Bored, sad.

No explanation.

A true story from 32 years ago.

The mother's in the delivery room, and as was the custom of the time, the father's in the waiting room.

The mother wears a false set of front teeth, because of a car accident in college; at the doctor's insistence, the teeth have been removed, to the mother's chagrin. It's her first child, so there's a good deal of nervousness in the room.

The baby arrives--a fine healthy baby boy with lots of dark hair. The doctor slaps his butt to remove the mucous and hands him to the mother.

"Well, Mrs. -----, how do you feel?" the doctor asks.

The mother stares at him, and intones, "I'll tell you how I feel if you give me my fucking teeth back."

Senseless?

Not so much beautiful as... ineffable. That thing you always reached for but never quite got.

Or, worse, that thing you never even saw, but just imagined. And the wondering--the "what if?"--never goes away, does it?

Eyes in a mirror, a smile... a turn of phrase.

Yet all gone. No, not gone--never was. A dream, possibly (or definitely) eclipsed by the joy of reality. And never knowing whether you were dreamed of, too.

And the worry: is wondering a form of betrayal--or worse, rape?







(In other news, tomorrow is my birthday.)

Hundred thirty pound weakling.

Having a contractor in your house--even, or perhaps especially, one who is a good friend--is a continual exercise in emasculation.

While he's cutting and measuring drywall, I'm dressing the kids. While he's installing a new plywood floor base (and removing the toilet to do so), I'm taking out the garbage. While he's laying tile, I'm trying to keep myself awake and get the kids to sleep.

During my blogging hiatus last year, I installed recessed lighting in the bathroom--well, finished doing so, anyway, as I had started sometime in 2000. As part of the process, I slathered drywall mud on the ceiling to hide the old stucco that some idiot homeowner had placed there before. It looks okay now that it's been sanded down, but it's, y'know, amateur work, and Rex offered to smooth it out a bit for me.

"Rex," I said, hurt, "please! You've put up new walls, removed water damage, and made my wife swoon with your tile prowess! Leave me the tiniest sliver of manhood!"

Not the Shire yet.

My friend Rex, lead singer of the Gonnas, is a building contractor when he's not lead singing, which is most of the time. He's remodeling our bathroom this week, and doing a bang-up job. That is to say, he's doing a lot of banging and kicking up dust.

Nah, he's great. But our house is giving him a run for his money. The water damage on the drywall behind the original tub surround was incredible--picture the slums of Mordor™ times two. We're talking holes in the wall, mold, poorly cut plaster, the whole shebang. All the old drywall has been replaced with concrete board.

The area under the toilet was destroyed, too--the water damage turned the original plywood to sponge, so that had to be replaced before the tile floor could go down. So, we spent last night in a Holiday Inn.

Have you ever gotten a one and a half year old to sleep in a hotel-issue crib? If you have, can we borrow your one and a half year old, 'cause ours is clearly defective. E only slept when in our bed, between us. D, who is four, had an entire double bed to himself and slept like a baby. (Well, given our "baby" experiences, perhaps the phrase needs revision.)

Speaking of babies, I found out today that a friend from high school had his first kid--a little girl. May he and his wife have even more fun with theirs than K and I have had with ours.

OUCH!

One of WETA's sponsors is a law firm with the most unfortunate name ever, which I am not making up: Harness, Dickey, and Pierce.

Can Barbra juggle?

Television listing in today's Washington Post:

Steve Harvey's Big Time. Guests include people who juggle people (Channel 50 at 8).

They're the luckiest people in the world.

Self-santafication.

Well, I did it; I bought the Mbox, and got a new pair of headphones to boot (for free). So now I have a new toy to play with for a week and ignore. We never grow up, do we?

Worth looking at: America for Sale. The first anti-Bush site I've seen that offers extensive citations (from reputable sources) rather than uncorroborated assertions.

(link courtesy Brian Flemming)

Right now, I'm in a weird twilight between years, unwilling to admit that there are just some things I wanted to do that I'm going to have to say I didn't get finished in '03. (I won't say what those things were publicly, of course -- public websites are not really the place to air negatives or deep life thoughts. If you want more in-depth conversations, you have to call or email!!)

Amateur.

Not a sexual metaphor.

The devil is dangling his carrot. Will I resist? Will I succumb? Will I just buy the upgrade to Final Cut Express 2 instead? Will I stop asking silly questions?

Hey, Devil: now that you're reading, I get to be envious of you again.

No, seriously, regular readers: what's your opinion of software copying, and why?* Personally, I would love for the entire world to go with the GPL; but in the real world, I know people need to make a living.

I tend to draw the line at companies that seem like mom 'n' pop stores, or at least offer a good product at a good price. If someone shares software from a faceless behemoth, I tend to not worry about it.

That said, never in my life (well, at least since I got a second iMac) have I worried about the part of the software license agreement that states, "You may only use the Software on one computer at a time." Even if the same person owns and uses both computers? Give me a frickin' break.

And I will say this: it's absolutely immoral, hateful, and just plain uncool to make it impossible (whether through copy-protection or legislation) to exercise one's fair use rights.

*YES, I'm trolling for comments. So sue me.

And many more!

In this day and age, the people who design DVD packaging should not be allowed to include "interactive menus" and "scene selections" in a list of special features.

Green (little men) for America.

I always suspected Mars was a Democratic stronghold.

Ah, sweet nectar of sound!

Godfrey has made me jealous, so I've been hinting that I want new music production hardware and software for my birthday. I love Pro Tools Free, but it doesn't work on Mac OS X; and the amount of software currently bundled with Digidesign's products is just insane.

Now I just have to figure out why I bought that multitrack recorder, instead of a laptop and the Mbox. (Well, besides the money, anyway.)

K has set me an ultimatum: "Do you want this and nothing else, or do you want to be surprised again?" Ahhhh, the guilt....

Incidentally, as long as we're talking about the Musician's Friend catalog, which a different Jeffrey turned me on to, do you know they sell a keychain which is a callus builder? How insane! I mean, who would use this thing? Someone who doesn't have time to build calluses through, y'know, practicing?

Hey, wait...

"Hey Bertram--want to go skiing?"

"I... have no legs."

Let the record reflect!

"Peggy Sue" is in the key of A.

Now selling Deanie beanies.

Well, I finally did it--I gave my hard-earned money to Howard Dean's campaign. (Well, technically, it's my wife's hard-earned money, since I don't have a paying job.) What pushed me over the edge? A statement Governor Dean made about Liberia back in July. A quote:

Saddam Hussein's was an extraordinarily brutal regime.� The Iraqi people and the world are better off without him.� But that was not the justification the Bush administration presented for the invasion of Iraq.� We based the war on the argument that we faced an imminent threat to our interests from weapons of mass destruction and Iraqi support for Al-Qaeda neither of which have been proven to date.� The world community did not buy our rationale for war or the evidence we presented and it looks like their skepticism was justified.

I stated clearly at the time that our approach to Iraq needed to be multilateral and based on humanitarian grounds.� If we had done so, the entire situation might have played out differently and today we might have the broad international backing we need for the nationbuilding efforts that are now failing.

I opposed the war in Iraq because it was the wrong war at the wrong time, not because I believe American force should never be used.

(Emphasis mine.) I guess I just needed to hear, from the man's own lips, that he was anti- this war, not anti- any war. I don't know about anyone else, but hearing a candidate continually labeled as "antiwar" makes me think he doesn't ever favor military action. Believe me, I wish we lived in a world where that was a realistic viewpoint--but we don't.

So, what happens now? I'm told that when you've found Howard, rather like when you've found Jesus, there are some side effects. Urges to place bumper stickers on cars are commonplace, as is the need to witness for Dean at every opportunity. A total loss of sense of humor is possible, especially if a Bush supporter is the one telling the jokes. Finally, there's the inability to comprehend the fallibility of Governor Dean. But that last one is written off easily, since he's infallible.

Wait! It's happening already! No, no... Governor, I will hew to the One True Path... Put your stethoscope away... AAAAAAaaaaaaarrrgh....

Time-waster of the day: The Urban Legends Reference pages, found because of this in my mailbox.

(Applause, laughter.)

Pyotr, Pwyll, and Murray once sang:

Where's my sense of humor gone?
Long wind passing...

When I started this blog nigh a year and a half ago, I really wanted to just make people laugh--not the side-splitting, gut-curdling humor of Dave Barry, but a gentle, Mao Tse-tung's Little Red Book kind of chuckling. And for a while, I succeeded, or so I'd say, but with each and every good bit, there was a crushingly depressive corrollary.

So how does my humor return? Well, I could try political jokes:

Governor Schwarzenegger! HAHAHAHAHAHAHA...

Or maybe, I could emulate the Farrelly Brothers' style:

Drew peed on my sleeve today! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA...

Or maybe just rely on Zippy-the-Pinhead-style dadaism:

There's a monkey in my pants, and it's breaking its wig over the crimping tool! HAHAHAHAHAHAHA...

(Things are always funnier with monkeys.)

Perhaps it's a yin and yang thing. Since starting to blog again after my hiatus, I've avoided the extreme suicidal posts; you can tell when I'm feeling bad because that's when I don't post. But could it be that the humor only appears in relation to the despair?

Or could it be, horror of horrors, that I was never that funny to begin with? Don't answer that.

If I had a stalker, I'd stalk her in the morning...

Happy New Year! And, oh: whoever my regular visitor is from verizon.net (the one whose referral is always "unknown"), please say hello, eh? Or did my former fan from snet.net just get a new ISP? Curious, but not yellow.