Thoughts......

So the 2010 VMA’s were on last night…I just….So.…hmmm…I just don’t know where to start. Okay, let me start this way. Music goes in cycles, at least popular American music does. It has from the beginning (the 1950s). At one end of the spectrum, you have the poppy, bubbly, fun, love-crush-infatuation-heartbreak, sweet, party music. And at the other end, you have its antithesis: angsty, angry, depressed, rage-fueled, nihilistic, searching for meaning, dealing-with-real-life, social, expositional, stripped down to basics music. Neither is better than the other. There’s nothing wrong with happy, in love, fun songs. Who doesn’t want those things? Who doesn’t want to feel good? And there’s nothing wrong with brutally honest expression of emotional pain and desire for change, for someone standing up and saying, “You know what? Things aren’t that great right now!” And so the popular styles consistently swing back and forth. Fun love pop of the late 50’s and early 60’s (Bobby Darrin, The Fo...

My dad was a pretty cool guy. I grew up hearing stories told by my grandparents about how, when he was 10, they all went to Mexico City . They had separate rooms at the hotel, so when my grandparents woke up and got ready the next day they discovered that my dad had already gotten up, gone down to the dining room and had breakfast, and then proceeded to head out exploring the city in a cab by himself. (It was obviously a different time, as that kind of thing would make my mom’s head explode- mine too, for that matter!) And I heard other stories too, some perhaps a bit misremembered through time (just in case you’re reading, Ma, and see something wrong. J ) He went to Admiral Farragut Academy, in the east, for High School, traveled throughout Europe picking up enough of a number of the local languages to make his way and make friends, enlisted in the army, learned Russian through a government program, and was eventually stationed in Ethiopia as a Russian translator in 1971 or 72. ...

I really do. About a year ago I was watching VH1's Top 100 Songs of the 80s and, later, the 90s, enjoying a godfather (whiskey and amaretto) on the rocks, and it just struck me how very many awesome videos they played over the years. I think my earliest memory of watching a video on MTV was 83's "Land down under" by Men At Work. (Though Rick James' "Superfreak" in 1981 or anything Prince did for 1984's "Purple Rain" might have been first. It's tough to remember.) As the years rolled by, videos by the Police ("Wrapped around your finger"), Michael Jackson ("Billie Jean", "Thriller", "Beat it", "Say Say Say" with Paul McCartney), Tears for Fears ("Everybody wants to rule the world", "Shout"), Madonna ("Borderline", "Material World"), Cindi Lauper ("Girls just wanna have fun") and A-ha ("Take on me") were part of the culture, the ...

One day, six years ago I had a dream. It was a tough time in my life. Everything seemed to be meaningless. In my dream I was in a mansion. Outside I heard the sound of thunder and rain. You know the sound. The steady pounding of raindrops against the window; the sudden bursts of thunder, preceded just barely by the flashing of light in windows. Evoking both a feel of contentment and expectation and even comfort in the monotony, the white noise drowning everything out, with the occasional explosions of sound and light to tell you how you can never get complacent. Even though it seemed a mansion replete with rooms, I only remember one room for all of them. Maybe it was the idea of 'rooms' standing for all of them. Maybe it was that weird way dreams had. The rooms were dark, except for the ambient light around the windows, especially when lightning flashed. I was searching. I don't know what for. I was lost. My very self seemed on hold until I had found whatever it was that I ...

My biggest hope.... My deepest fear..... Even worse is realizing that I don't know how to tell them apart any more...That the hope for a true connection has made the recognition of a true connection impossible...and that I can't find a way out... It sucks... (Comic from xkcd.com)

Just the word causes irritation and stress. There’s even a name for it: Math anxiety . Carrying, borrowing, long division, finding the common denominator, solving for x,…all of these procedures that had to be memorized! And it wasn’t forgiving either. A single mistaken step anywhere in the problem always (always) gave you the wrong answer. It’s not surprising, then, that most grew to view math as a necessary evil- magical incantations that might as well have been in Latin;repetitive and incomprehensible rites invoking the spirits for answers to questions, many times questions nobody really cared all that much about. But when one looks past all the procedures and steps to very the core, to the heart of it, there is a deep magic to mathematics that can be observed. In many ways, mathematicians have been explorers and artists in a landscape that exists completely in the mind. And yet that mental landscape has, time and again, given us the tools to truly understand and manipulate the world...

So the other night, I took Connor to Red Lobster. Boy, do I hate that place. I always have. Not because of some faux-elitest sense of what "real seafood" tastes like. No, it's more basic than that. I detest seafood. I hate it. I've tried, believe me. But still, no thanks. So being at Red Lobster is a bit like being at a Mexican restaurant looking at the paltry non-Mexican food list they serve for morons who come to a Mexican restaurant wanting a grilled cheese sandwich. The waiters are surreptitiously rolling their eyes at the fool who would come to a seafood restaurant desperately looking for something on the menu NOT seafood. Connor, on the other hand loves every kind of sea food. (Thank you, Awake! magazine, for the suggestion that we not be vocal to our children about our food dislikes, lest we bias them against certain foods.) So he went to town on some Snow Crab and shrimp. And played with the claw, and the tendon that sticks out of the claw, making his own cla...