And then I found five bucks

OK, quick story about what a doofus I am.

Yesterday, shortly after I got to work, I visited the men’s room, the primary purpose of which I (correctly) estimated would take a few minutes. The secondary purpose was to continue reading the book which had been occupying my attention on the commute that morning, at least until I got to a chapter end or similarly suitable stopping point. (Reading at my desk would look like goofing off, whereas the men’s room affords a modicum of privacy.)

At one point, after both of my dual goals had been met, I set the book aside to have free use of my hands. And somehow I neglected to pick the book back up again, probably because my head was already starting to fill up with work-related tasks for the day ahead and a vague plan for managing all of them. It wasn’t until the end of the day that I even thought about the book again, as I was gathering up my things to leave. I couldn’t help but notice that the book was not sitting on my desk or tucked into my workbag, which was distressing for several reasons but foremost among them was the fact that I had used my monthly VRE pass as the bookmark in the book. Those suckers are not cheap, and since it was only the 6th of the month there was a lot of value still remaining on the ticket.

I generally wait until the last possible minute before I have to leave to catch my train, so I dashed for the men’s room and checked to see if the book was right where I vaguely remembered leaving it. It wasn’t, and with no time to look around more extensively I just headed out of the building and toward the train station. Fortunately, I have learned over the course of the past year and a half to carry a spare multi-ride ticket in my workbag, in case I ever find myself without my monthly pass. Usually that happens in the mornings rather than the evenings (if I’ve left my pass back at the house in the pocket of a different jacket or something) but at least I was able to get home yesterday evening without jumping (metaphorical) turnstiles.

When I got to work this morning I was able to look around a little more methodically for my mislaid book, but it stubbornly failed to appear anywhere. So I had to swallow my pride and explain what had happened to the office manager (so much for the privacy of the privy) and ask what the lost-and-found procedure was. Apparently, there isn’t one. But the office manager guessed that if anyone had found the book lying around unattended, they might have turned it in to one of the security officers for the floor. So I had to swallow my pride again and confess my absent-mindedness to yet another person, though I at least could avail myself of a little face-saving by inquiring about the matter via e-mail. My e-mail was answered immediately … by an Out of Office notification, as the head security officer is on leave until next Wednesday. So I had to swallow my pride YET AGAIN and forward my original statement of mental ineptitude to a third person. That e-mail was also immediately answered, but this time with a very straightforward “I have your book.” Turns out this security officer had picked up my book himself, not wanting one of the cleaning crew to assume it was abandoned like an old newspaper and just throw it away or something.

So, the story ends happily, if mortifyingly, I suppose. I imagine I’ll be a bit more attentive to my reading materials in the future.

Carrots, carrots, everywhere

Beebee the scout elf, as I’ve already reported, has been perched in various lookout spots since the beginning of the month, keeping his watchful unblinking eyes on the kids (mostly the little guy) in order to report back to Santa, a fact which my wife and I are not hesitant in the least to remind the little guy about when he’s being particularly obstinate (approx. 67% of the time). The little guy also, on a recent shopping excursion, somehow convinced us to buy him an oversized plastic candy cane filled with mini Reese’s Cups, and we acquiesced primarily with the understanding that he could have one chocolate per day, along with his bedtime story, and only if he were able to get through the rigors of the bathtime and bedtime rituals with a minimum of drama-trauma. And in addition to all that, the little guy is currently working on a sticker chart; every morning, if he gets dressed by himself (with implied minimum of d-t), he gets a sticker, and if he gets enough stickers he will get to stay up a little past his usual bedtime this Friday night and watch the animated How the Grinch Stole Christmas (on dvd, because CBS broadcast it the week after this year's super-early Thanksgiving and we totally missed it because it was November, come on, network execs, seriously).

It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year, in other words: between Santa’s naughty-or-nice list and rationing of candy and once-a-year cartoon specials, we have no shortage of incentives for the little guy to do the things he’s supposed to do right when he’s supposed to do them. And apparently we need them in triple-force, because it has been a little tough lately. I can only speculate as to how it must feel to be four years old (no picnic in and of itself), still grappling with no longer being an only child, with a little sister who is rapidly becoming more and more assertive about her own opinions, and fully aware that yet another baby sibling is on the way. And it is almost Christmas! No wonder the little guy just seems to be teetering on the edge of a total freak-out some days; if anything I should be amazed he doesn’t lose it altogether more often.

Some days I think it’s getting better, and some days I think it’s getting worse (like the evening we all got tied up in logical knots because I had defused an extreme little guy meltdown the previous night with a “calmdown story” before the bath, while still allowing for a regular bedtime story after, and now 24 hours later the little guy was expecting to get a calmdown story every single night until the end of time, and finding out it didn’t work that way just sent him into a tantrum tailspin) and many, many days it feels like it’s harder than it’s supposed to be, although in my moments of clarity I’m usually dubious as to where exactly that supposed-to originates. (I suspect it’s someplace not entirely adjacent to reality.) I do believe, in my heart of hearts, that everything’s headed in the right direction in the long run. But then I think about surviving Christmas, followed a couple months later by bringing home the new baby, followed a couple months later by school-testing for the little guy to see if he’s ready for kindergarten, followed (I’m assuming) by actual kindergarten a couple months after that, and the potential opportunities for setbacks abound. Oddly enough my saving grace may be that my wife and I will be too busy and exhausted to overthink it much at that point, and whatever will be will be.

Back when Ice was cool (Three Kings)

1001 Movies Blog Club Time! (Although I’m a bit out-of-sync with the club, as it happens. This week’s assignment is a foreign film which I had planned on skipping, then curiosity got the better of me and I did some research on what the ambiguously-titled flick was about, and now I very much want to see it, but I won’t have a chance to watch and review it for another week or so. Meanwhile, back when the little girl was home sick last month I finally tested out streaming a movie on my Kindle during her naptime, and I chose something I knew the Club had on the upcoming viewing schedule, and so here I am getting some thoughts down before I forget them, although the rest of the Club won’t weigh in until late next week. Everybody got all that?)

David O. Russell’s Three Kings is a movie I can remember wanting to watch back when it was first released, way back in 1999. But it was yet another example of something I never quite managed to get around to, crowded out by other things vying for my attention over the years. The strange thing, though, is that the movie is just as relevant (if not moreso) close to a decade and a half on from its creation.

It’s fundamentally a heist movie, set against the backdrop of the immediate aftermath of Operation Desert Storm (or, if you prefer, the First Gulf War). I was finishing up high school around the time of Desert Storm, and I remember lots of crazily contradictory things about those days. I remember how surreal it was simply to have the U.S. engaged in a major military action for the first time in my life; the World Wars and Korea and Vietnam were events from history books that other people had lived through and no more real to me than the fictional conflicts in Orwell’s 1984. I remember my grandmother fretting excessively, after having made it through Vietnam without either of her sons being drafted, that one of her grandsons (me, most likely, since I was the oldest, but possibly my cousin or even my Little Bro if things dragged out long enough) would be called to service and never make it home. I remember being devastated in the way only a bleeding heart teenage idealist can be, because I was sure that a utopian war-free future was right around the corner for my generation, having learned the lessons our parents fought for in Vietnam, and yet here we were recapitulating bad mistakes.

Of course those are all impressions from the earliest days of Desert Storm, which ended up lasting a grand total of six weeks. In my mind, the soundtrack of mid-January 1991 is dominated by a heartbreakingly earnest cover version of “Give Peace a Chance” by Yoko and Sean and a who’s who of zeitgeisty pop stars and alt-rockers. A month and a half later, Vietnam no longer haunted the U.S. military, it was simply relegated to history, and a modern victory was being celebrated, and an old Vietnam protest song was replaced on the soundtrack by Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA.”

So how brilliant is it that Russell, working with eight years’ worth of hindsight, makes sure that his opening scenes of soldiers in Iraq partying in triumph includes those soldiers not just listening to but hollering wildly and unironically along with the words of “God Bless the USA”? It took me back to the early 90’s in a hurry, that’s for sure. And it captures a lot of the feeling of those times, the sense of wonder and almost disbelief: what had we been so afraid of all those years since Vietnam? We won a whole war in 42 days, and it was easy, with enemy soldiers surrendering without a fight because we totally outclassed them (and they were underequipped and starving)! We’re the supreme global superpower! What else should we do with this newfound sense of invincibility?

And the answer, in the case of Three Kings, is to grab some Kuwaiti gold, partly because the soldiers deserve it for liberating Kuwait in the first place, partly because they deserve it for overturning decades of American malaise, and partly because the post-war landscape is almost totally lawless and no one is there to stop them. Them, in this case, consists of George Clooney, Ice Cube, Mark Wahlberg and Spike Jonze, I should mention, all of whom are excellent throughout the whole film; I especially found Wahlberg’s portrayal of a young new father who just wants to do right by his wife and baby girl compelling (but anyone who reads this blog regularly/knows me at all should not find that even slightly surprising).

Unfortunately, as I mentioned, this is a heist movie, and heist movies are almost always about how the heist goes wrong. (Ocean’s Eleven being one of the major exceptions, and given Clooney’s presence in both that would make for one fascinating double feature.) The real strength of Three Kings lies in the manner in which the heist unravels, as the soldiers get drawn into the struggles of the rebels and refugees who oppose the regime of Saddam Hussein and are in for nothing but misery, torture and death once the U.S. Army evacs out of the area and the despot has no choice but to face-savingly reassert his vicious authority over his own people. Nowadays, of course, we are several years past the ultimate fallout from the decisions made around the time of Desert Storm, including fighting another Gulf War to settle the Hussein matter with more finality. I believe we still have a ways to go before history can judge either of the Gulf Wars; all I can say from personal experience was that my Little Bro ended up joining ROTC in college and serving in Iraqi Freedom and it felt unsettlingly full-circle (which did nothing to ameliorate the fact that when W. tried in his typical way, i.e. employing his dullard’s sense of humor, to justifying going after Hussein by saying “This guy tried to kill my dad” I was furious on my own blood relation’s behalf). But the fact that Russell, before the turn of the millennium, was probing at these questions of what happened in Iraq after we won the war but left the people of Iraq to fend for themselves, is a little bit mind-blowing.

I don’t think Three Kings is a perfect movie by any means. There’s a plot complication wherein Wahlberg gets captured by Republican Guard loyalists, and tortured by someone who monologues about how he was trained by U.S. forces and then further monologues about how his own infant son was killed by Allied bombing in the earliest parts of the coalition offensive. Wahlberg mouths some platitudes about how the U.S. did what it had to do for “stability” in the region and the torturer shoves a Michael Jackson CD jewel case in Wahlberg’s mouth, scoops some oil out of barrel (conveniently labeled OIL) and pours the oil down Wahlberg’s throat while growling “Here is your stability!” So that’s a bit heavy-handed and on the nose with the symbolism of cultural exports and fossil fuels and all, hilarious but I’m assuming unintentionally so. Also, the movie basically has a happy ending; one of the soldiers dies (which is all but demanded by the premise) but the others get honorably discharged after helping the refugees escape over the border, and the epilogue shows them enjoying happy lives back home in the states. It’s honestly hard to tell if the epilogue is supposed to be sincere or satirical; maybe it’s a bit of both.

Three Kings isn’t a fawning love letter to American military might, but it’s not a total condemnation, either. From start to finish, and especially during the tense standoff scene where the refugees may or may not make it out of the country, the recurring theme seems to be “U.S. soldiers will almost always do the right thing … eventually … but it often takes them right up until the very last possible moment to come through.” Not exactly “God Bless the USA” but that’s what makes Three Kings something still worth checking out today, as opposed to an embarrassingly kitschy artifact of another time.

Retroverload

This past weekend, or Sunday specifically, was quite the timewarp. The main objective of the day was getting out of the house on time to meet with our realtor by 10 a.m. at the old townhouse, which has been officially vacant since the last day of November and was going to be put on the market this week. All of those things (he cut to the chase) were successfully managed, somehow, and there was an undeniable nostalgia in heading back to the town that I called home for a solid seven years. We managed to bookend the property walkthrough with meals at a couple of our old haunts, the Dunkin Donuts in the shopping center behind our old neighborhood (where we used to obtain many a weekend breakfast), and a local deli in the same center. As we cut through the vast parking lot from the DD to the back approach to the townhouses, I made an offhand joke about how cutting through the shopping center was the route MapQuest used to default to when giving people directions to our place, which was absolutely true, and got a good belly laugh out of my wife via combination of the inherent humor and not having thought about it in ages.

The townhouse was where I lived when my wife and I got together and where we lived jointly when things got serious enough for a shared address. Its back patio was the spot where I proposed; its second bedroom was the little guy’s nursery when we brought him home from the hospital. There were a lot of sweet memories there, but those same recollections are in our hearts forever so it’s not all that difficult to let go of physical ownership (or heavily mortgaged claim) of their collective backdrop.

And the backdrop has seen better days, as you might expect after renting the place out for three years. Fortunately we didn’t find any gruesome surprises, just an above-average (if we do say so our-fastidious-selves) amount of ground-in grime and wear and tear. Not to mention the little guy’s old room repainted an in-your-face shade of puce. Ah well, the whole plan at this point is to short sell the townhouse as-is. It’s a solid piece of property in a reasonably good location listed below market value on one hand, and a bit of a fixer-upper that has to have any offer on it approved by the mortgaging bank (which could take any number of months) on the other. Hopefully it will all work out, and soon, and we’ll be left with just the pleasant mental associations, minus the monthly bleed of a superfluous house payment out of our budget. Fingers crossed!

Meanwhile, speaking of sites like MapQuest that almost nobody uses anymore, on Sunday night my wife and I put together an Evite for a holiday open house. We’ve hosted mainly intimate, informal gatherings for the past couple-few years, but we’re feeling like we’re in a good place now to handle more of a large-scale mingle once again. The funny part for me was opening up my Evite-specific address book and just kind of marveling at a snapshot of my social life circa I’m gonna say 2005 to 2007 or so. Some of the e-mail addresses belonged to boon companions with whom I still keep in touch regularly, and others were people whom I have drifted away from due to typical entropy and neglect on one or (usually) both sides. It was a lot like reading through the more heartful signatories of your senior yearbook, five or six years after you’ve graduated high school, gone to college, and more or less moved on with life; the strange part was having that experience in my late 30’s as opposed to my early 20’s. At any rate, I skipped inviting the people who had moved far away, but for a lot of the others who (I assume) still live in the area I figured there was no harm in clicking the Add icon. Sure, they may think it’s totally random to get an open house Evite from me after multiple years where I was incommunicado, but aren’t the holidays the best time for warm sentiments’ rekindling? Auld lang syne and all that? We shall see!

Festive festoonings

The building that I work in is remote from yet technically considered part of the Pentagon, much like Alaska and Hawaii are technically parts of the United States. There is a dedicated staff of security officers checking to make sure that no one gets more than a foot or so inside any of the doors without having proper identification and permission to enter. Those multiple doors include sidewalk-facing entrances on opposite sides of the building, and a side entrance that is accessible through a shops pavilion shared with a couple of other buildings connected at street level.

Of course, both the DoD building where I clock in every day and the retail space are fully decorated for Christmas by now, but it’s amusing (to me) how visibly the dividing line between the two areas manifests itself. Inside my office building, the evergreen wreaths and garlands are decked with red and white poinsettias and blue and gold ornaments, leaving absolutely no doubt as to the patriotic nature of our work. Just outside the pavilion door is a huge Christmas tree staged with presents underneath it, and the wrapping paper as well as the ornaments are all purple, green and gold (which obviously makes me think of Mardi Gras, a weird but not entirely bad thing).

The icing on the cake today is … literally icing, actually. When I went to heat up my lunch in the kitchenette’s microwave today I discovered the remains of a large (like, warehouse-store large) sheet cake: devil’s food cake, chocolate crème, chocolate buttercream frosting, and a giant American flag across the top. No explanation for its appearance was given, just a small post-it note exhorting everyone to “Pls eat!” (And under that, not kidding, the assurance “Good for breakfast!” indicating someone had dumped it on one of the eat-in tables first thing in the morning.)

So that’s life in the Big Gray-But-With-Lots-Of-Colorful-Seasonal-Accessories today. I am trying to get ahead on various work assignments today so that I will have plenty of time to babble about non-work topics later this week. So far so good, assuming I get back to it right now.

The Week in Queen (5)

I grew up around vinyl records; my dad had a fairly good-sized collection he had accumulated through the years, lots of Beatles, Stones, the Who, Zeppelin, Jefferson Starship, Cat Stevens, the original Star Wars soundtrack … and those are just the ones that stand out in my mind. But the very first vinyl LP I ever owned was Chipmunk Punk. I was six years old, it was a gift, and I loved it. You may suspect this is a delusional false memory of childhood, retrofitted with my wacky pop culture sensibilities, but it was an actual thing:

The name of the album was a bit of a misnomer, though, especially as viewed through the retrospectoscope. The cover songs peformed by Alvin, Simon and Theodore were by such notable punk rockers as Linda Ronstadt, Billy Joel and Tom Petty. There were also versions of songs by The Cars, Blondie, multiple tracks originally recorded by The Knack, and “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” credited to one F. Mercury. Really, it was just a quickie cash-in on songs with available rights that were popular in 1980. “New wave” probably would have been a more apt label (though still not exactly right) but there’s always been a fair amount of both continuity and confusion between those two genres, and at the dawn of the 80’s they were indistinguishable. Plus, admittedly, “Chipmunk Punk” just has a nice ring to it.

If we zero in on the Queen track (which of course is why we’re here), it seems like an odd fit either way, neither punk nor new wave; if anything “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” is a throwback rockabilly number that borders on being a novelty piece. And Queen isn’t exactly a punk band, either. Defining labels is already a mug’s game at best, but I do believe that certain hallmarks of punk rock are essential, including the stripped down, rough-around-edges DIY sound that often resulted from the bands being far more interested in self-expression than technical proficiency. And since I’ve already staked out my opinion-turf on Queen being musically exacting in every way, they’re pretty much the opposite of a punk band, QED.

Most people (and Wikipedia) simply refer to Queen as a rock band, and rightly so since over the past five or six decades the concept of rock has evolved to be pretty all-encompassing. I have my own fair share of bands who are easier to pigeonhole amongst my favorites (glam metal and party rockers and third wave ska and whatnot) but I happily acknowledge that good bands feel the creative freedom and possess the creative chops to dabble in multiple genres. And the truly great don’t just dabble, but approach each song as a brand new starting point. There are disco-inflected Queen songs, operatic Queen songs, arena rocking Queen songs, and Queen songs that defy classification. Queen’s legacy isn’t so much how they shaped the direction of one particular approach to rock music (unless that approach is “pure bombastic awesome”); it’s much more self-contained, and maybe that’s why they continue to stand the test of time.

And I don’t think it’s just me who thinks that. One of my favorite comic novels is Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. Pratchett is brilliant and Gaiman is one of my personal heroes, and their collaboration on Good Omens is another good candidate for my hypothetical Required Reading list. It’s an absurd farce that manages to dig into faith and fate while also throwing in tons of surreal gags about our ridiculous modern world. One such running joke begins thusly:

"Admittedly he was listening to a Best of Queen tape, but no conclusions should be drawn from this because all tapes left in a car for more than about a fortnight metamorphose into Best of Queen albums."

Which simultaneously proves two of my points! First, that Queen’s music is ubiquitous, true in 1990 when Good Omens was published and true today. And second, that any genre of music is only two weeks of ripening away from sounding a lot like a Mercury/May jam.

And this is the week that was in Queen, for the final week of Movember!

Monday, 7:15 pm: "Bohemian Rhapsody" on Big 100 FM while putting the little girl down to sleep.

Tuesday, 5:00 am: "Under Pressure" on ??? right before I hit snooze on the alarm clock. I was so dead to the world that my subsequent attempt to hit snooze resulted in a hot mess of button mashing and inadvertent dial turning. I don't know what station my radio alarm was on before (I just need a burst of noise to wake me up) and I certainly don't know now that I can't refer to the tuner band. But I definitely recognized the bass line for the couple of seconds I came in contact with it, so I'm counting it.

Tuesday, 6:30 pm: "We Will Rock You/We Are the Champions" on Big 100 FM, followed immediately by "Crazy Little Thing Called Love". Twofer Tuesday strikes again!

Wednesday: Queen-free.

Thursday, 6:25 pm: "Under Pressure" on SiriusXM's 1st Wave station, during a little downtime between feeding the kids and getting the little girl into the bath.

Friday, 6:55 pm: "Bohemian Rhapsody" on Big 100 FM as the little girl was being put down for the night.

Saturday: Queen-free.

Sunday, 1:55 pm: "Fat Bottomed Girls" on Big 100 FM, in the car as we were leaving lunch out with some friends.

Sunday, 4:25 pm: "Another One Bites the Dust" on 102.7 Jack FM in the car as I was heading home from Costco.

But, wait! I hear you say. Movember was over as of Friday, so what am I doing chronicling encounters with Freddie Mercury's discography into December? I do love running a concept into the ground and then some, and I still have a few more random Queen-related essays in me, so this feature is going to keep going a bit longer. See you next Sunday!

Saturday Grab Bag Elf on the Shelf

The pixie-snitch is back! The Elf on the Shelf arrived late last night, kicking off the month of December proper instead of lollygagging along a week or so late. We just might get the hang of this whole organize-Christmas-for-the-kids-on-schedule thing yet.

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Tangentially related to my post earlier this week about The Lifespan of a Fact, which is all about the essayist as unreliable narrator, I also wanted to make a minor observation about How I Met Your Mother (which my wife and I are still watching faithfully, accompanied by near-constant vocal insistence that "we just want to know who the mother is!"). You may recall that I had some serious nits to pick with the Wedding Bride episode of HIMYM (or I can link you to it) so I feel it's only fair to admit that I've come around on that particular installment. It's not one of my favorite episodes by any stretch, but I've greatly softened my attitude towards its illogical warts.

Because what I've come to realize is that Ted is an archetypal unreliable narrator. The inherent charm of the show is that it has a framing sequence set in the year 2030 and the action set in our present is one long, extended flashback. And in theory, future-Ted is telling a true story to his kids, because he really thinks it's important that they know where they came from (in the emotional context sense, since they both seem old enough to know how babies are made). BUT, Ted's a human being, not a history-recording robot. They've made running jokes about his deliberate self-censoring of the story (substituting "eating sandwiches" for "smoking weed") and on more than one occasion future-Ted has tripped himself up, conflating events and then later saying, "Wait, that's not right". All of which provides opportunities for both comedy and moderately innovative non-linear narratives, and all of which basically announce themselves as goofs.

The Wedding Bride episode employs a much more subtle device (or so I've convinced myself) in that Ted is neither bowdlerizing nor misremembering. When he says that The Wedding Bride became one of the top-grossing films of all time, I initially cried foul because rom-coms don't do that, ever, argh. But Ted is the one telling the story, and to him, that's how it felt. He was sensitive about the raw wounds the movie rubbed salt in, and it seemed like everyone in the world was talking about the movie, going to see it multiple times like Titanic, and declaring it an instant classic. All of which is an exaggeration, but far be it for me to deny someone some poetic license to convey a subjective experience. There's no overt winking within the episode to broadcast that this is Ted inventing his own reality as he retells his life story, but I think it still falls under the same heading.

And that came up again on HIMYM this week, where the story mainly focused on one of Marshall's court cases. The upshot was that Marshall was on the side of the angels, but the opposing counsel was winning the case with raw charisma rather than the relevant facts. But in the comedic escalation, opposing counsel was doing things which are completely inadmissible in the U.S. legal system. Bad writing devoid of fact-checking? Or just artistic expression of how frustrated Marshall (and Ted by proxy as his best friend) must have been feeling? I'm choosing to believe in the latter.

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Not only did 2001: A Space Odyssey require a large time investment to watch, but I also spent quite a while doing research on it afterwards as part of my overall mental processing. Clearly after all that I needed a bit of a light and effervescent brain-cleanser, so I jumped back into Smallville season 8. And after the deliberately sparse dialogue of 2001 (and the fact that very few commentaries on the film fail to point out that characteristic) my major response to gorging on some typical mid-season episodes of my favorite fantasy teen soap guilty pleasure was: Holy Rao these kids never shut up!

Going from the understated and underexplained to the oversimplified and over-the-top was a bit whiplash inducing, but it did emphasize to me once again that the target audience for Smallville really always was children. After more than 150 episodes it gets a little difficult to roll with all the histrionic highs and lows the characters go through; it's like, come on, the show hasn't been set in high school since season 5 started, aren't Clark and Lana and all the rest ever going to emotionally grow up already? But then again, much like early comic books themselves, there seems to be a built-in assumption that the audience isn't growing up along with the actors; it's turning over, with older kids moving on and younger kids tuning in, so the emotional pitch is still solidly adolescent.

Plus I'm a big believer in the neurological theory that human brains don't finish fully developing until age 25, and everybody younger than that is technically immature. I'm at the point now where Smallville as a whole was getting a bit long in the tooth, but the characters are only supposed to have aged to about 22 or 23 (since they were 14-year-old freshmen when the show debuted) so that's within reason. Smallville ran a total of ten seasons, which means the whole Clark Kent coming of age saga wraps up right about the time he's about to turn 25. I'd love to give them credit for doing that on purpose.

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The falafel joint on my office building's block opened this week, finally. I have yet to go there for lunch, though. My wife has instilled in me a healthy respect for waiting out a grace period to make sure any new restaurant can operate successfully without a horrific food poisoning incident or somesuch. But I've also realized that part of my earlier disappointment at the failure to open was because I consider falafel a summer food, stemming directly from the association with that long-ago summer job, I guess. Warm weather can't return soon enough! (Of course I say that every winter anyway, but still.)

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And finally, since this grab bag seems so very reflective (or outright backwards-looking) let's check in with my co-worker Mr. Gregarious, whom I still see from time to time. I shared an elevator with hm and a few other people the other day, and somehow a woman riding with us casually mentioned something about how she was going through a divorce. Mr. Gregarious kindly offered to answer any questions she might have because he's gone through a few of them himself. I don't remember if I voiced some earlier suspicions that in the time since his arrival in Rosslyn (when we were supply closet co-occupants) and frequent mentions of his wife and our move to the new office building in Crystal City he had dissolved the marriage, but that seems to be (unsurprising) confirmation.

In any event, he proceeded to start doling out advice immediately anyway, but at least it was brief and to the point: "Don't be a taker. And don't be a hater." Honestly, that is good advice for all of us, in every human interaction! And so I leave you with that.