Wednesday, January 30, 2008
20 Deep Questions…
Current mood: chipper
This showed up in a bulletin from one of my friends. I thought I’d put it in my blog, rather than load it into the bulletin-shotgun and belabor everyone (that would be seven people) with it.Ultimately, I think this points out the embarrassing difference between what I know I should do in a situation, and what I’d actually do in a situation. The needs of modern society are a bitch.
20 deep questions that could really tell you something.
[ Not simple questions like "How Old Are You?" ]1. Is it difficult for you to look into some one’s eyes when you are telling them how you feel?
Actually, no.
2. You are on a flight from Honolulu to Chicago non-stop. There is a fire in the back of the plane. You get enough time to make ONE phone call. Who would you call?
My wife.4. You are at the doctor’s office and they have just informed you that you have approximately one month to live. (A) Do you tell anyone/everyone you are going to die? (B) What do you do with your remaining days? (C) Would you be afraid?
A – I’d like to say that I wouldn’t, and that I’d be virtuous and honorable and not burden everyone with my affliction…but I know me, and I’d blab it to everyone and secretly enjoy their mortification.
B – I’d like to say the easy answer — “live each day as if it were my last.” The grim reality is that I’d probably still go to work, and I’d spend much time on the internet looking for miracle cures. The other grim reality is that we simply don’t have the money to let me do anything other than what we already do — no quick trips around the world before I die or anything.
C – Terrified, absolutely petrified with fear. Hell, I already am.
5. You can have one of the following two things: love/trust
Trust. I’ve lived most of my life without love. Having my trust betrayed hurts more if it’s from someone you love.
6. You are walking down the street on your way to work. There is a dog drowning in the canal on the side of the street. Your boss has told you if you are late one more time you get fired. What do you do?
I would like to say that I’d save the dog. With the job I currently have, I’d save the dog because my boss isn’tgoing to fire me. Given this artificial situation, though, I’d let the dog drown — if I lose my job, I can’t feed and house my wife and my four children, and their life is more important to me than a dog’s life.
7. If you could go anywhere in the world, where would you go?
Since I was a boy, I’ve always wanted to fly a WWII airplane to Henderson Field on Guadalcanal, in the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific.
8. Think of the last person who you really knew that died. You have the chance to give them 1 hour of life back, but you have to give one year of your life. Do you?
No. That person is my mother. I would hope she wouldn’t want her only child to give up a whole year just for her. Regardless, I wouldn’t deprive MY children of one of their parents for an entire year, just for another hour with my mother — I would love the chance to see my mother again, but not enough to do that. As a side point, I fear she’d spend the entire hour making me feel the way she did when she was alive…
9. Are you the kind of friend that you would want to have as a friend?
No. Not even close.
10. Does love = sex?
No. I’m not sure anything equals sex these days. Four kids notwithstanding, I’ve spent more of my life not having sex than otherwise. I’m the most celibate pervert I know.
11. Your best friend dies, what would you do?
I don’t really have a best friend. In fact, I don’t really have any friends. I really don’t know how to answer this question.
12. When was the last time you told someone HONESTLY how you felt?
All the time. My wife and I are very close, and we tell each other everything. That said, when I tell her how I honestly feel, she usually gets mad at me. Doesn’t seem to stop me, though.
13. What would be harder for you, to tell someone you love them or that you don’t love them back?
It depends on the someone. It would be much, MUCH harder for me to tell my wife that I don’t love her back (if you’re reading this, HYPOTHETICAL situation, honey!). On the other hand, if a co-worker at random told me she (or he) loved me, it wouldn’t be hard at all to respond with an “I don’t like you like that.”
14. What do you think would be the hardest thing for you to give up on?
I don’t know if it’d be my marriage or my children. The thought of either is gut-wrenching.
15. Excluding romantic love, when was the last time you told someone you loved them?
It’s embarrassing, but I don’t know. I don’t say it much; I KNOW I don’t say it enough.
16. If you had to go back in time and change one thing, if you HAD to, even if you had “no regrets” what would it be?
When I was young, and expressed a love of flying, my mother told me I would never be able to fly a plane because I have glasses. I believed her and gave up on my dream. Knowing what I know now, I would go slap myself in the back of the head, ignore my mother and push for that dream.
17. Imagine. It is a dark night, you are alone, it is raining outside, you hear someone walking around outside your window. Who do you call.
I call nobody. I go outside with a flashlight and my double-barrel shotgun and I take care of the situation myself. Somebody’s going to wet themself before the night’s over.
18. Would you give a homeless person CPR if they were dying?
Most likely, I would. They might be disgusting, but a human life is sacred.
19. Are you old-fashioned?
I’d like to say I’m not, that I’m a hip, contemporary guy. Things throughout my life have proven, though, that when the chips are down, I fall back on old-fashioned values every single time. I hold doors open for people, I let others go first, I try not to interrupt, I would never let my daughter go out in public “like that,” and when I was given a chance, I did NOT take advantage of that drunk, horny girl when I was in college.
20. Which would you choose, true love with a guarantee of a heart break or to have never loved before?
William Shakespeare wrote that “it is better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved before.” I would have to go with that.
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Monday, January 28, 2008
My Knuckles Hurt.
Current mood: content
Yes, my knuckles hurt. If I were truly manly I’d follow with a story about how I got in a fight at the bar and put a guy in the hospital, and made a 300lb Samoan cry. Guess I’m not truly manly. I got the snot wacked out of my knuckles at tae kwon do by the 7-year-old I was stick-fighting with. We use about 3′ of 1/2″ PVC pipe inside a thin pool-noodle, wrapped with duct tape. This kid was totally not holding back on his swings, either. Two-handed, swinging it like a baseball bat. I had no problem blocking 99% of it all, but he landed a fair number of swats on my knucks. It’s a fun hurt, though. Not like the last time I went and got pwn3d by the dude I already bitched about.Otherwise, the cold snap broke. It hit 46 degrees here. In Michigan. In January. It’s a nice change from being nine degrees. Real nice. The slush melted off the car. I was able to drive fast enough to charge the battery. I didn’t have to wear a fleece jacket under an inflatable snowboarding coat, with wool hat, eskimo gloves, and fleece-lined jeans. I could dress like a human and just wear a coat. Yes, I said inflatable coat. It was a present from my wife a couple of years ago and aside from being ruined by a dry cleaner, it’s a great coat. It’s got a maze of rubber tubing inside, and you blow in through a one-way valve to inflate the coat with your warm exhale and create a warm air-chamber insulation layer. It’s nice.
That said, I think I’m gonna go grab some Ho-Ho’s and surf the rest of the internet.
Currently listening :
Sing, Sing, Sing
By Benny Goodman
Release date: 25 October, 1990
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Sunday, January 27, 2008
Weekend? What Weekend?
Current mood: pissy
It doesn’t seem fair, really. Here it is, only 16 minutes left in the weekend, and by the time I’ve posted this it’ll be Monday, and I will be officially up too late, and only be able to get 5-1/2 hours of sleep at the most. It just doesn’t seem fair, this whole 5:2 ratio of workdays to weekend days. I know I’m not the first to bellyache about this, but that doesn’t make any more fair, either.I work a standard 9-to-5 job, (8 to 4:30, really) and have a half-hour commute each way, making for 9.5 hours per day taken up by work. Then, there’s the two hours each morning it takes to wake up, get the kids up and help get them ready for school. That makes it 11.5 hours — from 5:30am when my alarm goes off to 5:00pm when I get home. There’s dinner — either I’m helping get the babies set for dinner, or I’m making it and helping get the babies set. After dinner there’s the 4-children-sized mess to clean up. Say it isn’t really all done until 7pm. I’ve just spent 5:30am until 7:00pm on nothing but work, work work. The twins are really screamy and need to be put to sleep somewhere between 8pm and 9pm.
It leaves about an hour, maybe two every day of somewhat leisure time. If I haven’t fallen asleep with a baby on me, I can most nights get some computer time after 11pm or so…which makes me officially up too late, etc, and the circle is complete.
So we have two days of weekend. Lately, we’ve been packing in house-shopping every weekend for the past month; trekking all over four counties looking at homes, dragging increasingly aggravated kids with us. When we aren’t doing that, we’ve been mucking out the house from the work-week’s worth of scattered toys, crumbled snack crumbs, dirty dishes, muddy laundry and blown light bulbs. After the weekend, I swear I need a weekend. There have been some weekends where I’m actually glad to be going to work on Monday, so I can finally relax a little.
And something else — I would bet a dollar that nothing I’m doing at work is so critical that it needs to monopolize so many days of my week. So somebody’s computer doesn’t get installed on Tuesday, but on Wednesday. In a hundred years, who’s going to know the difference? I’d like to think that I work to support my family…not that I have a family to support my work. But the amount of time that my job demands of me makes me start to think otherwise. I’m damn lucky my twins took their first steps on a Saturday, because if it’d been during the week, I’d have missed it.
It isn’t fair.
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Thursday, January 24, 2008
They’re Mobile!
Current mood: drunk
(Let me apologize in advance…I’m drunk. I’ve had lots of a very nice zinfandel, and I may be more of an asshole than usual.)
Both of my babies started walking this week.This is big, so let me say it again: Both of my babies started walking this week. It’s a milestone — not only because we need to move the babyproofing up by about two feet. My twins now can motivate around like real people. They’ve gotten pretty proficient at crawling — they can put their head down and bull forward at a good clip — but now they’ve taken their first venture into adult transportation.
Maybe I could take a minute and bore you with some exposition. If you don’t know what that is, look it up.
www.m-w.com (That’s Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary.)I have four children. I have a seven-year-old son, a five-year-old daughter, and one-year-old twin daughters. My son is a tad bit Autistic — as crackpot as it sounds we can control his Autism with a special diet, and we do, and he’s more or less normal. So it’s the twins that just learned to walk.
My son learned to walk when we were in the first and only house we ever actually bought. We tricked him into it with a walker toy…we held it for him, and when he reached for it we inched it away from him and he walked for it without even realizing what he was doing. When he DID realize, he stood there (all of 14 months old) yelling “YEAH! YEAH!!”
My oldest daughter first walked at a Leelanau Peninsula winery, when we were wine-tasting with my dad. Maybe that explains a lot about her. ‘Nuff said.
And of the twins, the younger one first walked on Saturday, at my oldest daughter’s ballet class. The older one walked a day or two later in our kitchen.
So saying, it’s now time to move. We seem to be always destined to move away from wherever we live when one of our children learns to walk. By summer we will be living somewhere else. We’d like to stay in the house we’re in now, but our landlord is simply asking too much money — put it this way…we can get my wife’s dream house for $3000 less than our landlord is asking for a creaky, dingy house that’s been trashed by renters. For $33,000 less we can have a 4-bedroom Victorian with beautiful original woodwork, a 2-car garage/workshop, and a huge double lot, across the road from a park and a block away from a lake — the next town over. Is not-moving worth $33,000? Seems not.
But I digress. My babies are walking. Life is good — scarier, but good.
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Saturday, January 19, 2008
Cold. Cold? Cold.
Current mood: awake
So, I know I said it was cold yesterday. But that was yesterday. Today it’s cold. Yesterday it was almost ten. Right now it’s about -4 degrees. That’s “minus four.” Four below zero. Not on the Celsius scale, where that’d be balmy. No, four below zero Fahrenheit. Frigid cold. Damn cold. It’s like, ten thirty at night and dark, that helps. Today at the heat of the day, it might have hit ten…and it was hella-windy, and snowy. Felt like walking through a Siberian meat locker. Uck.On the other hand, it LOOKED really beautiful outside. We drove to town, and it was sunny for the drive. There was fresh snow from last night, and the morning sun lit up the whitened pine trees and made it look like a total winter wonderland. Sure, if you stuck your nose out the window it’d crystallize and fall off, but it LOOKED really nice.
Oh yeah, and we ate lunch at Olive Garden. Ain’t nuthin’ wrong ’bout that!
Currently listening :
Lazy Eye
By Silversun Pickups
Release date: 24 September, 2007
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Friday, January 18, 2008
And Welcome To Michigan
It’s snowing.Yeah, and in other news, the sun came up. Does it snow a lot in Michigan? Only on the days that end in “Y.” I had my arse out at six in the morning clearing the driveway with our asthmatic snowblower. What’s it like at six in the morning, in January, in Michigan?
It’s cold. Cold and dark. How cold? Nine. Nine degrees. You shouldn’t be able to spell the temperature. The accepted AP style for writing numbers less than 10 is to spell them out, you know? It’s like “I’d like to buy a second digit, Pat…a seven.” And Pat has to say, “I’m sorry, no sevens in this temperature. It’s nine.”
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Thursday, January 17, 2008
What Is The F, Dude?
Current mood: bummed
I’ve been noticing a disturbing (disquieting? disgusting?) trend in people in general. The only time lots of people do anything quickly, or assertively, or decisively…is when they’re being an asshole. The only time people duck through a door quickly is when they want to let it close on you. The only time people change lanes quickly in their car is when they want to cut you off. The only time people walk quickly is when they want to be in front of you in a line. And on and on and on.Most of the time, people seem to shuffle through life in a sort of collective unconsciousness. Existing, not living. They don’t look at me as they pass by. They don’t look at the trees, or sky, or snow, or anything…just a blank stare walking by me. Usually with a cell phone mashed against their ear. That’s the worst. Not only are they detached from what they’re really doing…but their conversation is detached from what they’re talking to. How many people on cell phones sound like this: “I’m getting out of work…..getting out of work…..out of work….work. WORK! What? What? What? What? It’s okay. It’s okay, Okay. Okay!”
Honestly, how much of a waste is that? Not only is the entire subject of the call the simple fact that they just got out of work…but the person they’re calling should honestly be able to surmise that fact by just looking at a clock. And the technology fails them so badly that they can’t even get that sad fact across.
But really, is the human race really only alive when we’re trying to screw someone over? Lately it sure seems that way. Nobody expends the energy unless it’ll squash another human at least a little. It saddens me. It really does.
Currently listening :
Battle Without Honor or Humanity
By Tomoyasu Hotei
Release date: 12 July, 2004
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