Just a quick PostScript to that last entry...I nailed it.
A-Rod did the right thing, in my book. Hell, I even got some of his verbiage right. "I goofed up big time" is almost a direct quote.
A lot of people want to chase this guy and ostracize him, angered by cheaters, etc. I'll reitterate that people are flawed and will always make mistakes. Test him every week and let him play ball. As for the record books...I agree with pundits that call for a wing at Cooperstown entitled, "The Steroid Era".
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Sunday, February 8, 2009
Turned on the television today and saw that Alex Rodriguez pumped some steriods into his body back in 2003, the same year he won the MVP as a member of the Texas Rangers. Saw that the press was having a field day with the water cooler topics that were sure to fly around sports bars and airwaves for the next 3 months.
I saw that Barry Bonds was beginning the next phase of his trial or inquest as to the allegations that he doped while playing in the MLB.
Then I saw that there were new allegations of DNA evidence recovered from needles belonging to Roger Clemens' trainer that proved that the Rocket got shot up with more than a little B-12 whilst a Yankee.
Flipped the page and noticed that Aquaman himself was being dropped from the Wheaties box after pictures "surfaced" with him wearing lambchops and smoking dope from a 3 footer. He got banned for 3 months from swimming and will likely not hear the end of this until he retires.
Lance Armstrong accused of doping. Back page of last year's news.
I'm sitting here staring at the biographies of some of the most prolific athletes of the last ten years...hell, the most prolific athletes in their respective sports ever, and they all have something dreadfully wrong with them in common. They are all human.
Humans cheat. On their taxes, wives, husbands, at stop signs, when they get too much change from a lazy cashier, and in sports. Humans make mistakes. They believe people when they tell them that their actions won't have consequences. They listen to people that give bad advice, and ignore detractors that offer the opposing sentiment. Human beings are flawed, and can be downright devious. But most of the time, making a mistake only requires an apology for people to rightly feel empathy and let them off the hook.
Phelps did the right thing. He said he was sorry, young, eager to have fun, and negligent. He is forgiven in my book. Lots of people continue to throw stones at him, and there will be more fallout than he deserves, even if this was the only time he ever smoked weed (it wasn't, and we all know it). But he did what nobody else in this blog has done (yet) and he manned up to his actions. Now, the irrefutable proof of holding a bong in a really clear picture will force you to "tell the truth" and admit mistakes. So I suppose that if there were picture out there with Barry injecting Roger in the hip with a day-glo colored substance that we could universally ID as 'roids, we'd have gotten a quick apology from them, too. Unfortunately in this case, we live in America, and we have a constitution that protects you from having to admit you made a mistake in your life until a team of three hundred lawyers get paid 20 million dollars to sniff out irrefutable proof that it was true. Damn that freedom thing.
Sadly, I wish certain things were exempt from that protection. I can't name a single person that thinks that Bonds, Clemens, Armstrong, Sosa, Palmiero, Phelps, or A-Rod are perfect. Each of them has most likely done something in their professional or personal life that they are not proud of or that they wish they could take back. But since admitting freely their mistakes and laying themselves before the mercy of the court of public opinion would entail such a brutal beating from the very fans they worked so hard to gain adoration from, they listen to their lawyers. They go in to hiding. They let the chips fall where they may. They basically hope it will go away and someone else will make a bigger mistake that will overshadow their own (see: Phelps' sigh of relief after A-Rod's allegations made the headlines).
I would love, just once, for an athlete to take this course after it comes up...
Call a press conference and gather your friends and family there. Look into the camera and occasionally back at your F and F, and say, "I goofed that up, big time. I made a mistake, and I went with peer pressure and I did the wrong thing. I volunteer for mandatory testing so that it won't happen again. I failed you."
Then, and only then, let the chips fall.
I think I'd stand up and clap if A-Rod did that this week. I'll bet you his salary that I'll see a lot more of his attorney than of him.
Postscript:
"A-Roid" and "Alex Roidriguez" have been Trademarked by me, years ago. The fee for using either nickname in conversation, print or on the air will result in me sending you a bill for $10,000 American. You can talk to my attorney if you need proof.
I saw that Barry Bonds was beginning the next phase of his trial or inquest as to the allegations that he doped while playing in the MLB.
Then I saw that there were new allegations of DNA evidence recovered from needles belonging to Roger Clemens' trainer that proved that the Rocket got shot up with more than a little B-12 whilst a Yankee.
Flipped the page and noticed that Aquaman himself was being dropped from the Wheaties box after pictures "surfaced" with him wearing lambchops and smoking dope from a 3 footer. He got banned for 3 months from swimming and will likely not hear the end of this until he retires.
Lance Armstrong accused of doping. Back page of last year's news.
I'm sitting here staring at the biographies of some of the most prolific athletes of the last ten years...hell, the most prolific athletes in their respective sports ever, and they all have something dreadfully wrong with them in common. They are all human.
Humans cheat. On their taxes, wives, husbands, at stop signs, when they get too much change from a lazy cashier, and in sports. Humans make mistakes. They believe people when they tell them that their actions won't have consequences. They listen to people that give bad advice, and ignore detractors that offer the opposing sentiment. Human beings are flawed, and can be downright devious. But most of the time, making a mistake only requires an apology for people to rightly feel empathy and let them off the hook.
Phelps did the right thing. He said he was sorry, young, eager to have fun, and negligent. He is forgiven in my book. Lots of people continue to throw stones at him, and there will be more fallout than he deserves, even if this was the only time he ever smoked weed (it wasn't, and we all know it). But he did what nobody else in this blog has done (yet) and he manned up to his actions. Now, the irrefutable proof of holding a bong in a really clear picture will force you to "tell the truth" and admit mistakes. So I suppose that if there were picture out there with Barry injecting Roger in the hip with a day-glo colored substance that we could universally ID as 'roids, we'd have gotten a quick apology from them, too. Unfortunately in this case, we live in America, and we have a constitution that protects you from having to admit you made a mistake in your life until a team of three hundred lawyers get paid 20 million dollars to sniff out irrefutable proof that it was true. Damn that freedom thing.
Sadly, I wish certain things were exempt from that protection. I can't name a single person that thinks that Bonds, Clemens, Armstrong, Sosa, Palmiero, Phelps, or A-Rod are perfect. Each of them has most likely done something in their professional or personal life that they are not proud of or that they wish they could take back. But since admitting freely their mistakes and laying themselves before the mercy of the court of public opinion would entail such a brutal beating from the very fans they worked so hard to gain adoration from, they listen to their lawyers. They go in to hiding. They let the chips fall where they may. They basically hope it will go away and someone else will make a bigger mistake that will overshadow their own (see: Phelps' sigh of relief after A-Rod's allegations made the headlines).
I would love, just once, for an athlete to take this course after it comes up...
Call a press conference and gather your friends and family there. Look into the camera and occasionally back at your F and F, and say, "I goofed that up, big time. I made a mistake, and I went with peer pressure and I did the wrong thing. I volunteer for mandatory testing so that it won't happen again. I failed you."
Then, and only then, let the chips fall.
I think I'd stand up and clap if A-Rod did that this week. I'll bet you his salary that I'll see a lot more of his attorney than of him.
Postscript:
"A-Roid" and "Alex Roidriguez" have been Trademarked by me, years ago. The fee for using either nickname in conversation, print or on the air will result in me sending you a bill for $10,000 American. You can talk to my attorney if you need proof.
Monday, January 26, 2009
TalkPick of the Week
Which came first, the Chicken McNugget or the Egg McMuffin?
Blatant thievery, that question; stolen directly from Little Jackie and her mega hit (as Wiki would say: citations needed. ) "The World Should Revolve Around Me".
Well, it doesn't.
The line she or some song(?)writer composed is definitely worthy of some discussion, though. It raises a philosophical and moral question that has been plaguing six year-olds for decades. It's a derivation of a riddle that is older than my favorite Ham Jam t-shirt depicting a pig's head being squeezed from the tap of a beer keg (1988), and older still than my brother's Mumpy (disgusting yellow security blanket which was sewn circa 1973 by a woman named Severance).
Its a McSong version of the age old question, "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?" (Wiki says its Egg that evolved, in a landslide citations needed ). People have bantered on about the subject for Eons, and the revolving time-warp it puts your logical brain into is a classic dinner topic for farmers, The Duggars and most any family that owns the Little Jackie album (according to Wiki, there are seven such families You really need to find some citations, smartass. ).
Time honored traditions like a dinner topic are a lost art in today's world.
In my house alone it is possible, and not unlikely, for there to be dinner-time interference from 4 televisions, 3 Ipods, a computer, a Wii, a PS2, a Gameboy, two dogs and actual food chewing to get in the way of a family conversation. I am proud to say that we turn almost all electronic devices off during family meals unless the four of us agree that the episode of Drake and Josh that happens to be on is funny enough to warrant leaving the volume up in the family room loud enough for us to get the gist of what's actually happening on the screen. In these instances, we generally migrate one by one in toward the TV, salad bowls balanced on our heads and dinner rolls under our arms. We admit defeat to being TV slaves with barely a whimper as we crowd the couch.
Well not anymore America. My wife of 15 years has recently and proudly invented TalkPicks (Patent Pending, All Rights Reserved, Copyright 2009 anything you say will be held against you in a court of law...Citations needed), and the craze is coming to a disjointed dinner table near you.
TalkPicks is a play on words. Say is fast or without the aid of front teeth and it sounds like an already invented and patented word. Say it slow, and you have yourself a gold mine...and a really cool idea.
Every Sunday night becomes someone else's turn to pick the TalkPick. The first week she introduced it, I glared at her and tried to feign interest while listening to Drake argue with Josh about who would go and...never mind. She told us that, from now on, we would have a TalkPick every Sunday, and spend the rest of the week becoming fluent in that paticular subject for until it became retired on midnight of the Saturday hence (that's a fancy Olde English way for tossing it forward seven days, old school, yo).
Knowing that diving immediately into "Moon Landing Conspiracy Theory" would go directly over the heads of some of the members of our (Sam and Ben) family, she wisely chose Spongebob Squarepants as the innaugural TalkPick. And the ensuing conversation was absolutely glorious.
We talked as a family for 45 minutes. I was so engrossed, I forgot to eat my broccoli (citations propbably needed). We talked about our favorite characters, episodes, sayings and conspiracy theories. We talked about animation, the time it takes to make one episode (six months to a year), the reason the show enjoyed longevity and even how plausible it was that Spongebob would ever need to clean a restaurant floor using a bucket of water and mop when said restaurant happens to be resting at the bottom of the ocean floor. It was truly glorious.
The next week, we selected World Records as our TalkPick at Sunday dinner. There was some huffing and puffing at first because it seemed dull compared to Mr. Squarepants and company, but my eldest son rescued the day with his Herculean effort to right the ship. He came home from school on Monday afternoon having absconded (checked out from the library) the 2008 Guinness Book of World Records. It was a field day. Did you know that the record for most pushups by a 38 year old man is 56 in one day (held by yours truly (citations needed)) )?? Did you?
My point, however difficult to see, is that we now have a bonafide tradition in my house involving feeling, conversation and words as opposed to Megabytes, HTML and Wikipedia citations.
Because of this beautiful and soon-to-be-permanent tradition in our house, I can now explain to my boys how life used to be at the dinner table without sending a single text message.
BRB. ROTFLMAO.
Blatant thievery, that question; stolen directly from Little Jackie and her mega hit (as Wiki would say: citations needed. ) "The World Should Revolve Around Me".
Well, it doesn't.
The line she or some song(?)writer composed is definitely worthy of some discussion, though. It raises a philosophical and moral question that has been plaguing six year-olds for decades. It's a derivation of a riddle that is older than my favorite Ham Jam t-shirt depicting a pig's head being squeezed from the tap of a beer keg (1988), and older still than my brother's Mumpy (disgusting yellow security blanket which was sewn circa 1973 by a woman named Severance).
Its a McSong version of the age old question, "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?" (Wiki says its Egg that evolved, in a landslide citations needed ). People have bantered on about the subject for Eons, and the revolving time-warp it puts your logical brain into is a classic dinner topic for farmers, The Duggars and most any family that owns the Little Jackie album (according to Wiki, there are seven such families You really need to find some citations, smartass. ).
Time honored traditions like a dinner topic are a lost art in today's world.
In my house alone it is possible, and not unlikely, for there to be dinner-time interference from 4 televisions, 3 Ipods, a computer, a Wii, a PS2, a Gameboy, two dogs and actual food chewing to get in the way of a family conversation. I am proud to say that we turn almost all electronic devices off during family meals unless the four of us agree that the episode of Drake and Josh that happens to be on is funny enough to warrant leaving the volume up in the family room loud enough for us to get the gist of what's actually happening on the screen. In these instances, we generally migrate one by one in toward the TV, salad bowls balanced on our heads and dinner rolls under our arms. We admit defeat to being TV slaves with barely a whimper as we crowd the couch.
Well not anymore America. My wife of 15 years has recently and proudly invented TalkPicks (Patent Pending, All Rights Reserved, Copyright 2009 anything you say will be held against you in a court of law...Citations needed), and the craze is coming to a disjointed dinner table near you.
TalkPicks is a play on words. Say is fast or without the aid of front teeth and it sounds like an already invented and patented word. Say it slow, and you have yourself a gold mine...and a really cool idea.
Every Sunday night becomes someone else's turn to pick the TalkPick. The first week she introduced it, I glared at her and tried to feign interest while listening to Drake argue with Josh about who would go and...never mind. She told us that, from now on, we would have a TalkPick every Sunday, and spend the rest of the week becoming fluent in that paticular subject for until it became retired on midnight of the Saturday hence (that's a fancy Olde English way for tossing it forward seven days, old school, yo).
Knowing that diving immediately into "Moon Landing Conspiracy Theory" would go directly over the heads of some of the members of our (Sam and Ben) family, she wisely chose Spongebob Squarepants as the innaugural TalkPick. And the ensuing conversation was absolutely glorious.
We talked as a family for 45 minutes. I was so engrossed, I forgot to eat my broccoli (citations propbably needed). We talked about our favorite characters, episodes, sayings and conspiracy theories. We talked about animation, the time it takes to make one episode (six months to a year), the reason the show enjoyed longevity and even how plausible it was that Spongebob would ever need to clean a restaurant floor using a bucket of water and mop when said restaurant happens to be resting at the bottom of the ocean floor. It was truly glorious.
The next week, we selected World Records as our TalkPick at Sunday dinner. There was some huffing and puffing at first because it seemed dull compared to Mr. Squarepants and company, but my eldest son rescued the day with his Herculean effort to right the ship. He came home from school on Monday afternoon having absconded (checked out from the library) the 2008 Guinness Book of World Records. It was a field day. Did you know that the record for most pushups by a 38 year old man is 56 in one day (held by yours truly (citations needed)) )?? Did you?
My point, however difficult to see, is that we now have a bonafide tradition in my house involving feeling, conversation and words as opposed to Megabytes, HTML and Wikipedia citations.
Because of this beautiful and soon-to-be-permanent tradition in our house, I can now explain to my boys how life used to be at the dinner table without sending a single text message.
BRB. ROTFLMAO.
Saturday, January 17, 2009
The Thief And His Pushups
I have two boys.
Sam. Eleven. Gregarious, thoughtful (I'm boasting) and fun loving.
Ben. Six. Sensitive. Wide-eyed and a little too cautious.
This is about Ben, who just left my embrace and headed upstairs to place the pen he stole in a safe place so we can take it back to his piano teacher next week...
Ben broke his leg when he was three. Somewhere in the back of his three year old heart, he grew scared. He jumped off one step when other kids were jumping off three or four. He walked when others ran, sat when they sprinted. He's burned off some of that fear and put himself in harm's way a couple of times since then, but usually because he's not looking where he's going.
He has these huge blue eyes and a totally honest heart, so you can't imagine for a minute that he would become the Keefe thief. But he did, clear as a blue bell today at his piano lesson. I wasn't there, but I could see it in those eyes the second he walked into the house. He looked like he stole the car, ran over the dog, went out with friends and got drunk, tagged the neighbor lady's garage door with green spray paint, and then passed out in the bushes in the front of a cop's lawn. But he is six and I just watched him leave for piano an hour earlier, so I put that anxiety on hold for 12 years from now.
One of the jobs a little brother has is to be amazed at things. You have this big brother that does stuff and you can't be too amazed because you share a room with this guy, and you can't just be dropping your jaw every time he coughs or defeats Bowser on a Wii game. But all the same, keeping your cool isn't easy and sometimes your big bro does stuff and you just want to faint because it seems so cool. But the closer we get to 7, the less we decide to be impressed with big bro and the more we'd like to show him up just a little.
I made a New Year's resolution to complete a minimum of 40 pushups every day this year until 40 seems wimpy and I'm not sore (not yet) and then move it to 50 and so on until I transform magically into a 5' 9" version of Michael Phelps with smaller teeth and fewer cranial hair follicles. I shared this with the boys and they went bananas. They practically cleaned their room to make a place to do pushups to outshine the other. Sam has good core and leg strength (I rationalized after his 3rd pushup left his arms shaking like a hummingbird trying to pose for a class photo). Ben, however, just lit it up. He could probably do 100 pushups if he didn't constantly lose his train of thought and decide to go have a snack.
Sam needed the rationalization not to feel to bad for being outshined Soundgarden style by Ben. He appreciated my praise of his core strength and tried to blow it off. Little bro finally had the upper hand, though, and was not letting him off the hook. He dropped and gave me twenty for no reason and then shot a supermodel-catwalk-over-the-shoulder glare at Sam as if to say, "I know you counted."
And I want to be impressed with both my kids for their achievements, honesty, hairlines etc., so it's really hard not to want to give Ben a high five at this point, which I wisely choose not to do in order to save some emotional scarring for the 11 year old. (Ed. Note: I can hear my father, father in law, brothers, grandfather and high school gym coach now: "Oh man, the pussification of American kids...") Maybe.
Bottom line, Ben is staring at me and wanting this reassurance, so I give him a quick wink and smile and we move on to less competitive activities like going to bed. That wink sticks with you as a boy, and he wears it like an honor badge for two straight days, falling on his hands and throwing down 10 pushups between bites at dinner. Anything to catch that wink and smile again.
Well, I'm glad I gave him that wink now. It occurs to me that needing your Dad's approval and support makes it harder for you to let him down. Ben had the complete opposite look on his face when he came home from piano tonight. Kari and Sam walked in chatty and moved in different directions and left me staring at big blue-eyed Ben, half crying and broken. I was clueless at the time what might have gotten him to that state of mind, but I could sense the body language in the threesome that someone needed to tell me something. He was holding a pen. It was silver and had a ball point tip on one side, and on the other side it came equipped with a laser pointer and a light blue flashlight. This is a an extremely rare find for a first grader; such a marvelous and multi-purpose writing/pointer-of-things-on-the-wall/dog-teasing instrument rolled into one.
He'd stolen it from his piano teacher's apartment, subsequently been questioned as to the origins of such an awesome instrument, and copped to the theft in the car. Mom and Bro told him it was wrong, but they left him alone with his tears and sobbing apologies because they knew it was me he was really afraid of disappointing.
He didn't. He admitted it, told me he was sorry and agreed to return it and apologize.
I couldn't be more proud if he broke the world record for pushups.
Sam. Eleven. Gregarious, thoughtful (I'm boasting) and fun loving.
Ben. Six. Sensitive. Wide-eyed and a little too cautious.
This is about Ben, who just left my embrace and headed upstairs to place the pen he stole in a safe place so we can take it back to his piano teacher next week...
Ben broke his leg when he was three. Somewhere in the back of his three year old heart, he grew scared. He jumped off one step when other kids were jumping off three or four. He walked when others ran, sat when they sprinted. He's burned off some of that fear and put himself in harm's way a couple of times since then, but usually because he's not looking where he's going.
He has these huge blue eyes and a totally honest heart, so you can't imagine for a minute that he would become the Keefe thief. But he did, clear as a blue bell today at his piano lesson. I wasn't there, but I could see it in those eyes the second he walked into the house. He looked like he stole the car, ran over the dog, went out with friends and got drunk, tagged the neighbor lady's garage door with green spray paint, and then passed out in the bushes in the front of a cop's lawn. But he is six and I just watched him leave for piano an hour earlier, so I put that anxiety on hold for 12 years from now.
One of the jobs a little brother has is to be amazed at things. You have this big brother that does stuff and you can't be too amazed because you share a room with this guy, and you can't just be dropping your jaw every time he coughs or defeats Bowser on a Wii game. But all the same, keeping your cool isn't easy and sometimes your big bro does stuff and you just want to faint because it seems so cool. But the closer we get to 7, the less we decide to be impressed with big bro and the more we'd like to show him up just a little.
I made a New Year's resolution to complete a minimum of 40 pushups every day this year until 40 seems wimpy and I'm not sore (not yet) and then move it to 50 and so on until I transform magically into a 5' 9" version of Michael Phelps with smaller teeth and fewer cranial hair follicles. I shared this with the boys and they went bananas. They practically cleaned their room to make a place to do pushups to outshine the other. Sam has good core and leg strength (I rationalized after his 3rd pushup left his arms shaking like a hummingbird trying to pose for a class photo). Ben, however, just lit it up. He could probably do 100 pushups if he didn't constantly lose his train of thought and decide to go have a snack.
Sam needed the rationalization not to feel to bad for being outshined Soundgarden style by Ben. He appreciated my praise of his core strength and tried to blow it off. Little bro finally had the upper hand, though, and was not letting him off the hook. He dropped and gave me twenty for no reason and then shot a supermodel-catwalk-over-the-shoulder glare at Sam as if to say, "I know you counted."
And I want to be impressed with both my kids for their achievements, honesty, hairlines etc., so it's really hard not to want to give Ben a high five at this point, which I wisely choose not to do in order to save some emotional scarring for the 11 year old. (Ed. Note: I can hear my father, father in law, brothers, grandfather and high school gym coach now: "Oh man, the pussification of American kids...") Maybe.
Bottom line, Ben is staring at me and wanting this reassurance, so I give him a quick wink and smile and we move on to less competitive activities like going to bed. That wink sticks with you as a boy, and he wears it like an honor badge for two straight days, falling on his hands and throwing down 10 pushups between bites at dinner. Anything to catch that wink and smile again.
Well, I'm glad I gave him that wink now. It occurs to me that needing your Dad's approval and support makes it harder for you to let him down. Ben had the complete opposite look on his face when he came home from piano tonight. Kari and Sam walked in chatty and moved in different directions and left me staring at big blue-eyed Ben, half crying and broken. I was clueless at the time what might have gotten him to that state of mind, but I could sense the body language in the threesome that someone needed to tell me something. He was holding a pen. It was silver and had a ball point tip on one side, and on the other side it came equipped with a laser pointer and a light blue flashlight. This is a an extremely rare find for a first grader; such a marvelous and multi-purpose writing/pointer-of-things-on-the-wall/dog-teasing instrument rolled into one.
He'd stolen it from his piano teacher's apartment, subsequently been questioned as to the origins of such an awesome instrument, and copped to the theft in the car. Mom and Bro told him it was wrong, but they left him alone with his tears and sobbing apologies because they knew it was me he was really afraid of disappointing.
He didn't. He admitted it, told me he was sorry and agreed to return it and apologize.
I couldn't be more proud if he broke the world record for pushups.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Ears and tears
It never fails. Right when Sarah Brightman spills into the high ending of "Time To Say Goodbye", the tears start to well up. This song might be on and I'm driving like a Nor' Easter to make it to a softball game on time, wearing cleats for crying out loud, the manliest of footwear, and the tears start to come. Hell, I could be playing poker with Clint Eastwood and John Wayne and I'd cry when she gets to the high part.
Something about music transforms the prefontal cortex (or is it the mandibular lobe?) and bathes my brain in the moment. Am I the only one? No way? Really?
I once confided in a good friend, (and an intellectual guy) that I got really emotional whenever I heard the song "Satellite" by Dave Matthews. I had been reading the album credits one night (pre-dawn technologically, of course, as I actually owned the physical CD) and happened upon the dedication of the song or album to a little girl who had passed away. I can't even remember, and the dedication isn't important, but the words hit me just as the song hit a crescendo, and consequently, so did my heart. It's all about crescendo.
Anyhow, my intellectual friend is a music fan, culturally efficient and wears pink while maintaining masculinity, so I figured he'd have some empathy for my situation and possibly even share a similar tale. The reaction I got was similar to the one you'd get from a 2nd grade classmate upon calling your teacher "Mom" when asking her a question. He still has never let me live it down. He'll call me when he's visiting from Chicago to check on me, and the line of questioning is in the order of:
-How's the family?
-Still love your job?
-When can we get a beer?
-Are you crying listening to DMB right now?
-How's your Fantasy Football team?
Etc.
But the older I get, the more frequently the emotional tags keep coming, each one pasted neatly to a song from the past or present. The latest example is a song I bought off ITunes two days ago that I would NEVER have purchased with your money had it not been for the cry tag that accompanied it. I first heard "Jai Ho" at the end of the movie Slumdog Millionaire right before Christmas with my wife. Unless a movie stars Burt Reynolds and Dom Delouise, I don't watch the credits. Well, that's not entirely true. Anyone who saw Ferris Bueller's Day Off stayed for the credits. And, I accidentally discovered the magical and side-splitting ending to Napoleon Dynamite after the 5th or 6th time I'd seen the movie.
For some reason, when Slumdog ends, you stay. I'll need to see it again to know how long it is between the closing scene and the start of Jai Ho and the (SPOILER ALERT) dance scene, but it seemed like a long time. We didn't move from our seats, thankfully, and it turned out to be another cry-tag moment. There's no reason why...it's not at all sad. In fact it's the movie's most jovial and uplifting time. In addition, the actors are no longer even in character. So basically, this song comes on, the actors (not the characters) start doing this dance to a song by this artist from Mumbai and I am crying.
Before you suggest anti-depressants, let me tell you...It was a good, cathartic little cry just like the one that got me when my boys were playing in their first piano recital three weeks ago. Another came the same day when their teacher sat and played this incredible concerto (or sonata, I can't read music). Just a little tear. That's all. Eyes well up a little and then it passes. But it feels really good.
I might be an emotional goof, but I like it. I look for a song with music and lyrics that builds up fiercely, slowly, and without pretense, and then spills it's guts on the floor. I want my music to puke when the rides over.
Something about music transforms the prefontal cortex (or is it the mandibular lobe?) and bathes my brain in the moment. Am I the only one? No way? Really?
I once confided in a good friend, (and an intellectual guy) that I got really emotional whenever I heard the song "Satellite" by Dave Matthews. I had been reading the album credits one night (pre-dawn technologically, of course, as I actually owned the physical CD) and happened upon the dedication of the song or album to a little girl who had passed away. I can't even remember, and the dedication isn't important, but the words hit me just as the song hit a crescendo, and consequently, so did my heart. It's all about crescendo.
Anyhow, my intellectual friend is a music fan, culturally efficient and wears pink while maintaining masculinity, so I figured he'd have some empathy for my situation and possibly even share a similar tale. The reaction I got was similar to the one you'd get from a 2nd grade classmate upon calling your teacher "Mom" when asking her a question. He still has never let me live it down. He'll call me when he's visiting from Chicago to check on me, and the line of questioning is in the order of:
-How's the family?
-Still love your job?
-When can we get a beer?
-Are you crying listening to DMB right now?
-How's your Fantasy Football team?
Etc.
But the older I get, the more frequently the emotional tags keep coming, each one pasted neatly to a song from the past or present. The latest example is a song I bought off ITunes two days ago that I would NEVER have purchased with your money had it not been for the cry tag that accompanied it. I first heard "Jai Ho" at the end of the movie Slumdog Millionaire right before Christmas with my wife. Unless a movie stars Burt Reynolds and Dom Delouise, I don't watch the credits. Well, that's not entirely true. Anyone who saw Ferris Bueller's Day Off stayed for the credits. And, I accidentally discovered the magical and side-splitting ending to Napoleon Dynamite after the 5th or 6th time I'd seen the movie.
For some reason, when Slumdog ends, you stay. I'll need to see it again to know how long it is between the closing scene and the start of Jai Ho and the (SPOILER ALERT) dance scene, but it seemed like a long time. We didn't move from our seats, thankfully, and it turned out to be another cry-tag moment. There's no reason why...it's not at all sad. In fact it's the movie's most jovial and uplifting time. In addition, the actors are no longer even in character. So basically, this song comes on, the actors (not the characters) start doing this dance to a song by this artist from Mumbai and I am crying.
Before you suggest anti-depressants, let me tell you...It was a good, cathartic little cry just like the one that got me when my boys were playing in their first piano recital three weeks ago. Another came the same day when their teacher sat and played this incredible concerto (or sonata, I can't read music). Just a little tear. That's all. Eyes well up a little and then it passes. But it feels really good.
I might be an emotional goof, but I like it. I look for a song with music and lyrics that builds up fiercely, slowly, and without pretense, and then spills it's guts on the floor. I want my music to puke when the rides over.
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Oil and Water don't mix
I don't know if you know it or not, but that statement is positively true.
I never gave it much thought. I'm 38 and I am starting to realize that there are far too many things that I have never given too much thought to.
Oil is a lipid, literally. A fat. It is hydrophobic and thus, again literally, scared of water. It cannot mix with it, cannot blend with it and exist again as oil. Oil and water do not mix.
How can this be? Water mixes with and exists in nearly everything. Man cannot live without water, cannot survive for more than a handful of days without it. Water is everywhere and water is the most crucial substance (aside from one of it's chemical components, Mr. Oxygen) on the planet. And if you told me there was a creature, a plant, a living or non-living organism that could not bear to be near water, I would laugh (after giving it some thought).
Now, I could spend some time on Wiki and find other things that water does not mix with, like Gore Tex and the Wicked Witch of the West, but none of them could be as important as oil.
I am not going to spend too much time on the current cost of a gallon of gasoline to prove my point, nor will I drag the Iraqi war, Presidential election and impending Iranian and Russian crises into this post to serve that point either. Though any of them are fodder for much debate and illustrative of my current mindset, they are too plain and require a more political debate. I choose instead to draw the strangeness of this oil/water dispute in a parallel to Valentino Achak Deng and Omar al-Bashir.
God talks to me in many ways. He opens my eyes to things and then I see them for the 300th time and the first time, all at once. Dave Eggers and my Mom helped me see this one.
I was mowing my yard today and thinking of how strange it was to own a plot of land, small as it is, in the middle of Kansas City, Missouri in conjunction with Wells Fargo bank. They have agreed to pay for this plot of land and let me pay them back for the better part of my life if all goes well, and ask in return that I not be late with payments. Beyond that, they could care less what I do. I can paint the walls red or blue or fuscia or knock them down with a sledgehammer and rebuild them. I can install tile or laminate flooring to collect my dog's hair. I can put 6 tons of gravel on the outside perimeter up to the property and easement lines and spray 20 gallons of Roundup each season to keep it weed free and rocky; or I can mow. Twice a week. Bag it, clip it and trim it. Edge it and water it and feed it and weed it and look at it and preen and slave to it. Then, when I least expect it, I can be in the middle of taking care of this lawn, and I can run out of gas.
I'll write another story some day about owning a house and maintaining a yard, for whom and why we do it, but for now, that will have to serve as my segue...
I am dependant on gas to keep my yard looking nice. I need gas to power my car to drive me to the gas station to get more gas for my mower. I do not like needing gas.
Gas comes from oil, and oil is a drug we are slaves to as humans. We've created this dependancy and I'm certain we can break it, as is so hip to want to do these days. But I find it interesting that two of the things we covet the most in this world are oil and water.
I recently finished Dave Eggers' What is the What, a semi-biographical account of Valentino Achak Deng, a Sudanese refugee living in America. It recounts the horror of the Sudan civil war, the Lost Boys marching across a continent to escape sure death and torture at the hands of a violent regime, and his struggles to find his heart throughout the turmoil of being a castoff wherever he was in life (including the States). I bring this up because the book was written 5 years ago, the atrocities began when I was in grade school, and all of it has been front page news to everyone except me.
I knew next to nothing about Sudan. Even less than nothing about al-Bashir. I am ashamed about that fact, but so happy for it to no longer be the truth.
In the story, Valentino is orphaned along with thousands of other boys and left to fend for themselves together in a long marching line of death through the arid conditions in Sudan, Ethiopia and Kenya. One of things they need most is water. Too many die of starvation and dehydration on their journey. But when rain falls, it falls hard. Boys drink from puddles and live in mosquito infested marshes and die of malaria and dysentery.
What they need most, they don't need too much of.
It's a great book and one you should read, but the kicker of my tale is this...At the crux of the warfare and violence that forced these boys to travel for months and then only to live in refugee camps after witnessing the slaughter of their families was oil.
The territorial fight for oil that was discovered under their herding grounds became more precious to al-Bashir than the thousands of people he murdered to get rights to it.
It's the same tribal fight we see in the Middle East.
Bottom line. As humans, we need water. We only want oil.
I really hope we don't try too hard get too much more than we need, because the effects of too much are the same as standing in a puddle of standing water.
I never gave it much thought. I'm 38 and I am starting to realize that there are far too many things that I have never given too much thought to.
Oil is a lipid, literally. A fat. It is hydrophobic and thus, again literally, scared of water. It cannot mix with it, cannot blend with it and exist again as oil. Oil and water do not mix.
How can this be? Water mixes with and exists in nearly everything. Man cannot live without water, cannot survive for more than a handful of days without it. Water is everywhere and water is the most crucial substance (aside from one of it's chemical components, Mr. Oxygen) on the planet. And if you told me there was a creature, a plant, a living or non-living organism that could not bear to be near water, I would laugh (after giving it some thought).
Now, I could spend some time on Wiki and find other things that water does not mix with, like Gore Tex and the Wicked Witch of the West, but none of them could be as important as oil.
I am not going to spend too much time on the current cost of a gallon of gasoline to prove my point, nor will I drag the Iraqi war, Presidential election and impending Iranian and Russian crises into this post to serve that point either. Though any of them are fodder for much debate and illustrative of my current mindset, they are too plain and require a more political debate. I choose instead to draw the strangeness of this oil/water dispute in a parallel to Valentino Achak Deng and Omar al-Bashir.
God talks to me in many ways. He opens my eyes to things and then I see them for the 300th time and the first time, all at once. Dave Eggers and my Mom helped me see this one.
I was mowing my yard today and thinking of how strange it was to own a plot of land, small as it is, in the middle of Kansas City, Missouri in conjunction with Wells Fargo bank. They have agreed to pay for this plot of land and let me pay them back for the better part of my life if all goes well, and ask in return that I not be late with payments. Beyond that, they could care less what I do. I can paint the walls red or blue or fuscia or knock them down with a sledgehammer and rebuild them. I can install tile or laminate flooring to collect my dog's hair. I can put 6 tons of gravel on the outside perimeter up to the property and easement lines and spray 20 gallons of Roundup each season to keep it weed free and rocky; or I can mow. Twice a week. Bag it, clip it and trim it. Edge it and water it and feed it and weed it and look at it and preen and slave to it. Then, when I least expect it, I can be in the middle of taking care of this lawn, and I can run out of gas.
I'll write another story some day about owning a house and maintaining a yard, for whom and why we do it, but for now, that will have to serve as my segue...
I am dependant on gas to keep my yard looking nice. I need gas to power my car to drive me to the gas station to get more gas for my mower. I do not like needing gas.
Gas comes from oil, and oil is a drug we are slaves to as humans. We've created this dependancy and I'm certain we can break it, as is so hip to want to do these days. But I find it interesting that two of the things we covet the most in this world are oil and water.
I recently finished Dave Eggers' What is the What, a semi-biographical account of Valentino Achak Deng, a Sudanese refugee living in America. It recounts the horror of the Sudan civil war, the Lost Boys marching across a continent to escape sure death and torture at the hands of a violent regime, and his struggles to find his heart throughout the turmoil of being a castoff wherever he was in life (including the States). I bring this up because the book was written 5 years ago, the atrocities began when I was in grade school, and all of it has been front page news to everyone except me.
I knew next to nothing about Sudan. Even less than nothing about al-Bashir. I am ashamed about that fact, but so happy for it to no longer be the truth.
In the story, Valentino is orphaned along with thousands of other boys and left to fend for themselves together in a long marching line of death through the arid conditions in Sudan, Ethiopia and Kenya. One of things they need most is water. Too many die of starvation and dehydration on their journey. But when rain falls, it falls hard. Boys drink from puddles and live in mosquito infested marshes and die of malaria and dysentery.
What they need most, they don't need too much of.
It's a great book and one you should read, but the kicker of my tale is this...At the crux of the warfare and violence that forced these boys to travel for months and then only to live in refugee camps after witnessing the slaughter of their families was oil.
The territorial fight for oil that was discovered under their herding grounds became more precious to al-Bashir than the thousands of people he murdered to get rights to it.
It's the same tribal fight we see in the Middle East.
Bottom line. As humans, we need water. We only want oil.
I really hope we don't try too hard get too much more than we need, because the effects of too much are the same as standing in a puddle of standing water.
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
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