An impressive instant - ten years on

Ten years ago tonight, at the time I'm writing this very blog post, I had my first audience with The Queen, otherwise known as her Madgesty, Madonna. August 29th, 2001 was the night I attended the Drowned World Tour at the United Center in Chicago. I went with my good friend and accomplice in all things Madonna related, Jeff. Heidi went along too, but she didn't go to the concert. At the time, she was almost 7 months pregnant and, on the advice of our doctor, she sat the concert out.

I remember it like it was yesterday. We started calling in to Ticketmaster (who the hell does that anymore?) about 30 minutes prior to the on sale time. You hoped and prayed that you remained on hold until after the tickets went on sale, but not too long so that you didn't miss your shot at good seats. Heidi was on our cell phone, I was on our landline, and Jeff, living in Williamsburg at the time was on his phone. We all were trying to get tickets and the instant that someone got through, the others were to stop trying. The fact that I was the one that ultimately got through to Ticketmaster (after having connected 5 freaking minutes before the on sale time...back to the queue for me) was fortunate because I'm not sure how Jeff, who lived alone at the time, would have been able to call us and stay on the phone with Ticketmaster. In any event, I got through and amazingly, I got tickets.

We got seats in section 332. I don't remember the row number, but here's a map of the arena, which I amazingly and not surprisingly still have saved on my computer. Here it is.

Check out the prices of those seats! I remember blanching at the thought of spending $85 for a concert ticket and could not even fathom spending $250 even if I could have gotten one of those rock-star floor seats. Clearly, I didn't remember that 5 years later when I spent $265 for my Confessions Tour ticket in Las Vegas.

I took a couple days off work and we drove to Chicago. Since Heidi wasn't going to the concert, she got to pick the hotel. She chose the downtown Marriott. It ended up being okay because it was a pretty quick cab ride from there to the United Center. I had been regaled with stories of what a terrible part of town the United Center is in (it is kind of a scary part of town, as I was reminded in 2009 when we saw Sticky & Sweet there) The show had been broadcast on HBO the a couple of nights before and Jeff had taped it but not watched it. I was on total tour blackout - I knew next to nothing about it, not even the opening number. It was fairly easy in those days to avoid tour spoilers. Nowadays, I've totally given up and do just about everything but watch crappy fan shot video of tour and download audience recordings before seeing the show myself. Anyway, Jeff had brought the VHS tape of the tour with him and the idea was that Heidi would watch the show while we were at it. Only problem was the room didn't have a VCR. We walked all over downtown Chicago trying to rent a VCR, only to end up in a slightly frightening part of town, at which point we gave up. I don't think Heidi cared enough for us to have gone to all that effort, but she was a good sport, especially as she walked around downtown Chicago on a hot late summer day, pregnant and uncomfortable.

We hit Pizzeria Uno prior to the concert. I found these pictures which really blew my mind when I saw them. We were babies!!

Me, squinting into the sun or something with apparently rimless glasses.

Heidi is the only one drinking pop.

Jeff doing what he does best - being Jeff.

Heidi rode with us in the cab down to the show and dropped us off, then headed back to the hotel. We found our seats and, as I'm so fond of saying when I tell this story, there was nothing above us but ceiling. Seriously, we were as far away as you can get from the stage without being behind it. No matter though, we were in the arena!! We sat next to a nice couple from Chicago that were not real huge Madonna fans but the fact that she hadn't toured in so long drew them both in. They hadn't purchased the last couple albums but knew enough that they thought they'd enjoy it.

I bet they left wishing they'd have purchased those albums. The Drowned World Tour was many things. A hit parade it was not. There were only two bona-fide 80s hits performed on that tour - "Holiday" and "La Isla Bonita." The rest were primarily tracks from Ray of Light and Music. And many MANY album tracks at that. This was not a show for the casual fan, at least from a song selection standpoint. Sure we got some great recent hits - notably "Frozen," "Ray of Light," and, to my great delight, "Secret." But we also got the self-indulgent Madonna track "Mer Girl" not once but twice and the autotune mess of "Nobody's Perfect." She was also a bit cold with the audience, as if she was annoyed to be performing. None of that bothered us at the time because we were finally at a Madonna concert!

The crowd really came to live when the familiar keyboards of "Holiday" started. It's still my favorite performance of this old warhorse of a song. I love Donna's introduction - "you know they try to imitate her but they just can't duplicate her!" And the "I say pimp! You say ho! Pimp! Ho! Pimp! Ho!"



In the end, it was a good thing that Heidi didn't come with us. When we left the show, there wasn't a taxi to be found so we really had no way back to the hotel. So no problem, we called her at the hotel and she came down to the United Center in a cab to pick us up. This is notable because the cabbie, upon hearing that her husband was at a Madonna concert with his male friend, was apparently convinced that I had to work through my unacknowledged homosexuality, since obviously that's the only reason I would go to a Madonna concert with another guy. Whatever. We all got a good laugh out of it and it was just another in a long list of hilarious things that have happened on trips to see Madonna. That said, the gay guy contingent at every Madonna concert is, as you might expect, very heavy but not nearly as heavy as at the Kylie show. That show took the gay cake.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention our little trip to the Museum of Science & Industry the next day, where we re-enacted scenes from Superman II.

Heidi as Ursa and Jeff as the hapless astronaut. "I tore it like paper!"

Me doing my best General Zod.

We've seen Madonna three other times since - The Re-Invention Tour which found us jetting to Washington D.C., The Confessions Tour for which we traveled to Las Vegas and back in less than 24 hours (never again.) For the Sticky & Sweet Tour, we were back at the United Center in much better seats. We waved at the people in our Drowned World seats which were probably twice the price by the time Sticky & Sweet rolled around. And you can bet I'll be there with bells on again. Her live shows are never disappointing. Like pizza and sex, even when they're not so great, they're still better than most things.

And to the 10 years that have passed, why in the hell have you gone so damn quickly?

Absent minded me

For someone who can focus so intensely on life-and-death things on a day-to-day basis, I swear somedays if my head was not attached to my body, I would lose track of it. My wife always calls me her "absent-minded professor." And it's true. It's the little things in life that will ultimately trip me up. I am eternally looking for my keys, my work badge, my shoes, my headphones. The only thing I manage to keep a pretty good eye on is my phone, but that's mostly because it doesn't really leave my side. I never thought I'd become the kind of person whose cell phone is an extension of their arm, but sadly, I have. I said the other day to Anna, while I was frantically looking for my car keys as I was getting ready to walk out the door to work, "Anna, guess what I'm looking for?" Her reply was "Your keys? That's not that hard of a question, Dad."

Yeah, I'm perfectly willing to admit that I am absent-minded. The older I get, the more I'm trying to just embrace who I am, flaws and all. And believe me, there are plenty of them. A perfect example of my absent-mindedness was last night's Search For The iPod.

After work, I got all the way down to my truck before I realized that I'd left my iPod in my work mailbox. Too tired and lazy to go back up then, I went home without it and figured I'd run back later and get it as I was going to be out and about. I went back to get it when I went to pick Anna up from a friend's house because I knew I was going to take her to her horse lesson and I didn't want to be without it. As it turned out, I slept pretty much the entire time I was there - 4 hours of sleep the night before and busy day at work had completely fried my brain. I got home, zonked out on the couch some more. We ate dinner and then I assumed my normal spot in the kitchen to do the dishes. I went to look for my iPod, which I thought was in the pants I wore to work. It wasn't there. It wasn't in any of the usual spots either (the island in the kitchen, the dining room table, my desk.) I became focused on the fact that it must have fallen out of my pocket while I slept at Anna's horse lesson and dropped down into the couch cushions. In my defense, my glasses had done just that - I had to pull the couch cushions up to find them before we left.

So I drove the almost 5 miles out to the horse barn and looked all through the couch. Not there. I tried to Zen myself out about it, saying that the more likely scenario was that I'd taken it out of my pocket, set it down absentmindedly in some strange spot (helped not one bit by my dubious consciousness) and now I just couldn't remember where I'd put it down. And that's exactly what I did. I found it on my dresser - approximately 5 feet from where I'd changed into shorts after work.

When things like this happen, I've adopted the strategy of using the line from The Wizard of Oz that the Tin Man says to the Scarecrow after he's been torn apart by Flying Monkeys in the Haunted Forest - "that's you all over!" I maintain that my absentmindedness stems from the fact that I am so focused in my job. The consequences of absentmindedness in my job are severe and when I leave it, my brain disengages just enough to keep it from being in a constantly fried. This means that I can't keep track of keys and badges and yes, sometimes iPods. I get mad at myself when I do that, but I've kind of come to the conclusion that pretty much all I can do is aspire to a state of "less absentmindedness." It is as much a part of me as my brown brownish-gray hair and my height. I can make noise about how I'm going to always put my badge where I can find it so I don't have to spend the last 5 minutes frantically trying to figure out where it is, but there's really only so much I can do.

I am who I am, I am my own special creation. Absentmindedness and all.

Double flat

I have to be up at 5AM tomorrow but this story must be told - partially because it's too good not to tell and partially because I have to own it in order to stop the negative monologue that is trying like crazy to go at full bore.

The short version is that I went to Hy-Vee tonight to pick up some milk and coffee. I added some Diet Rite Zero to the list as well, then swung by Hy-Vee Gas and got my 8 cent per gallon discount. After that, I headed northbound on Grand Avenue and that's where the fun started.

Somehow, some way, I ended up hitting the median right by the Ames Veterans Memorial and flattened both my driver's side tires. Like most car accidents, looking back on it is like looking through etched glass into a foggy night. I can't, for the life of me, figure out HOW I did it. Clearly, I was driving too close to the median (you think?) but I hit it and the next thing I know, I'm pulled off to the side of the road with two flat tires. I'm lucky I didn't hit a sign, or careen into oncoming traffic. This, of course, makes me sound like someone who routinely drives recklessly which, let me assure you, I am not. The worst part was that I was mere blocks from home, but far enough that I can't make it without doing more serious damage to my car.

So I get my car off Grand Avenue and pull it onto 5th Street. At this point, there's no doubt that I'm going to need a tow. Finally, AAA is worth more than just hotel discounts. They send me a guy from the local Amoco who takes nearly an hour to arrive. He puts the donut on and tows me to CarX which is who does all our car work. Once we get there, I ask him if he can give me a ride home and he either couldn't or wouldn't - I can't figure out which. He said he had another call to go to and acted like driving me a couple miles back home was like driving me from the south side of Chicago to the northern outskirts. WTFE, I walked from CarX. He was kind of a jerk, but a jerk that towed my car so he gets points for that.

It was at about this point that my evil twin really started in on me. He started with the old reliable "stupid" and then moved on to "klutzy" and "absent-minded" and "you just don't pay attention!" For him, it's like the word "accident" doesn't exist. I did it deliberately and because I was an idiot. At other times in my life, this evil twin, who really is a shithead to me, would have won the argument. I would have felt terrible and awful and beat myself up for something that was clearly accidental. Yes, it's a big deal, but no, I didn't do it on purpose and just because I had an accident does NOT make me "stupid." Nice try. Moron.

Anyway, the best part of the story is that I was texting Heidi this whole time. As I started to walk home, she tried to get someone on Twitter to give me a ride home since Anna was already in bed. By the time I noticed this, I was nearly half way home, so I texted her to let her know this. I must not have turned my phone off before I slipped it back in my pocket because the next text I got from her was "??" As it turns out, I had pocket-texted her and as random pocket texts go, this one was a doozy. Of all the possible letter combinations, the text I sent her was "Fu" which made her think I was saying "f*** you." We had a good laugh about that.

So yeah, it sucks. But it could be worse. At least I didn't get hurt. At least I didn't hurt someone else. At least there wasn't any more damage to the car. It probably won't be cheap, but as I always say about money, easy come, easy go. My dad always says you don't want to be the richest guy in the graveyard and at the rate I'm going I'm sure that will be no problem. I did, however, get the great joy of drinking Diet Rite Zero right out of the 2 liter bottle while sitting at the Ames Veterans Memorial. I know - classy.

Papa, can you hear me now?

I don't know what made me do it, but last night while doing dishes, I got a huge yen to listen to the soundtrack from the 1983 Barbra Streisand film Yentl. When I was a kid, Yentl was the butt of a thousand jokes, none of which really progressed much past "Barbra Streisand is playing a man!!" Whether or not she pulled it off successfully is up for debate, but there's certainly no doubt that Streisand OWNS that movie. I never saw the movie during the 80s but when I started listening to Streisand's music in earnest in the early 90s, I found myself really wanting to see it. I can't remember which came first - buying the soundtrack or watching the movie. It really doesn't matter in the final analysis because I took no end of grief from my brother and sister (mostly my brother) for buying the soundtrack.

The funny thing is, when you think about Streisand's bazillion albums, Yentl is probably one of her finest. Granted, it's not the folky fun of Stoney End or even the cheesy bombast of Guilty. It is, however, what I feel to be Streisand at her vocal peak. Simply put, she sounds great on this album. Heidi always prefers Streisand's 1960s albums, saying that anything much past the early 80s sounds like someone's grandmother singing, albeit someone's exceptionally vocally gifted grandmother. I don't really agree with her assessment - the grandmotherly voice wouldn't arrive until the early 2000s and I would argue it's more of a change in the timbre of her voice but whatever. One listen to Yentl and you can hear just what a gifted vocalist Streisand really is. An actress who sings? Who is she kidding?

So yeah, I puchased the Yentl CD on winter break in 1993 and I listened to it like crazy during January of that year. I think it's pretty safe to say that I was the only straight 20 year-old male college student listening to the Yentl soundtrack in his dorm room at the University of Iowa, although at that point I had not made the connection between Streisand and her legion of gay male fans of a certain age. It was music that spoke to my soul and, much like I do now, whenever I find that, I hang on tight to it. The cool thing about the CD is that listening to it, you almost don't need to watch the film. Why watch the 2+ hour film when you can get the Cliffs Notes version in ~40 minutes on the CD. Thanks to the liner notes, a lot of the gaps are filled in and now, looking back, the CD must have come first because I remember learning the story of Yentl via those liner notes.

The story, for those that don't know it takes place in late 19th century Poland. Yentl is the only daughter of a rabbi who is teaching Yentl the Talmud and other religious teachings, despite the fact that women are not allowed to do so. When her father dies, she disguises herself as a man, takes the name Anshel, and enrolls in a yeshiva to continue her studies. She meets Avigdor at the school, who is engaged to marry Hadass. As Anshel, she gets to know both of them, but falls in love with Avigdor. When the engagement between Avigdor and Hadass falls apart (a silly reason that could only happen in the late 19th century), Hadass's parents conspire to get Anshel and Hadass together. During the time, however, Yentl has fallen in love with Avigdor. Oy vey!

As you might imagine, Hollywood didn't exactly jump on this idea. I remember reading in a Streisand biography that after she finished filming Funny Girl in 1968, she brought the idea for Yentl to her agent or somebody and said "I've found my second film role." Their response was "you just got done playing a Jewish girl, now you want to play a Jewish boy?" The film was in development hell for 25 years, but eventually Streisand got it filmed, starring Streisand, co-produced by Streisand, co-written by Streisand and directed by Streisand. It's starting to sound a little bit like Lindsay Buckingham credits on a Fleetwood Mac album. I'm pretty sure that the movie got turned into a musical at the insistence of studio heads. I can't imagine that they would be willing to take a chance on this kind of material without Streisand music to push.

Thankfully she agreed, because, as I've said, the story is told so well through the songs by Michel LeGrand and Marilyn & Alan Bergman. In many ways, it's like a Broadway libretto, with themes that recur throughout and, most importantly, lyrics that push the plot forward and are not simply musical interludes to endure. The best known of the songs is probably "Papa Can You Hear Me?" which was exposed to a whole new generation when it was used on Glee last season. And like the best music, you can take your own meaning from the lyrics that tell the story of Yentl/Anshel, Avigdor and Hadass. Without that universality, it wouldn't have the appeal to me that it does.

You can take a lot out of this story and its music. I think the most obvious one, listening to the lyrics, is that the entire story could serve as an allegory for a "coming out" experience. When Yentl becomes Anshel and falls in love with Avigdor, her feelings for him (as a female pretending to be a male) that are expressed in the songs are what I could imagine a young gay man (or woman, for that matter) would think. The song "The Way He Makes Me Feel" is a good example of this - with lyrics like "Why is it that every time I close my eyes, he's there/The water shining on his skin/The sunlight in his hair/And all the while I'm thinking things that I can never share with him." "Tomorrow Night," in which Yentl describes her feelings as she's about to wed Hadass screams to me how a man marrying a woman might feel if his heart was not really in it, so-to-speak. And the song "No Matter What Happens" plays like the best song of self-assurance after the eventual coming out occurs. I've always felt like this story of a "repressed love" speaks to that kind of situation. But maybe it's just me because a quick and dirty Google search turned up only a few message board results that agree with my assessment.

For me, the song that always got me in my early 20s was "Will Someone Ever Look At Me That Way." My story of being a lonely early 20-something who felt like he had nothing in common with most men and no qualities that would make members of the opposite sex want to date me is well documented in this space. In hindsight, which is always 20/20, I had many friends and actually, there were more than a few women that liked me and were probably waiting for me to make the first move - some of whom I actually had crushes on or whatever. The fact that my self-image was in the ashcan and I struggled with undiagnosed depression is probably why I saw my life through the lens that I did. When you don't even like yourself, it's really easy to concoct a narrative in your head that no one else does either. Even now, at nearly 40 years of age, on my worst days I can see vestiges of that. In any event, the line in "Will Someone Ever Look At Me That Way" that always resonated to dateless Dan was "Even though it's crazy, still I can't help wondering if I'll ever live to see the day/When by some miracle of miracles/You'll turn around and look at me that way." As I saw everyone pairing up, especially late in my college years, I felt like that would never happen and wondered what I was missing that everyone else had. As it turned out, I just hadn't met the right person yet. Fortunately, in November of 1995, I did just that.

Anyway, I will always view the Yentl soundtrack with a little bit more fondness than most guys at my age and station in life might. Maybe this post helps explain that. Maybe it just confirms your suspicion that I was REALLY weird. Whatever. This is who I am. Like it or not. Never gonna stop.

And honestly, every time I hear the Lady Gaga song "Paparazzi" I wait for her to sing "I'm your biggest fan/I'll follow you until you love me/Papa-papa-papa can you hear me?"

Celebrity eggs

We colored eggs this morning which, for the record, I don't really like doing a terrible lot. I dislike most of the stuff associated with Easter. Easter candy kind of annoys me. I've never been one for egg hunts or anything like that - probably because I was always too old for them at our church growing up while my younger brother and sister were not. I'm kind of dreading having to fill plastic eggs after Anna goes to sleep tonight because yes, Virginia, she still believes in the Easter Bunny and who am I to crush that? After a bit of obligatory bitching, I kind of got into the spirit of it though. It was kind of fun to blow out the eggs yolks (every time we try to hard boil them, they crack plus no one here eats hard boiled eggs) and I got to go around annoyingly saying the word "PAAS" over and over again until my wife and daughter were ready to hit me with a brick.

It got me to thinking about the time when I was probably in the 5th grade and for whatever reason, we decorated eggs in my Lutheran Sunday School class. We didn't do the dyes as that would have been far too messy for our Sunday best. Instead, there were crayons and markers and little bits of discarded fabric and other crafty items that we could glue onto our eggs.

Amidst all the crap that they had for us to decorate our eggs with was a small scrap of fabric that was a golden band with a little fringe on the edge. To me, it looked just like a sweat band, with hair going over the top of it. Those of you who know me well know where this is going. Yep, that's right...



...it was OLIVIA NEWTON-EGG.

I remember drawing the face on it and putting a little cartoon balloon down by the mouth and it was saying "Let's Get Physical." Oh my God, I took so much grief from my Sunday School classmates. And oddly, I had almost completely forgotten about it until this morning. That's how deeply buried in my subconscious it was.

Of course, I told this story to Heidi and she laughed uproariously. And, as is her standard retort when I tell stories like this, she said "And yet, somehow, you turned out straight." She added "Seriously, Dan, that's the type of story a gay man of our age would tell!" followed by "I fucking love you SO MUCH." It worked out best for everybody involved that I did turn out straight - especially Anna who wouldn't be here otherwise. I chalk it up to having only one functioning copy of the gay gene. It gets to the part where it codes for the sexual orientation bit and it just spits out a nonsense protein. And if that is not geeky humor, I don't know what is.

Now that I've completely humiliated myself, I think I'll just leave everyone with a Happy Easter if you are celebrating it. May you not eat your weight in chocolate eggs.

Pants and plans

I gave in this morning and bought four new pairs of pants. It mostly makes me feel like a failure, but oddly enough, it also feels like a call to arms.

Over the last few weeks, I've noticed that my pants had not been fitting as well as I would like them to. Mornings have been a struggle because the combination of my pants not fitting and having the worst case of closet malaise in recent memory usually had me getting out at least five different things to wear, only to reject them all and wind up wearing what I started with. But that hasn't changed the fact that they have been uncomfortable to wear.

This is frustrating on many levels as I really have been eating better this year. French fries are an infrequent treat and I do try to watch how much I'm eating. It's hard at work where the selections are not the healthiest but you can always eat off the salad bar. But the fact remains that I have gained some weight this year - probably not so much that you can notice it unless you're invading my personal space - but I notice it, primarily because of my previously mentioned ill fitting pants. I also battle a less-than-desirable blood lipid profile that is at least 60% genetic. Whenever I vocalize that I would like to lose weight, I'm usually met with a chorus of WHAT??? I may not look it, but alas, according to the highly-flawed-but-still-best-measure-we-have BMI, I am overweight.

I know that the key component that I'm missing is exercise. I used to walk to work all the time, but this, that or the other thing always comes up at the last minute and half the time, I end up driving. I always feel like there's no time in my already packed life for exercise when clearly, it's something I just need to make time for. Part of my trouble is that I'm constantly tired and trying to muster up the ambition to do anything that's remotely like exercise seems like it takes a Herculean amount of energy. I had grand plans earlier this year when I vowed to make some small changes slowly over time so as to lessen the impact. While my attempts at eating better have been mostly a success, I have still caved to emotional eating on many occasions (especially recently) and my efforts to work even mild activity in have met with complete failure.

The purchasing of new pants was met with a lot of resistance. As I said, I equated it with failure. When I was out with Heidi buying them this morning I said "I don't want to buy many because I'll be back in my old pants soon." Who knows if that'll happen or not. I'm realistic enough to know that unless I change careers and become a male escort, I have to have pants to wear to work.

A lot of people I know are trying to increase their activity. I'm still not sure how I'm going to do it, but I do know that it'll involve baby steps. I am not going to announce a bold new initiative to create a new me that runs a marathon daily because for me that's just an invitation to failure. But hopefully I can find something that holds my feet to the fire a little bit better than an interventional cardiac cath procedure. Ultimately, fitness is a solitary journey and I'm not usually the best when left to my own devices. We shall see.

(Note: the pants pictured are NOT the pants I bought.)

Glasses or bust

Yesterday started out on rather a bad note. I picked up my glasses from my bedside table and the left temple completely and utterly fell off. You would have thought that I had thrown them across the room - honestly, all I did was pick them up! I am notoriously hell on glasses, and these frames, having been a little more of the wiry type than I had been accustomed to had suffered unduly. As I held the broken glasses in my hands, trying to put them back together again which is no small feat when you can't see, Heidi woke up and wondered what I was cussing at. "My glasses just broke!" I said. Ever the resourceful one, she pulled out the iPad and looked up Lenscrafters and saw they had 50% off lenses. Plus we had our AAA discount which would buy us 30% off - whichever was the better deal. We had already been planning on heading down to Ankeny to go eat at IHOP just for the fun of it, so we decided to head down to Des Moines as well. So I found my old glasses from 2 years ago and off we went. It was around 9AM.

After getting sufficiently full on pancakes we set out for Merle Hay Mall. Merle Hay Mall was the site of many after-Christmas mall trips for my family when I was in college so we could spend our Christmas cash. It is, like many malls, a shadow of its former self, but it's trying hard in the changing economy. We arrived at Lenscrafters and it didn't take me long to pick out a frame that I really liked. I had always been partial to my Dr. Who glasses that I wore from 2006-2009 and the only reason I gave them up is because they were so broken that I couldn't repair them anymore. Not surprisingly, I picked out a frame that looked a lot like them but was yet new and exciting at the same time. They were Ray Ban 5169 2383 frames, black plastic frames with a hint of green as well. All I had to do was have them get my prescription from Pearle in Ames and we'd be set to go.

Only Pearle couldn't find my prescription. And when they did, it was expired. At first, I thought, well, why can't they just use it anyway? And then I thought about it in terms of a prescription I might get in my work. There's no way on God's green Earth I would take a 2 year old prescription. Not only is it not in the best interest of the patient as people's health can and does change over the course of 2 years, it's also illegal. So I set about trying to figure out how to remedy this. The easiest option would be to just get an eye exam right there. The only trouble was, they were double booked. So was the Valley West Mall location and the Jordan Creek location. Heidi pulled up "Des Moines optometrists" on her Palm Pre and started calling around while I headed down to the Merle Hay Mall Pearle Vision. They had no one on site that day AND it just so happened that the Iowa Optometric Association was holding their spring meeting that day, so not many doctors would be around. Just my luck. I need an eye doctor and they're all at a meeting! They did, however, call out to the Pearle Vision Express at Southridge Mall and they did have an opening. So we piled in the car again and headed across town to the south side of Des Moines. By now, it was about 1PM, and my appointment was for 2:15PM.

The exam was uneventful and pretty much like every other eye exam I've had in the past. When I got there, I was immediately taken aback by all the Christian imagery - they had the Ten Commandments posted at the reception desk. I wondered if I qualified to be seen since I'm a heathen, gay-people loving, barely-church-going kind of guy, but I must have looked the part. The office staff was very nice and the doctor pleasant and competent. They even took my insurance which was nice. A $25 copay and an hour later, we were out the door and headed back to Merle Hay Mall so they could get started on my glasses. Heidi was going to wait for me in the car but came in because Anna was getting crabby and complaining about the lack of internet in the parking lot. Privileged child. Time at the tone: around 4:30PM.

We went to supper at Applebee's and had supper. After supper, I go back to Lenscrafters. It's now 5:45 PM and I'm told that one of the lenses was made wrong, so they had to redo it, which added another 30 minutes to our wait. At this point, everyone's edges were fraying so we just sat at the play lot while Anna, the tallest kid there, tore around and burned off all the energy that Heidi and I both seemed to be lacking. At 6:30, I headed back in and, at long last, my new glasses were on my face.

We stopped in Ankeny on the way home at a park (we had promised to take Anna to a park in Des Moines but it just never worked out.) While we were there, Heidi snapped this picture of me with my phone.


So I'm back to looking like a NASA scientist in the 60s, but hey, I really like it. And again, there's something Whovian about them.

Lenscrafters. Glasses in about an hour. Or eight.

Postscript: Even though we blew the whole day getting me glasses, my only regret of the day is patronizing an establishment that felt the need to shove its Christianity down my throat. For all the screaming of the right wing and how the "liberal agenda" is being forced on them (especially the nefarious "gay agenda"), I really felt like this was as bad as what they complain about. No, they never mentioned God once, but for all the Christian imagery and literature in the office, they might as well have. The doctor did ask me if I listened to Jan Mickelson in the morning. Mickelson, for those that don't know, is our own sort of homegrown Rush Limbaugh and is virulently homophobic. Also, checking out the office's web site, I noticed that they link to Exodus International, the famous "pray the gay away" group. In the light of day today, I find myself thinking, what if I had been a gay man, there with my partner and this had been my only avenue in a day long effort to be able to see? I find it unlikely that the office would have refused to see me, but would I have been able to swallow it and be seen - which I did yesterday and only to be left with a bitter aftertaste. The fact that my money might be going to further this kind of homophobic bullshit sickens me, but I'm going to count this as balancing out his karma and to never forget that this stuff is out there. It doesn't affect me directly, but man, there are so many people I know and love that it does affect. So to them, I am sorry. But I really really needed to see.

Jackpot

Today was one of those days where I needed to have a label on me that said "Caution: Not for human consumption." It really has been one of those days. Efforts to shake the funk off were mostly in vain, although I will say that the Pat Benatar book Between a Heart and a Rock Place has been pretty good tonic. Not being a huge Pat Benatar fan, it's filled with little tidbits that I didn't know and the writing, while not great, is highly readable. Not surprisingly, it's also made me want to listen to her music.

Heidi made beef stew for supper tonight and it was especially good. After supper, I still had serious munchies so I went looking for something else. I settled on one of my favorite after school snacks - chocolate milk and graham crackers. Boring? Yes, but beyond good. What you do is fill the glass up about 3/4ths full of chocolate milk and dunk the graham crackers. It's always a bit of a gamble because your timing has to be just right. You don't want to the dunk to be too long lest the cracker break off and fall into the milk, necessitating rescue with a spoon.

When I was in junior high, I would come home from school and sit at the kitchen table in front of the black & white TV set with chocolate milk and graham crackers. I would watch half-hour after half-hour of game shows. I kind of miss the 80s game shows but everything changes. The one I most associate with this time of my life was on the USA Network - Channel 7 back in the day. The show was "Jackpot" and it featured 16 contestants, 15 of which were seated and had envelopes containing riddles that were worth varying amounts of money. One of the contestants stood at a podium and selected numbers 1-15 and tried to answer the riddles. One of the envelopes contained the "jackpot riddle" and if answered correctly, the jackpot was split evenly between the two contestants. Much like contestant's row on "The Price Is Right," everyone had a chance to get up to the podium, but many didn't.

As I ate the graham crackers and milk tonight, I got to wondering if "Jackpot" was on YouTube. I shouldn't have even had to ask because of course it is.



As it turns out, the one I watched was a syndicated (and Canadian) version of the game show, the original being from the mid 70s. My father always hated game shows - they were in his list of shows he wouldn't watch ("I don't watch game shows, doctor shows, lawyer shows, police shows, soap operas or situation comedies!"), leaving pretty much "Nova" and "Market to Market" for him to watch. I remember old game shows fondly and the new crop from today just don't have the same feel.

Now, back to Benatar.

King Tut

I will admit to not knowing a terrible amount about what's going on in Egypt right now. I'm actually quite eager to ask my native-Egyptian coworker tomorrow what her take on all this is. It seems like the world is just going to hell in a handbasket these days. Even a couple of years ago, that would have caused me great anxiety. Now I can look at it from a comfortable distance, recognize that it's probably a big deal, but then realize that nothing I can do - least of all worrying about it - can alter what is going to happen. If only I had been able to do that in late elementary/junior high when I was sure that Russian nukes would rain down on us in the middle of the night! From the sounds of it, events over there are shaping up to be similar to the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979, minus the Islamic component. But then again, who really knows?

It was with great interest that I read about the security of all the Egyptian artifacts in the Cairo Museum, which is not far at all from the epicenter of the riots and protests. I remember seeing a documentary once that mentioned how a lot of the artifacts were not under the most ideal of storage in the museum to begin with due to structural defects in the building, but I could see something like what is currently going on over there causing irreparable damage to things that represent 4,000 years of history. Like many other people, I thought of all the treasures recovered from the tomb of King Tutankhamun as many of those are among the most iconic of Egyptian antiquities.

I remember seeing a touring exhibit of The Treasures of Tutankhamun in 1977 when I was five years old. If memory serves me correctly, my dad had gotten discounted tickets through either his work or somewhere and even though we were living on a teacher's salary in the 70s, we found the money to go. It was showing at the Field Museum in late summer and this trip to Chicago is one of my earliest memories of a vacation. My brother got to stay with my grandparents, but I was lucky enough to get to go. I still remember my dad carrying me around on his shoulder, sharing the earpiece with me so that I could listen to the descriptions of the various items. You couldn't take any photos in the exhibit itself, but I can remember the golden funeral mask like it was yesterday - it was the centerpiece of the exhibit. When another exhibition toured the U.S. in the mid 2000s, stopping again at the Field Museum in 2006, I really wanted to try to get to it again but time and circumstance really didn't allow for it. As it turns out, the previously mentioned golden funeral mask was not on that exhibition, as the Egyptian government has decided it is to fragile to withstand the rigors of international travel. So I guess I'm glad I saw it when I did, as the chances of me getting to Egypt are pretty damn slim.

So far, looters have smashed a couple of mummies and damaged some displays. It was initially thought that the artifacts of Tutankhamun were untouched, but this blog shows that this may very well not be the case. The museum is now under 24 hour armed guard, but who knows if it can withstand angry rioters and looters.

Nothing I say or do can change what will happen, but I can only hope that 4000 years of history isn't flushed down the drain during what looks very much like an Egyptian revolution. All of that history is irreplaceable and if it is lost during this time of unrest, it will be a sad state of affairs.

I will say, that if the golden mask had looked like this when I saw it in 1977, I would have been scarred for life.

Karaoke as bravery

A few weeks back, I watched several people that I follow on Twitter tweet about being at a karaoke event in Des Moines. I remember trying to figure out if this was a big thing or if it was just a bar that was having karaoke that several people happened to be at. I have never done karaoke - not even one time, but it's one of those things that I wouldn't mind doing some day.

For me, karaoke is one of those things that would require me to be extremely brave to do it. It's not that I've never sung in public before, it's just that the last time I did that I was in 6th grade and playing Santa in the school Christmas play. My voice hadn't changed yet so it sounded like Santa was a eunuch. I remember having to sing a song about a Super TV Set that would broadcast Santa's travels to the entirety of the North Pole. There was also a part that required me to pretend that I was on the phone and I put the microphone up to my ear instead of my mouth before I started talking. I was mortified because, naturally, that was the performance that was recorded and that we had to watch in music class after the program was over.

I sing in the shower, in the car and around the house doing chores. Anna and I take turns singing on Guitar Hero. Heidi always says that she can tell I'm doing well and feeling good by the amount of singing in falsetto that I do. It's true. I don't know that I sing particularly well, but it's fun. I don't really remember my dad singing around the house when I was a kid. He famously didn't like to sing hymns in church or anything like that. I want my daughter to have as one of her childhood memories a dad that sang in the car with her or around the house or whatever.

I've toyed with the idea of going out to do karaoke many times. In 2003, I went to visit a friend in Cincinnati and that was totally on the agenda. Well, I got sick with a cold toward the end of the trip and for a million other reasons, it didn't work out. My friend Jess, whose bravery I admire on a nearly daily basis, does karaoke quite a bit. She's a really good singer though and even does it in places outside the confines of her own home. She has even invited me out with her several times when she has gone but for whatever reason, it just has never worked out.

I always used to say that I would need to consume a considerable amount of alcohol to do karaoke. The trouble with that is that alcohol may be liquid courage but it's also liquid brain mush. It also causes me to talk non-stop and for those of you that know me, I know that's hard to believe, but it's true. How can you be expected to do a decent job singing a song when you're sloshed? You can't. It's just impossible. Some people would say that performing a song badly is the point of bar karaoke. I would disagree. If you're going to do something, why deliberately do it badly? Even the people that made Mommie Dearest thought they were making a classic - that it turned out to be a camp classic is beside the point. And if I ever do karaoke, I would hope to God that it sounds something like the episode of House where Chase, Foreman and House all sing Gladys Knight & The Pips' "Midnight Train To Georgia" at a karaoke bar. The actual video from the show is fucking embedding disabled, but watch it here (really, do it. It's worth it and essential viewing.) Here's the audio of it that is embeddable. Chase is Gladys and Foreman & House are the Pips.



I suffer from no delusion that I would sound as good (or look as good) as Chase does in that clip. But I'll admit it - there's a Chase in me dying to get out. I push him to the side or squash him down with relative frequency, because it doesn't fit in with the image I've cultivated over the years. But you know what? Fuck that. Heidi and I have been talking a lot about bravery lately and really, to be brave means you really have to take the chance. I may be pushing 40, but I'm not dead yet.

The thing I've learned over the last year is that, like it or not, I am the sum of all my parts, even those parts I would rather bury in a tub of cement a la True Blood. The trouble with that is that even when you do that, it's still a part of you. Better to just embrace it all and be a whole person. I would love to not have to deal with anxiety issues. I would love to be more outgoing and less tentative. The fact of the matter is that those things are who I am. Period. That doesn't mean I can't change them, but at this point in my life, those things are pretty hard wired. And if there's something like a songbird version of Chase ramming around in me, I'd best pay attention to it as well as the parts of me that I'm accustomed to dealing with.

So who's with me? Who among you are ready to be the Pips to my Gladys Knight? I know that if my brother Ryan were here, he'd totally do it. But he's been singing the Pips' part of "Midnight Train To Georgia" for the better part of a decade now. Now that I've done shots, maybe I need to cross karaoke off my list as well. And who knows? I might just like it. And then again I might not. Regardless, it's called living and I intend to be doing more of that.

You Couldn't Ignore Me If You Tried

Like so many people my age, the teenage films of John Hughes loomed very large on the cultural landscape of my adolescence. Unlike so many people my age, there are many I haven't seen. For example, Sixteen Candles still eludes me, as does Pretty In Pink and Some Kind of Wonderful. But I have seen The Breakfast Club more times than I can count and surely that should count for something, right? Because I hadn't seen some of these essential films, I wasn't sure how Susannah Gora's comprehensive history of Hughes and his films, You Couldn't Ignore Me If You Tried, would play with me. On one hand, I'm a sucker for this kind of pop culture stuff, but on the other, would my lack of familiarity with some of these movies detract from the reading experience? I needn't have been worried because familiarity with the subject matter, while helpful, was hardly required.

The first thing I want to say about this book is that it very deftly avoided being a book that was all full of itself, chock full of essays about how this character or that character represented the greed of the 80s or some other bullshit thing. Books that take pop culture touchstones like Hughes' movies and then suck all the life out of the subject matter by attaching meanings that aren't there are almost always more interesting in theory than they are in actual practice. I have plenty of Madonna books of this ilk that, while admirable, are nearly unreadable as books. Instead, what Gora has done here is give us a living and breathing history of not just Hughes' movies, but of the so-called Brat Pack and other teen movies of that time period. Each movie gets its own chapter and she has definitely got the goods on the making of each movie. Reading this book made me want to finally sit down and watch Sixteen Candles and Pretty In Pink. It made me want to put the book down and rewatch The Breakfast Club.

I still remember the first time I saw The Breakfast Club. I was 15 and over at a friend's house watching movies on VHS with him and his girlfriend. I was the eternal third wheel in their relationship, but he didn't seem to mind mostly because a part of him really wanted to break up with her but he couldn't bring himself to do it. Looking back, I was pretty clearly being used there - not that he didn't like me or enjoy my company, it was just that my presence defused things to some degree. Me, I was just elated to be included regardless of my role. But I remember watching that movie and yes, it is cliched to say so but I saw myself in that movie. Who among us has watched that movie and not seen ourselves mirrored back at us? That's the genius of that movie - teenagers everywhere, from different walks of life and different high school cliques could watch that movie and see themselves. We saw not only ourselves but our friends as well. What I saw that night in that movie was a balls-out honesty that seems to only exist in movies. I think that movie taps into the loneliness of adolescence and how what we really want then, what I really wanted then, more than even a girlfriend was a good friend. I had one sitting across the room from me and others that weren't there that night, but even amongst that, the loneliness of those years were a heavy weight. Seeing that kind of connection in a movie was both reassuring and depressing - reassuring because you were given hope that it could happen and depressing because, well, it was "only a movie."

Without getting too psychobabble, most of us still have those lonely teenagers inside us. Some of them speak a lot more loudly than others. As adults, we tell them to shut up and don't treat them very well. I really think that's why life can be so completely unfulfilling. We lose touch with those teenagers that craved human connection. We get busy with our overscheduled lives and we forget about the people around us that give life its color. Facebook and Twitter, while nice are not enough. I can speak for at least myself when I say that as nice as our interconnected world is, nothing beats a face to face meeting with a friend, be it for a night out, a lunch or having them over to the house for a night of listening to music and telling the same stories over and over again. That, to me, is where it really is at. That kind of connection is why these movies still resonate with so many of us 25 years later.

This post kind of went in a different direction than I intended. I haven't said very much about the book! But what I will say about the book is that it is very readable and not at all drowning in academese or anything like that. However, as it progressed, it did tend to become a bit repetitive which is usually the case with books like these, but I didn't feel like that detracted horribly from the book. New interviews with all the expected cast of characters helped make this book feel less like a piece of nostalgia and more a fun look back at movies that shaped a lot of people from our generation.

One sidenote: despite a great deal of effort on the part of the book to convince me otherwise, I am still not a Ferris Bueller's Day Off fan. From the way they talked about it, you would have thought that it cured cancer. I still think Ferris is a spoiled piece of shit. That's just what I think. The book did, however, cause me to get over my general eye-rolling at the boombox/"In Your Eyes" scene in Say Anything and now I kind of want to watch it.

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.

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)

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.)

Fun raiser

Anna is participating in what most parents dread most - the twice-a-year school fundraiser. The last 3 years, she hasn't been interested in them, so we've tossed the packets and forgotten about it. But this year, she wanted to do it, drawn in by the promise of a limo ride if she sells 25 of the overpriced food items that are in the catalog. Of course, we've had the packet since the 14th, but tonight was the first night she was serious about it. The fundraiser ends on Friday. The neighborhood has been scoured by other kids from Anna's school and we're left to selling to close friends and relatives. I hate bringing this kind of stuff to work and subtly guilting people into buying things even though other people in my department do it shamelessly. I did send out a mass e-mail to some internet peeps and relatives to see if anyone was interested. This only made me mildly uncomfortable and if you were lucky enough to have received one, you're included in the group of people I don't mind making a fool of myself in front of. I meant what I said - only buy if you want. If you don't, it doesn't hurt my feelings one bit. I was just doing my duty as a parent.

When I was a kid, there was nothing I despised more than fundraising. It seemed like every organization I was in had fundraisers. Band, chorus, speech and drama, church groups, you name it, we were always hawking something to help pay for the bus to Timbuktu or something like that. I usually ended up selling to my parents and that was it. The funny thing is that the very first fundraiser that I remember doing was actually a rousing success. We sold Bic pens door to door for Cub Scouts - I was probably 10 or so. Back in my hometown, I lived in the 700 block of my street. My brother and I sold pens all the way up to the 2200 block in one afternoon - both sides of the street. I was a fearless salesman. I sold a shitload of pens. I also scared the crap out of my parents because I vividly remember being in about the 1300 block of my street on the way back home and there they were, driving up the street in our old Maverick looking for us, sure that we had been abducted or murdered or something equally horrific. Shit no! We were just selling pens.

After that, I really lost my drive for selling. I remember being heckled by some 20 something guys when I was selling popcorn for Scouts (I'm pretty sure) and was kind of freaked out about that. After that, my introvert REALLY set in and I just couldn't go and sell things to people cold. I wasn't going door-to-door ever again for that kind of stuff. And mostly, I never did.

Well, since there's no door-to-door for Anna after the locusts picked the neighborhood clean, we resorted to telephone tonight. We called grandparents, aunts, uncles and godparents, among others. I let her do the pitch (spectacular! spectacular!) but sat on the extension while she talked. She did a pretty good job for being eight. She was articulate and excited and clearly wanted to make a sale. There always came a point where I had to break in and explain that this is not the type of fundraising you're used to. This is 21st century fundraising as you can go to the website and do online orders. The school has a number as does Anna. You plug the info in, order whatever you want and she gets credit for it. Plus, the stuff gets shipped to your house. How's that for slick?

The best part of the night was when Anna was e-mailing Heidi's mom with the info that she needed and I was checking it over before she sent it. The subject line of the e-mail was "fun raiser." I said to her, "Anna, it's FUND raiser. You're raising funds for the school - funds are money." She looked at me like suddenly, the light bulb had gone to full brilliance. I thought, but wisely kept to myself, that doing a fundraiser is decidedly not a "fun raiser." At least not for me.

Not what you'd expect from an amusement park

Every year we make the trip to Adventureland, an amusement park located just south of here near Des Moines. We've gone there ever since I was in the 6th grade when I went along with the safety patrol at the end of the school year. Like I have written before, my first encounter with Adventureland was the first time I'd gone to an amusement park that didn't require tickets for rides. You pay the admission, you ride till you're done or you puke your guts out - whichever comes first. I get massively discounted tickets through work so we go pretty much every year. As Anna said to me earlier this summer "Dad, it's kind of a tradition that we go to Adventureland." Yes, Anna, it definitely is.

We were supposed to go yesterday, but we got rained out. Fortunately, I had today off as well, so we simply rescheduled for today. The only hiccup was that tomorrow is the first day of school and Anna likes to stay until the very last possible minute. This was not going to happen today. So we got up early and got there not long after the park opened with the caveat that we were leaving at 5pm sharp. After some initial grousing about not being able to stay as long, she saw the light and agreed to the terms. This was a good thing as it was not a negotiable point.

She brought a buddy with her so she didn't have to hang with us oldsters and in the end, it was an especially smart move. I used to ride those rides like crazy. When I was a kid, there was no ride I wouldn't get in line for, even if I really was a little bit scared. I did take a long time to really warm up to roller coasters. I didn't actually ride the Tornado until the year after I boasted to my friends that I had done it, only to give a completely inaccurate account of the ride (based on the cartoon depiction of the coaster on the Adventureland map.) My deception revealed, I vowed to ride it the next year, which I did. After that, I rode everything and mocked those who didn't as sticks-in-the-mud.

Well, karma's a bitch because now it's me that's the stick-in-the-mud. Each year, I ride less and less. This year, I rode exactly four rides - the Giant Sky Wheel (100 foot tall Ferris Wheel), the Tornado, the Space Shot and the chair lift across the park. You can forget anything that goes rapidly around in a circle. My innards just can't take it. The Silly Silo (aka The Human Centrifuge) was the first to go. Now, even something as innocuous as the Tea Cups (modeled after the Mad Tea Party in Disneyland) leaves me feeling nauseous. As I have said before, I will not continue to ride that stuff just to say I can do it. I am over that shit. And Heidi, with all her aches and pains that randomly come and go didn't so much as set foot on anything save the chair lift.

So this year, Adventureland felt more like a sentence than something we were looking forward to. But Anna does love it so and as I have said, being a parent really teaches you the true meaning of the word "sacrifice" so we muddled through. We turned the girls relatively loose and sat on benches, talked a lot, ate crappy amusement park food, listened to late 90s music coming from a speaker near the Falling Star and really, despite our expectations, enjoyed the hell out of it. We enjoyed being together so much today. After a summer that has really felt like the Lost Summer, with me working a fantastic number of evenings and during which we never really established a good routine, it was nice to reconnect, even if it was over our lack of desire to spend one of the last free days of the summer at an amusement park we've been to so many times I need scientific notation to express it succinctly.

Heidi said to me today "you know, I feel like I should feel bad about not wanting to ride and not really liking this anymore, but honestly, I don't." I know what she was saying. We used to make trips to Chicago to go to Six Flags Great America and even up to my late 20s, I was still loving rides and all that. We kind of decided that we were glad we enjoyed it then. It's just like anything else, you grow up. Even this perennial boy-in-a-man's-body has realized that that part of me really isn't there any longer. It only exists in memory. I can still fake it a little bit, but each year it gets a little bit harder. My long-running joke is that I am 3 years away from having to sit in the car while everyone else goes in. The fact that I've been making that joke for 10 years should tell you that it's deliberately melodramatic. However, there is a kernel of truth in it.

I always remember my grandparents taking the entire extended family to Adventureland through my teenage years. They, of course, never rode the rides - at least not that I can recall. They were well into their 70s by then so it's no surprise that they didn't. Still, they went religiously, year after year just to be with family. Those are some of my most treasured memories of my grandparents, even though one year my grandfather did inadvertently belch in my face - something that was mentioned several times at his funeral a couple years back and still comes up in conversation to this day.

So here's to family and relationships and all that. Who knew that an amusement park had such a binding effect? We're not grandparents yet, but Lord knows I have enough gray hair to pass as one!


(I actually had to buy that hat today as I couldn't find my sunglasses and needed something to keep the sun out of my eyes. It's the first piece of distressed clothing that I've ever purchased unless you count stonewashed jeans in the 80s.)