Building Castles on the Beach

I've been writing this blog for just over two months and I've been obsessed for at least seven and a half of those eight weeks. However, I start teaching again next Monday and I ought to psych myself up. Plus, I need to read Pride and Prejudice ; I can't let my students get ahead of me. Thus, I've decided that I'm going to take the next week or so away from the internetting. Rico Suave for sci-fi geeks. A friend of mine recently posted on Facebook that instead of imagining songs out of the pithy, clever thoughts she has--like she used to--she now conjures up a FB status update. Similarly, I find myself thinking in terms of blog posts. I'm eating Dots and really love how the gooey, chewy candy feels when it gets stuck in my teeth. Blog post! I just finished watching all the David Tennant  Doctor Who specials and now I wait for the season 5 series to be available for streaming on Netflix. Blog post! Xander was on his tummy during his doctor's visit last w...

(I plan to tell this story in three parts: Before, During, and After. This is Before.) Mommy's water broke 11 weeks early. That night went something like this: It was after ten p.m. and my wife and I had both gone to bed. I was conked, which is abnormal. I usually don't sleep well on Sunday nights before a regular school week. My mind races. But tonight, I was out cold. May, however, had gotten up three times in ten minutes, wondering how hard the baby had to kick her bladder to make her wet herself. She was leaking. She: Brent, something's wrong. I need to call the doctor. Me: (basically still asleep) Are you kidding? We go to the doctor every week for some new paranoia of yours. Just go to sleep, crazy woman. But she didn't do as she was told by me. She called the doctor. Due to a variety of factors, the pregnancy was high risk, and we had enrolled in a special care clinic at the hospital just down the street. The doctor said she had better come in to make sure s...

I'm a romantic when it comes to Sundays. The day of rest, not the 90's jangly pop band. But if you're interested, here's a great song by the Sundays called "Summertime" that pretty much fits the tone I'm aiming for. Sundays should involve lots of fruit. Sunday. The kids jump on your bed to wake you up. You have orange juice and bacon for breakfast, reading Calvin and Hobbes in the paper. After church, you take the convertible Nash Rambler for a Sunday afternoon drive down the lane where the scent of the ocean meets the fragrance of the forest. So what music sets the mood for such quixotic reveries? Classical Sunday I have an iPod playlist for anything I have labeled classical music. This includes movie soundtracks done in a classical style: from John Williams ( Star Wars et.al.) to Tan Dun ( Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon ). I can't play this on Sundays, though, because every once in a while the 20th Century Fox Fanfare or battle music from Gladi...

Waiting for "Superman" is clearly a one-sided production. It is produced by persons and groups who have agendas that are pro-corporate, anti-union, and as Diane Ravitch has said, are for the privatization and de-professionalization of education. (Check here for more specific names and information.) To discuss everything that is misleading or just incorrect in this film would take more time than I have, and others have already done it anyway. ( Like this .) Watch closely to see the problem. Let's get the worst of the snark out of the way up top. Why does the title Waiting for "Superman " utilize both italics and quotation marks around the word " Superman "? In standard English, when I write out the title, I need to italicize the whole thing to indicate this is a title of a larger work, as I have done in the second sentence above. But when you make your own movie poster, you don't need to use italics because it's your work and we alrea...

Chanel over at Fabulously Neurotic has lobbed the Versatile Blogger award my way. This is very kind and I don't deserve to win any more than the others who were also nominated, but still, I blush. I'm not sure what to do with this, since Bryan at nuclearheadache came up with ideas for all kinds of blog awards but this one. Enough with the in-jokes. I'm supposed to tell you seven things about me, so in order to show how versatile I am, I tender the following information. See if you can count seven fun facts about yours truly. I love a soda with a fruity filling. Not literally, because no one wants to chug a Coke and suck down a couple of blueberries into their esophagus. But I enjoy the sweet candy flavors that resemble fruit juice. Every one of the seasonal varieties of Mountain Dew is liquid sunshine. Voltage. Supernova. Revolution. I get energized just seeing a new strain on the shelf and I die little inside when it's gone. He doesn''t drink diet. Ne...

Watch this video: It's a European band called Hypothetical Prophets from 1982. YouTube calls this song "Person to Person," but I knew it as "Personal Announcements," featuring lyrics taken from personal ads. This critique of the non-personal nature of modern relationships concludes with a wicked last line (if you can make it that far). The music is minimalist electronica and suffers from the fairly common poor production of the time. And the video images date it even more. But oh, how cool this was for me as an impressionable young lad trying to find himself through music. Back in the 80's and into the 90's, one of Denver's local public broadcast stations (formerly KBDI Channel 12, now Colorado Public Television 12) aired a video show called Teletunes , actually predating MTV's first broadcast. It ran until the late nineties, but by then I was no longer a viewer. It had done it's work on me throughout most of the 80's and I didn't n...

Yesterday was Xander's first excursion out of the house since he's been home. We've taken him to monthly doctor appointments, but that just means a return to the hospital from whence he came, so they don't count. This escapade has Xander exploring the interior of Office Depots heretofore unknown, and searching the wild continents of Smashburger for midday sustenance. The dark spot means you're breathing wrong. In order to tell the story correctly, I will set the backdrop. For fear of raging infection, and due to the run-of-the-mill first-time-parent paranoia of my wife, we declared early on that, excluding doctor visits, Xander wouldn't leave the house until RSV season was over, which is sometime after his seventeenth birthday, I think. Despite this edict, last week Xander came down with a cold anyway. The doctor called it bronchiolitis, which is the infant form of "I can't breath due to the mucus-gunk building up in my airway." A cough adva...

One of my favorite activities in life is driving. But it's not about the car. I couldn't care less about what the make and model is or how fast I'm going or how sleek the interior is or whether there's a racing stripe on the side. I just want a decent stereo. When I was just a lad, my dad would play two tapes over and over in the station wagon so that the whole family could sing along. The first was Kenny Rogers The Gambler . The only song we listened to was the title track and my whole family knew every word, every note, every country twang by heart. The other was the Bee Gees tape Spirits Having Flown , and we only knew the first three tracks, but especially the first song, "Tragedy." This was when I learned the wholesome delight derived from singing in the car at the top of your lungs. Plus, it brought the family together to sing about when the feeling is gone and you can't go on. My older brother bought a car just after he got his license. Some fat...

As of today, I have one month left of my paternity leave. Just four weeks more to accomplish all the great things I had planned. You know, paint the house, fix the plumbing, publish a novel, raise a child, save the world. They're little things, really. It seems like I've done hardly anything with my time. And it's not the kind of time-wasting that happens on a good mental health day away from work where you sleep in and wear pajamas all day and watch daytime TV and nap on the couch and order pizza at three in the afternoon. When I tried to watch a movie during the day, I had to watch it in increments. It took me three days to watch Where the Wild Things Are . And that's a problem for me because I'm a film snob. Even at home, I like the real movie experience with the loud surround sound on the giant screen TV. And no interruptions. If you can't watch a movie all the way through, you're not feeling it the way it should be felt. This, of course, doesn't...

I feel violated. I don't live in the most savory neighborhood. But I do have a pretty great house. My wife and I obtained a deal through the Teacher Next Door Program--you can't sneeze at a house for half price. That arrangement was supposed to result in heaps of equity and the chance to move to a better land after just three years. Of course, the housing market sank and we're still here almost six years later, but that's another story and the point is that we were glad to have the opportunity to move into this house, in spite of its location. If this isn't feng shui, I don't know what is. The inside is just the right size for us, and we were able to fix it up right. Refinished hardwood floors. Paint paint paint. New appliances. Completely new bathrooms. The living room has cool rounded doorways, and the ceiling has this swell molding that looks, I don't know, Victorian or something. Outside, we've got a decent yard with mature trees, a covered ba...