While my brother was here for Christmas we talked about blogging and writing in general. Being an English teacher, he has some insights on the subject. One observation he made was that if you write a truly good work of fiction you are almost embarrassed to show it to those close to you for fear that they will see themselves reflected in it and be unhappy with your portrayal of them. Although I have written very little fiction in my life, I got what he was trying to say and it has factored into a sort of internal dialog I’ve been wrestling with for the last week or so, though I’ve only just really realized it.

In the course of our conversation I told him that the last several posts here were written more from the head than the heart. I’d written them without any real inspiration and I felt that it showed in the writing. What I didn’t stop and consider at the time was why I’d written them at all if that was the case. I told him, and had been telling myself, that I wrote them just to have something to post, and I believed that to be true at the time. While that may be a small part of it I’ve come to realize that it is only a very small part. I think it would be closer to the truth to say that I wrote them because I was looking for inspiration. I enjoy writing when I feel like doing it and, over the last month or so, I’ve been writing more than I have in years.

I’ve been dwelling on the subject lately because I’ve felt completely uninspired to write anything. I look at my list of draft ideas and nothing strikes me as even remotely interesting. I don’t feel any of it. It may as well be a list of assigned topics handed out by a teacher, not ideas that I felt would interest me enough to have made note of them. Ironically, the last post I wrote that I really ‘felt’ was one I ultimately decided not to post at all because it ended up feeling too personal. Only one person besides me has read it. Beyond that, I’ve just not had my heart in it.

I think the problem, at least in part, is that I’ve been very busy between some things I have to complete for work and the holiday rush. The other part is the sort of mild depression that seem to always settle in as Christmas draws to a close. Well, depression may not be the right way to describe it. Now that I think about it I guess I don’t really know how to describe how I feel. Melancholy? Pensive? Dispirited? Somber? I don’t know. I think all of those touch on what I feel, but none quite capture it exactly. It is just a sort of ‘blah’ feeling. I suppose it is really just a sort of listlessness that comes after any big event. You spend weeks or months running around like crazy getting ready and that sort of becomes your purpose in life. Once it is over your compass needle just needs time to settle.

And then there is an issue I’m faced with that is unrelated to the holidays at all.  Nothing I want to go into here in any detail, just something that I never expected any issues with that has turned out to be far more complex than I ever imagined it would be. The problem has left me a little bummed out and that distraction is just one more log on the fire. All of it together has me somewhat distracted and completely uninspired. Unfortunately, that lack of inspiration is a big deal for me because I am simply not able to write about topics I don’t have any feeling about which, at the moment, includes almost everything. That same lack of inspiration has even more impact on the types of things I’ve written here in large part because I tend to write things here that I wouldn’t normally write or say otherwise.

If you don’t know me and just happened upon my blog, what may not be immediately evident is that I am normally a very private person. I am very outgoing and sociable in general, but there are very few people in my life I let close enough to me to see many of the things I’ve written about here. Having some stranger from Des Moines read my private thoughts doesn’t bother me at all; I don’t know them nor they me, and I have no reason to care about what they come away thinking about me. What I fear most is that people who know me will end up reading them. I often reveal far more of myself here than I intend to and, quite frequently, I don’t realize it until I go back and re-read a post some time later.

When Dave said what he did about not letting people close to you see your work it didn’t immediately click that it had any application in my world because we were talking specifically about fiction, but I realized tonight that the same could be said for what I’ve been writing here. I think that same embarrassment he mentioned where works of fiction are concerned holds true for works of non-fiction in some cases and for similar reasons. You are embarrassed to show it to people you know not for fear that they will see something of themselves in it, but that they will see something of you in it and whatever they see will change or lessen their opinion of you.

Everyone compartmentalizes themselves to varying degrees, allowing only certain people into those different compartments. In the information security world there is a term for that concept: zones of trust. Different systems and different users belong to certain “zones of trust” and access to those zones should be closely controlled. No user should be able to access information from a system in a zone of trust they don’t have rights to. I’d never really thought about it before now but that concept, right down to the choice of language, maps very well to life in general. The problem is that blogs don’t have any facility for parsing posts up in that fashion so, if you choose to blog at all, you can choose to either not put anything out there that is inside any but the most casual zone of trust or you can choose to put it all out there for anyone to see. As I said before, I am closer to the latter than the former.

So here I sit, completely uninspired and unsure what I want to write about or even if I want to write. I dunno. I suppose a little time will let the post-holiday blues burn off. I hope the unexpected issue will resolve itself sooner rather than later too. In the mean time, I will probably not have much to say here; at least not much of substance. So bear with me while I gather my thoughts. Hopefully the new year will bring with it just a touch of inspiration.

/g

This post is waaay past due. Two weeks ago my baby sister, Heather, graduated school and already has a gig as an RN. I started this post then and put it aside while trying to get the photos I wanted for it. In the holiday rush it fell through the cracks. I am such a bad brother (shut up, Heather) for not getting this posted before now. She and her husband have both been in school for many, many months now and have been killing themselves to keep up with the work load of school while keeping food on the table. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone any happier to be done with something than she was that night and I can’t say that I blame her.

Heather and I have an odd relationship as siblings go, I think. There is nearly a decade difference in our ages so I moved out of the house before she ever hit double-digits in age. When she was a baby I would sneak her out of her crib at night and bring her to my room to sleep over. She was my little buddy and I loved her dearly. Then she learned to talk… Seriously, though, we’ve not been as close as we should have been, or should I say as I wish we were, for many years. That isn’t to say that we are estranged or even have a strained relationship, we just aren’t as close as we could be. Hopefully that will change as time goes on.

In any case, I will take the bad brother award for being so long in getting this post up. So, to Heather (if you happen to read this) I am way proud of you. My hat is off to you, you showoff. Love you bunches!

/g

This isn’t the best shot of anyone in particular but I loved the feel of it overall. I’m not sure what I was doing in the picture and I’m certainly not going to attempt to figure out what dad was doing. lol. From left to right: Rachel, Mom, Heather, Me, Christy and Dad.

I warned in my very first post here that I was into photography in a very big way and that it would likely be a commonly discussed topic here then, for a month and a half and 34 posts, I never mentioned it again. Hmm. Seems I had more I wanted to say on other topics. Well the time has come so, for those of you who are used to reading my usual soap box rants and introspective drivel, here is a little something different.

Over the holidays I’ve been reading an excellent book called “The Moment it Clicks” by Joe McNally. For those of you not familiar with Joe, he is an amazing photographer who has shot many major celebrities, many stories for National Geographic (the ultimate photographer’s fantasy gig) and was the first staff photographer in 34 years for Time magazine. He is, to say the least, a very impressive photographer. The focus of the book is on sharing some of the hundreds of little tidbits Joe has picked up during his time on the job.

Two of those tidbits in particular got me thinking. They were both to do with controlling lighting. In one, regarding a shoot he did of Tony Bennett, he quotes a Time photo editor as saying “If you want something to look interesting, don’t light all of it.” In another section he says that “The hardest thing about lighting is NOT lighting. We’re talking control of lighting here – lighting THIS but not THAT.” Now, if you’ve ever spent any time playing with studio lights or, worse yet, trying to get the lighting you want on-site using available light, you know that these both present major challenges. To pull off the first part (not lighting all of something) you have to accomplish the second part (controlling the light) in a very big way.

Those two things were swimming around in my head and resulted in an idea for a concept shot. Something that would graphically illustrate controlling light in a conceptual manner while, at the same time, requiring me to actually do it. To light some of a scene and not other nearby parts is much harder than it might sound. That is especially true in enclosed spaces and doubly so in small enclosed spaces because of the light reflecting off all the walls and back onto whatever you are trying not to light. That is to say, if you are in an open field there is nothing but the ground for light to reflect off of so pretty much the only light hitting your subject is the light you put on them directly (assuming it is at night and the sun isn’t out, of course) but if you are in an enclosed space light reflects off all available surfaces and spills light back onto your subject. Photographers use that to their advantage all the time in location photography. Look at any photographer at, say, a wedding reception. Assuming there isn’t an insanely high ceiling you will almost always find them with their flash pointed more toward the ceiling than whatever they are photographing. That is because light hitting someone from your camera directly produces an unappealing, flat light – that is why most point and shoot shots stink – but light coming from another direction lets you see shadows and creates depth. By pointing their flash up they are bouncing the light off the ceiling effectively turning it into a big, soft flash.

The reason I say you will only see that when the ceiling isn’t way high is that , if it is too far up, the light ‘falls off’ too much. Light falloff is governed by the inverse square law. Put in non-geek terms, if you double the distance between a light and a subject, the subject will not receive half as much light but one quarter. Triple the distance and they don’t receive a third the light but a ninth. Because smaller spaces have surfaces much closer in all directions the light falls off much less, so you get lots of reflected light. That’s why photo studios – I’m not talking about Sears here, I mean real studios – are typically pretty big rooms.

So it is with all that in mind that I contemplated trying the shot I had conceived in my own studio. The problem is that, not only is the room I use very small for a studio but the walls are light colored so they reflect more light than darker walls would. So my big challenge would be to control the spill light to get the effect I intended.

What I had in mind was giving the illusion of a literal control of light. Having someone actually ‘holding’ light. Since I needed to work out the concept and see if I could pull it off I used myself as a subject. As much as I hate pictures of me (all of them) I didn’t want to waste someone else’s time before working it out. The shot shown here is what I came up with so far. It is (a) me, so I don’t like it and (b) photographically so-so and (c) not really even posed since I was just checking the effect. Having said all that, it does show kinda what I had in mind. I would like to get a model and re-shoot it for real but that will have to wait until life settles down.

To pull this off I had to hang more black paper than a goth house at halloween and, even then, I had to clean up some light spill in post-processing. Nothing in the shot is what it appears. The ball of light is a small studio strobe sitting just behind me aimed directly at the camera with a deep reflector to keep the light from hitting me. My hand is actually a foot or more in front of the light, just positioned below it to give the appearance of it being in my hand. I had to hang black behind the camera position to keep that reflection down. The light actually hitting my face is from a 36×48 soft box with the face removed to produce a harder, more directional light. I had to put up a large black ‘flag’ just out of frame to my right to control reflection from that direction too. The bright light on my palm is actually from a strobe boomed overhead with an improvised snoot to keep it to throwing a small tight spot of light that would just hit my hand. I ran that one at full power to produce that blown out harsh glow on my hand. The final piece of the lighting was a strobe next to the camera with a slot shaped mask so it would throw a stripe of light across my eyes to make my right eye visible. I kept it pretty dim just for effect. The whole thing was shot on 9′ seamless black paper.

I am reasonably satisfied with the end result but will work to refine it more. If I get a chance to shoot it with a model under more ideal circumstances I will add it to the post. I’m also working on a lighting diagram that I’ll put up when I’m done with it. In the mean time, I promise to rant more and photo-geek less… maybe.

/g

As I sit here writing this I am still shaking off the effects of a turkey induced tryptophan nap. Almost all of my family spent Christmas with us and most have just left leaving the house feeling oddly empty (which is at once a good and bad thing). I look around at the ruins that remain and marvel at the sheer quantity of empty boxes and trash bags full of wrapping paper and I am once again struck by how excessive Christmas has become for so many of us. And nowhere is that more true than here.

We had so many presents piled around the tree that it looked like a Hollywood set gone horribly wrong. I don’t even recall all that I got, much less what all the kids got. And my in-laws, brother and his wife and kids, my sister and her husband or my parents? Forget about it. Not a clue. It bordered on absurd, but I prefer to think of it as doing our part to ward off recession. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. And in sorting and handing out the packages I got a small taste of what FedEx or USP must face from a logistics standpoint. We were still opening stuff when Christy’s brother called at 11:00 to wish us a Merry Christmas;  we started at 7:30 only breaking for a short breakfast. During and after that I was busy cooking away preparing a meal that was very nearly as excessive as the shrine to retail in the next room. I almost needed a written plan for getting everything to come out on time.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining. I feel exceedingly blessed that we are able to do those things and I had a fantastic, if a little long, day. I’m a firm believer in the ‘too many cooks’ theory so I pretty much do the entire meal myself but, as crazy as it sounds, I rather enjoy doing it. It is somehow theraputic for me. And, though I was the only cook, I had a steady stream of company at the other side of the island. I got to spend the morning and early afternoon chatting with my family in a far more one-on-one setting than is the norm. And we all had a great time socializing afterwards. We caught each other up on the current events in our lives, reminisced about old times and laughed at each other more than a little and we spent the entire day together as a family under one roof again, which is an unfortunately rare event these days.

I find that time together especailly refreshing at the end of what becomes a more hectic period every year. There are the weeks of shopping and days of decorating and wrapping and planning of meals and mailing cards and helping with kids Christmas parties and attending various Christmas parties and all the other 100 little things that are part of Christmas to attend to. I am rarely more exhausted than I am in the weeks leading up to Christmas and that is saying a lot for me. I just feel like I can’t get five minutes to myself. And all of that effort leads up to the big day which is perhaps busiest of all. Worth it, but so very busy.

Again, I’m not complaining about our Christmas nor the work that goes into it now about the excesses so many of us indulge in, but it does make me wonder if we lose sight of the real reason we celebrate it to begin with. So many of us will tell you that “Jesus is the reason for the season” and always capitalize ‘Christmas’ and never, ever use the term Xmas, but I sometimes wonder how much of that is reflex and how much is real. I mean, I see the manger in so many yards and I wonder how many people have stopped and considered the real inspriation for that scene. Lets forget for a moment that the ‘three wise men’ were never at the manger. For that matter the magi are mentioned in the Bible, but nowhere does it say there were three of them. And I’m reasonably sure that Santa nor his reindeer were anywhere in the vacinity in spite of what is suggested in so many yards I see. Nevertheless, at least people are still putting out the nativity scene at all, and that’s great, but what I really wonder is how many people have stopped and considered that the nativity story is not at all a ’story.’ That is, it isn’t a storybook tale with a neat little manger and benevolent wise men, but I suspect that is how it is thought of by most people. If you believe the story to be a true one – and I do – you really have to consider the magnitude and reality of the nativity scene and the events surrounding it.

Stop and consider for a moment that Joseph and Mary travelled something likely approaching 100 miles while she was nine months pregnant. And we aren’t talking about our standard mini-van trip. We are talking about 100 hard miles through mostly desert on foot or on livestock at a time when few people ever travelled anywhere near that far. And there wasn’t a McDonalds to be found anywhere along the route. It was a major undertaking. And if you’ve ever been around someone who is 9 months pregnant you know the kind of discomfort a trip like that must have caused Mary. And once they arrived in Bethelehem there was nowhere to stay. The best they could do for sleeping arangements is a barn. A barn.

For most of us, our idea of a bad trip is if the hotel books us into a room with two full beds instead of a king or, God forbid, you have to stay in a Motel 6 because the Marriott is overbooked. But imagine for a moment that you arrive in town and check every hotel you can find to no avail until one kind manager offers to let you sleep in the parking garage. That is basically what we are talking about here. Now, most of us are city dwellers and the closest we’ve been to a barn is on an old rerun of Dallas so we really don’t have a grasp of the situation beyond what we see in the scene on our mantle but, the thing is, barns are not exactly cozy places. They have hardpacked floors and rather strong unpleasant odors for starters. They are not somewhere well suited for human habitation; they aren’t somewhere you would want to sleep and they certainly aren’t somewhere you would want to go through childbirth. And yet, that is exactly what happened.  Mary gave birth in a barn and she did so without an epidural. I know, right? How primative. Not only that, but she had no nice clean bed, no modern medical facility and no pain killers. She had a barn. And some hay. And the best they could come up with for a place to put the newborn was an animal feeding trough. And all of that is just the actual birth.

Looking back it is a wonder that the birth ever took place at all. Put yourself in Joseph’s shoes for a moment. Your bethrothed turns up pregnant and the best story she can come up with is that God did it. It sounds like I am being glib, but I’m not. I mean, from his perspective that must be what it sounded like. We’ve fictionalized biblical characters to the point that we’ve washed out the reality that they were human, but they were; they weren’t the two dimensional characters we picture any more than the 50’s were really in black and white. In general the bible only relates the salient points of any given story, not the minutae of their day to day lives. They were real people with real feelings and, excepting the main character, none were perfect. You know that Joseph was hurt and likely very mad and yet his reaction was to hide her suspected indescretion from the world. Now, thats a stand-up guy. When you consider that the penalty for her at that time would have been being stoned to death, that whole event could have, and probably should have for that time, turned out very differently.

Then after Jesus’ birth the three wise men visited King Herod asking after Jesus. Herod was less than thrilled and, ultimately, ordered all children under the age of two in the area around Bethlehem be killed. Let me repeat that. The king ordered that his men go out and kill all the children under the age of two. I can’t think of anything more horrific than that, personally. When removed from the abstraction of the story I suspect most of us couldn’t imagine what that would be like. And, by conventional wisdom, Jesus should have been caught in that heinous sweep. So, once again, He escaped an event that should have resulted in his death before he really even got started.

And after he was born, there were all the milestones any child has. He took his first steps and cut his first tooth and probably left Mary as sleep deprived as any modern child does for a time. He made little ‘presents’ for mom (I suspect that, even then, dads rarely changed those) and laughed and cooed and learned to talk just like any baby or child, then or now. And he was raised as a normal child to a large extent, studying carpentry at Joseph’s side and working as a tradesman until well into adulthood. In other words, He was a real person. And, still, we distill it down to an idyllic scene with kneeling sheep and fluffy hay.

While that does make for a nice, clean, encapsulated and easy to digest version of events I think it does a disservice in that it allows us to mentally relegate it, at least in part, to the same mental bin as the three little pigs and Humpty Dumpty. Instead we focus far more on the shopping and planning and cooking, only giving lip service to our beliefs; and we spend far more time getting the turkey right and the lights right than getting our lives right. It’s really kind of sad when you think about it.

So, what now, Greg? Well, I’m so very glad you asked. If only I had all the answers. Heck, if only I had some small portion of the answers. I really don’t know what the answer is. How do we combat that commerialized complacency? Well, perhaps next time you put that manger scene up on your mantle put some dirt around it. Move the wise men out to around two years away and position Joseph so he is shooing the kneeling sheep away from eating the hay around baby Jesus. Add a little, um, compost to the dirt to give it that real barn smell then stop and consider. Maybe, just maybe, then you’ll be reminded when you look up there that you aren’t celebrating an abstract event, but the birth of a real, live baby; one that would change the world in equally real ways for thousands of years to come. Just a thought.

/g

Another kitchen sucessfully trashed! And I’m only about half way done here. =o)

But, man, did my my bird come out good. =oD

Well, I started out to have a big Christmas post ready for tonight but, alas, it wasn’t meant to be. Between all the family in from out of town and cooking and cleaning and last minute details to wrap up I literally haven’t had five minutes to myself today. I ate a fast food lunch between errands. On top of that I got all of three and a half hours of sleep last night so I’m not exactly in top form anyhow. I’ve spent the past few minutes working on the post-to-be but I’m just too out of it. I’m throwing in the towel and going to bed.

Hopefully I will find a few minutes at some point during the day to get it wrapped up and posted. In the mean time, I didn’t want to let this special day roll in without at least saying Merry Christmas. As we share time with our friends and loved-ones and eat and open presents let’s not forget to take a little time to remember the real reason for this day. Take a few minutes alone to say thanks if you can.

So, until next time, Merry Christmas from our home to yours. May God bless you with the company of good friends. May you remember those things worth remembering and forgot those things best not remembered. God Bless.

/g

Oh, and I’ve attaced a photo I took last night of my lighting handywork. I used blue lights on the house because I wanted a wintry feel. Now, if we could just get some snow…  Oh, well.

I just pulled into my neighborhood from a trip to the store to find the kid across the street – the very popular kid across the street – is having another party. What that means in practical terms is that approximately 150 teenagers have converged on our area and the streets are lined for a block or two in all directions with cars on both sides. The kids gathering there are, not unlike the neighbor kid, pretty decent kids. They’ve been very respectful, they turn their stereos down before coming in the neighborhood – ironically, I was the only one who rolled into the neighborhood with the stereo blasting – and keeping things pretty well contained to the yard they should be in; really all a guy could ask for from any hoard of teens converging on the house across the street. Even still, it is only a matter of time before someone calls the police and they come flush them all out. Kind of a shame, really. They could be other places getting into trouble instead of here. Oh well.

Annnnyhow, the reason I was at the store to begin with was to get a splitter so I could run one more light to complete my Christmas lights outside, which is what I went out to do when I got home. The bulk of the party was gathered not 40 feet from me while I was working on the lights and they were reasonably loud so it was kind of hard to miss the conversations among them. As I’ve discussed several times before, I am a people watcher so they provided the entertainment while I worked.

I’ve had a couple of reminders lately of how long ago it was when I was the age of the partygoers milling about across the street, so I’d been thinking a lot about what it was like for me back then and how things have changed. To be honest, it is rare than an adult gets the opportunity to observe teens in a party atmosphere ‘in the wild’ if you’ll pardon the phrase. But in this case, I don’t think any of them had even noticed me or, if they had, the didn’t seem to care. So it was that I got this rare peek. I felt a little like Marlin Perkins on Wild Kingdom.

The first thing that struck me is that this could have easily been any of the parties I attended when I was that age. Heck they even are wearing 80’s hair styles and clothes at the moment. The only thing that didn’t fit was the cars. Replace those parked there now with Cutlass Supremes and Camaros and it would have been hard to distinguish from those I attended. But aside from the looks, the group dynamic hasn’t changed in the least. All the standard stock roles were filled in with the appropriate cast. The life of the party with his entourage was there as was the hangers on who probably weren’t invited but were skulking around the edges looking for a way in. There were the gaggles of giggly girls (say that ten times fast) and groups of guys watching them. There were the more reserved types staying apart from the crowd talking among themselves. There were the jocks and cheerleaders and the guy with the hopped up car; it sounded good too. A couple of times I found myself not paying any attention to what I was doing I was so immersed in their scene.

All of the simalarities got me reminiscing about specific parties I’d been to and some of the people I knew then. And those flashbacks got me thinking about the life experiences I’ve been through since that time. And it has been a lot. Far too much to list here in any meaningful fashion. And it got me thinking about who I was then and who I am now and what the differences are. I guess you could say it put me in an introspective frame of mind, but that seems to have a hair-trigger these days so it should be no suprise.

But in looking back at who I was then I was suprised at the differences and the similarities. At my core, I was then who I am now. I’ve always been a good person at heart, even when I’d lost my way. I can thank my parents for that; I had a very sound foundation that carried me through the depths of my considerable stupidity back then and brought me back safely. By a good person, I mean I was never one to pick on the weaker kids or laugh at the fat kid or mock the projector kid. I was never one to shoplift or steal even when the punks I was hanging with did. I acted the fool with them, but I had lines I wouldn’t cross. Even then I refused to to be someone I wasn’t to fit in. At least not in a way that meaningfully violated my core values. That caused me a number of lost friends and even a few fights with guys who thought I was insulting them by telling them what they were doing was wrong. Again, thanks mom and dad. My interests then and now were also the same, as was my taste in music and love of gadgets. So, like I said, at my core I was then who I am now but there were significant differences.

Life was far more tumultuous for me then than now. I didn’t have the clear vision of who I wanted to be. Back then I had ideals and expectations of the world that have proven to be completely wrong in some cases and amazingly right in others. I think the biggest disapointment was that I expected bigger changes in those around me. I thought that, as we all became adults, we would ‘grow up’ and stop all the childish bickering. I’ve found that only the manner of it seems to have changed. The backstabbers still are backstabbers and the jerks are still jerks, but now, instead of waiting for someone they don’t like outside after school they try to torpedo them with the boss at the office. Instead of casting the subject of their gossip out of their group and mocking them, they now invite them in to get better dirt, all pretending to be their friends. At least, I see a lot of that in the workplace. I can only assume it carries to their personal life as well. I’ve learned that who you choose to hang out with is important.

On balance, I think there are far more similarities than differences between the then me and the now me. Even then I don’t think I was your average teenager. As a child and especially as a teen I related to adults far more readily than I related to my peers. I was still very much a teen in so many ways, but I found adults far more interesting. I would sit at youth functions and talk to the youth pastor. At school I was more likely to find myself having a substanitive conversation with my computer teacher or an administrator than one of my peers.

It is really ironic in a way. I was in such a hurry to grow up I forgot to enjoy my time there. But now that I’m grown I realize how much I missed – how much we as adults still miss - because we are so focused on being ”grownups.” I think we forget how to have fun. Or, more precisely, we forget how to lose ourselves in that fun. We stop going to concerts, we stop throwing parties, we stop doing all those things we did as a teen that were so much fun and the more I think about it the more I can’t find the reason quit. I mean, sure, we can’t live like that all the time like we did back then - we have mortgages to pay and kids to raise – but does that mean we have to cut it out all together?

Honestly, I think that outlook has helped my relationship with my 19 year old daughter in very large ways. She is not ashamed to be seen with me in public and never has been; she calls me to meet her for lunch a couple of times a week and we go places together routinely. She isn’t afraid to talk to me about pretty much anything. She and I are in that place where my role as a parent ceases to be that of an authority figure and becomes that of providing guidance and I’m relieved we have the relationship we do. I see too many of my friends with kids who act as though they don’t know them and I’m glad not to be in that group. Rachel going out on her own is scary enough for me as it is and I can’t imagine what it would be like were we not as close as we are. At least I have the consolation of knowing that she trusts me enough to call me for advice; she has already done so numerous times.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying I’ve remained static. I am far more confident of my role in life now than I was then and enough of life has passed around me to give me more perspective on what is truly important. These days my deepest desires are for the intangible rather than tangible; I want better friends and happier kids more than I want ’things’. I’ve learned that ’things’ don’t matter and that a friend who is a friend because of the car you drive or house you live in isn’t someone you should waste time on. I’ve learned that love and ‘warm fuzzies’ are completely different things. But I haven’t forgotten, or at least not for long, what it was like to be that age. Hopefully I won’t.

So I sat there dwelling on my thoughts and considering all the places I could have gone wrong. And I look across at all those teens at the cusp of becoming adults and wonder which of them will be as blessed as I have been. And I wonder which of them have a relationship with their parents – and which of them have parents who care enough to give them a good foundation - and which of them frame their choices based on what those around them do. And I realize how great a gift it is to have a parent who cares enough to get involved. And I consider how important a role both my parents played in my life and I will play in my kids lives. And, as bizarre as my family can be from time to time (whose can’t) I am thankful that God gave me the parents he did. They weren’t perfect, but they were close enough to get the job done. That’s really all that matters, isn’t it?

/g

Tonight, Courtney and I went to one of her friend’s birthday party. While I normally find those about as much fun as dental work, this one was actually nice. For one, the girls parents are from our Sunday School class and there were others there from the class so I at least had someone to talk to.

The real fun, though, is that it was a swimming party in December. The parents had rented the use of an indoor facility at a local park. Gwinnett County Parks Service, who I mentioned in an earlier post, has outdone themselves with this one. It is a new aquatic center at Bethesda Park, less than 5 minutes from my house. More like 3. They opened that pool perhaps a year ago but I hadn’t bothered to go. I was expecting a normal indoor pool, but what I found was a kid’s paradise. The main pool is probably the size of an olympic pool, perhaps larger, and the deepest it gets is a little over three feet. In the shallow(est) end (about 18″ deep) is a huge playground with all kinds of things squirting water, many of which the kids can control. There is this huge kinetic sculpture in the middle of the pool that has all these colorful buckets about 20 feet up constantly filling with water until they get full and dump over into the pool only to right themselves and start refilling The kids loved hanging out under that. There was an area where rain was falling from the ceiling and there was a huge ‘lazy river’ section where a current just pushes you around a circuit. But the pièce de résistance was a 100 foot long slide that started perhaps 30 feet up and wound its way down, going through the wall to the outside of the building and coming back in just before the bottom. Too cool!

So, what I expected to be another tedious birthday party turned into a lot of fun and I got to go swimming with Courtney and ride a slide to boot. Sometimes you get lucky, huh?

/g

The other day someone asked me where I came up with the ideas I blog about. My response? Well, um, duh. Random thoughts. Hello? Ring any bells? OK, seriously, here’s the dirt. When I originally contemplated starting this whole thing up I spent some time thinking about what any blog I started might be about and realized that I didn’t want to do a themed or topical blog, at least not here. If anything, it would be, well, just random thoughts of mine. The decision to even start this at the time was far from certain. I grabbed the domain name just because it was available. Got the rest of the family’s names too for that matter.

But the real truth is that going with random thoughts was my only choice. I mean, I really admire those bloggers who have a topical, useful blog (as opposed to mine, which is about me, me, me) and are able to keep it fresh and come up with interesting topics related to the subject at hand. But the truth is that I’m not creative enough by half to come up with topics on demand. Even the few times some clever topic occurs to me, if it isn’t something I really care about I just can’t write it. My heart just isn’t in it and it shows. You think these posts are a painful read? You should see the few of those I attempted to write.

The topics I choose to write about are sometimes spontaneous. That is, I am sitting somewhere and an idea pops into my head fully formed so I grab my laptop and write the entire post on the spot. More often, though, I will have a rough idea and a few stray thought about something that I care enough about to write about so I create a post with a title and a few notes. Then the topic just goes on the back burner. For me, that doesn’t mean I stop thinking about it, it just means that I just stop actively thinking about it. It brews away in the back of my mind until something pops out. Most often it is just another stray thought or two on the topic which I just add to the notes I already had; sometimes, though, it is the real essence of the topic and I’ll stop and write the whole post on the spot.

Most of the topic ideas come to me while I’m sitting in my truck either in traffic or on a road trip with the music up and my mind adrift. They are usually related to some life experience or something topical that has been on my mind for one reason or another. Sometimes they are stirred from my subconscious by a snatch of a lyric or a mood a certain song puts me in. On one of my road trips I added 14 topics in a 6 hour drive. I’ve already completed and posted around half of those, the remainder are still in the queue. And sometimes, though rarely, I just get a flow going while I’m on the road and I sit there and type blindly  with one hand before the thought escapes me. Such is the case with a piece I recently finished. I haven’t decided rather or not I’m going to post that particular piece yet because it is something that feels too personal at the moment but I may. The point is, I wrote that entire post on my drive in to work. At lunch I opened it up and reread it making minor changes for flow and structure and posted it. I had less than an hour in it total and most of that was while driving. I just never know when or where inspiration will strike.

So all of this leaves me with a backlog of half formed ideas for posts entered here but not yet published (posted publicly). I have around 20 as I write this. Every day at some point in my day I’ll open the list and see if I feel inspired by anything there. If not, I just don’t write anything. Occasionally I will see that one has enough random notes accumulated that the bulk of the post is there in rough form and I’ll start organizing the thoughts and, in the process, find the thread of the post and complete it.

That really compliments how I write anything, though. I’ve never been one to sit down and plan out anything I’m going to write beforehand, be it a term paper, a report for work or a blog entry. That’s just not how my mind works. I know the structure of a good story – not that it necessarily is reflected here, this is mainly for my own amusement – but I can’t approach it from that angle. I simply sit and start typing anything that comes to mind about a topic rather free form. My mind just wanders about the topic at hand and I type. When I feel like I’ve gotten most of it out of me I go back and start grouping like thoughts into rough paragraphs. Then I arrange those paragraphs in the correct order to tell whatever story I sat out to tell. Then I read it. I try to make sure it has at least a beginning, middle and end; my freshman English teacher, Mr Powell would be so proud. It generally needs a ton of wordsmithing and I often find that there are major sections that need to be filled in, but most of the finished piece is usually there by then.

The part that really gives it voice, though, is the rewrite, and the re-rewrite, and the re-re-rewrite. You get the idea. In the end I wind up with something that, if you knew me in person you’d immediately recognize as mine. That’s because I write exactly as I speak, at least what voice my writing has mirrors my speech patterns. That accounts for a lot of the poor grammar or sentence structure. It certainly accounts for my abuse of semicolons and such. I tend to speak in nested tangents, so that’s how I write.

Writing these little missives is far more work than I anticipated to be honest. I generally come back to a post and rework sections of it, sometimes large sometimes small, several times before I think it is ready to ‘put out there’ as it were. Even then I’m not entirely happy with about half of them, but I feel like they are as good as they are going to get. I recalled a quote from years ago and went looking for it. Gotta love Google. It was by Samuel Johnson and the quote was “What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.” While looking for that I also found an unattributed quote I liked: “the essence of good writing is rewriting.” Now, I’m not saying that because I put a lot of time in on it it is a pleasurable read, but I am saying that if there is any truth in that first quote – and I think there is – not putting in the work would almost guarantee it would be read without pleasure. So, there. See all the work I do for you? 

And then there are those ideas that simply wither on the vine. I go back to the idea time and time again and I just don’t feel it anymore. Worse yet are those I write most of only to decide it stinks and isn’t likely to improve. Either way, those get deleted. At the other end of the spectrum are those posts I’ve already published and I suddenly realize the I missed some major point in it or have some great thought that I should have put in there. I go back and rework them generally, but only for my own gratification. I’m fully aware that my posts are only lightly read and my back posts are completely unread.

So, at the end of the day, my topics are exactly what the tagline promises: random thoughts. And my writing is also as advertised: poor grammar. As an aside, I originally spelled grammar, ‘grammer’ as sort of a bad joke but no one got it. They just thought I couldn’t spell grammar. Oh well, can’t win em all. I’ve frankly been surprised at the number of people who have found me through some search or another and have hung around to read more than one post. That is more gratifying than I would have anticipated. And many thanks to the few of you who’ve taken the time to email, comment or text me. I sincerely enjoy hearing from you and it is a large part of what keeps me going. But, as I said in the beginning, if no one ever reads this but me I’ll still find value in it. My goal in writing this blog was to force myself to examine my life more closely and it has been more successful at that than my wildest hopes. So now you know. I’ve given you a peek into the inner workings of a self centered, overly introspective blog. And in doing so, I think I might have set a new standard of narcissism. Like dad always said, if you are gonna do it, at least be good at it.

/g

I can’t stand a mystery; never have been able to. I have – and always have had – a deep abiding need to figure out and understand the world around me. Whether it is what someone is thinking, how something works or why something happens, I simply need to know and, according to my mom at least, I’ve always been that way.

Some of my earliest clear memories involve exploration of one sort or another. Many of them specifically involve taking things apart that I probably shouldn’t have. That’s just me. I take things apart; and I don’t get people who don’t take things apart. I have to know what makes something tick. I need to know how the mechanism inside works to produce the end result. I’ve simply never found anything I am afraid to take apart. A few times I had some second thought well into the deconstruction process, but that’s a whole other discussion. Rather it is a car engine or a laptop, it’s fair game. And I could sit and watch shows like “How its made” or “Ultimate Factory” pretty much non-stop, given the time, and never get tired of it. Sometime I feel like Johnny 5 from Short Circuit; need more input.

The flip side of that same coin is that I’ve always made stuff. Over the years I’ve built everything from transistor radios to strobe lights just, well, because it would be cool. That, and it was an exercise in further understanding a concept; and that curiosity has certainly served me well in life, but has from time to time landed me in trouble. In fact, the worst beating my dad ever gave me was because of it (calm down, mom. I’m using the term beating for effect. Well, OK, not so much in this particular case, but you know what I mean). My parents had just gotten a brand new Sony Trinitron TV when I was perhaps nine. It was a brand new technology and one of the most expensive TVs out there. We were far from rich but my mom had gotten it in barter for work she’d done for the owner of an appliance store. The point is, it was an extreme luxury item for us.

Well, as luck would have it I was working on a project at that time that was in need of a power cord… so I removed the one from the TV. Oh, and I should mention that we’d had the TV less than a week. Stop looking at me like that, I was gonna put it back before my parents got home. The operative word here, of course, being was. Unfortunately dad, who was a union guy and never ever got off early, got off early. And the first thing he did when he got home? Turn on his new TV. And the first thing he did when it didn’t come on? Check to see if it was plugged in. And the first thing he did when he discovered that it wasn’t plugged in, nor did it have a power cord any longer? Well, that’s where the beating came in.

I still haven’t worked up the nerve to tell him I’d also completely disassembled that same TV the day before. Oh, and I should note that I wasn’t a kid who took things apart and left them broken. I’ve always been able to put them back together in working order, and with no parts left over as an added bonus. Somehow that fact seemed to console my dad very little that day. Oh, and dad, if you’re reading this, now you know. I took it completely apart. But the TV still works to this day, right? OK, right, I’ll call before next time we come down just to be safe…

The same curiosity applies to people too. Well, I mean, I’ve never taken one apart and have no plans to, but I need to know what makes people tick. I could spend the day at Disney doing nothing but watching those around me given the chance. People are just fascinating to me. And again, that evidently dates back to my earliest years as well. My mom tells me that I was the easiest kid in the world to take care of when I was little; as long as she sat me somewhere I could see people I would sit quietly and watch them for hours. They didn’t have to be interacting with me, just where I could see them. The same still applies. In the many times I’ve been stuck in an airport because of a canceled flight or weather I’ve never had a problem passing the time. Some people read, others strike up conversations with those around them and still others get on the phone. I, on the other hand, sit and watch everyone read, talk to each other and talk on the phone. Don’t get me wrong, I also get involved in conversations with those around me sometimes, it just isn’t necessary for me. I’m entertained either way.

People’s ability to constantly surprise me is part of the draw I think. I mean, a computer is cool and fun but, unless you install Vista on it, it is a fairly predictable thing. The same input will produce the same output every time. Not so with people; you simply never know how or why someone will react to a given circumstance. I’ve always been an informal student of psychology. Talk about the ultimately complex system. I mean, wow! Now here’s something I’ll never figure out!

Reading through this it may sound like I’m watching fish in a bowl or bugs under glass but that isn’t it at all. I love people. I am a very social creature and empathetic to a fault at times, but that doesn’t mean I can’t also watch whats going on with those around me. It is far more entertaining than anything on TV.

What it really boils down to is this: curiosity defines me. In fact, it is the culmination of the curiosity about things and curiosity about people that has led me to where I am today. The job I have is very specialized in several regards, but nowhere more so than in the ability to work on very complex systems while still being able to relate to non-technical people in English. That, and being able to read those customer’s reactions since further business for my company often hinges on how well I do so. I am very very good at my job but only because it fits my natural disposition so completely.

The only real downside of that tendency for me is when I encounter a mystery I’m not allowed to solve. Not something I am incapable of solving – that doesn’t bother me it only makes me dig my heels in more – but those I’m not allowed to. Sometimes it is because it involves a customer’s proprietary or sensitive information that would inherently be disclosed by any further digging. Sometimes it is for personal reasons; respect for a friend’s privacy or things that I know are simply none of my business. Not being allowed to explore that curiosity causes me a discomfort that is almost physical. It is a burr under the saddle as it were. But, as with any other area of life you learn to deal with the limits you are given. It’s just that that particular one is a tough one for me.

And it seems that, through the wonder of genetics, Justin has inherited that same inquisitive nature about both people and things. He is able to take things apart (and put them back together) that most kids twice his age would have difficulty with. It is just something he gets. And any time I pull out the tools he is positively mesmerized. If I show up with some tool whose function isn’t immediately apparent he will stand ans quietly stare it it (not me, it) until I explain it to him. If I’m not quick enough to explain, he starts asking about it. The last one was a digital multimeter. Try explaining that to a three year old sometime. Fuuuuuun.

And, while his language skills lagged way behind that of his youngest sister, Courtney, he is far more observant of people. Courtney at 6 has already begun to defer coordinating any sneaky activity or requests for candy or anything we might say no to to him even though he is half her age. She knows he is far more likely to be successful. It is really amusing to watch him sometimes; he conducts almost obvious experiments in other people’s reaction. He will do things to provoke a reaction from you (good or bad) and you can see in his little face that he is actively observing your reaction. Then later you can see him apply what he learned in his attempts to get you to let him have something he wants. At 3 (well, just turned 4) it is painfully obvious when he is trying to manipulate you, but I’m very concerned about when he gets older. I fear he will be a little slippery. But the point is, he is in constant observation mode. Courtney is extremely smart and is always learning, but not in the same way as Justin. She absorbs information from books, he absorbs it from the world around him.

So I have a hint of how his life might unfold and what to watch out for, unlike my poor mother. At least I have that. And I fear for my stuff. As he gets older who knows what he will take apart (and hopefully put back together). Just the same, it is really neat to watch. Sometimes I feel like I have my own personal mini-me. So for me, as I suspect it will be for Justin, the phrase ‘learn something new every day’ is more an active statement than a passive one. I am constantly striving to learn new things and rare is the day that I don’t. My task now is to make sure he does as well, I suppose. Now, if I can just have him do it without taking apart my laptop…

/g

Hello there, and welcome to the gripe and complaint department of my little blog. It seems I needed to get more things off my chest than I ever imagined I did. Even if no one reads them, I feel better for having written it. Again, cheap therapy. Today’s complaint comes to us from Greg in Gwinnett County, Georgia. Greg writes:

The county I live in (Gwinnett County) is generally a good place to live as is evidenced by its ever exploding population over the past 10 years or so. They have an amazing parks department and do more to keep the roads in shape and growing them to match need than I would have thought possible. Up until recently I had not one complaint about the county as a whole but all that changed back in early November so today’s saga actually began well over a month ago.

Gwinnett County is one of those places where garbage collection is not a county provided service. Each resident contracts with a waste management service of their choice and that service handles their garbage collection. And the system is (or rather was) working fine and has been for many years. Unfortunately it seems that a few thousand of our million plus residents elect to dump their trash illegally rather than pay for waste service. More unfortunately the county elected to deal with this in a most draconian way.

The county, in it’s infinite wisdom (that was sarcasm, in case it isn’t evident already) decided to hand control of how waste collection is handled to a non-profit group called Gwinnett Clean and Beautiful (hereafter referred to as GCB) and they, in turn, decided that the well established system wasn’t working in spite of all evidence to the contrary. So they decided to completely change how we will handle our trash.

They put out for bid the right to be the sole waste management for the entire county. Well, technically they were looking for two to equally split the geographic territory. So, to put things in perspective, they were going to throw out the perhaps 30 services currently competing for my business and award a monopoly to one that would now handle my entire area. In the process they would be driving most of the small companies that account for the bulk of those 30 completely out of business. Oh, and the cost would be higher per month and they are upping the number of recycled items from 9 to 27, and they will be enforcing it; that is, recycling will no longer be optional. While I think recycling is a good thing, and we happen to recycle everything on the current list of 9 I don’t like being told that I have to and I certainly don’t like the idea of someone going through my trash to see if I’m being a good boy or not.

So, when I heard all of that back in November I was disgusted but there wasn’t a lot I could do about it so I resigned that I would just have to deal with it. That was then. Since then I’ve learned that my current carrier, Atlanta Waste Industries (AWI), is charging all of their customers a fee of $23.50 to “cover the costs of collecting cans and winding down operations as they close the local office.” Now, I didn’t ask them to close that office and I didn’t terminate service with them so I’m not exactly sure where they think their cost of doing business is my problem. So, with that, there is exactly zero chance I will ever pay that fee. Let them sue me for it. I dare ‘em. The county is saying they are going to keep their 150,000 security bond if they charge the fee, but that is a mere pittance compared to what they will collect from those dumb enough to actually pay it.

So, I’m already irritated about that when, last Thursday (trash day) I come home to find my trash can has disappeared. I mention it to Christy who tells me that AWI came by and picked up the can, trash and all. She happened to be outside at the time and the guy told her that they were picking them up as part of the cut-over and that the new service would be dropping a can off in “a couple of days.” Well, as a couple of days passed then a couple of more I began to wonder where the new can was. My curiosity was heightened even more by the smell of the garbage that was now piling up in our garage for lack of anywhere else to put it. With that in mind I called the GCB offices yesterday to inquire where my can was. Their answer? “Oh, we have until the middle of January to get you a can.” Let me repeat that: they will have me a can by the middle of January; my existing can was taken on December 11th. Now I’m no math wizard, but it looks an awful lot like they are telling me I will be collecting 5 weeks of trash in my garage. I can hardly wait!

When I explained to GCB that my can had already been gone a week they told me that it wasn’t their fault; AWI was supposed to leave the can until the end of the year and that I should call them about it. I noted to them that AWI and I never had any issue until they inserted themselves into the middle of my business and hung up. Then I called AWI. And listened to a looped message telling me they were experiencing high call volume and that I should click on the Gwinnett county link on their site. I did so and it only explained whey they thought I owed them the $23.50 they’ll never see. After two hours of that same loop I began to get a sense that they weren’t gonna answer. A little searching on the net revealed that they had, in fact, stopped actually answering their phone.

I was further irritated when I realized that I had pre-paid AWI for service through the end of the year. You pay every quarter for the coming three months. So AWI had messed me over by taking my can early and lying to me about why and GCB had messed me over by starting this mess to begin with. Great.

So here I sit now with garbage piling up ever higher in my garage and with the smell you might expect increasing with it and no one wants to take responsibility for it. My big problem now is in deciding whose steps I will be dropping my garbage off on for the next 4 weeks; AWI of GCB. I am currently leaning toward splitting it evenly and delivering half to each. I’ll let you know when I decide. grrrrrr.

/g

Update: We got a call from AWI on the 22nd with a recording telling us they’d won a temporary injunction against the new plan so they would remain our carrier (that’s what they think) and to carry on as usual. I called them on the 23rd to inquire as to when we might expect a trash can again. They brought one out on the 26th. Of course, it was a used one that they hadn’t bothered to clean (nor had the previous users ever cleaned it from the looks of it) so it smelled like 6 day old roadkill skunk in August. They actually deigned to pick it up today (Jan 2nd), 3 weeks and a day after the last pickup. That they’ve shown so little regard for me as a customer and have shown themselves to be the only trash carrier in the area to happily slap a charge on my bill for arbitrary reasons, I’m done with ‘em. I’ll be starting with a new carrier next week. They can come get their smelly can and do whatever they want with it. At least my garage can begin to detoxify now. Sheesh.