xtcian

incense and peppermints

10/31/05

As many of you know, we take Halloween very seriously in our household. First, was the viewing of "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown," in which Lucy got to watch Lucy:

I guess our tyke in a panda costume was pretty much a no-brainer:

And what were we, might you ask? Tessa was a "bunny librarian." I was a member of the 1960s art-pop band The Left Banke, who had a hit with "Walk Away Renee." I was also a member of The Zombies, and perhaps even The Strawberry Alarm Clock.

Traffic in LA almost derailed us - we spent most of Halloween on Interstate 10:

We ate in Silver Lake, with Lucy now able to sit in a high chair. Despite her love of solids, she was not impressed with the pumpkin ravioli filling. She was, however, obsessed with the duck we brought:

After getting home and putting the panda to bed, Tessa and I listened to the Beatles and carved pumpkins. Happy Halloween, everybody!

we're just following ancient history, if you strip for me

10/30/05

My high school 20-year reunion was last weekend; I did not attend. It was not for lack of intense, some would say morbid, curiosity on what my classmates were doing, what they looked like, who had gone bald, who looked they had filled with water, who was more successful than you had imagined they would be, etc... in fact, I was ready to fly across the county with baby in tow. But then we got this TV deal, and suddenly the distance from Santa Monica, CA to Norfolk, VA looked totally impossible.

Some of the attendees posted pictures on the Kodak website, so it's nice to see how everyone turned out at least, and though my feelings have always been terribly mixed about my high school experience, it kinda looks like I missed a really good time. If approached correctly, those events can be way more fun than the cliché would portend.

playing King Pellinore in "Camelot" in 1985 - no, my hair was desperately uncool even then, and my friends begged me to cut it

Another problem was this: out of the twelve people I called good friends, maybe two showed up. My particular clique, it seems, couldn't get it together for this reunion, perhaps preferring instead to randomly get together in other places. True, none of us live anywhere near Norfolk these days, but I was struck at how few of us were witness to the Seminal American Event of the 20th High School Reunion.

I always considered my particular clique to be slightly dorky, studious, absurdly humorous, and prone towards cultural obsession (I mean that in all the good ways). I didn't think we were "popular" per se, but we kept each other afloat. It wasn't until senior year, when I was paired up with one of the bitchiest cheerleaders in our class, largely suspected of doing all kinds of fun drugz with the lacrosse team (hey, it was the '80s, MAN!) that she said to me - "I'd ask you guys to a party, but there's absolutely no way to penetrate your little clique."

I was stunned. I had no idea we'd forged something envious. In the weeks that ensued, during the long, hot Aprils and Mays of the coastal South, all kinds of social barriers broke down. It's always this way the final days before graduation, when the Senior Class is imbued with a social bravery that comes from no tomorrow. I even went on a quasi-date and openly discussed love with a crush I'd had since the Dark Ages of 1981.

Perhaps reunions offer a time when you can go back into the past and tell your schoolmates that everything turned out okay with you. It was touch and go for a while there, but so far, you nailed the dismount of your young adulthood. Tessa likes to tell the story of why she wrote to me in 2000, after we'd fallen out of touch since about 1995 or so. She imagined me sitting in a dark room getting high, and was worried. Hopefully, I've transcended that prognostication for her.

Looking at those pictures, it also put into stark relief: we are not kids anymore. This is what 38 and 39 looks like. At the 10-year-reunion, people seemed in fine form, reaching the apogee of their attractiveness, but now we are retreating over the other side. I mean, my skin problems and stupid hair allow me to look young, but I can't deny I'm 38. If I'm not careful, I, too, may fill with water.

One more thing about the pictures. Everyone looks like they're having a great time, some even clinging to each other. I forget that many of my classmates went to NA from kindergarten through 12 grade; they were together every single day for twelve years and suddenly it was over. Re-meeting again, now, when they have seen so much and been slightly beaten-down by the world, must mean a lot.

Hell, I look at these faces and think, "I know your mothers! I remember when Amanda was caught chewing animal fat in Mr. Sims' class! I remember when they airbrushed Boo's childhood nipple out of the yearbook! Mike has my birthday and damaged his pinkie on an escalator!"

These faces provide continuity in a deeply non-contiguous world. I think I must attend the 25-year reunion and drag my little, impenetrable clique with me.

Steve Shapiro and I usher at my dad's outdoor concert, 1982

you are here and warm

10/27/05

I'm know I'm going to be a complete hypocrite here, but I'm a little tweaked by the constant suggestion that every man who marries someone pretty or smart is somehow "marrying up." I make the joke all the time, and in fact, it has been something of a mantra among the Williams brothers that we all "married someone who could stand us" etc., but I think if you take that thinking too far, it ends up being problematic and dishonest.

Tessa has taught me to be a better person, and there are at least 743 ways I've learned to better deal with life due to her gentle suggestions and leading by example. And yes, I was a pimpled dork in junior high, didn't kiss a girl at my prep school, remain furious at my childhood assailants, and know Morse Code to 35 wpm - but would it be too pompous to think that she got a catch too?

Everything else, as I'm sure you suspect, is about physical attractiveness. I may have not been classically handsome, but I'm bloody well cute enough, and it never got in my way. I remember a housemate once told me a girl was "out of my league," and I did two things right away: 1) I told him that no friend of mine, including HIM, was out of ANYBODY'S league, and 2) I dated the girl all summer.

Anybody who reads this blog, not to make this a reflection on me, but you are all in everybody's league. None of you has "married up," all of you are brilliant in your idiopathic way, and judging by some of the comments, you possess an introspection and spirit that would qualify you as a coup for anybody.

The idea that there should be some kind of agreed-upon equality in the physical attractiveness of a married couple is the kind of bottom-feeding horseshit reserved for reality television. Transitively, the idea that a bad man needs a good woman to turn him around is a remarkably lazy notion, one that plays upon tired gender roles, allows men to take no responsibility for their own spiritual education, and worse, is boring.

It also sells your wife or girlfriend short, as they obviously saw something in you that was pure and wonderful and didn't sign up to be a halfway house for your recovering soul.

I think a lot of men, when they look deep into themselves, don't see much. We see shame, we see secret stashes of porn, we see that time when we did something awful to that girl, we sense brutality and the desire to beat the shit out of some random guy in a parking lot. Sometimes we see these things and it makes us feel like a fraud, because it's not something we ever share with our girlfriends and wives.

The secret is this: they already know, and decided to love us anyway. And this layer of crap inside men, I've come to believe, is largely window dressing. None of us are as really bad as we think we are, and while it's relaxing to think we were saved by the love of a sentimental lady, it might be a little more empowering to believe that we, too, rock the fucking free world.

love on a farmboy's wages

10/26/05

My friend Carrie McLaren, another Chapel Hill person bursting with immeasurable talent, runs Stay Free! Magazine, probably the smartest collection of hilarious and pissed-off writers this side of the Algonquin Round Table. She's been at this zine for years, and all of you should be daily readers of the Stay Free blog, which features writers like the puzzle-master/cartoonist Francis Heaney and your very own Jason Torchinsky.

I bring this up not only because Carrie's periodical is probably the only zine to survive the heydey of 1993 (complete with Archers of Loaf single), but because she is about to get married to Charles Star (who happens to work for Axiom Legal, which is run by... my housemate Alec from UNC. See? LIGHT BLUE MAFIA!). In doing so, Carrie and Charles started a blog called, wonderfully, anotherfuckingwedding.com.

And here's where it gets a little mean-spirited. Several commenters on both the Stay Free blog and the anotherfuckingwedding page have taken the engaged couple to task (read this page so you can see the vitriol) because they don't approve of the way they're going about it. Stay Free, you see, made a name for itself by trying to take down Walmart, distributing "The Grey Album," going after SUV drivers, and basically being anti-voracious-consumerist. Which means several vocal critics are horrified that Carrie is spending $15,000 on her wedding.

To quote Nina on that page, "Weddings are one of those American Sacred Cows, along with Television, Christmas, Cars, Meat, and Makin' Babies." She meant that in a bad way, of course, but she is right about one thing: if you dare express an opinion on any of those topics, you will get shellacked by your audience.

Dooce almost shut down her blog because of all the vicious commentary she got when people didn't like how she was raising Leta. People never tire of ridiculing vegetarians and lambasting their militant cousins, the folks from PETA. And when it comes to weddings, people just can't seem to shut the fuck up.

Before there was a comments section on this blog, I happened to get married. I posted this entry showing pictures and coming clean about certain emotions, and what did I get? An entire message board, complete with other links, savaged the whole thing. Apparently, Tessa is too pretty to marry someone like me, and I'm goofy-looking and my tux was ugly. "Two fucking preppies in love = BARF" said one poster. And I discovered this whole thing on my honeymoon.

Here's the facts: there is no event with more potential for schadenfreude than a wedding. Everyone thinks everyone else's wedding sucks, or at least, ripe for high-handed commentary. We've all done it, even if it was just in the back of our minds; the difference is that some people like to say so on the internet.

Were we two preppies in love, and am I too goofy-looking to marry someone like Tessa? Well, DUH. By my tux was gorgeous, I'll stand by that.

As for Carrie and Charles, is their $15,000 wedding hypocritical? If you know anything about American weddings, you'd know that's a paltry sum, even by lefty let's-not-make-this-a-big-deal standards. But sure, they could be more "anti-consumerist" by having a druidical gathering of eight friends in the middle of the forest and a picnic lunch.

But why should they have to? Certain things in life demand pomp, demand ritual, demand circumstance, demand gravitas. You don't have to buy into the American Wedding™ ideal, but ensuring a special day takes money. We spent a fuckload of cash shoring up our barn so that 175 people could eat on the second floor without the threat of falling into the pig troughs below.

We all are hypocrites when it comes to the ones we love; we gladly throw away long-held notions when the alternative is such bliss. If a tradition doesn't actively affect you, even your heroes can be granted a day when they are not held to your standards. It's none of our business what Carrie does for her wedding, even if she is the progenitor of one of the East Coast's greatest anti-establishment screeds; hell, I'd hire the Blue Angels to fly over.

I love the Passover question "what makes this day different than all the others?" because, for me, the answer is, "it's the day you shut your piehole about my tux!"

dei sub numine viget

10/25/05

So I'm watching "Commander in Chief" tonight, and one of the characters excoriates the other by saying HE went to HARVARD and SHE was a "Pi Beta Phi from U.C. Santa Barbara." She then totally slays him by saying that she actually went to Princeton and was a Phi Beta Kappa. First off, there's nothing wrong with being a Pi Phi from anywhere, as many of my best friends wore the wine and silverblue and continue to be fabulous people.

Secondly: why all the harshing on a perfectly good state school and what's with the obsession this country has with the Ivy League? Now, this rant is coming from a person who went to a prep school that taught us that if we didn't get accepted to Harvard, we were going to be driving the shuttle bus from LAX to Parking Lot B. However, I never bought it. I never fell victim to the bright shiny lustre of the Ivies and I never believed it was going to cure me of either my intellectual longing or my virginity.

Worse yet, was this mid-80s invention of the "public ivies," as if a school like Cal-Berkeley or us needed our lily gilded. The Wikipedia entry for Public Ivies mentions, among others, UVA, Michigan, Austin, William & Mary and some later additions like Indiana and UC-Boulder. Having visited and "lectured" at most of these schools, I can tell you that the education at these institutions is every bit as good as you make it as the Ivy League.

Let me just go on the record and say that UNC is a better school than Dartmouth. I'll also say that Berkeley is a better school than Cornell. Discuss at your leisure.

I guess I'm offended at the label "public Ivy" because it speaks of an inferiority complex that I'm not willing to shoulder. I also hate terms like "Harvard of the Midwest" or "Harvard of the South" because it denies these places its true character in the reductivist rush to crown a Number One School of All Time, which, apparently, is Harvard.

I say it's time to strike back at this way of thinking. The problem with Harvard grads, and there are many, is that they hire nobody else but each other. This has been bemoaned so often in the entertainment industry that it has become a cliché. So I'd like to propose something to you Carolina grads.

Create more of what my brother Kent calls the Light Blue Mafia; hire UNC grads first, then look around to other state schools. Special consideration should be given to UVA and the rest of the ACC (with one obvious glaring exception). Then go for the public schools of NY (SUNY) and California (UCLA, Cal). Take time out to look at people from Auburn, Tulane and Sewanee, who shouldn't be penalized just because they're from the red states. The rest should come from Chicago, Iowa City and Minnesota. Then let's take over the media from the Cambridge Cabal!

Fuck being a "public Ivy." I went to a school where my suitemate collected his tobacco spittle for two years, and I still got a script deal in Hollywood. Don't call yourself the Harvard of the Midwest! In my book, Harvard is the Carolina of New England!

she's like the village bicycle

10/24/05

Back in 1993, I remember a professor at UNC saying that "email" was the "killer app" of the internet, meaning that the internet basically existed due to the early, incontrovertible adoption of email as they way people talk to each other. In essence, the net spawned email, but email made the net.

Between the heydey of email and the widescale adoption of the World Wide Web, the closest "killer app" was Usenet. If you never used Usenet's "newsgroups," you missed out. It was crazy back then. More on that in another blog.

Anyway, the World Wide Web and the Browser of Your Choice became the next reason for the internet to exist, and by 1996 every college graduate with a pulse was trying to work the angles. Along with my friends, I consider that era our mini-Wild West - and I was lucky enough to help bring to fruition a website that still exists today (citysearch.com, albeit it's a different beast now).

What was to become the "killer app" for your Web browser? My prediction, early on, was porn, dating and eBay. It lent itself perfectly to those three things. A distant second was Amazon, the late Kozmo.com, and Napster back when it was illegal and free.

The true killer app of the internet right now? It has to be Google. People try to say blogs (which are just public diaries, really) and iTunes (which Napster had done just fine) but can you imagine going to college in the age of Google? I remember trying to track down a Latin quote from Virgil [thanks, shannon!] at Carolina in 1987, because I'd seen it scrawled on a painting - after years of searching, I gave up. On Google, 18 years later, I found it in .0863 seconds: tempus erat quo prima quies mortalibus aegris incipit, et dono diuum gratissima serpit.

Why am I telling you all this? Because Wikipedia is becoming the next indispensable killer app of the Web. I don't know why it hadn't occurred to me sooner, but it is the proletariat's dictionary. What if the encyclopedia of the entire world were posted in the town square of the village, and each person got to add their knowledge to it? Everyone agreed not to burn it down or use it for an agenda, but as an altruistic desire to illuminate your fellow villagers?

To be honest, this entry about UNC's "Pit Preacher" Gary Birdsong is what sold me entirely, as it is a perfect overview - with a picture - of a random guy who used to yell at me circa 1988. Everyone else from my generation of UNC grads will remember him, but everyone remembers a different piece of him, and it's all collected there should you ever need it. Which you won't, but still.

Again, why am I telling you all this? Because that Birdsong page linked to UNC's page, which in turn, linked to the page about Public Ivies.

Oh shit, the baby's crying. Anyone got something to add before discussing the Public Ivies?

please more gruel, sir

10/23/05

I've always been fascinated with the first of something, and having a baby around offers very quiet, earth-shattering events every few days.

Take the human heart. In an average human life, it beats 2,500,000,000 - two and a half BILLION - times, and it all started with the first beat. Unfortunately, the human embryonic heartbeat is a bit of a gooey, vague process, and as a parent you don't get to experience it.

So let's take breathing. There are two major revelations to a baby being born, at least for men: the afterbirth, which you only find out about in 10th grade, and breathing. Until I saw Lucy being born, I never fully grasped that the baby would not actually be breathing for a fair amount of time outside the mother.

When she came out, all slick and red and blue, she wasn't moving. Among thirty-five other emotions, I stood in stunned horror, wondering what was wrong. It wasn't until they took her to the "heat lamp" table and put an aspirating bulb in her mouth that she suddenly gasped. It is the closest thing to a miracle I have ever witnessed, and I have never recovered. I experienced her first breath, and if she lives to be ninety, she'll do it an average of 798,912,000 more times.

Now think about a bite of food. Think of how many times you've taken a bite of solid food today, and guess around how many you took yesterday. Think of sufferers of anorexia, think of foodies writing for the New York Times, think of every great date you've had over dinner, think of those picnics as a kid, and every hamburger or bowl of pasta you'll ever eat. Every single social experience, alone or at a long dinner table, every meal you ever had or will ever have began with a single bite of solid food, hopefully when you were around six months old.

Guess who just had hers?

id, meet your ego

10/20/05

Dear American Psychological Operations (or PsyOps):

Just a quick note! I'd like to personally thank you for burning two Taliban soldiers, facing them toward Mecca, and then basically calling the Muslim troops "faggots" for not coming out to fight. That was really cool. Especially after Abu Ghraib, and the Koran/toilet scandal, this was another masterwork of international diplomacy.

I'm so glad you are doing your part to keep us safe here in America - I cross the Manhattan Bridge with my baby daughter a lot, and it warms the heart knowing you're keeping those people in their place. Now they'll never try and do something awful over here, right?

Some say that burning bodies - which is forbidden by the Koran - and pointing them toward Mecca would make any average teen in Saudi Arabia... well, seethe with uncontrollable rage. And maybe turn his life over to fundamentalist causes. And then either blow himself up while taking eight of our Marines with him, or maybe travel in America's direction with a car full of fertilizer. But I'm sure you thought all that through. Pooh-pooh on those who say you're a bunch of insensitive dickwits! Clearly they don't know you put the "pysch!" in "psychological ops!"

Keep up the good work and give 'em hell!

picture yourself in a boat on a river

10/19/05

On Wednesday, Lucy met her namesake for the first time, Tessa's grandmother Lucille Tessman. Actually, my great-great-grandmother Lucy Rigby was also a factor, but Lucille - known as Nonnie to everyone in the family - was the steadfast rock upon which Tessa affixed her entire childhood. Those of you who have Netlfixed (or bought) "Five Wives" will remember Nonnie as the grandmother on the back porch saying that Tessa's dad could buy anything except "those four letters L-O-V-E." Needless to say, Nonnie rocks.

four generations of incredible women

I got there a little late to the Nonnie show, and so did Lucy. When I saw her in 2001, she was still driving herself around, but a bad car accident, a broken jaw and some tiny strokes landed her in the old folks' home in Huntsville, Texas by 2003. She drifts in and out of attention, yet when Tessa shows up, she lights up like a Christmas tree.

Across the hallway from Non's room was a door with a wreath on it, and some sort of medical tape sealing it shut; my guess is that someone had just died. Next door to that was a huge sign saying "Everyone Please Welcome Mrs. Woo!" It struck me as positively existential, the idea of moving to a place you know will be your last. There's no getting out of there, it's the final stop. Judging from some of the looks of the patrons, they're quite content with the notion.

footwear: Nonnie wears the ankle monitor keeping tabs on her whereabouts, with Sandy and Tessa's feet as well

It was Nonnie's 89th birthday, complete with ballons and cake, and though it was great to celebrate it with her, it's just the nature of history that Lucille and Lucy's paths will cross but for a few years, and neither will get to know the other. Think of the time span - say Nonnie met an 89-year-old when she was 6 months old. That person would have been born in 1827 during the presidency of John Quincy Adams. Say Lucy lives to be 95. That means she will live to see the 22nd century. And both will have touched Nonnie.

It's so hard to see someone you love deteriorate, but modern medicine has still not taken the chill off extreme old age. For Nonnie, I believe she is forgetting what feeling good feels like, and is thus not doing the things she ought to be, like taking oxygen while she sleeps. And the worse this gets, the more you slip into a dream state where you can no longer quite be sure if the life you are seeing really exists.

Furthermore, you don't care. It's not a flippant lack of care, like the ones we engage in as young people, but an actual inability to muster concern. This must be the defense mechanism inserted by the Higher Power of Your Choice to keep you from going crazy. In all, a nursing home is a strange environment in which to bring a baby. So incongruous, yet so alike.

Nonnie finally got sick of all the commotion and wheeled herself away. In the recesses of her memory, she knows her family loves her, she knows goodbyes are painful, and now she knows that she made such a huge mark on the world that another lithe spirit will carry her name into the distant future.

vapid eye movements

10/18/05

By all means skip this one if you aren't of the parental persuasion - I used to read three words of "baby advice" columns before turning my thoughts to basketball - but a few interesting things have come up lately.

First off, an article in today's New York Times talks about the growing number of parents who have sheepishly admitted to letting their babies sleep on their stomachs, despite the fact that SIDS rates have plummeted since the "Back to Sleep" campaign started. Anyone with a baby can tell you that a baby sleeping on its back is a baby about to wake up and scream (unless you're one of the lucky ones) so none of this is surprising.

As I mentioned before, we didn't exactly follow the "Back to Sleep" rules either. Our compromise was to put Lucy on her side with those foam sleep positioners and cram them in so she couldn't flop onto her belly. One reason this side-sleeping was so comforting, I think, is because the positoners simulate being on your belly and all the tummy-related comfort that gives.

This worked really well for us until she got very strong, very early, and just did whatever the hell she wanted to do. She started rolling over - from either tummy or back - by about three months, so now we just keep the sleep positioners in her crib because she likes to kick them.

One thing about that NYTimes article (besides its awesome mention of Park Slope Parents and our newborn-care teacher Erica Lyon): they mentioned the "epidemic" of plagiocephaly, where babies' heads end up misshapen because of constantly sleeping on their backs. We have a close friend whose baby has to wear a helmet for this very reason, and it is fascinating to hear that this once-rare condition is now a daily problem for pediatricians.

From what I've read, certain Native American tribes' babies have totally flat heads in the back because of the wooden papoose, but these kids - like their honky counterparts - usually grow up to have perfectly head-shaped heads. Still, as a parent, having an oblong-headed baby has to be nerve-wracking.

Oh yes, and the lovely and talented Joanna wanted to know how we got Lucy to adhere to her now-very-nice sleeping schedule. The answer is: totally by accident. We told one of our babysitters never to disturb Lucy after she went to bed, but one night we got back from a movie, and the sitter was feeding Lucy the bottle at 11pm. We were chagrined, but then Lucy slept until almost 8am the next morning. Cue light bulb flashing over our heads.

Here's what we've done, culling the advice from several books and our own experience:

1. Never let the baby fall asleep in your arms. Rock them a little, and wait until that liminal moment when their bodies seem to go a little limp from fatigue, and then stick them into the crib while barely awake. If they learn to fall asleep in there, they will also learn to put themselves back to sleep when they inevitably wake up at 2am for no reason.

2. There is a bit of tough love involved here. If your baby doesn't go straight down during your transfer-to-the-crib moment but you KNOW they're tired, they are going to have to cry a little. Lucy never cried for more than 15 minutes, even though it felt like three hours. THEY MUST LEARN THAT SCREAMING IS NOT WORTH IT. If you cave in, they will learn that you will cave in. There are ways to make this less dramatic (read "The No-Cry Sleep Solution") but we never needed more than 20 minutes of patience.

3. The so-called "dream feed" must be done by the husband. He is just boring enough to pull it off. No more than 4-5 ounces from the bottle, and then make sure there's a little burp before going back down. The baby should learn the drill after about two nights. DO NOT breastfeed, as this is a whole other emotional ball of wax for the baby. Put the dream feed near the half-way point of your baby's night.

4. I realize some of this sounds a lot like "crying it out," but if you really read Ferber (from which we took a few pointers), he does not advocate cruelty, just boundaries. Plus, when it works out, your baby will be so much happier in the long run, and you will feel a sense of freedom that will allow for your sanity to creep back in.

5. In terms of sleeping arrangements, here's what we did, with a fair amount of success:
- from the first day to about eight weeks, Lucy slept in the bed with us, with very hard "sleep dividers" so there was no chance of us rolling over near her.
- from 8 weeks to three months, she slept in a crib about six feet from our bed.
- from 3 months to now, she sleeps in her own crib in her own room, and by all accounts, loves it.

I always thought there might be something a little draconian about making a baby sleep in his own room, but really, if you want to have a life, a job, and a great relationship with your little tyke, I have to say that good fences make good neighbors. Don't feel guilty about your fatigue. God helps those who help themselves to sleep.

Thoughts? Or did everyone stop reading right about when I said "By all means skip this one"?

lkb-w = 6/12

10/17/05

Darling sweet little Lucybug. You turned a whole half-year old this weekend, and I didn't get you anything. Well, I got you several issues of In Style Magazine that you edited thoroughly, and there is my bottle of saline solution you like to gnaw on, and then there was the spoon we stole from Goode Company in Houston, but there's nothing on earth I could give you that compares to how rich you have made our lives.

I used to read sentences like the above and roll my eyes, but being a parent to you has reminded how myopic I have been for so much of my life. Shit, I used to hate wedding rings because I said they were a showy reminder of "ownership," but if I were being honest, it was mostly because I felt so far away from being in love. When I saw parents doting on their kids, I immediately wanted to take a road trip to Calgary, Canada and do tequila shots on top of their Space Needle - presumably because becoming a father meant the end of all spontaneity.

Man, spontaneity can suck balls for all I care. It's such a shoddy drug in comparison to the opiate you provide by even a half-smile. Is it possible to still rock and/or roll and have a kid? I don't know, but watching things through your eyes easily provides the same amount of glee that the "Xanadu" soundtrack did for me in 1980, and that's saying something.

We haven't kept strict documentation of your development, certainly not the way my mom did, but we figure we can always go back and look at the pictures with their time stamps. It's much more accurate now: when I was a kid, there would occasionally be "OCT 71" or something printed on the back of pictures, but that would be the date the images were processed, not when they were taken, and if you knew how long certain rolls of film languished at the bottom of my mom's purse, you'd know how off-base those could be.

at 1 month (5/11/05), almost 3 months (7/1/05), and 6 months (10/14/05)

Here is where you are: as long as we're not traveling, you go to sleep around 7:30pm, I "dream feed" you at midnight, and you wake up with your mom around 7:30am (or some variation therewith). You have 2-3 naps a day, and the longer they are, the happier you are, and the longer you sleep at night. Don't ask me why this happens, it just does.

You are desperate to crawl, but can't quite get it together. You like standing up almost as much as you like putting everything - including Chopes - into your mouth. We are going to start you on "solids" next week, but right now, there's nothing you like better than a spoon, or the Mickey Mouse we got you at the Disney/ABC lot a few weeks ago. Something you find utterly fascinating: the way brown liquid called "coffee" seems to start in a cup, and then disappear into Mom and Dad's face. You think this must surely be magic.

You've noticed that everyone else "talks," so you are giving that a go, with varied success. You'll stay quiet for hours, and then give us twenty solid minutes of what I can only guess to be Serbo-Croatian.

editing In Style Magazine

But mostly, you smile. All day long. To strangers, to family. You stop people on the street, you light up long lines, the entire country wants to talk to you. I'm suddenly understanding what it must have been like to sit at the cheerleader's table in junior high school. Your belly-laughs, usually occurring in the car or while naked waiting for the bath, should be bottled and sold as an antidepressant.

Mostly, what I have learned from you is this: you are so willing to be happy. You find no solace in misery. When you are done being tired or hungry, your natural state is delight. Me, I used to cling to my cynicism, sarcasm and negativity like rotting wood barely afloat in the ocean. But you ask: what if our resting state was always on the verge of giggles? Obviously, my writing would be pathetically twee, but I think of the many seasons I wasted on my precious indignation, and wonder why you didn't come along to pull me out of the water a little sooner, my little pumpkin pie spice.

falcon cannot hear the falconer

10/16/05

I promise I'll get back to being a good "online diarist" and all, but we just pulled into Dallas and got Ol' Ironsides to sleep, and I thought - why should I write a blog when my sister Michelle just got back from the Gulf Coast and has an amazing treatise on her website? Why should both of us Williamses have to work at the same time? Thus, I encourage - nay, urge you to go read her wonderful account of her 10-day journey into the damaged heart of disaster-struck America. For those of you with short attention spans, there are pictures. And since Blogger is weird, feel free to come back here to comment.

yellow rose of taxes

10/13/05

Sometimes I read the comments on the blogs and think, shit, I should write less. You guys are way more fun than I have been lately. All that changes now, as Salem has joined me in Houston, and I'm here in his hotel room stealing his internet connection. He's had an airplane-bottled-sized Dewar's and I'm waiting for the good stuff for tomorrow.

It's late October and all, but getting off the plane in Houston still feels like you're walking into a soiled gym sock. Humid, hot and sultry. Yet I still quite like this town, the bastion of our current administration, because it has a kick-ass mall with an ice-skating rink, and an Oshman's where you can get Vans and other skating shoes for, like, twenty bucks.

This is also where we came exactly a week after September 11, to attend Tessa's father's funeral, so this place - along with New Orleans - will always have therapeutic, palliative properties despite being a bit incongruous. It's like a baby's transitional item: it was there when we needed it.

Lucy has yet to have a transitional item, by the way, but she is VERY partial to the tiny cardboard box that used to contain my bottle of Excedrin. She's at the age when we can no longer stick her in some weird crib in a foreign hotel room two time zones away from reality and expect her to say, "cool, y'all. Why don't you just go hang out at the pool?" She's very happy to be awake in Houston, but she's not terribly psyched about sleeping there.

Displaced Katrina victims are everywhere. We got the last crib in the hotel. Opulence combined with destitution equals a basic honesty. Wish you all were here, and yes, I'll invite everyone to a party one day. As long as nobody's creepy.

cue horn: wah-wah-wa-a-a-a-ah

10/12/05

I'm sitting here in Houston at a nice hotel paying tons of $$$ and yet still I get stuck on dial-up. I'm taking this as my Columbus Day Holiday - but I have one thing to add. I'm no longer planning fun things. If you want to do fun things, you're going to have to plan them, invite others, and then you can invite me if you'd like. This is the end of the "cruise director" portion of my human development. Not an overly emotional decision, just an epiphany of sorts. That's all for today.

P.S. Yesterday's comments are amazing.

sperm bank mix-up comedy

10/11/05

Okay, CODE WORD. Too busy packing.

Today's question is: have you ever voluntarily walked out of a movie, and why? I ask because I've never done it, as much as I've wanted to. I actually took a date to see "The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover" at the Varsity in Chapel Hill, and we were the only people left for the last fifteen minutes. And I think my mom and Sean walked out of Made in America.

And you?

float some flotsam

10/10/05

A few things...

1. I have been playing this game like crazy. Don't click on the link, seriously. And don't blame me if much of your fleeting youth is spent trying to spell "trammeling." Which I did.

2. I am going to Texas on Wednesday to play golf on the course that Tessa's dad designed. It's called Blaketree National, and according to Avid Golfer, "the best-kept secret in the South." Given that the South has a LOT of secrets - just ask Faulkner - I'm assuming this is a really awesome golf course.

Oh yeah, and Tessa hates golf and makes fun of me for playing. I told her that I needed a sport I could play with my friends when we're 87 and pooping our pants.

3. Speaking of which, Lucy is such an awesome little tyke. She had her first date with Stasia's li'l boy Noah (above) and promptly tried to plant one on his face, which freaked him out, and rightfully so. We told her on the way home that most guys find that kind of frankness refreshing only in theory, and in reality they just get kind of weirded out.

It's funny, as a parent, reading news about child-rearing as you're actually in the act. The American Academy of Pediatrics came out yesterday with a report that pacifiers lower SIDS risk and that babies shouldn't even sleep on their sides. Lucy liked her pacifier for about two weeks at some point in May, and now she throws the thing across the room. And we put her to bed on her side for her first four months, because she refused to sleep on her back.

Apparently they don't like side-sleepers because the babies rassle around and end up on their bellies, and the AAP really hates that. We were pretty good about using the foam sleep positioners, however, - we crammed her into position and turned her on her other side like a hot dog every few hours. So it is possible, and she thanked us for it by being an excellent newborn sleeper.

Next up: fire-roasted chili peppers and chicken vindaloo!

4. My sister Michelle got on a computer for about ten minutes yesterday while working as a Red Cross leader on the Gulf Coast. Here's her brief post.

5. Fresh off winning Best Musical at the Fringe Festival NYC, my brother Sean and crew have a new play going up at the end of October, a horror show just in time for Halloween called Hail Satan. Don't forget to visit Mac's Hollywood-influenced trailer for the play.

6. This year, I left my pumpkin patch to the elements. Sure, I gave it everything it needed to grow: manure, mulch and a perfect location... and then I left for the summer. I was rewarded with the biggest haul of my pumpkin career, and guess what? I won't get to pick ANY of them because I'll be three thousand miles away until November. Shed a sad tear for the jack-o-lanterns that could have been.

snapped last week by a neighbor... *snif*

flame-retardant bridges

10/9/05

Over the last year or so, I've avoided talking about The Pink House movie for a variety of emotional reasons. Folks who have read this thing since 2002 - which is probably my family, three friends and the FBI - will recall that fully a third of my entries used to do with post-production on the film. I've gone on about reshoots, the screening of the rough cut, and even when we were utterly betrayed.

The last of these three proved almost impossible to overcome: Tessa and I had spent so much emotional energy by then that "getting back up on the horse" never happened the way we would have liked. Some wounds are too deep, and sometimes you really do wait for a savior that never comes.

I bring this up because the movie Waiting... came out on Friday (if you've been watching "My Name is Earl" or Comedy Central lately, you've seen the ads) and writer/director Rob McKittrick has been keeping a tell-all blog about the various people that helped him and tried to destroy him along the way.

Here was a guy with zero connections who went from being a waiter at TGIFriday's in Orlando to making a real film with Hollywood backing. If you've got 15 minutes, start from the beginning of his blog and read all the way through, because I've never seen a more honest account - and outright name-calling of those who probably deserved it - in the history of indie film. Sure, you've seen exposés of celebrities and directors long after their careers are assured, but Rob is just starting out, and his honesty is the sort of thing every agent in Hollywood would BEG him not to put in a blog.

Perhaps this video of him fighting with Luis Guzman might whet your appetite. [Scratch that: we met Vanessa Lengies today, and she said it was a prank. We didn't believe her at first, but she was right! -mod.]

God knows when it came to the Pink House movie I kept my mouth shut. I could say things about certain actors, certain members of the crew, and a particular demon that would have you enrapt, but we were always so afraid, so worried that it would all come back to haunt us. That some producer at a big studio would get wind of my attitude, and it would be just enough to make them say "forget it."

As it was, we never exactly finished the film the way I wanted it. We ran out of funds $30K short of our goal, and it was just too much. After a screening of the movie in front of some friends and family down in Tribeca - yes, the one YOU attended - we made some massive editing changes and tightened it up. After a screening in Chapel Hill where students got to give notes (along with laughing a lot, I might add), we did one more big tweak and sent our impossibly-long-gestated baby to a bunch of festivals for this winter and next spring.

We've foregone the festivals on everyone's lips (Sundance, Toronto, etc.) because we just don't have the production machine or feature-film connections to be even remotely in the running. Instead, we've chosen smaller festivals in towns we love, towns we want to visit, and towns that contain people that we adore. We think we could have a great time with our little indie comedy, and maybe close that chapter of our lives with an award from somewhere delightful. Possibly even see it on Comedy Central one day. Or just put those lessons learned in the back of our brains to use again, possibly sooner than we expect.

And "Waiting..." by Rob McKittrick? The tiny film he had worked on since 1997? Blew expectations out of the water this weekend by grossing $5.7 million with an average of $3,450 a theater. All without holding his tongue.

funny candid of Tessa and me, first Pink House shoot, 2001

Lord's to-do list: 1) taketh 2) giveth

10/6/05

Who probably should have died:

Keith Richards
Elton John
Billy Joel
Don Rickles
Robert Byrd
Joey Bishop
Rich Little
Danny Bonaduce
Ann B. Davis
Kurt Vonnegut

Who should have stayed a little longer:

Jim Henson
Peter Sellers
Jerry Orbach
Richard Fariña
John Ritter
Chris Bell
Kirsty MacColl
Audrey Hepburn
Paul Lynde
John Lennon

feel free to add yours

sleeping with the television on

10/5/05

Let me tell you a little something about television, or more succinctly, how TV shows are chosen. This is the very quick, scaled-down version so you don't have to buy that book "How TV Shows are Picked For Dummies." I'm not implying you're a dummy, by the way. I hate how those books make that subtle implication. Except for Divorce for Dummies, which really is for dummies.

Anyway, each network hears about 4.3 billion pitches during "development season" for dramas, which lasts roughly from "after the 4th of July" to "just after Labor Day." Some years the development season goes on much longer for a variety of reasons (like this year), and some networks don't like the concept of seasons and will develop when they please (Fox does it occasionally because of Major League Baseball, and networks like HBO and Showtime play by their own rules).

Somehow you have to get a meeting with one of the networks in order to be one of these 4.3 billion pitches, and if they like the idea - or they like you - they will buy your pitch. Each network will purchase about sixty script ideas this way each development season. Stop me if I'm getting any of this wrong, Jen.

Ladies and gentlemen, Jen Chambers!

Anyway, these sixty scripts are usually written by people who already had deals with the network, or already have a show on the air, or are some kind of newbie with a hot idea. Out of these sixty, about 7-10 are chosen to be shot as pilots. You know pilots as their better name, the "season premiere," but there are plenty of shot pilots that don't go anywhere. In fact, there are festivals dedicated to them.

Perhaps three or four pilots make it to the airwaves: in the last few weeks, you might have seen "Prison Break," "Surface" or "Commander in Chief." If the pilot and subsequent 2-3 episodes do well in the ratings, the network orders more (which just happened to "Everybody Hates Chris"). If it doesn't, it is cancelled (like "Head Cases") and one of the other un-aired pilots might get a shot at mid-season. "Grey's Anatomy" was introduced at mid-season last year and became a hit.

You remember the career cliffhanger I was mentioning last week? Well, I can't reveal any details, but I can say that something wonderful happened to us today, something deep in the long list above. What could be better than to tell stories for a living?

what I do know is we're here and it's now

10/4/05

The nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court scares the shit out of me. Liberals and progressives are breathing a cautious sigh of relief because the right-wing nutjobs are frothing at the mouth, but I think it's a ploy and we're being had. She could be the biggest disaster on the Supreme Court since Clarence Thomas, and it'll be slipped right under our noses.

I've heard several opinions saying Miers is a "selection borne out of weakness," but when has that ever held true for the Bush/Rove administration? These are people that promised to be "uniters" in 2000 and then became the meanest bunch of motherflubbers since the Whigs. In 2004, they thought 51% of the electorate meant a "mandate." These people have never cared what anyone thought of them, shoved through as many insanely ideological circuit judges as possible, tried to outlaw gays in the Constitution, kept sending American kids to their deaths in a war that nobody wants anymore, and people think that Miers is a choice made from weakness?

"Oh, but Katrina and Iraq and Abu Ghraib and DeLay and Frist, etc.," you might say, but I think that only makes these people more brazen. They could be on a drowning raft in a lake of fire and still maintain that they create their own reality. Look at Bush's statements today: that she is "never going to change." Glad to know that arguments are useless in front of her, which is always a great characteristic for a judge hearing cases.

She is getting this job because of a decade of loyal, dogged, unwavering service to BushCo., and she's been appointed to the Supreme Court, whose main charge is to provide checks on the Presidency? And she's never argued a case? Has no paper trail? When did we become so used to this kind of unbelievable mediocrity? This is THE UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT. Does that mean anything anymore?

And the more I delved into my soul on this one, the more the question kept coming up: when did we become so used to such mediocrity in our entire world? I don't want to get too touch-feely and metaphysical here, but grant me this one question... in a world where everything could be so much better, why are we satisfied with things being so shitty?

There is a commercial on right now - by Toyota, for the Prius and Highlander Hybrid, no less - that asks a simple question: What would it be like if the air were clean again? It's beautifully shot, with waving wheat and sensational sunsets over Scottish shores, and though it sounds like a cliché, it really does put the viewer into a sort of reverie.

Why do we have to be scared to get on an airplane? Why are there metal detectors at schools? Why is there Islamic fundamentalism? Why do progressives and conservatives hate each other so much? Why is there any poverty in this country? Why is the Arctic ice cap melting? Because men, or mankind, causes all these things to happen, and with a few tweaks - tiny blips on the great historical timeline - we could be free of them all.

I love a conspiracy theory as much as the next red-blooded American, but I don't believe there is a 100mpg engine being hidden by Exxon-Mobil, nor do I think there is some solar panel made of spinach that achieves 85% efficiency. But having said that, WHY AREN'T THERE?

To be satisfied with the way things are, I don't know, I can't live like that. Which is why, much to the snickering of the right-wing commenters on this blog, we choose to drive a Prius and got solar panels for our house. Sure, it won't "pay for itself" in the next ten years, but that's so utterly missing the point.

There's still so many instances of such beauty in the world: state parks, basketball, that girl in the cafeteria who likes you, the Painted Desert, Lucy in her giraffe jammies... but it only serves to highlight the despicableness of everything else.

I'll stop there, because I'm sounding like one of those Kid Power public service spots they used to show after Schoolhouse Rock on Saturday mornings. But I would like to know how all of you think we got so okay with things being so rotten.

what's the part above the subtext? oh yeah, the "text"

10/3/05

Old-timers to this blog will know what a hopeless fanboy I am of the Yahoo! Most Emailed Pictures Page, as I think (by way of Lars) that it provides the perfect snapshot of America's brain: obsessions with sex, gore and kitty kats. It also infuriates the living shit out of me, like when low-rent photographers use dime-store metaphorical skills to further some bullshit agenda.

Last year, I bemoaned this picture:

...when, on the other side, we were getting shit like this:

And so, because I am a Photoshop MASTER OF ALL I SURVEY, I offered this:

It seems I wasn't the only one who got sick of this nonsense. Over at the Corrente blog, they spotted Reuters' photo of "another Leni Riefenstahl-esque 'Triumph of the W'-style photo of Dear Leader, this time, sweet Jeebus, with a halo" and responded thusly:

I have to ask Lars if he's reading: what possesses these photographers to do this? Is it merely money, or is it some other sort of freakish devotion? Or is it freakish devotion to money, because they know the Washington Times is going to snap up every picture of Bush with a subtle halo and beaming Latino schoolchildren?

Us Americans are no better. The Number One picture on September 11th of this year was this:

Um, yeah, sure, it's about the "reflecting pool memorial." Or maybe it's about HER TITS. You be the judge.

The only good thing about the new low standards in photojournalism is that it feeds off whatever prey is hobbled. After years of Bush-worshipping pictures, his unfathomable ability to bungle every aspect of American leadership has finally trickled down into the trenches of political photogs. Here it is, a groan-inducing, dime-store visual metaphor to make the progressives happy AT LONG LAST:

they call alabama the crimson tide

10/2/05

My poor little baby girl has some kind of stomach flu tonight, so I can't really write anything - not with her screaming in the background when I know she's really miserable. She could have inherited my digestive tract, which makes me doubly upset to think my genetics have something to do with this. I blame my dad, which is where I got it from.

Hopefully Lucy will inherit a lot from her Aunt Michelle, who was just deployed by the Red Cross to help out on the Gulf Coast. In lieu of a real blog, I'd like to send out this email crafted by my brother Sean as Michelle was talking to him.

***

She's in Mobile, Alabama and she has been put in charge of a team of case workers, who's job is to discern who is actually deserving of funds and who is conning the Red Cross. Apparently, they have now served the equivalent number of citizens that reside in the affected states, and they think they have only managed to serve half of all those affected by the disasters, so you can see that fraud is apparently rampant. She said that women get in line with one another's children and collect as much as possible, and then pass the children off to someone else in line. The Liberal Nightmare.

She's staying at a motel, and the entire motel, I think it's a Radisson, is completely full of Red Cross volunteers. By which I mean, the motel is closed, it's open only to Red Cross volunteers. And I can only guess just how crazy that place gets at night. They had a, get this, Mardi Gras celebration last night for people who've been there for the entire three weeks and apparently a strapping twenty year old from Des Moines tried to get Michelle to go down and drink with her, leading to this conversation...

Me: "So, this is a great big guy from Iowa?"

Michelle: "He's adorable."

Me: "While he was talking to you, did he, like, accidentally eat an entire hamburger?"

Michelle: "I think he's my boyfriend, I'm not gonna lie."

Me: "He's totally your boyfriend."

Michelle: (sigh) "He's totally my boyfriend."

So, she's got a group of armed guards making sure that when she turned people down for money, they won't hassle her. Her day today isn't starting until 1 PM, but the rest of the time her days are gonna be outrageous. She's got her cellphone, and it works, but she doesn't have internet access or a computer.

They put her in charge of a group of people who are all older than her, leading to her life long problem of being a blonde woman who is twice as smart and twice as capable as the people around her, but those people keep saying, "So, why are you in charge?" Also, she tends to get what she wants by being nice, which is confusing to a lot of people. So, the battle rages on for her.

Michelle, East Village, 2002