Massacre on QVCUK

To be honest, today was a bit of a misfire. Up too late last night, up too early today. No nap. Lots of work to do - some of which I did, most of which fell by the wayside. I did end up taking Anna out to the dollar theater to see Toy Story 3 which was pretty damn amazing. Mostly, I just liked being there with her. I hope she still will go see movies with me when she's 13 and 15 and whatever. Who knows if she will. A dad can hope though.

I had a post that I really wanted to write but I simply ran out of time today, so it'll have to wait for another day. That's okay, really. November has plenty of days! So in the place of a real post, here's the most horrifying thing I've seen all day (courtesy of P.Viktor.)



Yes, that is Elaine Paige massacring "Take A Bow" - one of Madonna's biggest hits. As a friend of mine said when I sent him the link - MY EARDRUMS ARE BLEEDING.

Dolly-lusional

Fandom is an interesting phenomenon. Even as diehard of a Madonna as I am, I'm still pretty tame compared to some. All you have to do is head over to a message board and you'll see that, despite my ability to talk about nearly any aspect of her career, I am clearly not as obsessed as some of the fans. My friend Kelly once said that you haven't really experienced something until you've dipped into an obsession. While I think that's true, my view on that has softened significantly as I have gotten older. And after watching the documentary For the Love of Dolly tonight, I'm more convinced than ever that fandom is one of those things that can go from charming to downright creepy in 3 seconds or less.

For the Love of Dolly is a 2006 documentary that follows five extremely avid fans of Dolly Parton - and that is putting it mildly. They have gone beyond the usual collecting of her music and movies and interest in her projects. These people live and breathe Dolly. Their homes are filled with Dolly memorabilia. Dolly dolls, posters, records and CDs adorn the walls and shelves. One of the fans sports a tattoo of Dolly's autograph. They've saved the clothes that they were wearing the first time they met Dolly. Dolly has signed a wide variety of items that they proudly display under glass cases. One wanted to drain their backyard swimming pool to have a portrait of Dolly painted on the bottom. They have made it their life mission to follow Dolly. And they gather annually in Pigeon Forge, TN for the Dolly Parade, an event for which Dolly serves as the grand marshal. They long for just an acknowledgment from Dolly and since they have been so persistent, they usually get it which just serves to fuel the obsession.

I'm not quite sure what the intent of this documentary was, but if it was to portray these five fans in a positive light, it missed the mark by about 100 miles. Rather than understanding the reasons for this level of devotion, I found myself saying to myself throughout the 60 minute documentary "These people need help. Professional help."

I get that these people took a great deal of personal inspiration from Dolly. I think Dolly herself would appreciate that. But when someone goes and creates a life-size replica of Dolly's Tennessee Mountain Home cabin in their backyard complete with dolls representing Dolly and her childhood best friend Judy Ogle, I think it's safe to say that things have gone a little overboard. And when you add in the fact that to make this cabin replica, the fan took a piece of wood from the Tennessee Mountain Home cabin at Dollywood and TOOK THE WOOD TO HOME DEPOT TO HAVE IT COLOR MATCHED, you've crossed a line that I can't even come close to. It's one thing to be a fan, it's quite another to let said fandom take over your life.

I thought I had seen everything, but the scene in which two of the fans track down a car owned by Judy Ogle that had been sold back to a dealer really took the cake. They scoured the car for Dolly's hair. They were obsessed with the fact that Dolly had ridden in the passenger's seat. They LICKED the seat belt. Even my 8 year-old recognized the batshit craziness - her comment was "Yuck, Dad! That has DNA on it!"

I really do love Dolly and her music. I have been a fan of hers since I was a kid and was a fan before I even knew that I was a fan. I'm also a fan of a lot of other artists and celebrities. A friend of mine is fond of saying that if you don't have passions, you're a little bit untrustworthy and I mostly agree with that. But these people? I'd be backing away slowly from them. They scared me with their level of devotion. And if I were Dolly, I would be putting out a restraining order on them. But since she's Dolly, she doesn't and she meets them and signs whatever random crap they've brought and accepts their handwritten crazy stalker notes.

Maybe it's just me, but I'm one that likes to keep the objects of my fandom at a comfortable distance. In the end, they are just people like you and me - they just happen to be famous. And I think that if I got too close, the illusion would be shattered and well, I kind of like the illusions I have built up around some of my favorite artists. I have no desire to meet Madonna - she'd likely be bitchy! Don't get me wrong, I understand the devotion but I feel like fans that tip into obsession have really lost sight of reality and end up putting a lot on the celebrity that isn't really there to begin with. What killed me the most was how these folks assumed a personal relationship with Dolly. I suppose if that delusion helps them get through the day, well, more power to them but not being able to see the folly in that is quite dangerous. Somewhere, somehow, the balance was lost.

All I can say is that if I ever tell a potential employer that I need a flexible schedule to be able to follow Dolly Parton around, someone please organize an intervention.

Coffee snob

There's a running gag at work and amongst my friends that I'm a terrible coffee snob. It's true. The coffee in the cafeteria, by my estimation, only barely qualifies as coffee. The addition of a Burgies in the lobby has made drinking the cafeteria coffee a thing of the past. I will stoop to drinking Folgers if need be, but there is no coffee emergency that necessitates drinking instant coffee. That's actually kind of funny because instant coffee is how I learned to drink coffee. The summer after I graduated from high school, my part time job at Center Pharmacy had morphed into a full-time summer job, complete with coffee breaks. One of the long-time employees had a method of making instant coffee that she swore made it taste like fresh brewed coffee. She maintained that if you boiled the water and poured just a little bit in over the top of the crystals and swirled it around really fast, it would "melt them" and make the final product indistinguishable from fresh brewed coffee. Never really having had fresh brewed coffee, I had nothing to compare it to so I believed her.

The last 20 years have taught me that she was full of shit. Nothing but nothing will make instant coffee taste like real coffee. It'll always be a pale imitation. I blame the Java House in Iowa City for most of my coffee snobbery. The Java House is one of the things I miss most about Iowa City. Many coffee places try, but no place has ever managed to get the mix of coffee and ambiance as perfectly balanced as the Java House does. And what's better is their coffee ROCKS. Whenever we're in Iowa City, the Java House is a required stop and I always get the St. Louis Blues au lait. You can buy the beans and bring them home and make it yourself, but it's just not the same. Nobody does it better than the Java House.

So despite my fondness for Starbucks and other such highfalutin coffee places, I have a small confession to make.

There's nothing quite like a convenience store cappuccino.

I know, it seems anathema to everything I stand for coffee-wise, but there's something about those little cups of joy that makes everything right with the world. Putting an empty cup into a slot and pushing a button while what basically amounts to a powder/scalding hot water mix pours down is so satisfying. Of course, these "cappuccinos" are nothing like the real thing. And thank God for that. I'll take one of these any day of the week over an actual cappuccino. And the fact that came from a place called Kum & Go or Kwik Shop or Swift Stop or Quik Trip is just icing on the cake.

The quality of these convenience store cappuccinos varies wildly, sometimes even within the same machine. The french vanilla may be nothing but water but the Irish Creme is just fine. And if you really don't want the caffeine but instead just want something hot? There's always hot chocolate. It's the drink of choice when I'm headed back to home from a trip down to Ankeny or Des Moines so that I can stay awake for just the drive home as opposed to the entire night. This brings up another point - these drinks are really only ever consumed inside a car. Never would it cross my mind to get a drink like this to bring home. Besides, if I'm going to be at home, I can make my own (better) coffee for less.

So despite my coffee snobbery, I can't help myself. It's in my genes. My mom loves a good convenience store cappuccino, and I, for one, am glad to have inherited that.

Hello you fool, I love you

When I was taking Anna to school this morning, Roxette's "Fading Like A Flower (Every Time You Leave)" came on. (An aside: any song with a parenthetical portion is automatically better than it should be. It sure helped out a boatload of Samantha Fox songs.) I hadn't heard this song in forever and I had forgotten how much I really like it. It's kind of tied to a road trip I made to Kansas City in 1991 with a group of friends. It was all over the radio at the time, riding the wave of "Joyride" which had been a pretty big success despite the fact that I was always a bit lukewarm to it.

But more than that, everything Roxette will always remind me of the woman with whom I've shared my life for the last 15 years. Now that I think about it, today is probably 15 years ago to the day that we met. Heidi and I met in early November 1995 at Jeff Tadsen's housewarming party - a party that both of us almost missed for various reasons and had that happened, who knows WHAT the world would look like now. But the reason that Roxette and all their Swedish cheese will have the Heidi connection is because Roxette was pretty much the ONLY pop music that Heidi listened to when I met her. Was Roxette even having hits in 1995? I can't remember. In a sea of Deep Forest and Clannad and Enya and other what we refer to as "woo-woo" music, there was Roxette. Clearly, I had work to do.

It wasn't because I thought her choice of Roxette was a bad one. I always liked Roxette enough, but never enough to actually purchase any of their albums. They were a staple of my senior year of high school, with hits like "The Look"(Mary, I owned the cassingle of that song!), "Dangerous", and "Dressed for Success" which my friend Holly always referred to as "Undressed for Some Sex." I was less impressed with the song "Joyride" as I found it rather annoying but all the other singles from the album Joyride were pleasant, especially the previously mentioned "Fading Like A Flower."

Within the first couple months of dating (which commenced after the three weeks it took me to call her after our initial meeting - YES, SHE STILL MARRIED ME. It's amazing.) I had made for her a mix tape of the definitive Madonna songs. Now, that tape would be woefully incomplete. Within a few days, she had responded in kind with a corresponding mix tape of the definitive Roxette. It was with that tape that I was exposed to some of Roxette's deeper album cuts and how I discovered what would become my favorite Roxette songs. They were all dubbed from the tapes of Roxette's albums which blew me away because I thought that dubbing from a tape had gone the way of the dodo bird by that time. I wasted no time in going out to the now-defunct BJ's Records in Iowa City and I picked up every last one of Roxette's albums for her on CD. If I recall correctly, it was part of a Valentine's Day present. And as a bonus, inside the copy of Crash! Boom! Bang! was a live bootleg album. This excited me more than anything else and Heidi had a good poker face and put up with my excitement because she has never really been a fan of concert recordings and really couldn't have possibly cared less.

But on that tape was the Roxette song "Run To You" which, at that point in my life, spoke very strongly to me and really summed up how I felt about the fledgling relationship we had at the time. I didn't know there was a video for it until just this morning. Naturally all Roxette videos on YouTube have embedding disabled (seriously?) but I did find it elsewhere.


Roxette - Run To You

I don't know what happened to "The Definitive Roxette" mix tape. I know I wouldn't have consciously gotten rid of it. It's probably around here somewhere just waiting for me to find it.

It's pretty safe to say that had I not met Heidi, I wouldn't have spent the last hour listening to Roxette. And honestly, I can't imagine this morning without it.

Hello you fool. I still love you. Happy 15th anniversary of meeting. Ish.

Year of 25 Books: #17 - A Gathering of Crows

We've all seen them - those rural small towns that seem to be hanging on by a thread (and likely a prayer.) Western Iowa, in particular, is littered with them. But what makes a a struggling town a ghost town? If you believe horror writer Brian Keene and his latest release, A Gathering of Crows, it's five otherworldly creatures that can shapeshift between a human-like form and that of a crow. They gut (both literally and figuratively) those small towns that have been completely forgotten. And tonight, they're headed into Brinkley Springs, West Virginia.

I've read Brian Keene's zombie fiction (most notably, The Rising and City of the Dead) but had not branched out into his other horror fiction. I saw this at the library and was intrigued enough by the premise that I picked it up and started reading that very day. In 3 days, I was finished - that's how sucked into the story and characters I was.

The story starts by introducing us to some of what will become the main characters. We don't know it yet (although you can guess it) but all their stories will intertwine in some way by the time the book is over. Sticking out like a sore thumb amongst the locals is traveler Levi Stoltzfus, a formerly Amish man who has been disowned by his family for dabbling deeper in the dark arts than his father would allow. As these five demons arrive in Brinkley Springs to feed on the souls of everything that's living, he's their Obi-Wan Kenobi. He is their only hope.

Keene will be one of those writers that's dismissed because he writes genre fiction, but really, he's a great storyteller and fantastic at setting up a story. He makes the characters very real and believable. Sure, it's an easy read, but what's wrong with that? Is there a law somewhere that says that everything good has to be "literary" and "mature"? If there is, I'm not interested. Keene's writing is over the top and gory and stomach turning at times, but THIS IS HORROR FICTION. What do you expect?

Like most horror stories, I felt like the resolution of the novel was a bit underwhelming - Mushroom World really didn't work for me, but oh well. Keene is good at what he does and I applaud him for daring to set up a Lovecraftian mythology that spans most of his novels to varying degrees. That is no small feat (says the husband of an author that has a 7 book series she wants to write.)

Horror fiction can be so bad, but Keene is definitely the cream of the current crop. And A Gathering of Crows (incidentally, known as a "murder") is well worth the time of anyone who likes a fast paced story with more scares and gross-outs than you can count. I heartily recommend it. I actually recommended it to a friend while I was reading it, telling him "if I knew how to buy this for you and send it to your Kindle, I would so be doing that right now."

And when you want to buy the book for someone else, that's how you know you've found a good one.

Private dining

Those expecting a political post from me tonight will be sorely disappointed. After hashing it out last night and earlier today on Twitter and Facebook, I just don't have it in me to talk about it. Yes, the results were unfortunate, especially here in Iowa. But as I have said to many people today, we have not yet begun to fight.

To kind of cleanse my palate of all the nasty, divisive political garbage as well as to avoid continually rubbing salt in the wounds all day, I stepped slowly away from the computer and got out and enjoyed a really awesome fall day. I always say that I'm going to go and walk on the Iowa State campus in the fall but every year, fall comes and goes and I never seem to follow through. So today, I finally did it. I actually attended Iowa State for a couple years in the early 90s before transferring to University of Iowa where I got all of the letters after my name. So I'm not an alumni of ISU, but there are days that I may as well be. Whenever the Iowa-Iowa State football game rolls around, I never really know who to root for.

I have a lot of fond memories of Iowa State, which is kind of odd because for the most part, I felt really quite lonely and isolated during my time there. This was not really reflected in reality - I had more friends than I realized and I, frankly, didn't try very hard. A lot of my feelings of loneliness and isolation had more to do with my own perception than anything else. I was shy and quiet and had a bad self-image. I didn't feel like I had anything in common with any guys and certainly, there were no girls that would possibly want to date me so I always felt like no one liked me or would want to get to know me. Ah, the folly of youth. Looking back, I can see how dreadfully wrong I was.

But because of that, meal times were the worst. I was so self-conscious that I never wanted to eat with the people on my dorm floor. I did sometimes, but I'll admit that I ate by myself - A LOT. Not all the time, mind you, but a lot of the time. I talked myself into thinking I didn't care and that it didn't matter, but deep down, it really bothered me. I felt like there was nothing more pathetic than eating lunch by yourself in a bustling cafeteria filled with college students having a the time of their lives. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy. I felt bad so I ate by myself and then I saw other people having a good time which made me feel bad and on down the line we went. I rationalized it in my head quite well - "I want to read my book" or "I want to listen to my Walkman" were the most common rationalizations I had for eating in solitude. I read a hell of a lot of John Irving in the Friley cafeteria at lunch. Yet, it still bothered me. As much as I could intellectualize the whole experience, I couldn't help but feel bad and very loser-ish. It was very shameful in my eyes.

I remember thinking to myself "there needs to be a club that all the people that eat by themselves can join so that they don't have to eat by themselves." Of course, the fallacy in that is that if people who ate alone were club-joining type people, they wouldn't be eating alone. I mean, I don't think I would have joined it and it was my idea!

I've had that story ramming around in my body for ages and have only told it to those closest to me. I was always so embarrassed by it. It was not that I was antisocial, it was that I had a difficult time making casual acquaintances because, in the sea of students at ISU, I had no way of finding other people like me. It was up to chance and I was not interested in chancing it with anyone. The rejection would have been more than my self-image could take. But now, with the benefit of 20 years of living under my belt, I feel like I can finally own that story. Because owning that story is owning that part of me that still exists. It's still a little bit hard to tell though, mostly because I worry about how it will make my mom feel. (don't feel bad Mom! I don't!)

Today, on my walk around campus, I got to commune with that 19 year-old version of me. Looking around at the college students now, aside from feeling positively ancient, I know that I would probably follow the exact same course if I had it all to do over again. I'm not all that different from the 19 year-old Dan sometimes - some of that is just hard-wired into us and there's not much you can do despite all the the grand talk of "I'd do it all differently if I could go back." I would still be shy and quiet and tentative. It was who I was and, like I said, still am to a certain degree.

I ate at Jimmy John's in Campustown today and sat at a table by a window by myself. I was not self conscious in any way. Even so, I could still feel a twinge of it, even now at 38 when I should be well past all that. Sometimes, it still hurts.

A wise woman (three guesses who) once told me that a brave man sits with pain. I would add that he sits with it but doesn't wallow in it. And that's what today felt like. Despite the fact that the walk back to campus dredged all that up, it was worth it.

(photo via)

Curiouser and curiouser

This picture is from Curious George Wins a Medal. I had this book when I was a kid and that very same copy is now in Anna's room. For whatever reason, we laugh uproariously at this picture every single time.


We not only laugh at it, we laugh in anticipation of it. Several pages ahead of it, we start giggling until we finally turn the page and erupt into peals of laughter. No, it's not really all that funny, but it really tickles us for some reason. I think it's because of George's little head sticking out of that huge shirt. Maybe it's because he's pulling one over on the clueless farmers that were chasing him.

I actually quite like Curious George - I even don't mind the PBS show that is on now. As characters on PBS shows go, he's very low on the annoying scale. (Topping that list is Caillou and all the members of his family.) It won't be long before these kinds of books are "babyish" to Anna, so I still make the time to read them with her before bed.

Kind of a lightweight post tonight - it balances out last night's as well as the election returns. Polls are closing now in Iowa so time to start go obsessively reloading CNN's website.

Is it over yet?

I think this has been the longest election season in history. Tomorrow is Election Day and I have had enough of this. I almost don't care that the Democrats are going to get crucified in the election tomorrow. I just want the whole bloody thing to be over with. That way, the ads (which I think have been particularly horrible this year) will finally be off the airwaves. Seriously, they have been the worst ever. You can see it even on the local level. One ad I heard on the radio today was talking about how a candidate for either the Iowa House or Senate was a wife beater and a deadbeat dad. Now, if this is truly the case, well, sure he probably shouldn't hold elected office, but how much of it is true and how much of it is typical election season hyperbole? You really can't believe ANYTHING you hear any longer.

I was talking with Matt last night who is a political junkie. We talked at length about what is probably one of the more heartbreaking races here in Iowa - the vote to retain three of Iowa's Supreme Court justices. As most everyone knows, in April of 2009, the Iowa Supreme Court unanimously struck down the state's marriage law defining marriage as between one man and one woman, making same-sex marriage legal in Iowa. This (predictably) got the social conservatives' undies in a bunch, particularly perennial also-ran Bob Vander Plaats. After losing the Republican gubernatorial primary to Terry Branstad, he made ousting the three Supreme Court justices who are up for retention this year his raison d'etre. Never mind this won't change the law. Never mind that no justice has been ousted in Iowa history. NOT ONE.

It's no secret around these parts that the Supreme Court decision that allowed all Iowans to enjoy the benefits of civil marriage and not just the ones that happen to be heterosexual made me very happy. So the fact that 37% of those polled favored ousting all three judges vs. 34% who favored retaining them made me a little sad. (10% favored retaining some and I have no idea what the remainder would do.) What this really is is a referendum on marriage equality - make no mistake about it. Put to a vote now, I have a feeling that a constitutional amendment would pass. It would be a squeaker, but I think we'd succeed in putting discrimination into the Iowa Constitution.

But it's not just the question of judicial retention that has me on pins and needles. House and Senate Democrats have been pretty successful at blocking a vote on a constitutional amendment defining marriage as one man-one woman. Republicans promised to make it a campaign issue and honestly, I haven't seen it much. Granted, my House district is heavily Democratic so we're likely to re-elect our current representative. Our Iowa Senate candidate is a bit more of a toss-up. If you were to go by yard signs, I'd say that he has a bit of a fight ahead of him. But that's the thing - polling numbers for races like that are virtually non-existent. So we won't really know until tomorrow night. The CW says that one of the chambers has the potential to flip to Republicans, and the other is safely Democratic (I forget which is which.) But even one chamber going Republican forces a vote in both chambers and I'd rather keep pushing that off. The longer we wait, the more likely an amendment vote is to fail.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a one issue voter. But this is a HUGE issue for us and one that we're heavily invested in personally. I take solace in knowing that I'm on the right side of history when it comes to this. But just because the rest of the country isn't ready for it doesn't mean that we should have to wait for them to catch up with us.

I've been saying over the last few months that Iowa is better than this. And we are! But tomorrow night I think I'll be watching election returns through my fingers as if it were a horror film. Wake me when it's over.

And just think, the 2012 presidential campaign will begin in earnest early in 2011. I can't wait.

The ghost of Halloween past

I don't know about anyone else, but it seems like Halloween has been an all-weekend affair this year. I guess that's what you get when you have trick-or-treating on Friday night and Halloween doesn't actually happen till Sunday night. Surprisingly, we really weren't all that into Halloween this year. A lot of that had to do with the fact that October was an amazingly draining month so by the time we got to the end of it, we really lacked the ability to put something fantastic together. We had a few friends over, but we didn't even dress up this year which is VERY unlike us. So since there are no new pictures of a costumed us, I raided my hard drive and found a bunch of photos from Halloweens past.

This is from the first Halloween party we ever had. We lacked the space for it so Jeff hosted it with us at his place. We went as Gomez and Morticia Addams. My sister Wendy went as Wednesday Addams but I can't find the picture of the three of us. She killed it as Christina Ricci's version of Wednesday. We weren't too shabby ourselves.

1999 found us hosting our first Halloween party in our first house. We went as Dorothy and the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz. Heidi made our costumes and I do believe we pulled it of pretty well, even though we had to be a bespectacled Dorothy and Scarecrow.

Never to be outdone, Jeff came to that party as Joan Crawford accepting her Oscar in her nightgown. Jeff, you have a level of courage that I can only aspire toward.

My brother and sister were living in Iowa City that year, so they came to the party as well. On the right is Ryan doing his classic Unabomber costume which was based on the famous artist's composite sketch. My sister arrived as "the new Jan Brady" complete with blond hair sticking out from her black Afro wig. Perhaps two of my favorite costumes ever.

This is from 2002 - Anna's first Halloween. She was a ladybug that couldn't stop sucking on her pacifier.

In 2004, Anna had to wear the cat costume that was worn by Heidi and all her sisters at some point. So I decided since Anna was going as a cat, I'd go as a mouse. That thing hanging around my neck is a picture of cheese but it's flipped around so it just looks stupid.

2008 we started doing Halloween parties again in earnest. Anna was Princess Leia that year on a "diplomatic" mission to Alderaan.

That was also the same year that I shaved my beard and went as David Tennant as The Doctor. Heidi went as the scariest thing we could think of - President Sarah Palin. Looking back, my resemblance to the Doctor is only vague at best, but I had a good time.


Last year's Alien chestburster victim is the best costume I've ever done. It was a little bit technically difficult to rig up, but once I figured it out, the rest was easy. I got more comments on that costume than any other.

Heidi was a bit less inspired that year - going as the "H" Scrabble tile. Anna was Coraline from the movie version - complete with blue hair.

Jeff arrived in full Glinda regalia that year. I think that we both peaked in terms of costume ideas that year. No one does Halloween drag like Jeff. And it led to the very surreal picture below.

So yeah, although Anna dressed up this year, we didn't. Next year, we'll have to make up for it.

NaNoWriMoBloPoMo

It's almost November which means only ONE thing around here - we're about to lose Heidi for a month. Monday starts the beginning of National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo for short) in which participants attempt to write the first draft of a 50,000 word novel during the month of November. Last year, Heidi wrote Double Blind during NaNoWriMo. This year, I think she's planning on writing the third book in the Special Delivery series so fans of that series, the wait is getting close to being over. There will be write-ins all over central Iowa for the next month and I'm sure I'll be at many of them providing moral support and drinking overpriced coffee.

Me, I'm not that ambitious. But what I AM planning on doing is participating in NaBloPoMo or National Blog Posting Month. I did this unofficially last year but this year, I'm jumping in with both feet and have signed up on the web site. While it was originally developed as a counterpoint to NaNoWriMo, it no longer is just a once yearly event taking place in November. However, in honor of Heidi's attempt (and the attempts of all others in the Central Iowa Authors NaNo group), I'm choosing November and, according to the FAQ on the web site, it's still the most popular month for people to participate.

I can't promise something witty every day, but there will be new material at least once a day in November. Some days, it may be no more than a YouTube link with some sentences to go along with it, but I do hope for some longer posts as well. I know that blogging is ancient history, but my dogged determination to keep this space going is stronger than ever right now.

I have a few posts I've saved for November, but expect me to catch up on my book posts. But if last November is any indication, who knows what I'll get up to.

Year of 25 Books: #16 - Lips Unsealed: A Memoir

Although this is only entry 16 for the Year of 25 Books, I'll have you know that I'm all the way up to 20 as far as reading them goes. Clearly, I'm behind on blogging the books. Yes, I'm behind on reading as well. Only 8 weeks left in the year and 5 more to go. What can I say? The last half of the year has been a bit busier than I expected.

When I first heard about Belinda Carlisle's memoir, I knew that it would be a must read. The advent of Belinda's solo career coincided with my musical awakening which, in layman's terms means the point at which I stopped listening solely to Olivia Newton-John records. The Go-Gos actually predated me musically a little bit, although I was swift enough to figure out that she was the lead singer of the Go-Gos and "Our Lips Are Sealed" - the hit song from which the title of the book takes its name, was one of the first music videos I remember seeing (on HBO's Video Jukebox, no less.)

Belinda's solo work was such solid pop that I had no choice but to love it pretty much unconditionally. So the revelation in the book that she really is more of a punk rocker at heart was a bit of a surprise. The Go-Gos always seemed to flirt with punk, but they were grounded in such a pop sensibility that calling them punk would have certainly not been accurate. The book follows Belinda from her beginnings in southern California to the formation and break-up of the Go-Gos. It includes the years of her solo career which peaked in the late 80s with the album (and Dan favorite) Heaven on Earth only to see her fortunes fall steadily through the 90s. It is a pretty standard music autobiography - trials, tribulations, love, heartache and above all, drug use.

Belinda's drug use during the 80s is no secret. I remember reading or hearing somewhere (although now I am hard pressed to find the source) that there are some Go-Gos videos that she has absolutely no recollection of doing because she was so high on various drugs. Listening to Carlisle weave her tales of drug use in the 80s rock and roll scene makes me wonder how there were any drugs left in Los Angeles after she was done. The most amazing thing was that her drug use continued up until just a few years ago, although there were periods of sobriety, she's only been drug free for the last 5 years. And here I thought she'd left her drug habit in the dust 20 years ago! After reading the book, I think it's only her marriage and family that saved her from ending up dead from a drug overdose. In many ways, she's lucky to be alive (but not as lucky as Stevie Nicks - talk about someone that probably shouldn't have seen their 60s based upon the amount of drugs they did.)

The book is, like most rock-star memoirs, an incredibly easy read and I have no idea how much of it was ghost written, but it's very readable and entertaining. I have a love of biography because I am, by nature, just a bit of a snoop and just love to hear other people's life stories. And even though they are celebrities, they're still people. I think that's the thing that fascinates me the most. She does not, however, address the plastic surgery tragedy that is her face now.

I can't wait till Madonna gets around to writing her inevitable autobiography, but by then, will there be anything left to tell?

Fish death

The fish just keep dying.

Anna has an aquarium in her room that was a birthday present a few years back. It was born out of her desire for "something alive" in her room (never mind the fact that we have 5 cats.) I nixed all talk of rabbits and guinea pigs and chinchilas and what not. I was NOT interested in cleaning up after one of those - litter boxes are already bad enough. So we settled on fish. We had fish growing up and my mom has a tank now.

One of the things I remember my dad saying to us as kids regarding fish tanks was "don't get attached to fish." They are, after all, the lowest form of vertebrate life on the planet. The ones living in her aquarium have a brain the size of a hangnail. Still, when we first started with fish, we named them and everything. My dad would just shake his head and repeat his mantra "don't get attached to fish."

Those of you that know Anna know that she gets attached to everything. Her first two goldfish that she had were named Kiki and Fifi. With the clear memory of my father's mantra in my head, I reminded Anna that fish were fragile creatures and not to be disappointed if they died. To our utter amazement, they lived for nearly a year. But then the great fish die off began. Replacement fish lasted a month at best. We switched to tetras and glowfish and one by one, they croaked too. It wouldn't be so bad except Anna gives them all these cute little names. Strawberry and Silvermist and Popcorn and Chocolate Chip and Fred. That's right, Fred. Fred and Al were both algae eaters. Both gone to the great fish beyond.

I got an e-mail from Heidi on Saturday night when I was in Kansas City about the death of Popcorn. Popcorn was a guppy that was yellow with little black speckles. He had just been purchased the day before and could have been returned to Petsmart, but heartbroken Anna wanted to bury him. Both algae eaters bit the dust last night - a fact I discovered when I came up to find Anna despondent and crying in her bedroom. Tonight, another glowfish had died. He was up against the filter and I don't even know what his name was.

Anna keeps this list on the back of her door. I know that I am overly sentimental about my child, but it breaks my heart.


I think I could handle fish death if it weren't for the cute names and the ever lengthening list of casualties. But I know that's how she's dealing with it. She told me once that it's how she remembers them, which I suppose is fair. It's just another example of how, as a parent, you want to shield your child from all pain. It's not only impossible, it's fucking stupid. I always say that if I had just learned how to deal with some of the shit I am learning to deal with now at an earlier age, it would have been SO much easier.

But for now, I would like the fish to stop dying. Pretty please?

(image via)

Frequent fliers

It's been a while since I've done an iPod data post. They are probably only interesting to me, but what the hell.

Top 25 Most Played Songs on my iPod (as of today)

1) I Put My Ring Back On / Mary Chapin Carpenter (63 plays)
2) Get Outta My Way / Kylie Minogue (41 plays)
3) Hormones / Tracey Thorn (37 plays)
4) It's Here / Kim Wilde (35 plays)
5) The Way I Feel / Mary Chapin Carpenter (30 plays)
6) Put Your Hands Up (If You Feel Love) / Kylie Minogue (29 plays)
7) Ain't No Son / Court Yard Hounds (27 plays)
8) Broken / Madonna (26 plays)
9) Oh No! / Marina & the Diamonds (26 plays)
10) Dear Anne Sexton / Vanessa Daou (26 plays)
11) The Age of Miracles / Mary Chapin Carpenter (25 plays)
12) Aphrodite / Kylie Minogue (24 plays)
13) Be My Lover / La Bouche (24 plays)
14) San Antonio Rose / Patsy Cline (23 plays)
15) Wheel Of Fortune (2009 Remix) / Ace of Base (22 plays)
16) Go Hard or Go Home / Kylie Minogue (22 plays)
17) I Was A Bird / Mary Chapin Carpenter (22 plays)
18) I Wanna Life / Goldfrapp (20 plays)
19) Better Than Love / Hurts (20 plays)
20) Something About You / Cary Brothers (19 plays)
21) Telephone / Lady Gaga & Beyonce (19 plays)
22) Naked to the Eye / Mary Chapin Carpenter (19 plays)
23) Heard It On The Radio / The Bird & The Bee (18 plays)
24) On Her Mind / Duncan Sheik (18 plays)
25) Free Man In Paris / Joni Mitchell (18 plays)

I just reset my iTunes play counts in April - right before the new Mary Chapin Carpenter album came out which is why it is so well represented there. It got off to an early head start and still holds the number one slot, although Kylie is coming up fast and furious. It also explains the relatively low play counts on this list. That's also because there's just so much music in my library it really takes a lot for something to get repeated and multiple plays.

It'll be interesting to see where this is in 6 months.

Look who's evil now!

Horror and comedy frequently go hand in hand. The Nightmare on Elm Street sequels prove this beyond a shadow of a doubt. But the combination of horror, comedy and musical theater is a little bit rarer of a bird. Over the weekend I got a chance to finally see Evil Dead: The Musical at Kansas City's Off Center Theater with my friend Jason who had traveled from Boston to Kansas City for a conference. I'm not really sure where to start with this musical except that it was funny and campy as well as being a complete gross-out. So in other words, it was a total win.

Evil Dead: The Musical is based on the Sam Raimi films Evil Dead and Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn. Both films deal with the summoning of demons by reading from the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis or The Book of the Dead. The musical cherry picks the best parts from each of the movies and creates its own plot line, punctuated by Broadway style show tunes that are as funny as they are profane. The five college students on their way to an old abandoned cabin in the woods have NO idea what what awaits them.

In addition to singing and dancing and very bad puns, there is a shit-ton of fake stage blood that gets used during this show. And not content to just let the players participate in the fun of being covered in blood and gore, each production of Evil Dead: The Musical designates the first several rows of the audience as the "splatter zone." Sit there at your own peril, because as the program said, they will do everything in their power to make sure that they get the blood on you. For the show we went to, there was a row of folding chairs right up by the stage and then the first 2 rows of permanent seating were covered in trash bags. I had heard about this and Jason and I both decided it would be better to NOT sit in the splatter zone. Unfortunately, I heard about the splatter zone AFTER I had ordered the tickets, so our seat in row B was clearly going to be splattered. I called the ticket office mid-September and got our seats changed to row C which they assured me would not be in the splatter zone. Well, imagine our surprise when we got there and there were trash bags over our seats. It all worked out - we talked to a manager and they seated us in house seats clear of the splatter zone (and also free of seats in front of us which is nice for two 6 foot tall people.) And it was a good thing - the people in the splatter zone were covered in blood. It looked like people had been murdered.

The cast was good and the songs were well sung. What I wasn't expecting was how much dancing there actually was! I'd have dropped over dead after the first number had I been in that cast. No wonder they were all in terrific shape. I was especially impressed with Sam Wright's performance as Ash - the physical stamina it must have taken for that role is a bit mind boggling. He is in virtually every scene of the show and sings in most of the songs. I was not as impressed with the guy who played Scott, which made the performance of what has always been my favorite song from the musical "What the Fuck Was That?" a bit of an anticlimax. He didn't sing it as much as he shouted it and after having listened to the cast recording of that song for the last 2 years, I was a bit let down.

We also found it very odd that the theater was in what was basically a mall, but it all worked out because we basically just hung out around Crown Center for most of the day while we waited for the show to start. It was a good venue for the show and the audience really ate it up.

The next morning, I e-mailed my friend Matt and told him that if there is ever another semi-local performance of this show, we must go. I would totally go again but this time, I think I want to sit in the splatter zone. They even had "I survived the Splatter Zone" t-shirts! I did buy a T-shirt at the show - my one souvenir from my trip to Kansas City this weekend. Here it is:


The one I really wanted had the hand making an "L" in the Evil Dead logo a la the Glee logo. The tag line was "Like Glee, only dead." The other one said "Evil Dead: The Musical - a fucking good time!" which I just didn't feel comfortable buying.

The show is not going to win Tonys but who says it has to. It was a bloody (pardon the pun) good time and really, what more can you wish for from something called Evil Dead: The Musical?

Phair warning

I've said so on Twitter and Facebook this morning already, but I have found myself rather inexplicably listening to Liz Phair this morning despite my original plan to have a Kylie listening party before I go out and tackle the yard. Phair's re-emergence is entirely Amazon's fault. I head over to their digital downloads page pretty much every day to see what the deal of the day is and there's Liz in the new releases section with her album Funstyle. Well, I was powerless to resist so I clicked on it. I had no idea she was still releasing albums! Her last album Somebody's Miracle, in the words of Shania Twain, didn't impress me much. It had what I felt to be a boring and generic Sheryl Crow vibe - not the sound I was expecting from the woman who, on her previous album, was extolling the skin-moisturizing and hair-conditioning virtues of semen in the song "HWC" (for the uninitiated, I'll let you figure out what the letters stand for.)

To say that I am a Liz Phair fan would be grossly overstating it. My introduction to Phair was not with Exile in Guyville as it was for so many others. My first real exposure was on her self-titled 2003 album. Phair was vilified as a sell-out for making this poppy album when she had been an indie darling prior to this. But for me, Phair was finally making music that was accessible to me. To this day, I have still not heard all of Exile in Guyville. Indeed, only one song from that album is in my iTunes library, although I noticed that the re-issue is one of the $5.00 albums on Amazon this month. So while I like a handful of her songs, most of my love is reserved for the Liz Phair album. That said, I can understand why long time Liz Phair fans would be disappointed with the direction she started taking in 2003. Still, the whole thing reeked of pretension on the part of her long time fans. It speaks to me of the bias against pop music in general. Who says that something with a good melody and fun production is necessarily without a soul?

I listened to samples of Funstyle on eMusic to see if I would even be interested in it. Predictably, most of it didn't do much for me, although I ultimately puchased three songs from the album. But after listening to Liz Phair for the last 45 minutes, I'm ready to go re-evaluate my position on it. There is definitely an Indian sound to the album (one song is even called "Bollywood") and truthfully, it is kind of a mess. But my prediction is that by the time November gets here I'll have succumbed to it and the entire album will have been purchased a la carte from eMusic - hopefully before they institute their new pricing scheme which will make buying from eMusic feel less like stealing.

I remember how, when I first discovered Liz that Heidi wasn't quite sure what to think of her. She told me once that she alternated between being intrigued by her and by wanting to wash her mouth out with soap. I wonder how she would feel about her now, 6 years later. If I know her, her opinion probably has softened but she will still probably not be a fan of the music.

The Liz Phair listening will undoubtedly pass, but right now, I'm loving the fact that she's running neck-and-neck with Amy Grant for my most played artist of the last 7 days on my last.fm page. In the words of OMC, how bizarre.

Pharmaceutical influence

This is National Hospital and Health-Systems Pharmacy Week, or as we like to refer to it Pharmacy Week. We're having a potluck at work tomorrow (which reminds me, I still need to hit the store for my contributions) and the techs at work all have t-shirts that they've gotten the approval of administration to wear through the week. I don't know if retail pharmacies are celebrating this week, but we are.

I've said it before that if I had it all to do over again, I wouldn't change a thing (cue Kylie.) And it's true, I wouldn't. I can't imagine doing anything other than what I'm doing right now. Being a pharmacist is so much a part of who I am that doing any other job is just an alien concept to me. There are days that being a pharmacist makes me crazy, but I imagine that it's no different than any other profession - you have your good days and your bad days. But the simple fact of the matter is that I am well suited to this profession both because I am smart enough to do it competently and because it fits in with my personality quite nicely.

If you can believe it, there was a time that being a pharmacist wasn't even on my radar. For most of my high school career, I was interested in going to medical school. I was always pretty bright and I was interested in science so I figured why not dream big? That started to change in August before my senior year of high school started when I got a call from a local pharmacist offering me a job. He owned a small pharmacy that was attached to a medical clinic in the town I grew up in. Each year, he hired a high school senior to work in his pharmacy doing deliveries, waiting on customers, restocking. What it amounted to on the surface was performing rather menial tasks but it was also an opportunity for him to give back to the community as a local business owner. Unfortunately, I had already signed up for community college classes that were in the evening, so I turned him down. However, my folks encouraged me to call him back and see what it was all about. I did, and after a very informal interview, he hired me on the spot for $3.60 an hour. This man's name is Don Jones.

It's fairly safe to say that I wouldn't be a pharmacist today if it hadn't been for Don Jones. The more time I spent in his pharmacy, watching him do the job he did, the more I realized that this type of health care profession was really much more my speed than any other I could get into. I was fascinated by drugs and how they worked and learning what they treated. I remember taking package inserts off the bottles and putting them in a file folder at home so that I could learn more about the drugs I was stocking every day. Don nudged me along the road to choosing pharmacy as a career very subtly. When I finally spilled the beans and said I had changed my mind, I think he was a little bit surprised. After I graduated from high school, Don hired me back every summer and Christmas vacation (and some spring breaks) until 1995 when I finally graduated with my B.S. in Pharmacy and he sold his pharmacy and subsequently retired. It was his influence and quiet role as my first pharmacy mentor that really set me on the path that ended up with me becoming a pharmacist rather than a very unhappy M.D. It's quite possible I would have seen the light along the way, but because of him, I didn't have to do it that way.

If Don Jones is responsible for me becoming a pharmacist, then John Hamiel is the reason I'm the type of pharmacist that I am. John was my boss in my first "real job." Looking back, he was my boss, my colleague and my friend - a situation that required him to wear a lot of hats. He was also, oddly enough, one of my students when I T.A.'d the P4 parenterals lab at the U of Iowa College of Pharmacy when I was doing graduate work. This just goes to show you that you should be nice to everyone you meet along the way because you never know when they might become your co-worker or even your boss. This is doubly true in the small world of pharmacy.

Anyway, the notable thing about John is that he really took a chance on me when he hired me. Here I was, applying for a hospital job with zero hospital experience. My only real pharmacy experience was retail, which included the years I'd worked for Don Jones and my part-time job at Drug Town in Iowa City that I used to help pay the bills while I was getting my Pharm.D. But for some reason, I didn't want to do work at Hy-Vee my whole life and on the encouragement of my friend Dr. Lynette Iles, I applied for the hospital job where John was the soon-to-be director and Lynette was on the medical staff. Despite my lack of experience, I got the job.

I am fond of saying that retail pharmacists and hospital pharmacists may both be pharmacists, but they speak in totally different languages. The learning curve I experienced my first year in a hospital setting was a steep one, indeed. There were times that I didn't think I could do it. When you work in a hospital, there's a whole subset of drugs that you never see in community pharmacy. The patients are (naturally) sicker than they are in an outpatient setting, so learning that sometimes we can do everything right and still not save the patient was hard for me. It's still hard for me. I think if it isn't hard for you, you need to check and make sure you still have a pulse. But John was always supportive and helped me learn lessons not just about hospital pharmacy but in the politics of working that everyone needs to get at least a little bit good at. Both sets of lessons ended up being invaluable.

My practice style has been so influenced by John that sometimes I find myself saying things that he said, even saying them like he said them. In a lot of ways, he was kind of "future me" although I didn't realize it at the time. We got along well and shared a lot of the same geeky humor and interests that define some of the strongest friendships I have. It was hard to leave when it came time for our family to change our scenery and move to Ames. But I owe him a debt of gratitude. Because he took a chance on a 27 year-old newbie, I've learned more about pharmacy than I ever thought I would and have more knowledge in my periphery than I thought humanly possible.

So during this Pharmacy Week, I want to take this time to say thank you to both of these men who were friends and mentors to me. Their influence is palpable in my life and career.

And because we don't want to be too serious and because I still have a 12 year old boy in me somewhere, here's the Top 11 Reasons to Date a Pharmacist:
1. Pharmacists do it twice 3 times daily
2. You can see your pharmacist the night before the morning after.
3. Pharmacists have a long duration of action.
4. Pharmacists are Rx rated.
5. Pharmacists find new routes of administration.
6. Pharmacists do it over-the-counter.
7. Pharmacists are patient lovers.
8. Pharmacists accept 3rd parties.
9. Pharmacists have a quick reconstitution time.
10. Pharmacists do it without breaks.
11. You will want no substitution

Happy Pharmacy Week to all my pharmacist friends and colleagues!

(Hug your pharmacist today. Especially if that pharmacist is me.)

The view from here

I've always been interested in the "cultural history" of AIDS. It fits in well with my interest in it as a health care professional and general science-head. Many readers will recall that one of my all time favorite books is And The Band Played On... by Randy Shilts, an exhaustive (if biased) account of the early days of the AIDS epidemic. For me, reading it encompasses equal parts fascination and horror. I'm fascinated by the history, but horrified by the inattention that history has received and especially by the inattention that the government at large paid while it was happening.

My friend Jason recommended the documentary Silverlake Life: The View From Here to me a while back based on my interest in AIDS history. He shows this documentary in his Queer Identity class that he teaches and it always ends up being shown right around the first part of December, coinciding with World AIDS Day. For most of his students, this movie (which came out in 1993) is ancient history. Most of them now were just in the process of being born when this movie was released. For them, AIDS has always been a manageable chronic illness. It's hard for them to imagine the time when young men died from this disease every day, often alone, mostly in the prime of their life.

Silverlake Life: The View From Here is the story of Tom Joslin and Mark Massi, two gay men whose 22 year relationship comes to an end in front of a camera for all to see because of AIDS. Having both been diagnosed with AIDS, Joslin (who also taught film at the college level) started to document what would be the end of his life as a sort of "video diary." It is fascinating and heartbreaking. The documentary starts with footage from 1989 and ends mid-1990 following Joslin's death. During that time, his decline is remarkable for its speed and magnitude. He starts the documentary out as a thin, frail looking man for whom most activities of daily living are exhausting, Massi, by contrast, appears relatively healthy, especially when compared to Joslin. But this is belied whenever he removes his shirt and reveals a body covered with Kaposi's sarcoma lesions.

We see them at doctor's appointments. We follow them to an herbalist who grinds up herbs to put in a tea to be consumed every 30 minutes. They consult energy therapists and other alternative medical treatments, all in an attempt to delay the inevitable. It's hard to remember that in 1990, we didn't have the bevy of treatment options we have now. Protease inhibitors were still 6 years off so FDA approved treatments were still pretty slim. But Joslin's decline continues in spite of all of this. When he ultimately succumbs to the disease, in what is probably the hardest scene of the whole documentary to watch, we see just how wasted is body had become, how the disease had ravaged an otherwise healthy body of a relatively young man. His ribs and spine are clearly visible, as is his pelvis. These images, combined with the clearly distraught Massi providing the voiceover on the video tape ripped me in two.

I am so glad that AIDS is not the death sentence that it used to be. It is, in many ways, a more manageable illness than it used to be. It does not inevitably and rapidly lead to death in the ways that it used to. Treatment, while cumbersome, does exist although at times it's a toss-up as to which is worse - the "cure" or the disease. I would never wish for a return to this time. As I (and others) have said innumerable times, a generation of gay men was nearly decimated by this disease. Andrew Holleran compares the AIDS epidemic in the 80s to a "very nice dinner party with friends, except some of them were taken out and shot while the rest of us were expected to go on eating." The improvement in survival and treatment is, however, a double edged sword, as I think it has led us to forget how devastating the disease can be and that prevention of infection should still be the goal.

Subsequent generations would be wise to remember this, lest they be destined to repeat it. Films like Silverlake Life: The View From Here provide us with a sobering reminder of a time gone by. But it also gives us a glimpse into the how AIDS shattered the lives of those touched by it.

I'd advise anyone that wants to watch this to watch it when they can handle the images they will see. No matter how ready you think you are, you aren't ready for this. But it's essential viewing, not just for those interested in the impact HIV/AIDS had on a generation of gay men, but also for those that question the commitment that gay couples can have for each other. You will walk away from it with a much different opinion than the one you went in with.

Devil inside

I've gotten to the point with M. Night Shyamalan that I simply don't trust him any longer. The Sixth Sense was great, Unbreakable less so and pretty much everything since then has been quite awful. I kind of liked The Happening in spite of myself - something about malevolent plants just really turns me on. So when I heard that Shyamalan's name was attached to the film Devil, I mostly just wanted to roll my eyes and move on without even dipping my toes in that pool. But last week it rolled into the dollar theater here in town and for $1.50, I couldn't resist.

Originally I was set to see this movie tomorrow night with a couple of other guys but one of them had another commitment and the other had the ironclad excuse of it being his wedding anniversary. So it looked like I was on my own for this one. That's okay - I'm not averse to going to movies by myself. I don't do it often and that's mostly because without the incentive of meeting a friend at the movie, I will usually give into inertia and just decide to skip the whole thing and stay home. For perspective, the last movie I went to on my own was Cloverfield.

But when I really want to see something, I can overcome that inertia and that's just what I did tonight. It helps that it's October and I was really in the mood to sit in a theater at a scary movie. Devil promised to deliver just the right amount of chills. The basic premise is quite simple. Five apparently random people end up trapped in an elevator in a downtown Philadelphia skyscraper. One of them just happens to be Satan himself. The set-up of the movie describes this as "the devil's meeting" - a South American legend in which the devil takes human form to punish a select group of people on Earth before claiming their souls. His entry into the world is always preceded by a suicide and so, naturally, Devil opens with someone falling out of a building and on to a delivery truck.

If I were only able to say one thing about Devil it would be that it plays like a long episode of The Twilight Zone. It never really delivers any true scares. There were a few jumps here and there, but, much like Paranormal Activity, it settled for creepy rather than scary. I felt like this was a good trade-off because with nearly all of the action taking place inside an elevator, it just wasn't a good set-up for honest to God scares. I found the story of "the devil's meeting" and the slow reveal of the components of the myth and their subsequent incorporation into the movie to be particularly well done. In addition to the events inside the elevator, there's an interesting side story of a Philadelphia police officer whose loss of his family to a hit-and-run driver nearly caused his own demise from alcoholism which fits like the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle.

What I liked about Devil is that in this day and age of torture-porn horror films, it dared to be subtle and different. Yes, there is some gore, but most of the deaths occur off-screen which simultaneously heightens and lessens their impact. By doing this, it plays to one of the human brain's greatest strengths - the ability to imagine. What we come up with in our minds for what's happened when the lights go off in the elevator is much scarier than anything that could be put on film. It's refreshing to see a horror film that tries to scare with concepts and ideas, rather than gushing blood and decapitations.

Like I said, I didn't find Devil especially scary, but it did make me think which was not what I was expecting from a movie like this. I also had feelings for the characters, whether it be the people in the elevator that I mostly loathed because they were depraved human beings or the cop whose loss of his family affected me more than I thought it would.

This will be a movie that's shown on cable a zillion times. If late night TV were still running movies instead of infomercials, it'd be a new staple. It was definitely worth the $1.50 but then again, most movies are. The only movies I've ever seen there that were probably not worth the admission price were Silent Hill (people actually booed at the end of it) and The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor. It wasn't as good as the best horror movie I've seen for next-to-nothing (30 Days of Night) and had nothing on the fantastic-ness of Drag Me To Hell. However, if you're in the mood for a movie with its fair share of creepiness along with a little morality tale as well, Devil might just be the ticket.

I know it was for me tonight. And at 80 minutes, I felt like I was barely even at the movie. If I had paid full price for it, I'd have been pissed just based on that short running time!

Vacation reflections

It's the last day of vacation. Tomorrow, I head back to work and back into the real world. It's not quite going to be the real world until Heidi gets back sometime on Thursday, but it's the end of lazy days in front of the TV and yard work afternoons with my dad. No more staying up till 2:30 in the morning and sleeping late. I'm sad to see it end but I'm also ready for the return of my daily rhythm - well, as much rhythm as I can generate in a job that has rotating shifts.

I didn't blog nearly as much as I wanted to. I didn't get the bathroom recaulked but will try to do so this afternoon. I did get to meet up with Matt and Bess one day for lunch which was very fun and, as usual, full of unpredictable conversation topics. I was massively productive outside with the always appreciated help of my dad. I reconnected with my daughter - not that we were suffering this huge disconnect, but being her sole caregiver gives you a glimpse into the things that she usually splits between us. She missed her mom but learned that, as a certain Gloria Gaynor said, she will survive.

The thing I would excise from this past week if I could would be the unanticipated arrival of Operation: Keep Blair Alive Until Heidi Gets Home. After spending approximately 48 hours during which time we saw him exactly once, he is quarantined in my office where he is recovering from a respiratory infection brought on by his extremely low white blood cell count which is the direct result of his recently diagnosed multiple myeloma. He's on the mend - eating and drinking and getting stronger. Still, facing the very real possibility of having only three more months with him is a hard truth we're still coming to terms with. We do love him even though, as Heidi said, he is the fucking bitchiest cat that ever lived.

I feel ready to get back to it, even though I'm sure that I'll miss my free time the instant I get back to work. That's a natural reaction. I have had a lot of good times this week even though Heidi has been gone for the entirety of it. I have learned a few things over the last week though.

1) If I did nothing else, I could almost keep up with preventing the house from falling into complete disarray.

2) I can give Blair medication without the help of anyone as long as it is a liquid medicine with a total volume of 2 mL or less.

3) It helps to have an agenda. Otherwise, you can spend massive amounts of time at the computer accomplishing next to nothing.

4) It's amazing how the absence of one person can make the dishes so much more manageable.

5) There is such a thing as watching too much Hoarders.

I've been beyond lazy this morning. I got laundry put away but I can't motivate myself to do anything else. Even writing this blog post seemed like a Herculean effort. But I suppose that since this IS the last day of vacation I should cut myself some slack. The good thing is that there are fun things on the horizon. I'm headed down to Des Moines on Wednesday night with my mom to go see 9 to 5: The Musical while my father does Anna duty. And then on the weekend of the 22nd I'm headed to Kansas City to meet up with my friend Jason who will be in town for a conference. We'll be hitting Evil Dead: The Musical and I'm looking forward to just hanging out. We started planning this back in July and it seemed like forever away then. Hard to believe it's just around the corner now.

Today is also my 13th wedding anniversary. It's a little bit bittersweet because Heidi is not here. She is on her way to Austin today as she and Marie make their way back to Iowa. I love her so very very much and can't wait for her return.

But for now, I'm going to go see if I can find the caulk. Because there is caulking to be done on that upstairs tub. The caulk just looks terrible. We'll see if I can make the caulk look more appealing. And yes, those last four sentences are there specifically to make a certain reader laugh like a 12-year-old boy.

Year of 25 Books: #15 - "The Call of Cthulhu"

Including this short story in my yearlong challenge to ready 25 books is, admittedly, a bit of a cheat. After all, it IS a short story and not a novel. But I purchased a collection of H.P. Lovecraft's stories for the Kindle app on my Droid phone awhile back. 67 tales of Lovecraftian goodness without the heft of the physical book - what more could you ask for? Well, I've determined that it's going to take a millennium to finish all 67 stories because in the month since I bought it, I've finished exactly four, the most recent of which is "The Call of Cthulhu." (a word that I will never be able to spell for as long as I live.)

I've been interested in Lovecraft for a long time and appreciate his place in the canon of horror fiction, but had never really gotten around to reading him. A friend of mine in pharmacy school recommended Lovecraft to me during the summer of 1995. He was not a guy that I was close with by any means during pharmacy school, but he was one of the few people that remained in Iowa City after graduation, so he initiated me into films like Evil Dead and Reanimator. After watching Reanimator, I headed down to the Iowa City library and picked up a Lovecraft collection. I surrendered after half a story - a complete and utter fail.

Despite that, I'm still intrigued by the Lovecraft mythos and even though his writing is still as dense as I remember it being, I really wanted to cross "The Call of Cthulhu" off my to-be-read pile this year. It's an essential Lovecraft story and references to Cthulhu, a gigantic winged and tentacled beast from another world that is pure and unadulterated evil, populate the internet and pop culture in everything from web comics and plush toys to oven mitts and ukeleles. Since it seemed to be one of Lovecraft's more enduring tales, I figured it would be one of his best. After reading it, my verdict was "not so much."

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents" is the famous first line of "The Call of Cthulhu." I think my mind lacked the ability to correlate all the contents of "The Call of Cthulhu." I wanted to like this, I really did. But I just kept thinking about how I liked the three stories that I read prior to "The Call of Cthulhu" so much better than this one. I felt like Lovecraft's prose was more obtuse than usual and for being a horror story, it was really not all that scary. Creepy in places, yes but scary? Not by a mile.

I will keep plugging through the 67 Lovecraft stories that are on my phone. I figure if nothing else, there will always be reading material with me. But I've determined that I really do appreciate Lovecraft more than I enjoy him. And I'll still think that anything Cthulhu related that I find on the Internet is cool - the more tongue-in-cheek, the better - even though I'm resigned to the fact that I'll never completely get it.