Why E is great, pt. 1

One of the many reasons I love E is that often when we sit around having conversations about the mostly meaningless things we see in our day to day lives, we have some seriously synergistic episodes. For example, while flipping channels a movie called Break Up was playing, and we simultaneously coined the term beefed up man-twat to describe what Russel Crowe had become in the last ten years. Take a look and I think you'll have to agree that few phrases conjure up a more apt description.
I love the things that roll 'round in her head. Sometimes because I have instant access to them, and sometimes because they are the things I would have thought of myself sooner or later, but she saved me the work. An otherwise boring, mudane evening at home is often changed into a rewarding and entertaining experience, simply by talking to her. Most people should be so lucky.

I'm OK, Your'e OK...

I am having second thoughts about my last post. I don't usually put my internal struggles on display (I don't often HAVE internal struggles) but I just needed to get that stuff out. I am fine ( no, really) and appreciate you all for listening, but don't be surprised or alarmed if I don't mention any of that again.

So anyway...

Today I had a great day at work. I did Fractured Fairytales in my reading class, which is where the students put on a little play that switches conventions in the telling of a short, frog-based fairy tale, and I also had my last "Mythbusters" Science club with my 3rd and 4th graders after school. I promised to show them a potato gun, but was beginning to re-think the idea of bringing that much firepower into the class when I came across these instructions. So I made this mini, though I made my combustion chamber out of a jumbo tylenol tube instead of a pocket one, and it is tons of fun. We shot some potato slugs across the room, watched an episode of Mythbusters, ate pizza, and just chilled. It was great. I can't believe there are only 2 weks of school left.
I had promised them a ride on the hovercraft we built in science club a few years ago, but it was just too hot to go outside. I'm thinking I may take them inside to try it next week, after choir is done using our multi-purpose room.
I really enjoy my job, and sometimes, like today, it is just plain fun.

Fear

The following post is my way of trying to deal with something that has been heavy on my mind for the last few weeks. Sorry if it seems self-indulgent or confusing.

My house burned down about a year and a half before I met Erin. For years I have thought that during that time I grew as a person; more responsible, more... real.
As I remember it, in the months following the fire all of my closest friends had abandoned me, I had cut my father out of my life for his callousness in the aftermath of the fire, and Nick was 3 and I was trying to be a good father to him. I pretty clearly remember feeling as though I was alone in my life, but in a good way, not a bad one, and that I was finally having some clarity that had been lacking for years. I remember feeling that. But I also remember being, well... alone.
Then Doris came for Christmas. We had a great time, I was going to come visit her that summer. Then she left. She was pregnant; she wasn't going to have the baby. I supported her in this. I moved in with a roommate, started dating Adrienne, graduated... never made it to Germany that summer; I couldn't (didn't) save the money. I was terrified to go. Summer ended, I broke up with Adrienne, met Laura, ditched Laura, met Erin... and had my 2nd to the last ever phone conversation with Doris, where as I remember it, she asked me to make a clean break with her because it was just too hard to keep going like we had been for all these years. I didn't want to, but I agreed I'd never call her again. Erin and I had been "dating" for maybe 2 weeks at this point.
I loved Doris, and still do, for everything we shared. The last thing I wanted to do was cause her any pain, and so I never called her; I put the letters I had from her in a box and haven't looked at them in the last 8 1/2 years.
About 1 1/2 years ago, as Erin and I were coming back from a hiking trip to Escalante, we were driving in the desert right outside of Mesquite NV when I received a phone call from Doris. I recognized her voice right away, she said she was coming to the US with her husband for X-mas, she'd gotten my # from my stepmother, and she'd like to visit me while she was here. I was losing reception because we were in the desert, but I managed to get her husband's email.
Try to imagine how weird a moment that was for me. On second thought, don't. There's no way you could.
Well, she never called again, and I never received replies to my emails to her husband about their trip. Nothing.
So when I found out about my trip this summer, I really wanted to get in touch with her. I sent another email (no reply) and did a web search for both her maiden and married names, but both were fruitless. So I decided to pull down the box of her letters to get her parent's address and to write her there. As I re-read her last several letters, I had a horrible revelation; things are not as I remember them. Or, more accurately, I haven't thought about those things since then. But when I look at them now, through her eyes, I can see unfolding in my past the picture of a person very, very different from the one I felt I was at the time. I was not who I thought I was, and it's left me wondering if that is still the case.
My biggest fear has always been that I will be the kind of person my father is, and this recent discovery has me very unsettled. I don't want to be the person who wreaks havoc in people's lives but can't or won't see it. I have huge amends to make to Doris, impossible amends, but as much as I loved her, that concern pales in comparison to my fear that I am somehow completely in denial of who I am. I don't think I am, but I didn't then either, and I can see now that I was totally wrong. It is a completely foreign concept to me to feel like I might be deluding myself. I really don't think I am, and I can lay my behavior back then on the fucked up circumstances of my life's events at the time, etc. but that could all just be part of the lie; I have always been a master at deception, especially self-deception, and my huge fear at the moment is that the biggest deception of all has been my telling myself I'm no longer the same guy I was when I walked into AA 18 years ago; that I actually changed. What I don't want to admit is that I never loved Doris the way she deserved. I was too afraid to commit to her and too selfish to let her go, and that's what it ultimately comes down to. And I don't know how I could possibly make amends.

And looking at all of this now, my truly biggest fear is that somehow I'm still no good at love, and that I'm not loving Erin the way the way I think I am. I worry that I am obliviously failing her, not giving her the love she deserves. This thought has been keeping my up lately.
So I AM going to write to Doris, and I hope that I can meet her and somehow make amends. Outside of Nick and Erin, she has been the most important person in my life, and I hope I can do something to make up for how fucked up I was back then.

Celebrity

I pretty much ignore celebrity in most cases, and when I can't, my emotions usually range from mildly irritated to mildly jealous. For example, every time I see some dingbat pop singer in a casino or on TV, I get mildly annoyed. Whenever I see a pro poker player or a published author (or the equivalent) I get a little jealous. But then they go away, and out of sight, out of mind. However, there have been 2 times now in the last year when news of a celebrity had a relatively deep impact on me, entirely to my surprise

The first incident happened today. when I got home I read on my news banners that Jerry Falwell died, and I experienced a brief moment of elation, followed by a less intense feeling of satisfaction. These feelings perplexed me, and my first instinct was that I ought to feel guilty for feeling that way. But upon an evening's reflection, I really don't.

Many bad people have died in my lifetime, and it hasn't made me feel anything. On an intellectual level I can appreciate how the world is better off when a bad person dies, for example Saddam or Jeffrey Dahmer, but as far as affecting my emotions, zip. Zilch. Nothing.

But finding out the Falwell died made me feel something strong. It wasn't joy, but relief, and satisfaction, and dare I say, glee? It was confusing to me that I should feel this way about someone I didn't know personally, but I am beginning to work out why this, among all the famous deaths I've known of in my lifetime, should be the first to produce in me a feeling of satisfaction.

Falwell was a hatemonger. A bigot. A man of conviction whose convictions were wrong and who dedicated his life to spreading intolerance and fear and self-righteous indignation. He founded the Moral Majority, spearheaded the fundamentalist infiltration of the republican party, and to a large degree was responsible for the epidemic of christian fundamentalism taking root in our country. It is this more than anything which I hold against him, and which makes me feel the way I do. The US, the world is better off without him, and I don't feel bad for being glad he is dead.

The second incident affected me in a different way. When Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter, died, I got really, really bummed out for days. I certainly didn't expect to react the way I did, but in hindsight, I think the reason it moved me and made me sad was because he was a man with a burning passion for life, not just his own, but all life, and I could totally identify with his enthusiasm. Coupled with that was they joy he brought to others through entertaining them as well as educating them. I really felt like the world was a lesser place with his passing, and it made me sad.

It is too bad that people like Falwell have the power to inspire millions to affect negative change on people who are different from them, while people like Steve Irwin are seen mostly only for their entertainment value.

For Elaine, because I frickin' hate spiders too

Since I am the resident male-with-a-clue on our campus, and the science guy, and the animal guy, I am often asked to scoop up various creatures that wander into or near classrooms. I have rescued snakes, squirrels, birds and lizards over the years, but no year was quite like the 2005-2006 school year. In the 1st month and a half of 2005 we recieved almost 1 1/2 times our average annual precipitation here in southern Nevada. In addition to flooding damage in the mountainous areas, these record rains produced the best spring desert flower blooms in 50 years, and they had some interesting effects on a variety of animals' life cycles here in the Great Basin desert. We discovered one such unusual occurance when we came across a bonafide plague of Mormon crickets in a valley that separates two mountain ranges in our state that summer. These little beasts are shaped like crickets, are the color of cockroaches, and cannibalize each other. We drove through a swarm of crawlers (they don't fly) that must have literally numbered in the 10's of millions. The road, desert and mountains on the horizon were all colored the same red-brown as the bugs, because they were nose-to-ass for miles in all directions, as far as the eye could see. Gross, yet fascinating.
But that's not the creepiest thing to spawn as a result of the record rainfall.
The week before school started in 2006, I was there doing my teacherly thing when one of the 2nd grade teachers told me she found a 10 legged spider in her room, but it ran away. She wondered if I know what it was. I had no idea, and thought nothing more of it. A week later, the 1st week of school, one of our kindergarten teachers told me she had a spider trapped in a laundry basket in her room. She said it came out of her closet, and it kind of chased her as she tried to put the basket over it. Curious, I went to dispose of the thing.
I had never seen anything like it. It was big, maybe 2 inches long, sort of spider looking, but with 10 legs and the most wicked jaws I have ever seen. Here'a drawing of one. I became morbidly fascinated. How had I lived here 6 years and never even seen one of these things? I scooped it into a jar and began researching...
It turns out that these creatures are not spiders at all, but a non-poisonous arachnid with the strongest jaws of any animal in the animal kingdom per size. The great white shark has nothing on these things. Here a famous picture of one eating another, taken in Iraq. It's easy to see how they could spawn alot of half-truthful myths/nightmares. I turns out their 5th pair of legs aren't actually legs, but specially adapted mouth parts. If you are interested in all the gory details, click here for the best page on these creatures, which are actually called solphugids. Their common name is the camel spider or the wind scorpion, and there is a huge body of urban mythology surrounding them, mostly spawned by soldiers in the 1st Gulf War, where they were often seen in the deserts.
So I became obsessed with these things for a short time. That 1st night, I did a search for camel spiders in Henderson NV on google, and I came across this article. Take a good, close look at the size of that thing: and these guys were popping up in huge numbers all over the area. I found out later that normally there aren't nearly so many, but that the massive rains of earlier that year were tied somehow to their lifecycles, and that was why they were so prolific that summer.
So my guess is that what you saw was one of these. If not, then you've gotta see one in person, because it will give you the willies unlike any other spider-thing you'll ever see.

Spidey, Lowes, Borsht, and building a shed.

... pretty much sums up my weekend.
Friday we went to see Spiderman 3, and while it was fun, I think it was the least well done of the series. After that I played a little poker for the 1st time in 2 months, making 986$ in about 4 hours (I love days like that!) and then I came home, about 11:30. I had taken a break from poker for awhile, but I needed to make some extra money to pay some back child support from 4 years ago that might have stood in the way of my getting my passport. That is another long story, and the crux of it is that Texas is a state which I am quite glad to be out of; their family court laws are archaic and instututionally bigoted towards fathers. I have been paying faithfully for 9 years now, but about 4 years ago my employer switched payroll companies and they stopped deducting my payments for 10 weeks (over the summer) and I was never informed. Anyway, I don't mind paying it back, and in fact I called the Texas AG just to make sure things were OK, and that was how I found out. How you guys put up with your state government and the religious wack-jobs that are so rampant there baffles me. But I digress.

So on Saturday, while we were at Lowes buying a 10 x 8 shed for our back yard, our Greek friend Sophocles (yes, that is his real name) invited us to his church for an international food festival, so we decided to go to see what was up. But first we had to get out of the store, which took forever. I'll spare you the details, just suffice it to say that 80% of the people who work retail are total morons, and the other 20% must have been on break. It literally took us 2 hours to get the shed we'd purchased.
So next we went to the food festival. There were booths from Lithuania, Russia, Bosnia, Greece, Lebanon, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and a few others. We decided on the Russian booth, and I had borscht for the 1st time. I always assumed it would be kind of gross, but it turns out it was Awesome! We also had a slew of other dishes, including one of my favorite foods, beef stroganoff. It was nice. There were a few groups of children visiting from another Orthodox church doing traditional dances of Greece and Eritrea. Interesting stuff. After the dances, we left. Then it was back to Lowes to get more supplies for the next day.

Today I started the shed, but didn't finish it due to my pissing away about 4 hours playing guitar hero this morning. Couple that with the inevitable return trip to the Lowes-of-no-return for forgotten supplies, and it was 4:00 before work started on the foundation. My friend Juan was helping me, and we got the foundation framed, the floor put down, and the ceiling beams put together. Tomorrow we will finish the rest, and then we can get all of our camping stuff out of Nick's room so he can have a real bedroom when he comes to live with us.