Aww...dammit!!

I love electronic thingys and gadgets, almost as much as I love life itself. So in theory I should be happy that I've a new, faster, and more up-to-date computer at work. But sometimes theory doesn't carry over well into real life. Oh sure, I received the emails from Dell that my new machine was on its way, so I had plenty of time to backup the files that I really need for my job. And it helped that I had to create backups last October when my computer's hard drive needed to be reformatted and Windows XP installed. But when you're dealing with so many CD-Rs and jump drives containing three years worth of files and data and images, it's a bit frustrating. I spent the better part of this morning looking for the backup files for my email inbox. It wasn't until the middle of the afternoon before I got the drivers for my printer installed; I can now print, but I've lost the ability to scan documents into Adobe Acrobat--and forget trying to print from the campus course schedule and student information systems. Worst of all I lost my email address books and all the mailing lists I had set up. All the contact info for my friends, co-workers, important people on campus...all gone, and will have to be reconstructed, as will a number of software programs need to be reinstalled all the while dealing with the everyday aspects of my job. The final insult is that I can't install the second hard drive that I brought in from home that contains the music that I listen to each day. Dell, in their infinite wisdom, uses their own custom cable to wire their hard drives to the mother board, not the traditional IDE cables of which I have tons laying around my house.

On the plus side, inspiration has returned to me and I've come up with some more topics to write about.

Corrections...in lieu of anything worthwhile

That I haven't been posting at such a prolific rate as I had been has not been lost on me. I can't say that there's one underlying reason for the drop in my writing production; work has been keeping me busy, I've been dealing with a recurring problem with my jaw which manifests itself with aching teeth. Work I can deal with; nine months of discomfort in my jaw and mouth is a different story. Like many people the dentist chair is not the place where I prefer to spend time and is the place most likely to arouse my anxieties. Having your teeth bother you for no good reason is a needless source of anxiety and depression, especially considering all that I went through ten years ago getting some problems taken of then.

So while I'm up for some writing, it's time to correct a few factual errors and oversights from previous posts. First, regarding one of my favorite movies, The Grapes of Wrath, it wasn't John Ford who distributed scripts with the last pages omitted; producer Darryl F. Zanuck was actually responsible for handing out the shortened scripts.

Next, I shouldn't be too surprised that an effeminate character made the final cut in James Cagney's The Public Enemy. It occurred to me after the fact that the movie was made in 1931. The Hayes Code wasn't enacted until 1934. Occasionally you can find some blue humor in the pre-codes films, such as in Laurel and Hardy's Sons of the Desert, when Charlie Chase's character is speaking to his sister (who turns out to be Oliver's wife) and when he mentions that the last time he saw her she was working the bellows for a church organ, he asks how his "little organ pumper" is doing. Even in 1931 I don't think moviegoers would've missed that double entendre.

Finally, I should correct myself and say that the university I work for has attained seventy-five percent of its capital campaign's goal, not the lower percentage I mentioned. I think some folks interpreted my comments as saying people who do development are stupid, which is certainly not the case. It takes a certain type of person with the moxey and persistance to be able to raise money. But what I wrote gave me reason to pause and reconsider my views on the whole fundraising campaign. Ultimately I decided that if my value to my alma mater was measured in monetary contributions and not my contributions running a new academic department whose graduates will ultimately benefit this state and this nation, then so be it. Off came my alumni decal from my car, in a week my membership in the alumni association will expire with no good reason that I can see to renew it. Having less of my alma mater in my life would be a good thing, I believe.

Monday Moronics

There are a lot of good things that come with being a parent. That being said, there are a lot of downsides as well. For the most part, the downsides come with the "entertainment" the child wishes to watch or listen to. At first, some of these things are cute and sometimes kind of catchy. After a while, following your one hundredth listening or viewing of a tape or DVD, it gets kind of annoying. For example, my daughter used to LOVE listening to her Wiggles tape on the way to daycare a few years ago. It got to the point that I had heard the tape so much, that, as a self-defense mechanism, I began to change their song lyrics to something more sinister in my head. On occasion I would chuckle at my inner voice's alternate lyrics, which would prompt my daughter to ask why I was laughing. "Oh, nothing, sweetheart. Just thinking about something I heard at work."

Which brings me to this, this unspeakably wierd commercial from Nickelodeon--a "rap" highlighting the benefits of breakfast. This is one of those aforementioned downsides to being a parent. This is also one of those rare moments where words simply fail to capture the essence of crap. If there were any justice in this world, then certainly this commercial would have ended with the obnoxious plate character being gunned down in a drive-by by the Ryan's Mega-Bar.

Sunday morning and a book

I somewhat recall an in-class assignment I had in one of my English classes during my technical college days some years ago. We had to do some sort of write up on Emily Dickinson’s poem, “I Like to See it Lap the Miles.” I definitely recall being unsure exactly what we were supposed to do or the objective of the assignment, so I began writing sort of a “stream of consciousness,” ideas and observations of the poem, stringing them together like the cars on a locomotive that Dickinson describes in the poem. I missed the point of the assignment but got an excellent grade for my “creativeness.” As I don’t have another blog entry ready to go just yet, I think I’ll try the stream of consciousness approach yet again.

Ah, spring has arrived yet again in the south. The warmer weather comes after a false start a few weeks ago, where the temperature got up into the upper 70s to low 80s, only to fall back into the 50s again within a few days time. Certain signs that spring is here can be found on the pine trees and the numerous pollen blooms (for lack of a better term) on the end of the branches, not to mention the hundred of bees that are now flying around. In the south during the months of April and May, every car is yellow regardless of what color it was when you purchased it. It’s not uncommon to watch the evening weather report on the local news to see that the “extreme” pollen count for any given day has been surpassed by four hundred percent. My personal favorites are windy days, when the air is literally filled with yellow clouds of pollen.

Despite the yellow menace (pollen, not Asian immigrants) I spent the better part of Sunday morning out on my back deck trying to make some headway into the biography of FDR I’ve been reading for the past few months. I’ve finally gotten to the 400-page mark in the book, which is only a quarter of the book. I’m accustomed to being done or almost done at this point in most books! Admittedly it’s hard to plow through a twelve-hundred page book when you allow yourself to be sidetracked by other books that are, or were, in the waiting list. The small font size doesn’t help either, as the publisher can cram much more material onto two pages—not to mention this is the only book right now that requires use of my reading glasses (one of my few concessions to the aging process). But on this particular morning I was able to make quite a bit of progress towards getting to the end of the book.

During breaks in my reading, I sat back and tried to get lost in my thoughts. In the short distance that morning a hoot owl could be heard, his call coming from somewhere along the wooded slope my house sets atop. Suddenly I was back in seventh grade, in particular Mrs. Ryan’s social studies class. It was late spring, and our elementary school was not air conditioned so the windows were open. Believe me, in the south a school without air conditioning, or any building that lacks it for that matter, is not where you want to be and not very conducive to learning. From the tree line beyond the cow pasture next to the school (yes, next to the school) a hoot owl would make his/her presence known just about everyday. The first time Mrs. Ryan heard this, she asked the class, “Okay, who’s making that noise??” And she asked that multiple times, so fierce was her determination to discover the offending student, little knowing the sound was coming from outside. She had a southern accent so I had assumed she was from around these here parts and knew about hoot owls. Apparently not. Perhaps Mrs. Ryan knew about social studies, but she didn’t know a damn thing about hoot owls. And I wonder why our state ranks nearly last in educational rankings.

As the sun began to clear the tall oaks that are behind the house, the glare from reading sunlit pages (magnified 1.5x with my glasses) started to give everything I looked at a bluish hue. I stopped to flex my hands, which were starting to cramp from trying to hold the book at an angle least reflective of the sunlight. Geez, I thought to myself. My hands look so old! Maybe it’s just the dry skin, I tried to reassure myself. Most people I know guess wrong when it comes to my age; it would seem that in my face I don’t look as old as I am. A lot of the folks I work with have been surprised when I’ve told them my real age. One of the reasons I’ve grown facial hair is to add a few years to my appearance—well, that and I look dorky without it. Last Saturday my daughter had to ask me, “Why do you have wrinkles?” I resisted the urge to tell her they come with being a parent and explained how skin loses its elasticity as you get older. Sigh.

It then occurred to me how little things have changed in my life the past few years as far as my daughter is concerned. She truly is a “Daddy’s Little Girl.” At one point of time my wife had exclusive rights to give the child a bath; on occasion I would pitch in at bathtime as needed but most of my duties entailed getting the child up and dressed in the mornings, get her to daycare, get myself to classes then to work, pick the child up afterwards, and then prepare dinner. Juggling a full load of college classes with a job and an infant/toddler is exhausting work, take it from me. I’ve been out of college three years now and I’m still feeling tired from the ordeal. At least I had my wife to help out; my hat is really off to those single moms who are trying to juggle those responsibilities without a safety net.

But I digress. A few years ago bathtime fell within the realm of tasks my wife would take on. Since we moved into our house three years ago my daughter has requested, nay, demanded, that I be the one who gets her into and out of the tub. I don’t mind, really, except during those times when I’m busy with something else, for example, “Sorry, sweetheart, Daddy’s hanging a ceiling fan. Mommy’s going to give you your bath tonight.” That’s usually followed by three minutes of whining. The task of giving the child her bath this past weekend was mine. I had hung a net in her tub the weekend before as a place to keep her tub toys, and it was then that I noticed that she had more Barbie’s in her bath than any hot tub at the Playboy Mansion.

With the arrival of spring and clouds of pollen also comes any number of plants blooming around the house. As I prepared myself to delve back into my book I noticed the sweet smell of some flowering plant nearby. I’m still not sure what plant it was; it’s too early for honeysuckle; we’re too low in elevation for mountain laurel; we have some shrubs on either side of the yard with white blooms but I’ve no idea what they are. Perhaps it was the wisteria growing in our neighbor’s yard. Regardless, it was a nice smell for a change, not the fowl odor that blooms on Bradford Pear trees emit in early March. For twenty seconds I caught a case of Spring Fever, and began thinking of people I know and have known—family members who have passed away, friends I’ve had for many years, other friends who passed into and out of my life with so much cat burglar like stealthness, former girlfriends. Yes, spring; filthy, shameful spring. I could consider all the “what ifs” in my life, speculate how my life would be different now if I had made one or two decisions differently. But I find the “what is” much more preferable to the “what ifs.”

The twenty seconds of Spring Fever, which in recent years has been more like a minor case of melancholy than anything else, passed by quickly and I considered myself healed of all the evils of the illness. Perhaps my immune system would be better equipped to fight off Spring Fever if I took some time off. Certainly I could use some time off to try to catch up on some sleep and generally rediscover my life’s “center.” I have four months of combined accumulated sick and annual leave, and wouldn’t it be nice to use it all up at once. Four months with pay! That would be nice, but it ain’t gonna happen. I could certainly use that time to copy most of the movies on my DVR onto DVDs, something I’m going to need to do soon as I’ve used ninety hours of the total ninety-six hours the machine will record. I seem to add a lot of movies during free preview weekends of HBO and Showtime. HBO had theirs a few weeks ago. I saw Napoleon Dynamite for the first time. I knew of the movie, the more quotable lines of dialogue, and its place in current pop culture, so I made it a point to see it…and I didn’t get it. My DVR had been set to record the movie, but I shut it off after twenty-three minutes. Maybe I need to see it again, to see if I can catch anything I’m missing. Or maybe I see a little bit of myself in Napoleon which I don’t find very funny. Also recorded Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban; I have no desire to read the Harry Potter series of books, but I find the movies to be entertaining.

Showtime did their free preview this past weekend. For the most part I didn’t think the movies they were offering up were as good as the lineup on HBO, but they did show The Spongebob Squarepants Movie on Saturday morning. I’m very hit-or-miss with Spongebob, but I liked the movie. They added a few jokes that would never make it into the regular episodes on Nickelodeon. And as my wife would quickly point out to anyone who asks, I’m just a big kid anyway.

Enough! I had allowed myself to distract myself long enough and it was time to get back to my book. When I left off, FDR was hunting a cyborg from the future who was hunting a lady named Sarah Conner. No, wait…different story. I got back to my book and was well along with the first page when my daughter joined me on the back deck. For all practical purposes reading time was over. Besides, it was noon though I didn’t realize it, the time change the night before throwing off my internal clock. In a couple of hours we had a birthday party to go to, so it was time to feed the child lunch and get her ready to be a social butterfly again. Boy, I could use a vacation.