SubUrban Zen Garden

Movies like Once are beautiful and depressing.  The wife and I were excited about the movie when it first came out, but it blew through town at inconvenient locations and seemed not to tarry long so of course we missed it.  Not long after the desire to see it was forgotten.  Then the Oscars came around last weekend and the performance of the award winning song reminded me how much I had been looking forward to it.  We finally watched it tonight and it was fantastic.

Which is not to say that it is a capital G great movie.  The story is well done, but really nothing spectacular.  The music is very good, but nothing earth shattering.  Really what sums up the movie for me is the way the male lead concluded his Oscar speech with the final phrase, “make art.”  A command to tap into that part of your soul that makes you happy and share it with someone.  That’s the message that came through this movie.  The film makers clearly were deeply in love with their work.  The characters in the movie didn’t seem to mind the day to day drudgery of making ends meet because they found a way to do what and be with whom they love.  That kind of passion will sucker me in and leave me crushed every time.

Perhaps its partly due to my impending-but-not-too-impending fatherhood, but that was particularly poignant to me.  What is it that I am passionate about?  How can I be thirty years old and not have found it?  Don’t get me wrong, I have lots of things that I enjoy, probably too many.  There are also many people that I love, none more-so  than my wife, but I don’t know where that burning passion is.  I’m still waiting and looking for something that I HAVE to do.  I wonder if fatherhood might be that thing?

That really doesn’t seem to be my style, but I am still tremendously excited about the prospect.  Sometimes even more excited than I am terrified.  To be completely honest one of the reasons I fought so long against the idea of having a child is that in many ways I’ve always thought of it as a cop out.  An admission that you are insignificant in and of your own merit so the only thing left to do is procreate and hope that some part of yourself lives on to do something worthwhile.  To a certain extent that’s the literal truth.  Especially in days gone by when you wouldn’t necessarily be expected to live to see your children out on their own.  Now it seems that to do the right thing by your children you have to at least put your ambition on hiatus until they’re done with college.  Or maybe that sentiment is just the risk averse mid-westerner in me.  How does a chid learn to take risks if their parents are terrified of risk?

Learning.  Teaching.  That’s really the crux of parenthood isn’t it?  That yearning to take everything you’ve learned and pour it into the next generation so that they might achieve something greater than you.  Not necessarily for selfish reasons or even to advance your own causes.  Just to see that things can continue to move forward.  That for all the crap and strife and unfulfilling moments  are actually meaningful.  That we have a trajectory and it isn’t downward or backward and it doesn’t end with us.

Fuck, that almost begins to sound religious.  No I haven’t found god.  At least not the capital G god.  Nor Yaweh or Allah or Thor or Vishnu or Zeus.   No, for me it always goes back to Hegel and his god-damned Geist.  Or at least my perversion of his idea.  The spirit of a people operates independently of the individuals within it and can even influence them.  But in the end, the Geist is nothing more than what the people within it make of it.

So uh yeah, Once, it’s a good movie.  You should see it and then you can have your own pseudo intellectual circle jerk.  Oh, and if you’re reading this and didn’t realize that I’m becoming a father, um, yeah, I am.  Due October 2nd, simultaneously too far and too near.

Only 10 days late!  The Karen New Year was January 8th.  We celebrated on Sunday with the local growing Karen community.  In the last year and a half or so, the Karen people have begun to come to the US from Thai refugee camps and in some cases direct from the Burmese jungles they’ve been hiding out in since the military dictatorship of Burma, they call it Myanmar but no one officially recognizes that name, seized power decades ago.

I can’t imagine what its like for these people coming from that part of the world to Minnesota where the wind chill is expected to hit -50F in parts of the state today.  The kids, of course, seem to be adapting to American youth culture based on the fashions I saw on display that day.  Overall the people are very welcoming and friendly.  It was an odd mix with my stoic Midwestern attitude.  Hopefully I didn’t seem like too much of an a-hole.

Sadly there are no pictures from the event.  We didn’t know cultural attitudes about cameras before going to the event and elected not to bring ours.  We realized our mistake almost immediately upon arrival, everyone had a camera of some sort it seemed.  Even most of the very young kids had a small camera or a cell phone with a camera.  So, unfortunately for you, you don’t get to see the colorful traditional outfits or stills of some of the traditional dances that were performed.

Of course, you were never going to get to sample the food, which was all prepared by members of the community.  Very tasty stuff.

Due to a major accident it looks like my normal half hour commute will be a bit longer as it will probably take that long just to get out of the parking lot tonight. Yes, I learned that at lunch, five full hours before the evening commute. Apparently it takes a long time to clean up 8000 gallons of fuel. Hmm… methinks that is good for a 10 cent/per gallon bump at the pump.

Also, Harvey’s, previously known only as the last stop of the night and home to EXTREMELY blurry people and a tiny dance floor actually is a sit down restaurant during the day. Who knew? Apparently Bar & Grill is part of the official name, but I had never noticed that. Equally strange, every strip joint I’ve walked by (and there are A LOT near the office) has a lunch buffet. I had no idea. I don’t think I’m brave enough to give these buffets a shot though. Something about them seems very… unsanitary.

Finally, I’m deeply saddened to report the the Minneapolis Chicken & Waffles place is no more. All that’s left is an official orange notice on the door informing their mortified former customers that their liquor license expired on the first of the year. Happy New Year indeed. This is probably a good development for my overall health, however.

Briefly, happy new year, everyone!  Ours was celebrated in style with our friends making maple ice cream in five degrees Fahrenheit and fluffy snow flakes while the dogs romped around in the yard.  Our friends have a 120 lb. black Newfie/Lab mix and we have a 40 lb. apricot Labradoodle.  They make something of an odd couple, but they seem to have a blast with one another.

The real meat of this post however, is an anecdotal comparison of social networks old and new.  The new social networks being MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, what have you.  In this world, people make a short entry describing the biggest of life’s events, “We’re pregnant”, “We’re splitting up”, “I just saved $20 on my car insurance, ask me how!”, etc and their networks know as soon as they check their RSS feed, or e-mail.

The other network, possibly the oldest, is that of family. My mother’s family is an Irish Catholic farm family from Iowa.  Ergo, very large.  In fact, my mother is the fifth of thirteen children.  The family as a whole ranges from 100% computer illiterate to people like my cousin who runs his own business on his PC from his house.  As you can imagine this has interesting effects on how information travels through the family.

We used to be dependent on my grandmother, the matriarch, who was jovially derided for her forgetfulness in relaying news items.   Sure there were clusters of family that lived in close proximity and mingled more than some far flung members, but Grandma was the central hub that connected everyone together.  Calling lists were half-jokingly discussed.

In the mid-nineties a core of techno-literate family members stepped in to form a new group that had ties into several of the other enclaves and could act to distribute news more consistently, but we didn’t reach the complete graph.  Eventually there was even a newsletter, incidentally it was put together by my aunt who this post is really about, that mostly completed the network, but was destined for a relatively short run of a few years before the ambition ran out and we returned to our previous semi-connected state.

All of this is important background information for a very important announcement  that came between Christmas and New Year’s Eve.  You see, the aforementioned aunt hadn’t been in a serious relationship for over a decade since moving to Denver in 1995 to the best of our knowledge.  This summer she decided to take an adventure in Sitka, Alaska and shortly thereafter rumors began to swirl about a love interest based on photos linked from blog entries among the techno-literate cabal.  Occasional pictures of my aunt holding hands with some guy referred to only by his first name were intermingled with beautiful scenery.  The cabal did not know what to make of this, though it did lead to an interesting exchange an the Christmas party that went something like this:

Aunt 1: Have you been reading Karen’s blog?

Aunt 2: Karen has a blog?

Aunt 3: What’s a blog?

Cabal Reps 1, 2 & 3: Long winded description of a blog.  I started mine with a deep inhalation and “Back in 1994, before the term blog was coined…” and my wife kicked me in the shin.

Aunt 1: So who’s this Robin?  Are they dating?

Wife: We discussed that a lot!  It really looks like they’re holding hands in that first picture.

My mom: They’re dating.

Me: How do you know?  You don’t even have an internet connection?

My mom: She told me on the phone.

All: A general mixture of surprise.  e.g. “I had no idea she was even looking!”

Two days later we got an e-mail announcing their engagement, two days after that I told my mom, a day after that the info really hit the fan and phone lines from around the country, mostly central to NE Iowa, were commandeered to inform the entire family. So, there you have it.  An example of how a non-Web 2.0 social network distributes information in modern society as well as a bonus example or two of how disconnected I am from what most people consider reality.  All of which is just a long winded way of setting up an additional “Congratulations!” to my self-proclaimed favorite aunt Karen.

Congratulations, Karen!

It was a very good year! Things got started a little early because of gift size, etc. You see, in the past its occasionally been a challenge to cram all our new stuff in the vehicle and this year we had a dog and all of her associated travel supplies to haul there and back. So, Heidi decided to give me my bulkiest gift the day before we left, the shiny new monitor I’m using to type this entry, and I gave Heidi the gift I didn’t know how to wrap, a membership to My Football Club.

The following day, Sunday December 23rd, we headed down to Mason City for the Smith clan gathering. The gathering itself was relatively uneventful, but getting there was a different story. The weather report in the morning suggested that snow was coming from Lake Superior southwest towards the Twin Cities, which was fine because we were heading south from the Twin Cities long before it would get there. The only thing we had to worry about was some blowing snow, so take it easy and everything would be fine.

It was a good theory. Several cars were pulled, or more correctly spun, off the road in the Twin Cities. No matter, people in the Cities drive like idiots, there’s always someone in the ditch when its snowing. 15-20 miles outside of the Cities the wind really picked up and there were occasional whiteouts. No problem, just keep your distance, go slow. You know, keep moving past most traffic, but slow-ish. Watch out for the multitude of fender benders on the side of the road.

About 20 miles from Albert Lea flashing lights shown up ahead. The trouble turned out to be a rollover in the median from the northbound lanes. An ambulance and tow truck were on the shoulder of the median in the northbound lanes and another ambulance was on the outside should of the southbound lanes. With a vehicle to my left and another coming up quickly from behind I thought it prudent to ease on the breaks. The car to my left must have done the same because it sounded like someone was sliding. I figured I was a little ahead of them so I should be okay as long as I kept going straight, etc. Then the wind blew me partway into the left lane. So, I attempted to slow down and steer back into my own lane. Hmm. Now we’re sliding sideways down the middle of the interstate heading the general direction of a stopped ambulance with the EMT standing beside it. Oh, and the car to my left is also sliding on the median shoulder and the car closing fast from behind is even more out of control than I am. My wife has covered her eyes, is squealing and her legs have tensed such that she is nearly in the backseat with the dog. The dog is mildly confused by the unusual trajectory.

In the end, all’s well that ends well I guess. I straightened my swerve, the car to the left avoided the median, the car from behind nearly hit the ditch the ambulance and us, but stopped short of all three. Whew! Sorry to be anti-climactic and all, but that’s what happened. We pulled off at the next exit and phoned ahead. Assured that we were just a few miles from clear roads we continued on. The roads never really cleared until we were almost there, but they did get improve somewhat.

The meal went well, at my parents’ I got a Waterloo Blackhawks jersey that I love and some other great gifts. Christmas Eve at the mother in-law’s concluded my personal gastronomical triathlon with some fantastic lasagna.

To conclude, enjoy our animals helping the wife with getting the cards ready to be sent out.