Don't Forget the Chaos

Home Improvement

2012-02-19T20:10:00.001-08:00

Homeowners uniformly understand the pain of home improvement projects. Sure, they all seem like they'll be great fun, and the house will look so much better afterward, and you'll be increasing the value of your home... then someone loses a hand on a borrowed circular saw, you make three hundred trips to Lowe's and still have the wrong drill bit, and things in general start to go downhill.

I am like most men in that I like to think of myself as a DIYer (that's a "Do It Yourself-er" for the uninitiated). What I mean is that most men like to think of themselves as someone who can handle most any task, but would rather not actually be bothered with the handling of anything more difficult than changing a light bulb (I currently have at least four burned out in our house, and will get to them when I get to them). DIY sounds great - most guys equate power tools with fire and red meat in terms of thing that elicit primal bliss. But most DIY projects are undertaken less for the masculine joy of the thing, than for the very practical reason that it's a lot cheaper to do it yourself. This is borne out historically. The very concept of being a DIY homeowner - someone who handles all but the most arduous of home improvement and maintenance tasks themselves - is a relatively new concept. Fifty years ago, it was just called being a homeowner. If you bought a house in the fifties or sixties, it was more or less understood that you had some basic mechanical proficiency and you would be taking care of your home and wouldn't need any damn professionals to fix a leaky pipe or change out a ceiling fan. Much the same with cars "back in the day." Sure, you could take your Chevy to a mechanic, but if it was for anything less than a thrown rod, you handed in your man card with the keys.

Our society has gotten more specialized, and as a result it is more than acceptable to pay someone whose time you value less than your own to do unpleasant tasks like painting your trim, putting up fences, or de-pooping your backyard if you have pets or free-range children (I kid you not, this service is now being advertised on the radio locally). It has become increasingly quaint to actually do significant manual tasks around the home yourself. There is a reason for this, as I have recently discovered. "Significant manual task" is just a fancy way of saying "hard damn work." All other things being equal, I'd rather pay someone to do that kind of stuff and spend my free time playing with my kid. Or playing Mario Cart. With my kid. Who is six months old. Shut up.

Before

Despite this recently acquired insight, the Wife and I, along with a sizable portion of our social circle, have recently completed (mostly) the single most significant home improvement project of our relatively brief home-owning life: we replaced the twenty year old carpet in our downstairs with hardwood flooring. Among other minor projects thrown into the mix just for funsies. The flooring thing has been a long time coming, but the fact that Olivia is getting closer to crawling everyday kind of forced the issue. The carpet was bad, and the fact that Auxiliary Dog had three or four dozen favorite accident spots downstairs did nothing to help matters. So it had to go.

Sans Flooring

We rolled out the padding last Friday night, after the carpet and original pad were taken up. We started the process of putting the flooring into place, but didn't get very far that night. We basically put down four rows of snap-and-lock flooring, just to get the feel for it. We were glad for that the next day. On Saturday we had a group of friends come to pitch in on the heavy lifting. With a few exceptions, actually placing the floating floor boards is a (forgive me) snap. The tongue and groove generally lock together pretty well, and you use a vinyl block and mallet to close the gaps periodically. The hard part is the constant measuring and cutting, which itself isn't so bad, except that the various tasks require you to constantly get up and down, kneel on hard surfaces, and avoid losing digits to a table saw. Over a twelve hour day, this can wear on you. I have always thought I had respect for people who do back-breaking labor for a living. I woke up Sunday sore in places I hadn't known about. Next time I will pay someone and thank him for the privilege. And yet, sore or not, the show must go on.

Thought about keeping the blue motif...

Saturday we nearly finished the installation of the floors, and I thought we were about 90% there with the whole project. We did manage to polish off the floor installation on Sunday in a matter of just a few hours. This, I thought, meant we were nearly done, with nothing left but a few hours of finishing work. Hah. Right. Finishing work is a cute little euphemism for the final 2/3 of any given project. In this case, the finishing work involved the installation of about 200 linear feet of quarter-round (shoe molding, if you prefer) and several floor transitions (thresholds or floor molding - pick you poison). The problem started with the fact that I hadn't bought any of this stuff in advance, assuming that our local home improvement warehouse would have an ample selection of everything we needed. True for the quarter-round. Not so much for the thresholds. See, being the amateur installers that we were, there were several places in our floor where the standard three-inch wide floor moldings offered by Home Depot weren't quite sufficient to cover our "creative solutions" to the more intense installation problems. We needed something wider, and it was nowhere to be found.

Table-sawing by lamplight. Brilliant.

In the meantime was the quarter-round installation. This is relatively straightforward, if a couple of assumptions hold true: (1) you are at least mildly competent with a power saw that can cut at 45 degree angles, or have a hand saw and miter box; (2) your house has straight walls; and (3) you've done everything with your install completely correct up to this point. I'd love to say one out of three ain't bad, but here I'd be lying. Needless to say I needed some guidance on this part of the project, and there was much weeping and gnashing of the teeth when it came to certain cursed corners of our home. While we are generally very happy with our house, it is obvious in a few places that this house was part of a planned development and some of the subs cut corners to move on quickly to the next house. The curved wall in our hallway wasn't all that obvious until we had to work around it. Stupid wall.

I finally found a place that sold thresholds wide enough to cover all of my half-assery. This wonderful establishment had the audacity to hold the inconvenient hours of 9-5, Monday through Friday, and be located near Williams Brice Stadium, thirty-five minutes from my house. This is only relevant because, in my frugality, I bought precisely as much threshold as I needed and promptly ruined the first piece I tried to cut. I nearly killed a friend of mine in the process, but no actual blood was spilled. I think I ended up going to this place three times, all told. And, as I've intimated, we're not really all the way done yet.

After multiple trips to every hardware store in the midlands, and a full week of working on the "finishing" work, the project is about where I said it was after the first full day of working on it - about 90% done. But this is actually 90% done as opposed to incredibly naive assessment 90% done - the downstairs is usable again, and the floors really do look fantastic. There are more nails to countersink and putty, and one last threshold to go in once the grout sets in the bathroom (one of those other "fun" projects thrown in for good measure). All in all the experience was a good one, though I do believe that weekend projects should never last beyond the weekend in which they begin. But they always do. Stupid projects.

The (more-or-less) finished product

Shortly, Beagle and Auxiliary Dog will come back from their exile to my parents house to a home that is wholly unfamiliar, and provides them with limited traction. This, by itself, should be worth every penny. I'll try and get video.

Super Bowl Edition

2012-02-06T14:24:00.000-08:00

In the spirit of ESPN's ten takeaways from last night's game, I've decided to offer up my own short list of takeaways for the common man - the man who, like me, is from somewhere other than Boston or NYC, prefers college football to the overpaid, over-praised divas of the NFL, and didn't really have a dog in the fight last night. This sub-par Bud commercial is for you.

1. The commercials really seem to be going down hill.

There were a few decent offerings. The Chevy apocalypse commercial was good fun, and the lack of any sense of humor from Ford's corporate office this week only makes the commercial seem more valid. Clint Eastwood for Chrysler was powerful in a whole different way, but the Seinfeld/Leno effort to sell cars was a forced, weak effort, as evidenced by the fact that I cannot now tell you which car company they were shilling for. The E*Trade baby made his customary appearance, which was good for a laugh, but he's getting a little long in the tooth. Time for some younger blood, perhaps.

Mostly though, the commercials were just kind of blah. I'm probably the only person in America not putting the Ferris Bueller car commercial into the elite category, but Broderick just kind of mailed it in (almost as if he called in sick...how meta). The typical beer and Pepsi ads were universally forgettable. Betty White's appearance (regrettably advertising reality television) was at least worth a laugh.

2. The halftime show was (much) better than I expected.

I heard Madonna was performing and automatically thought "meh." She's not my cup of tea on the best of days, and her best days are behind her. I thought.

I stand corrected. While her music is still not going to top my playlist, Madonna proved to me that she is still a knock-out performer capable to delivering a high quality product. The visuals were amazing, and the quality of the sound and dance was top notch. Apparently there was a "middle finger malfunction" with one of the featured artists - clearly in poor taste, but I missed it. All in all a great show. Anything would have looked good after last year's Black Eyed Peas fiasco, but Madonna took it several notches above the talent we've seen the past several years.

3. I am not as young as I used to be.

Eating my weight in junk food at a Super Bowl party used to be no problem. Now, like staying up past midnight and trying to work the next day, it's a sure way to wreck myself. Keeping a six month old up for the game and then trying to get a normal night's sleep? Also guaranteed to start your next day off wrong.

4. The Giants won.

Turns out there was a football game on last night too. This might seem obvious to some, but since the Patriots' receiver corp missed the memo, I thought it was worth reiterating.

Go the *&^% to sleep!

2012-01-30T14:30:00.000-08:00

Parenthood is amazing. The show is moderately entertaining, I'm speaking here of the real deal. Having a kid - it's awesome. Those of you faithful readers without kids are undoubtedly in the phase of life where you are surrounded by people like me, high on their own blissful cloud because of the joy that comes from having a kid.

You can't stand me.

It's okay. I've been there. I know how unbearable I am. I also know that the ability to reproduce doesn't make me any better, smarter, or faster than anyone else. God knows you just have to look around once in a while to see that being a parent doesn't automatically qualify you as #winning at life. But, all other things being equal, it's pretty awesome.

Olivia is probably in the best phase of babyhood I can imagine, though undoubtedly I will say that of every phase. Right now, she is smiling and laughing all the time, babbling nonstop in her consonant-heavy language of nonsense. Undoubtedly, if we could interpret her revelations, it would just be "42" over and over again. She is rolling over, and getting close to sitting up on her own. She loves to stand and sway and cuddle, but can't yet crawl or walk away, so she's not getting into all the stuff babies eventually get into like electrical sockets and day-trading. And she's sleeping through the night.

Correction. She was sleeping through the night. We have begun to experience the dreaded dormis interruptus (not to be confused with another genus of interruptus that flows naturally from having kids).

For about three blessed months, Olivia slept through the night. 5:30 or 6:00 wake-up calls were common enough, but any new parent will tell you that this is an amazing lie-in. Especially if we actually went to bed shortly after we put her down at 9:00 or 9:30 the night before. Oh man, those were the days.

Then something changed. We don't know what, or why, but suddenly she stopped sleeping all the way through the night. She first started waking around two or three, crying or wanting to play. We assumed, because this was about the time she was mastering rolling over, that she was waking herself up with her new mobility, and it would pass. Then she started needing to be fed in the middle of the night again. After going months without a midnight feeding. She started fighting tooth and nail against being put in her crib. Lately, she just doesn't really go down at all. She sleeps fitfully for a few hours, then yells. Another hour. Another yell. Another...and another...

I do not get the full brunt of these midnight air raids. Saintly Wife sees to her at night so I have an outside chance of functioning at work (I really am the luckiest man alive, and I know it). But even so, it is taking its toll on both of us. I'm getting paler, and sunlight really irritates me. Also, I've noticed that I'm starting to sparkle sometimes, and no longer think Stephanie Meyer was just writing to pay the rent. Something is truly off about me.

Parenthood really is awesome. But if you can get a robot nanny to get your kid through the night for the first year or so, definitely jump all over that. You'll all be better for it.

Weekend Edition: Primary Day

2012-01-21T06:17:00.000-08:00

I detest politics and political discussion, and I'm not about to use my blog as a stump for any political ideology. I have enough to be getting on with on spiritual, parenting, and geek ideologies.

But today is primary day here in South Carolina, and suffice it to say, I am not impressed with any current candidate for political office, or any current incumbent politician, which doesn't give me warm fuzzies about the immediate future of our state and country.

Despite that, I do believe voting is important. If you don't vote, you have absolutely no right to gripe about the condition of our country. I value my right to gripe, so I am voting.

Just not necessarily for anyone with a shot of winning....

Please vote.

Musings upon my imminent deterioration (happy birthday...to....me)

2012-01-19T19:43:00.000-08:00

"Thirty is just a number," he said, weeping openly into his scotch glass.

No, seriously, thirty is just a number. As ages go, it's one day older than twenty-nine.

Most of the people I thought of as "old" when I was "young" still consider thirty to be quite a youthful age.

But then, they've aged a lot since then.

If it's not clear to you yet, I've just turned thirty. Despite my rather morbid title, I really haven't been terribly bothered by the "milestone" birthday. Maybe it hasn't sunk in yet. Maybe the fact that my daughter's birthday present to me was to decide depriving me of her presence at 2 a.m. was unacceptable, and I was too tired to care about turning thirty. But the fact is, thirty really doesn't feel that much different from twenty-nine. Twenty-two? Yeah, a little different. Sixteen? Sure, lots more energy back then. Three months old? I only vaguely remember, but I'll take it as a given that there's a difference. But the subjective difference between twenty-nine and thirty is negligible.

And I find that rather odd.

See, in the back of my mind, I always sort of pictured thirty-somethings as... well... adult. Twenty-somethings are party-animals, drunks, spendthrifts, and dreamers with no real prospects. You know - college students. Thirty, though, was supposed to be the beginning of adulthood. I don't know why I assigned such significance to this number. Probably as an excuse to enjoy my twenties more. But, as stated previously, I don't really feel any different.

I don't think I expected to magically have all the answers by virtue of seniority, but back in the dark ages of my adolescence, I sort of thought that one day I'd stop having to wing it. That maybe I'd get the important stuff down. And yet, here I am. No different than I was a week ago, except that I need to shave.

By any objective measure I can think of, I'm about as adult as you can get. I've got a wife, a baby, a job, a mortgage, one and a half dogs, and Cat. I commute and listen to NPR because the rock station plays the crap today's kids listen to. And it is crap. I work behind a desk, and mostly enjoy what I do. I get excited about home improvement projects and ask for practical Christmas presents. I go to happy hours out of professional obligation, and leave by seven so I am home to see my baby girl before she has to go to bed.

And yet, most of the time, I still feel like a kid dressing up in his dad's suit. (I'm speaking metaphorically here, but as it happens my closet is about half hand-me-downs from my dad. Just FYI. That's how I roll.) I don't have all, or even a big fraction of the answers. I can't even manage most of the simple stuff on my own - stains are my nemesis, and my wife has to throw out my old underwear to keep me from wearing stuff that has worn down to nothing but elastic bands. As excited as I get about home improvement projects, I am very fortunate I have not burned down our house. Not kidding. I'm really just kind of faking it through this whole "adult" phase until I start to get a handle on things.

Thirty hasn't changed much in that regard. But I suppose not having all the answers keeps life from getting dull. Like the old proverb says, "May you live in interesting times." I know I do.

Ghost of Christmas Past

2011-12-14T06:09:00.000-08:00

Christmas is a time for making memories and, as you get older, for elevating and embellishing the older memories far beyond the quality of the original experience. Many people tend to think that Christmas used to be way better than it is today. Maybe, but I think Christmas is pretty much the same today as it has been since post-WWII - same movies (except for those starring Chevy Chase and Tim Allen), same songs (except for the one Mariah Carey sings), and let's face it, there hasn't been much innovation on the decorations front in that amount of time either. A friend recently joked that Christmas is the time of year when we try and replicate the Christmas experience of the Baby Boomers' childhood. It's kind of true - there's not much support for the idea that Christmas 100 years ago looked much like it does today. Tradition isn't much more than something you can get two generations in a row to do more than once in a lifetime.

None of that diminishes the fondness with which I hold many of my Christmas time memories. I'm just a bit of a realist and recognize that childhood memories (mine, at least) tend to get exaggerated over time. So while my fondest Christmas memories (and I think those of most people) tend to be the oldest, I really think Christmas is pretty awesome today as well.

I say all this only as an unnecessarily long preface to a few reminiscences of Christmases past. I'd like to share them in the hopes that you might have some similar experiences to share, or at least some pleasant memories of your own to enjoy.

Christmas as a kid usually meant lots of time with my grandmother. My mom's mom lived nearby, and would usually stay with us over the holidays, and keep us kids while school was out. My dad's parents lived further away, and while we usually saw them for a short visit over the holidays, I had nothing like the same degree of time spent with them. Gramma's presence, as with most grandparents, meant we were spoiled rotten. Among other things, this meant anything we wanted for breakfast was fair game. I could probably have asked for lobster thermidor and she'd have found a way to do it, but invariably I asked for nothing but french toast for breakfast for the whole of Christmas break. We also had a seemingly endless supply of "Gramma cookies" - homemade sugar cookies cut into Christmas shapes and sprinkled in red or green. For a special treat, we'd get an occasional pan of homemade cinnamon rolls which made Cinnabon look like the mass-produced, overly-sugared lumps that they truly are. Really, it's kind of no wonder I was a chubby kid. Food is awesome, and the homemade variety doubly so.

We didn't have many huge traditions. I don't recall caroling as a family, no big Christmas letters or Christmas cards with pictures of the kids in their Sunday best (I fought tooth and nail against my Sunday best on Sunday, let alone on other occasions), and we didn't have elaborate light displays on the house a la the Griswold's. We had a tree, of course, and in later years we had a small secondary fake tree set aside specifically for mine and my dad's Star Trek and Star Wars ornaments. The Death Star v. Borg Cube debate raged even then in the midst of an artificial evergreen microverse, complete with lightsaber sound effects and Spock hailing the Enterprise with "Happy Holidays" from the shuttlecraft Galileo. But I digress.

In the weeks before Christmas, it was traditional for me to take every opportunity to snoop for my gifts in every nook and cranny of our house. My parents weren't stupid, however, and either used a hiding place I couldn't access without being noticed (like the pull down attic) or kept all of our gifts at Dad's office until they were wrapped. I usually only managed to discover wrapped gifts, and wasn't quite bold enough to attempt the unwrap/rewrap game. Only once did I manage to discover what I was getting ahead of the big day, and that was through no particular cleverness on my part - an instruction manual was left out from where my parents had the foresight to test and make sure my present actually worked. Unfortunately, I made the discovery in plain view of my parents, which nearly cost me the present. Now that I am a parent myself, I finally understand what got them so upset. Not so much the spoiling of their big surprise as the sheer stupidity I showed in asking "what's this?" when the perfectly obvious answer was "it's the instruction manual to the gift you've begged and wheedled for over the past six months." They were undoubtedly furious that they had wasted so much effort over the preceding years on a high-achieving moron. If Olivia demonstrated that lack of subtlety, I'd probably ask whether she needed to be held back a grade.

At some point every year I recall hearing the Charlie Brown Christmas Special on in the background. The Grinch, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Clay Lump, and even the rather forgettable Garfield Christmas special made occasional appearances as well. I don't recall seeing any of the "classic" Christmas movies like "It's a Wonderful Life," or "Miracle on 34th Street" until I was much older, but "National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation" and "A Christmas Story" did get some occasional play. Growing up in South Carolina, Christmas very rarely meant snow, but on the few occasions where we got some December flakes we took full advantage, sticking a carrot in an 18-inch pile of dirty ice and calling it "Frosty."

We went to Christmas Eve services at church every year. I enjoyed that more than most church services as a kid because they let me, yes, me, play with fire. Well, a candle. Christmas morning usually involved me sneaking in to the living room as early as possible to spy out whatever Santa had brought (Santa's gifts were traditionally left unwrapped). There was no explicit rule about waking the parents up - just the general understanding that if you wanted to enjoy your Christmas presents at all, you would let them lie abed until the unreasonable hour of six a.m. or so. I do fondly remember the Christmas I received a Sega Genesis (I was not an SNES kid, and we can debate their relative merits in another post), which had quite kindly been hooked up for me in advance. I'm not sure how early I got up to snoop on my presents that morning, but I'm fairly confident it was in those wee hours that blur the lines between "too late" and "too early." In any event, I had not been playing terribly long when my dad came stumbling in, sleep-blind and in desperate need of coffee, five more hours sleep, or both. Rather than sending me back to bed though, he sat down, and we took turns running Sonic the Hedgehog off of cliffs.

My dad had as much talent for the Sega's three button controller as I have for the 60-button fiascos that come with modern consoles. But we had a blast. I did anyway, and he at least humored me.

There are lots of other good memories I could share - Lights at the Zoo, listening to Christmas music on the radio until you wanted to puke, the elaborate nativity scenes of some of our neighbors, and Monopoly-based brawls with cousins while visiting family out of town. This last was not so much a Christmas specific memory as a fact of every family gathering between the ages of 6-12, when someone had the clever idea to ship the Monopoly board to Jimmy Hoffa. There were some rough Christmases too, of course, like the year Gramma passed away, along with several other beloved family members. There was the Christmas Eve in college where I very nearly totaled my truck on the way home from Columbia. Still, no one was hurt, and the honey-baked ham in my floorboards was unscathed. Vehicles can be replaced, but those hams are expensive. There have been some pretty incredible Christmases in more recent years too, like five years ago when Christmas came a mere five days before the Fiancee became the Wife. That was a great year, and a great celebration.

Now come the memories we get to make as parents. Our perspective on Christmas over the next few years will undoubtedly be world's apart from the perspective Olivia will have, (for starters, our perspective is about five feet further from the ground) but I look forward to helping shape her memories and experiences of this time of year, and creating some traditions of our own.

We have already decided to nix the egg-nog gallon challenge, and I'd recommend you do the same.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Christmas - the least interesting title possible for a blog post about Christmas

2011-12-13T14:33:00.000-08:00

Saying "Christmas is my favorite time of year" in a crowded room in America is akin to saying "No way! You're a fan of eating and breathing, too!?" There are certainly grinches, scrooges, and those who object to the holiday on religious, philosophical, or moral grounds. They are wrong, of course, but they are out there, and are part of the reason why Wal-Mart greeters will generally only give you the generic "Happy Holidays" as you flee a hoard of ravening Black Friday shoppers.

Even when you love the season, it's easy to get cynical about certain aspects of it. Materialism is at a peak between Thanksgiving and New Years, and it's easy to get a little grouchy when you have to sit in traffic moving at the approximate speed of a glacier on a Saturday afternoon because everyone else lacks the good sense to Christmas shop on Amazon.com. Not that I'd know firsthand. There's also the fact that the primary message of the season tends to get lost in the "traditional" Christmas shows and movies. Christmas is fundamentally a Christian celebration that has been all but completely secularized. Yes, I am aware that before it was a Christian holiday, December 25 (more likely the 21st) was the pagan celebration of the winter solstice, later Saturnalia, that it was chosen for convenience by the first Holy Roman Emperor, and that in all probability, Jesus was born sometime around April. So? I suppose I should also acknowledge that there is only marginal biblical authority for the existence of the Easter Bunny. So what? I'm making a point here.

Despite the many aspects of the season there are to be cynical about, most people who grew up in the U.S. have pretty fond memories of Christmas (because, despite what Occupy would have us believe, the poorest U.S. Citizen is still in the 1% of the rest of the world). With a few notable exceptions, most of my own best memories of Christmas have little or nothing to do with the gifts I received. They have more to do with the people I spent the holidays with, the traditions we observed (sometimes unwillingly), and, inevitably, the food. Based on common wisdom and a complete lack of personal research, I know that the sense of smell is the most prominent memory trigger we have, so it's really know wonder we develop strong memories of Christmas and Thanksgiving, when we are surrounded by scents and tastes that we might not have any other time of the year.

As time goes on, my memories of Christmas actually seem to get stronger (probably more exaggerated), while my enjoyment of the season itself .... I suppose the best word for it is "matures." I remember as a kid experiencing this overwhelming anticipation for the day itself. Christmas Eve had me wound tighter than a guitar string. Christmas Day was an explosion of gift wrap and boxes, and flurried visits with cousins to compare loot, and finally, the inevitable crash. Not like a let-down crash, more like a kid coming down off a sugar high (which more often than not ran parallel to the Christmas adrenaline). You enjoyed your gifts and started counting down for the next year, which never seemed to come.

These days my experience of Christmas is a lot more sedate. I find myself more and more often asking for "practical" presents and finding myself overjoyed with them. Christmas doesn't seem to take anytime at all to get here, but the enjoyment of it seems to start a lot earlier - maybe because the family has grown, and our get-togethers have started spanning the entire month. The gifts are nice, but the gatherings, the food, the planning, the parties, the cards, the songs, and the general feeling of the season ... none of these have to wait for a date on the calendar. Neither do the gifts in point of fact, but the Wife still won't let me open any.

I am overjoyed that my Christmas experience will now include building traditions and memories for our little girl. I know - this year she's a touch young to actually retain anything, but it will come. I can't wait to enjoy watching her ever-growing anticipation, helping her decorate the tree, singing hymns with her at Christmas Eve services, and holding the ever-present threat of Santa over her head for her obedience and cooperation (though I draw the line at that creepy Elf on a Shelf).

I hope to share some of my best Christmas memories with you in another post in the near future, but for now I'll just say that I hope you and yours are enjoying the Christmas Season. Watch a bad clay-mation movie with a fire in your fireplace and apple cider or eggnog in your mug. Kiss your wife under the mistletoe. Put reindeer antlers on your dog and take bets on how long they last. Mostly, have a Merry Christmas.

In which I expound on parenting like I've actually got a handle on this thing...

2011-12-01T13:42:00.001-08:00

Olivia, with gas

Parenting, I've been told, is the most exhausting job you never get to retire from. I can see it.

The Wife and I have been parents (in the fully accepted, "outside baby" sense) for just over three months. Being a parent is a blast. It's also a lot of work.

Despite my expectations that having a kid is like having a dog that slowly learns to talk, kids don't get housebroken within a few weeks of bringing them home. They might, if you were allowed to crate train them, but child welfare agencies get a little touchy about things like that. Nor will the Wife comply with my wishes to "freerange" our baby. So, you've got the work of near constant diaper changing to contend with as a new parent. I mentioned in an earlier post that our daughter's bladder control is inversely proportional to the newness of the diaper. It's not as bad anymore, but she has gotten to the point where she is entertained - I'm not making this up - by immediately soiling a fresh diaper on occasion. She laughs all the way through the changing.

She has my sense of humor, and I am doomed.

Babies also cry. Some more than others. Some only with cause, while others cry for no apparent reason. Boredom, hunger, temperature, pain, anxiety, and sheer excess energy can all constitute cause, so they might as well all cry for no apparent reason. As a parent, you spend a lot of your time doing things to keep your baby from crying. Exhausting things, like holding your baby while standing up and swaying gently. Sounds easy? Try it for four hours straight. Don't have a baby? Try a ten pound flour sack, and keep in mind those don't squirm. If you don't believe you will spend a lot of time doing this, try to get a new parent to stand still for a ten minute conversation. See that unconscious sway? Yep. Muscle memory is a powerful force.

You also do lots of rather undignified things to keep your child happy (or at least quiet), like making stupid faces and singing and dancing. Well, "dancing" is a rather loose term. My daughter's current favorite form of entertainment is for me to move her feet rhythmically to a stupid little tune. She has no idea it's the song from Mos Eisley Cantina in Star Wars IV, but when she's a little older she may wonder why she has such an affinity for that scene.

Feeding your kid is a lot of work too. Mostly I get a pass on this since I lack the necessary equipment, but we've started supplementing with formula, so I get to help some of the time. The biggest challenge in bottle feeding is getting most of the food in her mouth rather than on her face, neck, bib, onesie, bunny blanky, or daddy's shirt. Oh, and don't take that thing away from her until she tells you she's done. This is usually conveyed by passing out.

Dressing a child ... I'm not sure that I can give a better description than one I've read previously so I'll just steal it. Dressing a child is like trying to get a live squid in a fishing net without any tentacles poking out. With girls I think the problem is exponentially more complicated. Little boys get onesies. Maybe overalls, or a shirt and pants combo. If you are really ambitious, you might try putting your little man in a button up and clip on bow tie, depending on the level of pretentiousness you are going for. You are not likely to put him in tights, or bloomers, or put bows in his hair. But girls can be infinitely accessorized (see above picture for illustration). They also make a game of seeing how quickly and stealthily they can ditch those accessories, with extra points for leaving a sock or headband in bizarre places. I, for instance, don't recall leaving our daughter in the pantry (it's not a walk-in, in any case), so I'm not sure how her socks wind up in the back corner.

This is only a short list of the myriad "jobs" required to maintain a baby in good working order. And, keep in mind, this is only what is required during the "easy" period between getting your baby used to being out in the real world and when they start to crawl, walk, and talk, which necessarily means crawling away from you, falling down a lot, and repeating everything you say. How you are supposed to handle a kid at that stage I suppose we will figure out when we get there. Right now, we will try and enjoy her immobility and the more-or-less-reliable six hours of sleep a night she allows us.

In exchange for all this effort you get a helpless poop-machine, who laughs at your nonsense and owns you in every sense that matters. The joys of parenthood are not logical, and they are certainly not economic, but there is an inexpressible joy that comes from watching your baby achieve the simplest, most objectively silly task, like placing a pacifier in her mouth (the wrong way around) or roll over for the first time or hold her head up unassisted and follow you with her eyes. And any father with an ounce of his twelve-year old self left in him will get sophomoric glee from hearing his baby belch with impunity, and fart like a bellows with a huge smile on that little face.

The next twenty some odd years or so are pretty well booked for me. I don't think I'd have it any other way.

Thanksgiving

2011-11-21T13:39:00.001-08:00

Food...coma....setting in...

I have not participated in the Facebook craze du jour where I list the million things I am thankful for, but actually use it as a passive-aggressive tool for complaining about my life ("I am so thankful this day is almost over", "I am grateful that I won't have to do that again for a long time!", etc). Miss the point much?

Admittedly, I think more people than not do get the point, and have probably been well served by the deliberation and introspection that comes from actually writing down something you are thankful for everyday over a period of several weeks. I just love to point out peoples flaws and foibles. I'm thankful for that opportunity you might say.

As we enter the holidays, and once again feed our children a ridiculously inaccurate historical fiction to justify feeding them ridiculously caloric and fatty foods, it is even more appropriate that I lay aside my prejudice against the herd mentality that says "I saw it on Facebook so I must do it too!" and list a few of the things for which I am thankful.

1) I am thankful that my football team will not be utterly embarrassed again this year in Atlanta. Yes, it was heartbreaking to lose the East, especially in a year that we beat every single SEC East team - unprecedented for South Carolina. And yes, we all had dreams of playing spoiler to someone's BCS title hopes in the Championship game. But honestly, with apologies to Chris Low, the East title this year isn't even a consolation prize - it's a sentence. Whether LSU wins out this weekend, or UGA has to face Alabama (or through some fluke, Arkansas), it's likely to be a one-sided affair. Possibly a brutal one. We had that experience last year. I'll be glad to watch someone else take it this year.

2) I am thankful to have no affiliation whatsoever with Penn State. I don't think this needs much explanation.

3) I am thankful that Dreft will take poop, pee, and vomit out of clothes. Most of the time.

4) I am thankful that all of NBC's attempts to reboot seventies television shows have failed quickly, giving us more time for wonderful reality television. Actually, I'm only being sarcastic about the latter part of that statement. A new Wonder Woman? Seriously? Who thought that was a good idea.

5) I am thankful that stores waited until Halloween to replace their Thanksgiving displays with tinsel, bells, and fake snow.

Between this post and my Halloween tirade, I'm sure I have firmly established my place as the Scrooge of all fall holidays. I'm fine with that. Now that it's out of the way, let me be serious and tell you a few things I really am thankful for.

1) My family. Not just an incredible wife, and an adorable, healthy baby girl, though they certainly come first to mind. Our entire family is fantastic, and as a young couple with a baby and a lot of student debt, but not enough free time to hold up a sign about it, I don't honestly know how we would make it without the love and support we get from all of them.

2) My friends. I could just as easily include all of them in the "family" category, except I'm less likely get random bags of groceries foisted upon me by my friends. It is truly amazing to have a community around you, especially when you are going through big life changes, i.e., marriages, moving, changing jobs, having kids. All of which we've experienced in the last five years. Some changes multiple times. Friends rock.

3) Beagle. And to a lesser extent Auxiliary Dog. And to a significantly lesser extent, almost not worth mentioning, Cat. Cat is pretty damn cute rubbing up against my little girl. But the first time those claws make her cry it's Project Pet for you buddy.

4) A house, a job, a car that works. And lots of books. A fireplace and a cup of coffee, and a damn fine grill on the back porch.

5) God. Biggest for last, maybe? I believe every last thing I am grateful for is ultimately an unearned blessing. Whatever worth I may have, whether the product of nature or nurture, I had absolutely no control over, so even the abilities I have that allow me to "earn" a living are a gift. My faith is a gift, my church is a gift, my salvation is absolutely a gift that I did not deserve. Perhaps this strikes you as more of a Christmas-y message. Meh. It's my list. It's what I am thankful for. And I really, really am.

Happy Halloween

2011-10-31T17:44:00.000-07:00

Briefly, I'll acknowledge how sporadic my blogging has been over the past few months. I have an infant at home now. What do you want?
If you follow this blog with enough regularity that you feel personally affronted by my inconsistency, (a) I'm flattered, and (b) you need a hobby.

Fall is a fantastic time of year. I think you really have to be an adult to fully appreciate it. As a kid, fall just means school started back really recently, and you are as far away from summer vacation as it is possible to be. As an adult, you get the schadenfreude of watching kids go off to school, while enjoying (mercifully) cooler weather, college football, pumpkin flavored everything, and the approaching food and booze filled holiday season.

This Halloween is our first as a family of three. We are spending it quietly sitting at home, watching reruns of Warehouse 13 on Netflix, while our daughter compliantly snoozes in a pack-n-play and the lights on the front porch remain definitively off - the universal bah-humbug to trick-or-treaters everywhere. See above about the snoozing baby if you are wondering why we are so decidedly unwelcoming. We did not even do a jack-o-lantern. We carved out a pumpkin with visiting family a few weeks ago, and even baked the pumpkin seeds and made a pumpkin pie with the innards. But we found out the hard way that if you carve out a pumpkin, but don't carve a face into it to let the inside dry out a bit, it tends to do something I can only describe as "putrifying" within a relatively short time.

Personally, I've always been of the mind that holidays are a state of mind and should be dragged out and enjoyed as long as possible. I'm kind of halloweened out at this point. I realize Olivia won't remember any of this October, but we took full advantage of her first Halloween to do every kitschy family oriented outing we could think of. We attended Boo at the Zoo, where hundreds of barely controlled post-toddlers rage around animal exhibits in pursuit of sugar while displaying their parents' taste in costuming (or lack thereof). We saw a lot of fellow geeks in the crowd, mostly in Star Wars paraphernalia. We went with a group of friends to a corn maze, where the corn barely came to our shoulder and the group was lead unwaveringly through the maze by someone who practically had the layout memorized. It required no active thought on my part, but we still had fun, despite not getting lost for countless hours with a two month old. We went to a friend's Halloween themed birthday party where Olivia survived her first zombie attack. And, in a sign of the holiday creep infecting even my cynical self, the weekend of Halloween saw us hosting a few friends for a pre-Thanksgiving feast. Yes, that's right. Thanksgiving in October. We had to try out some tweaked recipes thanks to Olivia's dietary restrictions, and I daresay our friends made willing guinea pigs.

I look forward to taking my daughter trick-or-treating and all that Halloween necessarily means to a walking, talking kid, but I enjoyed this October just the way it was. Hope you did as well.

Now I'm going to return to shunning Trick-or-Treaters. Happy Halloween.

Adventures in Baby Feeding

2011-10-22T09:29:00.000-07:00

Remember back before Olivia was born, when I had time to blog occasionally, and complained on my wife's behalf about all the things she had to leave out of her diet? We looked forward to the days of having an outside baby so she could go back to eating whatever she wanted.

Not so much.

Some babies don't deal well with certain foods, even when those foods are getting processed through mom and delivered as breast milk. Dairy is a big offender, but occasionally babies can't tolerate soy, wheat, eggs, and so forth, which means you have the potential as a mom who is attempting to breastfeed to have a MORE restrictive diet with an outside baby than you did when you were pregnant. This is not exactly the same as having an allergy to the offending food product. As I understand it, babies' digestive systems just can't always process proteins associated with those foods, and ideally they will begin processing them correctly as their systems' mature.

Ideally. In the meantime, the inability to process these proteins can cause inflammation in babies' intestines, which manifests as stomach pain and incredible fussiness. Personally, I think there's a good chance that a lot of you whose parents described you as "colic babies" probably had issues with something you were eating. But what do I know? I'm a lawyer, not a nutritionist.

Olivia has an intolerance for dairy protein. So we went from no soft cheese in pregnancy to no cheese, yogurt, milk, ice cream, cream based soups, most sauces at Olive Garden, and a surprising number of bread products. But dairy hasn't been the end of the story. We are currently experimenting with eliminating soy from Wife's diet, and that appears to have taken care of most of the rest of Olivia's digestive issues. Do you have any idea how many things have soy in them? Between the two intolerances we are seriously considering the cro-magnon diet where you eat nothing but unprocessed meat and produce.

The only other realistic option is going formula. There's nothing wrong with formula in my opinion except for the ludicrous expense. Especially if you have to find a formula that is neither dairy nor soy based. So, ladies, if you are expecting and looking forward to eating everything you've missed out on for the last few months.... go have some ice cream. It might be the last you have for a long time.

What I did over Fall Break

2011-10-09T09:08:00.000-07:00

I remember back in high school and college when I was too spoiled to truly appreciate all the free time I had. In my naive, spoiled point of view, Christmas break went by far too quickly, spring break wasn't long enough by a long shot, and fall break, that glorified long weekend that usually coincided with Columbus Day (a holiday for one of the most celebrated screw-ups in history) was a damn tease.

Oh, for the days when responsibility was nil, and days off were plentiful.

In adulthood, a long weekend is a precious commodity. The only way you can really replicate the type of responsibility-free time off you have as a kid is to retire. Barring that, take time off between ending one job and starting another.

And that's what I did last week.

Some of my Constant Readers already know that I have left state employment for private practice, but for those of you not in the know...I ...left state employment for private practice. That's pretty much all I have to say about that since I don't blog about work as a general rule. Mostly out of courtesy for you all - law practice isn't really that exciting.

But last week the Wife and I took Olivia on her first beach trip with some of my family. You might be questioning our sanity, taking a seven week old on an attempted vacation. You'd be right. By and large, she was great, but take a new baby out of their element and surround her with lots of new stimuli, as well as grandparents, aunts, and uncles all itching to hold her constantly, and you've got a recipe for an overstimulated baby and a destroyed schedule. As if a seven week old has an established schedule.

Nonetheless, we all enjoyed ourselves. Olivia got to visit the aquarium (which I'm sure amounted to a lot of soft colored lights to her), and put her feet in the sand and water on the beach. The latter was a bit cold, and elicited a scream or two. Olivia didn't like it either. It was a good trip and a much needed break.

Weekend Edition: Internet Memes

2011-09-25T18:48:00.000-07:00

In an effort to better educate our readers about nonsensical references to idiotic internet fads and viral videos, DFTC proudly offers some of the source material for the best of the interwebs. We will try not to bombard you with too much all at once - it might break your brain.

To begin, please enjoy a news report which started (or was at least on the front edge of) the phenomenal success of "autotuning" on Youtube.

Both the original:

And the autotuned version:

A Timely Rant about the Netflix/Qwikster Debacle.

2011-09-19T08:50:00.000-07:00

I woke up this morning to an email from the CEO of Netflix. He and I are on a first name basis, so this isn't altogether surprising. If you happen to subscribe to Netflix, you probably have the same email in your inbox right now. Whether you have taken the time to read it (or will later) is entirely up to you, but maybe I can save you the time. Here's the nutshell version of Netflix latest communication:

"We recognize that we could have handled the recent change in pricing structure better and that many of you (or perhaps we should say the few of you still left) are none-to-happy with us. We are not going to change the prices back (well, we're going to spin it like we're doing you a favor by not increasing prices yet again... at least not yet). Rambling about business justifications for splitting the two services. Oh, btw - from now on your DVD service will be called "Qwikster." The name "Netflix" will be reserved for our streaming service. There will be two separate billing items on your credit card, and two separate websites for you keep up with to manage your queues if you continue to subscribe to both services. Have a great day, and please hang in there with us as we continue turning the screws. -Reed"

Let's back up for a moment to the halcyon early days of Netflix. What a fantastic concept. DVDs by mail with postage paid return envelopes. An incredible library of entertainment delivered right to your door for what I think we could all agree was a more than fair monthly subscription. Blockbuster had no answer - it tried to play the instant gratification card, but unless you wanted a recent blockbuster (no pun intended) or a recent straight to DVD release, their brick-and-mortar stores really didn't have anything to offer. As evidenced by their nosedive into bankruptcy, the margins on their video game rentals were not enough to offset the losses Netflix caused.

As time wore on, and video rental stores became scarcer and scarcer, there was still some demand for instant video gratification - just not enough to justify the rent on a 3000 square foot store front. Enter video-on-demand services, Redbox, and eventually Netflix streaming. Coming out of the gate, Netflix streaming was something of a novelty. It was cute, really. Not a lot of offerings, but they also weren't charging customers anything for the privilege. This was probably for the best, since most people without the tech-savvy to hook their laptop to their 50 inch plasma screen aren't going to watch a two-hour movie on a Dell sitting in their lap. If they won't use the service, they won't pay a lot for it.

But slowly, Netflix was added as a bonus feature on higher end electronics - PS3s, Blu-ray players, and some dedicated devices were rolled out to allow Netflix to stream straight to your television. Business boomed, and suddenly there was a small, but noticeable charge for the feature on your monthly bill. This was to be expected. Netflix had to pay for the right to offer these movies and shows, so we needed to offset that costs.

Then came the pricing structure change. Netflix split the services altogether, increasing the overall cost to have both a physical DVD service and a streaming service. This pissed a lot of people off. Personally, I was annoyed, but I had at least seen it coming unlike many customers. This change wasn't entirely Netflix' fault - studios had finally gotten wise to how lucrative streaming could be and realized it wasn't a passing fad, so each contract renewal with content providers was costing Netflix exponentially more and more money. What was Netflix' fault was the way it was rolled out - abruptly - and the size of the increase relative to the overall subscription for those of us on the bottom tier of their customer base (who presumably make up a sizable fraction of that base).

The backlash was pretty phenomenal. Short of Gamecock football games and national elections, I can't think of any other single event that has taken over my Facebook news feed quite this way, and it was overwhelmingly negative. Lots of people talked about leaving. Some actually did. Enough, presumably, to get a half-assed email apology from the CEO today.

And what does that apology amount to? Our bad. Here, try juggling two different websites instead of one integrated service. We thought that would be more convenient for you.

Thank Netflix. I really love your service. Really, I do. And at the end of the day, it is still a pretty affordable option. But thanks to your bone-headed customer service and PR campaigns, I have to wrestle with whether or not you, and your Star Trek reruns, are worth it.

A Word About our Title

2011-09-16T09:59:00.000-07:00

I’m pretty sure I addressed this in the first iteration of DFTC (yes, I just abbreviated my own blog - can you stand the pretension? Can you?) but sharing with you the origin of our blog title is good filler, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with babies, pregnancy, or parenting, thus fulfilling a goal I set for myself when returning to blogging - to give a sh** about something other than my own tiny universe. Yes, I’m psyched about the baby, especially now that she's finally here. Yes, parenting is a big deal. Yes, nearly everyone we know is in this boat with us. But not everyone, and we at DFTC (there it is again!) care about all our Constant Readers, not just the ones that care about us back. Moreover, filler is good, as our readers will note with dismay (or apathy) that posts on this blog have fallen off of late, in rough correspondence to the weeks since Olivia has graced us with her presence. I'm sure there's no connection.

Anyhoo, as the picture in the header indicates, I stole this title from graffiti - specifically, graffiti in the garage outside my freshman dormitory.

… Did you expect more?

I could leave it there, but that would make for a pretty crappy post.

The phrase was probably scrawled by a drunken frat-guy who considered the thought deeply philosophical, but I thought it was a fairly decent motto for that year of my life. College was good to me. I had come from a high school experience that was less than ideal to the “big city” of Columbia and was busy coming into my own. Far from feeling like an outsider, as in high school, I immediately found a circle (several circles, really) of like-minded geeks. I lived with a roommate who never slept, in a room with fake vulture and a light-up reindeer named Lupus. (If you immediately heard Hugh Laurie’s voice saying “It’s never lupus,” you are in the right place my friend)

Classes were challenging, but not ridiculously so (I assiduously avoided science and engineering in favor of business classes - hence my less than taxing course load), and as a result I enjoyed a high degree of free time for wrecking the toy aisles at Wal-mart at one a.m., LAN battles on Unreal Tournament, rolling twelve sided dice (yeah, that’s right), and consuming an unreasonable amount of Waffle House. It was a chaotic time, but in the best sense of the word - unpredictable, exciting, spontaneous. I certainly can’t say it was the best time of my life - I’ve been blessed way above my pay-grade in the years since then - but it was a good year, and the writing on the wall summed it all up pretty well.

But subsequent years have also been well summed up with this phrase, in good ways and bad. (This is me getting deep, so try not to get your ankles wet.) Life is not orderly, nor is it meant to be. We forget the chaos at our own peril, since the chaos is life happening.

Or it’s just a piece of graffiti that struck my fancy. Whatever.

Requiem for my video games

2011-09-12T08:04:00.000-07:00

Hmm...I wonder if this qualifies as "fair use"...

I doubt very much that I will ever permanently put aside all of the stupid, addictive, time-wasting, mind-sucking video games I have wasted my life on over the past three decades. Childhood indoctrination is just too difficult to overcome, and, damn but it feels good to crush a Goomba after a long day. That said, my wife's patience with me sitting on my ass and asking for "just one more level" before I load the dishwasher or change our daughter's diaper is likely to wear thin in the very near future. Probably that lack of sleep thing. Whatever.

In any case, for reasons that might once have been somewhat in my control but are no longer, most of my time wasting addictions have to be largely set aside for the next ten or twenty years. Maybe only four if I can get Olivia interested in a two-player game. ("Sweetie, that is the chainsaw. It's the weakest weapon.You'll want to find a shotgun quick before Daddy snipes you from behind. M'kay pumpkin?")

It felt appropriate to pay a brief tribute to some of the greater offenders with which I have wasted a measurable fraction of my life. I should note before posting this list that, where video games (...and music...and movies....hell, pop culture in general) are concerned, I more or less stopped paying attention in the mid-2000s. There are no current-gen console games on this list. But here they are, in all their outdated splendor, starting with...

Final Fantasy VII - I could easily just say FFVII-XII, excluding XXI (monthly fee for FF? Yeah, right). VII was the first I ever played, and I've played it through several times. Arguably one of the top five RPGs of all time, VII was a soul-sucking time vacuum. How many hours did I spend breeding chocobos so I could get a golden chocobo, so I could get Knights of the Round, so I could defeat all of the Weapons, none of which actually contributed to resolving the principal storyline of the game. Damn you sidequests! And I still never fought enough battles in the early game to see Aeris final Limit Break (has anyone outside of Japan actually had the patience for that?). Between the various incarnations of Final Fantasy and the replays I've done, I'd estimate anywhere from 600 to 1000 hours of my life were stolen by Square Enix. In terms of my current profession, that's half a working year. Damn. That's just depressing.

Heroes of Might and Magic III - One, two, and three were all fantastic games. Four is better off forgotten, and I hear great things about five, but my current computer is not what one would call "fast" or "good," so I can't speak directly to the merits of the latest game, or the sixth version due out shortly. These are great strategy/tactics titles, where you accumulate resources, build castles, recruit creatures borrowed from various mythological and fantasy traditions, and try to accomplish different goals (or just kill the other guys if you aren't into the campaign games). Maps come in various sizes, and the length of any given game corresponds roughly to the size of the map. Excellent in both one player and multi-player modes. I can't even estimate the hours I have lost to this game. Probably a few hundred just waiting for Dave to finish his turn so I could whoop his ass.

Civilization - I probably lost more time to III than any of the other titles, but the Sid Meier gaming franchise is pretty solid all the way around. This is a world-building strategy game in which the player, appropriately, plays the leader of a civilization from 5000 B.C. until the modern era, or until a competing civilization wipes him from the globe. Really great game. The only real downside is the mid-game lag, where if you are not actively engaged in military conflict you are really just pressing Enter about three hundred times per turn. That, and the sheer length of any given game. Playing for an hour or two a day, a single game can take days.

Bloons 4 - Damn, dirty apes. Bloons is my modern Tetris, or Snood if you prefer. A fairly simple tower defense game where monkeys throw darts at "bloons." I don't know why the target balloons are called "bloons," but they are. This is a stupid game. I admit that. The only saving grace I can argue for it is that it isn't a Facebook game.

Unreal Tournament - Haven't actually played this in a while (again, see my lamentations regarding my current computer), but I did lose many nights in college to LAN battles on Unreal Tournament. It's a first-person shooter, much like Doom before it and Modern Warfare since, but with aliens, space age weapons, low-gravity battle arenas, and a pretty sick multi-player mode. The updated Unreal Tournament (I believe it was out in 2004...yeah, I know how out-of-date that is) added vehicles into the mix for larger boards and absolutely devastating weaponry. The Goliath was a beast. That is all.

I kind of expect by the time I have the free time to enjoy video games on a regular basis again I will (a) have other hobbies, or something more pressing to do, and (b) none of my favorite games will be easily available anymore on any platform I have access to. Much like King's Quest from the stone-age of the computer era, technology will leave these obsolete favorites in the dust. What games have cost a chunk of your life?

Teachable Moments

2011-09-06T10:45:00.000-07:00

"Turn me around. The game is on."

One of the things I have looked forward to most about being a parent is the opportunity to share my wisdom and warped perspective on the world with my young, impressionable progeny. As evidenced by previous posts, I have probably spent more time than is strictly healthy envisioning ways to turn my child (or should we be so blessed, children) into a veritable nightmare for the poor teachers she will one day be assigned to learn from. You poor, poor souls....

Even though my daughter is not yet old enough to retain any of my wise instruction, I am trying to get in the habit early of finding and utilizing “teachable moments.” The phrase “teachable moment” is a popular buzzword (buzzphrase?), which I can really only tolerate using with a healthy dose of irony and/or sarcasm. Since virtually all of my instruction to my daughter is laced with irony and/or sarcasm, I think I’m safe.

Over this Labor Day weekend, we encountered a few teachable moments. During the first quarter of the USC v. ECU game, I was able to instruct Olivia on the definition of a “piss-poor effort.” Spike TV’s Star Wars marathon allowed us to observe an “overly simplistic paradigm of good and evil.” On Sunday, we were fortunate to have a few people over to play cards, and we learned all about inside straight draws, bluffing, and throwing good money after bad. Not that there was any actual money involved. Ahem.

And my obligatory Labor Day weekend yard work and grilling allowed us to expose her to early olfactory associations: sweat, fresh cut grass, charcoal smoke, grilling meat = daddy.

The weekend was also full of teachable moments for her parents. The things I learned:
1. Nothing starts your day quite like a triple helping of spit-up in your boxer clad lap.
2. Four hours of uninterrupted sleep is a blessing beyond dreams of avarice when you have a three-week old infant.
3. There is a nexus of cuteness at which some adults will voluntarily cease all higher brain function in favor of making “squee!” noises. Mostly this effects the female of the species (not to be sexist, but it does), but there were a few males who lost all reasoning, too. In case you are wondering, the equation for this appears to be 2 human infants + 1 kitten weighing less than one pound crawling on said infants = 1 cretinous mass of adults.
4. Until daddy grows mammary glands or the baby is bottle-trained, he is nearly always the wrong person to hold her, even when she’s not actually hungry. Conversely, if she is not actually hungry, nearly anyone with boobs seems to have the ability to keep her happy.
5. Our baby’s bladder control is inversely proportional to the newness of the clean diaper. To put a finer point on it, there is a 50% chance that any given new diaper will be soaked through before we pick her up off the changing table. That’s talent.

All in all, a very instructive weekend. Hope yours was just as good.

Preseason Hype!!!

2011-08-31T12:29:00.000-07:00

I am a late convert to college football. I attended games as a kid with my uncle and cousin, but truth to tell I wasn’t terribly interested back then. It could have been that, never having played football, I didn’t completely grasp the game beyond the obvious “run the ball in that direction” object of the sport. It could have had something to do with the fact that, throughout my formative years, the South Carolina Gamecocks - very definitely “my team” despite my ambivalence about football - were downright mediocre. Sometimes terrible.

If the fact that my ten year old self was a little “meh” about a team I only saw win at home about three times total makes me a fairweather fan in your eyes, then fine, I’ll own it. My wife thinks I still am, when really I just have a self-preservation instinct. If I don’t turn off the television after Stephen Garcia’s second pick in as many possessions, my blood pressure will literally explode my head. But I digress.

The fact is, it was really grad school before I finally started following college football with anything approaching genuine interest. The Gamecocks were less mediocre by then, certainly, or at least more consistently not-terrible. But I also think the sport as a whole had become more interesting, or at least better marketed, than it was when I was a kid. The BCS, for all it’s loathe-worthy crapitude, has at least made the entire football season an incredibly lively affair. Every week matters in the national title race, which makes for compelling entertainment, even for someone like me who grew up with nothing but a great big shrug for most professional and collegiate sports.

I enjoy watching college football, and I’ve enjoyed watching the (relative) success of the Gamecocks over the past several seasons. I particularly like watching some of the Gamecocks’ recent all-stars in action: Marcus Lattimore and Alshon Jeffery most notably. These guys are phenomenal athletes, and the individual accolades they have received are certainly deserved in my humble opinion. Moreover, unlike so many college athletes, they and several other recent recruits appear to be decent human beings. Laying aside Stephen Garcia’s off-field shenanigans (and why shouldn’t we? After this off-season, how hard can we really be on a legal adult for drinking?) the current crop of Gamecocks appear to be a high calibre bunch... in the greater scheme of NCAA athletics at any rate.

All of that said, the recent article by The NY Post picking USC to win the national title is a bit of a stretch for a team with single digit post-season wins. I’m not saying it can’t happen, and I certainly would love to see it happen, but lets take this thing one goal at a time?

The pick has gotten a lot of coverage, both nationally and locally. That’s exactly what The Post wanted. If The Post (not noted for its extensive sports coverage as far as I can tell) picked Oklahoma or Alabama, who honestly would have noticed? How many extra issues would they have sold of that issue?

South Carolina makes some sense as a black horse pick. They are favored to win the SEC East this year, and the winner of the SEC (not the East per se, but hey...) has won the national title pretty consistently in the past several years. There’s just that little matter of actually winning the East. Then winning the SEC. Then winning the title. I will say that I don’t remember a time in my life where such a string of event was more likely. Which is not the same as saying it is likely.

But, then again, anyone who picked Auburn to win the title this time last year would have been laughed out of town by most supposed experts. And at this point in the season, everyone has the same record, and the same shot at the crystal football. That’s one of the joys of college football. You never know. I'm looking forward to seeing how much of the hype we can live up to.

Death Star v. Borg Cube Redux. Subtitle: Lawyers are big damn nerds

2011-08-29T08:08:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine who shall remain nameless (for his own protection) shared my original Death Star v. Borg Cube blog post with an American Bar Association listserv for lawyers in solo practice and those interested in solo practice issues (appropriately names Solesez). I found the responses to be very entertaining, and it more or less confirmed everything I've ever thought about lawyers being big damn nerds. I’ll let their points speak for themselves or this post will go on forever, but suffice it to say I agree with conclusion that the Firefly-class ship Serenity (with, at a minimum, Mal and River Tam on board) would soundly defeat both the Borg Cube and the Death Star, probably by turning them on each other. Browncoats are just too pretty to die.

I have edited the thread to protect the geeky and to save space. Specifically I deleted some of the more generic posts, and those that don’t bear on the argument at hand. Please enjoy.

Forwarded conversation
Subject: Deathstar v. Borg Cube
------------------------
From: [edited]

Date: Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 1:30 PM
To: solosez <SOLOSEZ@mail.americanbar.org>

http://dontforgetthechaos.blogspot.com/2011/07/celebrity-deathmatch-death-start-versus.html

A buddy of mine posted this on his blog and I wanted to see what this collective said about the Deathstar v. Borg Cube debate.

From:[edited]

Date: Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 1:44 PM
To: SOLOSEZ@mail.americanbar.org

Oh, Borg Cube. Setting aside his bias, I agree with his analysis.
[OMG - did I just post on ST / StW in a public place?]

-----
From: [edited]

Date: Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 2:09 PM
To: SOLOSEZ@mail.americanbar.org

Hands down. It is well established that Kirk's ship had planet busting
abilities. Picard's ship was more powerful than Kirk's. The Borg cube
was vastly more powerful than Picard's ship. Simple A > B, B > C, thus
A > C, the Borg cube is more powerful than Kirk's ship.

The Lucas contraption required a veritable planetoid to reach planet
busting power. It wouldn't stand a chance against the Roddenberry.

Unless their agents cut a deal.

----

From: [edited]

Date: Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 2:16 PM
To: SOLOSEZ@mail.americanbar.org

Resistance is Futile! Borg Cube in the first round!

----

From: [edited]

Date: Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 2:18 PM
To: SOLOSEZ@mail.americanbar.org

You know you're a geek if you read through the whole thing (and get past the
cute how I met my wife part of it).

Before reading I said "Borg - no contest."

Nanu Nanu.

----

From: [edited]

Date: Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 3:02 PM
To: SOLOSEZ@mail.americanbar.org

Oh, please, this is simply SO silly. First, I never did care for any of the
star treks after Kirk: just never saw the point behind Captian Jean Luc
Picard.

And, obviously, EITHER ONE (deathstar OR the borg thingie) wouldn't stand a
chance against a General Systems Vehicle (and that's not a Larry Niven
General Products ship, that's a Culture ship as the real geeknoscenti
recognize). Bah.

----
From: [edited]

Date: Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 3:38 PM
To: SOLOSEZ@mail.americanbar.org

Really, it's a silly question. If a rag-tag bunch of rebels with
crappy ships can take the death star how could it possibly stand up to
the Borg?

----

From: [edited]

Date: Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 3:51 PM
To: SOLOSEZ@mail.americanbar.org

An X-Wing is NOT a crappy ship! You take that back!

Besides, Data defeated the Borg ship by basically emailing them to go to
sleep via Locutus-Picard. The Borg unquestioningly started their
"regenerative cycle" triggering a power cascade blowing up the entire ship.
The collective was the weakness. If you're going to penalize the Death Star
for having an achille's heal, at least apply the standard consistently.

----
From: [edited]

Date: Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 4:01 PM
To: SOLOSEZ@mail.americanbar.org

I can't imagine the Borg wouldn't have learned the weaknesses of the Death
Star. I mean, seriously, we are talking about the Borg. Between the
in-fighting on the Death Star and the inevitable vent holes which lead to
it's downfall, I'm sure the Borg are plenty ahead of the game.

This is fun.

----

From: [edited]

Date: Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 4:19 PM
To: SOLOSEZ@mail.americanbar.org

Deathstar all the way. But rules of engagement are necessary here. Is it a
standoff? Sneak attack?

Even in the blog post, it says death star with no Jedi's, sith or otherwise.

Well how about a borg ship with no Borg on it then.

----

From: [edited]

Date: Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 4:22 PM
To: SOLOSEZ@mail.americanbar.org

Many Bothans had to die in order for the Rebels to learn the Death Star's
weakness. They were willing to sacrifice themselves for the greater good of
the Rebel Alliance but would not have done so for the Borg. No Bothan
sacrifice, no knowledge of weakness.

The Borg win because they're the Borg is kind of circular logic. What makes
them so all powerful?

----
From: [edited]

Date: Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 4:33 PM
To: SOLOSEZ@mail.americanbar.org

I think ground rules would have to be stated. The Borg might not attack the
Death Star directly--all they'd have to do is get a few Borg inside and
start assimilating the crew.

----

From: [edited]

Date: Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 4:41 PM
To: SOLOSEZ@mail.americanbar.org

Objection, assumes facts not in evidence, e.g. that Borg teleportation
technology is not disrupted by shields generated by a small base on the
forest moon of Endor.

----
From: [edited]

Date: Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 5:48 PM
To: SOLOSEZ@mail.americanbar.org

The Borg would have the death star for lunch and the Borg Queen would dance on the emperor's head. Resistance is futile!

----
From: [edited]

Date: Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 6:13 PM
To: SOLOSEZ@mail.americanbar.org

Ahh but what about mind control and suggestions on the borg? Are they, due
to being a collective with no individual thought, as weak minded as
stormtroppers and thus easily persuaded to bow to the situation bidding?

----
From: [edited]

Date: Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 6:22 PM
To: SOLOSEZ@mail.americanbar.org

Yeah I thought about that as well and my thought is it wouldn't work on the Borg because of the collective. Don't think any Jedi mind tricks would work on several billion collective minds.

----
From: [edited]

Date: Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 6:40 PM
To: SOLOSEZ@mail.americanbar.org

Fascinating.
Initally, I would have gone with the Death Star because, as is pointed out
in the blog post, "It's the Death Star." I find it hard to see how a Borg
Cube could withstand firepower on that magnetude. I would also point out
that even the Borg haven't destroyed entire planets, and Species 8472 (or
whatever it is) was able to destroy hundreds of cubes with what appeared to
be less firepower than can be mustered by the Death Star.
However, the poster's comment about the lack of maneouverabilty is
persuasive. If the Death Star can't target the Cube, it's firepower is
irrelevant.
Then again, we all know that the Borg tend to ignore anything they don't
interpret as a threat.
So, round 1, in almost all scenarios (Death Star vs. Borg Cube, surprise or
no surprise) I'm going to say Death Star, easily.
Subsequent rounds will undoubtedly go to the Borg, as would a long
protracted confrontation. The Empire could not possibly win a war of
attrition against the Borg.
Regardless, all talk of Jedi's, Siths, Emperors, and mind tricks, etc is
foolish. We all know that stuff isn't real.

----
From: [edited]

Date: Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 6:45 PM
To: SOLOSEZ@mail.americanbar.org

The borg can shoot better than stormtroopers. The borg actually hit their
targets.

----

From: [edited]

Date: Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 7:02 PM
To: SOLOSEZ@mail.americanbar.org

When the Rebel Alliance comes out of hyperspace against the second Death
Star, they "witness the firepower of [the] *fully* armed and *operational
battle station" **as it picks apart Mon Calamari cruisers with its planet
destroying laser. Enough with the Death Star couldn't hit the Cube
argument.*

I can't believe I'm still engaged in this thread instead of finishing my
response to a MSJ due tomorrow. Damn you geek gene!

----
From: [edited[

Date: Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 8:01 PM
To: SOLOSEZ@mail.americanbar.org

Oh, for Pete's sake, people! Move on!

Serenity over Deathstar.
Serenity over Borg Cube.

Hutzpah beats overwhealming odds
like scissors beat paper.

----
From: [edited]

Date: Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 8:09 PM
To: [edited], SOLOSEZ@mail.americanbar.org

You have a point. Serenity has River...and we really don't know what she is capable of.

----
From: [edited]

Date: Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 8:27 PM
To: [edited]

Cc: SOLOSEZ@mail.americanbar.org

River hmmph. Serenity has Captain Tightpants who always comes up with a plan that works -- eventually. Zoe who kicks ass - literally. Jayne and his arsenal. Kaylee who can sweetalk that ship into doing anything. And Wash who can fly that ship places it shouldn't be flown once Kaylee sweettalks her. (In my world, the BDM never happened).

----
From: [edited]

Date: Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 8:44 PM
To: SOLOSEZ@mail.americanbar.org

Yeah, I think Serenity has it, I mean look at what they did just to get
around the reavers!
And I'm pretty sure the Tams could take out they Death Star AND the Borg
before they even knew there was a fight :)

----

From: [edited]

Date: Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 8:55 PM
To: SOLOSEZ@mail.americanbar.org

two words ... Kobayashi Maru ... pfffft!!!

Live Long & Prosper!!

----

From: [edited]

Date: Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 9:35 PM
To: SOLOSEZ@mail.americanbar.org

Batman always wins.

----

From: [edited]

Date: Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 10:18 PM

To: SOLOSEZ@mail.americanbar.org

My money would be on a fully operational Deathstar, provided rebel forces are not a factor.

----

From: [edited]

Date: Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 11:03 PM

To: [edited]

Cc: SOLOSEZ@mail.americanbar.org

Oh yea, River Tam rocks. But then so does the whole crew. Of course, better script and acting helps a lot too.

The Serenity crew and Mr. Universe (aka Charlie Epps) [and maybe a few "dolls"] could make short work of the a Borg Cube or a Death Star. Probably turn them on each other and make us all laugh in the process.

----

From: [edited]

Date: Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 7:51 AM

To: SOLOSEZ@mail.americanbar.org

Of course the Borg teleport onto Endor before heading towards the Death
Star. Yes, they first assimilate the small oddly Wookie like looking chub
chub peeps which name escapes those of us who really didn't retain to that
level of detail... chub chub. ♪

----
From: [edited]

Date: Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 10:22 AM

To: SOLOSEZ@mail.americanbar.org

That would be, methinks, the adorable teddy-bear-like Ewoks.

What an interesting mental image ... Borg Ewoks....

----

From: [edited]

Date: Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 10:40 AM

To: SOLOSEZ@mail.americanbar.org

At the risk of belabouring the obvious, and on the heels of a "Kobayashi
Maru" reference upthread, it really comes down to who's show it is. I
mean, hell, Dazzler beat Doom in her first ish. Point being, what makes
this sort of thing fun is seeing the underdog win, be it the Rebel
Alliance, Kirk, Captain Tightpants, whomever.

It makes sense that lawyers of all professions are drawn to this sort of
fantasy. First, our business all too often manifests pretty much the
opposite scenario: Little guys crushed by big guys, evil getting off on
a technicality, innocent men hanging that jurors might dine. Second, and
possibly more important in the collective psyche, our very system of law
is premised on the story of David and Goliath. It is founded on the
notion that God will not let an unjust cause prevail, although in our
modern state we have substituted "the System" for "God".

In fantasy (science or other) the writer plays God and, generally, we in
the reading and viewing audience require our heroes to "Never give up,
never surrender!"

----
From: [edited]

Date: Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 10:49 AM

To: SOLOSEZ@mail.americanbar.org

Borg Ewoks--highly useful for a Borg assault on the Muppets or Sesame
Street. "Hi kids, the word of the day is . . . assimilate."

----

From: [edited]

Date: Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 11:59 AM

To: SOLOSEZ@mail.americanbar.org

Borg Bert & Ernie? That would bring the Borg world to its knees.

----
From: [edited]

Date: Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 12:09 PM

To: SOLOSEZ@mail.americanbar.org

I really love this thread! It is making a very long week much more bearable.
It is also enabling some very serious Friday morning procrastination.

My vote is for the Borg. It's a completely biased vote due to my love of
Star Trek. (But my dog, Poppins, looks just like an ewok. We almost named
her Wicket.) I do think that the Borg as a villain are more unique than the
Empire. More of a political or societal concept than pure "bad guys" with a
cool weapon, which makes their defeat more challenging. I agree with most of
the blog poster's analysis of the two technologies.

The blog post reminds me of one of my favorite Star Trek/Star Wars
comparisons, which is from Lene Taylor, one of the duo behind the "Look at
His Butt" podcast, a Star Trek/William Shatner podcast that I've been
listening to for years. She has a proposal for a talk to give to a local
cynics group about why Star Trek is the more appropriate fandom for cynics
because much of Star Wars is based upon belief in the "magical" power of the
Jedi, whereas in Star Trek, the heroes usually triumph due to their human or
human-like qualities and science. I think that it's a great debate to get
into, especially with devoted fans of each franchise. The belief in some
sort of magic is one of the bigger differences between most of science
fiction and the rest of the fantasy genre. I love both!

Don't Touch the Banana

2011-08-26T09:51:00.000-07:00

Heh, heh. No, really, it’s not meant as an innuendo.

I tend to write only about my personal life in blog posts and in other online venues, and then only in limited detail with a degree of anonymity lent to all involved. There are a number of good reasons for this. First and foremost, my professional life is boring as hell to the average human being. This is true of most lawyers, believe it or not. As exciting as you may find Law and Order, life just isn’t that enthralling for your run-of-the-mill J.D. I’m currently a securities attorney, or more precisely, a securities regulator since I work for the state and not for a private firm. Aside from patent law, I’m not sure there is another job less exciting to the average Joe. This is not to say I don’t enjoy my job, just that I acknowledge most people don’t want to hear wild stories about securities law. Nor could I share a lot of stories if you did want to hear them. That, also, is in the nature of being an attorney.

I am also painfully aware of the fact that your online presence follows you. Everywhere. What you say online reflects on you in the eyes of potential employers, potential clients, and judgmental strangers.

But, I don’t want this blog to become about nothing but our new baby. Cute as she is, there are thousands of baby blogs out there discussing the same stuff I’m likely to find interesting about being a parent. While I may deny it kicking and screaming, there is more to life in this universe than admiring the cuteness that is my daughter. Also, and more to the point of this post, I’m not all that interested in working with or for people who have no sense of humor, so if I can’t make the occasional observation about working for the government or the practice of law, what’s the point of having a blog and a regular audience of three or four readers? I would never bite the hand that feeds me, but making sweeping generalizations about lawyers and government is the God-given right of every freedom loving, red-blooded American. Vulcan-Americans, on the other hand, do not have this right.

Ba-dum-ching.

I’ve worked for more than one state agency in my professional life, and have a number of friends who work for various state and federal agencies, so I feel this qualifies me to comment on the condition of such employment generally. Not necessarily from my own direct experience, mind you, but from direct and indirect observation (that should be enough disclaimer for now).

The truth is that, from the standpoint of an employee, working for state government is not a bad gig. The pay is generally low, but if you aren’t shackled with obscene amounts of debt (read: if you didn’t go to law school), it’s generally enough to make ends meet. It is also an employment position that allows you more flexibility in terms of having a personal life than many similar private sector positions. Here I am thinking specifically about the legal industry. Many of my law school classmates made double my annual salary in their first year out of law school. They also worked double the number of hours I did, staying in the office for late nights, weekends, and holidays. It works for some people, and I’m not saying I couldn’t or wouldn’t do it, but I have definitely enjoyed the fact that I get to come home to my wife at a fairly reasonable time every night, and can take advantage of vacation days without falling behind on the ever-looming “billable hours goal.” Now that we have a kid, this quality of life aspect of any given job is even more important.

All of that is great, but we love to poke fun at state government, and for good reason. Governments of all shapes and sizes do have some incredible bureaucracies. There are aspects of government (some would say “all of it”) which are inefficient, out-dated, inflexible, and downright useless. One thing in particular the government does not do well is respond well to change, or adapt to new situations. See, e.g., the federal government’s response to Hurricane Katrina, or the BP Horizon disaster in 2010.

A friend of mine (one I should stress works for a different agency than I do) shared this story with me over a beer not too long ago about an apocryphal scientific study that may or may not have actually taken place (but probably didn’t):

In this study, they (the ubiquitous, scientific “they” who always conduct these studies) placed three chimpanzees in a room where they lived, worked, and played. The chimps were well-adjusted to each other and generally cooperated with each other. After an initial period of happy coexistence, a new element was introduced to the experiment: a short set of stairs leading up to a banana hanging from the ceiling.

The natural reaction of the chimps was to immediately try and storm the stairs for the banana, but each time one chimp reached for the banana, a fire hose would loose a painful stream of water not only at the chimp reaching for the banana, but at his two compatriots as well. After an initial adjustment period, the scientists no longer needed to turn the hose on the apes - each time one started up the stairs, the other two pulled him down and beat the snot out of him.

Eventually, they replaced one of the original chimps with a new chimp who had never seen the fire hose, or experienced life in this room. The new chimp immediately saw the banana at the top of the stairs and went for it, only to be pulled down by the old-timers and beaten unceremoniously into submission. It went on in this fashion until the scientists had eventually replaced all of the original chimps with chimps that had never experienced the wrath of the fire hose. Any time one of the apes reached for the banana - BAM. None of them had any idea why it was done that way, they just knew it had to be done.

This, in my friend’s view, is how many government agencies, offices, and divisions are operated. No one currently working in many such offices was around when key decisions were made, and no one is aware of why things are done the way they are. They’ve just always been that way. And if you deviate from them, expect to catch a beating.

My suspicion is that virtually every workplace has some element of this mentality rearing its ugly head from time to time. With government, it just never goes away. Gotta end this post quick. I think I hear a fire hose turning on.

Milestones

2011-08-25T13:34:00.000-07:00

OMG! I'm in an effing shark!

Today was the big two-week check up for Olivia. For the uninitiated, this is where a medical professional determines whether or not you are competent to care for an infant based on the only-partially-under-your-control metric of whether or not your child has re-attained or exceeded his or her birth weight. It’s fairly normal for a baby to lose up to ten percent of their birth weight in the first few days after birth, and slowly put it back on over (roughly) the next two weeks.

I don’t know what the consequences are for failing to achieve this threshold, but I suspect water-boarding is involved. Fortunately, I don’t have to find out – Olivia is back up to fighting weight with 2 ounces to spare. Overachiever.

Despite the sleep deprivation and total lack of coherent feedback from our child, I can see why so many parents make a big deal about this age. The first year, and definitely the first month, is packed with milestones. First car ride (almost necessarily the one home from the hospital), first outing, first trip in the stroller, first time in the crib, first time you interpret a random hand stretch as your daughter giving you the California howdy... there’s a lot going on if you are observant enough to pay attention. There are also a lot of firsts for parents. First sleepless night, first infirmity brought on primarily by lack of sleep and consequent loss of immune system, first night spent sleeping (or trying to) on the floor of your child’s nursery, first poo, pee, and/or vomit related stain found on your clothes while in public, and so on…

The firsts are fantastic. I’m trying not to miss any, but I know inevitably there will be some I can’t be there for. Mostly because I haven’t found a way to stay home and watch the baby all day long and still get paid. If any of you out there can think of a solution to this dilemma, please let me know. As much as neither my wife nor I want to closet ourselves off from the world (we don’t) it is hard not to selfishly hold on to these early days for ourselves alone. Especially when we see our friends’ children, a mere two months, or four months, or nine months ahead of Olivia, and see what a huge difference such a short period of time can make.

Hell, the first two weeks have already made a big difference. She’s already gained two ounces.

Things I've learned in one whole week of parenthood

2011-08-22T11:34:00.000-07:00

We received a lot of advice and warnings from experienced parents in the nine months leading up to the birth of our daughter. We also endured the taunts and maniacal laughter of those who couldn’t wait to see us dealing with the trials and tribulations of parenthood. These are people who supposedly love us. I’m convinced at least a part of the joy of being a grandparent is an unhealthy dose of schadenfreude.

Needless to say, much of the advice we received, whether good natured or not, turned out to be right on. Here’s a little of what we’ve learned so far.

You will not sleep again. Duh. I never said these were going to be profound. Certainly each baby is different, but in general they have no respect for clocks, schedules, or the fundamental difference between day and night. If you can catch two or three hours at a stretch, consider yourself fortunate.
It’s not been long enough to assess how well we operate on such a poor sleep schedule. I’ll hazard a guess - not well. But so far, we’ve done better than I would have guessed. That is not to say “well,” but we do what we can.

Listening to your baby crying for no discernible reason is about as helpless as you’ve ever felt. Every parent goes through it. It’s as inevitable as Congressional gridlock, and almost as painful. Your baby has one means of communication available to her when she is born - crying. Crying can mean anything from “I’m hungry,” to “I’m tired,” to “I’m in pain.” It can also mean nothing at all, as some of the literature will tell you that babies sometimes need to cry for some period merely to expend excess energy. I don’t know that I buy this, necessarily, but there are definitely cries that appear to have no obvious cause. They. Suck. If you are remotely human, you don’t like hearing your child cry. Having it go on for hours and knowing you’ve tried pretty much everything humanly possible to alleviate the cries makes you feel like the most incompetent parent in the world.
If those cries happen to take place at night, and feed into the lack of sleep discussed above, then... well, your nights aren’t going to be fun.

Car rides and strollers are kind of magic. Our kid doesn’t exactly love the infant carrier. The idea of being strapped in to something doesn’t sit well with her, so we tend to get serenaded with high pitched cries every time we have to take her somewhere. As soon as the car gets up to speed or the stroller starts bumping along, the volume falls to zero. I suspect this will not last forever, or at least not for the duration of long car rides to visit family, but it is pretty nice to know we have an almost surefire way to put our baby under without pharmaceuticals.

Digital cameras are a godsend. I used to fancy myself a hobby photographer. I haven't picked up a camera in any serious fashion for several years, but I have taken more photos in the last ten days or so than I have in the previous ten months. I am very glad I don't have to pay to have all of them developed. Even a biased dad like me recognizes that the blurry picture of my daughters foot isn't really worth keeping.

Friends and Family are incredible. Southerners do food for almost any occasion. Someone die? Feed the family. Somebody born? Feed the family. We've had a lot of friends and family taking care of us, in many more ways than just keeping us nourished, and that has allowed us to spend more time focusing on our new addition. We are immensely grateful, and I can't imagine doing this without some kind of support system in place. Also, we have a ton of leftovers if anyone is hungry.
Mostly, I’ve just learned that I’m a big sap. Having a kid is pretty awesome, and we’ve spent a lot of time just staring at her sleeping. It’s hard to be human and not get a little sappy about your kid, so I fully expect I will embarrass myself will all manner of unmanly demonstrations of sentimentality in the coming months and years. I probably won’t share all of those.

Oh, and I’d like to throw a shout-out to Lumos Studio (www.lumosstudio.com) for the photograph above. As I mentioned, I'm a biased observer, but I happen to think they do some pretty damn fine work. Thanks guys!

Olivia: The Prequel

2011-08-18T19:38:00.000-07:00

Intellectually, I think most prospective parents... nay - thinking people - understand that the Hollywood representation of labor and delivery is total BS.

I can confirm that your suspicions on that score are accurate.

In film and television, labor almost always begins with the woman's water breaking suddenly, without warning, and generally in an inconvenient location or in the midst of a dramatic conversation. Usually, by the time the pregnant woman arrives at the hospital, the baby's arrival is imminent.

In reality, every pregnancy, and consequently every delivery, is unique in its particulars. Probably there have been a handful of Hollywood-esque deliveries in the history of modern obstetrics, but most are a little more drawn out, a whole lot messier, and much less overacted.

Our story began on Thursday night, a full three days before Olivia was actually born. My wife began having contractions around 9:30, too sporadic at that point to consider going to the hospital, but strong enough to make us believe this could be the real deal if they got close enough together.

Most OBs and midwives will tell you not to come to the hospital until contractions are coming at least every five minutes, and have been for a couple of hours. Some may want them even closer in time. What these professionals really aren't so good at conveying, especially to first time mothers, is how to tell when real labor has begun. Not all contractions are created equal, and most women in late stage pregnancy will experience Braxton-Hicks contractions, which generally aren't very painful (relatively speaking). If those go on for, say, ten hours at five minutes apart, even a woman who suspects she is not in active labor will probably get annoyed enough to call her practitioner and try and find out what the deal is. And if the practitioner's answering service has instructed its people to tell every woman who says the word "contraction" to come on to the hospital, the woman may end up sitting in a hospital room for six hours or so unnecessarily. I'm not bitter towards the answering service at all.

What we learned from this experience (a week before our Thursday night contractions started) is that labor contractions should be strong enough that the woman cannot talk or walk through them. Besides the obvious problems with this guideline - that it is completely subjective and every woman has a different threshold for pain - it turned out not to be entirely true when real contractions started on Thursday, and continued into Friday and Saturday. While it became increasingly unpleasant to walk or talk through those contractions, it could be done. It was a little harder for my wife, but she managed too. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

By Friday morning, it looked like active labor was likely at any time. The sporadic contractions were becoming more regular, though still too spread out to head to the hospital. It was not until late Friday night that they were consistently five minutes apart and we headed out to the hospital. We were assessed, and ultimately the hospital staff determined that labor was not progressing. Even though the contractions never stopped. This is apparently known as prodromal labor - labor like symptoms that don't progress to the birth of a baby. And when they don't stop at all, they suck. We were sent home, and the contractions continued unabated, strengthening throughout the day Saturday. From Thursday night until Sunday morning, my wife might have gotten a total of three hours of sleep. I wasn't much better off, but I wasn't dealing with stomach wrenching cramps at ten minute intervals, so I think I was still in the better position.

By Sunday morning (and I mean early Sunday morning) it was clear that something had to give. We headed back to the hospital for the third time in a week, and I will admit I was afraid they were going to send us home yet again. Mostly, that idea was just disheartening. We've heard some first time mothers end up in the hospital dozens of times with false labor, pre-labor, or whatever else pregnancy can throw their way, so I guess a false start or two can be forgiven, but when you are entering your third day with no sleep (and you don't have an outside baby to account for that lack of sleep) the prospect just makes you tired.

As it turned out, my concerns were unwarranted. Sunday was it. We arrived around 5:30 a.m. and were whisked to a labor room by 6:30 a.m. I'll spare the details - very few of you would actually have any interest, and those who do can ask my wife in person. The reader's digest version involved the best epidural ever, a lot of raspberry popsicles, several hours of Sportcenter (my wife is awesome), and a mere 10 hours of waiting-and pushing-beyond what had already been endured.

And then there was Olivia. 7 pounds, 6 ounces, and 20 1/2 inches of born contrariness. And she is everything we imagined she would be.

A brief epilogue. I will never in a million years compare the male experience of labor and delivery to the woman's, but I was completely unprepared for the physical toll the process would take on me. There is more adrenaline, tension, fear, and exhilaration in a brief period of time than any human body is meant to take. I crashed harder the night my daughter was born than I have in a long, long time.

My wife stayed up and fed our daughter. She is way tougher than me.

She has arrived...

2011-08-16T15:20:00.000-07:00

Olivia Katherine was born August 14, 2011 after a mere 65 hours of labor (God Bless my wife). Hope this explains the absence of a post on Friday and Monday. The vital stats and stories will come later, but for now I just wanted to share the good news with those who might not have already heard through the grapevine.

More to come....

Making sense of the chaos...

2011-08-10T11:58:00.000-07:00

Fair warning - not the most lighthearted of posts. I'll trade by keeping it relatively brief.

I am not a theologian. I am, frankly, pretty awful at apologetics. I know that many of the reasons people have for doubting the existence or the goodness of God are rooted in some intensely painful places, and there is no denying that people are capable of incredible evil. I don’t think I need to list examples - read the headlines this week or the history books published twenty years ago, and you can find plenty on your own. Bad stuff happens to people all the time, and I can’t offer a specific explanation for most of those circumstances or point to a greater purpose behind the suffering. But I do believe a greater purpose exists, and despite the condition of the world and the suffering I see in it, I do believe in the existence of a loving God who is more than just a theistic clockmaker who watches over the world without acting.

A group of us gathered this week in a friend’s apartment to pray for a man we all know and love who has been suffering with incredible pain for the past few months. It’s left him unable to work, and at times unable to get out of bed or walk. He’s a good person, as evidenced by the number and quality of the people who surround him. If circumstances were dictated by the worthiness of the individual, then his current condition would be completely incongruous with who he is. But rain falls on the righteous and unrighteous alike.

In the midst of the pain he’s been going through, he has been incredibly patient, positive, and grateful. Yeah. Grateful. Among the things he is grateful for, he expressed to us that he has grown closer to his wife in the last three months of trial than they have been in a long time. In all likelihood, the circumstances he is suffering through right now will pass - maybe not as soon as we would all have it, but pass just the same. Whether they do or not, those circumstances have still produced something good. These circumstances are not the hardest I have seen friends and loved ones go through, but I offer it as an example that the seemingly random crap that life occasionally throws at us is not always meaningless, or useless.

I’ve seen this in my own life through lost jobs and lost opportunities - things that outwardly appear completely negative, but produce great good. My wife and I would probably not be anxiously awaiting our first child right now if we had not also gone through some very uncomfortable circumstances in the recent past, and we'd never trade what we've gained for anything. I’ve also seen lots of dim circumstances - lost loved ones and sickness, for instance - in which I cannot point to any obvious greater good. Not that can be observed without some degree of faith, anyway. Some people will beg for the explanation to every circumstance, but I don’t think anyone can give that to you always. But I’ve seen often enough that the bad is not always so bad as it seems. And I believe that there is, in fact, some greater purpose. Yeah, I wish I could see it too.

I’m not saying God causes bad stuff to happen to bring the greater good out of it. Again, I'm not a theologian, and even theologians will disagree about that depending on where they fall on the free-will spectrum. I personally don’t think God directs a murderer to pull the trigger (call me a heretic if you will), but I have seen what I attribute to God bring good out of a bad act of human frailty numerous times.

Life is chaotic. That is neither inherently good nor bad, but sometimes rough stuff happens that doesn’t seem to have a good explanation at the time. Or ever, to our human point of view. Faith that there is a larger story that I can’t completely comprehend helps me make sense of the chaos.

I realize this post is a bit heavier than usual. That’s intentional. Every now and again I think it’s important to take a step back and examine so when you spend the rest of your time not taking yourself too seriously (as you should), it’s not because there is no substance there to be taken seriously.

Have you tried turning it off and on again?

2011-08-08T07:52:00.000-07:00

Reboots...the black holes from which creativity may never escape...

They are making another Superman movie. Let me get my excited pants on. Spidey too? Well, there is certainly some room for improvement on the last franchise. Fantastic Four? Seriously? Sigh...

I am a fan of comic books, and by extension of comic book movies. The first comic books I remember reading were some Batman mags (Detective Comics, I think) and a random issue of the Avengers (it may have been the only actual Avengers title I ever owned). I got them as a get-well-soon present while I was in the hospital with a badly broken arm in fourth grade. Probably I had a few comics before that, but these stuck in my memory. The simple stories, the artwork, and the black and white division between the good guys and the bad were very appealing. I got hooked on Spider-man, X-Men, Batman, and a smattering of others. As with many of my peers, my affection for reading comic books eventually developed into an obsession for collecting them that was directly at odds with appreciating the stories and characters. This collection mentality was exactly what the industry was trying to encourage in the nineties - what with all the die-cut, hologram covered, foil wrapped, No. 1 issues that were coming out, what were kids supposed to think except that every single issue of every single comic book was one day going to be worth as much as Amazing Fantasy No. 15 (first appearance of Spidey) or Action Comics No. 1 (Superman’s premiere). So instead of actually reading comic books, we brought them home from the store and put them straight into a mylar bag, supported by specially made, acid-free cardboard backings, and placed them in corrugated boxes designed to fit them precisely and keep them in “mint” condition.

I don’t know why the term “mint” is applied to comic books and baseball cards. They are not coins, and are not minted, nor does any flavor beginning with spear- or pepper- have anything to do with them. But I digress...

Fifteen years later I’ve got three huge boxes of comic books, only about half of which I have any recollection of actually reading. I could easily pare the collection down to a handful I would actually like to hang on to, but short of just throwing the rest out there’s nothing I can do with them. No one buys nineties era comic books (or baseball cards, for that matter). No one. They were overproduced, and comic book stores all over have more than they need. So, I’m stuck with my bloated collection instead of a distilled handful of issues with actual worth.

This is kind of how I have felt about comic book movies over the last several years. We have a bloated collection of movies, spinoffs, sequels, and reboots that has a net effect of dragging down the value of the entire genre. Any given movie may be excellent or total crap, but even the good ones tend to get undervalued over time as we see more and more crap that is simply derivative of what’s already been done.

Comic book movies have a hit-or-miss history in Hollywood. Batman is pretty much always box office gold, even if one or two of the big-screen turns of the caped crusader have been less than well-received by fans. (Nipples on the Bat-suit, Mr. Schumacher? For shame.) Anything featuring The Punisher might as well be released straight to DVD, John Travolta’s appearance in the film not withstanding. But the real variable in comic book movies isn’t the value at the box office (though that does vary widely) but the quality of the underlying film. Crappy films happen - I get it. It pains me when a character I grew up with is given a spotty treatment by Hollywood (X-Men Origins: Wolverine, anyone?), but c’est la vie. What drives me nuts is the current environment of constant, never-ending reboots. The attitude seems to be: It made money the first time, so lets do it again with a new cast and a slightly new direction in two years. Hooray! Unfortunately, from a financial perspective, this strategy seems to work, so we’re not likely to see a change anytime soon.

The big heroes probably need a reboot every fifteen years or so. “Need” may be too strong, but it can at least be forgiven and enjoyed if done well. But let’s look at a few of the recent insta-reboots.

Hulk (2003) and The Incredible Hulk (2008): Yes, the Eric Bana version was simply awful. There was nothing remotely redeeming about that film. Anyone who cared a lick about the character of the Hulk had to have been miserable in the wake of this travesty. But did that mean we needed another one five years later? And was Edward Norton’s version such an improvement that the reboot was justified?

I know - this reboot had nothing to do with redeeming a piece of crap movie and everything to do with fitting the Hulk into Marvel Studio’s long-term goal of an Avenger’s movie. The idiotic limitless size of the 2003 Hulk would not have meshed well with the other... more realistic?... heroes that will be featured in that film due out next year.

X-Men (2000) and X-Men: First Class (2011): The spread is wider here, but only if you look from the beginning of one franchise to the beginning of another. The first franchise last put out a movie in 2006 (X-Men 3: The Last Stand), unless you count the festering pile of poo that was the Wolverine movie in 2009. But this reboot is perplexing to me. The earlier franchise did at least a passable job with the X-Men story and characters. And lets be honest - who else could have played the adult Charles Xavier than Patrick Stewart? Wizard magazine called that one years before the script was written. I understand the reboot actually made a good flick (haven't seen it yet, myself), which is gratifying, but the movie wasn’t promoted very well and didn’t have the star power to draw the huge crowds that usually justify comic book movies. So if it wasn’t to replace a crappy franchise, and it wasn’t to make a cash grab, what was it?

Spider-Man (2002) and Ultimate Spider-Man (2011): Again, shorter spread than these two start dates indicate - Spider-Man 3 was a 2007 release. I can sort of get the theory behind this reboot. Based on the trailers, the new Spidey flick looks much darker and grittier than the Sam Raimi franchise which, by its end, was beginning to suffer from some of the same goofiness that defined Joel Shumacher’s much lamented Batman & Robin (aka, the Batman with nipples). To the extent that they are going a darker direction, Ultimate Spider-Man may be Marvel’s attempt to do a Batman Begins for one of their most endearing characters. The only problem with that is that Spider-Man is not, and never was, as dark, brooding, angsty, or angry as Batman at his most light-hearted. They are vastly different characters, despite the similarities in their backstories. I’ll probably drop ten bucks to see the new Spidey, but I’m not sure what to expect.

Fantastic Four (2005) and Fantastic Four (2013): A good friend of mine has said repeatedly that the best thing the Fantastic Four had going for it was Jessica Alba, and they made her invisible. I really didn’t hate the 2005 version, but I didn’t love it either. This is somewhat appropriate, in that I had a lot of ambivalence toward the comics on which the movie was based. My feelings on the FF - books and movies - can pretty much be summed up with “meh.” Yet, I didn't care a lick for Iron Man comic books as a kid, and I have thoroughly enjoyed Robert Downey, Jr.'s turn as Tony Stark, typecasting be damned. Thus, I don't think my lack of strong feeling about the FF has impacted my opinion about the movies.

Certainly there is some room for improvement over the first two movies with a reboot, but I’m not sure how this quick reboot helps Marvel. My best guess is the studio needs a filler project for the year following the Avengers big release while they go to pre-production on their next big buildup for...whatever comes after the Avengers. Probably more sequels.

Superman (1978), Superman Returns (2006), Man of Steel (2013): Okay, so the Brandon Routh reboot in 2006 was warranted if only by the passage of time. Nearly 20 years had passed since Christopher Reeves wore the blue and red pajamas, and movie-making had come a long way. A lot of people wanted to see what could be done with the Man of Steel on screen in the modern era.

But it was terrible. It seems there are a lot of filmmakers who subscribe to the George Lucas school of thought that if you throw enough money at the special effects budget, you can skimp on script-writing and direction. In fact, in a recent conversation with a friend about movies in general, Superman Returns was one of the films we determined demonstrate that Kevin Spacey is maybe the most directable actor in Hollywood, in that his performance quality is almost totally dependent on the skill of his director (contrast American Beauty and K-Pax if you need a “for instance”). This means that in his turn as Lex Luthor, he couldn’t convincingly villain his way out of a wet paper sack.

Of the big name comic book heroes, I feel like Superman is the riskiest to portray on film, financially and otherwise. Superman’s almost infinite power and unwavering morality make him inaccessible. It’s difficult to get modern audiences to relate to him without fundamentally changing the character. He was never my favorite hero as a kid - I didn’t hate him, but I never saw the drama in fighting crime when you were bulletproof. I don’t know that I’m the best person to determine how this next movie version of him is likely to go. Only time will tell I suppose.

Although not an insta-reboot in the same vein as many of these others, I would be somewhat remiss to not talk about Batman (1989) and Batman Begins (2005). These two franchises are probably spaced about right, and ignoring the Joel Schumacher efforts, both franchises have made for quality entertainment. I look forward to the Dark Knight Rises next year, and while part of me is disappointed that the current cycle of Batman movies will end at three, the entire point of this posting is that the law of diminishing returns calls for a lesser number of higher quality movies rather than squeezing a franchise as fast and hard as possible for a bunch of predictable, plodding storylines.

Still, I'm more likely to buy a ticket to each new reboot than I am to stay home in protest. Despite my well-reasoned frustration and desire for greater quality entertainment, I suspect Hollywood knows exactly what it's doing. After all, there aren't many big studios failing financially at the moment. What do you think about the constant rebooting of our childhood heroes?

Weekend Edition: Investment Humor

2011-08-06T15:10:00.000-07:00

Videos are fun. Enjoy a couple that are pseudo-related to my job, and have a great weekend.

NaNoWriMo

2011-08-05T11:22:00.000-07:00

This past week I was published, after a fashion. I didn’t get a plush contract for a novel, and I can’t even describe the work as a true academic publication - I wrote an article on securities fraud for a South Carolina Bar publication that is no longer published in hard copy. It’s written in lay-terms and has no footnotes or endnotes, so we’re not talking law review quality here, but its publication, and that’s something. I enjoy writing. Obviously. You don’t run across too many bloggers who loathe it. But the blog and most of my other writing, including this recent published piece, stems from an unrealized dream of being a professional writer.

Let me be clear: I have no desire to change careers to be paid by the line as a reporter or columnist. I have no aspirations to sweat it out year after year and pay my dues by selling short stories and novellas to literary magazines for pennies until my big break rolls in. I have dreams of being a total sellout, making obscene amounts of money from writing oft-criticized but popular fiction. Of telling a damn good story, and getting paid.

Alas, the latter is unlikely without the former. Or finding a genie.

Even paying my dues in some form or fashion is a little difficult unless I can finish writing something longer than a blog post (my recently published article is roughly the same length as what you read here). I know many people who have this problem – they desire to write a story or novel, whether with shallow, profit-minded goals like mine or simply for their own pleasure, but they can’t seem to get a story finished, or in some cases even start one.

To that end, let me tell you about the madness that is NaNoWriMo (www.nanowrimo.org). Nanowrimo (I’m dropping the official capitalizations for simplicity), or National Novel Writing Month (see how clever that is!), officially takes place in November of each year, though a few of the harder-core would-be and definitely-are writers take part in Nanowrimo Camp... which is really just an extra month of Nanowrimo. Because one month of this mental torment isn’t sadistic enough.

The point of Nanowrimo is to write a novel in one month. That’s pretty much it - 30 days to write 50,000 words. It’s incredibly simple. Not to be confused with easy. In practice, 50K words is a doable goal for 30 days, even with a full time job and other obligations, but you’ve got to really work it. It’s hard. I know. I’ve tried twice, and failed twice, but both times I’ve enjoyed the experience and I’ve gotten pretty good starts (25-35K words ain’t bad) on stories I may one day finish, for myself if for no one else.

You may note that, even if you succeed, 50K words would make a pretty short novel. And most people criticize the concept by wondering aloud how good a quality book one could write in a 30 day span. To this latter point I counter, how long do you really think James Patterson spent on the ten books he put out in the last twelve months?

Just kidding Mr. Patterson - you’re doing fine work just like you always have.

But really, the point of Nanowrimo is not to get published or create a great work of literature. If you do manage to create something others can enjoy, that’s great, fantastic, bonus with gravy on the side. But the point is simply to write a novel. Why is this a big deal? Because everyone I’ve met who was remotely literate (in the sense that they read for pleasure with some degree of regularity, not in the sense that they don’t need the picture menu at Denny’s) thinks they have a novel in them somewhere, and they’ll get around to writing it “one day.” Nanowrimo forces you to start your “one day.” And it gives you thirty of them to accomplish something. Even if it’s not great, or even readable, at least you’ve done it.

To follow the technical guidelines of Nanowrimo (yeah, there are guidelines - see the official site for all of them) you have to start a fresh novel. No cheating by working on previously written manuscripts or coming in with the first five chapters penned. Outlines are acceptable (officially - some people get really uppity about this stuff) but beyond that you bring in material at your peril. And that’s it, really. Write an extended work of fiction (that’s how they define “novel”) of at least 50K words before November 30.

Why am I writing about Nanowrimo? Because I do want to finish a novel one day, rather than have a small collection of unfinished ones that haunt me until I’m an incontinent old man quoting Monty Python to my great grandchildren as they put me in a home for talentless wannabes who never finished a novel. What I’ve produced out of Nanowrimo is as close as I’ve ever come and I suspect if I ever finish one it will be at least in part thanks to the concept behind Nanowrimo, summed up best as “just get off your ass and do it already.” Also I comment on Nanowrimo somewhat wistfully, as I can say with a high degree of certainty that I will not be participating this year. Somehow I doubt that the “I’m writing dear, can you bathe the baby yourself” thing is really going to fly in my house this fall. But, since I have many friends that will be participating, I will be writing vicariously through them.

The reasons that I have never finished a Nanowrimo novel, or anything else other than the odd short story are things I will one day have to overcome. First, there’s the lack of planning. If I write anything longer than a blog post it’s usually because I have a great idea for a scene or two, but no coherent story or clear cut characters. These elements are not critical for Nanowrimo necessarily, but the lack of these elements directly impacts my second big hurdle - my internal editor. I mean “editor” more in the sense of a censor or extremely zealous critic than the constructive “here’s where you could fine tune it” meaning of the word. I could honestly use a better “editor” in the constructive sense - my writing is replete with easily correctable mistakes. Have you noticed my atrocious abuse of the apostrophe throughout this blog?. But mostly I just live with those because this is just a blog. As in, a hobby. If you want to pay me for this, I’ll be happy to spend the time necessary to properly edit and fine tune. But, alas, for now I work pro bono. Back to my point - I am my own worst critic. I doubt a review of my work could say something negative about my writing I haven’t already thought myself. Inevitably, the writing cycle goes something like this: get idea, write idea, flesh out idea, love what’s written, flesh out further and add material, hate new material, burn the entire project to the ground and urinate on the ashes. Repeat as necessary. This makes reaching a goal of 50K words somewhat more difficult.

The thing is, I’m better than halfway to 50K words on this blog. Yeah, it’s taken me more than 30 days to get where I am, and by 50K it will be more still, but I’m writing about nothing, and still managing to pump out some ridiculous word counts (sorry for that, by the way, but no one makes you read all this). If I actually have something to write about, it seems like it would be easier, not harder. Alas, rambling about disparate subjects is much easier for the unorganized mind.

Anyway, if you’re participating this year, I wish you the best of luck. If you are not, but you hope to one day write a novel, consider Nanowrimo. I mean, I’ll have a new infant this November - what’s your excuse?

This Kid is Never Freaking Coming.

2011-08-03T09:07:00.000-07:00

For those of you without the direct experience of pregnancy, the final month of the process is about the least comfortable any human being can feel outside of a third world prison or a Waffle House bathroom stall.

To say nothing of how the woman feels.

Undoubtedly, some of our Constant Readers are thinking – “thanks, I still have to go through this one day and you’re making it sound so bright and shiny for me.” Others are thinking “shut up – you two haven’t even hit your due date yet. Come back and complain when you’re carrying an eleven pound bowling bowl at 44 weeks.” To both camps, I can think of no more apropos response than to give you a giant raspberry.

If your first thought was “Only one man would dare give me the raspberry…. Lonestar!!!!!” you are definitely in the right place.

My wife, like most pregnant women, is subject to the “rule of eight” – that being, eight months of pregnancy makes you so ready to no longer be pregnant that you would literally punch your own grandmother to get labor started. Fortunately for grandmothers everywhere, there is no actual connection between receiving such a punch and triggering labor in the puncher. Therefore, only the most irritable of pregnant women suffering through the rule of eight actually follows through on the punch. (Get it? Follows through?) My wife has mercifully avoided many of the common pitfalls of pregnancy – overwhelming nausea, swollen feet, sore backs, etc. have mostly been absent from our household for the last eight months. Still, try carrying a concrete block that kicks you in the ribs periodically and you’ll see that even a relatively “easy” pregnancy isn’t a job for weaklings and pansies.

We have officially reached “term.” I don’t really understand the technical meaning behind the various stages of pregnancy, but “term” is good. I gather it means the baby is pretty much good to go at any point. It also appears to be the time when women who have sworn off pharmaceutical inductions and other medical interventions will start using folksy medicine as a metaphysical crowbar to pry the baby out of the womb. Our plan for the first night the baby was term was a dinner of eggplant parmesan and pineapple (both reputed to encourage contractions and possibly trigger labor), followed by a long walk (which can also help encourage labor) around the neighborhood. I hate eggplant, and Publix was out of pineapple (what the hell, Publix?!), so dinner was thwarted. Also it was hot outside, so the walk was postponed until September. But in theory, we are implementing all means at our disposal to encourage our baby to arrive early rather than late. Other suggestions that have been made to us include Mexican food (I fail to see the logic here) and bumpy car rides (same principle as long walks, I guess). Yes, we are also aware that sex can help trigger labor, but it would be really crass of me to dwell on that here.

Still, anything to help my wife in a time of need…

Statistically, first babies are not swift in arriving. I say “statistically” even though I’ve never looked at the stats, but accept as truth that first babies are more often late than they are early because I was late, and that seems right to me. I’m pretty sure it’s true. In any event, most women in my experience would prefer their babies arrive early (see above re: the last month of pregnancy and discomfort). This desire may also have something to do with the hope that, should a baby be a week or two early, he or she will have a slightly lower birth weight and be a commensurately easier delivery. Don’t get me wrong – most mothers aren’t looking for a low birth weight baby. If they were we’d see a tobacco section at Buy Buy Baby – that’s just capitalism. But given the choice between a seven pound baby and an eight pound baby, both otherwise perfectly healthy, I think most moms would say less is more. I don’t know how much of a difference those ounces would make, and barring a rather disturbing change in physiology, I never will. But I do kind of doubt a week or two one way or another makes a huge, or even a predictable difference in birth weight. I apparently lost weight in the two weeks after my due date before I was born. I’m reasonably certain my wife would not take an extra two weeks to shed a few ounces off of our daughter.

What I do know is that however long or short pregnancy feels, the final month seems to stretch on endlessly when you’re in the midst of it. In retrospect, I’m certain it will appear to have happened in the blink of an eye – that’s sort of the nature of things at this stage of life. But right now, it seems time is slowing to a crawl. We are ready to meet our daughter. My wife is ready to have ten minutes where I can hold her for a change. I’m ready to have the thermostat set above “arctic.” We are, in short, ready. Still scared as hell, but ready.

And, in the true spirit of foreshadowing our lives to come, our child is going to keep us waiting.

On Geeking Your New Baby

2011-08-01T06:57:00.000-07:00

Let’s be honest. It’s not really as if our soon-to-be born child will have much of a chance to be anything other than a massive geek. Her tastes may run counter to ours in some ways, but she has virtually no chance to get out of our house without being inclined towards something innately dorky - science fiction or fantasy literature, elaborate and complex board games, dwarf tossing, etc. She will almost certainly go to college quoting Star Wars, Monty Python, and/or Firefly. I’m more than okay with that.

And none of this precludes the possibility that our daughter (or any subsequent children) may have talents that lie in territory not exclusively belonging to geek culture. I doubt we will raise up a future University of South Carolina Quarterback (I wouldn’t tolerate the arrest record, for one) but I can’t rule out the possibility altogether. Maybe music will be more their game. One can be a music geek, but can also be musically talented without being geeky about it. At least in theory. Most of the talented musicians I know are geeks. But I digress....

Regardless of where life takes our children, we, like any good parents, want to give them every advantage. That means geeking them, early and often.

“Geeking” a baby is just “geeking out” or expressing your geek tendencies in an outward fashion, specifically directed at and expressed upon a target: your child. Before your child is old enough to have and express preferences on clothing, television, toys, food, pop culture, and political ideologies all of these things are left to you. By geeking your baby, you can influence those future preferences. Be warned that the influence may not always manifest in the way desired or expected. Backfires have been known to occur. Minor example - my sister and I had polar opposite reactions to constant childhood exposure to Jimmy Buffett. While recognizing that many infinitely more talented musicians will never catch a break, I happen to enjoy Jimmy Buffett in almost any context. On the other hand, until fairly recently my sister entered into drooling convulsions anytime she heard the opening chords to “Come Monday.”

In retrospect, that might have actually been a positive reaction. But I digress again...

Anyway, despite the risks of backfire, if you can’t have a little fun at your new child’s expense, or at least with their assistance, what is the point of parenthood?

“So,” you ask, “how does one ‘geek’ their baby?”
I respond, “I’m glad you asked.”
You return, “So tell me already.”
I reply, “I will.”
You say, “okay.”
And we move on….

Clothing
Perhaps the easiest way to geek your baby is in your approach to dressing them. There is virtually no limit to the inappropriate, novel, and incredibly geeky items you can buy for your kid. Take, for instance, these Star Trek onesies from Thinkgeek.

Nice, right? I hope the red one says “please keep an eye on me” on the back. Look hard enough and you can probably find similar items for the science fiction/fantasy tale of your choice. The interwebs are full of strange and wonderful things for babies like Yoda-ear knit caps, vampire teeth pacifiers, and baby Cthulu hooded towels. Well, I haven’t actually seen that last one, but if it doesn’t exist already, somebody should make it. In any event, dressing your infant appropriately (or inappropriately as the case may be) can make them a living, breathing billboard to your own person fanboy or fangirl tendencies. But there is no real reason to spend lots of money on clothing your baby in geek garb. One of the best ideas we encountered in the myriad baby showers that were thrown for us (our friends and family are awesome, by the way) is the concept of a “onesie station” where guests decorate plain onesies with personalized messages or art. Your kid will need lots of onesies (or “creepers” if you prefer that term, though why you would I don’t know). Based on advice from older parents, having a stockpile of relatively plain onesies for layered garments, emergencies, and for days you’re just not out to impress anyone with your infant-related fashion sense is a good idea. Packs of these plain onesies go for about what a single elaborate onesie can cost. If those relatively plain onesies happen to get decorated by your incredibly geeky, fabric-marker loving friends, that’s just all the better.

Undoubtedly, you will end up with some sappy and sentimen–I mean, beautiful and caring messages on some of your onesies if you do something like this. But if your friends are like you, you’ll probably have some success on the geek front as well. Our showers resulted in some gems that included an original rendition of Trogdor that was quite good, a reference to the whole “a dingo ate my baby” scenario of the eighties, and a onesie declaring my daughter to be “daddy’s little tax deduction.” Damn right. Sure, they may not be professional print quality items, and yes, they almost certainly will violate some copyright laws somewhere, but there’s something uber-geeky about homespun (home-decorated, at least) geek-baby clothing. I approve.

This does not even address the subject of Halloween costumes for infants and all the geek-splendor that can result. It’s really just too easy to go crazy there, but I’ll touch upon kids and costumes in a little while.

Reading Material

For the first few months of your child’s life, it doesn’t much matter what you read to them. Mostly they are just absorbing your voice, and the simple rhythms of language itself. The whole issue of “attention span” is kind of a moot point. Why not take advantage of this fact and read something you enjoy to the baby? On my read aloud to-do list: The Hobbit, Harry Potter, Chronicles of Narnia, and possibly the Dresden Files and Dark Tower (maybe with some creative editing and skipped chapters). It could just as easily be Tolstoy or Melville, but if I can’t stand to read it why would I subject the baby to it? Some of these can be cycled back through as kids get a little older and have the attention span to follow chapter books. Others (Dresden and Dark Tower, for example) will probably go back on the shelf until at least adolescence. But, you might as well get them accustomed to the universes geeks play in early.

Fortunately, it’s not all on you once you get your children to the point of basic literacy. There’s plenty of books for children of all ages that can indoctrinate them just as well as you can. Take a look at this....

If Star Wars isn't your bag, you can rest assured that similar board books exist for whatever your interests... or the interest you want to encourage in your kid. Personally, I kind of like the idea of teaching our kids that E is for Ewok and S is for Stormtroopers.

Socializing

If you aren’t going to be those parents who closet themselves off from the universe when your first kid is born, then inevitably your kid is going to get packed off to one or more social gathering, concert, monster truck rally, or other event which piques the interest of you or your spouse. Since you and/or your spouse can be assumed to be in some sense a geek by virtue of the fact that you are still reading this post on this blog, these interest will run similar to those I have written about previously (see my post on Growing your Inner Geek).

Realistically, midnight movies are probably not going to happen for you for at least a while after a baby is born, unless you have an awesome and incredibly understanding babysitter. In any case, taking your baby along is a bad idea. Seriously – if I find that awesome babysitter, I don’t want your kid crying through the movie. Please don’t do it. But there are other events your baby can tag along to, and possibly even participate in.

If you happen to be in to table-top role playing, make your player character (PC) a parent and use your baby as a prop to help you get into your character. Or assign the baby to play some of the less interactive Non-player characters (NPCs). Some bartenders just grunt, so there’s a place to start them. Whatever you do, don’t let the baby hold your dice. Nobody likes to pause combat for the Heimlich maneuver.

If you are headed to a Con, take your baby along. You will probably have better luck getting pictures with geek icons like Felicia Day and Nathan Fillion if you ask them to take a picture with your cute kid, and those are memories that will last a lifetime. For you… the kid will have the pictures at least. You’ll probably have an even better time if you go in costume, and incorporate the baby in the theme. There are some easy ways to go about this – Batman and Robin, or any superhero with a sidekick is an obvious choice. Han and Chewy, Kirk and Spock, Aragorn and one of the hobbits (hehe... that’s just funny, I don’t care who you are), are a few other ideas. But you could get obscure, as Con-going geeks are wont to do. Don medieval armor and a sword, and wear the baby in a backpack/carrier, and you’re Michael Carpenter! (For those of you unfamiliar with Jim Butcher’s The Dresden Files, Michael Carpenter is a Knight of the Cross – a modern day paladin who slays evil with a sword that may be Excalibur. He’s also a good Catholic, and always has babies in his house. …Admittedly, it loses something when you have to explain so much.)

Those are just a few things that come to mind. How else can you geek your baby?

Home Sweet Home

2011-07-29T09:06:00.000-07:00

We have several friends who are in various stages of progressing from renters to homeowners at present. My wife and I have been homeowners for a couple of years now, and I’ve come to learn a few things about owning a home (although our friends may not appreciate this insight). Much like grief, owning your own home is accompanied by predictable stages. We all go through them - they just look different with each individual homeowner. For the sake of simplicity, I’m just going to use the five Kubler-Ross stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance) to describe the experience of each stage.

It’s not that far of a stretch.

Denial - In the context of owning a house, denial is actually the blissful beginning of your home-owning life. You are flushed with enthusiasm over the most adult purchase you’ve ever made. You are thrilled with the opportunity this home represents. You are convinced that your home will look exactly how you pictured it when the realtor took you on that first walk through. You are certain you are not paying too much and that the bank rate you got is completely reasonable. You are totally in denial.

This period can begin as early as the first glimpse you get of your new house, and almost certainly by the time you close on the house and pick up your keys for the first time. But the end of this phase is somewhat less predictable. Sometimes it’s as early as the home inspection (lucky you!) and you can bail on this particular house and the process begins again with the next. Sometimes its move in day. For a precious few, denial may not come to an end until many years have passed or perhaps at all. These people (a) have purchased new, quality construction (rare!), (b) have low expectations, or (c) have someone upstairs looking out for them in a big, big way. Inevitably, over a long enough time line, your purchase is going to disappoint you in some significant way, even if it is just the typical psychological response to any big purchase known as “buyer’s remorse” and nothing more material than that. When that finally happens, the happy, oblivious homeowner progresses to ….

Anger - You found out the sprinkler system was leaking by getting a $4,000 water bill. You hire a chimney sweep who tells you the chimney cap needs to be replaced before your siding is permanently rust-stained. The property taxes got raised. Again. You spend every weekend of the summer missing out on the lake, the pool, the camping, the whatever because your manicured lawn has to be mowed regularly or it will choke itself. You forgot to get HSA approval before having the fence put in, and it doesn’t meet spec. You found out your home, according to some obscure source, is worth about 75% of what you committed yourself to pay for it.

Owning a home is a lot more work than renting under most circumstances. Even assuming you live in the middle of nowhere and can let the exterior of your house go to pot, there is a certain amount of work that must be done in order to keep a dwelling livable. If you rent, that work consists in calling the landlord or super when something breaks. If they are slack, or just a slumlord, you may have to deal with uncomfortable circumstances for some period of time, but legally repairs and maintenance are their responsibility (unless you’ve contracted otherwise). If you own, you have to track down the appropriate contractor and pay them, or do the work yourself.

The chimney cap thing - that was our first big surprise expense with owning our own home. We’ve had more such surprises since, but we’ve been fairly fortunate about surprise bills (in terms of both size and quantity), all things considered. Even so, I have had to learn a lot about basic Do It Yourself (DIY) home repair - plumbing and electrical mostly - to keep our checking account from getting too thin on occasions. And some non-essential repairs have been indefinitely postponed. DIY blogs and books are your friend. Even with a semi-manageable maintenance workload (your home is your new hobby, by the way), the combination of unexpected expenses and inevitable buyer’s remorse will almost always drive a homeowner to …

Bargaining - Maybe if you throw enough money or time at it your home will treat you better. Maybe a different house would be easier to deal with, or big enough, or small enough, or have the floor plan you really wanted in the first place. Maybe you should downsize altogether and go back to being a renter somewhere.

The “grass is always greener” mentality is pretty normal in my observation. You try and come up with some way to “fix” whatever frustrations you are having with your home through a greater investment of resources or a significant and probably unnecessary change in circumstances. We went through a brief and unsuccessful bid to sell our house about two years after we bought it. We tried to achieve this by moving out of the house and into a small apartment. Our primary motivation in selling was to cut our expenses, but I’d be lying if I said this “bargaining” mentality wasn’t part of the equation. The thinking goes “if we can downsize our life, pay off some things, save up for others, things will be simpler - i.e., better.” Yeah. Except if you’ve already grown into a house, moving a house full of stuff into an efficiency condo is a little like getting a polar bear into a cat carrier - even if you are successful you are going to be very uncomfortable. And so is the polar bear. After four months (and about that many people viewing our house) we decided we were better off keeping the house than living indefinitely in cramped, miserable limbo. Even if our “bargaining” had been successful, we would have eventually ended up in another house, and the cycle would have started again. It’s only by plowing through that you move on to the next phase of the cycle....

Depression - The futility of it all has finally gotten to you. The forty year mortgage that seemed like such a great idea is stretching out into a subjective eternity. That landscaping you spent the first three years nurturing has died in the oven of a South Carolina summer. The garage door opener shorted out again. The HSA has decided to fine you because you left the garbage can in front of the house too long. It’s just too much.

There comes a point where you throw up your hands in frustration or hang your head in disgust. A house is the most expensive purchase most people will ever make – it’s kind of no wonder it comes with more frustrations than any other purchase as well. But, like any other form of depression, there is a good prescription to treat the symptoms of home-owner ennui, until you can move on to the final stage of this process. The prescription is simple, but unique to each home-owner: Pick an aspect of your house that you like, and actively enjoy it. Ignore the grass in the front yard and cook something in the kitchen that had everything you wanted from the first time you saw it. Forget about the peeling wallpaper in the guest room and spend an hour in the garden tub that made you want to buy the house in the first place. For me, this prescription usually involves grabbing a beer and a pipe (yes, I do know exactly how pretentious it is for someone younger than fifty to smoke a pipe. I don’t care.) and sitting on my back deck, enjoying the somewhat overgrown but uniquely mine backyard. It’s good therapy.
Eventually, you can lay aside your frustrations and move on to …

Acceptance – At some point, you realize that your house is never going to be perfect, or stay in good repair indefinitely, or stop needing regular infusions of time and energy. You will realize that, despite what developers wanted us to believe at the turn of the most recent century, your house is not really an “investment” in the financial sense. In all likelihood, your house is not going to be in the local parade of homes, or grace the cover of Good Housekeeping or Home and Garden. Because, if you are doing it right, your house is not just a building, but a home – a place where people live real lives, break things, get dirty, and have community, and that doesn’t typically happen in perfect little idealized spaces we build for ourselves in our mind.

Acceptance doesn’t mean you still won’t occasionally get angry or frustrated with the problems of owning a home, but it probably means those little annoyances don’t define the way you view your house. You are far more likely to see the good than the bad. You can stop noticing all the flawed, scrawny trees, and pay attention to the pretty nice forest you’ve got going on. You can, more often than not, simply enjoy being home.

I’m not pro-owner or anti-renter. Whatever is right for you is right for you, and there’s an arsenal of considerations either way you go. Just know that the buckets of frustration that come along with owning a house are normal, at least in my estimation. And I think usually, the good outweighs the bad. And, whether you’ve owned for years or are just considering taking the plunge, that is my unsolicited two cents about it.

Celebrity Deathmatch! Death Star versus Borg Cube

2011-07-27T12:02:00.000-07:00

This post goes a little beyond geeky, into pure nerd territory, but there’s a good reason why I consider the questions relevant. To give you a little context: This question represented a long running point of contention between my wife and one of her best college friends, who for the sake of anonymity we’ll call Karen. In point of fact, it was a debate amongst all the members of my wife’s social circle in college, but my wife took the unenviable and (for years) solitary position that the Borg cube would win such a confrontation (all things being equal, and no Jedi involved), despite the naysayers and pooh-poohers to the contrary.

Enter me, on our first pseudo-date: her college graduation party. I was invited by another friend of hers a few nights prior, and really only knew about two people there, but this hot babe who would one day be my wife was going to be there, so I was going dammit. I arrived, and had not even managed to say hello to the pretty lass before a girl I had never met before (Karen) abruptly demanded:”Which one would win - Death Star or Borg Cube?”

Now, the vast majority of those who even understand the question would probably answer “the Death Star.” Their primary argument would be “It’s the Death Star.” Valid point, but it fails to take all the variables into account. My response, off the cuff, was “Borg Cube, and here’s why....”

This, as my wife tells it, was the moment she knew she was really in trouble. The fact that I played along at all was all kinds of brownie points, but getting the right answer (read: her answer) got me super sexy bonus brownie points. Thus begun a love affair for the ages. Judge me all you want - you just wish your story started that cool.

Nonetheless, my feats of logic in determining that the Star Trek baddies would beat out the Emperor’s brazenly flawed LEGO project did not persuade the rest of her circle of friends. I think the fact that I was willing to play ball impressed some of them, much as it did with my wife, but they were not swayed in their convictions. Undoubtedly, many of you will disagree with me as well.

The primary reason I went with the Borg over the Death Star is that George Lucas is a moron, and Gene Roddenberry is (was) not. Roddenberry’s science fiction was, by and large, based on good science (very early episodes and techno-babble dialogue notwithstanding). Gene’s best friend, after all, was the brilliant Isaac Asimov, of both science-fiction and science-science fame.

George Lucas, on the other hand, wrote the line “It’s the ship that made the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs.” If you don’t get why that’s dumb, it’s okay. Google it and come back. We’ll wait.

Later on, Lucas gave us midichlorians...

I will never. Let. That. Go.

In any event, what this comes down to is the technical thought process behind the different technologies. What technical specs there are out there for the two fictional ships probably had little or nothing to do with the creators of the two franchises - I’ll concede that. Still, I remember once a long time ago seeing a pretty dated set of specifications for the “turbolasers” that Lucas’ Star Destroyers had on board. The range was kind of pathetic. Whether the specs came from Lucas’ people or not, whoever wrote them essentially designed a weapon that couldn’t reach much beyond the nose of the ship they were on. What specs there are for Borg weaponry bear no such obvious defects. I know I’m getting into some incredibly nerdy minutiae here, but I’m not the one who asked the question. I just answered it. Correctly.

Anyhoo, these “turbolasers” are the same weapons that played support roles on the Death Star (the guns that really only worked to shoot at small Rebel fighters flying a few dozen meters off the surface). Oh, and the Death Star also has a complement of relatively frail fighters and bombers. The Death Star’s main weapon, which is apparently the only thing it has that can reach a distant target, is limited to a 180 degree targeting range, since it obviously can’t fire behind itself. This targeting range is a best case scenario- it’s not even clear from the movies that it has that much targeting flexibility. Could it hit something directly in its peripheral range? We’ll never know. A few small fighters managed to blow it up. Twice.

In any event, any ship on the back side of the space station with a decent ranged weapon could spend all day blasting away from a distance, and adjust position as the main weapon turns to meet the aggressor (or tries to, anyway). Let’s face it, the station took an eternity to get clear of Yavin Four - it doesn’t turn on a dime.

Even when a target is in range of the Death Star’s main weapon, it appears that the target has to be completely stationary to be truly threatened. What did it actually manage to blow up? Alderaan and a completely unprepared Mon Calamari Cruiser (yes, that’s right - the fish-faced alien race of Admiral Ackbar’s people is called the Mon Calamari. Let’s give it up again for Lucas’ originality).

Most people counter all of this by saying “all the Death Star needs is one shot.” Maybe. The Borg Cubes can operate with about 75% of the ship completely destroyed, or something ridiculous like that. For the sake of argument I’ll concede that an ambushed Borg Cube would probably lose to the Death Star. But that’s not assuming all other things being equal - that’s assuming a massive advantage to the Death Star in the form of the element of surprise. Another massive advantage I’m assuming the Death Star does not have is the presence of any Jedi - Sith or otherwise. Force users on the bridge mean all bets are off.

Obviously the Death Star is huge, so destroying it through bombardment would be a task, but if the main weapon can’t hit an enemy that can hit the Death Star, and the TIE fighters are no threat to that enemy (and really? to the Borg? Please) then it’s really just a matter of time. Probably not that much time either. Seriously, if the engineers overlooked such a material flaw as an uncovered exhaust port the size of a womp rat, do you really think that was the only structural defect in the whole machine?

That’s my take on it - Borg wins by default. The Death Star was a great strategic weapon - a world destroyer and a symbol of power. But it was a terribly tactical weapon - unwieldy and incapable of quick, decisive action. And that is how I landed my wife.

Having an informed opinion about all things geektastic never hurts.

The Final Countdown

2011-07-25T07:59:00.000-07:00

If you saw an image of Gob Bluth throwing colored hankies awkwardly into the air when you read that post title, you've come to the right place. But this post has nothing to do with Arrested Development. That was just a cheap ploy to get you here.

We are quickly approaching the point where our first child’s birth is days away rather than weeks (hence "The Final Countdown"). It has become apparent, as the philosopher once said, that this sh** is about to get real.

I am looking forward to parenthood. I hope that truth comes across in my posts. I am incredibly excited to meet our daughter, and I look forward to watching her grow up and become an intelligent, beautiful, talented smart-ass just like her mom and dad (okay, so my intelligence, beauty and talent are debatable).

But obviously, something as significant as parenthood comes with a generous side order of change, even above and beyond the extra tick on the census tally of your home and the extra tax deduction on April 15. There is the obvious lack of sleep from having a newborn in the house. There is the financial pressure of providing for a child’s health, education, and overall well-being from birth until (ideally) 18 or (realistically) 27. There are decisions you didn’t need to make when it was just two adults living together. And at some point, you will probably drive a mini-van. If your pride or vanity just can’t handle that, you’ll drive a mini-van that calls itself an SUV.

All in all, it’s a big shift. The closest life change one can draw an analogy to would be marriage. Marriage and parenthood don’t really have a lot in common - I’d like to think the former would come before the latter in most cases (I’m old fashioned) but besides the obvious relationships between the two concepts, similarities are hard to come by. In marriage, two individuals (adults?) go from making decisions that impact only themselves, to making decisions (hopefully in concert) that impact both. In parenthood those two people, who quite likely haven’t completely figured out the first part, now have to make decisions for a completely helpless brand-new human being whose only contribution to any given debate will take the form of a piercing cry, or if you’re lucky a gas-induced giggle.

Both marriage and parenthood involve change, but you only get a big party for one of them. Whatever you may say about baby showers - good, bad, or indifferent - I don’t qualify them as parties. Yes there are gifts and food, and you may even have a good time if you manage to avoid the inevitable “guess the baby food” games, but I just don’t think they qualify as “parties.” No one ends up dancing naked, making out with the dog, or going home in the back of a squad car. Not usually anyway. With a marriage, on the other hand, you often get a wedding reception (which can be a real party depending on the circumstances) and a bachelor/bachelorette party.

Bachelor parties.... well here’s the thing. I don’t know the history of bachelor parties as a concept. Maybe it’s a holdover from the days when wedding celebrations were week-long affairs. I don’t know. This isn’t an academic examination of modern wedding culture. What I know from my observation is that bachelor parties as popularized in movies and television have it exactly wrong, and fortunately for me, most of my friends have got it pretty right. In popular culture, bachelor parties are mostly about haranguing the groom-to-be for what he is losing: ostensibly, his freedom, by which we mean his freedom to sleep with anything that sits still long enough, his freedom to throw money at half dressed women named Bambi who are just paying their way through college, and his freedom to drink himself into embarrassment. Most of my friends who have had bachelor parties have treated them as celebrations of what is being gained. Yes, there may have been some good natured ribbing, and yes, copious volumes of alcohol may have been consumed, but it was all in a spirit of camaraderie and encouragement that doesn’t exist in movies or on TV. Yeah, I’m old fashioned, and I’m actually pretty proud of that. I did go to one bachelor party where the groom-to-be kicked a party-goer in the face as we all attempted to tie him down with duct tape, bury him in the sand on Folly Beach, and put makeup on him. But that’s a story for another day..

...Actually, that was the entire story.

But I bring up this concept of bachelor parties because I am curious: what would the concept of a bachelor party look like if it were changed and applied to a couple on the eve of becoming parents? Unless you are celebrating before you start trying to have kids, you’re probably not hitting the bars for a drinking binge. People frown at resting your beer on a baby bump. Clubbing? My wife and I have never been much for the dance club scene (such as one exists in Columbia), but I’ll admit the image of the two of us on a dance floor during her eighth month of pregnancy with “Techno Chocolate” blaring in the background is kind of hilarious. More specifically, the image of the likely reactions we would get is what gets me laughing. Even more innocuous, nontraditional forms of celebration are limited either by the condition of pregnancy or by the absurd heat of South Carolina summer. I tried to convince her that go carts were perfectly safe, but that was a non-starter. Same with paint ball, though the look she gave me was almost as painful as a paintball welt. The golf balls on the putt-putt course literally melted when they hit the cement. A midnight movie? We’d both fall asleep. Maybe that’s the most practical form of celebrating/preparing for being parents. Sleeping. For about 48 hours straight.

I don’t know the answer. So I put it again to our Constant Readers - particularly those of you with kids - what would you do if you had a night (or dare I say, a weekend) without the responsibilities of parenting? If you could go back and celebrate the the transition from pre-parental life to having a child, how would you do it?

Movie Review: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part Two

2011-07-22T05:38:00.000-07:00

I’ve given you a week to catch it, but some of you may be waiting for this weekend to go see it, so here’s my Great Big Giant Spoiler Alert: I would assume anyone inclined to see this movie has also read the book, or at least knows how the story ends already. Obviously, if you don’t know how the story ends, this post may have some surprises you don’t want to read yet. But more importantly for most Potter fans is that this post discusses some of the (in my opinion, significant) liberties the movie script took with the source material. IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN THE MOVIE YET, I WOULD ENCOURAGE YOU NOT TO READ FURTHER. I don’t know how much plainer I can make it than that. My blog will still be here after you’ve seen it, but I don’t want to spoil anything for you or change your expectations. Moreover, even after you’ve read it, this review is really only useful to explain what I thought about the movie - so if you aren’t really interested in that, then skip this post and read something about what Beagle has done lately. Really, I don’t mind.

Good?

Very well. Most of this post is being written on Friday morning, July 15 after a post-midnight showing. These are some of my immediate impressions. I make this point because, at the time of writing this, I don’t know when I will actually post this to my blog, but it will almost certainly be a week or so after the movie premieres. By then, I may not have the same thoughts and impressions, as I have from time to time been subject to more reasonable thinking after a period of reflection. For example, immediately after I saw Phantom Menace, I thought the movie was okay - maybe even pretty good. It was only after some intense reflection that I realized what a total crap bag that movie was and that I was in total denial because of my attachment to a franchise that had in many ways defined my childhood. I didn’t want to acknowledge that George Lucas was destroying everything good he had ever built. My full thoughts on George Lucas and the downfall of the Star Wars franchise are likely to be a post for another time, but I use this to illustrate that I have occasionally been subject to snap judgments on movies and later thought better of my initial opinions.

Harry Potter did not have the same impact on my imaginative development as Star Wars, and I have been painfully aware of the shortcomings of some of the Potter movies in the past. That said, this is still a series I have loved, and in some ways my reading the series as an adult (albeit a completely geeky adult) gave me greater objectivity than the childlike perspective I had in watching Luke, Leia, Han and Chewy long ago, in a galaxy far, far away. I would never elevate Harry over Han - the two franchises are just too different - but Potter had a lot to offer, even to a reader that was somewhat older than its target audience. This movie is the penultimate culmination of that series - the high-budget, visual telling of the final installment of a great novel that ended a great series of novels. I had high hopes, and that may color my comments some, so please take my review (and anyone else’s) with a grain of salt.

So, there’s that. Disclosures over. Let’s get to it.

This was probably the worst Potter movie of them all.

I realize what a bold statement that is. Any objective fan can recognize that many of the movies fell far, far short of the source material - a problem not at all uncommon for movies based on books. I make this bold statement with a caveat - it is the worst of the Potter films, all things considered. Order of the Phoenix was probably the most painful to watch overall, but it was based on the weakest of the books (in my opinion). In this, the eighth installment of the movie series, the directors and writers had some of the absolute best, most emotionally rending and iconic source material of the entire series. And they pissed it away.

I have to constrain my comments to a few key areas of the movie because otherwise I’d be here all day. First, there’s the significant rewrite that Voldemort is suddenly aware when he loses a Horcrux. Point of order: Why didn’t he notice when the amulet was destroyed in Part One of Deathly Hallows? Why didn’t he already know the Diary was gone? And Harry can hear horcruxes? Interesting. Okay, I guess I can accept that this twist at least reduces the amount of narrative explanation for how he finds the diadem (which was in the wrong place in the movie, btw - Rowling put it where it was for a reason). The confrontation between Snape and Harry immediately after he arrives at Hogwart’s is an obvious and incredibly awkward departure from the book, as is the fact that all of the member’s of Dumbledore’s Army, despite apparently living together in hiding in a secret room (that is not (!?) the room of requirement(!?)) are still active participants in the day to day goings on of Hogwarts? I’m sorry, what? Are we to believe they are in hiding at night, but go about unpunished to their daily classes? Or are they merely having a slumber party, complete with hammocks and representatives from three of the four houses in another common area of the castle, with Snape’s blessing?

I can forgive the minor departures, like Harry never going to Ravenclaw Tower, and Malfoy taking Crabbe and somebody other than Goyle (I guess the actor who previously played Goyle read the script and took a pass on this movie) into the Room of Requirement. Even the failure to utilize the Shrieking Shack in the final movie can be forgiven for the sake of expedience and moving the plot forward. But there are the big changes to be considered. The conversation between Harry, Hermione, and Ron before he leaves the castle for the woods was a huge, glaring error. I call it an error rather than a rewrite for a reason. Obviously this was another intentional departure from the book, but this is one which gets 180 degrees away from the underlying characters of all three of the primary heroes of this story. Harry intentionally avoids talking to his two friends in the books precisely because they would never, under any circumstances, let him go alone to face Voldemort. Here, Hermione pats him on the back with a few goodbye tears and Ron stands there looking like a lump on a log.

That brings up another problem - one which has nothing to do with the script. The three principles utterly failed to show up for most of this movie. Maybe they were emotionally exhausted - I know each of them is capable of decent acting, but you wouldn’t have known it here. The only actors who really seemed to try at all were the young men playing Neville and Draco whose names I am too lazy to check for on IMDB. Oh, and Alan Rickman in the Pensieve scenes, though I was somewhat disappointed with his performance elsewhere.

The piss-poor acting and bad editing decisions collided together into a black hole of suck in the scene in “King’s Cross Station.” In the book, this is maybe the most important scene in the entire series, explaining virtually everything that has not already been resolved, and bringing some emotional catharsis to Harry after spending so long wondering about the true character of his mentor, Dumbledore. Obviously, the studio, the directors, the writers, or someone made a decision to forego most of the major “is Dumbledore who we think he is?” subplot in Deathly Hallows: Part One (a gross miscalculation in my opinion), so a lot of that conversation would have made no sense if it were included in Part Two. Still, Harry meets his lost mentor again in this scene of the movie and we see them feeling.... nothing. This was the coldest, most mechanical scene of the entire movie and at the worst time imaginable. I never liked the replacement Dumbledore, but I thought after the sixth movie he might actually understand the character. Wow was I wrong. Or maybe he does understand the character, he just doesn’t bother to put forth much effort unless he gets at least thirty minutes of screen time. Also, minor note, but as long as I’m dissecting this scene - with that massive budget, was that the best visual background Warner Bros. could give us for King’s Cross? I expected something I couldn’t have designed with Photoshop, but I guess they needed the extra dinero to make Harry and Voldemort fly together later in a totally unnecessary ploy to rake in more bucks on the 3D showings.

The climactic battle was ripped into separate confrontations to stretch the drama, and that might have been okay if they didn’t screw up some of the major elements. In her fight with Bellatrix LeStrange, Mrs. Weasley comes off less like an angry mother defending her child than an incompetent witch who got in a lucky shot. The drama and intensity of the book were totally lost. Neville does come across like a warlock from Mars with fire breathing fists -as he should - but the rewrites ignore the primary effect of Harry’s big sacrifice - that Voldemort’s curses can no longer really hurt the people Harry sought to protect. That was kind of significant. Or maybe I’m the only one who thought so.

In the final battle between Harry and Voldemort, I just have to point out - the only reason their wands were able to lock together in that fashion previously was the twin cores. There’s a reason they don’t do that in the book version of Deathly Hallows. At this point in the story, neither one is using their original Phoenix feather wands (and don’t get me started on the failure by Harry to repair his original wand - that would have added maybe ten seconds to the movie?), so I’m guessing Warner Bros. never bothered to hire a consistency consultant.

My final beef - at least of those I plan to write about - is mostly just to point out some moral ambiguity that didn’t sit well with me. In the early scenes of the movie, the three heroes break into Gringott’s bank with Griphook the Goblin, and Imperius curse one of the senior goblins into being a cooperative git. In a departure from the books, that senior goblin is killed by the dragon in the vaults below the bank, primarily because he has been imperiused and is too stupid to get out of the way. None of our heroes seem terribly concerned about this, including Hermione who has spent the better part of seven books fighting against the oppression of other magical races by wizards. What? Didn’t occur to any of you that this particular innocent death was sort of your fault? Or have we just decided that goblins really are a lesser race?

Any one of these particular flaws standing alone could almost be forgiven. No movie is going to be 100% faithful to a book it is based on, and expecting that is unreasonable. Moreover, I am very aware that much must be sacrificed to make sure the story - the main story - moves forward at a reasonable pace. This was the second part of the final book and still clocks in at two hours plus, so asking for more is somewhat unreasonable. BUT, consider the example of The Lord of the Rings (LOTR) Trilogy. Peter Jackson had to cut a metric ton of source material in order to make three still extremely long movies. Despite the inconsistencies and omissions, LOTR still made a damn good movie series, and many people who never read the books have loved those movies. Potter, while being one of the best and most entertaining book series I’ve ever read, failed to come close in more than half of the movies. The vast majority of people have either read the books or are dragged by people who have read the books. And good thing - you would undoubtedly be completely lost if you hadn’t read the books beforehand.

I will say this for the final Harry Potter movie: it gave me what I wanted. Something still felt missing after reading the last book, like I wanted the story to go on a little bit more... or maybe it was simpler and I just knew there were a few more movies to come so it wasn’t really over until then. After seeing this, I know it’s really over, and while I may have to go read Deathly Hallows one more time to purge this experience from my memory, I don’t have any immediate need for something new from the Harry Potter Universe.

Harsh, I know. Feel free to leave your flaming feedback. It’s just my opinion.

Iconic Moments in Growing Your Inner Geek

2011-07-21T07:33:00.000-07:00

I would never presume to write a definitive list of “things you must do to be a proper geek.” The reasons for such discretion are primarily practical - I don’t want to deal with my Constant Readers’ “constructive criticism” that I forgot this or that, or should not have included something else. Also, there is the fundamental disagreement amongst interested parties as to what precisely constitutes a geek (as opposed to a nerd, dork, dweeb, etc.) and exactly what type of geek a particular person is. Eventually, we will have to have some sort of U.N. sanctioned international summit to resolve this question (as if the U.N. ever resolves anything - political zing!), but until then I will go with a fairly broad definition of a geek as someone with an inordinate interest in one or more areas of popular or niche culture which have nothing to do with athleticism. “Geek” is in no way mutually exclusive from the other terms mentioned above - one can be a “geek” and a “nerd” - but one is not the same as the other (though I and others may occasionally use such terms interchangeably out of literary laziness).

Understand, when I use the word “geek” I (a) paint myself with the same brush, and (b) do not mean it as a derogatory term in any form or fashion. Urban Dictionary (yeah, I know - I need a new source) describes geeks as “the people you pick on in high school and wind up working for as an adult.” I think the spirit of that definition is accurate more often than not, as geeks tend to be people who think outside the box, and are non-conformists in some sense other than the really annoying teenage angst sense where “no one understands me, so I’ll go listen to Modest Mouse and grow out my bangs.” Geeks are well served in later life by being their own people, while often being ostracized in early life because they didn’t conform to some arbitrary standard of interests, hobbies, or fashion.

One can be a geek in a single category, as in someone who is well adjusted in most respects but has an unhealthy fascination with all things Disney. Not that I know anyone like that. Ahem. More often, geeks tend to hold interests in multiple “geek” categories - sci-fi, fantasy, role playing games, video games, comic books, etc. These are the more well-rounded geeks, but too many geek interests can counteract the constructive aspects of being a geek by making one a lazy slacker.

One can be a geek about a specific movie, TV, or book franchise, or one can get geeky about a more mainstream hobby - band is a great example. You knew them in high school, and may have been one yourself - there were kids in band, and then there were band geeks. Many of my friends are proudly self-described band geeks. I myself was a theater geek in high school. My parents wouldn’t sign the permission slip for me to warm the bench on the football team, so I had to do something, and that was where I found my niche. In the old days, AV clubs were havens for geeks, and though they probably aren’t called that anymore, any high school club involving computer based design, film-production, or audio/visual editing of some other kind is probably filled with geeks.

So, like I was saying, there’s a lot to take into account when discussing the general concept of “geeks,” so a definitive list of geek behaviors, or key moments in geekdom would be hard to pull together. That said, I am a geek and I know a lot of geeks, and there are many, many common experiences shared in and amongst those geeks I’ve known over the years. Herein, I offer a short list of Iconic Moments in Growing Your Inner Geek. Most people will not have had all of these experiences (I myself have not had all of them) but most well-rounded geeks will probably have had more than one. Enjoy.

Watching the Original Trilogy - The capitalization is not poor grammar, as there is only one Original Trilogy. Not all geeks are Star Wars fans, though it is a rare geek who truly dislikes episodes four through six in their original format, and an even rarer geek who has not at least watched these three films (cough cough *wife* cough cough). Star Wars was a defining cultural achievement, both for cinema special effects and sci-fi in general, as it allowed the concept of “space opera” to be part of popular, as opposed to niche, culture. Besides, if you can’t whip out a convenient Yoda quote when someone sets you up by saying “I’ll try,” you are socially crippled. I grew up in a generation that had “lightsaber duels” with broom handles almost as often as we had “sword fights.” From a distance they look the same, but the sound effects are miles apart. More importantly, we grew up innocent of such nonsense as Jar-Jar Binks and pod-racing intergalactic dictators. Needless to say, my early memories of the Trilogy are strong in the Force.

Mocking the Prequel Trilogy - No one hates like an old-school Star Wars fan scorned. Unlike the Original Trilogy, however, one does not need to have actually seen the movies to establish this geek bona fides, as popular culture, Youtube parodies, and RiffTrax have given us multiple ways to appreciate the finer points of the best franchise ever squandered without actually sitting through seven+ hours of excruciatingly painful “entertainment.” Midichlorians... George Lucas, you jackass.
In the same vein as this experience, but eliciting slightly less rage, is mocking the alterations to the Original Trilogy added in the “updated” versions. Among the more egregious - Greedo shooting first, the awful CGI Jabba, and the mighty “rings of doom” exploding outward from the two destroyed Death Stars. Unlimited resources and that was how you “fixed” the explosions George? Poor show old chap.

Rolling Dice- Depending on what phase of life you first experienced table-top role playing games (RPGs), you may today deny ever having had the experience, or avoid conversations where the subject comes up, but you’re just denying your inner geek. Many of us have known the joy, at one point or another, of sitting around a table drinking heavily caffeinated beverages until three a.m. and pretending to be a level seven half-elven ranger with a Ring of Sustenance, whose actions (and the outcomes of those actions) are ultimately determined by the roll of a twelve-sided die and the whims of a Game Master, or GM. And we’ve also experienced the boredom of putting up with the player at the table whose role play side-story took two hours to resolve with the GM while the rest of us grow more and more sleepy and likely to take our dice and leave. Table top role-playing is a rite of passage for many geeks, whether its the traditional medieval sword and sorcery variety (i.e., Dungeons and Dragons), or something more contemporary, or even futuristic. There are RPGs with themes ranging from western to pirate, space to other dimensional, ancient past to ridiculously unlikely future.
The big problem most people have with table top RPGs is the speed of the game, as calculating results by hand with the aid of dice is time consuming, and arguing over fine points of rules with a GM or other players is tedious. Video game RPGs (Final Fantasy, for example) eliminate that element but take away much of the social aspect. Enter Massive Multi-player Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) such as World of Warcraft, which have become intensely popular in recent years, even drawing in the advertising credentials of significant (and less than significant) celebrities. These games allow you to be social - ostensibly - by playing online with friends or people you have never met, but have nothing like the social experience of sitting at a table with a few friends and going old school with paper and pencil and a few dice. Hopefully, as big as World of Warcraft and other MMORPGs have become, they will not replace the table top experience for the next generation of geeks. That’s where it all started, and there’s still a place

Reading LOTR and/or Harry Potter - No, I do not think the two are interchangeable. In my view, both have a great deal of merit, but I include them together because they are exceedingly popular, exceedingly geeky book series, and each to some extent defines a generation of readers. In the sixties, LOTR (Lord of the Rings, for the uninitiated) fans scrawled “Frodo Lives” on subway walls in New York, and took pilgrimages to the home of J.R.R. Tolkien. Apparently, Mr. Tolkien did not understand what all the fuss was about, but was generally quite pleased at how well received his books were.
In the last decade, Potter fans have clogged bookstores for midnight BOOK releases (think about that crazy sh**), often wearing costumes. I’ve seen five year olds devouring the eight hundred page tomes of the Potter series, so clearly there is something to these books. I myself destroyed The Deathly Hallows three days before taking the bar exam, and threatened anyone who wanted to dissect the exam with me after the fact with spoiling the end of the story. It was very effective (shocking, that law schools would be full of geeks).
Both book series have inspired incredibly successful movies (of varying quality), but nothing about the movies replaces the first experience of reading the books themselves.

Utilizing Star Trek in everyday conversation - Whether it’s a direct quote, an homage to the Shatner’s broken delivery style, analogizing a situation to an engineering problem Geordi LaForge had to overcome, or simply testing a possible love-interest with the query “Death Star versus Borg Cube - who wins?” (this is a story for another time), the first time one references Star Trek in everyday life is a special occasion indeed. Like with Star Wars, one does not have to be a Trekkie (or Trekker) to be a true geek, but also like with Star Wars, it is a rare geek that doesn’t have a passing familiarity with some of the characters, situations, and actors of the iconic series. A certain amount of mocking is to be expected, as most fans acknowledge the original series had weak points, the first few seasons of TNG were terrible, and Voyager might as well take a long walk off a short pier. But unlike with the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, most Trek fan ribbing is good natured, and for the most part the bad is enjoyed right along side the good.

Attending your first “Con” - “Cons,” or conventions, generally implies either a thematic convention of small to medium stature (for example, a Star Trek convention in Akron, Ohio, or a Comic Book Convention in Charlotte, NC) or one of the much larger geek meccas which occur throughout the year in major U.S. cities which have no particular theme and seemingly cover all things geek (Comic Con in San Diego - going on right now! - or Dragon Con in Atlanta later in the fall). Cons are all about fully embracing whatever it is that has drawn you to the Con, which inevitably is some incredibly geeky side of you. Whether it is an interest in gaming (board or role play), anime, sci-fi, fantasy, comic books, the latest project by Joss Wheedon/A.J. Abrams/Chris Nolan/Marvel Studios, the Dresden Files, or just fishing around for fellow cosplay aficionados (if you don’t know, you’re better for it, and I’m not explaining the concept), there is a Con or Cons for you. Think what you will about the people who show up in wizard robes and chain mail - you are only in a position to judge at all because you are at the same Con. Embrace your geekdom and put on your Spock ears.

Having your first midnight movie hangover - Off the top of my head, I cannot think of movie that had a midnight premiere that doesn’t qualify as a geeky movie in some form or fashion.* The latest round of Batman films, Harry Potter, the Star Wars Prequels, the J.J. Abrams Star Trek reboot - the only So if you’ve ever been to a midnight showing of any movie, the odds are good your have some geek in you. Depending on your age at the time (midnight movies tend to be dominated by high school and college age geeks) you may have bounced back easily, but the mignight movie hangover is an experience unique to the fully formed, post-college geek. There are no more excuses. You’re old enough to know better. You’re still out doing this crap. You are Geek. Go roar, or something.

* Although the Twilight Saga had midnight showings, and every self-respecting geek I know despises Twilight fans almost as much as they hate Jar-Jar Binks, there is no denying that if you have an affinity for werewolves and vampires, you are probably harboring some geeky tendencies. Therefore, I grudgingly include even this detestable franchise and those who stayed up to watch the premieres in this discussion. Losers.

These are just a few iconic geek-oriented experiences that may help you identify whether or not you are, in fact, a geek. If you recognize yourself in some of these experiences, congratulations - you may be a geek. Keep doing what you’re doing and let your geek grow. If you haven’t had any of these experiences... what the heck is wrong with you? Even “cool kids” get references to Kirk and Spock!

Registering

2011-07-20T11:53:00.000-07:00

The difference between creating a gift registry for a wedding and creating a gift registry for a baby is the difference between an autumn drive in the mountains and having a cheese grater rubbed over your knuckles while someone threatens to kick your dog. The foliage tour may not be your cup of tea, but it need not be unpleasant, and can actually be quite enjoyable. The latter, however, is both immediately painful and causes you immense disquiet for the future well-being of another creature which is dear to you.

In the context of wedding registries, the following questions, statements, and lamentations might be made:

“Do we really need formal china?”
“Who in our family is going to pay for a $300 pillow, let alone a set of two?”
“Hell yes, register for the bar kit!”
“Do you need to make ray gun noises every time you scan an item?”
“No, beer and video games are not appropriate registry items.”
“This is kind of fun.”

By way of contrast, the following might be said while registering for a new baby:

“What degree of impact has this product been tested for?”
“How many times has this product been recalled?”
“Why are you implying my child will die if I don’t by this?”
“What is this? What does it do? Who would need that? Why? Can you start over please?”
“There are different kinds?”
“This is mildly terrifying.”

The difference obviously is that the wedding registry is all about the wants (framed as needs, no doubt, but wants all the same) of two individuals who presumably resemble adults and are able to fend for themselves. The baby registry, while full of wants and whims, is primarily about the needs of a helpless, squealing newborn, and is being overseen in most cases by those same two presumed-adults, a year or several down the line, who are slowly realizing they don’t have a clue what adulthood and responsibility are all about. There is immense pressure to choose correctly, to cover every base, and to do everything in your power to protect your new child from Entropy - that is, the scientific principle that the universe is out to kill us all.

We put this pressure on ourselves, completely ignoring or forgetting that thousands of years of human history have passed with human infants wearing strips of cloth or nothing at all, sleeping on hay, and playing with sticks and rocks in order to get all of us here. We defy history, choosing instead to give our own children better than one in ten odds of survival by buying the latest and greatest gear rolled out by Graco, or Britax for the big spenders. The pressure is not eased at all by the overt upselling of the big-box baby stores, where the employees will pass you from department to department on your introductory tour, give you intense demonstrations of the high end products and not quite tell you that your child will be killed or maimed if you buy a lesser product. The big-box stores not geared specifically for babies are no better, since they just hand you the registry gun and assume you know what is best for your baby. Right.

All of that is a meandering preamble to the real reason for this post: listing and mocking some baby oriented products. These products were chosen more or less at random for usefulness, ridiculousness, mock-worthiness, or sheer oddity. And because I was able to find them with a simple Google search.

1. Waste Disposal bags - the official description needs no help: “One for really hard-core greenies in keeping with current trends to cut down waste and keep in tune with natural rhythms. The idea is to monitor Baby’s bowel movements, and, instead of clothing them in diapers, let them do their thing whenever and wherever they please. The trick is to always have your 100% bio-degradable ‘baby poop scoop’ bag at hand to ensure their waste doesn’t become the planet’s.”

Yeah. It’s just like what you use when you take your dog for a walk. For your kid.

2. Pee-Pee Tee-pee - Doesn’t take much imagination to figure these out, but here’s a hint: my wife and I won’t need these disposable items for our daughter.

3. The Zaky Pillow - Pillow designed to look and feel like disembodied hands holding your baby in place. Have to admit, I found this on a fellow father/blogger’s site, and I have to agree with his assessment. Creepiest kid product ever. See picture if you don't believe me.

4. Milkscreen Test Strips - Brilliant little invention changes color if your breast milk is above a specified concentration of alcohol. Because let’s be honest, after nine months, no one gets to see the damn kid without bringing mommy a bottle of wine.

5. mamaRoo - Hi-tech “swing” features numerous movement setting designed to sooth your baby, including (inevitably) the setting for which it is named - the gentle hopping of a kangaroo. This device probably works wonders, seeing as it take advantage of the soothing genetic memory every human child shares of riding around in a marsupial’s pouch.

6. Any item, clothing or otherwise, ever featured on Toddler’s in Tiaras - Your three-year old doesn’t need high heels, diamond earrings, or anything made by Louis Vuitton. Especially if you are buying her formula with WIC vouchers.

What’s the most ridiculous baby-oriented product you’ve run across? More importantly, for us future parents, what’s the most useful?

Monday, Monday

2011-07-19T12:53:00.000-07:00

I am a very typical office drone in the sense that I really drag on Mondays. I love the weekends, and it takes me a while to get started on Mondays. I loathe scheduling anything on Monday, and this goes double for Mondays that follow long weekends and days off (yesterday was one such Monday) - there's usually too many fires to put out to make it worthwhile.

Long story short - there's a very short list of things I wouldn't do to avoid Mondays.

Spending seven hours in a hospital with a wife in extreme pain is on that very short list.

My wife is fine, and the baby is fine, and for clarity's sake the baby is still in utero (not a Nirvana album - actually still in my wife). In fact, at no point yesterday was our baby in any distress whatsoever, as evidenced by the constant and enthusiastic kicks she gave the fetal heart monitor my wife wore in the Maternal Assessment Center. You think nails on a chalk board make an annoying sound? Try the squawk of a fetal heart monitor with the volume on ten while your baby does an impression of a Japanese women's soccer player scoring on an American goalie.

I'm sorry. Too soon?

Still, we had a bit of an adventure yesterday, with my wife extremely uncomfortable for the vast majority of the day, and only slightly better today. After seven hours we were discharged, only really knowing what the problem wasn't - no kidney stones or gall stones. Just extremely painful muscle spasms on her right side. Having felt pretty much useless for most of the day (not at all helped by what I think was my first ever migraine) I wonder how I will react when my wife is actually in labor. I kinda hope I can be less of a lump when the time comes than I was yesterday.

Also, although my wife maintains she was perfectly clear in her Facebook post from the hospital, I would like to apologize to anyone who was caused worry, panic, distress, bloating, or mild diarrhea by the post referencing IVs and monitors on her day off. I fielded more than a few phone calls, emails, and texts yesterday, and we are very grateful for your concern. Everyone is fine, and the countdown to baby continues.

Vaguebooking or not? You be the judge.

Great thanks are owed to the staff at LMC's Maternal Assessment Center. They were a great comfort, and very professional. And although waiting in a hospital for seven hours is never going to be a fun way to spend a day, waiting in a private room with a recliner and cable TV is about as good as the experience can get.

For those of you who have asked, my inevitable review of Harry Potter is on the way. I wanted to allow at least the opening weekend to come and go before posting it so those who really wanted to see it without the temptation of spoilers and or positive/negative hype coloring their view would have that opportunity. That said, if you really wanted to avoid all that I suppose you could just not read any such post until after you'd seen the movie. Oh well. Chalk it up to needless courtesy.

Vaguebooking and oversharing: how to make me loathe your online persona

2011-07-14T06:31:00.000-07:00

In light of the sudden spur of interest Google+ seems to be generating, I thought it might be time to review a few basic truths about social networking. Google+ has been compared to Facebook and Twitter, combining some of the features of both. Maybe it will turn out to be a worthwhile endeavor and maybe not. I’m not a power user, by any stretch of the imagination, but I’ve been generally satisfied with google+ so far. But like any other form of social media, google+ gives us another forum in which to participate in bad behaviors that have become all too common on other social networks. My advice: don’t. I am not a violent person, but these behaviors make me want to do awful, awful things.

Bad behaviors exists in all forms of online social media, but in my observation they are much more obvious on Facebook than on other services, at least right now. Someone recently told me that Twitter makes them love people they’ve never met, while Facebook makes them hate everyone they’ve ever known. The reason is readily apparent - in order to be noticed on Twitter, you must be able to condense a coherent, relevant thought into 140 characters. A rare skill set to be sure, to be both relevant and brief. I’d accept being briefly relevant. Ba-dum, clang - damn, that flopped even in my inner monologue.

On Facebook, by contrast, the surest way to get a lot of attention from your legions of barely known “friends” is to be as vague and passive aggressive as possible. A few examples (you know if you’ve ever posted anything like this):

“Really?”
“I just wish people would talk about what’s on their minds”
“Well, that sucked.”
“...”
“That was interesting...”
“I just can’t take this anymore.”

Alternatively, one can “Vaguebook” as this phenomenon has become known by simply stating one’s current emotional state in the absence of any context.

“I’m so happy!”
“I’m sad :-(”
“I am unbelievably angry right now...”

Please note, negative emotional status updates tend to engender more concerned and sympathetic responses from “friends” whereas positive emotions may get a few “great” or “good for you” replies, but don’t create as much curiosity as negative statuses. Statusi? Updates.

Also note, “I am currently horny” is likely to get you blocked by a large segment of your friends, and arguably doesn’t qualify as an emotional state anyway. Also, this status update does convey a complete thought since no cause is strictly necessary (assuming you are male, and what female would be so crass?), so this doesn’t really belong in a post about Vaguebooking. I think I’ve taken this digression about as far as I can. Carrying on...

To make a long story short, when you engage in Vaguebooking it causes everyone to hate you. Many people still love you despite hating you, but it is very difficult to tolerate such ambivalent wordsmithing in a public forum. When you Vaguebook, you evidently consider your current thought worthy of bringing into the public sphere, but NOT worthy of full (or even in most cases a partial) explanation. Perhaps you only want a select few friends who know you well and already know what’s going on to see and respond to your comment. Guess what? Those people know you well and already know what’s going on. Odds are good your comment is unnecessary for their benefit. If you really need to say it to them exclusively use a message feature or - novel concept - pick up the phone. To the other 417 other friends you have on Facebook, your comment is meaningless and will either cause inquiry or frustration or both. In many cases, the attention is what the Vaguebooker is after anyway. If that is the case - well played. We all hate you, but you got 37 comments off of your open-ended post, most of them vaguely concerned and as heartfelt as a “Happy Belated Birthday” card from a third cousin. If attention is not what you are after - if you actually want to engage in dialogue with someone or get something off your chest, please... please... give us some context.

I hesitate to talk in great detail about the concept of oversharing for a variety of reasons. First, I’m painfully aware of the irony of a blogger berating Facebook users about oversharing since a blog is, practically by definition, vanity publishing, and by extension oversharing, at its very worst. One could argue that with a blog, unlike with Facebook, readers must seek out your thoughts and are not subjected to the sharing involuntarily the way the casual Facebook user must wade through the salacious details of your life to see how grandma is doing on Farmville. But I will allow the objection. Second, there is a lot of grey area within the concept of oversharing. Oversharing is defined (by Urban Dictionary, a completely reliable source) as “providing more personal information than absolutely necessary.” The grey areas come in when you try to establish what is absolutely necessary for whom, or for what purpose?

Did I use “whom” correctly there? English majors? Eh, whom cares?

Facebook is a great tool for keeping in touch with friends and family members, and it is a way more efficient method of communicating things like “the baby did something cute today” or “we bought the cat a lobster costume” than calling every single person who might be interested in those minor life details. As a pending parent, I am well aware that the soon-to-be grandparents will enjoy frequent updates, pictures, and even, perhaps, video of the little rugrat. Social media is way easier on me for that type of communication than phone calls or snail mail. I fully intend to utilize modern technology in this fashion - not exclusively, but extensively - because I will have other things to do with my time... like sleep. Inevitably, not all of your Facebook friends will care about your kid updates, how cute your animals look in human clothes, your sinus infection or upcoming medical procedure, or your recent promotion. To a certain extent, oversharing is a completely subjective concept which can only be specifically identified by the individual reader. One reader’s oversharing is another’s fantastic anecdote.

On the other hand, there is a level of sharing that takes place on Facebook and other forms of social media that we all (the 99.98% of us who do, occasionally, make rational decisions) can agree is just too damn much. We don’t need to know how “fly” that “ho” was last night. We don’t want to see your criminal domestic violence case played out on our wall. The nitty-gritty details of your delivery/surgery/divorce hearing do not belong on Twitter. And seriously, you have a fifth amendment right to remain silent - why brag about your crimes online? I’ve seen this played out in multiple contexts (shoplifting was my favorite), but every college student under the age of 21 probably has several pictures on their Facebook page that might not cause a criminal conviction, but would certainly look bad to a future employer. If I’ve seen them, odds are good they will too.

I’ve ranted myself out. My point is simple: if you are going to use social media, use it responsibly. If the statement you post online would not make any sense in a one on one, face to face conversation, you aren’t really communicating anything. Moreover, your statements, posts, pictures, and overall internet persona can and will follow you for a long, long time. Don’t get arrested, fired, or make us all hate you.

Good night, and good luck.

Quoth the Raven, "Pottermore?"

2011-07-12T06:59:00.000-07:00

In honor of the final film premiering stateside this week, I felt this would make a good topic for discussion. The title of today’s post might imply some sort of animosity (or at least spiritual ennui) toward Harry Potter or J.K. Rowling’s latest project - Pottermore. No, it’s actually a whole lot simpler than that. It’s that the traffic to the as-yet-unopened website is so intense, despite the fact that all you can currently do is submit your email address to express interest and receive updates, that you cannot actually submit your email address to express interest and receive updates. I know, because I spent the better part of a day trying.

Shutup. It wasn’t the only thing I did. And, I did eventually get on.

Anyway, that bodes well for the business model of Pottermore, whatever that may end up being, but doesn’t seem very promising for those of us hoping to access it in its first few weeks (it goes live in October, with a limited number of beta-testers gaining access on July 31, the birthday of the titular [heh heh] hero). The intense interest in the project is pretty interesting as well, particularly since Rowling and her publishers have been adamant that, whatever will come of this website, no new Potter books will be forthcoming. Pottermore will apparently be an online store where Potter e-books will be sold exclusively, with some new material written about the Potterverse, and several online games and interactive content. That last part kind of sounds kinda like sanctioned fan fiction, but one can hope that is not what’s intended.

The geek in me enjoyed Harry Potter far more than is reasonable for what, at the end of the day, was just a well-written but fairly simple book series. Arguably, it sparked the most recent revival of the supernatural genre novels, for which we can ply Rowling with both great thanks (i.e., for The Dresden Files) and lamentation (i.e., for the Twilight series). I’m sure those other authors would argue that Rowling’s writing didn’t influence theirs overly much, and they are probably telling the truth. The authors that have been most obviously influenced by Rowling are relegated to young adult fiction, if they’ve been published at all, and have mostly produced derivative crap in an obvious attempt to write “the NEXT Harry Potter.”

No, most of the recently released supernatural fiction, good and bad, is not directly influenced by Rowling’s writing (though they may share common influences). What the Potter books did for these other books was prime the fantasy pump for a large segment of the reading population that probably wouldn’t have given other fantasy/urban fantasy/supernatural genre stuff a chance. The increase in popularity in turn created a fresh wave of such novels from opportunistic writers (not a criticism - if I put that much effort into something I’d want to get paid too). That increase in inventory in turn created more interest, and the circle of life continues.

So, Potter created some opportunity for other writers, and made Rowling ludicrously rich in the process. And now, she’d like to “give something back” to her fans and readers, and we’d love to let her. If she happens to get paid a little more in the process (especially since she’s bypassing the Kindle and Nook stores to sell the hottest commodity in ebooks directly), one can hardly blame her. I for one am willing to admit my curiosity toward the new site. In the meantime, we have the final movie to watch and dissect. Its stateside release will be this Friday (or late Thursday night depending on how you view such things). I hear they gave the movie a twist ending - Voldemort is actually Harry’s father. No wait, that was something else...

Don't Forget the Chaos

Home Improvement

Super Bowl Edition

Go the *&^% to sleep!

Weekend Edition: Primary Day

Musings upon my imminent deterioration (happy birthday...to....me)

Ghost of Christmas Past

Christmas - the least interesting title possible for a blog post about Christmas

In which I expound on parenting like I've actually got a handle on this thing...

Thanksgiving

Happy Halloween

Adventures in Baby Feeding

What I did over Fall Break

Weekend Edition: Internet Memes

A Timely Rant about the Netflix/Qwikster Debacle.

A Word About our Title

Requiem for my video games

Teachable Moments

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Death Star v. Borg Cube Redux. Subtitle: Lawyers are big damn nerds

Don't Touch the Banana

Milestones

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Olivia: The Prequel

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Weekend Edition: Investment Humor

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This Kid is Never Freaking Coming.

On Geeking Your New Baby

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Celebrity Deathmatch! Death Star versus Borg Cube

The Final Countdown

Movie Review: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part Two

Iconic Moments in Growing Your Inner Geek

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Monday, Monday

Vaguebooking and oversharing: how to make me loathe your online persona

Quoth the Raven, "Pottermore?"

More Snappy Answers to Childhood Questions