Category: self

Introspective thought on my own behavior or actions.

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someday i will have to go to a funeral


Thursday night; this week flew. Sharaun’s at the gym (which I pronounce “gime,” as a play on how foreign the word is to me), and I just put Keaton down. I feel like I’ve become an expert at putting Keaton down. I have the touch, the knack, what she needs. I know exactly how long to hold her before she’ll be able to handle the hold-bed transition, know how tightly to cling to her arms and legs while they do her pre-sleep flail, and am an expert at calming her down. This is an immense source of pride for me, you have to understand that. I daresay that I’m actually better at getting down than her mom, and that’s a bold assertion. But that’s me. Boldly sitting here on the couch, the iPod shuffling up the Sundays (I think to mock my boldness), and watching that precious little girl sleeping soundly in her crib. Bold, I say.

I’m turning thirty this year, and I’ve never been to a funeral. I look at this as something to be joyful about. Sure, I’ve had people around me die – but, despite some being blood relatives, I wouldn’t consider myself having had been truly “close” to those that are now gone. That, in and of itself, is kind of sad to even think about. Watching family members pass away having never developed much beyond an acquaintance-level relationship with them. I do take some comfort, though, in the fact that the distance between me and those relatives no longer here was geography-driven – and I didn’t have much of a practical chance at developing those bonds. Lament over lost time aside, the fact still stands that I’ve never once attended a funeral – be it the funeral of a relative, friend, or acquaintance.

I bring the anomaly up because, as I write this, I’m sitting at home on an “extended” lunch break babysitting – while Sharaun attends a funeral. No one close (as if that callous statement somehow makes it better). The woman was a “yard duty” at her school, someone she interacted with quite often. A lot of the faculty and staff turned out, and Sharaun wanted to go pay her respects.

I’m lucky, you know. Someday I will have to go to a funeral, like it or not.

As I grow older, I find that the number of things which I allow to affect me emotionally – specifically those which impact me sufficiently to bring tears or sniffles – has grown. I think having a child has a lot to do with this as well, but I noticed the increase even before crossing that life threshold. Yeah… prior to Keaton, and before my old age, I can remember crying as a child, and at the end of Schindler’s List (y’know, the part with the rocks on the grave?), and that’s about it. All those times I “cried” so cheated-on girlfriends would take me back it was just lab-tears, whipped up for the moment. But now… I fear I’ve turned soft. Know how I know? I saw this picture online the other day, and, without even reading the tearjerking accompanying article, I nearly lost it. That is a human being.

Had my final Lasik follow-up last week, my eyes are doing great and seem to have settled out at 20/15. The nighttime halos that the doctor said I may have, and that I did indeed have, are now reduced so much that I don’t notice them but are supposed to go away completely within three months post-op. The only side-effect that’s still lingering is the extra dryness in my eyes. It’s gotten better than before, but I still carry around drops and usually use them a few times a day. That’s supposed to go away for the “vast majority” of patients within 6mos at the most, I’m just waiting. Again, I think this is some of the best money I’ve ever spent. Restoring my vision to something I can wake up to… that’s just awesome.

Goodnight.

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pleasantly longer than usual


Good Sunday evening my friends, coming off a weekend that seemed pleasantly longer than usual. I’m bringing you quite a disparate entry today, written off and on over the weekend to ensure it doesnt tie together at all. I did manage, however, to stick to tradition and post another (small) batch of photos to Keaton’s gallery. Last week, a friend asked me if I plan to post new pictures every week for the next eighteen years. Fair question, I suppose. I have no idea how long I’ll be obsessed enough with this baby to post weekly – but for now it’s become something of a habit, and, besides, I think you secretly like it. So here they are, Keaton’s gallery.

Sometimes, when I sit around on a Saturday doing absolutely nothing, wasting time, be ultimately nonconstructive, simply gaining weight – I get this feeling that all my friends are busy doing something with their time. I imagine them pulling weeds, cleaning house, gardening, washing cars, or spending their time doing something else equally as useful. I’m about 50/50 torn between loving being able to completely lose a day to sedentariness and hating the fact that I can be so lazy. Often, a thousand thoughts will run through my head: useful things I could do, things I’ve put off during the week which I could now devote hours uninterrupted to. Like now, it’s noon on Saturday and I’ve done nothing with my day but cook breakfast and play with the baby. I mean, I downloaded some music, messed with the iPod, and finished off some dirty dishes – but I feel like none of that matters because I haven’t even put on a shirt yet. I’m obviously not serious about today if it can’t even motivate me enough to clothe myself properly. Doomed to a day of sitting on the couch, listening to music, and writing… I’m 24hr useless.

But folks, as a result of that paragraph… I got the spirit. I went up to Home Depot and purchased some supplies to build some shelving in the garage, as well as the beginnings of the Baying Wolves project I have planned this Halloween (one of the two I hope to complete). Sharaun and I braved the 100+ temperatures to clean out and reorganize the garage. If you know me, you know I love organizing and tidying, and if I can do it in the garage while kicking some tunes on the iPod all the better.

I am positively in love with about 2/3 of this new Guillemots album – which means mostly the numbers with a decent tempo and a couple of the slower tracks. Some of these songs are so lushly done, with strings and rising chorus, plenty of cymbal crash to fill up the background, and unexpected falsetto. I recommend it, as it sounds like not much else I’ve heard out there right now. Also part of my playlist right now is an album by the group Midlake, which, while being slower and more muted, is crafted with extreme care – not to mention it’s not just 2/3 good, it’s 3/3 good. And, since we’re in the music paragraph – I’ll go ahead and say how excited I am about getting the new Ratatat album this weekend. Seeing as I liked the last one so much, I’ve got high expectations.

Looks like I’m not the only one who thought that CNN’s coverage of the current Israel/Lebanon/Hezbollah conflict is lacking. I’m finding that it’s really hard to get a “balanced” article on the current events over there, and I still stand by Wikipedia as the best checked-and-balanced telling of the tale as it’s unfolding.

Goodnight.

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girls are hot


Wednesday night coming off a slower day at work

I’ve written before about how terrible I am at “keeping in touch.” Unless a relationship is in my face on a regular basis, reminding me it exists, I tend to let it fizzle. I don’t know how to describe this other than a flaw in me personally. Most of the time, I have no desire to “end” a relationship or disconnect from a person or people – but I just don’t make any effort to keep things alive. You could call it laziness, but I’d peg it more as being rooted in my self-centered nature. I value each and every one of my friendships or other relationships, but in the bitter honesty of self-inspection I realize that I’m rarely the one making those relationships work. I’m usually a willing participant, and rarely the catalyst maintaining things. People call me more than I call people, unfortunately. At various times I’ve tried to address this, and all have met with great results. It’s odd how I sometimes seem to prefer some sense of being aloof, some strategic disconnection. If it makes me seem cold and uncaring, I’m sorry… it’s not that… I promise. I often get lost in my own brain and don’t pay enough attention to the things that keep my truly happy. How’s that for some introspection, huh?

I love girls; always have, likely always will. When I see girls, I want to look at them. Legs and belly-buttons pull my eyes, draw me in, like a cartoon character lifted into the air, nostrils leading, by the visible wafting scents of a pie cooling on a windowsill. Girls are my pies on windowsills. Curves and smiles and hair turn my head, prompting a discrete inhalation a few seconds after passing, perchance to catch a whiff of some sweet perfume. Yes, I like girls – I’m constantly watching and evaluating and assessing them. I can remember sitting in classes when in high school, running through different “I’d sleep with her if” scenarios. Keeping a count of who I’d “stoop to” repopulating the Earth with should we be put in such a situation.

So, girls of the world, please know that when you encounter me – I am looking. I am focusing on your hair, smile, eyes, and legs – in that order (you T&A men can have that, ranks low for me). Not that you care, but you are being evaluated and binned. Should I be lucky enough to be around you for any extended amount of time, I reserve the right to completely redo my initial rankings based on personality. Even if you’re bald, have gaping holes where your eyes should be, hairy legs and a toothless grin – I could fall in love with you just the same if you laugh at my jokes and overlook my many flaws. OK… maybe I’d want you to have teeth… or at least a passable orthodontia replicate… but then again you may want me to have hairless shoulders – touché.

On their current tour, Radiohead has so far played a total of 13 new songs off their yet-to-be-released new album. A while back, I wrote about my most anticipated albums of 2006. Radiohead was #2 on the list. I’ve been hearing rumors now that we may not see an album until 2007. Man… do albums ever leak a year early? And where the heck have the Arcade Fire been? Can we please get at least a press blurb about them “working hard in the studio” or something?

Goodnight?

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my bid


Hey Maygsters, I think it was you who once told me you sometimes check this page multiple times a day to see if I wrote late? That one statement was enough to motivate this late entry; thanks. Sorry it sucks anyway.

Going on 10pm Thursday night and I was fully planning on not writing an entry for tomorrow. Yeah, I had some canned stuff I could slap together – but none of it seemed exciting enough to make an entry out of. Work had me frustrated today, to the point where I called it quits around 11am and headed home to sit on the couch and do e-mail and conference calls. Let me tell you, nice weather wafting through the windows and the iPod on shuffle make for a much more enjoyable working environment than 3 and 3/4 shoulder-high grey fabric walls and a grey desk. In counterpoint to my normal “working from home” days, I actually got a good bit done.

I’m such a procrastinator. It’s an trait I think I developed as a natural second-order effect of my desire to be lazy. I don’t consider my laziness a laziness of thinking, or creating, or reasoning – just a laziness of convenience. When things aren’t what I want to do, I drag my heels. Even when I want something done, but don’t want to put the effort forth to get it done – my laziness steps in and takes over. It’s a bad trait, one that has me constantly putting off things that are simple tasks – but it’s the way I’ve learned to work. In the end it all boils down to being extremely self-centered (I do feel I maintain a line between my self-centeredness and my caring for others before, but I won’t try and make the point here). Anyway, this paragraph doesn’t fit… it’s now over.

Last night our company (remember, my first girlfriend and Sharaun’s college roommate?), Robin, inquired about the whole “blog” thing. And, being that she represented a major milestone in my adolescence, she is fairly well represented here – and I think she was surprised to find that out. Anyway, I ran a search for her name and handed her the laptop. She read through the entry about her birthday, the reminiscing over one of her notes, and the time I cheated on her with her best friend. At some point, she turned to me and asked, “Did you ever think we’d be here, on a couch in California, reading about this?” Hell no I didn’t, not in my wildest dreams. But… I’m glad it worked out that way, kinda cool.

Anyway, in the end she said the entries helped her remember what a dick I was. So, if nothing else, at least the blog serves the purpose of reminding people of my past-dickness. Which is good if I ever want to be inducted into the “Dick Hall of Fame” after my demise. I’ve heard written record of dickdom goes a long way as testimony in the judges eyes, so I figure I’m a lock.

Goodnight folks, love ya all.

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bank error in your favor


I’ve been writing and rewriting the topic-major of this entry over the past two days, and I realized it’s as good as it’s going to get. I wanted to convey more, but I couldn’t seem to get the words right… or maybe I don’t have the spirit or attention span to make it happen. Here goes anyway.

We’ll be taking Keaton on her first camping trip this weekend, hoping to infuse her with a love of the modern version of outdoor life. We’ll be packing it in and heading to the coast for a short overnight sleepover in the tent. We’re heading down with a close knot of folks we run with on a regular basis, including those ones with the twins (important, as we’ll not be the only folks with babies on the trip – potential relief from that “baby’s gonna ruin it” apprehension). Sharaun went out and bought a little bug-net cover thing for Keaton’s stroller, and got her some baby sunblock and a cute floppy camping hat. If we can pull it off without all three babies protesting the entire time, it stands to be an awesome adventure – I’ll let ya know how it goes.

The comments on my powderkeg entry this week really pleased me, especially the one from my own mom. I don’t know when I officially became a “grown up.” Maybe it was when I got my first job, or moved out of the house, or bagged my first vagina; maybe it was when I stopped smoking weed, or asked Sharaun to marry me; maybe when I bought a house or started my career – who knows. What I do know, though, is that, with the arrival of Keaton, I feel like I have passed that milestone for sure now. Regardless of how drawn-out and blurry the transition period may have been, I’m now comfortable saying I’m on the other side of it – crossed over. And, along with “adulthood” comes this feeling of wisdom-gained, not to mention shame of things done prior to the metamorphosis. My mom’s comment brought to mind one moment in time I remember from my youth that’s always given me that sense of shame, only more acutely now – now that I have my own child and am beginning to realize just how kids can effect parents. Read on…

I don’t remember how old I was but I’m guessing under 10. I do remember it was my family: mom, dad, me, and my brother all spending a week or weekend or whatever with my mom’s folks up at a cabin on a lake we frequented. I loved that place, they had those plastic paddle-wheel big-tired tricycle-looking contraptions you could take around the lake and a rustic hunting-lodge-esque building overlooking the lake where you could get three meals a day. The cabins were surely rentals, and were small if I remember, but nice. My story takes place with the entire family playing a game of Monopoly on a picnic table outside the cabin one evening. Multicolored money splayed across the table and little green and red plastic houses and hotels cluttering the gameboard – we were deep in the throes of a game and, I, I was losing. It was time to start mortgaging properties, and anyone who knows Monopoly knows that’s a player’s last raspy breaths before death.

Valuable information about me as kid you’ll need before proceeding: When I was a kid, I was a manipulative brat. I had well-formed methods by which I attempted to get my way, mainly through emotional plays and tantrums. These weren’t things which I did subconsciously, but things I’d thought through on a very conscious level, best-known-methods which I’d honed over time for maximum results. Despite how calculating and “grown up” this might sound, it was really nothing more than a bratty, stubborn kid trying cheap tactics to get his way – and breaking down into plain fits when they didn’t work. And folks, that was my endgame strategy – if I wasn’t getting my way, I’d scream, cry, kick, punch walls… whatever it took. I know all kids do this to some extent, but I’m pretty sure I was different, somehow more “extreme.” So much so that I remember my folks taking me to a “family therapist” about it, although my memories of our “sessions” are mostly of me sitting around trying to make the perfect paper airplane. But, that’s another story altogether… and you’re now properly setup for me to continue.

So here I am, something of eight or ten years, losing badly at Monopoly and not wanting to mortgage Mediterranean Ave. to stay afloat. So, I lost it; went completely berserk. I don’t remember all the details, just remember putting all I had into the effort. I’m not sure what my intended results were: the family declaring me winner by default, the banker cutting me a break and slipping me some yellow $100 bills under the table… I don’t know. I do remember, however, that the situation was such that I realized I mustn’t back down from the tantrum – in order to maintain the strategic advantage I perceived I’d built with such fits. So, I escalated, and things got out of hand. Now, the part that brings me shame, the one thing that sticks in my mind and makes me shy away from the memory… is something I overheard my grandmother say to my mom after we were all back in the cabin and things had died down:

“You don’t have control over that boy,” she said to my mom, “What are you doing with him that he thinks he can act like that?” Sure, I’m paraphrasing – but the gist was that I had caused my mother’s mother to question her child’s parenting skills. Even then, young as I was, I knew that must be a crushing blow. Now, as a self-conscious new parent – I can’t imagine how devastating it would be to hear my own mom question how I was raising my daughter.

Sorry mom (and dad), I didn’t really mean it…

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toting around a powder keg


Luckily, my customer meeting in the bay ended early enough that I was able to catch an earlier flight home – putting me on the ground and at home with enough daylight left to mow the jungle we call our lawn. Blissfully isolated from the cacophony by virtue of my new headphones, I trudged around in the so-tall-it’s-seeding green stuff, stopping every minute and a half to empty the dang bag. It’s high time I got a new mower… it could make the job so much easier.

Before having a baby, I never realized how self-conscious parents can be. Having one myself now, I can tell you that, for me, at least, toting around my powder keg of a daughter can, at times, be very nerve-wracking. The minute she tears off into a crying fit with people around, I immediately feel eyes on me. Some people, likely parents themselves, flash knowing smiles – but in my over-thinking head those same smiles come with hinted undertones and accusations: why can’t you quiet your baby, why’s your baby always upset, are you not a good parent? I know most of these fears are likely unfounded, but I have them nonetheless. I can actually understand why new parents often end up cloistering themselves with other new parents, as they likely feel none of these “all eyes on me” fears when in similarly self conscious company. May sound odd, but I bet I’m not the only one to have felt this way… am I?

No more writey, sleepy.

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invested


I love my blog; I really do. Sometimes, I just point Firefox towards it at random times during the day. I’ll re-read my own posts maybe three times during each given workday. Sometimes I do it under the guise of “looking for errors,” but really I just like reading my own stuff – I’m that full of myself. Every night, I check the day’s blog stats: who visited, how long they stayed, what they’re reading and searching for; I eat it up. During the day, I’ll take quick notes on my cellphone, things I want to write about (yesterday my cellphone chirped at 6pm, flashing a cryptic two-word reminder: “island sex”). I like to imagine people reading it and smiling or laughing, I like to imagine the little green s|f icon sitting in peoples’ favorites. I like to imagine people thinking, “I wonder what Dave wrote today.” I like all these things because I’m arrogant, conceited, and self-centered – traits which I think a good portion of bloggers likely share (blogs are for an audience, after all). I don’t care though, I still love my blog – and see no end to it, even as we march onward towards three years together.

This weekend, I sent off a note to an online used CD store. In it, I included a text list of all the titles I’ve ripped and verified from my extensive collection – and asked what kind of price they’d give me for the lot of ’em (some ~500 discs). Their original offer came in a tad low, so I countered and raised by about ~$400. In the end, it looks like I’ll be lucky to make ~$3 per CD upon selling them. Surprisingly, this doesn’t disappoint me that much… I mean, I’m done with these plastic things, they’ve served me well, and certainly given me $15 worth of entertainment over the years – if I can get 20% resale on them after all this time and use, who am I to balk at it? So, in the end, I’ll be dumping nearly half my collection (the other half being mostly Beatles, bootlegs, or CD-R copies of albums I accumulated via online trading) for roughly ~$1500. That’s a $1500 windfall, as far as I’m concerned. Plus, I get rid of ~100lbs of plastic and paper and can sell my specialized CD racks on Craigslist. All in the spirit of simplifying, well that and a corrupt “make a copy and then sell it” sense of capitalism.

Don’t tell anyone, but I bet I got at least 100 of those CDs by scamming the Columbia House and BMG music clubs. Back in middle/high school, I’d join up each service multiple times, under multiple pseudonyms with fake variation addresses of my folks’ house (y’know, Ian Ichamore in “suite B” and the like). I must’ve been a member of each club four or five times over, sometimes maintaining several memberships simultaneously, each one garnering my 12 free CDs. But Dave, what about the commitments you had to fulfill to get out of the club? How could you keep getting the free discs without buying anything? Easy, I had a few standard excuse letters that worked brilliantly each time. My favorite was the, “I’m in the US Navy and am spending the next 16mos aboard a carrier in the Pacific.” I also used the, “I’m in the Army and have been relocated to Japan/Germany/South Africa” bit – but usually my excuses involved compulsory military service – so as to lay on the guilt should I not be absolved of my commitments. Worked like a charm every time. (Dang! I thought I already wrote about this!)

Like the day I discovered I’d been spelling the word “won’t” wrong for my entire life, yesterday I realized that, in my some 30 years of writing, I’ve been using the word “desert” to mean both an arid, dry/hot area of land, and a sweet post-meal confection. Somewhere along the lines, the lesson about there being two Ses in “dessert” missed me. As of tonight, I’ve gone back through the entire blog and rid myself of this embarrassing faux-pas. Isn’t my face red.

Goodnight my friends.