My Boy is 7

First: let's do some addition!

This is a screen-grab of my archive from the moments before I hit Post on this: If you add the numbers of posts since back when I started, you'll get 1,499. That makes this 1500! I thought that I should make this about the Boy. His birthday was just this past Saturday. And, like Skippy from Disney's Robin Hood, he turned 7 years old:

I bring up Skippy because he represented for me a watershed moment: my brother and I watched this movie often and I remember watching it and being younger than 7, then sharing the birthday, then being older than 7, and reflecting on how quaint I had been. 

On June 10th, 2016, I became a dad in the literal, a breathing-human-needs-you-forever way. I mean, are "parents" born before kids? The title, of course.

My son is wonderful. He's so sweet and compassionate while retaining a rough and tumble exterior. He loves reading and math and comics and Nintendo and dunkleosteus. Bikes and handball and Giannis. He is love. He is joy.

He is his Own Person, strong willed with a volume control issue. Knowing this, that he's confident and self assured, is great. Parenting it poses challenges. It took me all my years to achieve/end up at whomever I actually am, and you're the same, only a kid? He is more strong willed than I ever was, certainly.

I love him so much. 

I rounded up some kick-ass pieces involving him (and some regular ones, too):

1. Cass is born
   
2. Cass Goes to Mexico
   
3. Cass Goes to the Book Fair
   
4. First Birthdays are for the Parents
   
5. On a Tractor
   
6. Birthday Party with Grandpa (and Grandma and Auntie and cuz, too!)
   
7. Birthday in Italy!
   
8. On Bikes!
   
9. Selfies!
   

1500 posts is a lot. Maybe? Feels like it when I look through the posts and realize there are many that I don't remember. Sometimes that seems nice, but am I losing it? Would you remember every single stream of consciousness thing you ever wrote if you wrote over a thousand of them?

Putting it like that makes it obvious. Most of the things written here are not Joyceian stream of consciousness, but even the deeply considered ones have an element of designed brevity.

I wasn't even 30 years old yet when I started this blog. That takes me back.

Here's to the easy toast: 1500 more!

Rambling On About My Shoes

Hoo-boy. Here we go. I'm not exactly sure how this came about. I bought a pair of Pumas years back, I liked them, and noticed they looked similar to a pair of Adidas. I started doing some digging, went down a random shoe-history rabbit hole, and then decided to write up a post about basically ALL of the shoes I've worn since high school. It's...mostly a waste of time, but I thought I'd finally post it. It's a rambling thing, with pictures. And, again, I'm not exactly sure how it came about.

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There were two brothers who ran a shoe factory in Germany. The younger was innovative and knew that paying a famous athlete to wear the shoes in ads could benefit their sales. He convinced his older brother to try and sign the best, most exciting athlete at the time, in track and field sports, to a contract. They were successful. Rudolf, the older brother and Adolf, the younger, made it to the Olympics in Berlin in 1936 and signed Black American athlete Jesse Owens to wear their running shoes.

Eventually Rudi and Adi had a falling out, with Adi leaving to start his own show company in a factory across the river from his brother's factory. These guys were the Dassler shoe-making family, and Rudi's company still has the white support strip and retains the name from the past: Puma (Super Liga):

While Adi just named his company after himself: Adi Dassler, or, better known as Adidas:

That might be one reason the Puma Super Ligas and Adidas Sambas are nearly identical beyond the side support/design decal.

Japan got in on the game and created the similarly designed Onitsuka Tiger variety. This originally was a running shoe, but Bruce Lee made them famous in one of his films, and Quentin used them as homage for Uma in Kill Bill:

I did get a pair of the Super Ligas, from Puma, but I've heard certain people extoll the virtues of the Sambas and other pockets that swear by the Asics, the Onitsuka Tigers. I may go in that direction in the future, the Asic direction, but the whole thing got me thinking of my own footwear, and basically, er, thirty years of my own shoe history.

That's the rambling discourse that follows, me grabbing pictures of my former (and current) shoes and talking about it. Not very scintillating...

I love my sandals, and back in the day---when I was in high school---Birkenstocks were seen as a choice about a lifestyle, one that I wasn't exactly a part of, but a choice nonetheless. The first ones here are the normal Arizonas:

But I preferred the Monterreys. They extended the leather toppers backwards (although it may be hard to see):

For some reason, they stopped making these.

Then there were the Doc Martens, boots I originally got in high school, wore for ten years, and then got another pair. Those lasted for another ten years, so there were two decades worth of Docs available for me feet:

And Chucks, old worn in Chuck Taylor All-Stars, one of the best shoes and one I still wear regularly. (I'm wearing them as I type this, anyway.)

In New York I found a pair of slip-on dressy shoes. They were branded as Bostonians, they were originally $400 marked down to $80, and I bought them. They cut the back of my ankles for two weeks, the blood coagulating on my black socks. Finally I broke them in. They were so great I had them resoled twice. They looked like these:

There was a time when I was determined to wear shoes that were made only from union shops and from fair trade sourced materials. It sucks that this continues to be a near impossibility. Anyway, I found the following shoe on the Black Spot offers, from the Adbusters people:

They look...fine enough. One of the comments in their review section---which incidentally were across the board negative---made me laugh and laugh. I still remember it, and after a handful of legitimate complaints you get to this one sentence review: "These are only available at the toilet store."

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The "...toilet store" joke still cracks me up, but it led me to a wall. What was I trying to say? What am trying to to say?

I still don't know. Oh well...another draft dealt with.

Rocky Notes

November 28th, 2012

Obama had been re-elected. I must have been in my program. I may have been limping, but was no longer on crutches.

At some point I decided to sit down and watch the 1976 classic Rocky. It was my first time...possibly...?

And, according to what I was typing, it looks like I was live-blogging it, for some reason...

Maybe I was drinking too, as it trails off...check it out:

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I just started watching Rocky. I believe that this is the first time in my entire life that I'll be seeing it. The first five-and-a-half minutes are about the saddest thing I've ever seen. That's a nice hat Rocky's wearing, bouncing the racket ball in his non-boxing introduction. Quaint apartment.

He's a hoodlum. How cool. Couldn't bring himself to break the thumbs. Lock combo in the hat. Nope. New lock. Booted from the gym. I didn't know that Mickey thought he was a bum.

Talia Shire's shop across the street from the gym? Makes sense, Rocky's world on two sides of the same street.

Taking the girl home was a nice touch.

They could subtitle this film "Apollo Learns About Hubris".

Rocky in the glasses is classic. Pauly deserves a crack upside his head.

Finally the fight! Only thirteen minutes to go?

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I didn't even describe the fight! I remember it was pretty even. I remember thinking Rocky put up a better fight that the sequel, when he gets hammered the whole match only to miraculously knock-out Apollo in round 12.

But I remember that the point of the movie is that Rocky "went the distance," which makes sense in the scheme of the first movie, and maybe not in the wider Rocky-verse, which is up to (checks notes) 9 movies now.

Rocky seems like a dim-witted thug, forever led around by his benefactors, who are mobsters. Is he Forrest Gump, the thug, fighter, and pugilist? Okay, that's cool, I get it, and that seems like an interesting movie universe. 

It may not make it to getting saved by Michael B Jordan. Just a drooling, battered thug, unable to speak properly after two fights with Apollo Creed sounds about right...

Dessert Notes

Editing the Draft Folder continues...

Look at this! This is a post I must have written up sometime in early 2015, that I actually brought back later in an unrelated rambling thing. I only chose not to erase it because it was so succinct.

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Why this was occupying my attention I can't figure. Maybe it was because of a conversation with Corrie...

So, I looked up some information upon learning that sherbert has dairy. The following rambling shenanigans concerns frozen iced-creams desserts, and their differences and similarities. In case anyone ever wanted this information all in one place...

The pieces of discussion: American-style "ice cream", gelato, sherbert, and sorbet.

My computer is having a bitch of a time, since "sherbet" is the true and more widely accepted spelling; whether it's pronounced like "sher-bay" like sorbet is, I still don't know.

Okay: Sorbet traditionally has no dairy, and usually consists of sugar, fruit, and water in some form of frozen concoction.

Sherbet has some dairy, usually some milk rather than cream to make it a little creamy, but it has the least amount of dairy product of these last examples. Also, it can be found with no egg products regularly, while gelato and ice cream nowadays almost always has yolks involved.

Ice cream, American style, has a higher cream-to-milk ratio than Italian-style gelato while also having more air whipped in than gelato. The extra air and cream means it must be served colder than gelato.

Gelato usually has no cream and less air, which makes it denser than ice cream (generally) and able to be served at slightly warmer temperature. The lack of fatty cream usually makes the flavors of gelato come on more strong than ice cream,

Editing My Drafts

I've been cleaning house in my draft post folder. Some weird stuff coming out, but many things being trashed for lack of progress or content. Late night bar musings; some weird live-blogging of Rocky that I don't remember; even a 2000 word thing about every pair of shoes I've ever had.

Need to streamline all my operations as summer arrives. Weirdness to follow.

Best Picture Nominees and Winners

Corrie and I just saw Everything Everywhere All at Once. About six minutes in I said, "Well, I can see why this won best picture." As it played on we both enjoyed it, and we started to feel like while we liked the movie, it may not have been the best movie this year. It was as if Hollywood was enjoying their own farts and trying to correct 90 years of wrongs with a single vote.

I've been a fan of Michelle Yeoh since Magnificent Warriors and Police Story 3 from Hong Kong in the late '80s and early '90s. Then she was the best part of one of the Pierce Brosnan Bond films, and then came 2000's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. For some of us, this was her true arrival, her coronation. She was badass as a tertiary character and you never had a sense that she could lose any conflict she got into, other than as Chow Yun Fat's unrequited love interest. (Also, Hard Boiled at the Tower Theater in 1996!)

What a rad poster!

It was in the role of unrequited/missed opportunity love interest with Chow Yun Fat that you could see how talented Michelle Yeoh is as an actor, and now she has the hardware to match. When I first heard of this movie, of its premise and cast and mid-level budget, I was all-in. It took longer than I wanted, but eventually we saw it. It's original and weird and fun. It's funny and heartfelt, features butt-plugs and hotdog fingers and fanny packs and sentient rocks and an event horizon everything bagel. Because that string of words makes sense.

But I started thinking: how many Oscar winners have I seen? Like in the recent past? I remember the year that Slumdog Millionaire won best picture that it was the only nominee we saw. And it won.

So I pulled up a list of the past winners and nominees. It turns out that Corrie and I have only averaged a single movie in the last five to ten years.

Since this year's Oscars are considered the 2022 edition, the only movie nominated from the 2021 edition was:

And from 2020:

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When I checked on 2019, I got bored with the concept, and lost the thread of what I was trying to say. The realities of caring about movies has changed for me, and the fleeting ideas or things to say come and go. This post sat as a draft for a few months before I got back to it. 

I quite wanted to say some stuff about Judas and the Black Messiah, and maybe that was the first thread to get focused on and then dropped. Don't Look Up was pretty neat, but the connection to climate change was probably too much for some audience members.

The three movies here, Everything Everywhere All at Once, Don't Look Up, and Judas and the Black Messiah, all have different things to say about life in America, the treatment of minorities, immigrants, er, the scientific community...

I was going to say that maybe we could get back to a time when movies may have things to say about the human condition, but then I noticed that, hey, maybe I had some of those right here...

Late Night Alley Walks

Time to time...

The evening lurches on, conversations are spoken to the drunken air between people. The space this air inhabits is sometimes loud and fitful, dark, grainy, thick with sweat and multiple lives being spoken into existence. Sometimes the space between people filled with hazy talk is much quieter, brighter, more aligned by the absence of many other lives.

Eyes directed from one to the other yield a strange curiosity, memories and possibly a longing. Does one prefer the other?

Do you, an adult entering the second half of your life, daily activities affected by relentless routine necessitated by young children, do you miss the psilocybin-fueled days talking to the forest? Do you even care that those days are far off in the future, if they shall ever return? Does it even matter?

Can you, an adult entering the second half of your life, childless and yet weighed down by life and ambitions nonetheless, fully grip the positives of what children bring to your life? Do you even care that you may not be able to? Does it even matter?

Sometimes realities are shaped by things outside of our control.

The Rules of the Kitchen

I developed my own set of Kitchen Rules over the years that grew out of experience, and I have been doing my part to impart them to my children. Cass, my boy, knows them so well that if someone were to ask him, "What's the first rule of the kitchen?" he'll answer accurately. 

There are two main rules, and either can be the First Rule. It depends on what's just happened. One thing I don't say as part of my Kitchen Rules is the old restaurant standard: "If you have time to lean, you have time to clean." Who doesn't hate hearing that?

1. The First Rule of the Kitchen is: You will get burned.
2. The Second Rule of the Kitchen is: You will get cut.

You can't let fear of those things make you timid. They'll happen. Accept it and move to the next thing.

 

The Third Rule is the poetic: A falling knife has no handle. And then the list mostly trails off.

But both kids are rather awesome about it. A few weeks back, I burned myself pretty good, and I was whipping my hand around huffing and puffing, looking for an onion and some oil top give me relief. Cass says, "You know dad, the First Rule of the Kitchen is: You will get burned."

"You're right, buddy," I laughed through gritted teeth.

Camille is at it, too. I'll say that something's hot, or something's sharp, and then, unprompted, the 3-year-old will start hollering: "You will get burn-ded! You will get cut-ted!"

"That's right, honey," I agree.

For our Memorial Day trip to the pool, Corrie suggested that Cass could finish up his reading Bingo chart from school---he still needed the "Read and make a recipe" tile---by making something for the party. They looked through Grandma Kate's gift recipes from Rad Dish (check it out!) and chose two. One was for pumpkin cookies, the other was for a cinnamon/brown sugar stuffed yeasted pancake things from Korea (hotteok, for anyone interested---they're great).

After the cookies came out but before we frosted them, Cass caught the upper part of his arm on the cooling sheet tray. It was cooling, not cool, and he got one of the trademark burns, but it was in a rare spot for professionals:

He was grimacing, but handling it. I said, "Wow, buddy! You got one! How is it?" He nodded. "You, uh, you remember the First Rule of the Kitchen?" I asked him.

He nodded again, "You will get burned."

Cue little sister, "You will get burn-ded! You will get cut-ted!"

It's nice. No hurt feelings, no judgement. He's all good now and barely remembers it, yet it was only a few days ago. Resiliency and realism in the kitchen. 

Awesome.