Blog

  • Beatles Concert

    When I drive my daughter to school, we have started to listen to the Beatles. There is such a deep joy that I receive as my kid is starting to listen to my favorite band. I have tried to not push this on her. I want her to develop her own taste in music, and I don’t want to influence her to or from any type of music. Both the wife and I try to play as may different styles and bands for her to listen to. I think it has been paying off because she wanted a guitar for Christmas this year, which Santa brought to her.

    Now, in the car ride to school, the kid gets to pick what she wants to listen to. For the past three months it has been Vince Guaraldi’s Peanuts music. On the way home, she has to listen to what I want, which I do try to make a choice of music I feel will broaden her horizons. Sometimes the Beatles come up.

    By talking to my daughter about music and bands, she has come to learn the names of the Beatles, and asks me who is my favorite or who plays the guitar, or is signing. Sometimes, she will ask me if we can go and see them play, which is when I will pull YouTube videos for her. Then the other night she asked me is we can go and see them play. I explained to her that they don’t play together anymore, and that we have to listen to them and watch their videos. She wasn’t happy with that answer.

  • That Possible Space Probe: Oumuamua

    This has been one of my favorite stories to read of late, and if you aren’t aware, please check the wiki page. Even The New Yorker did a story on it. I just find it fun that we can have a scientific debate on the physics of this object moving through our solar system, and from the data, it is possible that the object was created and sent by intelligent beings from another planet.

    That’s pretty cool.

    From what I can tell from the data, Oumuamua was in the Neptune distance from the Sun around 2014, and it will leave our system in the 2023 ballpark. So, if this thing was sent by an intelligent being, it sure isn’t in a hurry. I would think that if I could send a craft to, let’s say for the sake of argument, a neighboring star, that I would have a little speed to it, so I would be able to appreciate the discovery. But maybe it was built with the idea that the information would make it to the next generation. They have other things to do while they wait for the data. Maybe…

    Or, maybe they saw us, and don’t want to have any part it. Maybe, having studied how humans behave, the aliens realized it was better to slowly “ghost” out of the system, because humans quickly forget stuff that isn’t in their face.

    You know, like when you walk into a store, get greeted by an employee, but then you realize that you should leave, but you still go through the motions of looking at stuff, so the employee forgets about you and then you can leave.

    Again, if it’s intelligent life, they would know that about us.

  • Gen X: Still a Bunch of Losers

    And I feel completely justified in saying that because I am Gen X, and we are a bunch of losers.

    On SNL this weekend, they had a sketch called “Millennial Millions,” and the clip is below…

    This is a subject matter that I have hit on before, which is that Baby Boomers are ruining everything for everyone, making life way more difficult than they had it.

    Anyway, the part that made me really sit up and laugh was at the 3:15 make when Kenan Thompson as the host laughs at a contestant, then adds, “I’m Gen X. I just sit on the sidelines and watch the world burn.” And there we have it; Nothing better encapsulates my generation than that statement.

    The first person that I know who threw all this shade at us was my friend, and artist Erin Orr, also Gen X, who made this point about three years ago. Her logic to us was more along the lines that Gen X should be moving into the political forefront, as we should be established in careers, earning real money, have families, and the first wave of us just hit 50. In 15 years, retirement will begin to set in. With all of this happening in our generational lives, where are we? Why aren’t we demanding to be on the political scene to have our concerns heard? It’s like we can’t shake our loser persona, and the rest of the world has just moved on to the next group.

    That’s why I’m not real surprised that this story happened, and Gen X got left out again.

  • Blackout: Learning Experience

    Yesterday, very powerful and disruptive storms hit us on the west coast. The rain wasn’t any worse than a bad thunderstorm in Texas around late May, but whereas a Texas storm is done and over in about thirty minutes, the rain yesterday lasted for over twenty-four hours.

    As the storms were tapering off in the middle of the evening, just as we were about to start making dinner, we lost power, and got plunged into darkness. Luckily, we have a large collection of Yankee candles thanks to our many trips to outlet malls, and we quickly had light in our apartment.

    As we sat and waited for the power to return, the wife and I thought about the last time we were in a power outage. For me, it had to be at least 20 years, back when I was in Texas. My wife was in New York for the blackout of 2003. For our daughter, this was the first time she had experienced no electricity.

    We explained to her what was going on, and that nothing would work in the home. I know she heard us, and understood, but it was cute to watch her go from room to room, trying light switches, and then ask if we had extra electricity in the apartment to use. Like a battery, you know. We even opened the front door, so she could see the complex and the whole neighborhood cloaked in darkness.

    It was interesting to watch her learn. She had been given information, but she still needed to experience it for herself; to touch and see. She questioned why this happened, and how does rain make electricity go away. She wanted to know what we could do to fix it, and when I told her there was nothing to do but wait, she didn’t like that.

    If there is a problem, then we have to solve it.

    Waiting is still a lesson to be learned.

  • The Unexamined Life Sucks…

    Which I think is a more accurate translation from ancient Greek.

    I watched a documentary on Freud last night, and it didn’t help me sleep. What struck me in this program was that it claimed that in moments when Freud was stuck and frustrated by his own theories, he would apply them to his own life to see if they stood up to objective scrutiny. Depending on how you feel about Freud, you may feel that he succeeded or failed.

    It reminded me of Socrates’ quote, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” I know that he said it, or supposedly did, at his trial, choosing death rather than exile. Now, my interpretation is that the ancient world was about examining the external, and the modern world is about examining the internal.

    I remember wanting to write books from a very early age. I remember wanting to have as many books around me as possible. I can even remember memorizing the books my parents read to me, so I could act like I was “reading” them. (My daughter has started to exhibit the same behavior now.) I remember “scribbling” with wavy lines on paper, like I was handwriting a story. When I did learn how to write, this might have been when I was 9 or 10, I asked for and received a child’s typewriter for Christmas. I also remember wanting to tell stories; make them up, read them, perform them, etc.…

    But where did this come from?

    I understand the nature/nurture dynamic, but it can’t be all nature, can it? Being given books by my parents clearly had an impact, but is that it? Did books give me a feeling of power? Were books my “friend” when my older brothers left me alone to do older brother things? Was it playing by myself in those situations where I was forced to use my imagination to create my own stories as I did not have the interaction with another child? Or is it just something that is in me that was inevitable?

    I’m not sure if there is a clear answer here, or even a need for an answer, as in, what does that answer really “give” me? I am who I am, and I don’t regret it.

    But…

    As I mentioned above, my daughter has exhibited one of these behaviors. Is that coming from me, genetically, or from the example I set?