Friday, October 15, 2010

Oh Happy Day

Jess returns home tomorrow.  The world begins to right itself, centering once more on its axis.  The lion lies to the lamb, then has roast lamb and invites all his lion friends - everybody wins.  Except the lamb.
  

Sunday, October 10, 2010

Insert NO KIDS logo here

Before we got married (actually, years before marriage seriously came up), my wife and I confided in each other that neither of us wanted to have children.  Eleven-and-a-half years of wedded (mostly) bliss later, and neither of us has shifted one iota in this conviction.

That's why this isn't an argument so much as an affirmation.

I'd just like to say here that Tempus makes a finer and much more patient parent than I ever would have.
 

Haiku Status Update - 10 October 2010

-----
Feeling old today;
Like a typewriter ribbon.
frail and faded.
-----

I have a cold.  Not a "Man Cold", but a genuine, knock-one-off-one's feet doozy of a chest infection.  I think I'm over the worst of it, but I'm still congested as all hell and my head feels like it's been unscrewed and stuffed full of cotton wool, which itself has since become filled with mucus (thus accounting for the heaviness).  Unfortunately there's more where that came from, as the two tissue boxes I've emptied in the last couple of days will attest.

I hate being sick.  Partly because I hate the feeling of being sick, but more so because people assume that I'm not sick at all but just looking for some sympathy.  I don't do that.  I'll usually go to work unless I'm hurling or exhibiting a temperature higher than 102°F. In fact, I took two vacation days off last week to try and get over this affliction.  And I'll show up at work regardless tomorrow - hope I'm not contagious, like my boss who I probably caught it from (Thanks, Susan! It's been neat!).  

Speaking of health, I'm happy to report that Jess is up and around under her own steam again, and should be out of her convalescent internment in a week or so.  She came home for lunch today, and when she's back for good I'll get her to write out our vaguely Japanese/Vietnamese miso noodle broth recipe which we enjoyed today, and to which I owe at least 30% of my better-feeling at this point, and post it to our nascent Pragmatic Kitchen blog (as yet, unsullied).  It is a curative on the level of "Jewish Penicillin".
 

Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Built to last

The concrete facades may be falling off the remaining Brezhnev-era buildings dotted around Moscow, but oneSoviet-built monument to progress is not only still intact, but may well only need its batteries recharged to be operational once more; the Lunokhod-1 rover, launched in 1970 and "lost since '74.  Read about it here, courtesy of the good folks at MIT's Technology Review.
   

The road not taken

If I had it to do over again, knowing what I know now, I think the biggest thing I would change is my career-path, which was diverted in primary school, primarily by my parents.  I was a semi-talented, self-taught artist as a child (all big ideas but no technique).  This was something my mother encouraged me in, as she was a painter and ceramicist herself.  At least until grade seven; Near the end of the year I, along with bout half-a-dozen other of my Westminster peers, were offered the opportunity to attend a different public high school to the one I would normally attend (based on geography), in order to take part in an intensive Art course for promising talents.  Ironically, the alternative school was actually closer to where I lived.

I had some reservations - I knew a few of the other kids that had been offered the course, and I knew a couple of them were way better artists than me.  I wasn't sure if I would make the grade.  But the ultimate decision was my parents'.  Each for their own reasons, they decided that it would be a mistake for me to take up the offer; Dad because it wouldn't lead to a real job (essentially the same reason I had to drop out after year ten), and Mum, because she thought it would expose me to drugs and the wrong sort of people (those, I guess, who had no chance of getting a real job).

What shits me the most, looking back on it, is that nobody could make a compelling argument for why I should take the course (apparently an pilot program run by the school).  The options for visual artists career-wise are many and varied, and were even then.  At worst I might have gone into store window-dressing or become a photographer's assistant.  But what I think I would have really liked to do is build a career in typography.  I think it would have suited my particular suite of talent, technical proficiencies and bordering-on-asbergian passion for detailed minutiae.  God knows, I wouldn't be any richer (poorer, more likely) than I am now, but I think the product of my labour might have been more worthwhile, more of a contribution to the whole.

Vale Tony Curtis - 3 June 1925 – 29 September 2010

I grew up knowing Tony Curtis only as the Danny Wilde from the slick 1970s television series, The Persuaders!  Years later I began to realise that he was a movie star way before his brief television foray.  Every character I saw him play (up until Spartacus) exhibited something of Danny's irreverant, ironic, and flirty style that resonated with my idea of how fun it might be to be a grown-up.  Back then I had no idea how close Danny's hinted philosophy was to Curtis's.  There's a touching and funny rememberance of the great man by Tom Junod over at the Esquire magazine website*.

As for role models, I think I could probably have done worse.


* A big thank you to Tempus Fugit for bringing this one to my attention.