Random holiday reflections

So, I've been offline a week or two. It's now xmas eve and not what I'd like to have happening. Instead, it's loud and chaotic, last minute shopping and wrapping, hectic house cleaning (hopefully yet to come)...

...I wish it were a commercial free holiday. Lots of family reminiscing over something significant, something like a Rockwellian holiday, seen through a filter that blurs the edges, candle-lit charm, xmas music in the background, sipping cider...but it will be nothing of the sort all through the holiday.

Yesterday, for a brief interlude, I was in a store I loved, a health food store that was connected to an independent bookstore via a non-Starbucks coffee shop. It was just the kind of place consistent with my true core values and beliefs. It was what I really saw my life being like, going to poetry readings, writing short stories, rapping with peers over weighty subjects. I always wanted to buy things from developing nations, like from 10,0000 villages, the store. I figured I'd have cultivated friendships globally, perhaps served a term or two abroad myself, known hundreds of kindred spirits through Volunteers through Peace, Peace Corps, etc.

I guess, rather than getting sad over it, I should instead realize life takes turns, and that somehow this must be the turn for the best. It reminds me of "It's a Wonderful Life," and more recently, "Click" or "The Family Man" (or whatever it is, with Nicholas Cage). Their lives went west of center, not south, and they had come not to value what they had. It was not what they intended, and thus, it was deemed mediocre. They learned through the movie, what was truly of value.

I know that my family and what we're working on here is truly of value and consistent with my lifelong goals. It has very little semblance to what I visualized it being, but I guess that's okay. In essence, this is it, even if it's in disguise.

Curious.

I hope in the next year to really get into my Mother Earth News and start gardening and building with gusto. I want to cultivate comfortably w/n my means and values, from crops to friends. I want to begin into livestock, but I'm still wondering about living more conscientiously with the animal world (becoming vegetarian?), and I don't like thinking of what it would be like to raise a calf or pig to just slaughter. It's not that I don't acknowledge that it happens daily on my behalf for shoes, belts, and tons of meat right now, but at least I'm not doing it, directly. Maybe being that involved in what we eat will make us more appreciative of it (see slow food movement and related posts). I hope to find my niche in my head that embraces who I wanted to be more comfortably with who I am (it seems) left to be now. I want to see how I can make it all work out together. I am likely to have to work more and more this next year, especially if we are to ever build on or build outbuildings--all these things take money. Then again, more work is not consistent with more family, friends, farming, etc...but I'll work it out.

I hope everyone has a happy holiday and gets to reflect over the year, plan ahead for 2009. I may not get too worked up about these next three years until I see what happens to 2012, the next year prognosticated as the End of the World. After that, well, then maybe I'll start saving money. :)

Viral Video Highlights

There's little I can add to this, other than to restate how wonderful the world is with the Internet!

Enjoy...

It comes

Building, like the pressure and the silence when I dive deep in a pool, that feeling I get is coming again. Like the tangle of too much bedding and a night sweat to boot, I feel it enveloping me, early this year. It comes without regard, without reservation. It looms large, like a pressure system change, like a massive thunderhead. I have known weightlessness, having been bungee jumping, and I know that I will feel that, too, so very soon. The weightlessness of gloom, the darkness that follows the lightening storm. The End of the Semester Blues is creeping up on me like a high tide acid bath.

At least I know it is there, behind every door, waiting behind this monitor for when I send in the last grade. I can steel myself up against it this time, maybe, and avoid the funk, but it will still get on my shoes, in my hair, and stuck in the corners of my eyes. I'll be blowing it out of my sinuses for weeks, shaking it out of my shorts and shoes, too. About the time I shed that skin, a new semester will begin, and then...and THEN! Ahhhhh....it all begins again!




I could use a smoke!

On the eve of "knowing..."

...I'm not sure I want to. Tomorrow, through the marvels of modern medicine, we will come to learn a small bit of information. About noon tomorrow, another life will come into a clearer focus as we learn if that peanut in my wife's belly is to be a boy or girl. While my boys at home think this only matters as to whether she will sit or he will stand to pee, the +/- of it all is everything at once.

Having never had a daughter, I find it daunting.



Just considering the sex of the child is so very vast, so epic to me. I am so very glad that genetic engineering is still in its infancy, for I would not ever feel confident-enough to determine someone's destiny by what to predetermine they pack in their pants.

I think even if I were an old hand at fatherhood, if I'd birthed a brood of boys AND girls, myself--I don't think that even then I'd have the nerve to pin the tail on the donkey. To hang a penis on one or carve a niche for another--that's the stuff of God.

About as close as I dare imagine is to have a role in naming new beings that are my responsibility. My wife and I spend hours, days, years planning something so seemingly simple as a name. Sometimes I don't care, so far as even to let our firstborn name our third-born...knowing all the while that the kid can always have a name change down the road. Besides, they're likely to get stuck with some nickname, Skippy or Sparky or something, so perhaps the Power of Names is highly over-rated.

I was noodling around about this very issue early this morning, worrying that if we were to have a daughter, just how very challenging it is to come up with her first and middle names, irregardless of how well they may sound with our last name, since she would be likely to take the name of her husband in just a couple decades. So in naming her, one must think up something that goes well with everything, yet is not inconsistent with the naming conventions already established in our clan. Oh, the agony! So very tricky to even entertain! (So, on this note, I hope the newbie will be a boy, again.)

Once we do Know, it seems a whole chain reaction takes place, from wardrobe to sleeping arrangements. Even now, well, tomorrow, I will begin to assemble a world for him/her that is in his/her best interests. I will align the planets, set the galaxies in orbit around that child...and oddly, to me, so very, very much of what is to be established is indeed related to what's between the legs.

That's a crass way of saying it, but really--men and women are as different as species, at times. This news tomorrow will be the catalyst of a lifetime of sexism and typecasting, like it or not. The pink or the blue? The dolly or the gun? Though we have always encouraged our boys to be themselves (yeah, they have dolls and nurture them, so eat THAT)....I must admit, even now, that no matter how fairly I intend to operate things, there will be assumptions, accommodations, etc. that will be less-than-equitable, should peanut be a princess. I guess all I can do is try my best.

...but maybe all this angst is just for nothing. There is no knowing until the sonogram, and unfortunately, I'll be in class issuing a final when my newest creation issues his/her barbaric yawlp into the embryonic fluid and the ear of the sonographer.

*sigh*

So...Snow!

Don't I have anything better to write about than the weather? Not today. It's the first true snowfall of the year here, and I'm giddy. While I welcome every season change (that's why I stay here) I seem to be especially nostalgic when it comes to winter snow. I suppose it's got something to do with all the holiday clap-trap. I'm sure there's more being made of it all in my mind and memory than ever in reality...

I can remember scaling a snow drift that allowed easy access to the roof of our shop. I can still recall watching the weather man (on a black and white television) moving felt stick-on's that represented fronts, high and low pressure--all very technical sounding stuff by today's standards--and waiting for him to even hint at a snow day. I've been in my share of snow ball fights, built many-a snow fort, made a few snow angels. Having grown up in the country, we also were known to ride old pickup truck hoods as sleds behind the tractor. We used to come in from the cold to stand (on one foot, then the other), dripping, shivering over a floor furnace--warmth never felt so good!

I've been fascinated with what wind can do to snow. I'm sure it can sculpt sand and even stone over time--but snow drifting is glistening, sparkly and temporal. In eastern Kansas, where the wind is wimpy, I've been amazed at how snow can pile six inches high on a fence post.

I'm documenting all these warm-fuzzies, for I know there will be days this winter when I will curse the cold and snow. Today, however, while it's all fresh in my mind and new for the season, I rejoice!

Health is Wealth

Last week I had to go to a medical specialist for an *ahem* issue. Since it was my first visit, I had reams of paperwork to complete. As I am not one to go to doctors, it is rare that I fill all this out.

After something like 40 potential ailments and more family history--all checked off duly as "no" "no" "no" I began to feel better already! I may not even have needed to see the specialist, for after it was clarified that I was not hurting from x, y, z...I felt downright healthy!

I think many of us need to acknowledge just how healthy we are. I know that I take it for granted far too much. I've never had a surgery, never a broken bone (save knuckles). I've not been hospitalized, ever...until my kids were born, I'd never even spent the night in one, other than my own birth.

My three boys are all models of health. Every time one gets the sniffles or a belly ache, however, I become a worry-wort for them. My in-laws dealt with losing a boy at the age of 13 to lukemia--I do not think I could handle that. I just need to continue to be thankful and aware of the good health given to us. I need to celebrate it daily! It's so great to be healthy (even if pathetically out of shape) that it should be a national holiday! Health happiness should get its own day of the week, like the sabbath.

Yee-haw for Health!

The Road

I just finished a James Patterson novel in about two days, and while it was fun and engaging, it's gone. On the other hand, I read The Road, by Cormac McCarthy just last week before Thanksgiving, and it continues to resonate.

Set in a grizzly post-nuclear war wasteland, the novel can be read as a father and son travel tale. "The man" never is named, we never know his former profession, height, appearance--the story seems void of most of the conventional trappings of character development. "The boy" likewise is universally undefined; not even his age is clear. It's hard to tease out exactly how long ago the world was torched, but I'm guessing about six or seven years. Throughout the book, the two encounter a few other people, a lot of corpses, bones and skulls.

They are on a march south, to somewhere that may be warm and not overcast (from what I interpret to be Nuclear Winter). Everything seems hopeless, except the goal, and even that seems more of a mindset than a reality. They seem to be gritty survivors more than victims, but the man's wife argues they are not even that:

We're survivors he told her across the flame of the lamp.
Survivors? she said.
Yes.
What in God's name are you talking about? We're not survivors. We're the walking dead in a horror film.

The wife's description sums up everyone they meet. No one is well, suggesting that radiation, ash, no health care--all the above--is wearing everyone left on down to the bone. Description and imagery like made the book so seizing to me: Wearing masks and goggles , sitting in their rags by the side of the road like ruined aviators.

I've read many post-apocalyptic yarns, but this one is getting a place on my shelf next to Jonathan Schnell's non-fiction nuclear war scare book The Fate of the Earth. It has a degree of credibility and sensation to it like few I've read before, and yet it's speculative fiction, describing a world I hope we never come to know. McCarthy's depth of detail and creativity astound me.

This was most evident to me in the way the man and boy value things that we take for granted: a shopping cart, a blanket, a tarp, a Kool-aid pack. Little details of their lives take on seismic significance, like when the boy accidentally leaves the gas turned on a propane lamp, a recent find they treasured for its heat and light. They find a smattering of cornmeal in a cabinet and carefully sift the mouse feces and dirt from it before making little corn cakes which they savor. The attention to scarcity, the MacGuyver-like resourcefulness, and the unique approach to survival--all incredibly imaginative.

Had I read this book seven years ago, before I started down the path of fatherhood, I would have missed a great deal of the novel's potency. I might have offered something like the blurb on the cover, that The Road "is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best of what we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation."

Now, however, I find the book is truly all about fatherhood, in the absolute most challenging situation one might imagine. The man wakes at night to put his hand on his son's chest to feel his heart and breathing. Sometimes he does this when the boy is terribly ill or cold, times when life would seem to be fragile. Other times he does this in reverence. The man, I gather, has taught this boy everything he knows, and I believe the boy knew no other life before the bomb (sad as that is, the boy, under his father's leadership, has values and a good spirit). Still, the boy comes up with phrases and ideas that surprise his father (just like my boys do, but they are surrounded by inputs). Their relationship is the heart of the book, and it's a must-read for any dad.

In fact, for anyone who's needing a hero, I suggest reading The Road. While the man may not act like Mad Max or that Kostner character from Waterworld, his small acts, like giving a last morsel of food to his son, make him a hero. He tells his son they are the good guys, the keepers of the flame, and I wholeheartedly agree.

Now I find, while looking for a book jacket image, that this novel has been made into (what appears to be a respectable) film. It is scheduled for release in 2009!

Tough Guys have Big Hair

see famous look-a-like faces

I need bigger hair to look really tough! Now I have a goal I can reach. What's it take to grow hair?

Actually, I was just sharing this as a great time-wasting site to check out: Totally Looks Like