MadMania

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless — it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.”

‘Who are you?
Nobody.
Who is Porridge?
THE MOST IMPORTANT PERSON THERE IS.’

I’ve done a lot of things in my life, but probably the coolest thing was providing the voice of Snake Eyes on G. I. Joe Renegades.

I hate working on cars. I really freaking hate it.

There are many good reasons to work on a car: you are a mechanic, you are Tony Stark, or you are clinically depressed but don’t quite feel like dying. There are abundantly more bad reasons: you have to get to work, you are on vacation, you like your knuckles like Phineas and Ferb, e.g., un-busted, you want to stay non-filthy, or you don’t have the money to pay someone else to do it.

Elsa and I spent Saturday changing the starter in my car. It wasn’t her very first foray into mechanics, but the first big project, I think.

In some ways it was a pretty good representation of mechanic work: lying on your back on asphalt, getting all greasy, having to do mechanical work when you don’t feel like it, making a trip to the store for tools.

But in other ways it was quite unrepresentative: nothing went wrong, we only had to make one trip to the store, no one got hurt, no one skinned their knuckles, the old starter came out relatively easy, the new one went back in rather easily, the weather was nice, and everything just worked on the first try.

I’m not complaining about everything going so well. It’s just that I’ve set Elsa up to think that working on cars is fun and/or easy.

The first cassette tape I ever bought was the soundtrack to Phantom of the Opera (I already had a pirated version, but wanted the real thing). Sarah Brightman played Christine, and I loved her voice. Shortly after I bought this I started hanging around with Noodles. She did not think very much of Ms. Brightman’s voice.

And so started a trend that has followed me the rest of my life: whatever female vocalist I like, the women in my life do not like.

I started listening to Emmylou Harris the year before I met my wife. I have repeatedly said that I would listen to her sing the phone book. Heather and I were married 14 years before she revealed to me that she just didn’t care much for Emmylou. At all. We stay married for the children.

And so time passes by. My 14 year old, The Baby, has been a musical child since she was at least 2, and has always sang (we used a song to teach her to spell her name when she was little). She has always loved musicals (even bad ones). She first saw Phantom of the Opera when it hit the big screen back in 2004. The other day we were talking about different musicals, Les Miz, Phantom, etc.

“I love Phantom of the Opera,” she said.

“I just hate Christine’s voice.”

sigh.