xtcian

we got the last bottle of soco

9/30/07

I'm at the farm, where my vast repository of pictures lie, and I wanted to jumpstart my scanning project for the winter. Thus I'll have a bunch of random pictures cropping up on the blog, so be forewarned: if we know each other, I have a picture of you. Maybe several. I think I even have a picture of LFMD in 1986.

Anyway, a few jumped out at me tonight.

Christmas Eve 1985, my parents split up, and I walked out into the snow and demanded a life change of myself. Even if it was going to be shallow and stupid, I resolved to have fun for the first time in my life. I cut my hair, got contact lenses, was accepted into a fraternity and fell in love for the first time in the next three months. The picture above was taken for the fraternity composite in March 1986, when I had barely grown into my face.

February 29 - Leap Day, 1992 - was also the high water mark for Mardi Gras as we knew it. After three straight days of drinking brown liquor by the liter, we woke up in a dilapidated house on Freret Street not far from the Garden District in New Orleans. We had sleeping bags, but the beer from the carpet had seeped up into our clothes overnight. We were trying our best to recover, even though the band that lived in the house - with the hilariously horrible name of "Voodoo Jive" - was practicing upstairs.

No, I didn't have a mullet. It just looked that way when I woke up.

October 2000. I had just escaped the suicidal dreariness of LA, working in a swanky dot-com job for lots of money in downtown New York. I was a month into a romantic relationship with my beautiful friend Tessa Blake, and even though I hated the Yankees, I was not prepared for the beauty of being above the center of a World Series ticker-tape parade. All of us in the Woolworth Building - once the tallest in the world - stuck our heads out and threw confetti. It was like being in a magic snow dome of the joy that is New York.

Eleven months later, the World Trade Center buildings came down next door, and I remember all the charred bits of paper flying around the air that day, and thinking how similar joy and tragedy can look.

carry me back to old virginny

9/27/07

What age were you when you lost your virginity? And what was your feeling right after? Obviously, your comment can be anonymous if you want, but say your gender.

Me? I was 21, halfway to 22. I was freaked out, but it was still awesome. I was the last virgin I knew, and I can't say waiting that long ultimately did me any favors (a tome worthy of another blog), but there was a certain pride in waiting that long. I was totally in love, and I'm still friends with that person today.

And you?

springfield, springfield

9/26/07

We're coming to NY today, because our farm upstate is being rented for the fall, and if I don't winterize it, we might as well be pouring 500 gallons of heating oil on our driveway. The mere act of winterizing always reminds me of those war movies when soldiers are getting ready for the German panzers they can already hear in the distance.

So we'll be reporting from New York for the next week, and look forward to seeing all you krazy kats in the big city.

Anyone want anything?

how about a nice camembert

9/25/07

Last Christmas, Lucy infamously remembered one of my "South Park" references from the womb, and inserted "suck my balls!" at the end of all her songs. Tessa wasn't that psyched about it, to say the least, even though I couldn't have been prouder - that's my little girl!!! Anyway, I had to use operant conditioning to get her out of the habit, and the extinction technique was to replace "suck my balls" with "I like cheese".

The odd thing is that she doesn't really like cheese. But she does still bust out the coda at completely random times, guaranteeing that she always catches me off guard.

the closing of the american thighs

9/23/07

Man, you have to hand it to the Baby Boomers: they always get what they want. They wanted rock'n'roll, they got it; they wanted free love; they took it; they wanted money, the government, and the same music playing for 45 years, and they got all of that too.

When they turned batshit, bizarrely conservative and started dreaming of apocalypse (as Neil Howe and Bill Strauss said they would), they got their cohort George W. Bush to be president. The Boomers have been so powerful they erased an entire generation from ever being President: assuming John McCain isn't elected, the Silents (born 1925-1941) will be the first generation to be skipped in American history.

But back to them being batshit: one of the most egregious things Boomers ever did was to spend the late '60s trying every drug and sexual position imaginable, then growing up to be the most draconian, joy-prohibiting, litigious, rule-mongering administrators since Prohibition. If you want to see the embodiment of No Fun, look at your average college chancellor born in the early 1950s - they make Neidermeyer from "Animal House" look spontaneous.

And I'm not being metaphorical, like "they got to have sex, and we grew up under the specter of AIDS" kind of thing, I mean they actually made laws to curb fun as we knew it. Personally, it was legal for me to drink alcohol in college from May 26 to September 15, 1986. Then the law changed, and there was no grandfather clause - in other words, I could order woo-woos and Toasted Almonds all summer long, but by September, I was forbidden to do so for TWO YEARS.

This was the beginning of the end of Fun™ in college, even if we didn't know it at the time. By 2003, as I complained earlier in this blog's history, sororities were refusing to come to fraternities that had alcohol, which is a little like going to Egypt as long as you don't look at the Pyramids.

Now the other shoe has dropped; as predicted, kids are barely having sex in college anymore. Tests done internally by universities and confirmed by Zogby show that, in the words of an average graduate, "Either I missed out or everyone else in college isn't having sex at all." Take the science in all this for what it's worth, but it's no surprise to me that the one place left in America where anything goes - college - has fallen victim to the I-don't-really-feel-like-it school of life experience.

These kids are by-and-large unaffected by religious dogma, and all studies show that abstinence programs don't have any psychological effect. They are predominantly middle-class with easy access to the Pill or any other procedure, and they are almost all between the ages of 18 and 23 and at the peak of their, shall we say... total hotness. What the hell is wrong?

I'm no social anthropologist, I only play one on these pages. Perhaps kids' lives have become so virtual through the internet, gaming, Facebook, porn, or even what Allan Bloom called the "hymns to the joys of onanism" playing on Walkmen (today replaced by iPods) that there is no longer the pressing need to actually deal with the real, physical world. In fact, perhaps now, physical reality is by definition totally disappointing.

When we look at a site like Facebook (which I'm on - come be my friend!), you'll see college women like my niece with 457 "friends," and think "what an amazing social network!" But what if Facebook isn't an enabler at all - what if its illusion of intimacy and interconnectivity purposely keeps people apart? If so, Baby Boomers, normally a technophobic, computer-mistrusting bunch, have got to be pleasantly surprised.

What else could be taking sexual intercourse out of college?

- Perhaps the drinking age and the latter-day Volstead Act currently enforced in college towns finally had its desired effect, and the social lubrication necessary to get two people together is now non-existent.

- Perhaps the drinking laws have made a "speakeasy" out of certain dorm rooms, leading students to take five shots of Jägermeister at the beginning of the evening, effectively erasing the slow buzz of a casual evening out with the girls, and replacing it with a season-ending barf at 8:30pm.

- Perhaps every fetish known to man has a site on the internet, leading guys to get their ya-yas out with, to paraphrase Woody Allen, "sex with somebody they love" - i.e., themselves. With such fantasies at their disposal, maybe most guys have masturbated themselves out of the market.

- The intense sexual politics of the early '90s clearly put date rape and institutionalized misogyny in sharp relief, but perhaps it had another effect: guys think of the whole thing as entirely too much bother, and are increasingly opting for the effortlessly casual mingling of their male buddies.

- Likewise, perhaps women are so sick of the emotional retardation of their perpetually-confused, non-committal, vaguely-adolescent suitors that they have instead opted for a long-distance relationship with that guy who goes to Dartmouth they met over, yes, Facebook.

- Perhaps rampant anti-depressant use among college kids has resulted in a backwards tipping point for their collective libido.

- Or perhaps my own priapic, Lotharian past is poisoning my rationale, and today's college students simply don't place the same value on sexual and romantic experimentation that I did.

If that's the case, then Baby Boomers, your job is practically done. Your students have nothing to defend themselves but flaccid swords made of purest irony. They say the bees are all dying; all that is left are the birds.

when the moon is in the seventh house

9/20/07

I was going to write something else entirely until I saw the video CP kindly linked in yesterday's comments. I never thought I would find myself sobbing on the couch at 1am because of an awkward speech given by a Republican.

When he looks up in the middle, either to his daughter, or to a member of his staff in question, you see the smile of someone whose sun has just come out between the clouds. Simply wonderful.

o brother

9/18/07

By now, most of you have seen the video of Florida student Andrew Meyer getting tasered at the John Kerry speech, either filtered or unfiltered depending on your preferred method of consumption. One could argue that if you look like a flailing-armed moron who might possibly bum-rush the stage and attack a sitting member of the Senate, you're going to get what's coming to you, but the actual act of one person tasering another is indescribably sickening.

The bigger point is this: could there be anyone with more of a tin ear than John Kerry? There's no way he didn't know what was going on, what with the student yelling "don't tase me, bro!" Senator or no, that's time to jump off stage, wade through the crowd and see what the fuck the police are doing to this kid. At the very least, you get on the motherscratchin' mike and lay down the law, rather than continue droning on as if you're announcing pre-boarding for Delta's flight to Cleveland.

It's easy to be a Johnny-Come-Monday-Morning-Quarterback, but I like to think I came by my frustration with Kerry honestly and early (well before he was the Democratic nominee - like this unhinged entry from 2003). When he became the front-runner, my heart sank, and when he got the nomination, deep down I knew we were fucked. I put on a brave face, mostly because Tessa told me to, but it was the most important election in modern American history, and GOD KNOWS WE COULD HAVE DONE BETTER.

Don't get me wrong. I would have voted for J.J. Redick over George W. Bush every day of the week, and Kerry would have done a overwhelmingly more noble job as President than the cruel, smirking monkey we've got right now. But Kerry seems to have sacrificed a bizarre portion of his humanity at the altar of politics.

It's as if he is so tempered by expectation, so bizarrely addicted to remaining vaguely inoffensive, so hobbled by years of saying oddly-meaningless words in order to stay elected, that he comes across as six-foot-four of tanned goo. Mike Dukakis looked silly in a tank because he'd never been in one before, but Kerry managed to look like a panderer while windsurfing - something he'd done for decades.

As was the case in Swift Boat, or his botched joke, he issued a somewhat-dispassionate condemnation a day late, probably after looking at some polls and focus-group results.

only a matter of time before this shirt exists

The other players? God knows they were out of their league on this one, but the Kampus Kops of Florida sure looked psyched to test the taser gun on a writhing student pinned to the floor. I admit a bias here... any of you ever had a run-in with a campus cop? I have, about 15-20 times during my extended sojourn in Chapel Hill, and I always felt like they were some of the worst people in the South.

Every single UNC cop I ever met reminded me of Chet from "Weird Science" - too stupid to be logical, but just smart enough to be really goddamn mean. In the beginning, they were annoying-yet-harmless custodians of Carolina's brick pathways, but when I was a junior, they were granted the same powers as normal city cops, which, in my genuflected opinion, was a promotion none of them deserved.

Maybe times have changed since the batshit days of the early '90s, but an evening consisting of campus cops with cattle prods, a conspiracy-minded undergrad with an inhibition disorder, and John Kerry? That's got "YouTube Smash Hit" written all over it!

pink karmann ghia

9/17/07

There's a nice little piece in the Atlantic Monthly right now called Quirked Around - it's right up my alley, since it deals with the faint ephemera of pop culture, and it's about a phenomenon that may or may not be happening. This is the kind of article I was pitching from '96 to '03 or so. They're always fun to write because they function as an airing-out of the theories you've been storing in your emotional linen closet for years.

Michael Hirschorn's premise is that our culture is drowning in "quirk" - movies, docs, TV shows and plays featuring characters with "unexplainable but nonetheless charming character traits." He goes on to explain good quirk vs. bad quirk ("Rushmore" vs. "The Royal Tennenbaums") and mentions several other offenders, such as "Napoleon Dynamite", "Donnie Darko", Zach Braff, and a special takedown of This American Life's Ira Glass.

I have certainly been guilty myself of Quirk - the Pink House screenplay was full of it, especially the character Windy, who mixed up all the words in her sentences and kept re-painting an oil painting that had been hanging in the living room for years. Never mind that her character was a cross between Chip and an old housemate of mine named Amy; there were plenty of odd character choices in that script that were initially written because they were true, but retained because they were... I dunno, cool. At least I thought they were.

Hirschorn's dissection of Quirk is a close cousin to my favorite culture body-slam of all time: Caleb Southern uttering the word "PREMISE." Caleb, as some of you know, produced and engineered most of the Ben Folds Five and Archers of Loaf oeuvre, and remains a legend in the Triangle. I lived with him for years in the Purple House on McCauley Street, and I can tell you, there was no better human being with which to experience the early '90s.

We would be listening to a band that we wanted to like, but couldn't quite get there. Or we'd be walking home from a movie that should have been better. Caleb would say nothing for hours, then suck on a piece of his hair and say "PREMISE."

Jon Gray, Bud or Lindsay might have their own take on Caleb's bi-syllabic koans, but I always took "PREMISE" to mean "idea at the expense of truth." By adhering to an idea of what the art should be, by clinging to a kind of dogma or being self-satisfied by the overarching theme, the artist loses connection to the art actually being any good.

Words that float around this idea - while never actually hitting it - are "clever", "precious", and "twee". I wish I could remember examples of specific bands or movies that got the "PREMISE" smackdown, as it would make describing it so much easier, but it's something I definitely keep in the back of my mind as we develop scripts.

me, Caleb, Jon, Lindsay, December 2004

Anyway, Hirschorn spends so much of his Atlantic Monthly piece hating on Ira Glass that he (in my opinion) misses what makes Quirk such a big problem. Members of my generation, having rejected the literary canon and mostly ADD'd themselves out of being true dorks dedicated to some singular pursuit, have inserted Quirk and Quirky Characters as a shorthand for any kind of real insight.

In other words, Quirk is a hallmark of "good enough." Instead of truly getting to the bottom of structure, or plot, or universal pathos, or whatever, most writers are content to give their lead character (or sidekick or girlfriend) a set of random, incongruous personality traits and let that be enough. My buddy Brian has an overwhelming fear of loose change and dirty coins - numismaphobia - and I thought, man, I really have to keep myself from using that in a screenplay (unless, of course, the character is a toll-booth collector, which we in the business would call "IRONY.")

I'm having trouble understanding why it's so hard for writers in my general age group to embrace "plot". When we were 19-25 years old, all the stories and screenplays I read around me were stricken with emotional paralysis, full of characters that were not moving, and were never going to move. It was the logical endgame of nihilism - boredom and opting out.

A few years ago this was supplanted by Quirk, featuring a lot of stories about cool kids, ex-nerds, dorks who had been suddenly liberated by the internet and the dot-com boom. Both writers and characters were all wearing that fucking $45 "Gettin' Lucky in Kentucky" T-shirt from Urban Outfitters, and even the phrase "jumped the shark" jumped the shark, but at least Fonzie was doing something.

I know, we're in Hollywood now, and we'll probably fight the opposite problem: lots of shit happening with no emphasis on character. All we can do is try our best to create things with some kind of emotional resonance and hope lots of other people get it. In a way, it's refreshing. The diet of nihilism and Quirk was vaguely entertaining for a decade or so, but after a while you get sick from cakes made entirely of frosting.

khkhhhkhhh *snork* kghghggh

9/16/07

HA!

And all this time, they were just calling me lazy! Turns out my circadian rhythms knew what they were doing all along: "Rising early to go to work or exercise might not be beneficial to health, but rather a risk for vascular diseases."

What time did YOU get up this morning?

me and Luce sleepin' in, May 2005

all my loving

9/13/07

Just managed to get the new computer up and at 'em, which as most of you know, is an all-day affair. I had to choose a new background picture, however, and I went with this one taken by the wonderful Katie Kosma during the talent show at the Memorial Day Jartacular:

*sigh*

ooh la la

Enough righteous indignation from me... my computer cried uncle and I'm writing from my cell phone. Which leads me to today's CODE WORD question: what are you wearing?

No, seriously, what are you wearing this very second?

Answers not allowed:
a) "nothing"
b) "a grin" etc.
c) lies

So?

wake me up when zeptember ends

9/11/07

Something got me so fucking angry that I have to recant my desire to ignore the 9/11 anniversary: the Federal Government has now banned regular people from helping out when national disasters strike. I can't imagine anything stupider, less productive, unrealistic, cruel and downright goddamn contemptuous. Just when you think you've seen it all from these assholes.

Let me tell you something: if it weren't for the work of my sister Michelle and my wife Tessa on the nights of September 12-15, the main gathering area of firemen and paramedics at Ground Zero would have been NON-FUNCTIONAL. Impromptu lights were falling down, no water was being delivered to the actual crews, and as the saying goes, "there was no THERE there." Thinking on her feet, my sister basically reorganized the whole damn thing. Read her very short email from 9/13/01 here. And what was her training? Waitressing and acting.

Are you trying to tell me that the very same people who took FIVE DAYS to deliver a bottle of water to the Superdome after Katrina are now saying that you need special dispensation and a computer-scan badge to help neighbors dying by the score? It's like when they only bought 100,000 doses of Neumune, claiming you could get it by going to a hospital after a nuclear attack. What is wrong with these people?

They have no concept of what the world is like during an actual event - no clue of the immediate breakdown of normal channels. I can promise you this: in the event of a national emergency in your town, you will have ten contingency plans, and all ten will be laughably obsolete in a matter of seconds. An ID card with an embedded chip? And somebody will be on the ground at the tragedy, at a main entrance, with a working, electronic "chip decoder" that will determine if you're qualified to help a severely-burned little boy find his parents?

Jesus Christ, what happened to helping your fellow man? I urge all of you to listen to this podcast by This American Life six weeks after Katrina, especially Act 2, and then think about this new law. Go ahead and read Michelle's email from September 14, 2001 and tell her that she's not allowed to go to Ground Zero. Hell, read them all.

This act of uncharitable stupidity can only be one thing: a way to keep meddlesome lefties and Patagonia-wearin' bleedin'-hearts from observing what really happens during an emergency and telling anyone about it. This administration wants to keep the next terrorist attack (or natural disaster) a sanitized zone where no fault can be laid at their feet. Keep going to the mall, Americans. Keep buying your fucking shoes.

My "offhand" and "offensive" remark about disregarding September 11 as an anniversary doesn't come out of partisanship, mean-spiritedness or complacency. It comes out of necessity. The remembrance of that day only brings up two things to me: the naked, brazen political co-opting of America's grief by some of the worst people in the world... and the horrible realization that we have learned NOTHING from the actual event about how to take care of each other.

Victims of 9/11, their families, and those of us who wandered in the penumbra of that horror relive those moments plenty of times during the year, and speaking only for myself, the "anniversary" is an unwelcome redundancy. For some things, healing is forgetting.

the comeback kidding

9/10/07

To continue with our theme of blonde Southerners doing very silly things in front of everybody, I remained stunned at Britney Spears' VMA performance, not because of Spears' quaaluded dancing or her supposed rotundity, but because it was allowed to happen at all. While the rest of America basked in headlines like "The Fat Lady Doesn't Sing" and "Lard and Clear", the real story is how little power her handlers seem to have.

Britney Spears is a Jive recording artist, which means her career is now wholly owned by Sony BMG, who has millions of dollars at stake in her career. Although I wouldn't wish a music exec job on anybody, people actually depend upon artists like Britney to do well or else they eventually get downsized. Every time she flashes her coochie in a limo, shaves her head, or goes pole-dancing on Sunset Blvd., there is someone in a cubicle somewhere who feels three feet closer to the guillotine.

You could say that these antics have kept her in the headlines, and thus people still know who she is after 14 years in the business, but there is a point where anyone can fuse into a joke that can't be untold. These days, her status as a punchline puts all consumption of her product into question. Last year, well before her emotional cheese slipped off her Triscuit, the Budster and I took a little road trip where he said, "Look, the next song on the mix is Britney Spears, but I like it anyway" (it was "Toxic," and I promptly downloaded it myself).

Thus, there is a shitload of money riding on Spears' next album, because it could have been an against-all-odds legitimate comeback, probably the last one she'll be afforded. There will be millions spent on advertising, tie-in promos, videos, junkets - and Britney fucked it up in three minutes. So I ask: where is the person who keeps that from happening?

Even now, in the age of cellphone movies, the only scandals you hear about are the ones that get past the handlers, where Your Star of Choice does something so stupid and public that nobody can spin their way out of it. See Ashlee Simpson's visit to McDonald's, Lindsay Lohan's car chase, Pete Doherty burgling his own bandmate's apartment, etc... basically your average haul on TMZ or Defamer.

In the case of the VMA awards, however, there were so many bad decisions. She obviously wasn't ready physically, had lost all rapport with any audience, and chose the most bizarrely-unflattering get-up, virtually guaranteed to provoke the most derision. As far as the dancing, she looked like Kareem in his later years, barely caring enough to get back on defense.

With so much at stake, I'm flabbergasted Sony didn't have someone on her case, if only to provide some good orderly direction. People tune in to see one of two things: a train wreck or transcendence. That's fine, but with a train wreck, Sony actually just lost a ton of money.

Look, by any American standard Britney Spears is still skinny; in fact, I pretty much always think more weight is healthy, if not downright sexy. And buried deep within a frame atrophied by muscle relaxants, she must still be a great dancer. But if you want to see how to do things right, simply look across the Mouseketeer aisle at Christina Aguilera. It helps that Aguilera is an immense vocal talent in a league Spears can only dream of, but she also has one consistent trump card: she ain't batshit crazy.

bill and ted's slightly-below-average adventure

9/9/07

Man, you can be as philosophically belligerent as you want, but if you really want hate mail, simply impugn the reputation of Miss Teen South Carolina. I'm sorry, but I respectfully disagree with most of you. The second that girl entered a nationally-televised beauty contest, she abdicated all rights to intellectual respect, or at the very least, she threw open the door to whatever criticism might come her way.

If you can't take the spotlight, and you can't field a simple question about the USA, maybe you shouldn't be in the running for Miss Teen USA, I'm just sayin'. Yes, it would have been much better if Caitlin was a guy, which would have defused the inevitable dumb blonde jokes, but this wasn't about sexism, it was about a marked lack of excellence.

Yes, excellence. All but forgotten between the Scylla and Charybdis of snark and anti-intellectualism, excellence used to count as currency around here. My own family may have been too lazy to achieve excellence on any consistent basis, but we sure as hell knew what it was, and what it took to get there: no shortcuts, years of dorking out on a particular subject, odd dedication at the expense of a social life, and a belief than anything less than Awesome was a waste of everyone's time.

My dad even had a name for it: "turning a phrase." It meant, in musical terms, that you were so comfortable with your instrument and performance that you could inject these little moments of pure transcendence into each concert. They may last less than a second, but it's that tiny bit in the string quartet, the little moment in a movie, the briefest epiphany in a play that made you cry. There is only one way to get that ability, and it ain't by watching "Wheel of Fortune".

This spectre of achievement hung over my high school, was loosely draped over Carolina, and was even the motto of my frickin' fraternity: "In all things, excellence." Before the inevitable biorhythm of the brotherhood took us down a different path, my fraternity actually was excellent, producing guys that now run major parts of New York and Hollywood.

These days, I still run on the petrol of excellence, even when I'm a long way from achieving it. In everything we write, I try to ask myself if there were any shortcuts in it, any clichés that took the place of something more interesting, or a plot point that was merely "good enough". Do I get there every time? Hell no! I've been responsible for my share of crap, but at least I know a train wreck when I see it.

Another thing I do is keep this blog, which opens me up to a tremendous amount of criticism. With very few exceptions, I never delete a comment, all because I'm right here, writing these words, ASKING FOR IT. I write most weekdays, and while I'm no dooce, I have a strong readership, any of whom can deliver a whalloping criticism any time they choose. In short, I can take the heat, and therefore choose to stay in the kitchen.

And from my perch on the stove, I feel more than comfortable lobbing slow-pitch softballs at a beauty queen who could have chosen to excel in graphic design (like she says) but instead chose to answer questions about the United States' educational system on national television. The only way for this charade to have been intellectually honest would be if she ripped off her shirt, pointed at her nipples and said "learn THIS, motherfuckers!" The mere fact that Miss Teen USA has to answer any questions is the definition of "disingenuous".

As for the commenters, one in particular, who keeps harping on the apparently damning rumor that I could read when I was three, I have to say: gee, I'm really not sorry. It was 1970, and I don't remember it, but thank fucking god I had SOME skill that allowed me to transcend the schoolyard. Besides, why wouldn't that be something to celebrated? I delight in ALL of your kids' achievements - when I see xuxE's pics of her family, I feel like the world is moving in the right direction.

And with apologies to craighill (who no doubt believes I'd blame Wayne Ellington's missed 3-pointers on George Bush) but I truly think a populace subconsciously (or consciously) takes its emotional cues from its leaders, and the Bush Administration has vilified intellect from day one. Forget the travesty of No Child Left Behind - Bush has done exceptional damage by fostering an environment where Experts Are To Be Mistrusted, opting instead for "gut instincts" - and we all see how well that worked. Either Bush is the dumbest sumbitch ever to inhabit the Oval Office (which is scary), or he's pretending to be the dumbest (which is criminal).

Either way, the mantra of "you're trying too hard" got stuck on smartypantses around America in the 1980s, filtered to colleges in the '90s, and crystallized over the last seven years. Frankly, it disgusts me, and both my wife and I have an allergic reaction to the phrase "you're thinking too much."

Offended by this lecture? TOO BAD! TRY HARDER! NUT UP, YOUNG SPORTSPEOPLE!

Not everybody has to be excellent; it just has to be valued. Excellence doesn't mean "no fun"; you can do three tequila shots on a road trip to New Orleans and still be excellent. You can even show your tits, drop trou and hang brain, laugh at the guy who keeps farting and getting kicked in the nuts... and still strive towards excellence. That's the genius of genius: once you've turned a phrase, the low-hanging fruit tastes even better.

the capital of poo-poo is Fartypants City

9/5/07

By now, most of you saw the YouTube video of Miss Teen USA South Carolina 2007 Caitlin Upton answering a question onstage with the most outlandish gibberish this side of kindergarten - personally, I like this one with subtitles the best. Sure, we all got to have a good laugh, and for good reason: not even severe stage fright could possibly account for the goat's-head-stew of nouns and verbs emanating from her pharynx. This is someone who has obviously coasted through life, no books cracked, all doors having been opened for her from Myrtle Beach to Columbia, 'cuz she's pretty.

trying to find her way back from the bathroom

And she's pretty in that horrible New America Mall sort of way - all pinks and yellows, horrifyingly cute lips and brows that suggest anime or porn. Those of us who call North Carolina home would suggest it was only a matter of time before South Carolina gave us something like Caitlin Upton to put our borders in stark relief.

The amazing thing is this: she was so bad that she got a do-over on the Today show. You've got to give credit to our country's culture when the only remedy for such imbecility is "more imbecile, please!" In this clip, it's hard to tell who's more embarrassing, Caitlin or Matt Lauer, a groveling apologist if ever there was one.

For those among us who moan "oh let it be, the poor girl's suffered enough" I'd like to misquote Oscar Wilde, and say "the rancor is unbearable, I hope it lasts!" The mere fact that anyone is called out for being stunningly vacant in Bush's America is cause for celebration. In our oxygen-deprived, anti-intellectual atmosphere, I would have thought the idiocy of the Miss Teen USA Pageant would have earned her a pass.

Blessedly, no. Apparently there's still room for a good healthy shaming of the chronically chowderheaded, and for that, I give thanks. When forced to choose between two major annoyances - the dimwit and the know-it-all - gimme the know-it-all ten times out of ten.

please can i have another melocotón please

9/3/07

Lucy every three months up to 2 1/4 years - click for bigger

Hi there my sweet little Lulubean pumpkinpants! I know I said I'd write one of these every three months to you, but summers are crazy for us right now: it's not just the high season for all things television, but it's also the time we travel to see family, attend weddings, and anything else that comes our way. I usually purport to say something interesting, so I keep putting it off, and now here we are, well past your 2 1/4 mark. Still, I'm a glutton for formalism, so here you go.

The phrase most uttered in our house is "where the hell did she learn THAT?" - spoken by me to Tessa, or the other way around. Your lapses into soliloquy have to be some of the funniest shite we've heard in years, even if you yell "don't laugh!" when you're done.

You went on a Timothy Leary-esque tangent on The Long Way of the Fork at dinner the other night - O! Would that we had the camera! It lasted for five minutes and made sense in some LSD-drenched cranny in your expanding mind. All I know is that you were holding a fork aloft and telling a story with the oblique refrain "and the fork goes like this... the LOOOOOOONG WAAAAAAAAY." It reminded me of my intellectual fraternity brothers after shotgunning a full bottle of Pimm's.

You have continued using superfluous words in sentences just to try them out, even though it can make you sound excessively formal:
"I think I'm going to have to get dressed... after all."
"Here's the thing - my diaper has poop."
"Actually, I find the pasta is quite cold, I think."
"I asked Barnaby if he was delighted to have pancakes."
Sometimes I wonder if you haven't escaped from some Victorian-era boarding school for girls (or if it's just my wife's fault).

My favorite grammatical mixup (since five-teen) is your understanding of the word "relax". You think it's plural, thus you say "I relack" and "She relacks." I love these mistakes so much, because it allows me to look at English from an outsider's standpoint - after all, there's no reason for you NOT to think "relax" is the plural of "relack."

I raked leaves in the yard and you jumped in

We’ve had two big breakthroughs: one is not waking up from a nap in paroxysms of screaming misery - now you simply yell "Daddo! I'm awake! And I didn't cry at all!" The other is your hard-won understanding that it's okay for us to leave you at school, or in a nap, or in other circumstances - because we always come back. The following movie from July is long (and therefore only of interest to your fambly) but it shows the fascinating transference of this idea to your doll Patty:

They say "three is the new two" (along with "40 is the new 29") so we're not counting any chickens. BUT... you don't seem particularly interested in tantrums. You will doggedly wear us out on an issue "Can I have just one cookie and then no more? Can I have a cookie, just one, and then not another one? Can I have one cookie for me? etc..." but you will always take a reasonable substitute without throwing yourself on the floor and banging your fists until the neighbors call the Feds. In fact, I've watched you watch other kids having tantrums, and you seem removed yet oddly attentive, like you're judging the long-form figure skating at the Winter Olympics.

I have to mention one thing before we all forget - you have such a nurturing instinct that you not only care for your three dolls like children, but you'll anthropomorphize anything. Last week, you cared for a peach for an hour (before eating it), and two days ago, you said your new Dora the Explorer cup (still in the shrink wrap) was your baby, and you rocked it to sleep.

the "hand crib"

When you don't have a doll or other implement handy, you turn your right hand upwards and call it your daughter, stroking it to sleep on various pillows. It's a little disturbing, since it makes us look like parents who won't buy you anything, but there's something so achingly sweet about it as well.

Most of all, I'm so in love with your indefatigable spirit. One of your best playmates bit the ever-lovin' HELL out of your shoulder blade last week, and you did scream in misery... but you forgave him instantly and wanted to keep playing with the trucks. I watch you run around the house, spending just enough time to charm the socks off whomever's there, and I just wish I could go back in time. Back to my wracked shell of a self ten years ago, and say, just keep moving, you will see something in the future that will make all of this sadness evaporate in a hot second.

Love, Daddo.