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the saigon turtle


Sunday we set out to do our Christmas shopping, but before we hit the merchants I took advantage of Keaton’s nap and headed up to get my haircut. A while back I switched hair cuttery from the Singaporean-run place I used to frequent to a place closer to home. As I’ve been going there for a while now, I’ve developed likings and dislikings for certain members of the staff there. For instance, through the luck of the draw, I had learned that one of them in particular, an older Vietnamese gentleman, was super-slow and not very friendly. (Now, I swear, I really don’t have anything against Southeast-Asian cutters-of-hairs… this just happens to be a coincident.) Needless to say, when my turn came up today and he was motioning me to sit down in his chair, I was disappointed.

Now, let me give you a little side-info about me and haircuts (haircuts and I?). For me, the “goodness” of a haircut, or haircutter, is measured in speed. I am willing to get a slightly less-than-perfect haircut if it only takes me 5min from door to chair and back to door again. It’s not that I hate haircuts, I just see them as a huge waste of time. I’ve often thought I should learn how to give myself the ridiculously simple haircut I request each time I go in, and save the time and $16 every other week. So, you can see how, speed being my chief concern, getting saddled with the Saigon Turtle was a crushing blow. Despite this though, I reacted as a gentleman and sat down for what I guessed would be a ~20min “#2 on the sides, #8 on top” trim.

“Ready for the holidays?” He asked, his accent thick and unusually difficult for me to understand.
“Yeah, I am, how about you?” I replied cordially.
“Yeah. I’m going to ‘City X.'”
“Oh, that’ll be nice,” I say. “Myself, my wife and daughter are all headed to Oregon.”

Here he spoke two or three complete sentences in broken english over the buzz of the clipper, and I nodded and smiled having not understood a single word. As we continued to exchange niceties, his words gradually became easier to understand, as is often the case when talking with those who have accents. Soon I could understand him as easily as anyone else. Moreover, I began to enjoy talking to him. And, he wasn’t cutting my hair slow, either. He was smiling and laughing and making pleasant conversation, and I was enjoying myself. And then, he said the following, which is the whole reason I’m writing this:

“You know, I just moved here three years ago. From Vietnam.”
“Oh?” I ask rhetorically.
“Yes,” he affirms, “All my life my dream had been to come to America; this is the best country in the whole world.”
I smile at him in the mirror, and let him continue.
“In Vietnam, I was a lawyer.”
“A lawyer?” I ask, thinking I may have misheard him.
“Yes, a lawyer.” He pauses, as if remembering.
“People have asked me, ‘Why don’t you go to school here, become a lawyer here?’ I tell them, by the time I graduate, I would be 70. I’m 61 now.”

I’m looking at this man, cutting my hair for his share of $13 and my $3 tip, and imagining him in a suit and tie carrying a briefcase into some Vietnamese courtroom.

“You know,” he continues, “You can do anything here. In America, if you like to work hard, you can make money – anyone can make money.”
I smile, waiting for him to finish.
“Before I was a lawyer, I fought in the Vietnamese war. I fought against the South. Three years, I was a lieutenant. I was captured in 1967 and spent three years in a prisoner-of-war camp.”

Holy shit. Here is a 61 year-old former Viet Cong lieutenant, a POW-camp survivor, and former lawyer – and he’s cutting my hair. What’s more, he seemed so happy to be doing it. As I left, I wished him a good Thanksgiving in City X with his sister (who is a doctor), and he wished me and my family well in Oregon.

The whole exchange had an impact on me. I don’t think of America like that often enough, the kind of America you that the immigrants in movies and on TV talk about. For some people, that is the only America they know – and for the rest of us who’ve known no different, it can be easy to be blind to it. So, Lieutenant, I apologize for unfairly characterizing you as “that slow old guy who takes too long to earn my $3,” you deserved better. Thanks for telling me your story.

Goodnight.

Posted on

when i was bulletproof


Work today was another one of those sprints to five o’clock. Meeting after meeting, rushing to get one thing done before it was too late to do the next one. I don’t mind so much, but I hate the fact that, when I get home, I’m often so beat down that I’d just rather collapse than do something ultimately more enjoyable like feed my daughter dinner. Tonight, though, I powered through it – and went immediately from dropping my keys to spooning pureed chicken and apples into her perfect little mouth as she bopped around and babbled. At the time, I may have wished I was splayed out on the couch instead – but I think I made the right call.

Little by little these past few weeks, I’ve been working on my “best of” list for the music of 2006. I guess I’ll let it fly sometime in December, I’m imagining posting it while in Florida for the holidays. As part of the process, I go back and listen to each album I shortlisted throughout the year, and try to write something about it while it’s on the cans. Today I wrote a little bit for one album that I liked so much, I’m going to put it here – but without listing what album it was for. I justify this because a) I’m running low on material and I liked it, and b) I figure people don’t really read all the “best of” text anyway (who wants to read some dude’s gushing over rock ‘n’ roll, anyway?):

One night back in highschool, I found myself at one of many parties in the woods. Sharaun could never accompany me to these things, so I was flying solo. At some point, an upperclassmen girl I knew fairly well sauntered over and, her face lit furtively by the flickering bonfire, whispered close that she wanted to try some of what I was smoking, but that she was with her “straight” friends and needed to be discreet.

So that’s how this girl and I, our relationship already clearly established to me, her, and apparently others as being flirty enough to raise eyebrows, found ourselves quietly slipping off into the trees to get high together. I’m convinced I could’ve made anything happen under the shelter of those trees that night, but I didn’t. We smoked, laughed, enjoying our teenage moment, and walked out together into the crowd some five minutes later.

I guess our disappearance into, and subsequent reappearance from, darkness got folks talking though – and by Monday morning at school it was said that we’d bedded in the pine needles. I had a time explaining to Sharaun, but everything worked out in the end.

Ahhh yes, those sacred years… nothing like highschool when I was bulletproof.

Oh my, the “new” Beatles record has leaked and I’m 24hrs late to the party… gotta catch up… goodnight.

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we need more of those people


It’s 8:30pm already, Wednesday night. Tonight is garbage night, so I have to get the various garbages together and haul them to the bins, after which I’ll haul the bins themselves down to the street. After that, I need to clean up the dishes from dinner, and maybe try and pick up Keaton’s scattered toys from her busy day at home with mom. I hate nights where the late creeps up on you, like tonight… where it’s 8:30pm already and I’ve barely had time to do anything but get home and sit down. Nights where the late creep up on you are almost as bad as sleeps where you wake up 15min before your alarm clock is about to go off. Anyway… back to tonight – let’s write something.

I like friendly people. Today, as I was walking out the door heading back to work after lunch, a truck was parked outside my house and a guy was unloading some boxes from it. “Hey,” he said, “got some boxes for you here.” “Boxes for me?” I wondered aloud, “OK.” As I walked towards the guy, he must’ve seen my company-logo’d polo shirt and asked me, “You sill work for Company-X?” (I’ll call my workplace “Company-X” for this one). I told him I did, and he proceeded to tell me how he’d just been laid of from Company-X. Having worked previously in some shipping/receivables department, he’d been let go just weeks ago and was now delivering for FedEx (in a Penske truck, no less).

Anyway, he was quite the talkative fellow, asking me what the situation was like now at Company-X: was it still bad, heads still rolling, etc. The guy was genuine, if a bit of a jabberjaw, and sincere. And I stood on the curb for a good 10min just talking about this and that with him. For instance, I learned that his dad recently died, and he’d moved back in with his mom to take care of her. You know those people who get personal too quickly when you meet them, he was one. But, I enjoyed myself, standing in the sun there – me still having my cush position at Company-X and being able to look down on his now lowly profession of Penske truck drivin’, box lugging deliveryman. No, no, that was a joke. The point here is that sometimes it’s encouraging to meet people who are just straight up nice. We need more of those people.

Helped Sharaun work on her resume tonight, as she’s applying for some part-time work as a freelance elementary school textbook editor through a connection. Would be stay-at-home work done on the computer, but we sure wouldn’t mind even the part-time income. Y’know, I’m glad, though, that she decided to leave work and do the mom thing – I honestly don’t think I could do it full-time. Watching the baby is one thing, but I’d fear I’m just too selfish to do it long-term. You think spending all day “playing” with the baby and reading to the baby and feeding and changing and singing to the baby is easy work, wrong… for me I get caught up wanting to do my own things. The things I’m used to being able to do when I want to do them. Yeah, I’ve got a lot of respect for what a selfless act the full-time mommy gig is, and I’m glad Sharaun’s the one doing it the same way I’m glad some dude (who’s not me) drives a garbage truck and takes away my refuse.

Well friends, the CD ripping part of my CD-ripping project is about 99% complete. I don’t know if I ever figured I’d really get this far. What’s left now is to optimize the entire resultant digital files. Because, out of roughly 150 gigabytes of music, some 50 gigabytes were ripped from discs that wouldn’t auto-grab MP3 ID3 tags from the ‘net. This means I’m going through and attacking them manually to make them more usable. But through a combination of some scripting I’ve done with the wonderfully extensible Godfather tagger, and just good ol’ done-by-hand data entry, I imagine the entire library will be finished sometime in early December. Make no mistake though, it’s downhill from here. All my tunes are now stored as safe digital copies, on a redundant disk array – and I couldn’t be happier. It’s a good feeling, to see my mater spreadsheet (which I started over two years ago) finally be completely green. I have now arrived at the digital age, ’bout time.

There we have it then, goodnight.

Posted on

other than that, i’m out


So disinterested tonight, I just want to sleep. I fear I’m coming down with something, as I’m not typically this tired all the time. This weekend, I just wanted to sleep. And now, I swear I could go to bed and yet it’s only 7pm. Sharaun seems to be stricken with the same affliction, maybe we’ve both caught mono or something. Maybe I’m so tired because I’ve been reading all these gushing reviews of the new Joanna Newsom album that I just can’t get into. I mean, this thing’s done been leaked ever since I wrote this, and it still hasn’t gotten any better.

So, I don’t have much tonight… spent a good amount of time uploading pictures and movies to Keaton’s gallery. If you’d like, you can view said media by clicking this link.

Other than that, I’m out. Goodnight.

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bits of ham at christmas dinner


Both Saturday and Sunday I was tired; too tired. I also had that tight-muscled feeling. Both those things together usually mean I’m coming down with a cold. As a first response, I decided to see if a Sunday afternoon catnap might help. Not sure I was able to stave off any sickness, but it should felt good to take a nice long nap. I put the new Shins record on the iPod and drifted off while Sharaun watched Home Alone on TV and played with Keaton.

Speaking of Home Alone being on TV, “they” (the powers that be) sure are starting the Christmas stuff early this year. I went to Home Depot on Halloween day to pick up some last-minute needs and they had already taken down the Halloween stuff and were busily assembling the glut of Christmas lawn decorations and green extension cords. I can remember not being Christmas-marketed until after Thanksgiving, seems now that’s moved to after Halloween. When my kids grow up, they’ll start making their lists in August.

Speaking of Christmas, I’m all kinds of excited for Keaton to experience it for the first time. Although I realize there’ll be a limited amount of actual “experiencing” going on, at least that she’ll be able to remember, it doesn’t really matter because I’m also excited about us getting to experience Christmas with her. I’m excited to give her something to tear into on Christmas morning, excited to see her reaction to the Christmas tree, and excited to be back in Florida with friends and relatives to tell us how cute she is. I’m excited to dress her up in warm clothes (although not too warm, as Christmas in Florida is generally shorts and flip-flops weather), excited to feed her bits of ham at Christmas dinner… excited about all that.

Alas, my friends, I’d’ve liked to have followed up that Keaton-based paragraph with a link to a new gallery of her pictures – but I just didn’t get it done. I’m shooting once again for a Monday night posting this week. Oh, and I’ve also decided that this weekly posting thing will more than likely turn into a monthly one after I get to the 52nd week. I’ll try and keep it up for the entire first year, but after that it’s anyones guess. After all, I don’t want to back myself into a corner in terms of precedent when kid #2 comes.

Well, I guess that’s a lot of nothing for tonight – but it’s an entry. Goodnight.

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plasma-nuked by bleepblorkians (an iraq exit strategy)


Wanna know my exit strategy for Iraq? Just leave. Get the fuck out. Go.

Now, I know, you’re all saying, “Dave, that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. How can you call yourself a bleeding-heart liberal and not want to stick around to fix what those bloodthirsty republicans did to that poor, poor nation?” Well, I’ll tell you how – I just don’t give a shit. We fucked up, we lost, everyone already hates us – let’s just pick up stakes and ride out. Oh sure, I don’t mean leave here today gone tomorrow, but let’s get a seriously accelerated and real timetable for leaving. Something like, give the new government money to rebuild all the infrastructure we wrecked, maybe give some humanitarian aid, and then bolt.

“But Dave, those corrupt Iraqis will spend that rebuilding money on corruption!” So what? Fuck them. If they want to do that, so be it.

“But Dave, we went in there and tore up these peoples’ country and now you want to just abandon them to their own internal warring factions, complete lack of stability, and shit quality of life?” Yeah, that’s right, I kinda do.

“But Dave, what about spreading the goodness of Democracy?” What, our new-fangled version of Manifest Destiny? Give me a break. Is it really a “gift” if you have to give it with bombs and tanks?

“But Dave, what about our strategic role in the Middle East? How will we control our oil interests if we don’t have any presence there?” Easy, we don’t. Hows this trade sound to you: money and spilled blood spent on war vs. money and no spilled blood spent on alternative fuels. Not bad, right? I wonder if, over these past three years, instead of fighting this sham of a war, we’d taken the entire expenditure (some $340 billion dollars) and instead devoted it to developing a viable gasoline alternative – where would we be now? In fact, let’s talk about that last one a bit – partly because I know there are several large and obvious holes in it.

Just because you come up with an alternative fuel, it doesn’t end your need for gasoline. There’s a huge transitional period you’ll have to go through. OK fine, can’t we offset that too? I don’t know how much any of this would really cost, but I’d bet we could get creative with that $340 billion and not only develop a viable alternative fuel, but also help offset the gasoline-to-whatever transition in the places where it would hurt the most (like industry, shipping, etc.) I’m betting the $340 billion would fall significantly short, but it wouldn’t be a bad start. We could define the gas-to-whatever ramp with our own crude supply capabilities in mind, wean off at a rate we could handle entirely on our own reserves and active drillings.

We are industrious people. We built the best damn nation in the world from the ground up. You’re telling me that, were the world’s supply of oil to completely dry up, we wouldn’t be able to figure something out? You bet your ass we would. You’re talking about the nation that invents things like fast food drive-thru windows so we don’t have to get our lazy asses out of our cars to get our cheeseburgers, Segways so we don’t have to burden our legs with the act of transporting us around, and remote controls for ceiling fans. Trust me, we can figure it out. Now, back to the “But Daves.”

“But Dave, what about terrorism!! You want to just abandon that whole area and leave it the most fertile breeding ground for extremism and terrorism thought on Earth?” Terrorism-schmerrorism. As I’ve said before, terrorism is here to stay. Right now, it comes in the form of Islamic extremism, but it’ll always be around. Right now, it comes from the Middle East, but it’ll aways come from somewhere. In fact, in 2079 the United States may live in fear of hovercar plasma-nukings at the hands of the devoted followers of Martian God Bleepblork. People of 2079 will think back to quieter times when all they had to worry about was a 3,558,000 square mile bit of land on Earth with an extremely small number of extremists who were trying to kill us one airplane at a time with their sneakers and Gatorade. Yeah, what we call terrorism today will be some piddly nickel-and-dime ham-and-egger bullshit compared to what the legions of extremist Bleepblorkians will be capable of.

The here and now is always scary. But, much as we now look back in disgust on our “Jap”-interning days gone by, so will we eventually recall our outside-the-Geneva-Convention “hostile combatant” prisons. There will always be a new hotbed for hatred.

Anyway, there it is without my usual self-criticism and admittance of shortsightedness. Pick it apart in the comments. And we’re done with that.

Before I go, I wanted to say that I totally love the raw, unbridled anger in the latest comment on my (rather popular) iTunes is Crap entry.

Goodnight.

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invite the terrorists to dinner


Wednesday night (I’ve decided that it’s kinda my “thing” to begin my blogs with a simple statement of when I’m writing. I don’t care if you saw it somewhere else first, it’s still my thing) and I’m over at Anthony’s. At the moment, everyone has left me here to go somewhere else – and I’m all alone in the house save for my sleeping baby and Anthony’s sleeping daughter. Seeing as this is, understandably, not the most exciting of times, I decided to write to pass the time.

Today work was a regular blitzkrieg… an assault on all fronts. One of those days spent mentally juggling task after task, all the while driving to get as much done in the time available. I’m actually proud of my efforts today, I got a lot done – and allowed only a few distractions to sidetrack me. It’s at times like these, these “peaks,” that I feel like I earn my pay. It kinda makes up for that time I lied and said I had a dentist appointment and instead went home to take a nap, or that time I hid out down in the cafeteria reading, or when I purposely don’t answer the phone when the caller ID tells me it’s someone with whom I’m going to have to have a long, drawn-out conversation. Yeah, totally makes up for all that.

Big day today for the left-leaners out there today, the house, the senate, the don’t-let-the-door-hit-you-on-the-Ashcroft. Yes, big day indeed. Methinks, though, with all the fanfare and media coverage, that those dems better get to workin’ like, stat. Someone needs to get a platform, someone needs to do something, make something happen. Because, I’m of the opinion that, If the party of the ass decides to rest on their laurels for two years expecting their “Bush is dumb, Iraq is a mess” message to carry them in ’08 – they ain’t gonna win no elections. So, let’s see what ya got, guys and gals – get out there and raise taxes, take guns, invite the terrorists to dinner, and turn our children into godless homos. Yay!

What’s up with the Colbert Report lately? This Tek Jansen crap is boring and unfunny. Get with it Stephen.

Goodnight y’allz.