Category: family

So, I’m sitting here at my desk at work on a Saturday aftenoon. Why, you ask? Well, I forgot to bring the directions to the party home last night, and now I’m burning a couple CDs for the car trip to the party. I never realized how cool having a 100 CD-R’s, iTunes and a brand new G4 could be. I think I’ve burned 10-15 mix cd’s in the past two months, three or four Linux ISOs (that’s free software, baby…), and two backups CDs of all my project files. How cool is that?

I shaved off my beard last night as part of our “Beauty Night”. It was Jen’s idea. I shaved off my beard (thank you, beard clippers!). We did facials and had a Loofa Bath Party, where Jen hot-oil conditioned my hair. Then, we moisturized and went downstairs to watch Once and Again. I feel so pretty.

The big company party is tomorrow night. We’re getting all dressed up, smiling, and going.

In a whole different world, I wanted to tell you the story of when I discovered that girls and boys are different.

I was 8 or 9. We lived on an Air Force base in Goldsboro, North Carolina. If you’ve never seen military housing, imagine hundreds of identical duplexes painted varying shades of horrible lined up on practically identical streets. Our house was the first row in a newer section. Our back yard faced a football field sized field where I think they were planning on adding more houses. The middle and high school kids used to use it after school for various practices. We never noticed them as we played Army Men, Hide and Seek, Secret Agent, Superheroes, Tag, Smear the Queer (does that game still exist – did they change the name?), Orphan Adventuring Kids or whatever else we played.

One day, the cheerleaders started practicing. They wore shorts and tiny t-shirts. All of a sudden, we noticed. Every Tuesday and Thursday at three, my brother (who was 6 or 7) and I would lie on the living room floor like concealed snipers and stare out the sliding glass doors as they jumped, formed unstable human pyramids and did their cheerleading things.

It wasn’t sexual. I don’t remember having dreams about them. I just remember watching them, and thinking they were very different from me. They weren’t girls to me. They were women, but not like the moms I knew. They were just different, older but not old. Grown-up but not adults.

I loved being 9. More than being 7 and hiding in our windbreak. We lived in a neighborhood with lots of kids who played. We ran through the woods, caught crawdads, found illicit hidden military things in the woods we weren’t supposed to touch or they’d come shoot us.

If I were a work of art, I would be Pablo Picasso’s Three Musicians. I am colourful and provoking, always looking to break out of the mould and to pioneer new ways of doing things. I have a jaunty outlook and although I am a bit weird, most people have some idea what I’m about. Which work of art would you be? The Art Test

It’s all well and good, but did I have to be the creepy guy on the right?

Gene Weingarten’s article in the Washington Post Magazine this weekend, Why Not the Worst? was excellent. It’s a profile of Battle Mountain, Nevada, the armpit of America. Really, it sounds just wonderful. From the gigantic BM whitewashed on the hill to the delapidated downtown, it sounds really… armpittarific.

But, that’s not all. It’s really a great piece about America and how things have changed. Read it.

Which brings me to one of this weekend’s little epiphanies. Between being DAD, getting Jen to medicate her poor flu-ridden self and coughing up oyster-like collections myself, I got to go out for a little while. On Saturday, while Jen and Max were napping, I went to the book store, bought the latest Preacher collection and Purple Cane Road by James Lee Burke. Then, I went to Saigon Cafe, had fried spring rolls and Pork with Funny Noodle and read.

It brought back memories of my pre-married life in Tucson. I went out to lunch every day, always with reading material. Since we had to stagger our lunch times so the phones were always manned, I always ate alone. So, I read. I read almost the entire John Irving library (Hotel New Hampshire and the latest are the only ones I haven’t read), the entire James Lee Burke collection, and more comic books than I can count.

It was at this time, when I had no responsibilities, no debts, nothing to do but work and goof off that I realized I’d lived a sheltered life and knew next to nothing about how the world works. I decided, at the ripe young age of 20 that I needed to get out and meet different people. It was something I’d missed at BYU, where everyone’s lily-white and mostly from Utah or Idaho. They’re 99.6% conservative young Republicans, think the same things, do the same things, etc. After that, and my accident on my mission (that story will come much much much later if I ever decide to tell it here), I knew I was missing something. I’d lived all over the world and seen a lot, but hadn’t met people who didn’t agree with what I’d been taught my whole life. So, I began a quest (yeah, another one). I wanted to meet and get to know people from all different “categories”.

I didn’t have to go far. If you’ve never worked tech support, I’ll let you in on a secret. The facelessness of phone work means you can look like pretty much whatever you want. AOL in Tucson was a hotbed of “alternative lifestyles”. There I met my first lesbian, bi-sexual, gay man, transsexual, transvestite, pot smokers, etc etc. After working with them for a while, I realized they weren’t as different as I thought they’d be. Their views weren’t way out there and devilish like I was brought up to believe. They were just people, doing their thing the way they saw fit. They were pleasant and cool and loved to share their views on everything.

(this is a lot longer than I had intended)

And that’s where it began. Six and a half years ago. Now, I’m married, have a son, a good job, and have been working on this concept. Reading the article in the Post yesterday formalized it a little bit. So, here it is. America is big enough for anyone who wants to live here and do their thing. As long as you can live with a couple rules (you know, the “good of the society” stuff, going without murderin’ or thievin’), you’re ok. You can find somewhere to live, a group of people who agree with you, a place to live unfettered by anyone else’s ideas or rules. That’s part of what makes America great. The American Dream isn’t one dream. It’s the opportunity for everyone to have their own dream and to follow it. That little town in Nevada was a place for people with a little town dream. New York is a place for big city dreams. There are thousands of towns and places here that fit all kinds of dreams, you just have to find one that fits yours.

:: and the soapbox goes away, and I’m going to get back to work – happy Monday ::

Is it wrong to goof off at work on a day you were supposed to have off but had to cancel because off last minute requirements and changes needed on a project that all of a sudden became the top priority?

Monkeybutt, and the joys of being 10. It reminds me of walking home from school in Iceland. The school and our apartment house were about 150 yards apart across a rocky field (they call it “tundra”, which is the perfect word for it). There were a couple of us who went to the school (A.T. Mahan K-12) and lived in our little apartment house or the one next door. In the winter, the wind would whip across that field between the houses and the school at about 30 miles an hour. To combat this, my little group of friends made a leanto out of rocks about halfway across the field. We’d run for the windbreak, collapse into it and catch our breath for the rest of the trip. It felt like an odyssey every day. Mr. Wilson wishes he was 10. I wish I was 7, sitting in the little leanto all bundled up, puffing steam laughing with my little brother.