I seem to be getting to a point where I don’t think I’ve been since college. Three nights a week I’m out and about, I’ve got beaucoup work responsibilities, and I’m PTA president. Man, I’m busy.
It even seems like my downtime needs to be scheduled at this point. It’s a weird place to be. Not fully certain I like it here.
There’s a meme floating currently on Facebook, and as I refuse to install an application just to participate in the fun, I’ll be playing along here.
Said meme is “five albums that shaped me”. I’ve been mulling this one for a couple of days, and I think I’ve got enough to work with.
There you go. Meme accomplished.
I think I lived a fairly normal childhood. While I had a propensity for remaining indoors to play, I also did bowling and baseball for as long as I can remember. I had very few neighborhood friends, owing primarily to the makeup of the neighborhood by the time my parents finally got around to having me, I think, but that didn’t seem to inhibit my social growth (at least, not in my eyes then, nor upon reflection tonight).
I think that’s what makes Emma’s struggles so baffling to me. I’ve been as keen as I can be to offer her every opportunity I had and then some, and still something seems off. Some of it, I know, is her. I won’t deny THAT bit. There always seems, though, like there’s something amiss with the rest of the world as well. Emma, given to drama as she can be, often thinks the world is out to get her, and the more time wears on, the more I think it’s not just all in her head.
I can’t remember — ever — fighting with my friends (at least, not the people I called “friends”; there are some folks that were more than passing acquaintances that made it onto my pre-teen list). I certainly don’t remember having repeated disagreements that led to repeated dissolutions of the same friendship, over and over again. Is this a function of female-to-female friendships? Just Emma? Did everyone else go through this growing up? Am I just quirky (or AWESOME?) enough that I sat in the middle of my web, immune to this common issue? Seriously, I want to know. As it stands, I watch my daughter struggle to keep even one friend, and I worry, because I completely lack a base from which to operate here, and I don’t know if it’s because I had a charmed life or if it’s because Emma’s is particularly uncharmed.
There are myriad ways I’m a lousy father. I do my best, but I know I fall short. Providence has landed me in the arms of a great woman who is both able and willing to pick up my copious slack in that department.
One way I know I miss the mark is believing my older daughter. She never made it particularly easy with her penchant to exaggerate, just as I know that my fondness for teachers and a general belief in their absolute desire to do what’s best for the children in their care exceeds realistic levels. I kept telling Emma — and myself — that it couldn’t ever be as bad as she describes it. I don’t know what clicked, in her and in me, but something did, and I’m grateful.
To that end, today is my daughters’ last day at Middle River Baptist Child Development Center. I’ve watched this daycare:
There’s certainly more, ranging from ‘things that got on my nerves’ to ‘why are you a teacher again?’, but I feel that’s a decent bullet point list.
I’m sorry that I didn’t believe my daughter more the first time through, and I’m sorry that my inaction caused her grief. (And if you’re reading, MRBCDC, that is an apology. Not apologizing for how people feel, but rather apologizing for the actions that were in the wrong.) I’ll be working to make it better.
So the last few days have been an interesting mix of purgatory and hell, health-wise. My symptoms would be tolerable and controllable during the daylight hours, and then jump straight into chills and a spiked fever when the nighttime hit. I finally but the bullet on Friday and stayed home to try to sleep it off, and it seems to have worked.
So if you’ve missed me, that’s why. If not, feel free to disregard. Coming later: thoughts on social networks.
I’m fairly well off, but I’m not horribly affluent. The economy affects me, but hasn’t crippled me. So I think I’m decently qualified to take a stab at what a decent stimulus package ought to do.
For the bored: Keynes is right. Tax cuts do jack, and in a time like this, they only stand to exacerbate the situation. Tax cuts come when everyone has money. First, we need to get some. I’m frankly loathing hearing anyone talk about tax cuts and how it puts money into the hands of the consumer. No, it doesn’t; leaving you with more is not the same as seeing that you have more, especially when people are scraping to get by (and are likely least affected by taxes in general).
Create work. Create jobs. Pay people. THAT puts money into pockets, and lets people spend again.
So everyone on Facebook has been managing a full 25, even if it took days to accumulate the full amount. This has successfully guilted me into rounding out this damn list.
1. I had two of my elementary school teachers at my wedding.
2. The teachers mentioned above chipped in and bought me the microwave for my dorm room after high school graduation. That microwave is right behind me, still functional, as I type this.
3. I failed one quarter of one course in all of my education: third quarter AP Calculus, mostly because I didn’t like doing the homework.
4. If I could pick my career, I think I’d still like to teach, preferably at the undergrad level.
5. I used to be a kick-ass Magic: The Gathering player, having placed tenth in a two-state tournament in Germany at one time (eighth and higher went to German nationals, so I barely missed the cut). I still think I could do pretty well, but you’d have to give me the deck. Creation was not my forte.
6. Favorite movie: Hudson Hawk.
7. Favorite game: Uno.
8. I’m organizing a company volleyball team.
9. Despite being a trash-brained trivia whiz, I actually read very little, bookwise, at least. I read most everything that’s not a book, though, like the backs of cereal boxes.
10. I couldn’t tell you how much money I make in a given paycheck.
11. One Defining Moment: In high school, I was rehearsing for a play (Of Mice And Men), and my acting was pretty flat. My director asked me what it was my character wanted at that moment, and I failed to produce an answer. He LAID INTO ME, telling me that if I didn’t know what the character wanted, I should get off the damn stage. Yeah. That had an impact I still feel.
12. In tenth grade, I organized a reunion of sorts for my fifth grade elementary class at Emily Liadakis’ house.
13. Twice (in fifth grade and in twelfth grade) I played the role of Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I’m fairly certain that the director in high school did AMND solely because I wanted him to.
14. My Facebook friend collection contains ex-girlfriends and girls on whom I have had crushes. This is mildly awkward, even now.
15. The semester my first daughter was born (yes, I was in college, if you didn’t know) was the only semester in which I made Dean’s List.
16. I always thought I made a better techie than an actor. As much as I like being in front of people, My vision of lights and sets is far clearer than anything I’ve tried to put together for a role.
17. I proposed to my wife about two weeks after our first date. She said yes. We did the proposal again six months later for two reasons: our friends said we needed to wait, and we needed a ring.
18. I have a Brown Sr. belt in Taekwando. I started three years ago.
19. I bought clothes at a retail store once in the past… three years or so. That one time, I bought shirts off the clearance rack, getting $26 shirts for $4. I normally buy clothes at Goodwill.
20. I can fix computers by merely being in the same proximity.
21. In high school, I was active on about a dozen BBSes and less-than-active on a couple dozen more. This is what the cheap kids did in the time when you paid for AOL by the minute.
22. I want to live near and/or on the water, but am relatively ambivalent toward swimming.
23. I want a boat, in a bad way. We ALMOST bought a boat at the end of last summer, but the math just wouldn’t work out well enough to keep everyone comfortable.
24. I like redheads, but have never dated one. I have however dyed my own hair red on a few occasions.
25. I have two shirts that say “STAFF” in large letters on the back. One is from working a Fuel concert in college. The other is from working a cheerleading tournament. The Fuel concert was easier.
From a meme floating around Facebook. I didn’t want to do it there. The “Number” was either 16 or 25, depending on who I decide to copy from, so given THAT subjective nature, the number of things here shall be totally arbitrary.
1. I had two of my elementary school teachers at my wedding.
2. The teachers mentioned above chipped in and bought me the microwave for my dorm room after high school graduation. That microwave is right behind me, still functional, as I type this.
3. I failed one quarter of one course in all of my education: third quarter AP Calculus, mostly because I didn’t like doing the homework.
4. If I could pick my career, I think I’d still like to teach, preferably at the undergrad level.
5. I used to be a kick-ass Magic: The Gathering player, having placed tenth in a two-state tournament in Germany at one time (eighth and higher went to German nationals, so I barely missed the cut). I still think I could do pretty well, but you’d have to give me the deck. Creation was not my forte.
6. Favorite movie: Hudson Hawk.
7. Favorite game: Uno.
8. I’m organizing a company volleyball team.
9. Despite being a trash-brained trivia whiz, I actually read very little, bookwise, at least. I read most everything that’s not a book, though, like the backs of cereal boxes.
10. I couldn’t tell you how much money I make in a given paycheck.
11. One Defining Moment: In high school, I was rehearsing for a play (Of Mice And Men), and my acting was pretty flat. My director asked me what it was my character wanted at that moment, and I failed to produce an answer. He LAID INTO ME, telling me that if I didn’t know what the character wanted, I should get off the damn stage. Yeah. That had an impact I still feel.
Enough for now, I think.
Tonight was my high school’s annual Alumni Bull & Oyster Roast. A bunch of men in a large gymnasium, drinking beer and eating food, and most importantly, shooting the breeze. Network value in that room is incredible.
Graduation was 12 years ago and change at this point. Next year, I will have been out of standard non-collegiate education for longer that I was in it. Five years until that holds true for college as well, and my time removed from my school days eclipses the time spent in them, if only in quantity.
Like a memory perpetrator, still I return to the scene of the mind. At Loyola, it’s hard to get back there, as when I go, it’s generally to the new gym/fieldhouse that wasn’t in existence during my time there. It’s an odd disconnection, amidst all the reconnection from one year to the next. It even makes walking on the grass — which hasn’t changed — a new event, as the scenery makes its mark in the corners of my eyes.
I’ve written before about how the times they are a-changin’, and how I wonder what will bind the youth. An election showed me something, I guess. I still wonder though, unconvinced.
I don’t know if there’s a point to this. As you can tell from the timestamp, I probably lost the point some hours ago.
