullabying and so on. But the little girl is sleeping through much of the evening and night these days and the AL East is entirely in off-season mode now, so a return to Sunnydale was in fact well in order.

We had left off previously with four episodes left to go in Season 2, which is really the first full proper season of the series and the bar-setting example of building to a big finish. Or so I thought after having seen the shows once. On second viewing, it’s a slightly strange quartet to bring things to a close. Spoilers follow, arguably some of the biggest spoilers one can possibly give for BTVS as a whole.

First is “I Only Have Eyes For You” which I remembered absolutely loving the first time through and I had been looking forward to enjoying again. It did not disappoint! At heart it’s a ghost story in which malevolent spirits keep possessing people at the high school and re-enacting a murder-suicide, the result of a 1950’s era forbidden affair between a male student and a female teacher. The boy did the shootings, and Buffy’s outraged on behalf of the teacher, because Buffy’s in a very bad place with regards to her former lover, now evil arch-enemy Angel. Arguably, though, Buffy’s sympathies should have been with the boy, because he was the younger and more inexperienced one (just as Buffy was compared to Angel) and he was the one suffering his first real heartbreak with more pain than his adolescent mind could handle. All of which gets brilliantly underscored when Angel shows up at the high school just to torment Buffy while Buffy is trying to exorcise the ghosts, and the two restless spirits possess Angel and Buffy in the age-appropriate but gender-reversed roles, and the dialogue that’s been repeated over and over again takes on new meaning in how perfectly it mirrors what Buffy and Angel have been going through all season. And then it turns out that particular possession arrangement is the only way the ghosts could ever have found peace because Buffy shoots Angel but Angel doesn’t die (or was already dead, you know, same diff) and the teacher spirit in Angel is able to reach out to the student spirit in Buffy post-murder and achieve some closure. A neat trick, which not coincidentally foreshadows the fact that in three more episodes Buffy is going to have to really, truly kill Angel. But I get ahead of myself.

Also, the episode proves a point which I have long believed, which is this: if you take any song which is about deep, soul-stirring, all-consuming love, and use it to soundtrack the actions of someone who is unhealthily obsessed, the song immediately becomes HELLA-CREEPY. Seriously, it’s a great 42 minutes of television which has essentially ruined the song “I Only Have eyes For You” for me forever.

But anyway, “I Only Have Eyes For You” also ends, almost as an afterthought, with Spike getting out of his wheelchair! Pieces are moving into place for the endgame in what is very clearly a not-at-all made up as it goes along manner. Angel feels burned by the possession and decides it’s time to make a big move and stop toying with Buffy. But before we get to the final showdown …

We get a weird episode which is 99% padding between the epicness of “I Only Have Eyes For You” and the two-part finale “Becoming”. I don’t even remember the title of that intervening episode and I’m not going to Wikipedia it either (so there). It’s the one about how the members of the Sunnydale swim team are dropping like flies and at first it seems they are being targeted by fish-man monsters but then it turns out they are molting into fish-man monsters, and it’s all very silly and would not have been out of place in the early going of season one. There’s an almost superfluous scene where Angel shows up and is going to eat one of the swimmers, but gags on the mutated blood and buggers off – just to remind us, hey, Angel’s still around and up to no good. In the end the coach is the bad guy who was mutating his players by adding experimental Russian chemicals to the steam room intake pipes, and I believe there is a strong implication that he gets raped to death by the fish-man monsters at the end. Very bizarre.

And as I said, really it’s just delaying the big no-holds-barred match to close the season. “I Only Have Eyes For You” was even better the second time around for me because I knew how the episode ended and I was able to pick up and appreciate the (fairly blatant, in hindsight) clues throughout the episode which give the climax its power. By the same token, “Becoming” was even better now that I know where exactly the entire series is headed. So many seeds get planted in these episodes which bear fruit later on! Principle Snyder expels Buffy and then makes a phone call to the Mayor (hello, Season 3 Big Bad); Willow insists on trying a dark magic spell which may be too powerful for her (ditto, Season 6 Big Bad). Kendra the Vampire Slayer shows up, and gets killed by Dru, which makes way for Faith to arrive next season as well. Angel gets his soul back, dies and goes to hell! (He gets better on the latter two counts, and thus his own spin-off series becomes possible.) Buffy’s mom finds out she’s a slayer! (which, ok, doesn’t set major plots in motion, but changes the dynamic going forward a bit) And they do all this in less than an hour and a half total, while they re-tell/retcon Buffy’s origin, and also fill in a lot of Angel’s origin, too.

And then there’s Spike. He approaches Buffy and offers to make a deal with her: he’ll backstab Angel, increasing Buffy’s odds of survival, as long as Buffy lets him and Dru leave town never to bother her again. Spike’s been wanting to give Angel his comeuppance for a while anyway and has the element of surprise because everyone thinks he’s an invalid, Buffy needs all the help she can get and is really more concerned about forestalling the End of the World, and they make a tentative truce. (To be fair, it’s not a done deal until after Spike convinces her that he wants Angel to fail at Ending the World because “I like this world. It’s got … dog racing.”) In one scene they basically lay the groundwork for Spike working more and more with Buffy than against her in the future, and set up the relationship dynamic between Spike and Buffy that basically blossoms into one of the best things about the entire run of the show. All of which went over my head the first time I watched it but was downright impressive in how organically it works as an opening salvo when considering the big picture.

So Buffy saves the world, but loses Angel, and has already been expelled from school and kicked out of her house, so she runs away, fade to credits with a Sarah McLachlan song to play us out. (Oh, ‘90’s, don’t ever change. Not that you can, at this point, I guess.) Good times! I’m hoping we can keep the momentum going with the project and dive into Season 3 sooner than later. I’ve already warned my wife that when we do make it to about the 3 / 4 point of the next season, I will have no choice but to go ahead and buy the complete series box set of Angel, because that was either the primary or secondary reason for embarking on the project in the first place (it trades places with “because Buffy is good enough to warrant a complete re-watch” depending on how I’m feeling, and right now, all punchdrunk on foreshadowing and long-game storytelling, that might be in the lead): we’ve barely seen any of Angel, and I want to watch it the first time interwoven with the concurrent seasons of Buffy the way broadcast tv intended, so Angel Season 1 alongside Buffy Season 4, Angel S2 and Buffy S5, etc. But clearly we won’t get there by the end of October. Perhaps a snowday marathon will be in order this winter …

Write-offs

2011-10-18T15:22:00.003-04:00

As I mentioned yesterday, I had an office breakfast social this morning, which was scheduled for 9 a.m. I got into the office around 7:30, as usual, with several sleeves of grocery store bagels as my contribution, and I hung around in my cubicle until 8:45 or so and then wandered over to the conference room to lay out my portion of the buffet. As you can imagine I didn’t get much done in the lead-up hour and change beyond checking my e-mail to make sure there weren’t any web-app servers violently melting down at the moment. The breakfast was scheduled for 9 a.m. – 11 a.m. but I’m reasonably sure that was to account for latecomers and folks who couldn’t tear themselves away from their desks at the exact start time. I was out of there by 10. And thus I began my slow ramping up of mental activity to begin my work day, a few hours behind the normal schedule … and then we had an unannounced building-wide fire drill. That ate up another hour, and after that, I realized the day was pretty much a wash.

Which was just as well because I was absolutely torpidly overstuffed with food when I escaped from the breakfast. This is something about modern office life I have yet to figure out despite my many tours of duty through the various levels of the Big Gray. When you go to a potluck the general rule, as I understand it, seems to be that you bring enough of your foodstuff contribution for everyone. That works well if, say, four young couples are going to have a potluck dinner together. The host makes enough burgers for everyone, another couple brings enough potato salad for everyone, another brings two bottles of wine and another brings a pie sliced into eighths. Simple enough. But this approach is not, as they say, scalable. There were something like 40 people potentially attending the breakfast social at my office, and it looked as though every attendee brought enough food for everyone else. However, in practice, no one is going to put 40 helpings of assorted foodstuffs on their plate (or even on three plates ALTHOUGH I DANG WELL TRIED). I don’t know if anyone has ever devised a logarithm for these kinds of scenarios but our national productivity desperately needs one, especially as we are about to head into the holiday season when potlucks and other work functions abound. I would hate for all those food comas resulting from double-dipping into the donuts to result in a dreaded double-dip recession.

Anyway, speaking of torpor and sluggishness and things which are pretty much a wash, that’s as good a segue as any into the sports scene. I haven’t posted about baseball in a while because I was planning on saving up for the World Series. My wife asked me, shortly after the Yankees were eliminated, if I would thereafter be rooting for the Tigers. I informed her that I would not. While I understood and respect her reasoning (the “team of destiny” school of thought, whereby if the team that beats your team runs the table and wins it all you are supposed to feel less bad about being one of their stepping stones along the way) and while I also generally enjoy complicated if-then matchup scenarios and so forth, I really just wanted to root for the Brewers in the World Series, for three reasons:

1. They’ve never been world champs (I like a feel-good story now and then, I’m not made of stone, people)
2. A team name that references beer, which is sadly underrepresented in professional (non-fictional) sports

3. T-Plush

But it was not to be! Rangers versus Cardinals bores me to tears, so I doubt I’ll be checking in on the boys of summer anymore from here on out.

Football-wise, my wife and I were both pleased to see our Steelers and Giants, respectively, win on Sunday – but of course neither team managed to cover the spread, and we usually bet with our loyalty-filled hearts in the pick’em pool, so that was kind of a wash. (My wife actually bet against the Giants, though, and it did turn out to be a nail-biter, so more power to her there.) Overall in the pick’em pool both my wife and I are doing ok but not great, with the overall season wins leader holding a lead over each of us in the high single-digits. So it’s not quite to the point where we should give up the idea of ever clawing our way up into contention, but it’s definitely getting there. (If we’re down by double-digits after Week 8 I’d say that’s pretty much a done deal.)

Sometimes the best you can do is to appraise the situation with a hearty, “Yeah, ok, let’s try this again and take it from the top tomorrow/next week/next season.” Until tomorrow, then! (When I will probably spend a lot of time talking about a tv show that aired back in 1998.)

Five by five

2011-10-17T13:08:00.001-04:00

Not very much of note going on at work this week (unless you count a potluck breakfast scheduled for tomorrow morning, which should at least be somewhat diverting) but nevertheless it should be interesting to see how it plays out. Once again I find myself in the mental mode of not quite being able to remember the last time I put in five consecutive days at the office from Monday to Friday, between the supervision of our hardwood floor installers (which now seems like an eternity ago) the more recent sick days. But this could be a full work week, if nothing unforeseen pops up. Well, 90%+ of a full work week.

I went to the dentist on Saturday because, holy wow, there’s a dentist in town that is actually open on Saturdays. And I haven’t been to the dentist since before we moved two years ago, so I was overdue. Of course, I should have realized all of the above would have a cumulative delayed-backfire kind of effect. Because it had been so long since I’d seen a dentist, of course I need some moderately time-consuming procedures done above and beyond the typical friendly cleaning. And I made the appointment something like six weeks ago, because while they are open on Saturdays as you can imagine those Saturday slots fill up rapidly. So at the end of my exam I was asked to make another appointment for the real scrape-down-the-grit work, and they didn’t have a Saturday available for months to come, so I opted for … first thing this coming Friday.

In theory if I can stay late and/or go in early a couple times this week then I should be able to come in late on Friday after my dental appointment and still have a full 40 hours to report on my timecard. In theory. But if nothing else, I’m learning not to make too many plans too far in advance these days, because the tendency for things to get forcibly rearranged at the last minute is overwhelming.

The dentist was by no means the highlight of my weekend, but has the most direct bearing on my work schedule. I’ll be revisiting the weekend’s far more enjoyable and rewarding aspects as the week goes along, interspersing them with actual breaking news as necessary (which, I’d wager, it won’t be) or just letting them fill out the usual agenda of daily topicality.

I have a job, it’s around here somewhere

2011-10-14T13:11:00.001-04:00

Another day, another dip into my dwindling pot of annual leave hours. Actually the pot is officially exhausted,a lthough if I pull some longer days next week (as I’m already doing today) I might be able to still wind up with a marginally positive balance by the next pre-pay-period recalculation. Not that it matters much to me personally, really; the choice between telling my family to suck it up when one or more of them is sick and needs some creative rescheduling and accommodation, and telling my employer to suck it up when I’m out of official leave time but need to borrow against future accrual, that’s a textbook no-brainer (assuming said textbook is written, illustrated and edited by me).

So I stayed home from work once again yesterday. This time the root cause was a virus which had been doing battle with my wife’s immune system for almost a week already, in the face of which my wife was bravely soldiering on all the same, until suddenly a new and alarming symptom reared up in the form of an all-over itch that prevented her from getting any sleep whatsoever on Wednesday night. By 4 am it was apparent to both of us that she wasn’t going to be good for much except recovering on Thursday, and as I said, for me that meant staying home was just a given. It’s a little trickier to succinctly explain to my bosses that “my wife is ill and physically couldn’t sleep last night so I need to take today off from work, but I’m fine, and there’s not much I can do for her, but she can’t handle being exhausted and under the weather and minding a three year old and a six month old, and we don’t have daycare arrangements on Thursdays because those are usually my wife’s days off …” than the usual “my kids are too sick for day care and it’s my turn to stay home with them” (or the ever-more-infrequent “I myself am sick”) but I think I got the point across.

Fortunately my two bosses occupy opposite ends of the spectrum: my contracting supervisor never had kids so all this business of daycare and childhood maladies and whatnot are a complete mystery to him and he simply trusts my judgment and discretion in managing my own schedule and workload; my government supervisor is a mother whose children are just about grown but nevertheless she remembers the early days well and completely understands. She actually stopped by my cubicle this morning to sympathize and trade war stories about the vicious cycle of kids bringing home germs that get passed round and round the household in a vector death-spiral. (So to speak.)

If nothing else, the impromptu sick day yesterday once again lent credence to my belief that if I ever won the lottery I could quit my job with no reservations because I would never, ever get bored hanging around home every day. My wife got to take things slowly and rest up, my son and I got to go to his weekly toddler activity class (half an hour of free play on mats and foam climbing obstacles, fifteen minutes of loosely structured songs and games, pretty ideal), and my daughter and I got to go to the pediatrician for her six month check-up (she’s fantastically on-schedule developmentally, has two teeth coming in and is probably going to start eating rice cereal next week, and even got an official “no current active infections” declaration of in-the-pinkness). About as run-of-the-mill as things get, and I would have no problem with an unbroken string of days like that, fantastical finances permitting.

(One random thing about the little guy’s class: the theme of the day was apples, and as we were leaving I asked the little guy if he was going to tell his mom how the class was about apples, and he asked me “Why was today about apples?” And I actually tried to answer him by explaining how in the past apples were mostly associated with the early fall because that’s when they were available, although of course he would know no such thing because we buy and eat apples at the grocery store pretty much year round. Which further led me to think (but not share aloud with the little guy) about how the class teacher had brought out a little worm-in-apple puppet and sang a song about worms in apples, despite the fact that wormy apples strike me as highly anachronistic. Maybe I’m a bit sheltered in my affluent suburban neighborhood with its massive corporate food-retailers, but it seems like the odds of my children ever seeing an actual worm in an actual apple are zero-ish at best. Which is a good thing! Yet the iconic imagery remains in the popular imagination. We have a weird culture.)

Anyway, I haven’t even gotten to the real kicker yet. I bailed on work twice this week, once for a holiday, and once for a family-caretaker personal day, and absolutely no one cared or batted an eye. As I have observed many times before, I don’t have that much to do on a regular basis at work and it’s no trouble at all to catch up on it if I drop a day here and/or there. My wife, on the other hand, has a very demanding job which is also appointment-driven, meaning no end of eyes get batted whenever she has no choice but to miss a day of work due to illness, because those things by their nature come up at the last minute and require seismic amounts of schedule-shuffling to cover an unplanned absence. And recently that (along with myriad other ridiculous-to-sublime factors) has been taking a toll on my wife and she decided to take a stand and inform her employers that she wanted the same scheduling considerations that the other senior doctors at her clinic are accorded, namely instead of working two full weekends a month she would work two Saturdays a month but only one Sunday, which is one of those seemingly small concessions which really means a lot. So a meeting was scheduled for this Monday to discuss the possibilities (yet another reason why it was fortuitous for me to take Columbus Day off, so that I could be home with the kids while my wife re-negotiated her hours) and the meeting went very well. My wife got the two things she wanted, not just the one Sunday per month arrangement but also a general feeling of being respected and appreciated by her colleagues and bosses (and rightly so, of course). Of course, if you’ll recall, my wife was pretty sick on Monday so she barely made it to that meeting. And hot on the heels of obtaining her newly liberated Sundays, she was also informed that she should come in for only half a day on Tuesday, given how some extra rest could only due her salutary good. She did manage to work a full day Wednesday, and Thursday is her off-day, part of which she dedicated to going to urgent care to make sure nothing was, as it were, urgently wrong with her vis-à-vis the itching (Good news: not measles! Bad news: not really sure what exactly it is, so tough it out and drink plenty of fluids!) and was informed she was probably fairly contagious, which was dutifully relayed back to work and they told her to go ahead and stay home today, too. To which thankfully she acquiesced. But I know it’s just killing my wife to have not just made but won the argument that she’s been a dedicated productive worker at the clinic for close the three years and deserves the minor benefit of one more Sunday to herself every month … and then proceed to show up at work that week on severely reduced hours. It’s through no fault of her own, obviously, and getting sick doesn’t retroactively make her a slacker, but nonetheless it’s not how she wanted this week to go down. Alas.

Treats and tricks

2011-10-12T14:39:00.002-04:00

We’re getting close enough to the longest, darkest nights portion of the year that the sky is only barely starting to get light when my morning train arrives in Crystal City. (And that’s when it’s not raining, this also being a pretty reliably rain-heavy time of year.) So of course I’ve been arming myself with as much entertainment as possible, because the commute may run through the dark but inside the train it is reasonably well-lit.

We’re also getting close to Halloween, obviously, and once again I’ve given over the entirety of October to the horror genre for my personal pop culture consumption. A week and a half in and so far I’ve read a comedy-sci-fi-monster mash-up novel entitled Go, Mutants! – which was basically one long game of “I see what you did there” but as I happen to be a big fan of that game, that worked out well for me – and I’m about halfway through Frankenstein. Amazingly enough I’ve never read Mary Shelley’s best-known novel before, and that particular book is doing double duty not only as a Spooktoberfest entry but also as a Classic Book I’ve Never Read, since crossing off twelve of those was one of my New Year’s Resolutions. (It will be number eight, so I’m a bit behind, but I remain optimistic about finishing the year strong.)

This time last year I was pretty much only reading books on the commute, but nowadays I’m rotating in plenty of tv and movies on DVD as well. Spooktoberfest would be an ideal time to continue working my way through Supernatural, but I seem to be a victim of my own good fortune precluding that possibility. Two of my buddies chipped in together to buy me a Blu-Ray player for my birthday, which was touching in its generosity even if it may have been motivated in part by their selfish desire to be able to talk to me about various shows and films they’d be happy to loan me but only have in Blu-Ray format themselves. To wit, one of those buddies presented me with his copies of seasons 2 and 3 of Supernatural on Blu-Ray along with the player. So since the first of the month I have, in fact, been catching up on season 2, but only at home since my portable player option remains exclusively DVD-oriented. (This has been yet another dubious silver lining in the ongoing saga of everyone in my household falling ill, except me: while my wife and kids have been taking convalescent naps, I’ve been watching the Winchester boys deal with creepy killer clowns and pacifist vampires played by Tara from Buffy. Good times.)

(Also despite, or more likely because of, how resonant any suggestion of debilitating illness might be for me right now, I have no plans to go in the direction of any plague/zombie-themed horror during Spooktoberfest. Too soon.)

So, falling back on DVDs, last week I watched the movie Drag Me To Hell which … was a moderately entertaining modern gypsy-curse tale, but it seemed a bit overstuffed with competing ideas that didn’t really add up to anything (except perhaps a running joke where Alison Lohman keeps screaming while gross stuff – blood, bugs, death-ooze, etc. – is coming at her and said gross stuff ends up in her screaming mouth.) I remembered it getting fairly good reviews, which is why I wanted to check it out. I used to love horror movies when I was younger, from classic monster riffs to z-grade gross-outs to psychological suspense and just about everything in between. But lately, like many a diversion from my youth, they’ve just kind of fallen off my radar screen. I figured with a theme-powered October and a Netflix account I still haven’t cancelled, I might reacquaint myself via more recent offerings. But either the movies have changed, or I have, or possibly (probably) both.

I’d love to exhaustively research the question, with multiple samples from 70’s, 80’s, 90’s and 00’s horror cinema, but it’s amazing how fast a month goes by. If I choose wisely, don’t miss too much work due to sick days, and generally things go according to plan, I can probably read one novel a week, Monday through Thursday, paired with one movie on Friday. Which means by the end of Spooktoberfest I would have consumed four novels and four movies. And on the one hand that’s great, and a lot more leisurely brain-candy ingestion than a lot of people can scrape out the time for. But on the other hand, I can probably name ten books and twenty movies I’d love to include in the horror marathon. It’s just that the commute-time math doesn’t work in my favor.

Around the end of the month I suppose I’ll have to give an accounting of what did and did not make the cut for the Spooktoberfest slate. Assuming the world keeps turning, there’s always October of 2012 to pick up where I left off.

Plague 2: Infectious Boogaloo

2011-10-11T14:22:00.001-04:00

So sometimes apparently “turning the corner” really just means “starting the U-turn”.

Just when the kids were seemingly back in the pink, and my wife was over a bout of conjunctivitis, along comes the flu and … well, lands squarely on my wife, pretty much. So far (knock every available square inch of wood) she is playing the human shield for the rest of us, as the kids were both healthy enough to head to daycare today and happy to do it, and I made it to work with minimal complaints. My wife managed to secure the morning off for herself, but she was planning on making a go of it in the afternoon, which I believe is a combination of her genuinely feeling better and the fact that she hates feeling sick and anything that reminds her of being sick.

This latest malady began Sunday night, when we were headed home after a pleasantly sociable evening over at the house of some friends. My wife was feeling particularly worn down so I advised her to let me drive home and worry about getting the little guy transferred from car to bed while she saw to her own needs. It was a good plan as far as it went and we followed it to the letter, but by the next morning it was undeniable that it was going to be an unpleasant sick day for my better half. Which, funny enough, turned out to be one of those good news/bad news kind of things. The good news was that even though it was a Monday, I was around to lend a hand. When we had looked ahead at the calendar some time ago we had agreed that it made sense for me to use a floating holiday on Columbus Day, so that my wife and I could spend it together (since Mondays are always her days off). So I didn’t have to feel the slightest guilt or panic about calling out from work, as I had previously cleared the holiday anyway. The bad news was, so much for our spending the day together. I did some shopping, cooked some meals, tended to the kids as best I could (still don’t quite have the hang of that lactating thing), and generally kept the house from falling down while my wife spent most of the day in bed recuperating. At least the fact that it was Columbus Day allowed us to make some good jokes about smallpox-infused blankets and whatnot, but seriously, any day where the highlight is smallpox gags is kind of a rough day.

One of these days there will be other things in my life to talk about besides who is currently sick with what and how far from recovery they are! But considering that my wife and I share a bed, our little guy loves nothing more than climbing all over us (except possibly being picked up and showering us with adorable affection) and our little girl spends most of her awake time either nursing or playing in one of our laps … I’m not really sure how any of us are going to get off this crazy carousel of contagion any time soon.

Ah, nerts

2011-10-07T13:05:00.000-04:00

As always, I realized too late that I spoke too soon. I was right about baseball season being just about over, at least. That Yankees loss was a difficult game to watch last night. Part of me, while I was watching it, was convinced that falling behind in the very first frame but by a surmountable margin and playing excruciatingly slow and incremental catch-up all night only to fall just short in the end made for the worst kind of loss. But honestly, would a different kind of loss have been any better? Would I have preferred a blowout? Or an early lead that crumbled? I suppose not. Ah well, football it is, then.

(I do have to note, while I still can, that it is still very strange to me that we are headed into week 5 of the NFL season and the Giants and Redskins are tied for the lead in the NFC East while the Cowboys and Eagles are struggling. What weird alternate universe have I stumbled into? Of course now that I’ve pointed it out I have activated the blog-jinx and the Giants’ days on top are numbered. I really should stop doing that.)

Post-baseball, amazingly, the night went further downhill because our precious little baby girl would not go to sleep on her own. Then she reversed her stomach contents a couple of times and we took her temperature to find she had a very slight fever. She finally settled down around 1 a.m. and this morning we took her temperature again, and it remained elevated, a little bit higher still, definitely over the line of normal parameters. So not only does that mean we’re still apparently a few days out from everything being back to the normal routine, but it means the mystery of how her brother could have spiked a fever while she remained hunky-dory has been solved: the bug was simply biding its time.

The good news is that we are headed into a long weekend and my government office is, as a direct result, closing early today so I can get home that much faster to relieve grandma, who was pressed into emergency childcare service via morning summons today. The little guy made it back to school for the first time in like a week and a half, so I’ll have to pick him up, too, but then hopefully we can all just settle in for some uninterrupted recovery. (And hopefully saying “hopefully” will negate anything which might be construed as an actual prediction the universe feels compelled to countermand.)

The Comeback Trail

2011-10-06T11:53:00.000-04:00

It feels as though maybe, possibly, circumstances of this uncertain universe being what they are, my household might be on the verge of turning the corner on getting back to something sort of like normal. But don’t hold me to that.

There had been a very minor glitch in the final installation of our new hardwood floors, which I think I failed to mention hereabouts. Specifically the floor in the area right in front of the dishwasher was cut in such a way that the dishwasher door could only be opened about 40 degrees, a problem which my wife solved by detaching the dishwasher’s front kickplate and setting it aside and asking me to get the workers out to our house one more time. A rep did come to the house this morning and found that, actually, the crew had simply re-installed the kickplate upside down as they finished up the job, so he attached it right side up and demonstrated that the door did in fact open and close freely, and then he went on his merry way. So the whole new floors adventure is finally, totally a done deal.

The kids also seem to be mended, as close to 100% healthy as they’re likely to get during cold and flu season (and with my inherently flawed respiratory system as a component of their genetic heritage), so we’re anticipating that they’ll both be back in daycare as of tomorrow. Not that this means a great deal one way or the other to our infant daughter, but it’ll be nice for the little guy to slot back into his customary routine.

Yesterday was my mother’s birthday, and a week from yesterday will be my very Little Bro’s birthday, thus concluding the insane stretch from early September to mid-October that encompasses both my brothers’ birthdays, my son’s, my mom’s and my own. And as much as I love my family and love birthdays, it always comes as something of a relief to get past the point of constant gift-ordering, card-sending, and well-wish responding as summer turns to fall.

My wife’s work schedule has been a bit askew, and that actually continues tonight as she has a mandatory dinner to attend. On the up side, the dinner will satisfy part of her necessary Continuing Education requirement for the year, but she worked late Tuesday and Wednesday night, is going to be gone for about four hours tonight, and will be working late tomorrow night as well. It’s rare that we go four consecutive nights without at least being able to have dinner together, and we’re grateful for that when it holds true and a little put out when an anomalous string of nights like this crops up. But, again, after this stretch we should be back to the normal schedule.

And then finally, of course, there’s the deciding Game 5 of the ALDS tonight, at which point either the Yankees will advance to the Championship round or the baseball season will effectively end for me. So it’s probably just as well that my wife has an unavoidable professional reason to be out of the house tonight, and it is a similarly good thing that the first pitch is after the kids’ bedtime (well, the little girl still has many bedtimes throughout the night, but shares one with her brother, at least) so that I can pace around the den hyperventilating on my own. One way or the other, though, there’s a new phase about to begin. Probably? It really could go either way.

An oldie but a goodie

2011-10-05T20:36:00.005-04:00

So as promised I spent the day at home with the munchkins today, and it looks like we finally may be out of the woods. The little guy was, at a minimum, feeling well enough to push against my parental "stop that right now" just to see what would happen, so that's a good sign.

Anyway, I tried to make good use of the unplanned time at home, particularly when one or both children were safely occupied or asleep. I made some decent headway on two interrelated projects: getting the scanner hooked up again, and filing a ton of statements and other papers. Said ton was perched precariously on top of the scanner, which is why those projects were interrelated; don't go thinking I was scanning mortgage bills and filing them electronically or anything ambitious like that. I just had to stuff sheets into folders in our filing cabinet, which not coincidentally is what the scanner rests upon itself.

You might recall that I was really excited about using the scanner specifically in conjunction with this blog, when I acquired it, but then of course shortly thereafter our old home PC died. Then we got a new PC, after having relocated the whole computer workspace from the old spare room/new nursery, and I just never got around to hooking up the scanner because I thought it would be a pain to dig through some other box somewhere else and find trhe drivers and whatnot. What I had failed to realize was I now have a computer made in this decade and all I had to do was connect the scanner and it basically installed itself. Sweet.

Anyway, to celebrate the resurrection of the scanner (and of course the fact that it's Wednesday) I dug out an old comic that's been on my mind lately so that I could share it with all of you. It's a Justice League issue from the summer of '84, which I bought on the newsstand at the age of nine. It hasn't been in my thoughts because of the recent "New 52!" relaunch of all of DC's titles, because other than the publisher there's not much connection. (It dates from a matter of months before the geek-touchstone Crisis on Infinite Earths storyline which happens to be the first time DC tried chucking the past and rebooting everything, and also features Supergirl, who would die a very dramatic death in COIE, which means when I was eleven or twelve I thought that this particular Justice League issue would someday be worth a lot of money since it featured one of the last Supergirl appearances EVAR. I had a lot to learn. Supergirl got a new #1 in the New 52, too. But I digress.)

Really it's just a few panels that had always been burned in my brain, and I will present a scan of them to speak for itself:

Click to super-justice-size!

As noted, there's Supergirl, talking to sorcerer-superhero Doctor Fate about how they have a million tons of leftover evil to dispose of after their most recent battle, and since they happen to be in Washington D.C. they can bypass the step where Doctor Fate constructs a pentagram-shaped vault in which to lock away the bad juju. (This despite the fact that apparently no one told the artist that in panel 3 he had basically drawn half an octagon. Details.)

Work hasn't been going that terribly lately but I have been getting more and more Pentagon-wide e-mails every day which have nothing to do with me, my job functions, etc. and it does sometimes make me wonder if the mail servers for the Pentagon's network are in fact buried undergournd along with some glowing black tumor of undiluted malevolence which has been gaining awareness since the mid-1980's. But questions like that are above my paygrade, as we say, so sadly, we may never know.

Immunity

2011-10-04T13:12:00.000-04:00

So how are the two adorable little munchkins who live at the same address as me? They are both good, and yet both not-so-good, and (as may go without saying) manage to embody those inherent contradictions in different ways.

Let’s start with the little girl, who is growing like crazy and weighed seventeen and a half pounds at the doctor’s office yesterday and if I were still in the habit of handing out blogonyms would probably be christened Armbreaker McFrillybutt as a more or less permanent measure. She has reached the stage of grabbing everything within a one-foot radius that’s not nailed down and shoving it in her mouth, and she can pretty much sit upright and unaided indefinitely (or until she lunges at something and faceplants). She is also making the first limb-flailing overtures toward crawling which means we need to start planning on serious babyproofing soon. Note: this modicum of awareness will probably not prevent us from waiting until the first time she scoots over to a floor lamp and nearly pulls it down before we actually go ahead and perform said baby-proofing.

She is also babytalk-babbling up a storm and has decided that of all the pets she likes the kitten the best (although her big brother is still far and away the apple of her eye) and between that and all the aforementioned physical mass-gaining and motor control-refining she is doing quite well indeed. On the other hand, she’s a little under the weather at the moment. Not so’s you’d notice, not during the day at any rate, but she has a persistent cough which of course gets worse when she’s horizontal. So now, after months of managing to reverse-spoil her own parents by being an excellent sleeper, she is physically unable to stay asleep through the night, as she wakes herself up hacking up phlegm and gets understandably upset about it. That’s been a bit rough, much moreso on my wife than me since this started over the weekend and has stretched (so far) into my wife’s usual day off on Monday and an impromptu day off on Tuesday.

Because on the other hand we have the little guy, who is also a constant delight in his mad dash toward getting bigger and bigger but who is also stricken with some kind of viral bug that has given him a low grade fever ever since Thursday (with spiking monets of high-grade in there too for funsies). Our daycare has pretty strict rules about kids not coming to the center while they have a fever or for 24 hours thereafter, so the little guy didn’t go to school last Friday, instead staying home with me. Nor did he go today, and because he had a fever today it looks like he won’t be going tomorrow either. He usually stays home with my wife on Thursdays, so we’re hoping this thing burns itself out between now and then and he can just get back to his normal routine on Friday. It hasn’t been that difficult for him or us from the afflicted/nursemaid perspective, honestly: there have been stretches here and there where the little guy has clearly been a little off his game, including taking a three-hour afternoon nap yesterday (after seemingly giving up the practice of napping at home for good weeks if not months ago) and a couple of nights ago informing his mother and me that he was tired and wanted to go to bed as soon as possible, which was mind-blowingly unprecedented. But once he goes down for the night, he sleeps pretty deeply, as opposed to the insomnia plaguing his sister. And for the most part he seems like his usual self and when we ask him how he feels he either says “better” (if he remembers he’s supposed to be sick) or simply “great”.

My wife took both the kids to the doctor yesterday but got a very non-committal non-diagnosis. On the one hand, that’s frustrating, but on the other hand, it’s actually good news: something very specific could be very scary, but generic “childhood crud” is a reasonably benign condition that we know from experience clears up on its own. It’s just bad luck that both our kids seem to have gotten different germs which manifest in different symptoms (the little girl has yet to spike a temperature, and the little guy hasn’t coughed once) at the exact same time.

Tomorrow will be my turn to stay home with the kids (or kid, possibly, if it seems like a good idea to drop the baby off at daycare and devote all my attention to keeping the little guy from going bonkers stir-crazy) and I will check in if at all possible. But we all know my track record on that front speaks for itself (or not, as the case may be).

37?!?!

2011-10-03T13:46:00.000-04:00

It’s true, I had a birthday over the weekend and am now 37 years of age. Not really a traditional milestone along the lifepath but nevertheless it does carry a certain sense of “OK, now. SERIOUSLY.” Maybe it’s being a mere three years away from legit point of reckoning 40, maybe it’s just me. But I do feel as though I may have crossed a line where I really don’t have as much time to put things off indefinitely. Getting and staying healthy, tending to my house and plot o’ land, figuring out what exactly I’m doing with my long-term job plans: these are things I need to get on top of before I can’t even see the top of them anymore. The weirdest part may be that this realization isn’t hitting me as a crushing thing. I’m not weeping and wailing (or even scuffing and grumbling) about how quickly the days of carefree youth went by. It’s more of a “yeah, okay, here I am, let’s figure this thing out”, which is really not so bad.

So part of that, as mentioned, has to do with work and making at least a token effort to put a little more into it in hopes of getting a little more out of it, which I’ve been attempting today as my first post-b-day week in the cubicle opens up. I’m also slightly in catch-up mode as there were one or two things I put on my Thursday status report which I expected in full good faith to get done on Friday, only to end up not going to work on Friday at all because the little guy got too sick for daycare on Thursday night (more about that tomorrow). So I’m still not quite up to full speed here. Hopefully by midweek that will have turned around.

In other words I’m a little older and still as slack as ever but maybe sort of seeing the first outlying indicators that I’ll be trying to be less slack in the somewhat near future? I think that about sums it up.

Soxenfreude

2011-09-29T07:40:00.003-04:00

Every weekday morning, after I get up and take a shower and get dressed, I head downstairs and start a pot of coffee. If I haven't prepped the machine the night before so that all I have to do is flip the On switch, then the pets mill about my feet expectantly as I take care of the priority that ranks above feeding them. (I sometimes wonder if they are curious as to where the fifth pet is, the one whose food is tiny brown granules and whose bowl I always fill first.) Then while the coffee brews I feed the animals and tie my tie and eat my breakfast bar and, if I have a little wiggle room on time, I fire up the computer and hop online to check my e-mail or the previous night's scores.

That's basically the way it went down this morning. Last night I was lying in bed at 11-something and flipping back and forth between ESPN and MASN trying to see the outcome of either the Yankees/Rays game or the O's/Red Sox game. In Tampa, they were into extra innings; in Baltimore, they were trying to finish the game after a 90-minute rain delay. I kept dozing off and jerking awake and finally I gave up and turned off the tv and passed out almost immediately. But I was curious, when I woke up, if the AL Wild Card issue had been settled or if there was a second-place tie in the East or what.

I figured the possible scenarios broke down in order from most-likely to least- as follows:

1 - The Sox held on to their slim lead over the O's and won the game. This seemed probable because I kept seeing the O's fail to capitalize on scoring opportunities late int he game. The Rays rallied to beat the Yankees, who from the middle of the game on had been resting starters and making offensive and defensive substitutions like there was a special bonus for getting all 40 players in the game for at least one out.

2 - The Sox held on to their lead, as above, but the Yankees were the ones who broke the extra innings tie and hung on to win.

3 - The Sox somehow blew the game, but so did the Rays.

4 - The Sox somehow blew the game and the Rays won.

The reason why I thought scenario 3 was more likely than scenario 4 was pure pessimism. If both the Sox and Rays lost, they would have identical records and would need to play a one-game tie-breaker to determine who got the wild card spot. Whereas if the Sox lost and the Rays won, the Sox's season would be over, full stop. The Rays would be the Wild Card, which didn't matter to me so much as seeing the Sox conclude their historic collapse in third place completely shut out of the playoffs. But because I revel in curses upon Boston, I figured the universe wasn't likely to reward such meanness.

So I checked the Yankees website and saw that the Rays had indeed walked off with a win, as I expected. Again, I could be pretty sanguine about that because the Yankees already had the AL East pennant, home field playoffs advantage, blah blah blah. On the one hand a Red Sox/Rays one game playoff could make the playoff road that much harder for the eventual wild card winner because they wouldn't get a day off, but sometimes that actually ends up energizing momentum for the team that advances, and the Yankees have to worry about the Tigers before facing the wild card anyway ... And then I saw the other headlines on the site indicating that ... Boston had lost?

People are going to bandy about the numbers 7 and 20 (the Red Sox record in September, during which they totally choked up a 9 game lead in the wild card race - and don't forget they were actually on top of the AL East outright not much earlier in August) but you also gotta love the numbers 77 and 0, which was how the Red Sox fared all season in games which they led going into the ninth inning. 77 and 1 after last night. Another fun stat to recall is that the Sox, despite being heavily favored in advance to win it all, stumbled out of the gate and opened the season 1 and 7, and if they had even managed a mediocre 3 and 4 back then we wouldn't even be having this conversation (but sports hindsight is full of "if"s, and we don't play this game on paper, do we, Jim). 7 and 20, 77 and 1, 1 and 7 - that is a lot of 7's, I should be playing the lottery or roulette or craps or something. Although of course if I did and won any money the universe would surely balance that out with the Yankees getting first-round swept, so maybe I'll keep it to myself.

It's not terribly noble but taking satisfaction from the struggles (and abject failures) of a rival is part of the insane sports fandom package sometimes. And today I'm just gonna roll with it.

Oh, also, I will try to get to a second post later today for my usual catching-up-with-the-kids, but I would be remiss if I didn't express some sincere gratitude to my wife, who dropped off our daughter at daycare yesterday in a bright orange Orioles onesie so that I would know, when I picked the kids up, that my wife was rooting for the O's to beat the Sox. I'm a lucky, lucky guy.

Weird to some, not to me

2011-09-28T13:12:00.003-04:00

I acknowledge that the posts this week have been on the short side, and I'm afraid today is going to be no exception. I don't have a 2K-word geek rant rattling around in my brain at the moment. In fact, my brain is on the partly cloudy side at best as I seem to be fighting off some kind of crud involving a cough, a sore throat, and achy fatigue, so that further explains the low-content mode of the past two days which is about to extend into today.

But to make a general concession to the pop culture theme of Wednesdays, I will relate that today I read a couple of different articles online which fed directly into my personal obsessions. One was about the re-issue of Nirvana's Nevermind. I've talked before about how Nirvana isn't my cup of tea, which should be no big deal because lots of bands aren't, except Nirvana's place in the pantheon or canon or whatever seems so wildly at odds with my distaste for them, so I really put a lot of mental energy into justifying my contrarian opinion, blah blah blah. Obviously there is no way in the world I would willingly acquire the Nevermind re-issue in any form, but by the same token I can't seem to help but click on every link I see that talks about it. I'm forever trying to understand my own inverse obsession with Kurt Cobain's musical legacy. The article didn't really move that along very much, but who knows, maybe some day it'll be one more tile in a mental mosaic that makes some kind of sense.

The other article was about The Cambridge History of the American Novel and some of the predictable controversy between traditionalists and non-traditionalists about What It All Means. I thought to myself, "That there sounds like a book I need," and of course the article itself linked to the book's Amazon page and I promptly clicked over and added the book to my Wish List, only noticing after that the book retails for $185. (But can be yours at Amazon for $157.37!) It is also 1272 pages long, yes that is a four-digit number not a typo. But as I said, I noticed these things. I didn't freak out about them or really find them all that strange, and they didn't make me reconsider for a moment the Wish List status I had just bestowed on such a big whomping pile of dead trees. I still think it sounds like a book I need, albeit one which might finally convince me to invest in an e-reader. (Except it's not available in that format right now. So there you go.)

Work stoppage

2011-09-27T12:13:00.002-04:00

Yesterday was supposed to be the end of our long floor-replacement saga, the idea being that after ripping up the old hardwood in the area that had been soaked the most by our dishwasher leak, and giving the subflooring beneath a good four days and change to dry out more fully, the area would be in good enough shape to finish the installation of the new hardwood. So the workmen showed up (at about 10:15 after we had been told to expect them between 8 and 10, and I honestly can’t figure out if “missing a two-hour window” is pretty terrible or if “only fifteen minutes late” is pretty good) and started testing the moisture levels of the plywood. My wife was the one home yesterday to meet them, so I am getting this second-hand, but apparently the subfloor was “still 1% too damp” to properly finish the job. I get where that single point comes from, since the little electronic analyzer does measure things on a percentile scale of overall water content which presumably goes from bone-dry zero to 100% pool of liquid, but I was still a little surprised to hear it expressed so precisely. When I saw the device myself last Tuesday, I thought that at best it could give readings at about +/- 5% accuracy. I don’t know, maybe the little stack of LED bars that go from green to yellow to red along the percentile scale were oscillating uncertainly between the last green light and the first yellow, and that translates to “still 1% too damp”. And to be honest, being exactly that close and yet so far just seems like par for the course as far as our house is concerned.

So my wife told the workmen they could come back Thursday, and she cranked down the AC to try to take that much more humidity out of the air and hopefully help things along that much more. In theory, we should finally have a non-hazardous walking surface from wall-to-wall in our kitchen just a couple of days from now. But I wouldn’t want to bank on it prematurely.

Meanwhile, one week later and I have yet to return to the task of re-tiling our basement ceiling, and I’m not entirely sure when I’ll have the opportunity to do so, either. I’m trying to remain optimistic that between now and then I won’t forget everything I figured out to transform the task from something impossible to something merely onerous. And of course when I get that whole project completed, there’s a joy-of-homeownership-reinforcing list as long as my arm of things to do next … but at least most of those don’t involve sticking my head into the innards of the house itself and/or creating massive amounts of crumbled ceiling tile particles and dust, so maybe I can run through those later tasks fairly quickly by enlisting two trusty helpers in the persons of my children. (Kidding.) (Mostly.)

Yay, sports

2011-09-26T10:43:00.002-04:00

I’m staring down the barrel of a fully-loaded, five-day work week, and I once again have a non-negligible amount of actual work that I’m expected to do therein, but otherwise, really, there’s not much to report from the Big Gray …

This past weekend was quiet, too, with my wife working and me holding down the fort, but at least there was nothing to complain about in terms of the sporting diversions offered up along the way. The Michigan Wolverines won (and are now 4-0), the NY Giants and the Steelers both won, and were both on tv (and are both now 2-1), the Yankees took 2 out of 3 from the Red Sox (pretty much solidifying home field advantage through the playoffs for the Yanks and keeping the Sox in Circling The Drain mode with Tampa Bay making a charge for the wild card to keep Boston out of the post-season altogether, I dare to dream) – and the silver linings of the Yankees blowing the sweep in the 14th inning of the doubleheader’s game 2 late last night are as follows:

1, I was up anyway watching the Steelers/Colts game which surprisingly came down to the final drive
2, If the Yankees had swept the sports weekend would have been just about perfect, which would put undue pressure on the Monday Night Football game to somehow allow for both the Cowboys and the Redskins to lose in order to keep the streak alive

I suppose I should also mention that after two strong weeks in the football pick’em pool which had me near the top of the heap and well-positioned to make a serious attempt at winning the season champ prize, Week 3 officially blew up in my face. Depending on how tonight goes, I could end up with a paltry 6-10 this go-round, which is pretty dreadful. But I ain’t mad or nothing. It’s just a game about a game at this point.

Co-located disasters

2011-09-22T12:16:00.001-04:00

Aaaaaaand we’re back, to the blog which I really should have named Online Yammering I Do When I’m Bored At Work because, man, if I stay home for a couple days, ain’t no updating going on here.

I skipped out on work Tuesday and Wednesday because of the installation of new hardwood floors, which required physical presence of a homeowner to let the workmen in (primarily) and keep an eye on them around our stuff (distantly secondarily – I’m just not that paranoid). Skipping work on Tuesday also allowed me to get up in the morning and get cracking immediately on moving “everything light enough to be picked up by one person” off the floor and out of the living room, dining room and kitchen, before the workmen arrived, instead of messing with stuff like getting dressed in work clothes and catching a train and whatnot. Then, once the installers arrived, I was able to retreat to the basement where I had work of my own to do, namely replacing the drop-ceiling tiles. Only a couple of them were damaged by the leaking water from the dishwasher directly above, but all of the drop tiles were old and cheap so it seemed like a good idea to do one massive sweep, clear and replace operation.

Thus the stage was set for two comparable yet contrasting jobs to unfold literally within inches of each other on separate floors of the house. Above, professionals doing skilled work which would end up having a transformative upgrading effect; below, a DIY gig which would (theoretically) end up being subtle at best, with things looking more or less the way they did before. And as the guy on the DIY end, I gotta say, those are my least favorite kind of jobs. I don’t mind maintaining a house, I don’t mind physically demanding or tedious labor, but dagnabbit when I finish I want to be able to show off what I’ve done and say “Look, look what I did, look how impressive that is!”

Not only was I bound to be disappointed in that regard with the swapping of old white textured ceiling drop tiles for new slightly sturdier white textured ceiling drop tiles, but it turned out to be physically and mentally grueling work out of all proportion with reason. To condense a very frustrating and long couple of days’ worth of lessons learned, here’s the deal: the drop ceiling frame in the basement was installed right up against the crossbeams beneath the main floor of the house. So there’s no clearance above the frame, and no space in which to insert a solid drop tile upward at an angle along the diagonal before straightening it and settling it into place. This was no big deal when the tiles were flexible foam with vinyl surface and could just be curved to fit between the frames and then uncurved to lay flat in place. This was an almost insurmountable deal when trying to install sturdier, rigid tiles, as I was. There was much cursing, which made me glad that we sent the kids to daycare while my wife was at work and I was playing fixer-upper. Eventually I figured out some ways to loosen the drop ceiling frame just enough to create maybe two inches of clearance to play around in, accompanied by much grunting and straining (sounds more fun than it is). Which didn’t solve the problem of the many weird corners and A/C vents and suspended fluorescent light fixtures I had to work around, which again is not hard with soft tiles but a royal pain with rigid ones …

Meanwhile at least someone else was doing to genuinely harder work of repairing our floors, but that ended up being a mixed bag as well. The crew leader was doing his job by the book and testing the plywood underflooring as they went along to make sure it was install-ready, but when he got to the end of the kitchen where the leak originated he found that it was not, in fact, install-ready; despite the days during which we tolerated all that water amelioration equipment, the subfloor had never completely dried out. So they ripped out a lot of old floor and installed a lot of new floor on Tuesday, then they came back on Wednesday and installed a little more new and ripped out the rest of the old, so that they could leave the underflooring exposed for four or five more days before finally putting in new floor in that part of the kitchen. Thus for the next few days we are living with half a kitchen/dining room floor, trying to keep the little guy from wandering onto its pointy-poky debris field, and skirting around a few pieces of furniture that have been dumped in the den until they can be restored to their usual sites in that half of the kitchen.

The new floor in the living room looks great though! And by midday Monday everything should be finished, so don't let the post title fool you, nothing going on at home really qualifies as a disaster (yet). Nothing’s ever simple, though.

A couple of boring office memos

2011-09-19T13:49:00.001-04:00

1.

It often seems pointless to carp about how unresponsive and behind the times the federal government can be in terms of the digital frontier, but today has been a particularly frustrating day. The computer in my cubicle froze up this morning for no apparent reason; I mean, I was running quite a few programs simultaneously but there have been days when I’ve put more workload on the machine with no ill effects. I’m gonna go ahead and blame ‘network latency’. Also? I understand it’s not part of my official job duties to check my personal web-based e-mail from my desk, but it is a little bit disconcerting to see messages on the Gmail home page to the effect that “You are using an older version of Internet Explorer that Gmail no longer supports.” Awesome.

2.

On the other hand, long-time readers may remember that a while back I was grousing about how severely irritating my allergies had become, and how I suspected various job-environmental antagonists might be to blame, including I-66, the Metro system, my confined office space, my co-workers, and just being a working stiff instead of a millionaire gadabout in general. I never did solve the mystery, and even when I stopped using 66 and the Metro to get to work and got a brand new cubicle all to myself in the new office building, I still coughed my way through the day pretty much every Monday through Friday, which was a drag. Then a few weeks ago it occurred to me that the problems had started shortly after we moved, which was coincidentally around the same time I started working this contract gig in particular but was also a time when I was forced by new geographical circumstances to start using a different dry cleaner located in the new town. Could it be that I was allergic to their particular brand of soap, and all my shirts laundered therein, which explained why I rarely had the horking hacks on the weekends and they always came back as soon as I dressed myself for work on Monday morning? Well, long overdue, I recently switched to a different dry cleaner’s (closer to the train station than the highway/bus stop) and today is the first day I am wearing a shirt cleaned at the new place. I don’t want to jinx anything but so far, so good as far as ease of breathing goes. Will wonders never cease.