Tessa,
Last night I was grilling, but the coals just wouldn't stay lit. I slid the burgers over and doused the stubborn little carbon lumps with more lighter fluid. No help, so I repeated the process until I ran out of fluid.
I waited. Still no heat. Fine, then, I'm going to the gas station to get some more lighter fluid and when I get back you briquettes are going to be reduced to burning rubble because the not-burning rubble you are right now is never gonna cook these burgers.
Hopped in the car, backed out of the driveway at a brisk, yet responsible, pace. Down the street, turn the corner. Flashing lights behind me. I'm being pulled over.
The worst part of being pulled over is the waiting. Usually you know exactly how fast you were going, the cop knows how fast you were going, but we're all going to sit in our cars and think about what we've done wrong. So I sit.
Speeding? No. Seat belt; haven't you seen all the PSAs lately? We made a special commercial to warn you, but in your infinite wisdom you used that commercial break to get more guacamole. Idiot. $105 spent, and I haven't even gotten to the gas station. $4 more for the lighter fluid, back in the car, buckling up this time so The Man can't keep me down, drive back home.
Hop out of the car, run over to the grill, open it up. Yup. The coals warmed up without me, then they used their keen sense of irony turn the burgers into charcoal briquettes. Like a Greek tragedy, my efforts to save dinner were the very thing that killed it. Oedipus burgers. If this square looks familiar, its because it's Square One, and we were here about 30 minutes ago.
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
Alien Archaeologist's Cheat Sheet
Tessa,
I just wrote roughly 3 pages of stuff here and then erased it. It was a list of things that people either love or hate; things that extricate applause or groans, but rarely silence. Birthday cake, talk radio, Republicans. Stuff like that. 1,300 words in I realized it was a) not really all that thought provoking, b) not really all that true, and c) kind of a stupid thing to spend 1,300 words on.
Not that this particular corner of the web is reserved for things most people consider worthwhile. It's definitely not. (A brief skimming of the "Shark Bites" entry will confirm as much.) But we have to have standards, because someday all of this will be read by alien archeologists trying to figure out what the heck happened here.
So my second list of the day will be "Things I Want to Say to the Alien Archeologists Currently Excavating the Remains of Our Long-Dead Planet."
- While it doubtlessly hastened our total destruction, MTV is not a fair sampling of the human condition. Especially The Jersey Shore. In fact -- except for Ken Burns documentaries and the Food Network -- cable television as a whole will likely be a waste of your time. It was certainly a waste of ours.
- While we're all quite pleased with ourselves for creating the Internet, none of us are particularly proud of what you're going to find there. If the Internet were an actual place, it would've been shut down long ago. No city would keep a business open that made getting your mail easier, while simultaneously luring people into dens of gambling, pornography, and Justin Bieber videos.
- The best chefs were French, the best engineers were German, the best poets were English or Italian, and the best vodka is Polish. The Russians will dispute all of this, and if the Irish hadn't invented whiskey this list may have been very different.
- If you aliens possess the technology to go back in time and warn us about Celine Dion, please do it. We had no idea.
- You might think them geniuses, far ahead of their times. However, the people who talked the most about aliens coming to Earth were considered by the rest of us humans to be dorks who lived in their parents' basements and never actually had girlfriends. The fact that they were right about you guys is a total fluke.
- A careful study of 21st Century architecture will give you the impression that we worshiped shopping and football. 100 years ago this would have been untrue; now it sort of depends on what you mean by "worship."
There. That should point them in the right direction. This wasn't a waste of my time at all.
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Covenant Pococurante
Tessa,
I'm writing a country song. It's called, "I need to buy a home, my wife needs a contract, our dog only has one testicle, and the Twins have the worst record in baseball." It's about the plight of the modern working man; very Woody Guthrie. What's a man gotta do these days to get a home, and a job, and an extra puppy nugget, and a couple of Joe Mauer home runs?
We spent all weekend at Covenant Pines with a dozen junior high students. That's actually going to be the title of my song. That does a better job at striking at the heart of my malaise. Wait, looking up "malaise". No, that isn't right. Pococurante. That's what I'm feeling. I'd like to thank Thesaurus.com for diagnosing today's affect.
Something about those kids last weekend just sucked the life out of me. While I was being lanced by hay, riding in a trailer down a bumpy road, in the cold, in the dark, while listening to a 13-year-old complain for the trillionth time, I had this revelation. An anti-revelation, really. It was this moment of faux-clarity, when I saw -- very clearly -- Youth Ministry as nothing more than this elaborate scam. It was a tapestry of lies, weaving religion and culture with camping and hayrides, all knit together to trick guys like me into watching other people's teenagers for the weekend. Cynical, I know, but hard to ignore when you're in the middle of a cold, dark, complaint-riddled hayride.
It's not that I'm pretty sure I was ineffective as a speaker, or ignored as a teacher, or mocked as a leprechaun who is likely to ingest his own fecal matter. That stuff is par for the Modern Teenager Course. I think it's that there was so little silver lining. The kids who did open up, share, learn, they opened up about big problems, tough issues. There was no, "Oh, now I understand Jesus in a more real and personal way" moment. The real and personal moments were about the deaths of loved ones, the drug use of a parent, the thoughts of suicide, the doubting of their faith in the face of a world that seems upside down.
And how do you respond to to that, when you're pretty sure that what they're describing isn't some rough patch, but actually a pretty apt representation of life on this planet? How do you describe GOD to someone when you're pretty sure they know you have no way of describing such a thing? That the faith of a child gets soured and stretched into the apathetic doubt of a teenager, from whence it grows and matures into the befuddled doctrine of a twenty-something?
It just feels like a lot.
I'm writing a country song. It's called, "I need to buy a home, my wife needs a contract, our dog only has one testicle, and the Twins have the worst record in baseball." It's about the plight of the modern working man; very Woody Guthrie. What's a man gotta do these days to get a home, and a job, and an extra puppy nugget, and a couple of Joe Mauer home runs?
We spent all weekend at Covenant Pines with a dozen junior high students. That's actually going to be the title of my song. That does a better job at striking at the heart of my malaise. Wait, looking up "malaise". No, that isn't right. Pococurante. That's what I'm feeling. I'd like to thank Thesaurus.com for diagnosing today's affect.
Something about those kids last weekend just sucked the life out of me. While I was being lanced by hay, riding in a trailer down a bumpy road, in the cold, in the dark, while listening to a 13-year-old complain for the trillionth time, I had this revelation. An anti-revelation, really. It was this moment of faux-clarity, when I saw -- very clearly -- Youth Ministry as nothing more than this elaborate scam. It was a tapestry of lies, weaving religion and culture with camping and hayrides, all knit together to trick guys like me into watching other people's teenagers for the weekend. Cynical, I know, but hard to ignore when you're in the middle of a cold, dark, complaint-riddled hayride.
It's not that I'm pretty sure I was ineffective as a speaker, or ignored as a teacher, or mocked as a leprechaun who is likely to ingest his own fecal matter. That stuff is par for the Modern Teenager Course. I think it's that there was so little silver lining. The kids who did open up, share, learn, they opened up about big problems, tough issues. There was no, "Oh, now I understand Jesus in a more real and personal way" moment. The real and personal moments were about the deaths of loved ones, the drug use of a parent, the thoughts of suicide, the doubting of their faith in the face of a world that seems upside down.
And how do you respond to to that, when you're pretty sure that what they're describing isn't some rough patch, but actually a pretty apt representation of life on this planet? How do you describe GOD to someone when you're pretty sure they know you have no way of describing such a thing? That the faith of a child gets soured and stretched into the apathetic doubt of a teenager, from whence it grows and matures into the befuddled doctrine of a twenty-something?
It just feels like a lot.
I Heart You.
Thursday, May 5, 2011
Perfect Passive Participles
Tessa,
HAPPY BIRTHDAY! I know it was like 5 days ago, but we were in Chicago with your family, and I forgot my computer. Also, we still need to celebrate with my side of the family, so I figure it's still Birthday Season. Your 27th year was a bit chaotic, most of that was my fault, but your 28th year is sure to be full of laughter and meaning. I have the fortune cookie to prove it. Also, your lucky numbers are 6, 13, 38 and 72, and the Chinese word for goat is "ya-gi".
Favorite sentence I've read all day: "The perfect passive participle is the past participle expressed in the passive voice." I've read this three times and still have no idea what it means. I Wiki'd some grammar terms because grammar is a serious gap in my knowledge net. I don't know what a reflexive pronoun is, or what it actually means to use the passive voice or why you shouldn't use the passive voice. Nope, the English language is a strange mistress to me. And it will remain such, mostly because the people who elect to write about proper grammar always wind up inking something that can only be understood by people who know all about proper grammar.
Moving on.
It's a map from the mid 1800's. Minnesota, all broken down into new counties and towns. Ordered, settled. Another proud star for the Field of Blue. Next door: Blob Dakota, a land our forefathers found so boring, that we hadn't even bothered stealing it yet. Note that just to the west of Dakota is Nebraska. Originally, Corn-huskers could traipse all the way to the Canadian border without leaving the Nebraska. Then legislatures remembered Nebraska is the Sioux word for "yawn" and they reduced the place down the the least exciting swatch of prairie they could find.
I joined Twitter today. I didn't intend on it, but John Potter joined and I wanted to follow his witticisms. So I'm on, but I have nothing to tweet. Seems like it should be something mildly worth saying, but as you can see from the last few paragraphs, "Mildly Worth Saying" isn't a star I really shoot for. Wait, Charlie Sheen just tweeted the recipe for bourbon ("...just add bourbon"). I guess I can say whatever I want.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY! I know it was like 5 days ago, but we were in Chicago with your family, and I forgot my computer. Also, we still need to celebrate with my side of the family, so I figure it's still Birthday Season. Your 27th year was a bit chaotic, most of that was my fault, but your 28th year is sure to be full of laughter and meaning. I have the fortune cookie to prove it. Also, your lucky numbers are 6, 13, 38 and 72, and the Chinese word for goat is "ya-gi".
Favorite sentence I've read all day: "The perfect passive participle is the past participle expressed in the passive voice." I've read this three times and still have no idea what it means. I Wiki'd some grammar terms because grammar is a serious gap in my knowledge net. I don't know what a reflexive pronoun is, or what it actually means to use the passive voice or why you shouldn't use the passive voice. Nope, the English language is a strange mistress to me. And it will remain such, mostly because the people who elect to write about proper grammar always wind up inking something that can only be understood by people who know all about proper grammar.
Moving on.
It's a map from the mid 1800's. Minnesota, all broken down into new counties and towns. Ordered, settled. Another proud star for the Field of Blue. Next door: Blob Dakota, a land our forefathers found so boring, that we hadn't even bothered stealing it yet. Note that just to the west of Dakota is Nebraska. Originally, Corn-huskers could traipse all the way to the Canadian border without leaving the Nebraska. Then legislatures remembered Nebraska is the Sioux word for "yawn" and they reduced the place down the the least exciting swatch of prairie they could find.
I joined Twitter today. I didn't intend on it, but John Potter joined and I wanted to follow his witticisms. So I'm on, but I have nothing to tweet. Seems like it should be something mildly worth saying, but as you can see from the last few paragraphs, "Mildly Worth Saying" isn't a star I really shoot for. Wait, Charlie Sheen just tweeted the recipe for bourbon ("...just add bourbon"). I guess I can say whatever I want.
I Heart You.
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