Frenzied Daddy

Miss B’s been all over us trying to go see Narnia. Unfortunately, it’s just not a good time for it. Gramma K, however, found a theater still showing it off in the bowels of South East Portland, and she surprised Miss B yesterday with an impromptu trip. Miss B was flying high all yesterday! Kudos, Gramma, Kudos!

“Who used all the toilet paper?! C’mon people, this stuff doesn’t grow on trees!”

Over on West 116th street, she’s taking a break from cable television. By “Taking a Break,” I mean — she’s cancelled her cable service and isn’t planning to renew.

The television irritates me. My favorite name for it is “the glass teat” (Thank you Harlan Ellison). Also available are “the idiot box” and “the boob toob.” Well, it’s not so much the television itself as staring at the damn thing for six or seven hours in a row. Oddly, the computer doesn’t bug me as much. To condense the West 116th entry, she has three points that the television does:

I conclude that television is an extremely effective and powerful way of controlling, manipulating, and distracting the American people. It works in three very basic and obvious ways:

1. Making you the passive observer of current events.
2. Making you a consumerist whore.
3. Distracting you from the real problems.

I admit that there are times where I need to be distracted. But isn’t it a current media joke that the television media (Fox News in particular) hasn’t any news unless a young white girl goes missing under suspicious circumstances? I mean, I like my Battlestar Galactica as much as the next geek, but sucking on the pre-chewed entertainment for several hours at a time irritates me. And for a further “WTF,” who the heck wrote her and asked how their kid’s going to become a famous baseball player if they can’t watch ESPN?

Gramma K came over yesterday afternoon, and as I was chatting with her, Baby K (of course there’s a relation!) came pattering out of the bedroom. We had put her down for a nap roughly two hours previously, in her crib. And nobody had let her out. Apparently she figured out how to get out of the crib!

We are in so much trouble.

I tried putting her back into the crib for bedtime last night, and then stayed near the door and secretly watched her escape. She was going to the corner, lifing herself up, hooking one set of toes over the crib wall and then scissoring her legs together and rolling over, then dropping soundlessly to the floor. I tell ya, if the whole President of the US thing doesn’t work out, she’ll be able to fall back on her career as a cat burgler. I picked her up, told her it was bedtime, and tucked her back into the crib. Four times. Then I figured I’d rock her to sleep. No, that wasn’t going to happen while she was awake. Eventually she got so tired that she fought me even holding her and snuggling on the couch. And on the bed. Then I tried putting her in the playpen, which I think has higher walls and less places for her toes to grip. But this was to no avail– she was out of that in moments.

Finally, I took her downstairs and put her in the baby corral. It’s a plastic playpen with segments and a door- it’s pretty big. I put a blanket in with her and turned out the light. A few minutes later she was back in my lap.

Finally, I put her in the crib and told her it was bedtime. At two in the morning. She was tired enough to just cry, but I watched her until she laydown and then fell asleep.

I have no idea what to do tonight.

An open letter to my dog…

Hey pal, I know you think the world of me. But it’s hard for me to believe your innocent look when you meet me at the door with bits of diaper fabric stuck in your teeth. No, no, don’t kiss me.

Last week, I rented Howl’s Moving Castle. It was directed by Hayao Miyazaki, the director of Spirited Away These stories are interesting- they’re an easy vector for Anime to be accepted by American “mainstream” viewers. Disney jas brought them to the big screens here.

I really liked Spirited Away,. Howl’s Moving Castle is similar; Sophie Hatter ( the girl on the cover ) befriends an odd assortment of characters, from the Witch of the West to Turniphead the Scarecrow, and they all tie together before the end of the story. What I really liked about the story, however, was that Sophie’s (I’m not spoiling anything, really) curse is explained but the removal of it isn’t. We see how the curse is lifted and we can surmise the underlying cause, but it’s not as obvious as “being kissed by your true love” or anything. It’d be interesting to watch this with my daughters and find out how they think it’s lifted. Miss B, for instance, has a very solid grounding in Magic and how it works- she’d be the expert witness.

And Miyazaki has optioned to bring Ursala Le Guin’s Earthsea books to the screen too! All the Earthsea novels in one arc of one movie; I’m not sure how well it’ll translate. But I’ve been waiting a long time to see someone’s interpretation of the novels. So long, in fact, that I once wrote a college admissions essay on a quote from one of the novels. It didn’t help me get into Stanford, though; I guess I was a little full of myself, writing that I was a “man, above Nature.”

According to that link, I totally missed the point of A Wizard of Earthsea. Le Guin is a Taoist — which I didn’t even pick up on during my high school reading of the novels, probably because I didn’t know what Taoism was. But the stories are a circle of balances, of the dichotomy between light and dark. Read the link for more info.

I just don’t feel like cutting and pasting.

“Is this a recipe?” Mrs B asked, suspiciously. She was eyeing the porkchops braised with apples, the rice, and the sauce I made with the braising liquid, sour cream and the immersion blender.

“Uh, yeah, it’s a recipe,” I said, crossing my fingers- It was a recipe I created, based on a couple of other recipes and keeping in mind a delicious hungarian pork chop recipe I used to be served. I took four pork chops and two apples, cored and sliced the apples and tossed them into the slow cooker, added the pork chops and a cup of water, some cinnamon for good luck. Then I tossed in some carrots I found in the fridge. I let them simmer for roughly six hours, removed the pork and the carrots, put in some sour cream and blended the snot out of it.

It was pretty good, but a little sweet. And next time I need to trim the chops better.

A hack is a clever mod someone makes. Usually it’s a hack to a device or program; I can “hack” WordPress to bring it together with another set of PHP Scripts. But there’s another way to use hacks: LifeHacks, or using the hack mentality (changing something to work better for you) on how you run your life.

Most of the entries on that LifeHacks page seem to revolve around a mechanism for keeping notes for yourself or some others; using a blog for sysadmin reports, using a wiki for keeping your memory in line. I’ve used both of these techniques, and I really like using the wiki for keeping the memory together. But this one is very interesting too:

You don’t exist.

You just think you do.

We’re nothing but the stories we tell ourselves. We know in our hearts what kind of people we are, what we’re capable of, because we’ve told ourselves what kind of people we are. You’re a carefully-rehearsed list of weaknesses and strengths you’ve told yourself you have.

(Self-confidence, for example, is a particularly nebulous quality you can easily talk yourself out of having.)

You owe no allegiance to that self-image if it harms you. If you don’t like the story your life has become — tell yourself a better one.

from BloodLetters

I like this because … everyone wants to believe that they’re the hero of the story. (Hey now, don’t be argumentative). But a story can change dramatically depending on the voice you use and the way you frame the incidences. Look at the story of Beowulf, and then the tale John Gardner told of Grendel.

So make your tale a heroic fantasy; don’t suffer like MacBeth or King Lear and be the tragic hero.