Drama Queen

She got the part!
Maybe I should back up a little.
A while ago Mia had a friend who somehow ended up in a local community theater production. She was a little jealous but most of all curious how she, too, could do the same thing. Now, this didn’t surprise her mother and I. She’s always had a flair for the dramatic. This is, after all, the girl who got up and did a whole number built around I Cain’t Say No from Oklahoma two Christmases ago. We did our homework, looked into the process and, on Saturday, Beth and Mia both auditioned for the next production.
On Saturday night they called. They both made it. Rehearsals start this week.
We appreciate our privacy so I won’t comment on the production but the I can say that the call was shocking because of the part they offered Mia. It’s not a large part but it is incredibly pivotal.
I know what this sounds like and I promise you we are as far from being stage parents as Michele Bachman is from an IQ score greater than her shoe size. This was Mia’s call from the beginning. And it completely fits with her personality. She’s going to knock ’em dead and be back for more. And we’re going to sit in the audience adoringly.

Haiku For Monday #383

The weather’s colder
and I could have slept forever.
But The Man awaits.

The Weeklies #186

The Weekly Fact. It should have been Friday, like, three days ago, right?
The Weekly Thing That Costs Way More Than It Should. Cereal.
The Weekly Read. I recently finished a really interesting and slightly terrifying book, Inside Scientology by journalist Janet Reitman. Reitman began her quest with an article commissioned by Rolling Stone. It turned into a five year journey, trying to get to the bottom of the secretive religion. What she found was truly fascinating. Beyond Tom Cruise and John Travolta is a truly odd belief system rooted in the belief that extra terrestrials sprinkled their knowledge and life force throughout the universe allowing humans to pick them up after they’d achieved a certain amount of enlightenment through techniques such as auditing with special electronic devices called E-meters. And what kind of commitment is required from the subject? Money. Sheer volumes of cash. In fact progress in the religion is accelerated based on the amount of money you put into it.
The Weekly Awesomeness in Literature. My buddy Marshall is now a New York Times #1 Bestselling Author.
The Weekly Music. This will probably appeal to three of you. This week I downloaded and listened to the new Dream Theater album A Dramatic Turn Of Events. Sure I own all their albums but I was really interested in how they’d sound on their fist album since the departure of founding member and insanely awesome drummer Mike Portnoy (who I saw earlier this summer drumming for Neal Morse). With incredible drummer Mike Mangini on board after a well-publicized search, the band honestly sounds better than ever. Yes, the vocals are dated and sure the lyrics are often cheesy but the music is technically perfect.
The Weekly Joke. “They told me that my password had to be eight characters long. So I made it Snow White And The Seven Dwarves.”
The Weekly Schadenfreude. Michaele Salahi – she of White House crasher and D.C. Housewives fame – got all kidnaped this week. Except it really wasn’t a case of kidnapping. No, Michaele ran off with Journey guitarist Neal Schon. Really. You can’t make this stuff up.
The Weekly Question. Speaking of Journey, what’s your guiltiest musical pleasure?

Celebrity Rehab

There’s a level of superstar that I don’t understand…or condone. You know the people, the ones who have riders in their contracts that demand five pounds of M&Ms in a crystal bowl with all the blue ones removed. And ten bottles of $500/bottle champagne chilled to 41.3 degrees at all times. The latest to blow her cover and prove that she’s an asshole is Madonna. Apparently when she premiered her new film at the Toronto International Film Festival she wouldn’t allow any of the great unwashed (a.k.a., the volunteers working the festival) to gaze at her.

eight of the volunteers were asked to turn their faces to a wall so that they would not look at the pop-star-turned-movie-director as she made her way to her press conference about the film. One volunteer told the Globe they all dutifully stood with their backs to her as she passed.

What’s up with that?
I think it’s that celebrities over time become so divorced from reality, so shielded from how people live and how people should behave that they virtually have no clue. So I propose Celebrity Rehabilitation Camps For The Stuck Up. In camp, they have to do things like the rest of us – wear clothes from Target, drink tap water, cook their own meals, drive compact cars and fly coach when they need to.
Regardless, Madonna’s still an asshole.

Giant Balls

I’m not as active as I should be. I know I should exercise or at least join a gym and say I exercise but there aren’t enough hours in the day. Over the last couple of years, I’ve dramatically changed my eating habits. As it turns out being a vegetarian is healthy but augmenting a vegetarian diet with a pint of Ben and Jerry’s a day is not. Caffeine (two cups of coffee, max) and beer (typically more than two) are my only daily vices. But its not like I sit around all day. I have kids. They wouldn’t let that happen. I do, however, have a desk job so there’s little that can be done about eight or ten hours of the day. I’ve become convinced that working behind a desk is seriously bad for your health.
A few months back I started to notice that I was waking up sore every morning. Sore legs. Unless I was sleep-sprinting, there was no good excuse. Then I realized that I’d get up from my desk every so often and hobble around for a couple of minutes until my legs stretched out and didn’t feel stabby. This process makes me feel approximately 103 years old and it looks cool too. Yet when we went to the beach a few weeks ago I had no pain in my legs at all. Hmmm. I concluded it was all the sitting.
I redid my home office – new desk, new paint on the walls, but no new chair. No, I decided that instead of paying a bazillion dollars for some space age, complicated chair, I’d buy a giant fucking yoga ball. It’s huge. It’s easily three feet in diameter. It’s supposed to help my posture, keep me from being so sore, and strengthen my core (whatever the fuck that is). And so far it’s awesome. Except for yesterday when I was on a conference call, forgot that I was sitting on a ball, lifted my feet up and fell down, then made the excuse “just my ball” to everyone on the call. Now my legs don’t hurt. Just my pride.

Reactions

I don’t talk very specifically about work but sometimes I have to. On Friday two interesting and not altogether pleasant things happend that highlighted to me my own emotional failings.
Right as I was in the middle of dealing with senior folks and clients and a person I mentor, an email bomb dropped, one of those messages that when it pops into your inbox makes you cringe and when you read makes you say fuck really, really loud.
My reaction was two-fold: I have to take action and solve the problems immediately and I have to do it myself. The problem? Neither of these things are true. Sure, each of these events necessitated some response. But not a response at 4:00 on a Friday afternoon. And not a response that consisted only of my own actions and own opinions.
So I did something odd. I didn’t react immediately. Sure, I freaked out a little bit. Then I reached out to a colleague and set up time to talk through a couple of issues yesterday and tried my best not to obsess about it over the weekend.
And you know what happened? I dealt with it swiftly, professionally, and, if I can be so bold, well yesterday. It took the whole damn day but I did it.
Hey, look at me…I’m getting mature and shit.
What’s your biggest emotional failing?

Parenting Fail #498

Beth and I don’t eat meat. We stopped eating meat ten years ago not because we objected to meat (though both of us do now) but because we weren’t big fans. As a result we don’t eat much fake meat either. But two exceptions are fake breakfast sausage and fake chicken nuggets. Both of the kids love them. (And before you start saying that we’re depriving them in some way, we always give them the option of eating meat and Owen’s something of a regular at our local Chik-Fil-A.)
On Saturday morning Mia woke up and wanted sausage. We were out. So she asked for a nugget. Not exactly morning food but hey, what the hell. I popped one in the microwave and handed it off.
“It’s too crunch. And it’s spicy,” she said. Now, Mia isn’t always very enthusiastic about food. We hear both of these excuses quite a bit. We don’t fall for them anymore.
“Just eat them. Mommy’s getting donuts and you can have one after you eat some protein.” And she did and again she complained. But she’d let them sit too long. They tend to get a little tough when you let them sit. “Do you want me to make you another one?” I offered.
“Yes, please.” I did and that second serving was met with the same complaints. Then Beth came home with the promised donuts, a rare special treat.
“Why are you giving Mia those spicy fake Buffalo wings?”
“What are you talking about? I gave her nuggets.”
“No, you gave her the spicy Buffalo wings, the ones I bought for myself to put on salads at lunch.”
“Oh shit.”
It was then that I realized that, indeed, I had been trying to guilt Mia into eating spicy Buffalo wings. And that she’d been largely compliant given the fact that they must have tasted so horrible to her. I was immediately and profusely apologetic. All day long. I felt – and still feel – horrible.
A note to the Morningstar Farms folks – when you make two very different products and put them in the exact same box with the same colors and virtually the same picture on the front – there’s going to be trouble. Especially when you’re dealing with a dad who’s only managed to consume one cup of coffee.

Haiku For Monday #382

Dark nights, dark mornings.
Leaves changing, chestnuts falling.
But Mondays still suck.

I Heard The News Today, Oh Boy

I was standing in my office on a phone call when, out of the unoccupied ear I heard that a small plane crashed into a building in New York. I was on my way to my psychiatrist when I saw the smoke rising from the Pentagon. I was pulling into the parking lot when the reports came that – if you believed them all – every building in New York and Washington was on fire. I told my psychiatrist what happened. She fell apart. I thought I might have the wrong psychiatrist. I got back in my car and headed home. The 15 mile trip took two hours. I arrived at home, opened the door and found Beth watching the news. I found myself staring at pictures of this horrible thing that I’d only, to that point, heard about and tried not to picture in my mind. It, for whatever reason, had not occurred to me that cameras could have captured horror of this magnitude.
We lived close to an airport. All flights were grounded. The silence was eerie. We sat in the silence glued to the couch emerging only when a helicopter flew overhead. Everyone came out of their homes and looked up to the sky. It was as if we were refugees. In a sense we were.
In the hours and days that followed I watched the endless coverage and surfed the news sites, reading first hand accounts and looking at pictures of decimated buildings and soot-covered people. Some part of me couldn’t sit idly by while so many other suffered so profoundly. I had to suffer a little bit myself.
I remember many things from that day but above all I remember the bright blue sky. In ten years I don’t believe I’ve seen such a beautiful day.
Week and months after 9-11, my greatest fear wasn’t getting blown up in a building or inhaling anthrax. My biggest fear was that we’d forget – we’d forget what a wonderful country we were, how people from all walks of life came together, how we all flew American flags, and, most importantly, how many people were lost as a result of sheer hatred. I’m still afraid of that.

Church and State

Earlier this week I got an email the subject of which was “Raising the Right.” I knew it would either be innocuous or deeply offensive. It was, in fact, the latter. It began a little something like this:

The U.S. has one of the lowest birth success rates in the world, schools are testing four-day class weeks, and liberals want to take “one nation under God” out of the pledge of allegiance. What is happening to our country?

Ahhh, the old what is happening to our country ploy. It got better since it was, after all, an email promoting a Christian artist and apparent patriot.

Patriotic artist, Bob McBoberson*, created a painting representing his fear, sorrow and hope for this nation titled, “One Nation Under God.” He painted it in the hopes to awaken Americans and the government to return to the principles of freedom under the Constitution and recognize God as the source of these blessings. With over 60 figures and symbols in Bob’s painting, Jesus is holding the Constitution while the founding fathers and other symbolic individuals from the past stand directly behind him. This is to show the belief that God & Country should be united. To the left side of the painting are the strong Americans who hold the country together while on the other side are those who are weakening it.

And I swear Abraham Lincoln is on the right hand side, along with “those who are weakening” our country. Which include a scientist holding The Origin of the Species, a reporter, a pregnant woman clutching her swollen belly, a lawyer counting money, and a man “on his cell phone not paying attention.” I wish I was making this up.
I’m an atheist, liberal (who doesn’t think liberal is a bad word), Fox News loathing, evolution believing, women’s rights supporting, pro-choice championing, separation of church and state upholding kind of guy. And I found this deeply disturbing.
I don’t foist my beliefs on anyone else. They’re mine and mine alone. Everyone has every right to believe whatever they want to believe because that’s precisely the thing that makes this country great. The problem with this example of extremism is that it both laughs in the face of separation of church and state doctrine while clearly excluding the other religions and cultures that went (and still go) into making this country so fantastic.
Am I wrong? Isn’t there enough division in this country as it is? Shouldn’t we be trying to find compromises instead of differences?
* Not his real name. I refuse to give this guy publicity.