I got home tonight, and just felt like going out, so we headed for a nearby Mexican food restaurant. Kaitlyn, who was sitting in her high chair at the head of the family, has recently been exhibiting all the drama of being a three-year-old. It's very tiring to endure the highs and lows, which seem to change by the moment.

One minute, ecstatic to see a container of steaming tortillas with butter arrive, and then the next, crestfallen and tortured because she dropped her red crayon on the floor.

It was at that moment that our young, Mexican waiter arrived at the table.

Kaitlyn wrathfully turned to him and, looking him straight in the eye, declared, "You will NEVER bring honor to your family!"

The young man stared at us, turned around, and silently walked back to the kitchen. I was a little worried that he might not come back.

I guess we've watched Mulan once too many times...

Stand Up Guy

I was watching a show on TV yesterday and something reminded me of an old friend named Gary. Just one of those guys who walks along with you on the path of life for a while and then gets off the path and is never seen nor heard from again. But thinking of Gary made me laugh.

It had all the potential of an awkward situation. I was working as an evening supervisor at a nationwide call center, and when all the managers left I was the guy in charge.

This wasn't a regular company, with happiness and smiles and forgiveness--this was an evil empire of strenuous rules, petty fiefdoms defended to the death, people fired over rumors and hearsay, and an out-of-control, autocratic Office Manager who was harsh, vindictive and a little bit crazy, even for a six-foot tall woman from Chicago. In short, it was pretty much like every other office out there.

Gary was the Office Manager's son, and was nearly exactly my age--We must have been around twenty-three. His mother was very overprotective even though he had been away for college for a couple of years. She was pretty shameless about it, so I dreaded having to supervise him because there were lots of rules and if I enforced them all, I would be a real hard-ass. If I let them go, which we often did, then I'm breaking the rules in front of the boss' son.

As a supervisor, I was supposed to distribute work and keep general order. So I was a little irritated when, after working on my shift for about a week, I walked around the corner and spotted Gary with his feet propped up on a short table. You see, the company had purchased a number of small tables so operators wouldn't put their drink next to the computer workstation--in case something spilled (ie. they treated the employees like 5-year-old kids). Not only did he have his feet propped up, but he also was reclining almost horizontally with his head thrown back, looking at the ceiling while he talked to the customer.

I walked up to him and said, very quietly,"Hey, man--this isn't your living room..."

He looked up at me with saucer-like eyes, shocked that I would say anything--actually, a little wounded.

I continued, "Yes, I know who your mom is, too...but she's not here right now."

He burst into immediate, genuine laughter, looked down, and shook his head from side to side in surrender. I would learn that that was just the kind of guy Gary was--his strongest reflex tendency was to laugh at everything. We hit it off immediately.

This was back in 1993, and during that year, Dallas acquired the Dallas Stars professional hockey team. Before that, the only time we could catch ice hockey was on TV during the Olympics, but it was a complete and utter mystery as to what was the point of the whole thing. In fact, the newspaper had to create a special section where they would list the rules of the game so the fans could understand what in the hell was going on.

Being from Chicago, Gary was a huge fan of hockey, so he would organize about 8 of us together to go--back then, the tickets were very cheap because the game hadn't caught on yet in this area. We found ourselves getting great seats, and we had so much fun--I still have the tickets from going to seven games the first year--people would even ask us when we were coming back, because we would jump around and high-five everyone around us when things went well.

Gary went back to college, but, alas, it wasn't meant to be. He moved back, mid-year, announcing that he had dropped out of college to be a stand-up comedian. He performed at the local comedy club...right up until they told him to stop coming back. He told me that he was bombing one night and just decided to start cursing continuously because that seemed kind of funny to him. And he was laughing as he told me...but here he was working in the call center, not going to college, and starting to feel like he was off-course.

Hockey season was over, so Gary and I got our group back together to go to a baseball game. Here we were again, a group of twenty-something guys laughing and high-fiveing and cheering and jumping around. It ended up changing Gary's life.

Juan Gonzalez crushed a home run to center field, and we all jumped to our feet in celebration. Even more exciting, the Jumbo-Tron featured us jumping up and down and celebrating. I turned to Gary, who was staring at the huge screen but had lost all happiness from his face.

"Am I really that fat?", he asked.

Well, how do you answer that? So I didn't.

"I mean, look at me, there. I stopped jumping but my stomach did two or three more bounces." As if on cue, the Jumbo-Tron actually replayed our group in slow motion jumping around. I didn't really notice anything, but Gary was horrified.

"Oh my God!" and he dramatically covered his eyes with the back of his hand.

"Hey, lemme get you another pretzel..." was my helpful solution (because that's the way twenty-something year old guys rub things in).

It turns out that the Jumbo-Tron changed Gary's life forever. He went on a regimented diet and exercise routine and lost over 100 pounds. He went to join the navy, and they told him that he had to lose 35 more, and he did. It all took over a year, during which time his mother bought a horse ranch in the country and Gary quit his job at the call center and ran the ranch. The physical work helped him shed some of the weight, and when he finally got accepted to the navy, they had a party out at the ranch.

That was the last time I saw Gary, although he did call from Seattle during his training and he dropped me a card a year or so later.

For a guy who couldn't cut it as a comedian., it's odd that he still cracks me up 14 years later.

Is it really that AMAZING?

Overused word alert: the world really can't be as AMAZING as it is being cracked up to be these days.

The first sector I heard it from was the highly religious. I think it was intended to replace "flippin' sweet!" Now, it is permeating everything in every media format that I see or hear. Yesterday, I had the radio on for several hours and heard no less than four different commercials touting something as "amazing".

You ever ponder a word again and again and all of a sudden it starts to take on a different meaning or implication? Well, I'm starting to see a skinny dumb guy straightjacketed on a white hospital bed--he's staring, open-mouthed and drooling, at one of those baby mobiles that gets hung over a crib.

Look at the pretty colors!

I have to admit that I'm pretty sensitive to that type of word hang-up. One time, when I can home from summer camp as a kid, I was stuck on the word "Oi!" I quickly became conscious of the fact that I would use it about 3 times per minute, and I couldn't help myself. It just seemed to fit every occasion. I used it in the same way most people would use the word "duh". As in "Duh, Mary! Everybody knows that..." So, it was a convenient way to be both offensive and annoying.

"Oi!" seemed to last for several months before, one way or another, it got knocked out of me.

Another one that I use quite often is "man". You know: "Hey, man, how's it going?" This immediately makes me sprout an Abbie Hoffman beard and make me want to listen to Jimi Hendrix (I had a drum teacher name Jimmy Hendricks). And it drives Fran nuts when it is said to a woman, specifically her. But sometimes the world just cries out for a confusing appositive.

And then there was "like". As in, like, you know, like. That was one that I swore I would never get stuck on. We used to, like, make fun of people who talked that way--like "Valley Girl". But eventually it wormed its way into my head, and now it comes out sometimes.

So, I just felt like calling out "amazing", and seeing if anyone else had noticed this trend...

By the way feel free to list any overused words so we can banish them from the vernacular.

Things Domestic...

Among mothers, I've noticed that it is a form of unpardonable insult for a dad to say that he's "babysitting". I suppose babysitting only applies when you are watching someone else's kids. I just always thought that was funny--they seem hyper-vigilant to become ticked off about the term.

For the past couple of weeks, Fran has gone back to work at a temporary job. This is part of the "Year of Fran", as I jokingly started calling it early on. Circumstances just seem to be falling into place nicely for her (knocking wood). Aside from her temporary job, which is working in a beautiful showroom talking to people buying things for fancy boutique stores, she also got an audition to sing in a chorus.

For weeks, she nervously tried out different audition songs on all of us, settling on Voi, che sapete che cosa é amor , which she then worked on and sang wonderfully in the audition. When she came home and told me that the director, who turned to the pianist and raised his eyebrows when she hit the first note strongly, offered her a position on the spot, which is relatively rare. I smiled and shrugged and said "Of course, it's the Year of Fran!"

It was also funny to hear Kaitlyn requesting that Fran sing her aria around the house--no makeup, non-matching socks, in jeans and a t-shirt. Mozart would be proud. Actually, it's my preferred way to hear it. It was further funny to hear my 3-year-old singing in Italian once she had learned the aria.

I think that it's great for all of us that she is doing more activities outside the home. It's given me some time around the house. Naturally, my first instinct was total destruction, so I ripped up the flooring in the master bathroom and stripped the cabinets so they can be repainted. I plan to lay down some tile, buoyed by my previous success upstairs in the kids bathroom. But I feel like this is "for keeps", since it is such a critical part of the house--if I screw it up, everyone will know. But I have faith,.

In fact, this time around the house with the kids has made me eager to launch all kinds of reorganizing and reconstructive projects. My goal was for Fran to come home from work each day and be wow'd by something I had accomplished, and I think I accomplished my goal. And I got to laugh a lot, too, at the domestic mayhem I was able to produce.

One of the funniest incidents occurred when I had Ryan ready to head out to a birthday party last Saturday morning, and Kaitlyn's slippers had become damaged--there was a large stuffed "Dora" head that had come unsewn. How hard could that be to fix? So I grabbed Fran's sewing box, threaded a needle on the 10th try, and stitched the head back on the slippers while Kaitlyn watched intently, delighted. I was tying it off when the telephone rang--Ryan ran to answer it. Just then, Kaitlyn, having seen me stash the needle and thread into the chair's upholstery, pulled it out and, in one stroke, planted it in my leg above the left knee. I was howling loudly when Ryan brought the phone to me with his friend's dad on the other end of the line.

Now, the temp job is over and things are getting back to normal. I think it gave Fran a big self-confidence boost--of course she's really smart, and was very successful in the corporate world before we had Ryan and she decided to stay home (she always says it was her "promotion"), but it sounds like she was helping everyone with their computers, which were a little tricky, was called on to translate, and was given a bunch of nice gifts to take home from the showroom. In fact, her boss gave her a little bonus above what he agreed to pay her since she stayed late and helped (my theory is that she stayed so it would give me time to finish folding all the laundry). She was proud, and is looking forward to going back to working there in a few months when they need her.

We also produced a lovely Pink Princess Birthday Party for Kaitlyn--I think when you turn three you can be indulged a little. The ladies in attendance were invited to wear pink, and it was fun that they did. We grilled out and had about 30 people over at our house (we didn't let them into the still-ripped-up master bathroom, but I did get compliments on my redone bathroom from last year). Kaitlyn was beaming, and all of a sudden looks a little more grown up.

Soaring with the Eagles

I got an Email a couple of months ago inviting me to a reunion of all the guys from my old scout troop--they were getting together the ones who had earned Eagle Scout, the highest award you can get. It turns out that there have been over 200 Eagle Scouts from the troop that I belonged to as a kid--the troop is now 30 years old, and I was around and knew some of the founding members, so I felt that it was a pretty significant thing. In looking at the list, I was Eagle Scout #12 or so, so the fact that there were 200 guys that came after me was also intriguing. Over the years, I have lost touch with everyone I knew from those days. In fact, I get out my old patches every once in a while for Ryan to look at, but overall, I've just lost touch with scouts and scouting.

My reason for not getting continuing to embrace scouting is very simple, and probably offensive to some: Women and their increased involvement in the program. Somehow, they kicked their way into scouting and changed the landscape--there seems to be very heavy female involvement in Scouting now, and I'm not sure it is for the better. About a year ago, when my brother was putting together a hike for our family, I went to a scout meeting to get some hiking trail information. I walked into the lobby of the meeting room and was eyed venomously by three cud-chewing cows with greater hate in their eyes than a vengeful Grendel's mother--in full Boy Scout regalia, no less. It was really creepy. During the meeting, the shrill shrieking of women's voices wrapped around my skull and pierced my spine, kinda like "Predator" monster ripping my vertabrae out. It was absolutely unbearable and I started to feel dizzy. I felt like I was regressing and had the urge to go home and mow the yard and mop the kitchen before dad came home.

Some people probably call it "good old day" syndrome--and I have to tell you that it was pretty unfair to guys who didn't have a dad at home that they didn't have an adult who could participate with them in the program, but scouting was a place where you could go camping and hang out and do stuff without someone really caring if you are wearing clean socks--in fact, nobody really cared if you wore clothes at all. The men running the place only got involved if they thought you were going to wind up in the hospital...or morgue--if they didn't intervene.

I picked up Time magazine the other day and there was a commentary on gay adoption and parenting. It was by Dr. James Dobson, who is more socially conservative than the prophet Ezekiel. So, it wasn't shocking that the argument was a case against gay anything. Not surprising, because the tone of the conservative branch of this nation seems to be "if you're gay, we aren't going to reward it in any way whatsoever--you aren't allowed to have fun in the same way that straight people can." Without getting too far into condemning or approving of the lifestyle, suffice it to say that I'm not in a position to be judgemental about anyone else's life (doesn't always stop me).

The surprising thing about the article in Time was that it makes a pretty good argument on why kids need a dad--it rang a bell. Here's what it said: "Fathers don't 'Mother'".

When I read that, I thought, "Yeah, that's really it." It reminded me of a (minor) constant issue between Fran and me about the kids--probably more Ryan than Kaitlyn at this point. She unapologetically supports him and reassures him, and I sometimes allow him to endure a little (and even administer) "trial by fire." It's probably easier to see from a distance, but I would rather him learn tough lessons about procrastinating and missing out on opportunities when it's around the house than when he's 20 and in college, or about not paying attention to things and ruining a $10 model than a $10,000 car. Sometimes Fran can't stand to see him fail or get discouraged, but I think that it's a part of learning. She sometimes insinuates that it is a little cruel to let him fail. For now, I can be there to pick him up, comfort him, and build him back up, as well as point out the lesson to be learned. I've seen the product of over-parenting and those horrid kids with a glorified sense of entitlement seem to make horrid adults with the same odious attitude.

Back to the Eagle Scout reunion. I went, and it was kind of neat. There were lots of guys from the "old days", including one guy who lived three doors down from our house when we were growing up--I always had looked up to him, because he was three years older. Time was a great, equalizer, though, because he was a completely bald, nerdy guy with a high-pitched whiny voice like a cartoon character and a very disconnected conversation style. There was another really weird experience--I mentioned to one of the guys that I saw his mother at the car wash the other day, and we figured out that she had died suddenly within days of my seeing her. I could tell that it really had shaken him up that I had seen her.

But the thing that really struck me was that, during my time in the troop, we went ten years and only had twenty Eagle scouts. It was really a badge of honor and represented an accomplishment--lots of learning, independent study, and a relatively complex work project that the guy had to design, plan, and organize. In 2006, the troop graduated twenty Eagles scouts! The youngest one was born in 1991 (which was when I bought my last pair of hiking boots)!

During the weekend, it came out that the women in leadership in the troup had formed a committee to push the boys through the program to successfully accomplish their Eagle Scout award. Once they got within a certain distance of the endpoint, these women would badger them about getting their requirements completed, their project planned, their paperwork filed, and drive the whole process. One of the women got up and told a story about one of the guys who was just going t blow off getting his award, and she arranged for him to have a special meeting, and helped him organize his paperwork and get his stuff together--she didn't mention if she wiped his butt and/or nose before the meeting. It really bugged me, and then I backlashed and got mad at myself for being so sexist--why don't I just start up a "he-man woman-hater's club"?

But there is a certain "get up off your ass and do it" quality that these guys should have in order to be highly commended and recognized for perhaps their whole life, and it seemed, sadly, like they weren't left alone to discover that trait in themselves. The award is not the end in mind--the process of accomplishing things on your own is the intention of the program. The "mothering" instinct is a strong one, though--these women see the shame and failure of not accomplishing something that is set out for, and they can't trust their boys to their own devices.

This seemed obvious to me in the slight generational gap which existed in the group--at one point, where there stopped being 3 or 4 representatives of a "class year" and started being 12 or 13, it was rare to see a true stand-out guy.

My humble opinion.

I've Lost it!

So far, I've started this entry five different times. I mean, on five different days. Then, disgusted, I just exited out without saving. I think I've just forgotten how to write--lost my touch. I think you can really lose it, and start copping out a little. The issue isn't filling a space, but putting something together that is actually enjoyable to read.


Here's an example: One of my entries was all a concerted effort to tell a funny anecdote that happened about 10 years ago. Only, when I read it written out, it was one of those "Hey, well you just had to be there" things. Uh...that's the point of writing, isn't it? If you finish reading something and think "I guess you just had to be there..." then whoever is writing it really sucks at capturing the mood.


Here's the anecdote: A friend of mine got a new girlfriend who was really annoying. Not sure why, but he got really wrapped up in her and they would sit in the corner whispering to each other all the time. And the girl was ugly in several ways, including a very snobby attitude, which was the most significant way. So, yes, I realize that when you get a new girlfriend/boyfriend/whatever it naturally takes you away from your buddies and there is a reshuffling of positions and time allotment, but this was getting just rude and irritating. At a weak moment, I referred to the couple collectively as "'Muskrat Love' over there whispering in the corner...", which is a reference to an obscure, crappy, '70's song which is somewhat funny in it's own little, obscure existence.


That's it--there's my un-funny anectdote/obscure reference. When I made it up, it seemed to be very funny to everyone who heard it, particularly those of us who remembered the crappy song, but now it's just a little pathetic story. The couple broke up but I still think about Muskrat Love when I see ugly people huddled with each other in a corner whispering or even sometimes just when I see this friend.


Well, you just had to be there...trust me, it was funny.


I was going to work it into a story about waking up in the morning during the holidays and cooking French toast for everyone. I've got this great recipe and I love to make a big batch of it and freeze a few pieces so we can heat it for Ryan in Fran's beloved toaster oven before he scurries off to school in the dark--so he can have a hot breakfast, which is important to Fran.


I had a few pieces of bread left over, especially the "heels", which Fran obscurely calls the "stumps". Anyway, I had a bag full of these pieces, and decided that it would be fun to take the kids to a nearby park to feed the ducks. I remember always loving to do that as a kid. I took my camera, and was delighted that the light was really interesting that day--it was somewhat chilly and very overcast, and the light was a very flat color and looked pretty on the water (the power lines ruin this picture, though). When I got home, I sheepishly acknowledged to my incredulous wife that I got 40 pictures of swans, ducks, geese, dirt, and brown water, but somehow none of them included the kids...This part of the story was supposed to portray me as an absentminded artistic genius...


But we had a really nice time feeding the ducks. Two huge swans came over to us, and they were pretty much insatiable--they even chased away most of the ducks and geese. I had to explain to Kaitlyn that she didn't actually have to go into the water to feed the swans, and Ryan was trying out his fastball straight at the poor, exiled ducks' heads ten yards away.


Then we looked up, and there was a big, fluffy beaver-looking rodent about three feet from my two-year-old. I ran over and scooped her up and she exclaimed "Look at that Humongous Mouse, Daddy!" I laughed so hard that I almost dropped her. Ryan began to feed it bread, and we both noticed that it had very odd-looking, huge, bright orange teeth in the front--perhaps from chewing wood--I don't know, but it was weird. It must come over sometimes when people feed the ducks, because we didn't seem to scare it at all, and it was chomping on the offering of bread that Ryan had piled in front of it. The swans, growing jealous, started hissing at it. But the tail was long and skinny like a rat's tail, so it wasn't a beaver.


I went home and looked it up in the Texas wildlife guide--it was a muskrat, which are known to live in this area (I guess it doesn't take a wildlife biologist to report that they exist--you can spot them huddled together in corners of the forest). Somehow, in the hands of a more skilled writer, this could be turned into a humorous and technically clean story, but you'll have to clomp through my muddy description here (and, ironically, without a picture of the muskrat, which I forgot to snap with a squirmy 2-year-old around my neck).


And there it is--my first entry in a while...I'm not deleting it.

Hi There, it's still me...

Tomorrow is the second anniversary of my blog. 374 total posts for an average of about one every other day. Of course, when I first started out I was a little manic about the whole thing and sometimes posted three times a day for a while. That's just the way I do stuff, sometimes.

I think over the past month I've really blown the average--I haven't really looked, but I feel like I've just posted once or twice in the past 30 days. Sometimes I feel like the guy getting caught and eaten alive by the alien--"just kill me!" (I'm referring to my blog here, not myself for all you literal types and/or Ted Bundy types).

The travel schedule went nuts there for a while--Arizona (woo hoo!) and then California (left Texas at 29 degrees and landed in California at 78 degrees--didn't want to go back except that's where all my stuff is...like: wife, kids...).

Lots of weird travel stories--I'll just have to catch up on them later. Funny things came from the San Diego trip especially--the first cab driver I had who was having a nervous breakdown or something--he acted very erratically. In the end, he parked the cab, popped the trunk and wouldn't tell me how much I owed, or get out and get my bags, which is really, really weird. After I retrived my bags, I figured how much I owed myself from the meter, fished out a bill and asked for a receipt, which he slowly filled out completely for about three minutes. Then, he wouldn't accept a tip (which I thought I was being VERY generous in giving at all). Weird.

The driver taking me to the airport was obsessed with talking about the Russian spy who was killed via radiation poisoning. A little bit of a downer, but intriguing. I asked him if he was from Russia and he told me he was from Bulgaria. I brought up Georgi Markov , a Bulgarian who was also killed in London (rough place, eh?) by the KGB, who supposedly injected ricin into him with an umbrella as he waited at a bus stop. I don't know why, but that's kind of a cool spy story to me... After being disgusted for being mistaken for Russian, the driver was at least impressed that I knew that story and that Markov was Bulgarian.

And I got hit on while riding on the plane--no, not buy a woman, but by one of those "hey, are you looking for an opportunity?" guys. A woman would have been easier to say no to--this guy actually has my Email address now and has been sending me very nice messages and wants to get together some morning to discuss his company with me. Here's a hint: I wasn't feeling well on the plane (allergies/stuffiness + pressure change = misery) , and he told me that he's been feeling great since he started taking some herbal supplements....

Well, I'll catch up on some other stuff later, including: Evil Quack dentist from Hell, Fran-tom of the Opera, and the gift orgy which is Christmas in my home. In the meantime, I'm smiling and I hope everyone out there reading is, too...

Around the bend...

The update itself doesn't really have anything to do with Christmas Eve, by the way. I just happen to have a little time on my hands today.

I guess I've been a little bummed out for the past few weeks. It doesn't usually happen to me during the holidays--I look forward to the kids getting their gifts on Christmas morning. I remember being a kid and feeling a little guilty about getting presents. One of my brothers got a bike and I remember thinking "Wow--we can't afford that!" Now, it makes me think of the movie It's a Wonderful Life, which is a great movie, but a little depressing, don't you think?

No, it isn't depression--This time of year just naturally makes me nostalgic and sentimental. The irony is that some day this is the time I'll be nostalgic for...

Some people I know are really awesome at giving great gifts. That's definitely a talent. My best gift to give this year was going to be to write a story for Ryan about the time during the summer when he hit a home run. It was really dramatic--he had struck out every time at bat the game before, and came home crying and saying that he didn't want to play baseball anymore. Then, he struck out again at his next at-bat--he was crushed, and my heart really went out to him. Finally, he was down to his last strike and struck out again, except that the coach on the other team, in a rare move, stopped the game and gave him another chance because the pitching machine malfunctioned. Ryan caught the last pitch and sent it over the heads of the opposing team, to the back fence. He easily rounded the bases for a home run! It made me so proud that he didn't give up, and kept fighting back with determination. Yeah, that would have been a great gift...if I had finished writing it.

Work has been pretty good for me over the past few months. It's taken me out of town a few times, which I enjoy for brief periods. Plane trips seem to be like short stories to me--Purposeful, dramatic, and with a beginning and end. If you keep your eyes open, you can see different characters out of their ordinary habitat--these days, flying is a stressful situation, so it's interesting to see what people do. I listened to my Ipod the other day and just felt a peace with the world for a few minutes, tuning out everyone around me. For a time, the peace just felt so wonderful.

I got a telephone call from an old friend a month or so ago--I'm not sure if I mentioned this, but I am an Eagle Scout. Protocol sort of dictates that you don't say "I was an Eagle Scout when I was a kid"--it is actually an honor that is supposed to stay with you for your whole life. I was 14, for God's sake, and it seems a lifetime ago. Well, the call was an invitation to a reunion of all the Eagle Scouts that have ever come from the same troop. I was number eight, and now there are over two hundred. The reunion is in two weeks--should be an interesting time, maybe worth writing about when I get back. I hope I don't just feel pathetic sitting there as one of the "old dudes". I didn't go to my high school reunions, so this will be a new experience for me.

At this time of year, I like to plan what I'm going to do for next year. It usually comes to me as a whole year laid out like a child's oval train track, and I can see the different seasons and just put events in their place--this is the part of the year where I'll take the kids fishing...Why don't we plan a trip out of town here...Maybe we could go to San Antonio...Can I go back to Maine in the summer? When I was in San Diego, an acquaintence invited me to go Marlin fishing in the Pacific next year--should I go? I'm a shameless over-planner, but I try to leave a cushion to live in the moment when things come up.

I can't do it this year--I'm trying as hard as I can, but I can't see past the first turn in the bend. This could create a sense of excitement, promise, opportunity. Or a sense of dread and fear of the unknown. Almost like I'm so bound to the train itself that I can't rise above it to see the big picture--the whole track and where we are ultimately headed. Or driving in fog, only seeing things develop in the immediacy of the moment. It feels out of control and nerve-wracking, and I have a sense of foreboding for the coming year--why can't I see what's coming? Could I ever really see it, or was my planning a false mask of control over an uncontrollable future which gave me a sense of security? Maybe I'm just facing reality in a more open fashion. Either way, the train rolls on.

A funny thing happened on the way to sushi...

We walked along the Gaslamp district of San Diego. It was the evening dinner rush, and our group's first choice of restaurant, a bustling sushi place, had a wait which was too long to bear.

We walked along the sidewalk in somewhat of a daze, passing sights which had become familiar over the past week. Each restaurant in this area had an old-fashioned style gas lamp on their patios, which was a shock against the damp chill we felt as we walked along.

That's the Italian restaurant with the spooky, stalker-ish manager who paid slightly too much attention to our little group when we were there the first night.

Could that be the Tequila Bar? Is it possible that I found myself there at 1:00 AM listening to Reggae music and taking shots with Mike D.? I seem to remember dim neon lights, a friendly tattooed bartender who continually consulted the recipe card as she mixed our group's drinks--and a full-sized skeleton on a shelf 30 feet in the air who was wearing a Santa hat. Mike and I were outnumbered by guests from the Czech Republic--the more tequila we had, the better I understood those guys. The next morning, I was back to not getting a damn thing they were trying to tell me.

Another funny scene from the Tequila Bar: my new friend, Nate, and I, looking at bottles of tequila.

Nate (deadpan): "I have a feeling you and I are going to fight."

These flashbacks were entertaining, but our little band was still in search of sushi. I must explain that I know nothing about sushi--I am on the lazy side of remembering what things are called, and I tend to be always dependent on the people I am around to help me order. That's okay--I guess my brain is just operating at near-maximum capacity and I just can't retain that stuff. I'm not one of those radical people who craves sushi--I reluctantly agree to go along with it if that's what the group wants. Give me a good steak any day. I guess I'm still traumatized by the low-quality fish sticks they used to give us in school.

After our first choice was deemed unacceptable, we went to a restaurant just 100 feet away. We looked inside and there was absolutely no one inside. Something was wrong. We looked at the menu and, in addition to sushi, they had random entrees like Beef Stroganoff and Baloney Sandwiches. As we stood reading the menu, the hostess came outside and begged us to come inside. One of the more cocky members of our party asked "I don't mean to be rude, but why is your restaurant completely empty?"

The hostess was taken back a little at first, then her shoulders slumped and she answered "I don't know. the food is good." Then she went back inside. We all looked at each other and wordlessly agreed to get away fast. As we got to the corner, two ladies stood pointing in the air. They were clearly alarmed.

I turned and saw two very large rats making their way along a ridge in the architecture of the building. They were not in a hurry, but they certainly seemed to know where they were going. They might have been one hundred feet away, and thirty feet in the air, but I could see whiskers on the rats as they peeked over the corner of the building. They looked friendly, like pets.

I turned and looked at the ladies again, and felt like I was in one of those cheesy Godzilla movies that I used to watch when I was in second grade. By now, a small group had gathered and watched the rats wandering along the ledge. The ladies were agape and silent and seemingly frozen in position of pointing at the rats, incredulous. I could see people through the windows right behind the rats carrying on without seeing them. Thirty feet below, along the street below the rats, unsuspecting pedestrians bustled along the sidewalk.

I remember feeling pretty good about our decision to leave the restaurant--the rats were going away from that weird restaurant, too.

We went ahead and enjoyed our sushi and had a great evening together. It's funny what comes to your attention when you keep your eyes open and maintain a sense of humor.

Some drawings from my Thank You Notes

I mentioned before that I spoke to Ryan's class. They each wrote a Thank You note and some of them felt compelled to provide drawings. Here are my favorites:

Mwop Mwop Mwop! The Penguin Returns!

I'm wearing my flesh-colored mittens and saggy-crotch unitard...

At least I'm smiling, right?

I thought this was funny, too. A quite disinterested expression...

This was pretty funny--if you can figure out what is going on, you might be a little sick...This kid may actually need some counseling.

One possible caption was "Me teaching the kids about Satan..."

What really happened was that I was using a projector to show the kids stuff, and this particular kid stuck his Star Wars action figure under the projector camera, so it projected on the wall in front of the other kids. Unfortunately, that's what that kid remembered instead of anything I talked about.

No, I didn't wear a clown suit and galoshes to school. Seems to be pretty unanimous that my haircut is a comb-over...