Cut the cord

So for all my bitching about how I hate yardwork and don't want to do it, I finally relented and between last night and early this afternoon, I got the yard completely mowed. Although I was sweating from every pore when I was done, it is done and now I can get off my case about it. Because here's the thing. I had a real "come to Jesus" moment today when it comes to the yard.

My name is Dan. My backyard looks like holy hell. AND I DON'T CARE.

There, I said it. I remember how owning the story of eating alone in college really helped me feel better about it, like I was finally able to get rid of the shame that was dogging me about it even twenty years later. I thought that perhaps, if I write a little bit here about my relationship with yardwork, something similar might happen.

I say I don't care about how the yard looks, and that's only half true. I do care, but I also don't. I fight a losing battle with it every summer, so much so that I'm sure people are sick of me complaining about it. Yardwork seldom gets done because I am constantly tired or working weird shifts or *insert excuse here*. I have this imaginary, mildly paranoid scenario that plays in my head that involves everyone in the neighborhood saying "dear God, WHEN is he going to mow?" When I do pick a day to do it, invariably, the weather sucks or I feel like crap because I'm in my day-off funk and then it doesn't get done. Again. I'm embarrassed by the overgrowth and don't want to have people over or anything because I hate how the backyard looks and what it says about me (BAD HOMEOWNER). So then I proceed to beat myself up over it and feel bad about it, which only causes me to be in even more of a funk that then makes me less likely to have the energy to go out and do it. It's not unlike the vicious cycle that seems to crop up in a lot of areas of my life over the last nearly 4 decades.

Well, I want to be done with that shit. Yes, the backyard was starting to look like the forest moon of Endor, but there is only so much I can do. In the grand scheme of things, it's much more important that I take care of myself than the yard. When it comes to a choice between those two things, I'm going to stop sacrificing my own mental and physical health for the sake of something I honestly don't even care that much about. I think a lot of this has to do with being male. Men are supposed to care about how their yards look. For Christ's sake, I should be out there making diagonal rows and spraying pesticide all over it so that it looks like Teletubby land with nary a weed in sight. A guy that doesn't go out and mow every weekend is someone that maybe you shouldn't trust. Or at least that's what my brain tells me.

I think part of the reason I have so spectacularly burned out this summer is because I haven't been taking very good care of myself, either physically or mentally. Oh sure, I've been going to the gym and that's going pretty well. I've fallen off the wagon a time or two, but sometimes I swear the point of the wagon is to be there to fall off of. My weight is holding its own and I feel like cardiovascular-wise, I'm in much better shape than I was a few months ago. But I'm not sleeping well. And I'm doubling back at work and working long stretches. All this would be fine if I were taking care of myself, but I'm not. Mentally, I haven't been giving myself the time that I really need to recharge. This is what happens when I don't do that. I end up obsessing about something (the yard) that I really don't give one iota of shit about. I have plans to get to the bottom of this constant fatigue crap, but that's another post altogether.

In the end, I am happy that I got some of the yardwork done today. It does have to be done, but it doesn't have to rule my life. I managed to cut down most of the forest moon of Endor this afternoon (no Ewoks though) and this is what I was left with.


No, it still doesn't look great. The pavement cracks are teeming with life and I missed a few spots in the yard. I would have done more, but as per usual, I managed to slice through my extension cord with the hedge clippers.


The lack of an extension cord meant I couldn't get the weed whip out so nothing else got done. But hey, it's more than I thought I'd get done and now that I've helped (with the help of someone with the initials H and C) free myself from the guilt and shame of the yard, I'm not even that upset that I wasn't able to finish.

(Dad, can you fix my extension cord when you get back from Arizona??)

Doing something right

Those of you in my most intimate circle may (or may not) know that the last couple weeks have completely kicked my ass. Work's been stressful, there was the whole tire debacle, and then there's other shiz going on that I'm not going to go in here. But when you combine it all with the fact I'm just starting to burn out after having taken my summer vacation in May, there's no denying that I've been going through a bit of a rough patch. The other night when Heidi and Anna came out to have supper with me at work, Heidi must have really noticed it and I told her that I'd "talk to her when I got home." Her eyebrow arched and she wondered if something specific had happened and I assured her no but that I just "wasn't feeling very good about myself."

Anna must have heard me say this because this is what I found when I came home from work that night, exhausted and spent.


As Heidi pointed out, I shouldn't feel bad about myself because I had a hand in helping mold this child who knows enough at age nine the thing that I still frequently forget at age 39 - always like yourself! Much of that for me is an old pattern that I'm working on changing, but still, I'm glad that I've helped arm her with that kind of internal monologue.

So here's to a reboot today. We're going down to Indianola for the National Balloon Classic and good times with friends and may-as-well-be-family. I slept till 10:30 and skipped my cardio because clearly, I needed the unconsciousness more than the aerobic workout. There's always tomorrow.

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?"

Orbits, suns and planets

Winter's Bone was on last night's agenda. It was the last of the Oscar movies we had a prayer of seeing, which would have left us with only Black Swan, The Fighter and 127 Hours unseen (as far as Best Picture nominees go) as we head into next weekend's Oscar show. We bailed and watched last Monday's House instead. Honestly, I think it was a better choice because I'm just not in the mood for depressing movies. Real life, it seems, is depressing enough as it is without actively seeking it out.

The other reason it was a good choice was because it fit into what seems to be an overriding theme of the week. As House gets a bit long in the tooth, the medical mystery of the week is less and less intriguing and I'm more frequently drawn in by the secondary storylines of the episodes. As Heidi pointed out, putting House and Cuddy together really should have ruined the show, but for some reason, it works better than ever. This week's episode was really all about loneliness. The patient, who could inexplicably remember every single memory since puberty had isolated herself due to her inability to forgive anyone for indiscretions. Wilson, still burning from his breakup with Sam, gets a cat rather than jump out into the dating fray again. Taub has failed a pathology certification exam and is sentenced to having Foreman as a tutor, only to realize that, when Foreman extends the offer for him to stay at his place, living by himself in a fleabag motel in the wake of his separation was not the most ideal thing in the world.

A song played at the end of the episode that I had to go and search for the minute the credits rolled. It took a little bit of Googling, but eventually I figured out it was Wilco's "How To Fight Loneliness." I liked it because it was of the indie ilk that seems to always make the unofficial House soundtracks but don't frequently make my own personal soundtracks. I also liked how it could be interpreted in more than one way - the most obvious being that fighting loneliness is all about faking it, putting on a veneer for the world to see while inside you feel exactly the opposite. However, I think the more accurate interpretation (at least for me) is that if you smile all the time, laugh at every joke and fill your heart with smoke, you may actually end up attracting the very things that counter it, bringing more people into your orbit and taking the edge off the lonely feelings that seem to affect many of us, whether we admit to them or not. I think things like Facebook and Twitter, while helping us to connect with each other have, oddly enough, left us feeling more lonely and more out of touch. I can say for myself that there are many times I've thought about taking a week off of both FB and Twitter, just to see how I felt. Maybe I'd focus more on other things? Or would I be pushing away the things that "How to Fight Loneliness" urges you to attract?

Whatever the answer, I'm not convinced that's entirely right either. Really, the best commentary on this sort of thing comes from Stevie Nicks...like that should surprise anyone. It's another song that has been in heavy rotation recently - "Planets of the Universe." It's one of my favorite Stevie Nicks songs, one that has been around forever but finally found a home on Trouble in Shangri-La. It is angry and biting and, naturally, mostly about Lindsey Buckingham. Not having been in a relationship with LB, it has broader meaning for me. When I am at my loneliest, when it feels like the world has shut off just when I'm wanting interaction and there's just no having it, I take an incredible amount of solace in this song. Because here's what Stevie says:

And the planets of the universe
Go their way
Not astounded by the sun or the moon
Or by the day
You and I will simply disappear
Out of sight
But I'm afraid soon there'll be
No light

What it says to me is that we are all just like those planets. Sometimes our orbits cross or approach each other, but in the end, we are all on our own path. The best that we can hope for is to share a sun and that we stay in each other's sight, because ultimately, we have to do it on our own. I think it's really easy to fall into the trap of believing that others will fill that gap that almost everyone feels. Maybe for some, it does. But I think for the vast majority of us, the other people are really like the other planets - in their own orbits. I think the best marriages are made of two people whose orbits intersect but remain their own, bouncing off an energy that encourages them to live their lives while still keeping the other in sight.

In last week's episode of House, House says to the patient who is looking at certain death without a kidney transplant, "it's ok, everyone dies alone anyway." Of course, he stole this from Cher who famously sang "sooner or later, we all sleep alone." I'm not sure if he's right or not, but I don't know if that's the point. I think the best we can do is make peace with it and welcome those that enter our orbits, no matter for how little time it might actually be. I don't think I'm there yet, but maybe someday I will be.

(I double dare anyone to find a blog post that mentions Wilco, Stevie Nicks AND Cher.)

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.

Best of 2010: 12 Favorite Blog Posts

My blogging pal Brendan did a post in which he highlighted his favorite blog posts of the year. I meant to do this last year, but life got busy and by the time got around to it, the ship had sailed (oddly, that is the case with SO many posts that never see the light of day.)

Inspired by his post, I have spent a good chunk of the morning scanning through the year's posts. There were fewer this year than in any year since 2005. Not sure why that is - I chalk a lot of it up to Facebook. Things that used to get a post now get a sentence and a link there. Some of the posts clearly did not stand the test of time. They seemed brilliant at the time, but not so much 12 months out. Still, as proud as I am of this space, I found 12 (+1) that really stood out for me. Here they are, again, taking a cue from Brendan, in chronological order.

• Give It Up: One of those album posts that come out of nowhere - this time about Wilson Phillips' Shadows & Light. God, I loved that album more than I really should admit anywhere.
• Monolith: Social media is here to stay. It's changed how we interact with people, and not necessarily for the better.
• Easy Bake Pam: A not-so-great day ends with an impromptu baking of chocolate chip cookies in an Easy Bake Oven with Anna while she jams out to a song about a May-December relationship.
• And Now for the Audio Portion of the Program: My friend Jeff and I try our hands at podcasting. This was our first and only attempt and ended with us rambling on for nearly an hour about Madonna - like that should surprise anyone. The podcast is still available to download if you're interested.
• This Sweater is Old and Faded: I actually wore this sweater to work once this winter so far. For being a nearly 10 year old sweater, it's in remarkably good shape and not that out of style.
• A Mere Heart Attack: Misheard lyrics - the subject that launched a thousand blog posts.
• The (Non)appendicitis Was (Not) Rumbling: I'mincluding this post not because it was particularly witty or well-written - it's not. It was kind of a throwaway post. It has become, however, my most visited post of the year (next to the Madonna remixology posts.) Seriously folks, I don't know any more about rumbling appendicitis than Wikipedia. Move along.
• Come Down Here for a Minute: This was one of many Stevie posts I did this year. It was also the one that came the most out of nowhere.
• Get Out of Her Way: Kylie's "Get Outta My Way" video, as I have said before, reduced me to a screaming fanboy in the way that only Kylie can. My favorite song and video of the year.
• Zen and the Art (and Calculus) of Dishwashing: Probably the nerdiest post of the year. And that's saying something. Who knew calculus would EVER apply to the washing of dishes?
• Look Who's Evil Now: An account of my trip to Kansas City to see Evil Dead: The Musical - the bloodiest musical I have ever seen.
• Private Dining: Probably my most personal post of the whole year. I was surprised to get the amount of feedback on it that I did - both in the comments section and privately to me in e-mail. It made me realize that it's not quite as awful to share those kinds of stories as I always think it will be.

And the plus one...

• Last Night a Pharmacist Saved My Life: Because I can't let an opportunity to remind everyone of how awesome I can be when I set my mind to it. ;)

Thank you to EVERYONE who reads this space. The numbers are few, but I am thankful that anyone finds it interesting enough to come back to day after day. That's the best Christmas present I could possibly receive.

Best of 2010: Retro song of the year

I started writing this post on December 14th and it has seen a lot of versions. It's been much harder to write than I initially thought it would, but what the hell. Anyway, when I round up the best of the year, I'm fond of including a song or two that didn't have the good fortune of being released during the year but still contributed heavily to my personal soundtrack. This year, that award belongs to a single song and that song is Kim Wilde's "It's Here." While released 20 years ago, I simply can't imagine 2010 without this song. It was a huge part of my summer soundtrack and as the year has come to a close, the lyrics have taken on even more meaning. The fact that it is a classic pop song with a killer hook and fantastic bridge is just icing on the cake.

First, listen:



As I wrote earlier this year, Kim Wilde is terribly uneven. However, when she's good, she's fantastic. How can you resist that soaring chorus? That keyboard work is a relic of the late 80s and early 90s but somehow still sounds fresh. It's the music that drew me in on this song but what kept me and has turned it into 2010's retro song of the year are the lyrics. Like most good pop songs, the lyrics seem almost throwaway but the more I listened to them, the more they seemed oddly appropriate. Let's just take the first verse and chorus:

I've been looking all around the world
To see what I could find
Just a lot of broken promises
And people left behind
Oh and the - pain of being lonely
Is what everybody fears
Yeah, it took a lot of time for me to realize

It's here, looking me in the eye
It's here, here all the time
It's here, I've always tried to find a way to go
But now I know
It's here

I'm fond of telling the story about how a college friend of mine, after a bad breakup, was talking to me and said "a pop song shouldn't know how I feel!" My response to her was that if it doesn't, what's the point? "It's Here" really makes that point well for how 2010 has played out. In many ways, it was a watershed year in which a lot of the work I've been doing in life came to fruition, so much so that it could be the theme song for the year.

And it's funny because truthfully, I almost lost this song as soon as I gained it. Really though, it was too good to lose and in the end far, far to relevant to my life up to this point. Longtime readers will know how the lyric "the pain of being lonely is what everybody fears" resonates with me. As a Gemini and an Enneagram 4, that's kind of just how the ball bounces for me. Even surrounded by people, I can still feel lonely, sometimes painfully so. But what Kim Wilde and this year has taught me is that it will never go away, not until I realize that what I'm really looking for is a better, more honest relationship with myself.

She says it so clearly - "it's here/looking me in the eye/it's here/here all the time." It's kind of like when Dorothy Gale says "if I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look any further than my own backyard, because if it isn't there, I never really lost it to begin with." I suppose this is pretty par for the course for someone in their late 30s. I think when you start bumping up against 40 things change for you, whether you like it or not.

If you haven't figured it out, I have taken the advice of this song to heart. Even before I heard the song at about mid-year, I was already trying to cultivate a better relationship with all the versions of me - the scared kid, the lonely college student, the hopelessly nerdy adult, the ubercompetent pharmacist, the father and husband that feels like he's flying blind most of the time. My Christmas gift to myself this year is to listen to and take better care of all the parts of me. I've already worked hard on it and only when both sides of the Gemini are in balance can there be a little bit of calm.

Who knows, maybe there will never be complete calm - would life be boring if I stopped thinking about this kind of shit? Probably. But at least we'll have this great Kim Wilde song to remind me of what's important when the going gets tough. (I won't whip out that Billy Ocean song even though it's probably in my iTunes somewhere. Update: Just checked. Yep, it is. And I'm playing it in spite of myself.)

And that is what the retro song of the year is all about, Charlie Brown.

Stay golden

This weekend was the first of a few Christmases we have lined up this year. I can't keep track of how many there are actually going to be or when they're going to take place. I've kind of adopted the attitude of "you just tell me where to be and when to be there. Provided I'm not working, I'll show up." Truthfully, I find it to be much less stressful just to go with the flow rather than getting worked up and end up not enjoying any part of the holiday.

But last night's Christmas was what we lovingly refer to as "Tina's Christmas." It's called that because of a 15+ year-old inside joke that started between Heidi, Jeff and me. It refers to Christina "Tina" Crawford, adopted daughter of Joan Crawford and author of celebrity tell-all turned camp-classic Mommie Dearest. Don't ask me why the joke started, it just did. It's part of the history now and honestly, if it weren't there, life would be A LOT less interesting. But Tina's Christmas is tradition now, so much so that we book it a year in advance and God preserve your soul if you schedule anything else on that weekend.

Food is consumed, gifts are exchanged, alcohol is drunk, games are played. We always try to outdo each other when filling out the tags on the presents. This photo below gives you a pretty good idea of what I'm saying.

The best part of this was when Anna was passing out presents and she said "Who is La Bouch?" (pronouncing it so that it rhymed with "ouch") Close, but no cigar Anna. Among the other people receiving presents last night were Richard Burton & Liz Taylor, Barbara Mandrell, Dexter, 'Lizbeth Walton, Wonder Woman, Starbuck, Liza (from David Guest) and many others I can't remember. Seriously, it's the best part. It gets so bad that sometimes the gift giver has to think about who it was really for. It's kind of a very camp Christmas.

And somewhere along the line, Santa started to visit early. We're starting to push up against the age where Anna might start to not believe in Santa for much longer (she's 9 and not showing very many signs of disbelief) so we kind of milk it a little bit. Last year, he brought everyone pajamas and this year was the same thing. We orchestrate this quite elaborately to perpetuate the belief. Anna was really anticipating this to happen this year and so when it did, she came down the stairs declaring that she KNEW it would happen because she still believed.

Of course, a man in a red suit did not actually visit. We all had drawn names to see who would buy pajamas for who and Jeff got my name. We all had e-mailed our pajama sizes and preferences and I think for the most part, everyone was pleased. Inside my package was a pair of flannel pants and a big navy thermal shirt that I wore to bed last night. Also in the package was a T-shirt that might only ever be a bed shirt, I'm not sure. I did wear it today. I think the image kind of speaks for itself.

Really, coming from Jeff, it's a perfect gift. The Golden Girls is beloved by gay men far and wide, but he and are among the few straight men I know that enjoy the HELL out of it (although I do know of at least one other - you know who you are.) It really is - pardon the pun - comedy gold. The writing is so strong, the performances so perfect that even in the later seasons when Blanche was ultra slutty, Rose extra dumb and Dorothy extremely bitchy, it still didn't suffer. I've seen every episode multiple times and Heidi always says that watching me laugh my head off for the hundredth time is, for her, the best part of watching it. My friend Mary, who was also at Tina's Christmas, is fond of saying that in high school, while her friends were out getting laid on Saturday night, she was at home watching The Golden Girls. Well, so was I.

What I love about this gift is its subtle meaning. In many ways, what Tina's Christmas is all about is how everyone is loved for being exactly who they are, despite AND because of their flaws. These folks are our family of choice and it's so important to me that this continue in some form or another for as long as it can.

I've spent a lot of today in a funk I couldn't quite shake. That's not all that unusual for me after a flurry of activity. When the party's over, I'm more inclined to quiet introspection than anything else. It's not about turning it into something sad or melancholy, it's just about the transition. Tomorrow is back to work for four days and then a few more Christmases. I'm not getting that much time off around Christmas but I am taking eleven days off beginning December 30th for my sister's wedding on NYE. Then it'll be a week of trying to catch up and unbunge (as my brother always says) from the hustle and bustle of the season and get back to normal.

I would end this post with a "thank you for being a friend" gag, but really, it's too obvious. To all those who are family of choice to me - those present last night and others as well, just listen to that damn cheesy theme song and know what it's all about.

A telling moment

On Wednesday, when I was taking Anna to piano lesson, we were listening to her new favorite song, Marina & the Diamonds "Oh No!" She specifically requested it when we got in the car and we listened to it over and over again on the way. During one of the listens, Anna surprised me. Marina sings in the song "I always feel like I'm the worst/So I always act like I'm the best." Right after that, Anna says to me, in a moment of honesty, "Dad, that's how I feel sometimes."

Wow. I always joke about the apple not falling far from the tree when it comes to her. I told this to Heidi and she said "she is definitely your child." I wasn't really sure what to say to her at that point and looking back, I can't even remember what I said.

With the benefit of a day or two to ponder it, I decided that the most important thing I can do for her is to give her the tools to figure out that the former isn't true, so she doesn't have to waste energy on the latter. Hopefully, she can avoid believing that sentiment when she's 35 like her dad did. I told her this last night and she was predictably nonchalant about the whole thing but still. Someday she'll stop telling me stuff like that so I need to take every opportunity.

We see ourselves mirrored in our kids in the most bizarre ways.

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)

Senseless

I am pretty much heartbroken over the story of 18 year-old Tyler Clementi's suicide after his roommate posted live video feed of him having sex with another man in his dorm room to the internet. At first, I thought that he was merely missing and I guess until they find a body, he is, but all signs point to the high likelihood of him having jumped off the George Washington Bridge in New York City.

There are so many angles on this it makes your head spin. There was a good write-up on this on AMERICAblog tonight and really, that says what I would like to say so much better than I ever could. What I hate about this most is that this is 2010 and we are still living in a world in which society teaches our young men that it is better to be dead than gay. More than that, the simple perception that you might be gay is a fate worse than death. I would like to think that we've made progress since my high school days but apparently, we really haven't. And clearly I'm not the only one to think this. In the article I linked above is the following quote:

Gay rights groups say Clementi's death is the latest example of a long-standing problem: young people who kill themselves because they're bullied about being gay — regardless of whether they are.

I will go to my grave saying that homophobia has more to do with challenging the definition of masculinity than anything else. Anybody who doesn't fit that nice and tidy mold is immediately attacked, either directly or subtly. Gay men challenge masculinity and what it means to be a man. And thank fucking God they do because the definition we use is messed up.

The other thing that gets me is something I read in another article that (naturally) I can't find to link to anymore. But what I read was that when people first noticed that Clementi was missing, they went around to his dorm floor and asked people if they had talked to him. Only three people remembered ever talking to him. THREE. I have no idea how big the dorm floor was, but that is not very damn many. All I could think of is how shy and lonely he probably was, away at school for the first time and the to have his roommate pull a bullshit prank like that. No wonder he felt like he had no recourse other than to jump off a bridge. It's reminds me of the old adage "When I was young, I admired clever men. Now that I am older, I admire the kind ones." Or something like that anyway.

Tragedies like this just remind me how far we have to go as a society in general but as men in particular. It needs to stop being okay to refer to people as fags. It needs to stop being okay to use gay as a synonym for stupid. And we absolutely have to stop teaching men that death is a better option than being gay.

We all have to do our small part. I'm doing mine. Won't you join me?

The song goes on

One of my favorite songs of 2007 was Mary Chapin Carpenter's "On With The Song." It was the first song in the Best of 2007 year-end list and together with Debbie Harry's "Two Times Blue" was probably the co-song of the year for me that year. "On With The Song" is an example of something that rarely works - an angry political rant wrapped up in melody and lyrics. However, just because it rarely works doesn't mean that it hasn't been tried time and again, usually with embarrassing results. But as I said in 2007, leave it to Chapin to find just the right way to combine her anger at the Bush administration with her ace songwriting skills and a killer country-pop hook.

The song was written in response to the Dixie Chicks debacle in which Natalie Maines said at a London concert how they were "embarrassed that the President of the United States was from Texas." This seemingly off-hand statement infuriated many of their fans and country radio as a whole. I always applauded Maines' courage but was left scratching my head by it. Had she stroked out and momentarily forgotten who their main demographic was? The response was predictable. The Chicks were banned from country radio, their CDs piled up in parking lots and run over by payloaders in much the same way that disco records were burned at the end of the 70s. All this and the resulting fallout is documented in the highly recommended documentary Shut Up & Sing.

In "On With The Song" Chapin sings about all the people this song ISN'T for. It's not for people who blindly follow jingoistic bumper stickers telling you to "love it of leave it" and "you better love Jesus" and "get out of the way of the Red, White & Blue." It's not for the ones who gladly swallow everything their leader would have them know. It's not for the ones with their radio signals calling for bonfires and boycotts. In amongst all this, she manages to distill the frustration many of us felt during the Bush years, when it felt almost dangerous to espouse liberal ideas for fear of being called unpatriotic or a traitor to the country. It was a time when I watched with stunning disbelief as we went to war in two countries, cut taxes for the most wealthy of Americans and an American city was left to drown. Fortunately for us, this song was not just for the Dixie Chicks. It was for us as well - "this is for the ones who stand their ground when the lines in the sand get deeper/And the whole world seems to be upside down/And the shots being taken get cheaper."

I always wondered how this song would play in the post-Bush years. When Barack Obama was elected on a wave of progressive hope in 2008, I wasn't sure it would resonate like it did in 2007 when I first heard it. I felt that it might feel a little anachronistic and dated now that it seemed like we were heading into a time when it was no longer scary to be a liberal.

Boy, was I wrong.

I heard this song while sitting in flood traffic here in Ames a couple weeks back. Listening to it, I was reminded that, if anything, this song is even more relevant now than it was when it was released. We're living in a time when FOX News and conservative ideology attempts to drive the national conversation away from real issues and toward inflammatory nontroversies. Birthers, death panels, Ground Zero mosques - make no mistake, all these things divert attention from the real issues. They are dressed up in sexy, scary language so as to dominate the news cycle for weeks. The mainstream media seems to have consumed the Kool-Aid as well. They would have you believe that Obama is a left-wing extremist. All you need do is ask people who really ARE on the left-wing fringe and they'll tell you he's nowhere near lefty enough. Even someone like me who identifies as liberal but not wildly so is at times infuriated with his willingness to compromise his principles. Even with a Democratic president, it's a scary time to be a liberal. Again.

As long as the Sarah Palins, Newt Gingrichs and the Tea Party have control of the airwaves, this song will never lose its relevance. Why is it not surprising to me that Carpenter would write an angry political song that transcends its own time period?

And even though it's still not easy being a liberal, I take comfort in the final lyrics of the song - they apply to so many situations in life.

This isn't for you and you know who you are
So just do what you want 'cuz I know that you can
But I gotta be true to myself and to you
So on with the song, I don't give a damn.

She's that good, folks.

Parallels along the spectrum

I came across this article buried at the bottom of the Google News home page (which, incidentally, am I the only one that really dislikes the new layout?) Given Heidi's and my interest in gay issues, it caught my attention.

The Last Person Out of the Closet: The Bisexual Male

The article made think of two things - one addressed and one, oddly, not.

1) If the struggle for gay rights really is the civil rights issue of our time, the parallels between being bisexual and multiracial really are appropriate and one I had not thought of before. While I feel that the stigma of being multiracial has lessened since the early to mid 20th century if not evaporated altogether, I think it will be a while before those people who identify as bisexual are not perceived by society at large as being on a train - next stop, Gayville. I think human sexuality is so much more complicated and bigger than our paltry labels.

2) I maintain that the biggest objections to homosexuality in our society stem from how it has turned the traditional concept of masculinity on its ear. How a guy like me that is not interested in sports or cars or many of the "traditional" guy things can be straight yet a big burly trucker interested in those things can be gay messes with our collective heads. This is ultimately a good thing as it causes us to see things through a different lens. The fact that the article does not mention bisexual women only solidifies this in my head. That is not to say that bisexual women don't face similar hardships, but rather that the underlying masculinity issue as it pertains to gay rights is the rather large elephant in the room.

Not gonna give in to it

For whatever reason, today just never really seemed to start. And oddly enough, it's not because did what I normally do on my day off from work - sleeping easy, doing nothing. (It's attractive.) I was oddly productive today, getting out to the grocery store pretty much first thing, followed by mailing a package and depositing a check. I also finished my proof from Dreamspinner that I've been working on. But for whatever reason, I just can't shake the funk off today.

I think a lot of it has to do with the weather. It's COLD today. 51 degrees for May 10th is unseasonably cold. It FROZE the other night - something that while not unprecedented is also not common. It's gray and rainy and were this a fall day, I'd be reveling in it. But instead, it's supposed to be spring and it today feels like a step backward. From what, I'm not sure, but a step backward nonetheless.

Another thing that is really getting me is that despite having 8 days off of work, I am still operating on a significant sleep deficit. And I've finally figured out where my sleep deficit comes from - it comes from my early shifts. It's not so bad getting up at 5AM, even though I vowed when I was in college that I would never have a job that required me to report to work prior to 9AM. Life never goes quite like you expect it to and your ability to adapt to it is directly proportional to your success. But getting up at 5AM requires me really to not only be in bed no later than 10PM but honestly, I need to be sawing logs by 10PM. That just doesn't happen. In my younger days (read: my early 30s) I could handle this, but it's been one of the first real signs of aging that I've felt. So I end up going to bed at 11:30PM or midnight and wondering why I'm tired the next day.

Of course, all this sets me up for failure because not being well rested affects pretty much every other aspect of your health - both physical and mental. It messes me up and takes the smart part of my brain offline and puts the more primitive parts of my brain in charge. This is exactly what leads to anxiety, depression and general crabbiness.

I went out with Heidi to the chiropractor this morning and I was listening to Olivia Newton-John, having been put in the mood by last week's Glee, and the song "Not Gonna Give In To It" came on. It's a latter day Olivia song, recorded long after her hit-making days were behind her. It comes from the album Gaia, which was written almost wholly in response to her experience with breast cancer. I love this song because it has a positive message without seeming like a platitude - this isn't "a smile is a frown turned upside down" territory. I like the honest confession that we really are alone in our troubles. Others can support us, but we're ultimately the ones that have to do the work. Witness:

And I feel so alone
For although you care
No one else can share
It's my own misery
In the end it's all up to me

I never even knew this song until I saw Olivia in concert with my sister Wendy in 2005. The performance of this song was electrifying and fit in well with all the oldies. While this performance isn't quite as good as the one we saw, it's the best one I can find on YouTube.



Really, I live a charmed live. I'm amazingly lucky, but much like everyone else in the world, it's not always a walk in the park. It's times like these that I remember what my grandfather always used to say "Life is great as long as you don't weaken." And to tell you the truth, that's really just another way of saying "I'm not gonna give in to it."

Grandpa and Olivia - what a strange pair they would have made!

Taxing no more & a follow-up

The 2009 taxes are done! In the end, she came up with almost identical numbers as I did, and I got to pay 300 bucks for the privilege. But at least I know they're done right AND we have a good place to jump off of for next year which promises to be a little more interesting as hopefully Heidi's writing will not operate at a loss.

I'd like to address the previous post as well. I know that it came across as that which I hate the most and for that I'm almost a little ashamed. Heidi chewed me out for it and told me I couldn't quit blogging until I reviewed Libby Drew's new book for Dreamspinner (which I will be doing.)

I think that what I'm mostly doing is just trying to find a different direction for what I write. Sometimes I'm very frustrated because as much fun as it is to talk about divas (I've been thinking about writing something about Mariah Carey's first album lately), I do crave deeper subjects. I think it's possible to talk about them without barfing your insides all over the place or emptying your purse out for everyone to see, but that fine line is difficult and it's one I struggle with.

Basically what I need to remember is this: this is who I am, you can like it or not. You can love me or leave me, but I'm never gonna stop.

Waiting for a change of heart

UPDATE: Obviously this blog will go on. I would be lost without it. But bear with me as I work through some conflicting emotions and feelings about what direction I want to take it in.

If there's any one thing that I DESPISE with every fiber of my being, it's bloggers that come on and, in a desperate attention grab, announce that they're quitting or thinking of quitting.

That said, I'm giving some serious thought to being done with this. Or at least taking a break. As other blogger friends of mine have said to me over the years, who doesn't think of hanging it up at least 2 or 3 times a year? But then what would we do with all our time?

The reason I'm even going there at all is that I don't feel like my mindset is very much in line with the tone of the blog right now. I'm having a hard time bringing myself to write the posts about cheesy pop music. It's just not where my brain is these days. This leaves me with topics to write about that I think push up to the edge or what's ok to discuss in a public forum such as this. It's hard to write (and, conversely, not to write) about those things. If something serious is moving me or if I'm feeling something intensely, it's hard to write about Madonna's plastic surgery. But it's also hard to write about the undercurrent because, well, it's just too much exposure for this little introvert.

I suppose one option is to take out all personal stuff and just write about music and TV and books when the spirit moves me. But when I think about doing that and how it basically amounts to neutering the blog, I just can't bear to do that to what really is one of the few things in this world that I've created all on my own. Another option is to take my toys and head over to LiveJournal where I can control who sees my content a little more. Wordpress also offers password protected blogs, but I've been through that before and have decided against it. The thought of making friends and family log in to read stuff kind of turns my stomach, especially since I know a lot of my friends are pretty entrenched in Blogger.

As usual, it comes down to balance and how much do you want to expose of yourself? Whenever I do a post that is even semi-personal, I feel like I've put my heart on my shirt sleeve for the whole world to see. The reality is that it's probably only a sliver, but even after all these years, I'm still uncomfortable with people seeing anything of me that is not explicitly controlled. I'm like Madonna - I need handlers or something! I'll admit that I want pretty much everything on my terms so that I can control it and ultimately exert some control over the outcome, but the truth of the matter is that I control only a very teeny tiny portion of what happens. The sooner I get that through my thick skull, the better off I will be.

So right now, I'm on the fence I guess. I honestly can't see myself going through with it, but I also am seriously at an impasse right now. My gut instinct is to save this in draft form and not publish it because in 2 days I probably won't feel this way, but I think that writing it has been part of processing it. But even that is dangerous because, as a friend of mine once said, isn't blogging about the blog one of the surest signs of its imminent demise?

Time will tell.

Easy bake Pam

This was originally going to be a blog post about how I felt like today had been a colossal fail on nearly every front. To make a long (and painful) story short, I woke up to a computer corrupted with spyware. I don't know how it happened. I hadn't even done anything that would put me at risk except for the teensy little detail of not renewing Norton because no paycheck had an extra 50 bucks in it. Lesson learned. Well, I got that all cleaned up and now the damn computer has applications that refuse to connect to the internet. What I probably need to do is a complete Windows reinstall. I'm no stranger to that as I did one about 14 months ago after a similar experience.

Taxes were also on the agenda today - they're nearly complete with just Schedule C and all its sundry forms which we have to file for the first time since Heidi made money on her books in 2009. I tweeted earlier that trying to figure it out is like reading through muddy water without my glasses and that's only a slight exaggeration. We have it mostly figured out, but still. Compound the fact that TurboTax is one of the programs that will not connect to the internet so e-file is in question and I have had one anxious day. It's the first one in a while. I tried turning it off, telling myself it was okay. For whatever reason, I couldn't get off the roller coaster.

One day when Anna was having a bad day, I told her "Don't let one bad thing ruin your whole day." I was complaining to Heidi about my day while I did up the supper dishes and Anna must have overheard me because she echoed my own words back at me tonight. It was a sit-up-and-take-notice moment. So we did what any sane person would do - we got out the Easy Bake Oven.

We made chocolate chip cookies and listened to my iPod. She played the pan pusher like a guitar to the most random song. It was Billy Gilman's duet with Pam Tillis "Almost Over (Getting Over You)".

I downloaded that song on a whim a couple years ago and maybe listened to it once or twice before it got lost in the iTunes Sea. It showed up on one of my random songs playlists so it's been getting more play than usual. Personally, while I like the song, it's slightly unsettling as the (at the time) barely-legal Gilman is almost over getting over 51 year-old Tillis. Watch out Madonna! But Anna loved it. We listened to it three times in a row. We danced around the kitchen and generally looked like idiots, but we had a great time.

So I used it as a spring board to introduce her to some other Pam Tillis songs, most notably "Mi Vida Loca" which seemed appropriate for today.



It was a good way to end the day and although I'm not looking forward to reinstalling Windows (and everything else), I care a little bit less.

Monolith

There's a lot of, well, buzz about Google Buzz. Admittedly, I have not looked into it. Like I need any more social media sites to worry about - the ones I have now cause me enough consternation and grief as it is. All reports seem to indicate that it's less locked down than either Twitter or Facebook so I can't imagine it doing much except for people who really don't care one whit about their online privacy. It is, however, Google so there's no telling.

I've talked a lot on these pages about Facebook and how I both love and hate it. In spite of the fact that I get to decide who I let in, it still seems like the large number of people from different parts of my life all agglomerated in one spot is a bit daunting at times. Facebook helped address that problem with new privacy settings granting me He-Man like power in allowing certain friends to see or not see certain things. It makes it sound like I'm living this seedy double life and no matter how much I wish that to be true some days, nothing could be further from the truth. I just feel like that not everyone needs to know everything about me, or even the small amount that I post online. There's also a false sense of security in that control - no matter who you block, you're still posting it on the internet. There's no stopping someone from retweeting or sharing something that you did or posted with a mutual friend and then there it goes. As Olivia so eloquently put it, "once the rumor spreads, the truth is just a thing of the past."

While this is not a new thing for me to think about, I have been having an increasingly difficult time reconciling this feeling. It wasn't until a couple weeks ago that someone put it in terms that really resonated for me. I'm paraphrasing, which she was as well, but it goes something like this:

"The definition of good mental health is knowing the appropriate response based on the person and the situation."

She (and I) would argue that social media, especially Facebook, takes away that ability to make those decisions. Instead, you're forced into one monolithic response to everyone around you. Personally, I know that most of my inner circle (family, close friends) get me enough that pretty much anything I say will be at least partially understood - but what about the people I graduated from high school with? Co-workers? Long lost old acquaintances? Not so much and not quite as "safe." As usual for me, it's about boundaries and in the world of social media, boundaries are increasingly nebulous.

The same person who was talking to me about this also thinks that whenever successful communication between people occurs, it should be classified as a minor miracle. With all the things that can go wrong or be misinterpreted when people are trying to communicate, I would have to agree with her. It's a reminder to us all to be a bit more forgiving of the people around us. But it's also a mild warning that I think can apply well to social media.

No one is a monolith, and no one should be forced to be one.

Now excuse me while I go post a Barbara Mandrell video to Facebook.

Looping

I had a really hard time sleeping last night. My work schedule has been so wonky - overnights last weekend and nothing but evenings this week - that I fear that Monday will be a total loss while I try to get back to normal. But last night was kind of different. I was caught in a mental loop that I couldn't short circuit, no matter how much my rational brain talked to it. It was as if the part of my brain that had decided to ramp itself up was willfully ignoring the part of my brain that was trying to talk some sense into it. The fact that I finally fell asleep without the help of chemicals is miraculous and a testament to either my improving ability to override that part of my brain or to the fact that I was much more tired than I thought I was.

I slept till 10AM this morning and in the light of day, things are not nearly what they seemed at 1:30AM. It is times like these that I can seriously feel the years being shaved off my life and know that I have no one to blame but myself. So we chalk it up as a loss and try for a win the next time.

In much better news, Heidi is now the author of not one but TWO published works. Special Delivery will be out on Dreamspinner Press in February of 2010. Here's her author page which hopefully will eventually have links to both of her books. And you can bet I will be pimping the hell out of them here.