15 June 2010

Today we attended the child birth class again. At one point, one of the instructors held up a graph. It had the typical X and Y axes, and it had a linearly rising line. She said the name of the graph, which I promptly forgot, but explained that it’s a plotting of how most in the medical community like to see labor progress; essentially, 1 centimeter of dialation per hour. She explained that if a laboring woman is not progressing this fast, they might send her back home (at best) or start in with the interventions (at worst) because, you know, something’s not normal.

As much as I like graphs , I was pleased when the instructor said that, while the graph’s creators had good intentions, it’s pretty much worthless. She went on to explain how laboring, instead of following a linear development, is more like traveling a labyrinth. Sometimes, you think you’re getting close, but you’re not. Sometimes, you’re surprised at the progress you’re making.  Jennifer said that this made sense, because she went from 3 to 10 centimeters in 2 and a half hours, and the hospital staff treated her as if something was going wrong.  Instead, though, Jennifer was just taking her own unique route to the goal.

I can’t really say I didn’t know this before, but it was nice to have it so clearly spelled out, especially by someone in the know. It kind of reminds me of when I read chapter 4 of Film and Art, or chapter one of A People’s History of the United States. Yes, I know those are odd examples, but those are two of my favorite books, and, in both cases, I found myself nodding along with the words, thinking “yes, I intuitively knew this to be true, thanks so much for laying it out so plainly.”

16 June 2010

Today we recieved, via US mail, the title for our car. I opened it up, stared at it half-mindedly for about a second, then carried it into our bedroom to put in our file cabinet. As I stared at it, though, I saw my name. My whole name.

Of course, I’ve seen my whole name before. In fact, for a time, I quite liked it. I used it a lot. Especially since I share a first and last name with my Dad, I emphasized my middle name to distinguish myself from him.

But that’s the thing: no part of my name is uniquely mine. My first name is from my Dad, my middle name is from my maternal grandfather, and my last name is from my Dad’s Dad (and so on ad infinitum).  For many years – decades even – this didn’t bother me too much. Yeah, I got my Dad’s mail often; and people frequently remarked that it didn’t seem “right” that I – the young kid – went by the authoritative sounding “James,” whilst my older father went with the playful sounding “Jim.” But all in all, I liked being named after my Dad.

And I still do. I mean, he’s a great guy. I have loads of great memories of doing fun things with him. He sat in my room for hours playing Solarquest with me. Even as an adult, he’s been a good friend – he helped Jennifer and me with vaious problems with our homes and cars, even letting me borrow his car for 5 months once so I could get to college and back. I always admired him for his positive attitude and his ability to be assertive without being a jerk (I can’t seem to strike that balance). The only time anyone has a lgitimate gripe against him, it isn’t a big deal. I mean, yeah, my mom was right: if my Dad went off to run a quick errand, it inexplicably took him two hours, primarily because he bumped into a friend and they ended up chatting for 20 minutes, and then he got distracted by a cool new store adjacent to the one he was supposed to go to. But, come on, that’s hardly a major character flaw. Even as a Witness, my Dad has this nagging feeling that he should be shunning me (’cause his religion tells him to), but he lets his conscience trump those lame rules.

But then there’s my grandfather. For years I ingnored the tales of the abuse he handed out to my mom and her siblings. I rationalized by saying: “Oh well, he’s a changed man, now.” and “I think he feels bad for the way he raised his kids.” And, you know, he probably does. As the other side of family seemed a little to fond of pointing out: all his kids are messed up because of their father.

For some odd reason, when I was born, my mom decided to honor the man who had been such a strict, ridiculous, and abusive father. She took his first name as my middle name. And, for a long time, I liked that middle name. After all, my grandfather was nice to me. When I’d hear tales of his former self, I figured we all made mistakes, but that god had forgiven him, and so should I.

Last summer, my grandma was in the hospital, having suffered a heartattack. I called to check on her, and she and I  had a pleasant conversation. I told her I would come visit her soon, and she said that was fine. That afternoon, I made plans with my mom to go visit grandma that evening. But my mom called back about an hour later, telling me that my grandfather, when asked if it’d be alright if I come visit, replied: “Absolutely not.” He didn’t want me in his house, see, ’cause I’m not a member of his religion.

This was like  a lightbulb in my brain: Of course he wouldn’t want anyone in his company that doesn’t subscribe to the Watchtower Society! Because that means I don’t follow the same corporation that has given him an excuse for his power over the years. I’m not gonna get into that right now, but, needless to say, I pretty much dumped my middle name after that. Jennifer and I spent one evening looking through possible alternative middle names, and I even printed off the government forms for changing my name.  Turns out, it’s a big hassle, and it’s expensive.

Will I change my middle name one day? I hope to. I see no reason to carry on the name of a child abuser who shuns his grandchildren. Besides, there are other people who are also named after him, and they can carry on his name if they think he’s so awesome.

One thing’s for sure: no child of mine will ever have the first or middle name Daniel.

17 June 2010

I stopped at the library the other day, and, like a sucker, I went over to the shelf of books-for-sale. I thumbed through them real quick, and spotted Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated. More importantly, it was on audio cassette. This is good, because I love listening to books in the car, but I only have a cassetter player, and there’s a serious derth of books on cassette these days, unless I want to learn Hmong or learn how to be an empowered manager. So I paid the 50 cents and bought the book-on-tape.

A few years back, I read Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which is probably one of the ten best novels I’ve ever read. So I have high hopes for this new book I’ve acquired. I began listening to it the very next morning, and at first I liked it. But yesterday, it shifted scenes to a time, about 200 years earlier, when an overturned wagon in a river causes a big uproar in a little Polish community. I couldn’t follow it at all. All the characters (and there’s about 20 introduced in the span of 10 minutes) have similar, difficult-to-understand Hebrew names, and the narrative is laced with Jewish terms I don’t understand.

As an aside: I hate when authors do that. See, I speak English, and so I read English books. If an author suddenly lapses into French, Spanish, Latin, or Hebrew, I don’t know what’s going on. Is it to make the author seem intelligent? Of is it to make me pull out a translation dictionary and get me to laboriously decipher the text? Who knows? Who cares?

Anyway, today I tried listening to it some more, but I had the windows rolled down (my car lacks air conditioning) and so it was too loud to hear the tape.

I’ll try again tomorrow. My plan is to rewind the tape to the start of this scene, and try to pay more attention this time.

12 June 2010

Got a lot done today, which is funny, because today marks the first day this month that we had nothing written on the calendar.

Jennifer spent a good chunk of the day reorganizing Owen’s room. That boy has a lot of stuff. I repotted some of the plants we bought at the farmer’s market yesterday: cilantro, basil, and some random flower. It was raining, but our deck is covered, so it was kind of fun to be out in the rain without having the rain actually get me wet. Owen “helped.”

I dropped two Netlflix DVDs in the mail today: Inspector Gadget and Holy Smoke. They wee both really lousy. Holy Smoke, I think, qualifies as the worst Kate Winslet movie I’ve ever seen and Inspector Gadget was just plain dumb.

13 June 2010

Today we ventured down to the sleepy hamlet of Kilkenny. My sister and her husband live there and out on their property they have a pet cemetery. We buried our cat Oliver there nearly a year ago and today, finally, we set a stone at his gravesite. We also brought along a packet of wildflower seeds. According to the packet, they’re a hardly lot of flowers and are perfectly comfortable in a xeriscape environment. Which is good, ’cause, you know, I’m not gonna drive down to Kilkenny every other day to water the things.

Anyway, the hope is, the flowers will grow and our late decomposing cat will become fertilizer for the plants. Last year, the day he died, Jennifer helped make a list of ten good things about Oliver, inspired by the book The Tenth Good Thing About Barney. The tenth item on our list (and on the list from which is was inspired) is that the cat will help to grow the flowers. So, let’s hope he does. My sister plans to take a photo of the flowers growing around the stone and send it to us, especially if we don’t make it down there later this summer to see them for ourselves.

14 June 2010

So, last night, I pretty much didn’t get any sleep. I mean, I maybe fell asleep for ten to fifteen minute intervals, but that’s all. I kept waking up. I had these really weird dreams – filled with grotesqueness and apocalyptic scenarios. They don’t make any sense, but they don’t make for restful sleep, either.

I think this has to do with the food I eat. Earlier this month, I had some sauerkraut with sausages (while at the casino), Blue Moon beer, and I just in general overate. So I threw it up. Then I hardly got any sleep, though I think part of this was due to lying in a hotel bed.

Yesterday, after leaving my sister’s place, we went out to eat with her and her husband and I got the salad bar. I put some bacon bits on my salad, and there were some large bits of chicken in the wild rice soup. All in all, though, not too much meat. Still, it continued to affect me for the next 16 hours.

So, I’m gonna limit my meat intake even more. As it is, I hardly ever consume red meat (twice only this month – and in the small quantities listed above), but I should just not have it at all. Birds seem okay, but I should probably have even less. I’ll just limit my meat to fish, I think.

Also today: after a week-long delay, Owen’s toy bear Hop-hop has finally come home again, thanks to the good folks at UPS. It was a grand reunion.

Finally: For the second time in as many work days, a co-worker sent me THIS VIDEO. It’s funny. Watch it. It’s certainly waaay better than those two piles of crap I listed above.

11 June 2010

Well, today I’m 35 years old.  That equates to 12,784 days, though I insist I don’t feel a day over 11,504. In my lifetime, there has been one Queen of England, four Popes, four Presidents of Togo, seven British Prime Ministers, and seven U.S. Presidents. Speaking of which, I now fit all the qualifications constitutionally required to be elected President. Of course, I don’t fit all the “unofficial” requirements (e.g., being wealthy, being an asshole), but there’s still time yet…

I thought, in the spirit of a new year of life, I would take this opportunity to reflect on the past. Here, then, are 35 things I’ve learned in my 35 years. Things, I hope, that will help make the next 35 years a success:

1. The only thing to truly dislike about winter is anything involving cars.

2. If, when trying to get to know you, the first thing someone asks you about is your job, you don’t need to bother with them.

3. It’s almost always a good idea to document: if you have to call a customer service hot-line, get everyone’s name…if you enter into an agreement, get a contract…if someone tells you something important, write it down.

4. You can’t really ever put too much butter on banana bread.

5. It’s easier, safer, and it’s a lot less weird to hold a glow-in-the-dark condom up to the light before you put it on.

6. People marry people that look like them.

7. Creating films is quite possibly the most frustrating hobby invented.

8. In general, to get the best products and services, go with the smallest company possible. Thus, farmer’s markets trump co-ops trump supermarkets trump mega-stores. Likewise, Mac trumps Windows.

9. Given the choice between knowing and not knowing, it’s better to know. Except when it comes to people’s private lives.

10. You should probably check your order before you pull away from the drive-thru window ’cause, man, they never get it right. On the other hand, it’s probably a good policy to just not eat from places that have a drive-thru window.

11. The lower the quality of music, the more insistent its fans are that they share that music with others. Usually by blaring it out a trunk that’s been refitted as a subwoofer.

12. If you provide responses that are more precise than what is expected, people will think you’re weird.

13. Surround yourself with books wherever you go: leave one in the bathroom, in the car, at your job; and bring one when you go to the dentist. You never know when you’re gonna have time to read and reading, above all else, is pretty much the perfect pastime.

14. Whether it’s a certain genre of movies or a type of beverage, once you become a true fan you actually begin to like the majority of it less, because you become so critical and discerning that you no longer find enjoyment in just anything belonging to your favorite category.

15. The amount of automation in life is sufficient, thank you very much.

16. A possession’s useful value is slowly replaced with sentimental value. There is thus a narrow window of opportunity in which to discard it.

17. You might think it’s a good idea to bring a large metal mixing bowl in the car with you when your sick, nauseous friend is sitting in the passenger seat and is afraid he’s gonna throw up. But it’s only a good idea if you wish to see the vomit land in the bowl, arc out the other side, and spray out onto your dashboard. If you pass by a Burger King on the way home, you can run in and ask for some napkins to clean up the mess, but they’ll only give you three or four. You can try to roll down the windows, but that gag reflex just won’t quit. Also, you might think using the cigarette lighter to burn a tissue is a good way to mitigate the vomit stench, but then you’ll just be left with a fire in your car.

18. When it comes to music, movies, books, and even friends, you decide on your favorites when you’re in your late teens, and you pretty much just stick with that.

19. There is no such thing as a quiet neighbor.

20. There is no such thing as a good caged pet.

21. There is no such thing as “getting pregnant by accident.”

22. God might exist, but only in the same way that Santa, the Easter Bunny, the tooth fairy, Sasquatch, and the magic pixies under my chair might also exist.

23. Regardless of the quality of the toilet, those pipes are narrow. Flush often.

24. You can spank your kids and declaw your cats. Or you can get off your lazy ass and actually put some effort into training them.

25. It is far better to call someone a friend than to call them a brother or sister (or any other familial term). There is no compulsion to automatically feel close to someone simply because you share a recent ancestor. The closeness comes in choosing to be someone’s friend.

26. Formal education reaches its nadir in junior high school.

27. The scary thing about big events in your life is not the prospect that you will change so much, but the fact that everything around will change while you will be left, essentially the same person, trying to fit your sameness into all the changes.

28. If your feet are not sore, throbbing, swollen, or cramping, they are cold. Even if they are sweating.

29. There are about three days of perfect weather every year. Enjoy them.

30. If an estranged friend calls you out of the blue one day and says he’d like to get together with you again, it’s worth a shot.

31. If you decide, early on, that you enjoy something, people will nod and say “good for you.” If you decide, early on, that you don’t like something, people will say “oh, well you haven’t given it enough time.” But no one ever has a clear idea of what the ideal time frame is.

32. You can’t really know how well (or poorly) your parents did at raising you until you have children of your own.

33. If you want someone to join in an activity with you, just ask them once. If they don’t respond, there’s no need to badger them. They either didn’t care enough about the activity or about you to respond.

34. Lists are awesome.

35. Trying to boil your life down to a list of 35 items in an off-the-cuff, spur-of-the-moment fashion is, at best, silly.

09 June 2010

My mom took Owen for a day out on the town today. She drove him to Burnsville, where she first tried to take him to the McDonald’s play area, only to discover there was no longer a play area in that McDonald’s, then took him to Burger King to play in their play area. After that, they walked around the Burnsville Center, where they checked out JC Penney’s and went mini-golfing. Later they hung out at Walgreen’s for a while.

I think he had a fun day. It’s funny, though, because I think that’s all we did when I was a kid: we spent our days shopping (primarily at the Burnsville Center) and eating fast food.

My wife called me while I was at work and said my mom wanted to know when I was getting home so that she could say goodbye to me. I gave her a time, and then I made sure to be home by that time. And boy, my mom wasn’t kidding: once I got home, she only stayed for about 15 minutes.

She’s still in Minnesota, but she’s leaving for Colorado on Sunday. She plans to come again in August.

10 June 2010

Today we made a memorial stone (or whatever you want to call it) for Oliver. That’s our cat who died last June.We buried him on my sister’s property, where she had quite the pet cemetery going on. We didn’t mean to let nearly a year go by without marking Oliver’s grave site, but, you know, things happen. We actually bought the kit to make the stone several months ago. But since it was winter, there was little point in making a stone that would just have to lie around the house for months until the weather warmed.

I mixed the cement while Jennifer laid out the pieces of stained glass all decorative-like. We tried to keep Owen busy by having him pick out the stamps that spelled out the letters to our cat’s name. I then poured the wet cement into a plastic mold and discovered the cement was way wetter on one side than the other. As Jennifer pushed in the pieces of stained glass, it was a lot easier to do on one side than on the other. After getting all the glass in, she pressed in some smooth stones and made them look like paw prints. Then she stamped in Oliver’s name which, at the time of this writing, is proving quite difficult, as the “ver” part of his name is setting very well, but the “Oli” part of his name keeps filling in with water.

We’re going to my sister’s place on Sunday to pay our respects to our late, good cat. I’ll let you know how it goes.

07 June 2010

Today I finished watching the movie The Naked Spur. I’ve been meaning to watch more westerns (there’s a serious lack of them on my list of watched movies), and so I put this one on my queue some time ago.  Despite its unfortunate title, I had high hopes: it stars both Jimmy Stewart and Janet Leigh, two people who, thanks to Alfred Hitchcock, star in some of my all-time favorite films.

It actually was a pretty decent movie. Stewart plays a lawman who’s on the trail of a murderer. He corners the ‘bad guy’ on a rocky outcrop, but can’t seem to scale the peak while dodging bullets. He recruits the assistance of an old down-on-his-luck prospector and, eventually, a discharged army officer. They do manage to capture the bad guy, who happens to be accompanied by Janet Leigh, but that’s just the first fifteen minutes of the movie. Suddenly, new information is revealed, and we see Stewart in a new light. It’s the remaining hour-plus that depicts the unraveling of the fivesomes relationships.

I watched about half of this movie last week, then finished it up today. I had the intervening few days to consider how I thought it was going to end. Do all five people make it safely back to town? Is the bad hanged for his crimes? I worked out how I thought the ending would proceed, and it turns out I was right on the money. Actually, I didn’t correctly predict the final minute of the movie, which I think was pretty lousy, actually. But I did correctly guess what would happen to all the players.

Anyway, it’s worth a watch. If you ever do see it, let me know. We’ll talk.

08 June 2010

Today my son graduated from preschool!

On the way to class, Owen asked us to play “It’s Alright to Cry” for him. After dropping him off at school at 9:00 this morning, Jennifer and I hung out in the area for a couple of hours, then returned at 11:00 for the ceremony. Owen was dressed in a cap (complete with tassel) and gown. He and his classmates were waiting out in the hall as the parents, siblings and others gathered in the classroom and sat on crazy-low chairs.

Once the music began playing, the students marched in and sat in a row of chairs facing the adults. Owen sat on the very left, nearest the teacher. She first welcomed us all, and thanked us for giving her the opportunity to teach the children and help prepare them for Kindergarten.

The kids sang four songs for the audience, which were titled (according to the program): “Slippery Fish,” “The Car Song,” “The Pumpkin Song,” and “Mr. Sun.” There were only four students at the graduation, so the songs were quiet, especially since Owen never opened his mouth the entire time. He did, however, perform all the gestures for each song.

After the performances, the teacher called each student up to receive their diploma. Owen was called first, and he hugged his teacher, then walked over and hugged the other teacher, then sat back in his chair. Once all the diplomas were passed out, the teacher announced that the students were now graduated, and she and the students said “let’s eat!” There was juice and delicious cookies for everyone. We took pictures and video.

Owen was privileged to have all three of his grandmas present: my mom, Jennifer’s mom, and Jennifer’s grandma all came. It’s a good thing, too, because we had plenty to carry out: besides the cameras and Owen’s cap, there were also a couple of art projects to take home, Owen’s name plate that had been on his locker, a large gift basket from the teacher (the basket was pink – how thoughtful of her!), a smaller gift package from the school, a framed picture of Owen in his cap and gown (that I assume the teacher took last week and then had framed and waiting for us), the diploma, the program, and a sheet with pictures of the students printed on it, that was signed by both of the teachers, and included this quote from Pooh’s Grand Adventures:

“After lots of adventures, Christopher Robin said to Pooh, ‘Always remember you’re braver than you believe, stronger than you seem and smarter than you think.'”

I will hang this up in Owen’s room, so he can remember his year and a half in that preschool and think about that quote. He made great strides in that class – a class where he didn’t even want to be dropped off at first, and that was so expensive we had to finagle a scholarship, and that we almost didn’t return to in September due to its location – and I am proud of him. It’s not often someone in our family graduates from something…so I’m glad we go this chance to celebrate this big accomplishment.