Better off dead

Since my recent posts have been pretty relentlessly cheerful, I thought I'd go for a change of pace.

I had a rather horrifying nightmare the other night. I think I was at a wedding. There was something vaguely doglike around, and people were acting like it was a dog, but I knew it wasn't. It reminded me that robot dog from the original Battlestar Galactica, but smaller and somehow monstrous. I saw that my recently deceased uncle Dave was the owner of the dog and I looked at him and said, "Uncle Dave...but aren't you...dead?"

Then he started decomposing, and I remember thinking that his skin was like runny cheese. It was kind of creepy at the time, but I went back to sleep. When I mentioned it to Jen the next day, there was that sense of distance that comes with morning, but that creepy feeling crept back to me as I described it to her.

Lily had a nightmare the other night too. She wouldn't say what it was. I usually ask, but Jen just wants to get her off the subject. Lily commented that the dreamcatcher near her bed didn't catch the bad dreams, and Jen made what I thought was a good save, observing that Lily had taken off some of the feathers and that's probably why it wasn't working.

Lily usually spends Fridays with her great-grandmother on Jen's side. Lily is getting very conscious about Great Nanny's age and the infirmities that accompany it. Lily has occasionally said "I never want to get old!", which reminded me of a Woody Allen line, "It is a sad fact that 50 percent of marriages in this country end in divorce. But, hey, the other half end in death. You could be one of the lucky ones!"

I was thinking of that when she came right out and said "I want to die before I get old."

I'm not sure she what she thinks death is ("The undiscovered country, from whose bourn, No traveller returns"), and I'm reluctant to bring up the topic because it does tend to be traumatic for her. She talked about her hamster getting better and I told her (gently) that dead is forever, but I don't think she accepted that.

Heck, I don't know if I've accepted it yet.

I would walk 100 miles, and I would walk 100 more

Taking a momentary break from the "My friends are awesome" project until I wrap up the next batch. See my blog at http://where-there-had-been-darkness.blogspot.com/ for previous installments in the series. Or you know, just read them as they post on Facebook. But where's the fun in that?

I try to walk every day at lunch for at least half an hour. I've got the cardiotrainer app on my phone and use it to track my walks. I broke 100 miles today. Specifically, in 49 walks, over the course of 23 hours and 42 minutes, I have walked 100.74 miles. That makes me happy. (And healthy!) So, yay me!

While walking, I'll usually listen to podcasts of NPR shows, which usually manage to be interesting, even if I don't really care about the topic they're covering. (Which is my goal with blogging. I try to keep my writing engaging enough so that my mom doesn't mind reading about the new lineup for the Green Lantern Corps) The subject of yesterday's show was "How do you know your pet is getting the right nutrition?" I don't have any pets. I don't even especially like animals. Sorry Tim! Not that I'm mean to them. I just don't like being around them. I just try to avoid them. If I wanted something smelly and subhuman rubbing against me, I'd hook up with the cast of Firefly. And I still listened to the whole show anyway. I'm such a dork.

I was reading Lily a story at bedtime the other night, about a girl named Marty being jealous of another girl named Kris, because Marty had been the best kicker on her soccer team until Kris showed up. While reading to her, or watching a show, I'll ask Lily how a character feels or why an act was chosen or what the best choice was to make in a situation. "Why does Marty feel that way?" "What would you do here?"

We were talking about Kris, while Lily had previously used a female pronoun to refer to Kris, she later called Kris a boy, probably because she knows several boys named Chris. I asked her about it and I think she just got confused when she spoke, and she owned up to the error, saying "Mistakes are another way to learn."

I think that's a great attitude. If we can expand that to losing, I think we'll have a healthy kid on our hands. (She's still a terrible loser)

I also ask her about words she might not know. She's pretty good at guessing things from context, but sometimes we'll come across a word whose meaning she can't guess its context. We were reading "Come Rhyme with me", which Jen hates, but I enjoy. It's 26 pages, with one rhyming couplet per letter (the final word being hidden behind a flap of page) and the accompanying illustration providing additional clues. I usually read everything but the last word and let Lily guess it (though I'm sure she has them all memorized by now).

Last night we were at D:

D is for dragon, who is a skillful flyer
be careful when or you tickle him or he'll roast you with his ????

(If you're playing at home, Doctor House, the answer is "fire")

and I asked her if she knew what skillful meant. She answered "Ummm..I think it means 'scary'" and I explained that it meant being good at something. If asked her what she was good at doing. She said she was good at running, then she caught on without any prompting and said, "I'm skillful at running!"

When Jen came upstairs, Lily was eager to show off her new word, "Mommy, Do you know what skillful means?! It means being good at something! Daddy's skillful at cooking," (I think happened to be on her mind just because I was the one who cooked dinner last night "and I'm skillful at running," (she's proud of how fast she runs. She calls herself "The Blur") "and you're skillful at driving your car because you hardly ever run into any trees!" Heh.

Also that night, she asked if she were pretty. I said, "You're the most beautiful kid I know," and she said "You shouldn't say that. It's not nice to other kids out there." We've been trying to avoid that kind of comparison, and I was glad she called me on it. I want her to be confident enough when she gets older so that she won't have to measure herself in comparison to other people. I want her to know who she is and what she is, and to be happy with that.

I remember reading Siddhartha by Herman Hesse, and one of the things that stuck with me from the book is a conversation that Siddhartha had with his friend Govinda, where Siddhartha says that the lessons taught by the ascetics are circular, but Govinda likens them to a spiral staircase, where one arrives at the same place, but at a higher level.

I was thinking about that as I get older, I'll sometimes arrive back at viewpoints I once held, but later discarded. And the whole process is strange, returning to beliefs you once dismissed, but now hold for entirely different reasons. I'm not sure of what to make of this, except to remember to be less certain that the views I now hold are the right ones. As Anubis said to Wakim under similar circumstances, "That may be the beginning of wisdom, then." (Roger Zelazny shout out!)

Part of it is being a parent and saying things to Lily that I can remember my parents saying to me, and understanding all this time why my parents acted as they did.

Speaking of parents, I asked Lily how I got my name and she said "Grammy Kathy named you after the Joshua tree."

My Friends are Awesome: Jen

Jen and I were talking about friendship at one point during our first year dating, and Jen said that she considered me her best friend. At the time I thought it was a very sweet sentiment and said so, but I also thought it was such a girly girl thing to say. I mean, sure, I thought she was a friend, but your boyfriend/girlfriend isn't your best friend! Everybody knows that other guys are best friends for guys and girls are best friends for girls! That's just how it is! Are girls going to stay up late playing video games, watching terrible movies, eating candy and drinking soda?

And yet, somewhere along the line, I started not just thinking of her just the woman I loved or a person I liked, but my best friend too.

I always liked Jen before I loved her. I first hung out with her when I was dating a crazy girl. Jen was a friend of Dave's, back home from college and looking to hang out with some of her buddies. So she hung out with me and Dave and crazy girl and later that night we decamped to the Lord's house to watch Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

I remember thinking that she seemed really nice. I suppose I thought she was pretty, but I didn't really notice that except in the abstract sense, because that's something I don't tend to notice when in a relationship with someone else. I've always thought Jen was pretty. I still think she that she has the most beautiful eyes I've ever seen.

We had another close encounter when Dave and I were working at a local Laneco (a chain of combination grocery/general merchandise stores. The entry on wikipedia implies that they were the model for Wal-Mart's super centers).

I was working outside pushing carts around the parking lot. Dave was doing something in the store. I saw someone put a note on his car, so I went inside and mentioned it to him, "A little red-headed girl put a note on your car," so he went out, got the note, looked at it and said, "That's my friend Jen. You should go out with her." I said that I couldn't, because I was already dating somebody. (I was still with crazy girl)

But I eventually broke up with crazy girl and started dating Jen. I'll leave that for another post, since this is "My friends are awesome", not "How I met your mother".

Eric once said that if he ever met someone who said that they didn't like Jen, he'd want to know why.

When Jen and I met with the UU minister to for pre-marriage arrangements, the minister said that while she was advising us to get married, sometimes she'll advise a couple not to. She expressed a little concern about my tendency to put Jen on a pedestal. And I do that. And I understand the danger in that, when someone you've been holding up as an ideal fails, the more you have built that person up, the more devastating the eventual disappointment will be (Here lies a fallen god/ His fall was not a small one/ We did but build his pedestal/ A narrow and a tall one)

But here's the thing. She's too modest to admit it, but I believe that Jen is really as great as I think she is. She's kind and she's smart and she's a good and loyal friend and a great mommy. One time when we she was still out at college, near Pittsburgh, I sent her a letter (snail mail!) that said that she should never change. She should evolve and become more of what she is, but that she should never change from that fundamental Jen-ness.

One time Greg mentioned that I got the better deal out of the marriage. And I think he intended that as an insult, but is there any way I can deny really that? She's better than I deserve, but being with her helps me become a better person. And I don't want to use Jack Nicholson's line from As Good as it gets, but I guess I might as well, because I'm sure you're all thinking it. She makes me want to be a better man.

My Friends are Awesome: Tom

Tom! The very name sets the blood afire! From the dawn of time he came, moving silently down through the centuries, living many secret lives, struggling to reach the time of the gathering, when the few who remain will battle to the last. There can be only one, and that one is Tom!

Tom! He's smarter than Rose and more beautiful than Davros, with the compassion of "Doctor" Greg House and the maverick cred of Mal Reynolds.

Tom! What can I say about Tom that hasn't been written with brightly colored pen in the notebooks of a thousand schoolgirls already, their first names followed by Tom's last name in curlicued practice signatures?

Tom! His father was an elephant, his mother was a crocodile, his grandfather was a gorilla, and his other grandfather was a gorilla who had been trained in Ninjutsu! He stands ten stories tall and has radioactive acid breath. He kills five men every day before putting on his pants, which he does both legs at a time! He bends steel with his pinky toe and extracts wasps from stings in flight!

Tom! It is Tom who ghostwrote the Goosebumps books for R. L. Stein, burning his holy writ in thirty-foot-high letters of fire on top of the Quentulus Quazgar Mountains in the land of Sevorbeupstry on the planet Preliumtarn, third out from the sun Zarss in Galactic Sector QQ7 ActiveJ Gamma.

Tom!

To understand the person he has become, you have to understand the boy he was. From birth until age 12, Tom lived in an attic, united with his conjoined twin Hugo, with only fish heads for sustenance and DVDs of Firefly for "entertainment". Eventually they were separated in a radical but compassionate procedure Tom pioneered, with Hugo achieving modest success as an actor under the stage name Matt Smith and Tom marrying a woman who worked with me.

I knew Tom's then-fiancee Jen from the bookstore where we both worked, and of course his legend is whispered in hushed silences in even the most sheltered portions of the globe, but I would not be lucky enough to finally met Tom in person until shortly before the wedding. Instead of wearing a tuxedo, Tom would dress up in a Cyberman outfit but rather than a Mondasian Cyberman, he dressed as of one of John Lumic's parallel universe Cybermen from the modern series, which hadn't even been invented yet!

Tom went underground after that, partially due to his increasingly public feud with Dick Cheney and well as the fact that sentiment was turning against his grassroots organization CAMOS (Committee for the Advancement of Mediocrity in Outer Space Westerns)

Someday, when the world is at its darkest, and hope seems gone, Tom will return to save us from ourselves. Until then, we must strive to live up to his impossible ideal. It is to Tom's credit that his nigh-infinite awesomeness serves not to invoke jealousy, but to inspire us all to live up to the Tom-spirit that lives with all of us.

I leave you with a quote from America's first poet laureate. It is fairly well known in certain circles that Raymond Chandler's stories of Philip Marlowe are thinly disguised accounts of Tom's more mundane adventures. In the The Simple Art of Murder, Chandler writes of Tom.

"Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world."

And that is our Tom in a nutshell. The best man in his world, and a good enough man for any world.

My Friends are Awesome: Tim

Since I got myself a real blog last month (http://where-there-had-been-darkness.blogspot.com/ is the address if you're reading this on Facebook) complete with tags and everything, I thought I'd do a series of posts with a theme. The theme is "My friends are awesome" and I'll dedicate a post to one particular friend and explain why he or she is so awesome.

I'll start with my buddy Tim. He introduced me to two of the things I blog about regularly, role-playing and Hong Kong action movies. He's also a big video game and anime enthusiast. I would totally cast him as Scott Pilgrim, which looks like such a great movie! Suffice it to say he shares my nerdery

I think the trait that I admire most about Tim is that like Neil Gaiman, Tim is capable of keeping his mouth shut if he can't say something nice, a skill I've never been able to master. I am completely unable to restrain myself when someone says something I don't like. Hey, that Clash of the Titans movie was crap. I think I'll go on a three thousand word tear about it. God forbid that someone mention something vaguely complimentary about Firefly, because it's the only thing I'm going to talk about for the next three weeks.

More than that is that Tim is genuinely decent guy, a trait that counts for more and more with me as I get older. He works at animal shelter and draws all sorts of cool pictures for their promotional stuff. He's an artist too, you see! We share a sense of humor and I think he's a pretty darn funny guy. He's smart and well informed, and he had the guts to teach English for a year in a country as far from his home as you can be and still be on the planet, something I don't think I'd ever be able to do.

Also, my mom says he's a great kisser. But she says that about all my friends.