Dress To Suppress

At the age of 38, I have come to the conclusion that I have no one to impress on a daily basis.  Unless I am looking to advance in my career or I am mandated by certain mores such as company dress code or acceptable for the event, I will dress mostly for comfort.  Now, granted, being a t-shirt designer, after work and on the weekends I’m liable to be wearing a tee I love or designed, which has a message or is used for marketing purposes.  In any case, the my morning goes like this.

I get up, shower, and then put on clothes that satisfy the following criteria: did I wear that shirt last week, and is it comfortable for the weather  Beyond that, I don’t put a lot of thought into the manner or style of dress.   However, if you were to ask the me that was 25 years  my junior, you’d get a vastly different answer.    There was no comfort involved.  It was dress to suppress.

Now, what does that mean?

Well, in the case of eight to ten year old me, I wore a good deal of hand me downs.    Being the youngest of three, by seven years, I was subjected to wearing the clothes my brother had from a previous decade.   Factor in that my parents didn’t have a huge bank account, I wore the same clothes for multiple years while they fit.

But at some point, I wised up.  I went to my mother and thanked her for my impeccable fashion sense but asked if my older brother could take me clothes shopping before the first day of 7^th grade.   In my town, you had K-6 (Grade School) in one building, 7-9 (Junior High) in another, and then 10-12 (High School) in yet another.   You see, the division in schools also determine the threat level to one’s psyche from their classmates.  In grade school, you could get away with wearing sweat pants, a ¾ sleeve baseball tee, and Sears’ brand Velcro running shoes without drawing attention.  However, in sixth grade the natives begin to take notice and you prepare yourself for the inevitable catty comments about how you dress and how you look to your peers.   So, I decided to keep that from happening and turned in my running shoes for Nike high tops, just so I could keep up with the pack.   Then, in the summer before Junior High, I went on that all important clothes shopping trip to the mall with my older and infinitely cooler brother.  I came back with Ocean Pacific and Shah Safari shirts, Bugle Boys and Dockers pants, a pair of Chuck Taylors and assorted shirts from 80s mega trendy stores like Chess King and Just Pants (I’m kidding).

That first day of school was all about blending in and not sticking out.  It wasn’t about the clothes drawing attention.   It was about disguising myself to look like the enemy.  That way I could infiltrate their ranks and they could see me, not what I wore.   In those days, if your parents got your clothes at stores like Gabriel Bros. or Montgomery Ward, you were an easy target.  The cool people could zone in on you like a geek seeking missile, claws bared, ready to attack your fashion.  It was survival of the fittest.

By when you reach High School, the claws retract somewhat.   The rules are more relaxed.  In Junior High, the bodies and minds of teenagers go completely nuts.  All the instability of hormones and growing fight your ability to be comfortable in your own skin, so you lash out at others as a way to justify your own metamorphoses from ugly caterpillar to butterfly.   In High School, you stop focusing on how to take others out of the race and work to getting to the finish line first with flare.  It’s called preparation for college.  Soon, you start to compare acceptance letters to schools like you did with shoes or earrings, years before.  It’s not about how you dress, it’s about how you will succeed in your post High School career.  Still, I did do my best to keep up and went the route of the Boyz II Men, Olive Garden waiter route with jeans, white button down shirts, and ties.  Some days loafers, some days sneakers.     But I never got called out by the worst offenders from Junior High when it came to my clothes.   I mean I caught a glimpse of it in sixth grade with my clothing.  In Junior High, there was that one disastrous pair of blood Red Pro Keds high tops that nearly destroyed me.  Luckily, the poorest of the poor kids had on Moon Boots and the geek seeking missiles locked onto him instead.

Funny how, when you get to college, all of that goes out the window and you end up wearing pajamas to class or sweats with a ball cap, and you’re just fine.  Sometimes you wonder if uniforms in the education system help to tone down bullying or other harassment of not so cool kids in those years.    My argument for that is to a kid going through all the agony of adolescence, their clothes should be a coat of arms for their individuality.  I wouldn’t bow to inappropriate or obscene clothing, but as a form of expression and a way to help that transition, clothes do make the man they will become.  Why suppress that?

Clarity

Freedom from indistinctness or ambiguity. 

That’s one of the definitions from dictionary.com. Listed synonyms include: Intelligibility, exactness, simplicity.

It’s also said that people can find a moment of clarity, like drug users.   They find some truth, some understanding.  Something comes into focus and their vision becomes unclouded.

Well, sometimes people need to find that moment of clarity in their life, but they are going to do incredibly stupid things prior to that light bulb going off in their heads.

Unfortunately, for me, as a teenager, that bulb never went off.  I would float from cloud to cloud, hoping and wishing, secretly pining for certain people.    They either knew and ignored it or dug in deep to get away from the major dork that resided in their class.

Looking back, it seems so 80s movie stereotypical.  It seems stupid.   It seems ridiculous.   It seems so familiar.

I usually followed two courses  I would hang back, hoping that something in my eyes, buried behind coke bottle glasses would connect with their gaze, attracting them to my undeniable charm and ability to burn ants with simply a nod of my head on a sunny day.  If that didn’t work, I would make these grandiose gestures of friendship, thinking that, by definition, I was laying some sort of groundwork with which I could build some castle for us to live happily ever after.

Yeah, in either case,  I was an idiot.   I was unclear.  I was ambiguous.   I didn’t have clarity.

As a teen, the forces of nature and biology are against you.     Your body rebels against you.  Hair grows.  Voice changes.  You become a freak of nature.  Your own feet attempt to kill you when you walk.  When you speak, birds screech and eardrums pierce.  Your brain forms words that aren’t in any intelligible nature.  You look like a stroke victim in a cartoon.

Social anxiety and class also thwarts your attempts to rise up and change your lot in life.  You can’t crash the cool table and expect to sit next to the King and Queen without anyone noticing the peasants in the room.  And don’t even think about trying to steal their hearts.   That just won’t happen.  Not unless you are in a John Hughes universe.  Not unless you are already pretty hot, disguised by some frumpy outfit that morphs you into a drop dead hottie in some four minute montage.

So, what?

What’s the worst that can happen?  You’ll get laughed at?  You’ll get shot down?  You’ll find out that are already dating some Greek God/Goddess equivalent that is on some other plane of existence than you? Yes, Yes, Yes.

DO IT ANYWAY!

Go down in some epic blaze of dorkish glory because you know what;  in ten years, you’ll be at some shit job, paying back student loans, driving a piece of crap that leaks fluid, and wonder where it all went.  They will probably be in suburbia with the other real housewives or country club guys and that doesn’t matter.   You’ll find each other on whatever social media platform exists at that moment in time and you will make the same mistakes all over again.

Don’t hang back.  Jump out in front of the love bus and at least do what so many wish they would do.

What will go wrong?

Facebook will document it, Likes for your misery will number in the millions.   Twitter will favorite it, retweeting it to the Huffington Post.  You’ll probably have to change planets to hide from the collateral damage but for Ducky’s Sake get in the game.

But listen to this 38 year old who has been there.  I’ve made that mistake time and time again in my youth.  I laid it all out on the line, two minutes too late.  “You’re a good friend.  You’re a great guy.  You’re funny.  I have a brain cloud.”  Wait, what?  I’m pretty sure you made up that last one. 

Look, that girl or guy is going to get hit on by much worse than you.  They’re also going to get hit on by much better.   Your heart is going to be broken 1000 times in your life and each one is going to be more devastating than the last.

So, be the Edison of broken hearts.   Don’t fail.  Just find 10000 ways to not succeed.  You only fail if you quit.   One time it will work.  Sometimes it might be someone with a whole underground garage full of crazy.  Just hide the sharp objects and breakables.

The best thing you can hope for is some experience.   You may even find confidence.  You may find yourself doing things better, coming off more suave in the future.   You may find yourself having to turn some people down.  

Fix yourself, first, though.  I’m not saying change.  Don’t ever change.  Well, unless you’re an asshole.  Then, by all means, napalm yourself and build it back up from the rubble.    But don’t change what’s good about yourself.    That’s the bottom line.  That’s the thing you need to get them to drive off the lot in you.  But you need to augment that.  Bring things to the forefront that not everyone knows about, or at least they don’t understand.  Make them see why it’s important to you and why it makes you better than the rest.  Everyone puts up a front with first impressions.   In reality, we all have a pair of underwear that have a hole the size of the grand canyon in them and we wear them every chance they come up in the rotation.  No one is perfect, no matter how much they sell it in the window.

You really think people buy cars based on how well they move?  No, they buy the bells and whistles or the right color or detailing.   That’s the superficial stuff that sells the car.  The car being able to make it from point A to B is the same on every version of that same car.     If it works, it works on every one of them.  What makes you stand out is the power steering or the moon roof.

Hell, screw it, be give yourself a plate that says “Fresh” and hang dice from the mirror. 

Do whatever it takes to realize that you are the person they need to notice.   Don’t hang back.  Don’t be vague with gestures or goodwill. 

 

Fail Big or Go Home.

Give them some clarity.

Double, Double, Bailey Is In Trouble

You want to believe your kids. You want to believe that when they say they saw the bogeyman in their closet with blood soaked fangs, a sharpened ridge of spines on their back and a thirst for child flesh. You know, however, that it’s simply a shirt or some other outfit hanging in their closet that takes on the grisly form they described. Yet, you know that they think they saw it and you believe that they believed it.

Confused?

My three year old is finishing up her first full year of Kindercare in a couple of months and it’s been a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing because she gets that socialization and structured learning that she’s going to need. It gives my wife and my father-in-law a much needed break from having to watch her while I’m at work. It also gives my wife the chance to go back to work as well. The downside is that you get the four months of chronic ear infections and a membership to the green mustache brigade. You also get the reality check that your kid is a hellion at school as well as at home. Sometimes, we can bribe the kid for good behavior. For this week, we promised that if she was a good girl, we’d go to McDonald’s on Thursday night.

We did this because we had a bit of an issue with the little one drawing on chalkboards with unapproved writing tools. I picked her up on Tuesday and saw a chalkboard in her cubby. I have no idea why it was there, nor do I know why it had appeared to have been scribbled on with a marker. I gathered my kid from the next room and off we went. She immediately apologized to me for something. I asked why she was saying she was sorry. “I didn’t mean to do it. It was an accident. Are you mad at me?” I still have no idea what she had done. It was almost as if she was trying to get me to absolve her of any wrong doing before knowing what she had done. I asked her what happened. She rattled off a story about a chalkboard. I pieced together the fragments and figured out that she drew on the chalkboard with something other than chalk and got in trouble for it. The teachers did not tell me what happened and I didn’t ask. Putting a chalk board in the cubby doesn’t tell me much and there was nothing on her report that indicated there was a problem.

I asked my wife to inquire on Thursday when she dropped her off in the morning. When I talked to my wife that afternoon and remembered about the chalkboard, I asked if she had talked to the teacher but it was already too late to discuss it. I figured I would ask when I picked her up. When I went into her room at the end of the day, I saw the chalkboard in her cubby. It looked like it was still there from the other day. I gathered up all my kid’s things and went to go collect her, outside. I asked about the chalkboard and her teacher said she drew on it with marker before and then did it again, today. Now, I was upset. I had just had this heartfelt apology on Tuesday about the chalkboard with a promise that she’d never do it again and now I find out that she broke that promise.

Once we got in the car, I asked her why she drew on the chalkboard with marker.

She said, “I didn’t do that today.”
I said, “Your teacher told me you did it.”
“But I didn’t do that today.”

At this point, I noticed a difference in her voice. At anytime when she is lying about something she has a certain tone to her voice. This particular instance was different and it sounded totally sincere. But, I didn’t let her know that. I wanted to draw more information out of her and see if she really was telling the truth.

“Honey, why would the teacher lie? She has no reason to lie to me. You run the risk of losing McDonald’s.”
“Daddy, I didn’t do that today.”
“Ok, well, I want to really believe you.”
“I love McDonald’s and I want to go there.”
“I know. It’s just that I need to discuss this with your Mommy and decide if you deserve to go.”
“Daddy, I deserve to go.”
“Why do you deserve to go?”
“Because I want to go and I love McDonald’s.”
“OK, but I still plan on telling Mommy about the chalkboard and we’ll see.”

Pause…

“You know what, Daddy?”
“What?”
“Snitches are witches.”

Childhood Movie Madness

I blame Ginny, over at That’s Church, for this post. She opened up the floodgates by mentioning Pete’s Dragon in a recent post.

In my 35 years of being on this Earth, I have seen a lot of movies. I mean a lot of movies. And even though there are movies I have not seen, I could probably hold a conversation about or figure out what movie you were talking about if you were all staring up at the ceiling, waiting for the answers to fall from the sky into your head. My own sister regularly uses me to settle arguments or jog her memory about movies, even if I haven’t seen them. It’s just something I pay attention to.

So, when Ginny went on for a few paragraphs about tattoos and Pittsburgh and being old, the one thing I latched onto and ran with was the comment about having the song, “We Got a Bill of Sale Right Here” from Pete’s Dragon, stuck in her head. That immediately sent me reeling into my subconscious iPod playlist to retrieve “Every Little Piece.” Now, I’ve been going, “Money, Money, Money by the pound” every few minutes until my brain explodes in a pop culture mess all over my cube.

That mess sent me on another hunt, this one went further into my brain, past the cobwebs and skeletons and thoughts of Susanna Hoffs in the “Walk Like An Egyptian” costume and the poster of Alyssa Milano in a New Jersey Devils’ sweater on my bedroom wall when I was a kid.  Um… excuse me for a minute.

Ok, where was I?

Oh yeah, going past all that I return to my early childhood, in grade school. It’s just about this time of year and with the impending holiday season the lack of structured instruction taking place, we’d all assemble in the cafeteria/gymnasium/auditorium in my school and watch movies. They were usually Disney flicks or other kid friendly fare. One of those movies was, in fact, Pete’s Dragon. That conjured the list of other movies I had seen during these days.

Pete’s Dragon
Hot Lead, Cold Feet
The Apple Dumpling Gang
The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again
No Deposit, No Return
Any number of Herbie movies, minus Lindsay Lohan
Condorman
The Black Hole
Freaky Friday (Again, minus Lindsay Lohan.  This was the Jodie Foster version)
Bedknobs and Broomsticks
Candleshoe
The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes (Kurt Russell version)
The World’s Greatest Athlete
Escape To Witch Mountain
Return To Witch Mountain
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines

The only other movie I can recall being shown at our school was that super secret sixth grade film that was shown to all the girls. They taped paper on the windows so that we couldn’t see what was going on in there. Conspiracy, I tell ya! It’s all a plot to take down Y chromosome!

That’s all I got folks. If you’ll excuse me, I’ll be somewhere in the recesses of my mind with Alyssa Milano, Susanna Hoffs, and a Disney movie marathon.

The First Day Of School

And so it begins. Tuesday was my daughter’s first day of school. Well, preschool / daycare if you want to be academically accurate, and half day if you want to be chronologically correct. I took an extra day off for the Labor Day weekend so that I could be there for moral support. Had things been different, my wife would have had her mother riding shotgun on our daughter’s first trip to school. Sadly, her mother died this past Spring and I felt that I needed to be there, even if I was a poor substitute, to make sure everything went smoothly since my wife was a little apprehensive about this. She felt a little guilty sending the little one off to school. She felt she should be at home with her instead of leaving her in daycare. But, with October around the corner, it’s getting to be that time of the year and that means she’ll be back to work at the local farmers’ market she’s been working at for the last 16 years. We had originally thought about holding off a year since our daughter will be going into Kindergarten after she’s already turned five. She’s a July baby, after all.

The truth is, I’m glad. Not because she’s out of the house. I’m at work so I don’t get any benefit from her being in preschool. Besides, we have to pay for her to be there and that pretty much makes whatever my wife makes at her job a wash. It’s been a little rough the past few months. With my wife’s mother passing away in April we’ve kind of taken a hit in the wallet. It’s purely on us, though. I’m not blaming anyone but myself. We don’t cook much and when we do, we cook for my father-in-law as well. You see, before April, we spent close to three or four nights a week eating dinner with my in-laws at their house. Again, we don’t cook much. We’d also go out to eat at least three nights a week with them. Since April, we’ve been going out a lot more or cooking for her Dad. It doesn’t seem like a lot but it started to add up.

So, my wife decided that she needed to go back to work, if for anything to have money for Christmas. The only reason she’s even doing Christmas this year is for our daughter. Now, we could easily make three changes that would save us enough money to not have to worry about Daycare but we’re lazy. Sometimes, when you get home from working an eight hour day and you spend the next three hours teaching piano lessons you would rather just go out to eat instead of cooking dinner. But all of this is neither here nor there and my going off on that tangent was just as bad as that cliché I threw out there at the beginning of this sentence, so we’re moving on with the story.

Needless to say, my wife had to go back to work and that caused my daughter to have to go to some form of preschool or daycare. My father-in-law picked up more projects at work and has been going every day and cannot watch her like he had. That was Grammy’s job before she died since she was “retired” [read: job was eliminated] The concept of putting our daughter in preschool so my wife could work which was necessary to pay for the preschool is a snake eating its own tail puzzle. Still, socializing the child with other kids, her age, and allowing her to pretty much play in the Petri dish that is preschool would help her immune system. The kid already has a few strikes against her in the heredity department. Both our family histories are riddled with issues from cancer to MS to diabetes. Thankfully, she has been very healthy in her first three years and hopefully she inherits my immune system.

So, all of this build up and tangent taking and misdirection hasn’t caused you to flip over to ICANHASCHEEZBURGER for a mind numbing kitteh fest? Ok, I’ll get to it. First day went off without a hitch. We got to scope out the place last Friday and the munchkin seemed to be ready to stay there all weekend. She was a little upset with having to get up early on Tuesday and couldn’t understand why she wasn’t able to wear her pajamas to school. I told her save that for college. When we walked her in we had to drop off her paperwork and while my wife dealt with that I was having my arm pulled out of my socket by my kid trying to get into the classroom. We were told that it was best if parents said goodbye and then went away because hanging around might give the child a sense of anxiety if she saw the parent having a problem letting go. So, we said goodbye and she gave us a kiss and never missed a beat going back into playing. Apparently, it would be OK.

We both decided to grab some breakfast and went back to the house. Here I was, home from work, free to do whatever I wanted for the next four hours and I was bored out of my skull. I watched a little TV, played a little PS3, and basically surfed the Internet for awhile with no real direction. I even got a progress report in my email box from the school. The little one was completely acclimated to her surroundings. They couldn’t even tell that it was her first day. She even made fun of one of the boys in her class. “Aw, she’s just like her mother,” I thought.

Actually, I’d venture to guess she was more like me. I never shied away from a social gathering when I was a kid. I was all about being in the mix. Granted, I have become embittered by the world around me in my older age and lead a somewhat hermetic existence. Offline, that is. But growing up I learned to roll with the punches and adjust to the situation. I explained to my wife how my first day of school went. I realized within five minutes of entering the classroom on my first day of Kindergarten that I needed to keep a low profile when it came to fear and anxiety. Now, I had some preschool under my belt and some might say I was the scourge of the classroom. I led a few revolts and even enlisted the aid of another classmate in a black ops campaign which resulted in the flushing of another classmate’s sandwich down the toilet. I don’t know why we did it but I apologize immensely for it happening. Anyway, since I had some schooling beforehand I wasn’t walking blindly into the fray but I was a bit nervous. It was only a half day but it was every day. And it wasn’t just for fun, there was actual learning to be done and the class was a bit bigger than what I was used to. All of this added up to me feeling a little scared when I walked in but I kept it hidden.

However, there was a moment that solidified my thoughts on how to handle myself in these types of situations. I had walked across the room and my mother was still standing in the doorway, just in case I needed an escape plan. I turned to make a decision, feeling a little overwhelmed, and then it happened. There was a blood curdling scream coming from the door. Another boy had shown up and he was not exactly prepared for his mother to leave. She let go of his hand and was turning to exit and he went four alarm kablooey. It was like a train wreck but I wasn’t watching him. I was watching everyone else watching him. That was the moment I realized I needed to play it cool. If for anything else, it’s 30 years later and I still remember that moment and I remember the kid’s name. I would like to be remembered in 30 years but not because I had a complete meltdown my first day of school. I simply looked at my mother and we both shared an unspoken moment that went like this.

MOM: What do you think?
ME: I’ll be fine.
MOM: You sure?
ME: Are you nuts? Did you see what just happened?
MOM: Right. I’ll see you in a few hours.

Now, it’s day number two for my kid and it’s a full day at that. I got the progress report from my wife and everything went just fine. I have yet to hear the Silent Hill like sirens blaring overhead so I will take that as a good sign that she's behaving well and having a good day.  I think the parents have more hang-ups about their kids going off to school than the kids do. Although, considering the display put on, by that kid back in Kindergarten, I could only imagine what his mom did out in the parking lot. She might have spontaneously combusted right there in her station wagon. I at least waited until I got out of the parking lot to shed one lone internal tear. No one saw it and that’s 30 years of conditioning still going strong.
Class dismissed.

How Are Kids Even Alive Today?

I should be writing my dissertation on the finale of LOST but that’s just way too much work. Instead, I’m dragging out the old soap box for another edition of “THOSE DAMN KIDS!” This week I want to look at a couple of stories, old and new, about trends in what could be considered the end of civilization.


First off, the hot dog. For what it’s worth, these things are going to kill you anyway. American hot dogs are probably one of the worst foods to ever be created. The hot dog looks at the Double Down and says, “Pfft, amateur.” Besides being lovingly referred to as “containing lips and assholes” the amount of nitrates and salt in the things would probably make Ghandi say, “No thanks. I’m full.” In fact, the one thing that sticks out in my mind from being a child and loving hot dogs was the notion that if I eat too much, I’ll get ass cancer.

But the biggest “Damn Kids” moment comes from a recent story about the changing the hot dog. According to multiple sources around the Internet, which is never wrong, pediatricians are asking for a change in how the hot dog is designed. Why? Because of the threat of kids choking on one. In a wonderfully monochromatic pie chart, the percentage of food related, non-fatal choking hazards was around 60%. Actually, I’d be worried if that number was any lower. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to see kids choke but if they are looking at things that kids actually choke on, food better be above coins and toys or anything else. If not, then what the hell are kids putting in their mouths and why are we not addressing that?

Now get this, one of the solutions was thought up by the guy who invented Steakums. I am astounded by this. I lived on Steakums my freshman year of college. It was a food group alongside Kraft Macaroni & Cheese, Rama Noodles, Pizza, and Beer. I almost lose respect for the guy because he is enabling people to be idiots. I suspect the number one reason kids choke on food is attributed to parental stupidity. Still, the fact that kids choke on anything is terrible and I’ve been through that scare with my daughter. She was still an infant and I was feeding her applesauce mixed with rice cereal and she got a little stuck in her throat. Did I panic? No. Did I do the Heimlich? No. I simply reached in with my finger and removed the obstruction. Now, my daughter is almost three and loves hot dogs. Hell, we had them for dinner last night. And you know how she ate them? My wife cut the hot dog in half and told her to take small bites. When that became too messy as the bun disintegrated from being too wet from the juice in the dog, she held the hot dog and said, “Here take a bite.” Otherwise, we cut the hot dog up into small bites and she can eat them off her plate.

So, spending millions of dollars on redesigning the hot dog, which has been the same since probably the 1400s, seems silly when the proper solution would be to use a fork. It costs less and does the trick nicely.

Next up, “THOSE DAMN KIDS AND THEIR FADS.” When my sister was in her teens there was a fad that swept the nation. One little toy became a must have among people in her generation. It was called the pet rock. It was literally in a bock with an instruction manual. Genius! When I was in school ten years later we had fads, too. They were called friendship pins. Do you know what they were made out of? Safety pins and beads. Now we have things called Silly Bandz which is a rubber band bracelet. KIDS ARE WEARING OFFICE SUPPLIES AS FASHION!?!?!? But, But, I say BUT, again, they are becoming band in schools? Why? They are a distraction. No…. School is boring.

You have to understand that a typical kid around the age of 9-13 has little attention span and that’s mostly the fault of today’s parenting and tech savvy-instant gratification-technology. Kids are already being made to conform to a dress code, sometimes even stricter than office casual Fridays. Their identity and individuality is being stripped from in pieces right down to how they can wear their hair. The more you try to jam them into a one size fits all container the more they will bust out of that mold. They’re growing and evolving and we’re trying to stop that. I’m all for rules but let’s not be crazy here. My generation didn’t disrupt classes or learning by sporting a safety pin with colored beads on our shoe. Why is it so hard today? Why are we just fine and kids today are so screwed up that they have to be threatened by the fun vampires?

I understand there was a some kind of bracelet debacle a couple of years ago where the bracelets had some kind of hidden meaning for how far the wearer would go, intimately, but come on, you could code the same messages with anything. I have a red pony tail holder today, I go all the way. I’m wearing a yellow one, that means I like pina coladas and getting caught in the rain. Hell, the way someone wears their hair could be code for stuff like that. It doesn’t matter because there is something inherently wrong with the way kids process information today. There’s too much out there and parenting doesn’t have a good governance plan put into place.

I have been adamantly stating that I was born too soon and that being a kid in today’s world would be awesome because of all the things available to make life fun but I don’t know now. I think life would suck because people can’t be trusted… correction some people shouldn’t be trusted with raising a child. They are ruining it for everyone else. I mean we played with lawn darts! LAWN DARTS! We stood twenty feet apart and threw pointy objects at each other for fun! You never heard us complain about toys. We rode big wheels in the streets and baked real cakes with 100 watt bulbs. We ate dirt and played tackle football at recess. And you know what? Not everyone got to play at every soccer game and there were winners and losers. We learned that from day one. At the end of the game someone’s taking a lap because they couldn’t hit the cut-off man from right field. Hell, kick ball is too dangerous now? We used to climb ropes to the ceiling of the gym.

Classroom safety, there’s another one. “In the event of an emergency, everyone exit the room, except you Johnny. Make sure you open the windows and turn off the lights before leaving the room.” Remember that one? Yeah, there’s a big ass funnel cloud coming at the building and some poor bastard gets left behind to try and salvage the electric bill. Of course, our parents had it worse. In the event of an atomic bomb, they were supposed to hide under their desks. Apparently, desks in those days were shielded for radiation, regardless of the open space beneath them.
Honestly, how are kids even living today?

The Afghan Incident

The title might suggest some sort of international disaster in Afghanistan, but it’s really just another in a long line of embarrassing moments in the life of Mongo.

In 1988, I was in trudging along through 8th grade. As anyone who survived adolescence will tell you, those are the dark days of growing up. After leaving the world of safety scissors and recess, that is grade school, you are thrust into the world of Junior High without a safety net. As you try to make that transition between childhood and adulthood, you are constantly being bombarded with the pressures derived from puberty, scholastic expectations and algebra. You’re brain is like a lit firecracker being held, tightly, in a fist.

It’s enough to want to make you crawl into a hold and die the first time you embarrass yourself among your peers. I was already becoming a pro at it. Teenage love and angst went together like chemical fertilizer and a detonator. Shakespeare was way ahead of his time writing Romeo and Juliet. If he were alive today, besides being really old and smelly, he’d probably be a writer for teen dramas like The OC and 90210. Honestly, he’d be the King of The CW.

Now, I tend to use Big Willie as a crutch in adolescent development analogies because he nailed it so well. Romeo and Juliet are the perfect encapsulation of what it is like being a teenager, to a teenager. Everything is life or death. You make one wrong move and you start the Mercutio Curse, setting off a cascading failure of events that eventually destroys your social standing. Sometimes you self destruct because a lack of self awareness and sometimes other people set the ball in motion. Usually, you find yourself digging a deeper hole, trying to rectify the misunderstanding, until the aftermath is the unraveling of an entire sweater thanks to pulling on one loose thread. This has happened to me.

One of my school friends had a Halloween Costume party at his house. Now, I didn’t have a store bought costume at the ready, because I was too old for trick or treating, and it’s not like I just buy costumes for the hell of it. A Nightmare on Elm Street 4 had just come out in theaters a couple of months prior so, I decided to go as Freddy Krueger. My costume was cobbled together from an array of unauthentic elements. A red and white striped sweater was used instead of a red and green one. I had built the glove from a tan leather one, attaching sharpened emery boards, covered in foil, for the blades. My grandfather’s old green fedora served as Freddy’s trademark brown one. Still, it was passable considering I spent no money on the costume at all, though I still owe my mom some emery boards.

The guest list included a group of friends from school, all of which I had known for at least a year or more. There was my best friend, as well as a girl I liked, the non conformist punk type that managed to be your friend but still critical of you, and the very smart, yet always in trouble kid who also served as a nemesis/friend figure in my life. I say that because he functions as the sort of person that is friends with you on some days and against you on other days. We once ended being sent to the principal’s office after he lunged across the lunch table at me for knocking off his glasses. Yet, we sat there in hysterical laughter while we waited to be seen by the principal. See what I mean? With all these different personalities attending the party there was bound to be some sort of dramatic cataclysm.

At first everything seemed to be going fine but soon that social thread loosened and was about to be pulled. I don’t remember the exact details but somehow another kid’s shoe was thrown in my direction. I was holding a drink in one hand and did not have the cat like reflexes needed to block the projectile. My drink was knocked from my hand spilling all over my shirt as well as the blanket underneath me. But it wasn’t a blanket, it was an afghan knitted by a relative of kid who threw the party. Just after the shoe made contact with my drink and flew out of view, the kid’s father came into the room. I stood up immediately after feeling wet. The spilled drink that had pooled on my lap, fell onto the afghan in plain sight of the father. He immediately yelled out about the fact that the afghan was handmade. From the tone of his voice I thought he was joking so I nearly doubled over from laughter at his delivery. Apparently, he was serious and rather upset.

The gravity of the situation became worse as the nemesis and non conformist punk kid began adding insult to injury by lobbing supporting arguments at me in the form of “Why would do that?” and “What were you thinking.” Their participation in the situation painted me as a derelict that found pleasure in destroying other people’s personal property. Every step I took towards fixing the misunderstanding resulted in two steps back, in the content of my character, in the eyes of this man and no one else stepped in to help. I think it all just happened to fast to even comprehend what exactly had took place. It was a ping pong ball tossed into a room of mousetraps holding other ping pong balls. Before you even saw the first trap sprung, it was all over.

From that moment on, for the parents, I was labeled as “That Kid” while the best friend, who was the non conformist punk kid, was seen as the angelic friend to whom their son should aspire to be like. Meanwhile, the “angel” was sometimes friend and sometimes friend who used you as the butt of a joke to get laughs. Yes, for years I was known as “That Kid” and the will to overcome that was testament to the strength and resiliency of the teenage psyche. The long lasting effects of Post Traumatic Keds Disorder have finally ceased to hinder my ability to sit on woven materials while holding beverages.

Now, I cannot say with any certainty that this particular event was like the butterfly effect causing me to be cursed with ridiculous epic fail syndrome. I believe that this was a side effect caused by the skipping of “3rd Grade Swimming Lessons” for the class of 1993. That single event caused a rippling of bad juju throughout my entire class that ended up shortchanging us in a lot of things that were a part of every other class’ normal scholastic development and experience. But that is another story.

Remember Days Of Skipping School

We are roughly two weeks into the school year and already kids are skipping. Am I teacher? No. Am I an administrator? No. How do I know this is occurring beyond a completely blind assumption based on my knowledge of the average school going youth? I will tell you.

This morning, around the back of my place of employment, which sits on a hill, overlooking a major road, an act of truancy was observed. Actually, it was more like, “Oh my God, there’s a kid lying dead in the grass behind the building.” He wasn’t really dead, although Ray Brower, as I will refer to him was lying in the grass unresponsive. All you could really see was a shoe, at first. Upon closer inspection, the body of the teen appeared to be sprawled out in the grass, clad in regular clothes, a can of Skoal and an iPod. Hence the unresponsiveness. He was told to move along and from there; your guess is as good as mine.

This delinquency reminded me of my own upbringing. I was never absent from school during the years between first and twelfth. I guess Kindergarten doesn’t count. Yes, I was one of those nerds. Actually, that’s a misnomer. I wasn’t a nerd because of that. I had years of 12 sided dies and playing in the marching band to cause the assignment of that label. For what it was worth, I should have enjoyed the days of calling in a “Lack of Interest” day from school. Of course, I more than made up for it in college. Hell, I skipped graduation. But from the age of five through the age of 18, I went to school every day and never complained. I spoke, briefly, about this feat in It’s Good to Be the King.

The reasons for why I never missed a day of school are simple. My Mother was a Stay At Home Mom and I never got sick. Now, I as well as any other person know that being healthy has nothing to do with skipping school. After all, the movie wasn’t called, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off With a Head Cold. But to that end, I never really wanted to skip school. Overall, I had a pleasant experience. Yes, there were times I wanted to crawl into a hole and hide but throughout those 13 years the good outweighed the bad. Even still, skipping school isn’t primarily about dodging a bully or gym class. It’s about bucking the system and telling Teach’ “I got better things to do.” But for me, I enjoyed being around my friends and having fun with them. I didn’t take school seriously as it was.

During my senior year I had three real classes (Sociology, English, and French V), three electives (Chorus, Band and Gifted) leaving two study halls. A new system was put into place giving students a different option for gym class. Instead of the normal two day a week schedule, we had gym everyday for half of the year then a study hall for the other half. I was lucky in that I had gym the first half. That year was a breeze as I hardly studied and still came out in the top 10% of my class of around 435. Of course, had a couple more kids actually graduated, I could have moved up to 9%.

I could have skipped, though. In fact there was one day I was supposed to skip, senior skip day. Depending on the social environment, it varies as to what day it will fall. The fogginess of approaching my mid thirties has degraded my memory of the rule but I recall it being the 93rd day of school which was also the number of the year in which I graduated. Also, there was a tradition of skipping the day after the class picnic to Kennywood. That had become such a recognized event that even the teachers paid little attention to the syllabus for that day. However, at that point in my scholastic career, I had already gone 11 years with no absences, what was another 87 days. Besides, I could only imagine what awards would await me for completing this mission. Perhaps I'll get a scholarship or maybe a new car. You never know.

As graduation approached, I counted down the days. During the ceremony I waited for my chance. I wasn’t Valedictorian or Salutatorian or even an officer. This was my only distinction among my classmates. When that moment finally came, as stupid as it seemed to other kids, I was proud to accept that honor. As the speaker began to run through the acknowledgements, I waited with anticipation. “One year of perfect attendance.” “Five years of perfect attendance.” Then it came down to it. “Twelve years of perfect attendance.” It was my time. Then, in a twist of fate, I found out that I wasn’t really that special.

Someone else managed the same achievement. Now, I had to share that bright, shiny car and distinction with someone else. How unfortunate? But I wasn’t about to let that deter me. Somewhere nearby had to be a car about to be driven in like on the showcase showdown on Price is Right. As I walked up to the stage, I passed by the other members of the “also ran” club. Their prize was a ruler. That’s right. It looked to be gold plated, but came off looking more like brass. Each one of them brandished it with some pride, but I scoffed at their inability to hold out a few more years for the grand prize.

I reached the middle of the dais and extended out my hand to be shaken. I would have settled for the principal kissing my class ring, but I didn’t want to appear too pretentious. With my other hand I reached out to accept the small box he held out as my reward for my achievement. My heart pounded as I imagined what I would find inside. It could be the keys for sure or maybe even a check for a scholarship.

As I stood there to receive a round of applause with the rest of the lightweights I opened the box. Inside was the same ruler. The only difference was the number of years of perfect attendance etched into its plating. I was crushed. I never had any accolades to speak of in school except the fact that I had been there every day and not earned one. This was my moment. This was my chance to be recognized and I was given the same measure of success as everyone else on that stage.

I got over it a couple of hours later. I even laughed at how silly I was. I didn’t take myself as serious in college as I missed a heck of a lot of classes over those four and a half years. Now that I am a Father and my daughter will begin her education in a few years, I wonder if she will try and sneak one past the judges when it comes to going to school. I probably won’t be as strict considering my own experience. Of course, I will want her to go to school every day and do well. I wouldn’t condone rampant absenteeism but if there was a day she wanted to just blow off for something important or like I said, “Lack of Interest” I wouldn’t become extremely upset but I would expect her to be smart and not camp out on private property like Ray Brower did this morning. That would be an inexcusable absence of common sense.

Princess Leia and Kindergarten Redemption

It seems the older I get, the more I can spin silly and pointless stories by weaving the tiny, fine threads of relevancy into a thicker, more industrial strength rope of crap. Since I have been on a back to school kick this past couple of posts I thought I would share a first day of school story from my own life.

I was recently in a conversation with someone about how some schools, nowadays, offer all day kindergarten to students. I was taken aback by this revelation as I was firmly rooted in the mythos that kindergarten was a half day rite of passage for children. That first foray into public education was a small step, to be taken, and not a full gallop into eight hours of instruction. Besides, at the age of five, what can they be teaching kids that takes eight hours? Times have changed, I guess. In my day, I had afternoon class which meant I could sleep in and watch most of The Price is Right before having to be educated in subjects that aren’t as nearly as important as how much denture cleaner costs and should I bid a dollar, confident in everyone else’s inability to understand the actual retail price of a Zenith floor model television set in a fine oak cabinet. These are practices that would not be exercised again until I reached college some 13 years later and could schedule all my classes around this meticulous study of the economy and retail industry.

From the moment I set foot into the viper pit that is the public education system, I knew I needed to choose my path very carefully. I was in a strange land with unfamiliar native mores. I looked around at all the kids playing together and knew that this was something that could make or break me over the next 12 years. I was a little hesitant to jump in right away. Even though I had spent the previous year in preschool, I had reservations about doing this on a daily basis for the next nine months.

In preschool, I was known as a man who could get things. Other kids joined in my reign over the plastic kitchen sets. They would partake in my practical jokes, hurrying back in from recess to hide underneath the tables, in an attempt to confuse the teacher of our whereabouts. Once, I even convinced a friend of mine to help steal another classmate’s sandwich and we flushed it down the toilet. In preschool, I was someone. But in the real world, I was just another kid, like everyone else. And that world was about to get bigger as the one person who knew me was about to leave.

My Mother was getting ready to head for the door and for a moment I thought I could not hack this dreadful experiment. I could feel the knot tighten in my throat and the burning sensation in my eyes. Soon the air was filled with falsetto ranged wails and streams of tears, flowing down the doughy cheeks of a child not wanting to be left behind by his mama. But they were not my tears or my wails that had pierced the atmosphere. Before the first drop could form in the corner of my eye, another child standing a few feet away from me had begun to sob uncontrollably and latched onto his Mother’s leg with a vice like grip. I stood there gawking, not at his performance, but at the reactions of the other children in the room. All forms of play and interaction had ceased. All attention was focused on this child, flailing around at the door. His mother trying to pry his clasped hands from around her thigh, now numb from lack of blood flow. As the minute long exchange took what seemed like hours, we all witnessed the equivalent of the first day for fresh fish in Kindergarten. Somebody always breaks down crying. Happens every time. The only question is, who's it gonna be? It's as good a thing to bet on as any, I guess.

After the spectacle had ended, my Mother looked at me and we both shared a look of understanding. The kind of look that says, “I love you, but I can’t show it right now or I’ll never survive past recess.” She nodded and left. For the next four hours, I would have to fend for myself in this uncharted territory. An explorer in a foreign world of sand boxes, story times, and milk and cookie lunches. I figured I better make friends fast or I will be swallowed up by the system. Another casualty of social calcification, doomed to a lifestyle unfit outside these walls.

I scanned the room for someone I could interact with and not be dismissed as weak and inferior. This small towheaded boy sat on the other side of the room and I struck up a conversation. He was a rather quiet but cordial kid named Richie. We became friends that first week of Kindergarten. On the playground we took to imagining ourselves in the Star Wars universe. I was, of course, Han Solo and he was my loyal Wookie companion, Chewbacca. The merry go round was our Millennium Falcon and the slide that stood nearby served as The Death Star, with it steps on either side, an arched ladder in the back, and a space underneath to hold an imaginary Princess Leia. We made various attacks on that slide in many offensive campaigns against the Empire, which were real girls, at that age, always returning to the merry go round in victory after freeing the invisible Princess. Those were definitely the greatest days of my early scholastic career. Soon those days, like many in my youth would be over, converting to a sepia toned flash of synaptic nostalgia.

One night, a fire had broke out at Richie’s home and they had ended up moving away. I never heard from or saw him again after that. He faded into the tapestry of my mind and serves as a small, but bright stitch on a much larger and faded canvas of memories. I have no idea where he is in this world but I still remember the days of him gurgling out a passable bark as Chewbacca. His own voice, used so little in our conversations, is gone from my recollection.

There have been times when I have visited my parents’ home, nestled among the trees on the ridge overlooking my old Elementary school. I would stand on the edge of their yard, near sunset, looking down at that same playground that served as my “Long long ago in a galaxy far, far away” nearly three decades prior. The playground equipment still stands, however, standing on the edge of the merry go round, today, would invariable spin the metal plate off its axis, grinding it into the concrete slab beneath it. With my 30 years of growth, attempting to fit myself underneath the slide would result in needing the jaws of life or a really good can opener to extract me from my confinement. Those relics of recess past were better left seen at a distance in the pristine condition I could make out with my strained eyesight. Getting closer would reveal the Monet-like painted truths, rusted and worn and in places missing paint. Those chips could probably be found in the stomach contents of a small child enrolled in the school or a thirty-four year old, suffering from acute lead neuropathy.

In any case I hope my friend is out there, somewhere, doing fine. I hope one day I can shake his hand. I hope I can tell him that the continued missions of Han Solo in those days, minus Chewbacca, were victorious yet not as fun without him. I hope.

Great Back to School Movies

It’s not a complete list like EW did for the 25 Greatest High School films of all time of all time but it’s some of my personal favorites and other cheese ball goodies for those of us 80s bred HBO junkies.

Yep, I’m phoning this list in with no long drawn out commentary. Sorry. It’s the weekend.

Back to School
Rodney Dangerfield’s finest performance. Zabka in College. The Triple Lindy. Excellent.

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
The King of 80s Pop Culture, John Hughes, will be missed more than we have really let on at this time. How to cut school and get more of an education and not get caught.

Real Genius
College bound Freshmen should be required to watch this if they are thinking of any technical or engineering programs, because who doesn’t want to try and perfect the Space Laser Cooked Popcorn trick…since Mythbusters proved it busted.

Karate Kid
Outsider, new kid in school, Zabka, Miyagi-do karate, wax on wax off, 80s montage at a fun park. YES!

Fast Times at Ridgemont High
Learn it, know it, live it…..and lock the bathroom door.

Sixteen Candles
Technically, not a back to school type movie. In fact, I found it rather odd that a wedding took place in the suburbs of Chicago during the school year and the weather was extremely nice. So, that puts it closer to summer but who cares….the donger needs food.

Breakfast Club
Another list on another blog post. I must be stalking this film…

Some Kind of Wonderful
Pretty in Pink for the rest of us realists.

3 O’Clock High
Only a handful of people will probably admit to have watched this multiple times. Casey Siesmaszko, Richard Tyson, Jeffrey Tambor and a pre X-Files Mitch Pileggi all can be seen in this day in the life of a teenager headed for a fight in the parking lot after touching the new kid.

Heathers
Here is a school that self-destructed not because society didn't care but because the school was society. Or at least that’s what was supposed to happen.

The Faculty
For all of us who looked at our teachers like they were aliens…here’s a slick little number from the director of From Dusk till Dawn and Planet Terror, written by the guy who wrote Scream and Dawson’s Creek, and starring Frodo, Jean Grey, The T-1000, Santanico Pandemonium, and that guy from the Daily Show…

Pump Up the Volume
Underground radio before the days of the Internet. They shy introvert who hides behind a microphone and a pirate signal. Was Not Was, The Pixies, Bad Brains, Descendents, Henry Rollins, and a slew of other punk and alternative music before it was trendy and a sell out.

American Pie
Thanks to Harold er John Cho, the word Milf entered into the lexicon of dirty minded teenagers. Thanks to Jason Biggs, apple pie was never safe again.

Varsity Blues and Friday Night Lights
For some towns, high school football is like church. Friday night is as revered as Sunday. Varsity Blues is the MTV version of Friday Night Lights choosing to focus more on the kids lives instead of the impact of football on the town and the adults who love it so much.

Plain Clothes
As far as plot devices go, the cop or adult pretending to be a student was done a lot in the 80s. 21 Jump Street, Hiding Out, and the lesser known Plain Clothes with Arliss Howard, Suzi Amis, and George Wendt.

PCU
Jeremy Piven, Jon Favreau, David Spade, and George Clinton. The Pit, the Balls and Shaft club. The complete disregard for conformity among college students. Awesome.

The Boy Who Read: Part Three

The Boy Who Read Part Three… I promise this is the last one…maybe.

In Parts One and Two I went on at length about my dislike of reading as a child and my newfound addiction in the form of the Harry Potter novels. While I might have made it clear as to why I decided to read the sixth and seventh novels before seeing Half Blood Prince on film. I never really revisited the entire series as subject of debate. I will say that I have spanked that 24 year old that treated the novels and the overall series as childish and unnerving. If anything, J.K. Rowling has relit the pilot light of inspiration in me to continue writing and perhaps make a more concerted effort to finish a piece of work. Of course, commitment to a diet holds about as much weight. With this I offer five things I love about the Harry Potter series and two things I dislike. I won’t go so far as say hate because I went into the books knowing how it ended so a lot of guesswork was taken out of one of the ‘dislikes.’

1. My first ‘love’ associated with the books comes from a background of loving language. I never met a pun or rhyme I didn’t like. Rowling has a firm grasp of etymology and linguistics which really delighted me in her usage throughout the series. The names of characters, locations, and objects such spells have this very soothing shape to them. Whether this can be attributed to her being English or just a lover of good study is beyond me. Looking at Tolkien or Lewis as standards in British Popular Literature, Rowling has earned her spot alongside some of the better writers in her use of language. I always looked at George Lucas’ use of language to create names for characters in the Star Wars universe as my own personal standard of yumminess, being primarily a fan of film and visual media, but Rowling now takes that mantle.
   
2. My second ‘love’ of the books is the way in which she treats the reader. While the books are written in the third person perspective primarily associated with what is happening to Harry, it kind of invites the reader into the story as a first person narrative. I attribute this to an understanding her audience, a kid who can identify with the main characters and the adults who live vicariously through their children or their own childhood. I also believe this to be attributed to her style of writing, specifically her descriptiveness of the action and environment. It is very to imagine the locations and looks of the characters through her descriptions. My biggest hang up with reading is my imagination, which oddly enough is probably more refined than any other trait I possess. I can think of something ten times more horrible under my bed than what could actually be there when I was a kid. Jaws and The Blair Witch Project are favorites because of this acuity of my mind’s eye. Another great thing about how Rowling treats the audience is that she is great at tying things together without letting the reader feel like they’ve tread upon old ground. There are paragraphs and passages in the last books that reference action that took place in the first or second book and it felt like new information when I read it.
   
3. Love number three is the story which is accessible to everyone. Remember, I was a skeptic. I admit, when the books first came out, I was totally against the idea of this school for wizards and witches setting. My gold standard for fantasy or science fiction has been either been based on Star Wars or JRR Tolkien. The idea of trying to fit a story about school and childhood into a medieval style or modern British world made me want to hear nails on chalkboards nonstop as an alternative. The fact that adults were gobbling up the books as much, if not more than, kids was disconcerting to me. Then, as time went by I started to soften a little. I had to admit from a cultural standpoint that this was a positive thing for kids. We were at a point where there was a definite shift from books to more visual media had occurred and then along comes these books that gets kids reading again. Not to mention, families are spending time together reading and discussing the books. It was a small check in the win column for family values. Of course, then the fundamentalist groups get in the way and start shouting “Satanic” and “Occult” and it sours the experience.
   
   As I let the fad, which by now had become a pop culture juggernaut, start to play out and plateau, I picked up the first book and was immediately sucked into it. A friend recently quoted C.S. Lewis to me regarding my change of heart. “When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.” I never realized that I had already boiled down that beautiful quote years ago into, “I may get older, but I’ll never grow up.” I forgot that somewhere along the way. Once I allowed myself to accept the story for what it was, I was able to enjoy it. As the books progressed, the story matured as did the writer, I believe.
   
4. My fourth love of the series is its hero structure and quest motifs. The story plays on the levels of the hero’s quest without relying on the standard convention of allegory on the surface. Yes, there are definite overtones of love vs. hate, family vs. solidarity, and good vs. evil, but it’s the subtext that really drives the action. By all accounts Harry Potter should not have lived until the age of two. Every step of the way he has someone there to help him. His mother’s love shields him and saves him as a baby. Dumbledore provides him with the tools to solve a lot of his problems. His friends sacrifice themselves time and time again for him to succeed.
   
   In all seriousness, Harry Potter hardly takes a stand and fights back until the end of book two and that was after he was given help in the form of the Sorting Hat from which he pulled Gryffindor’s sword. From then on he still has other people doing things to advance his march towards victory until well into the last two books. But what is really going on here, besides the Christ like referencing is that Harry isn’t alone in his quest even though he is pretty much an orphan. Yes, the Dursley’s provide basic food and shelter but he is emotionally on his own for a decade. It’s not only the prophecy, but the willingness by nearly everyone to believe in him that gives him the strength to be victorious. There comes a point in Deathly Hallows when it finally clicks for Harry. Until this point, he’s never asked to be a hero. He’s a mediocre student but he has the potential to be much more, a leader. A great leader is someone who does the job without asking for it. The first hints to this are in Order of the Phoenix when he forms Dumbledore’s Army. But the realization to Harry’s need to be a leader happens when he buries Dobby.
   

   
   Get Not a Horcrux on various items
   From Mongo Angry! Mongo Smash! the store.

   You can say that it happens when Dumbledore entrusts Harry with the task of finding and destroying Horcruxes, but Harry still hasn’t taken on the position of leader. He knows what needs to be done, but he doesn’t understand how to do it. He’s just following orders. You could also point out that when Harry continues to force Dumbledore to drink the potion in the cave to retrieve the locket has taken on the role of leader, but at that point he is still following orders as well. But after he buries Dobby he sees the power of sacrifice in the name of the cause. So much so that he himself has to do it as well in order to save himself and everyone around him. As he stands in the great hall overlooking the dead and wounded, he sees his friends lying there. In his mind, he struggles with the thought that they are there because of him and he accepts his fate and is prepared to die. It’s a leap of faith and he takes it. Yet, he still does not face death alone. He surrounds himself with fallen loved ones and accepts that he needs help from others, especially adults.
   
   The greatest lesson to be taught isn’t just the nature of love and good conquers hate and evil. It’s all about the journey. Voldemort is so obsessed with making things happen in order to become the most powerful, the he neglects to see the fine print. He rushes off into battle without first looking at the playing field. That’s why he loses. Harry only acts once he has enough information to secure his upper hand. This is another milestone for the boy who was willing to go off after Sirius when he thought him a killer and Voldemort when he returned. Over the course of the series, Harry follows in his father’s footsteps of arrogance and entitlement but learns to curb his temper and allow things to take their course. Thus, knowledge and defense become Harry’s greatest weapons over Voldemort. Yes, he was recognized as the master of the Elder Wand but if Voldemort had known that, he would have chose to dispose of Potter in some other fashion. Harry lets Voldemort destroy himself.
   
5. Love Number Five is Rowling’s decision to not play it safe. In children’s literature, much like the upbringing of children these days there has been an inherent decision to not let kids fail. This is my biggest pet peeve against our society as it stands today. My kid falls down a lot and I tell her to get back up. Now, if she’s really hurt, I go get her, but she fails at the age of two. She doesn’t like it but she is starting to understand it. For a story aimed at kids, there is a reluctance to take a chance and push the boundaries in regards to the safety of your characters. Happy endings come with little sacrifice in some stories. But Rowling isn’t afraid to kill her characters, regardless of their popularity or overall goodness. Apart from the killing of Harry’s parents, no other major character shockingly dies until Cedric Diggory in the fourth book. I don’t count the other deaths in between because they are either peripheral or not as intricately tied to an emotional attachment. Having Wormtail kill Cedric, a teenager proves that this is no longer just a children’s story. People die in violent and tragic ways and by the time we reach book seven, the gloves are off in terms of who is safe and who is cursed.

Now, unfortunately, my two dislikes.

1. Number one is Rowling’s use of Deus ex Machina. In the first book, Harry survives the Quirrell’s assault because he was protected by his Mother’s love. Albeit a stylized salvation, to simply end a climax by saying he was burned by love is pretty much phoning it in by my thoughts. In book two, Harry is first saved by Fawkes the phoenix when he blinds the basilisk and delivers the sorting hat which produces Gryffindor’s sword. Then he saves a dying Harry by producing tears that have healing abilities. Here Rowling has built into the early part of the story the significance of Fawkes and his abilities but even so, it still stands to serve as a “Just in time” salvation. As the books progress, the usage lessens or at least is subtle in its application which could account for the maturing tone of the novels over time.
   
2. My other dislike is Rowling’s attention to detail. To say that she is overly descriptive sounds wrong. Her world is fully realized and her intention in moving the story from point A to point B is sound. However, over time you begin to build up an attachment with certain characters who either become important in terms of development of story or just because they accentuate the action in the right spot.
   
   Case in point, Lupin and Tonks. Remus was a childhood friend of James and Sirius. He is an important part of Harry’s life in the third book but he stays out of Goblet of Fire. He comes back as part of books five and six but then only pops in and out of the story at certain moments in book seven to either deliver news or be sent away as a coward by Harry. He is regarded as a master duelist, yet he is hardly referenced at all in the Battle of Hogwarts except for whom he was fighting and that he died. The same goes for Tonks who has the same amount of action and is ultimately killed. Preference over character appearances aside, it’s the assumption of how both characters died that gets me. Both of them are seen sparsely during the battle and they are both killed off page. He get no real explanation other than the assumption that they were killed by their duelers. We get this passage about Fred dying and being placed in an alcove away from battle, but nothing about Lupin or Tonks. And what about Cho Chang and Lavendar Brown, did they survive? Accoding to the book, it's unclear, although Rowling states in an interview that Cho married a muggle. But what about Lavender? She was being attacked by Greyback and then Trewlaney smacked him in the head with a crystal ball. Did she survive? It seemed as if Rowling had too much going on and some to a footnote or explained afterwards. You see a lot of this over saturation of characters in television shows when cast members are continually added to an ensemble, creating a traffic jam of plotlines.
   
   Also, right after they escape the Ministry, there is a lot of story downtime during the search for Horcruxes in book seven. It especially drags after Ron leaves. Now, the one great thing about books over movies is the ability to take a story and shape and progress it without rushing towards the end. Look at Stephen King’s Dark Tower series. He builds and builds up action from the beginning to the end of book three. Then in book four, he stops it all to tell you another story from the past. It’s a kind of bait and switch tactic that works on paper but can drive someone mad if they’ve built up momentum in their reading. You hit that wall and your eyes nearly fly right off the page.
   
   Additionally, her ability to create a romantic development between characters seems to be a weak point. For the life of me I couldn’t resolve Harry’s affection for Ginny. It just seemed forced. Hermione and Ron’s affections are easy because they are rooted in conflict and that is a natural attraction but the payoff happens abruptly in the last chapters of book seven. I guess you can deduce that Ron’s compassion for the House Elves working in the kitchen is what spark the move for Hermione to eat his face off, but it didn’t read very well and it kind of broke my reading momentum. I hate having to go back and reread something once I've got a steady pace going.

For now, though, my head is not burning any longer. I have decided to take a small break in order to attend to other things that have been put on hold while I dive head first into the world of reading. I don’t think I will abandon it all together like I have in the past. I will probably make a more concerted effort to read something other than a magazine article. Just for a little while though, I need to enter a 12 step program and get myself clean. My wife is into book four of the Twilight series and even though she’s clipping along at a good pace, she seems perturbed at things that have happened in the fourth book. She has described in great detail the chemistry between these two characters and it really moves her. However, she is pissed. There is all this build up towards a payoff only to have the consummation of those desires be relegated to being alluded to and mentioned afterwards. It sounds as the author is great at setting the scene but can’t actually commit to writing about the icky stuff. I have my own thoughts on why, but I won’t get into a discussion about it here. I watched the movie and I feel as if I just watched a bad high school production of Into the Woods. My wife says the movie didn’t do the book justice. I think the producers and director went for marketing the film towards the OC and The Hills demographic and disregarded a lot of the text because they couldn’t keep the attention of the audience, otherwise.So, there you have it. I’m done. There is no more left to write. The Boy Who Read has grown up and is looking forward to the next good book. I’ve been given some suggestions and I will take them to heart. For now, the book is closed.

The Boy Who Read Part Two

Part Two

In part one I gave you a preface to my disdain of reading. Part Two specifically tackles a renewed interest thanks to a phenomenon in the popular fiction realm of literature.

In 1999, I worked as a Banquet Captain for a hotel. I worked with a variety of people ranging from high school seniors to senior citizens. It was at this time that I really took notice of the Harry Potter phenomenon. The book series was already a critical success and the third book, The Prisoner of Azkaban had been released with much fanfare. By this time in my life, I had already felt the grumpiness of adulthood settling into my soul. I was living on my own after graduating college. I was in the infancy of a new relationship after suffering an emotional setback in another, the previous August. I was working a job that found me gravitating towards the AARP group of coworkers instead of TRL generation and I generally hated people, especially teens, at this point.

My usual shift saw me working the mornings to mid afternoon. I would usually get to leave and hour or so after the changing of shifts. At that time teeny boppers came flooding in with their bags and belongings cluttering up the department office which had become my imaginary base of operations. Usually, I would get there, set up the morning meetings, making coffee, putting out beverages, and then I would relax behind the big wooden desk for a half hour filling in the USA Today crossword puzzle and reading the Life section. When the afternoon crew had come in, they overtook my serenity along with the available desk space in the office. Between the two, a link was found, Harry Potter. In the mornings as I read the paper, stories, reviews, and graphs charting millions of money made by the books bombarded me as I sifted through the entertainment section of the paper. By the afternoon, the conversations among the kids were about the newest book and even a few copies littered the area.

Within here lies the problem. Was I grumpy because I felt some sort of social detachment from everyone else that shared in this pop cultural saturation or because I inherently felt that this kids book was just that, silly children’s literature? It’s not that I was some kind of literary snob, far from it. It’s just that I couldn’t understand how a fantasy novel about a school for witches and wizards could capture an entire world’s attention. I pushed the thoughts of even becoming slightly intrigued out of my head and went back to my, “Get off my lawn” attitude.

Moving along to 2001. I had changed jobs and was now working with adults my age or older. I was further into my relationship which had progressed towards my engagement in 2003. Also, the first Harry Potter novel, The Philosopher’s Stone just debuted as a movie, directed by Christopher Columbus. My girlfriend had a job that kept her busy on the weekends leaving me with some free time to go to the theater. Having absolutely nothing better to do, I decided to take in a matinee performance of The Sorcerer’s Stone, as it was now called, and had mixed feelings about it.

Ok, I admit, I allowed myself to get caught up in the magic and grandeur of this medieval looking modern day world of wizards and dragons and giants. The acting was pretty good and I was delighted if not surprised at the number of established and well regarded cast members, which for the most part are all British, mind you. What I found a little hard to swallow was the circumstances by which the characters resolve their problems. It’s a sort of convention by which in a novel or story, with children as protagonists, the adults play the fool or refuse to believe the impending danger that is set to besiege them. The kids, feeling abandoned or rebuffed, decide to take on the conflict themselves because only they can complete the task leaving the adults to either still not believe them or feel bewilderment as to how they could have beaten such a foe being only children. I found it a little contrived that all the time the answers would magically appear and only Harry and his friends were able to see the truth and tackle it. In the real world, these dangers would have been near fatal for kids their age, magical or not.

Still, I praised the film for its delivery, not knowing that it had taken some liberties with the arrangement of action in the book as well as some geography of Hogwarts landmarks. However, I wasn’t about to give the series my full attention and relied on letting the films serve as an acceptable version of the novels. While I allowed myself to see the first movie in the theater, I waited until they came to DVD or even cable to watch them.

By 2007 I was married, had a child, and had seen each of the Harry Potter films numerous times on television. ABC Family’s continual airing of all the films over weekends detracts from my getting anything else done around the house. Even worse was when I had HBO for a year and The Order of the Phoenix aired every other day. It had become my favorite, to date, although I did hold a spot for Azkaban in my heart because of the cooler color palate used in the cinematography and the antique style of fade outs used in Harry’s Dementor attacks. My only sticking point with the film was that I had already established a connection with Richard Harris playing the role of Dumbledore. With his passing and the role being recast with Michael Gambon, I initially found it hard to accept him in my mind as the character but I think it plays a lot better as Dumbledore’s role increased with the later books. Not every wise old character can fight like Yoda, CGI or not.

It was at this time I made a conscious decision to try and read the books. Another reason became the ability to read them as pdf versions instead of reading the actual book. Finding some websites that offered them as free downloads; I pilfered the first few books and began reading in what spare time I had. Like The Da Vinci Code the year before, I breezed through the first book and actually enjoyed it. Once again, I already had the voices, looks, and environment added from the films so it was easy to read. When I would sit at night in my room and read, I tried to read at least 20 pages and that was pushing it as far as my attention span was concerned. Now, I could churn through a hundred pages in my lunch hour. Yes, the conversion from book to electronic copy left me with a few misspelled words and head scratching. Was that word supposed to be like that because of the writer or was it a bad translation? After finishing the first book, I allowed myself to realize that reading wasn’t so bad.

I was still a long way from ever picking up Moby Dick or War and Peace, though. Over the next year I read another book, The Zombie Survival Guide. This was actually a really good book and I highly suggest reading it. It's a sort of metaphor for post 9/11 survival tactics during a breakdown of society from zombie outbreaks. I am just about ready to get eyeballs deep into World War Z because the movie is about to be made. However, reading once more took a back seat to other distractions. Playstation 3 and Wii gaming along with creating designs for my CafePress store occupied my free time and I couldn’t push myself to read more books. That was until the release of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince movie.

Now, remember in the last post how I mentioned that my love of films prompted me to read both this book and the last one before seeing The Half Blood Prince film? Really, you don’t? Well, click here…I’ll wait. Finished? OK, moving on. I made the decision to read the last two books because I felt I owed it to myself to at least see what I was missing from watching just the films, especially now that the stakes had been raised. I knew that this penultimate Potter book was going to be important to the overall series. It sort of jumps the shark…but in a good way. Until this book, primarily all of the action either happens at Hogwarts, or The Dursley's. In Half Blood Prince we see more of the "muggle" world and a few new locations. I don’t want to spoil it for anyone, but unless you live in a Utah religious compound, you probably know how it ends. Someone important dies. Someone betrays Hogwarts. This is why I felt the need to read the book first. Now, it is probably a fact that I will be disappointed in the movie. After all, I’ve seen all of the previous films before I read the books. The extra scenes and dialogue, that were left out of the films serve as a sort of director’s cut with deleted scenes for me. I even know how the last book ends, but I didn’t care. I wanted to read this book before the movie came out, even though it was already over two years old. I just didn't look forward to reading over 600 pages.

I read it in two days. Between lunches, and every spare moment I could muster, I read 652 pages in two days. I have never read that many pages in that little time. I immediately downloaded a faithfully converted copy of Deathly Hallows and read that in three. That’s how addictive it became to me. Now, my wife has eclipsed me by reading three of the four Twilight books in less time. She has probably read three books in her life and they were all pregnancy related while she carried our daughter. One of her piano students recommended reading Twilight and she is hooked. She keeps trying to sway me, but I still won’t touch that series. We even borrowed the film to watch it and I protested over watching it Sunday night. We had taken our daughter to the zoo and she was hell bent on wanting to watch it. I told her I would not stay up until 2:00 AM watching that film on a Sunday night.* She agreed to wait.

Reading popular fiction has become a sort of heroin to us this last week. We’ve certainly neglected our daughter’s needs. Even though we are in the same room with her, we have our noses buried in these books as she is left to fend for herself. Although, I will say the effect has rubbed off on her. She has brought me the same ten books every day, asking me to read them to her. Sometimes, we read them twice in one day. We’ve gotten to the point where we have become so engrossed in our own reading that we told her to read her books herself. She’s only two and the other day she sat on the couch, reciting almost word for word, Goodnight Moon. As she turned the pages, she recited the words on them. While it is probable that she has memorized the story, it was still a sight to behold. Perhaps she will be a reader early on and make her old man proud.





*By the way, I stayed up until 1:30 AM Monday morning to finish it, getting only four hours of sleep before work. Hey, a half hour is a half hour.

Next up Part Three.

The Boy Who Read

PART ONE

I hate to read. Let me rephrase that, I loathe reading. This is quite an odd statement from someone who had an insane desire to be a great writer, huh? That being said, I just finished books six and seven in the Harry Potter series in just under a week. Why? Because I love movies.

Now, before your head explodes trying to analyze that statement, let me take you back to the end of the 70s. It’s 1978 and I am only three years old. I cannot recall myself the events that took place in this recount, but I can relay what I have been told by family members. The tale itself has become the stuff of table talk during holiday gatherings among my family. By this time, my brother was at the age of ten and my sister was 13. By requirement, reading literary works was thrust upon us in certain classes by some teachers who were of age during the 60s. One of which made it a point to have his class read JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series as well as The Hobbit.

Now, it was at this time that Ralph Bakshi released an animated version of the first two books in the trilogy under the name of The Lord of the Rings. It was memorable because of its style of using live action battle scenes rotoscoped to produce an animated look. It was also remembered as being only half a film because there was no mention of a Part One anywhere indicating that the movie would be continued later. I remember it…yes I said I remember it…because it was the first movie I ever saw. Let me clarify previous statements made by me saying that Star Wars: A New Hope was the first movie I ever saw. I should say that it was the first movie I ever remembered seeing. Lord of the Rings came out a year before I saw Star Wars in the theater when it was rereleased a second time in 1979. I remembered seeing Lord of the Rings, but did not realize that it had occurred before Star Wars because I did not realize that I saw the later version. Make sense? No? Good, moving on.

Anyway, the reason why this is a story told around the dinner table at Thanksgiving and Christmas is because apparently I explained it to my parents. That’s right; a three year old explained the plot of Tolkien’s story to his parents. Like I said, this is what I have been told by my family. I don’t remember adding commentary to the film. I’ll take their word on it.

Recollections aside, this began a pattern in my upbringing. “Why read the book, when you can watch the film?” I thought. So much time could be saved by spending two hours in front of the television instead of reading hundreds of pages over the course of days. Well, as you all are aware, part of the argument is that filmmakers get it wrong nine times out of ten when it comes to adapting a literary piece of work. They also get it wrong when adapting a video game but that is a tale for another time. The other, more important, half of that argument is that reading taps into that one thing that drives the five senses, the mind. When you read something, your imagination has to fill in the gaps on the page. What does the character and his/her surrounds look like? How does their voice sound? What does the world smell like? Feel like? Taste like? These are things that the reader supplies on the journey from Chapter One to The End and it makes for a much more enriched experience. I never got that at a young age. I was all about, somebody else can do the work of filling up the canvas, I just want the end product. Regardless of what television characters like Jeffrey from Voyagers or Cap’n O.G. Readmore had tried to pound into my brain about going to my local library, I would rather watch the film than read the book. Imagine the scene in Back to School where Sally Kellerman tells Rodney Dangerfield about several books to which he replies, “great film.”

Still, I read for class but never for fun. It was hard to cheat and watch the film in those days because home video was still in its adolescence and not every classic that had been adapted into a film was available as a rental. Sometimes, I just faked it and it showed in my papers for school. I can probably count on one hand how many books I actually read for assignments and how many I bullshitted my way through explaining in a book report. There was a Hardy Boys book that I butchered, piecing together bits of plot and making up the rest. I was supposed to read Brave New World for an Eighth Grade English assignment and instead read parts of Stranger in a Strange Land because I just couldn’t get into the other book. I also figured that perhaps the teacher would know I was lying because she would have boned up on my original title in order to grade my paper. Switching at the last second might have thrown her off her guard. It was still on the reading list but she seemed very perturbed that I shifted gears and didn’t tell her. Of the books I actually read in their entirety, I can list Animal Farm, Johnny Tremain, Call of the Wild and White Fang as the only ones that stuck out.

Sometime in my mid teens I had a slight change of heart. It was around 1988 and Stephen King had come into my world. I had seen Firestarter, Christine, The Running Man, The Shining, Creepshow 1 and 2, Cujo, Children of the Corn, Cat’s Eye, Maximum Overdrive, and Stand By Me by this time and thought…maybe I should try reading one of his books. That book was The Gunslinger. The first part of the Dark Tower series. It had been released six years earlier in print, but this was the first time I had ever seen it when it in paperback. I snatched up a copy and spent my evenings just prior to falling asleep going through this book with as much fervor as I had watching Star Wars growing up. I was sucked into the world King created without even realizing that it was interwoven with all his other stories. In essence, The Dark Tower was the source from which all his material sprang forth into the ‘real world’ if you could it that. I was like a child who had grown up inside a house, content in my surroundings, not realizing that an even bigger space waited on the other side of the door. I soon found myself reading the second and third book as well as Christine, It, The Body, The Running Man, and The Tommyknockers. Then I branched out into other popular fiction writers like Dean R. Koontz and read Phantoms and Watchers.

In high school I hit that same wall I hit before; reading classics for class was boring. The Red Badge of Courage, the Last of the Mohicans, and other required reading was given a cursory glance instead of my full attention causing me to try and pass tests and write papers with minimal knowledge of the subject. It seemed as though I was only interested in 80s and 90s popular fiction, but not classics. After high school, that suffered as I only picked up a few books from which I had already seen the film like Jurassic Park and The Silence of the Lambs. I had even picked up the fourth Dark Tower novel, Wizard and Glass, but to date, have not finished it. Though, I have it and Wolves of the Calla in audio format and have heard most of book four. Required reading in college had put an overall end to my leisurely reading and I had not read another book until 2006.

For someone who prides himself on being a historian on pop culture, full of useless trivia and quotes from film and television, I found myself not jumping on the bandwagon of fads at their onset. Like I had mentioned, The Silence of the Lambs and Jurassic Park were bestsellers when they were released but I didn’t bother to pick them up until years after I had watched the film versions, using them as a primer for envisioning the voices of the characters and their surroundings making for a much quicker read. That was the pseudo basis for my reintroduction to the printed word in 2006 when I began to read The Da Vinci Code. Once again, we are talking popular fiction, not classics. But this time around, I read the book before I saw the movie. Still, I had cheated a little because I could see and hear in my mind the voices and likenesses of Tom Hanks, Ian McKellen, Jean Reno, Paul Bettany, and Alfred Molina. I’d say I came a long way in terms of accepting books again into my life. The next year, I found myself revisiting a phenomenon that had began 10 years prior of which I swore I would not belittle myself to reading. And that my dear readers is where Part Two picks up and the aforementioned puzzling statement about reading books because of a love of film will make more sense. Stay tuned.