A friend of mine wears very conservative, one-piece swimsuits. She had left her swimsuit and shorts over at a friend’s house, but she didn’t remember where she left them. The friend didn’t know whose they were, so she threw them away. A couple weeks later she emailed my friend the bad news, having recently realized whose swimsuit it was, as it was “hideously modest.”
May 29
oubliette
OOB-lee-ET, n., a secret dungeon with access only through a trapdoor in its ceiling.
May 28
Memorial Day
I know that those who have given the most can’t read this, but I still gotta say it for those who can: thank you to all of you who served our country in the armed forces. I know I enjoy a lot of freedoms and comforts because you gave up some of yours.
I realize that many of you entered the military with the primary focus of getting vocational training or money for college, but you endured a lot of discomfort, separation, boredom, heat, cold, exhaustion and who knows what else in service to your country.
Thank you.
“No person was ever honored for what he received. Honor has been the reward for what he gave.” –Calvin Coolidge
May 20
Music and Memory
Every time I hear Elvis’s I Can’t Help Falling In Love With You it makes me think of Kaleb’s wife.
Hold on–I know I have some ‘splainin’ to do–just give me a second.
Music has a way of embedding memories. Trisha Yearwood and Clint Black, appropriately, used music to point this out, in The Song Remembers When and State of Mind, respectively. Sometimes for me it’s a whole set of memories, if the song was playing for several months during a certain part of my life. Frequently it’s just a single memory–not otherwise significant–it just happened to be when you first heard the song, or it was an event that gave new significance to a piece of music. Sometimes the music marks the event, sometimes the event marks the music.
I was just pulling onto T highway outside of Higginsville when I first heard Alabama’s Song of the South. Every time I hear it I’m suddenly 17 years old in a bright yellow ’79 Ford van. Listening to anything from Blackhawk’s first album or Paul Simon’s Love Songs & Negotiations reminds me of my wife’s and my brief courtship.
The connotations aren’t always so sunny. Every time I hear that really annoying Hall & Oates song (which one, amirite?) I’m reminded of having a giant argument with Heather in our old Mazda in the parking lot at Walmart. Likewise REM, Nirvana, and Pearl Jam bring back memories of working at Worlds of Fun, not having worlds of fun, but making little money, sleeping in my car/in the garage/at a relative’s house/on someone’s couch. Kind of like the aversion therapy in A Clockwork Orange, it’s like pre-programmed misery.
Certainly I had heard the Elvis song a long time ago, but it was at at Kaleb’s wedding that the music embedded itself on me. Mrs. Kaleb walked down the aisle to it, instead of Wagner’s traditional bridal chorus from Lohengrin.
I guess a more accurate thesis statement would have been suffixed with ‘walking down the aisle at her wedding,’ but it doesn’t have the same hook.
Kaleb walked down the aisle to Seal’s Kiss From a Rose, but it didn’t make the same imprint–that song/memory was already reserved.
May 17
More quotable C. S. Lewis, from The Four Loves
“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.”
May 14
Quotable: C. S. Lewis in Surprised by Joy
‘Who are you?
Nobody.
Who is Porridge?
THE MOST IMPORTANT PERSON THERE IS.’
May 10
G. I. Joe Trivia
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.
May 07
Starter
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.
Apr 22
Thank you for the coffee
Dear Nichole,
Thank you so much for the large sampling of Flavia coffee packets. I would write you personally and thank you, but I try not to write personal thank you notes to members of the opposite sex that aren’t from me and Heather. I realize that your kindness will go unthanked, but still I must express my gratitude somehow, and hope that what comes around really does go around.
On the day you gave it, I really needed some coffee. I once killed a man because he came between me and my coffee. I don’t mean that figuratively–he was simply between me and my coffee–and just slightly so, at that. At the trial they asked me why I didn’t just ask him to move. Anyway, I payed my debt to society.
All of the coffees you gave me were nasty, and I hated them all. You told me I would, especially after being spoiled by our marvelous Keurig machine for the last two years. Nonetheless, I appreciate you humoring me by letting me try them anyway. While you did say that Flavia coffee was nasty, I think a more accurate description would be urinesque.
Thanks again,
Dan
