Category: Serious Stuff

I almost backed into someone in a parking lot today – yay blind spot. When they started laying on the horn, I came to a dead stop at least two feet away from them. I know that even a slow-moving car in reverse can cover two feet pretty quickly, but the point is: contact was not made.

Well, not physical contact. The driver leaned out her window and started trying to contact me verbally immediately. I decided to put it in drive and just pull away.

She then pulled up alongside me at the point where the parking lot exits out onto the street, technically blocking the incoming lane so she could roll down her passenger side window and bellow at me. I finally decided I’d say a word to her. The moment my window opened even a little, all I was hearing over and over was “YOU ALMOST HIT ME! YOU ALMOST HIT ME!”

I waved – with all five fingers extended, I might add – and said “Sorry.”

“BUT YOU ALMOST HIT ME!” the other driver said, somewhere between angry and tearful.

“ALMOST SUE ME!” I shouted back with a shrug. I was more amused than genuinely angry.

For all I know, this woman has a nervous disorder, or panic attacks, or all of the above. I didn’t want to be any ruder than that. Then she waved at me – with just the one finger – and I realized that there was no disorder in play beyond her merely being an asshole.

What is it about our culture that we just love our little traumas? Mountains are tearfully made out of molehills on an annoyingly regular basis. Personally, I think it’s got not just a little to do with weepy “confessional” scenes built into nearly every “reality” TV show on the air right now. But the explanation on the ground floor is probably a lot simpler: it’s tied in, intensely, with the sense of entitlement-to-everything that pervades our culture even more deeply than the reality TV disease.

I think some people love their trauma and/or drama because then maybe folks will have to be nice to them, materially or otherwise, because in their world, the cosmic scales have to be restored to some kind of balance. I hate to tell them, but the universe doesn’t work like that. Despite our torted-up (as opposed to tarted-up) legal system which seems to reinforce the opposite view. Worse yet, it lessens the plight of those who really have been traumatized and those who really have been wronged. It’s like living in a village where every other boy is crying wolf while, on the outskirts of town, one boy really is being eaten by a wolf – but since he didn’t make enough noise to cut through the clutter, nobody notices and nobody helps.

This condition urgently needs curing. Please discuss.… Read more

Okay, people. Two houses on the drive between my place and, well, the rest of the world, have Christmas decorations up. I don’t mean tinsel. I mean major freakin’ department-store-scale displays.

Quick date check: it’s at least a couple of weeks until Thanksgiving. I remember seeing one of the aforementioned Christmas displays lit up on Halloween night as I drove little E home from trick-or-treating.

It’s bad enough that the stores decided that Christmas starts at 11:59pm on October 31st. When did the rest of us start buying into this? Since when does the average family in middle America take its holiday decorating cues from the retail giants?… Read more

A friend of mine sent me a link to an article about a group of scientists from Zurich using unusual means to actually obtain an image of a molecule. The story is fascinating stuff.

The comments…less so. It’s just the latest in a long line of incidents I’ve witnesses that has convinced me that the much-vaunted “Web 2.0” paradigm has fallen short of the sales pitch on the outside of the box. Perhaps it’s less than democratic of me to take a big number two all over Web 2.0, whose underlying mantras seem to have been “let everyone comment on everything” and “rely on users to generate new content,” but from what I’ve been able to tell, the experiment has not yielded a resounding success. … Read more

…poor old Walter Cronkite went and died on us at the age of 92 on Friday.

Once upon a time, I wanted to be a reporter when I grew up. At a very early age, in grade school, I was inflicting home-made newsletters, none of them really reporting anything of any consequence, upon my classmates. In junior high, I quickly found my way into the journalism department, and by the time I was off to high school, things had gone really well – the junior high paper had gone from, for all intents and purposes, a typewriter thing to a computer layout thing. Granted, the computer was an Apple II, and the software used had to be all but abused into doing anything that looked really impressive (not unlike my experiences with the Avid many years later, come to think of it), but it was an enormous amount of fun. My friend Robert and I poured a ridiculous amount of effort into it all, and I was under the impression, by the time we got to high school, that we were rock stars. Just a little bit.

High school was a good deal more challenging – as often happens in the transition from junior high, even if you thought you were a rock star, you were lucky if anyone thought you were a roadie now. Still, the same pattern repeated itself, in a slightly more compressed time frame – our junior year was awesome. Our senior year was, on the other hand, a nightmare – we turned out three papers because the department was broke. I doggedly stuck with journalism as a major going into college, but by the end of my first year, this thing that everyone had assumed that I’d be spending my life doing was gone; journalism wasn’t my major anymore after what I’ll simply refer to as a spirited debate with the department advisor about writing down to a third grade level for a college paper (in short: I refused to do it).

Oddly enough, I wound up still working in news – in a way. Nearly ten years later I was writing and producing news promos. It wasn’t being a reporter, but by that time I’d found my calling sitting behind a computer and making stuff look cool.

One thing I remember from my very, very brief stint in college journalism, however, was the semester that was spent on journalistic ethics. You did this semester before you were allowed to write a single thing for the school paper. If you didn’t ace ethics, you were outta there. At the time, even though I did well with that semester, I thought this was a bit draconian: some perfectly good writers fell under the axe because they didn’t score better than a B in ethics.

Now I wish every freakin’ college journalism department in the nation operated that way.

The news media landscape today is something I find deeply troubling. Entities that in the past were reasonably impartial have, for lack of a better term, chosen sides. I’m not a big fan of “news” that leans heavily conservative or heavily liberal, because either way, there’s a slant, there’s a spin, and you’re no longer in the same room with the truth. It’s down the hall somewhere, having inconvenient bits lopped off in the edit.

This is completely at odds with what I knew halfway through my freshman year of college: that you don’t infuse a news piece with your opinion unless you have specifically been entrusted with that duty by the management. That you don’t just present one side of the story. That you don’t just regurgitate the official press release with no further research. That you don’t treat people accused of something as if they’ve already been convicted. And that you don’t play to the lowest common denominator and let tragedy or weeping victims – who have had enough by the time a camera was stuck in their faces – stand in for the full human impact of an event.

What happened to that kind of thinking? Are we about to bury it with Walter Cronkite? Is no one having to run a brutal, semester-long gauntlet of journalistic ethics in school anymore? Or is everyone going into that field now going in with the understanding that the public wants pundits more than it wants the truth?

What’s scarier is that, after the past decade or two, there’s a very real possibility that, indeed, that is what the public wants. In today’s media landscape, Cronkite might find himself shuffled off-stage because he couldn’t pop the ratings numbers. These days, outfits that are charged with telling us the truth are axing trained reporters to save costs – and inviting the public to send in camcorder “reports” in their stead.

I didn’t have the chance to grow up with Walter Cronkite narrating the mind-blowingly major stories of the ’60s, but he was enough of a rock-solid presence in the ’70s that a kid like me could watch him in action and say, “That’s what I want to do when I grow up.”

Walter Cronkite should be remembered in the same breath as Edward R. Murrow as a member of a generation of journalists who truly raised the bar for their entire profession. But who is there to provide my son’s generation with that same spark of inspiration by way of integrity?… Read more

A few days ago I mentioned that one of my debit cards had been compromised by parties unknown who had apparently gotten into Forbidden Planet International’s customer database. This was a frustrating and somewhat frightening experience; since that debit card was tied to my Paypal account, any money that came in for DVDs or eBay auctions would just evaporate as the thieves tried to spend whatever they could on the card. The good news is that there just wasn’t a lot of money there; they managed to rack up four fraudulent charges, and only two out of the four were major – and even then, they were amounts that a lot of people wouldn’t describe as major. But hey, when that’s your source of income…it’s kinda major. … Read more

My dad dropped by for a visit on Friday morning; I kept Evan out of day care for the morning so they could get a little bit of time in. Unfortunately, as hard as this is to believe, Evan was just about on his worst behavior ever before my dad got into town – he was a total terror. I think a lot of that was down to his daily routine of going to day care right after breakfast being disrupted. We went to pick up my dad at the Alma Cracker Barrel while my stepmother ran errands elsewhere, and came back to the house. After a little bit, I had to let my dad down – Evan really needed to go to day care, run off some of this energy, and be with kids his own age. I know my dad was upset by this, but the kid’s got a routine…and at this age it’s all about the routine and familiarity. That and I was just tired enough that I was ready to hand him off for a bit. But my dad was bored to tears after we dropped Evan off – and then I found out why.

Apparently, one of Dad’s neighbors, or the clubhouse, or somewhere, someone has a Wii. And he’s played it. And he loves it. And he thought that if anyone on this planet was going to have a Wii, it’d be me. I kinda disappointed him on that count too. (Hey, I’d love to have one – maybe soon. I hope.) I just thought it was funny that someone came to my place expecting to play video games and found the experience a total letdown. 😆

[nocrosspost]One thing we discussed quite a bit was my stepmother. She’s always a topic of conversation – hell, in this family, she’s kinda like the elephant in the room that everyone does talk about. Thing is, she’s recently been diagnosed with cancer, she’s starting chemo, and so on. When she first broke this news to me a month or so ago, she instantly got incredibly hostile with me – saying stuff like “Well, I bet this is the best moment of your life, huh?”

No, actually, it’s not. I saw my mother go through that, and lose the fight, when I was only 14. And while I’ve never gotten along with my stepmother, I wouldn’t wish that fate on her. On anyone, at all, no matter what they’ve done. So no, it’s not the best moment of my life. I have not been waiting for it. I don’t think it’s any kind of poetic justice.

Which made it all the more amazing when my stepmother showed up later in the day. My wife came home from work and we snuck my dad off to our favorite local eating establishment, the Red Rooster (anyone who happens through the Alma and even so much as breathes a word about dropping by to see me gets a sales pitch for the Red Rooster, mainly because I don’t miss a trick in looking for any excuse to go eat there); my stepmother called to find out where Dad was so she could pick him up, and showed up shortly afterward.

We invited her to have a seat and have a bite, on our dime even, and she told Dad he needed to get his stuff in to-go boxes because she was running a high fever and needed to go see the doctor, now. While he did that, I started to ask her how she was feeling, and said I hope she’s taking it easy, and she started YELLING at my wife and I, in the middle of the restaurant, “AND NEITHER OF YOU HAVE EVER CALLED TO SEE HOW I’M DOING.” And then started in with the cursing.

I should point out that, cancer or no, the lady has always been a psycho – to be honest, I hesitate to extend the definition of the word “lady” to include her – so while it was embarrassing, it was perfectly in character for her and the only reaction I could really come up with was rolling my eyes and smirking. Really. That’s all I could do.

Anytime I talk to my dad, I ask how she’s doing. My main point of interest here is that I hate it that he’s going through this a second time, losing another wife to cancer. I don’t think anyone ever imagined a scenario where she’d be gone before he was, seeing as he’s in his 80s and she’s in her 60s, but now it’s become a real possibility. It’s not one that anyone looks forward to, least of all my dad, so yeah, I have honest concern for her well being.

But through all the years I’ve known her, this woman has never given me even the slightest indication that I was someone she’d want to hear from unless it was absolutely necessary…so I have also kept my distance. She was a black-hole-like influence on my teenage years, sucking all the life out of the family until I was finally able to get the hell out on my own, so she’ll just have to forgive me if I don’t call or write except to check on my father.

And as for her public display…I think at this point, everyone who knows her rolls their eyes and smirks. Terrible given her present plight? Maybe. But her reactions say more about herself than anyone she’s trying to denigrate in public – and her reactions also reveal a lot about why I strongly suspect nobody is calling to check on her too much.

This is also a woman who used to rant about cancer taking people who deserved it (by extension and implication, she was trying to include my mother in that category), back when I was living under the same roof and she was seriously into do-anything-to-break-your-spirit crap. The thought’s occurred to drag that old chestnut out and parade it in front of her now…but you know what? That’s the kind of shit she’d pull. I’m not going to stoop down to that level. I haven’t learned to be just like her; I’ve learned to be better than her.

A lot of the time I spent in Wisconsin was spent on realizing that I was no longer under her thumb, and learning forgiveness. But at the same time, some of the crap she pulled can only be forgiven so much; you can only forgive someone who’s pointed a loaded gun at your face so much. She’ll have to excuse me if I don’t bother sending flowers until they’re the kind that go on her headstone. This may be my final exam on the subject of forgiveness, and maybe I’m about to flunk it, but that particular test score is just going to have to be a discussion between me and God.[/nocrosspost]
… Read more