I copy/pasted this from my old MySpace blog. I wrote it just over five years ago and thought some people I've met since then might want to read it. Plus I'm bored. Enjoy!
I decide to take Little Man to the baseball field a block from our house after dinner. We cross through my neighbors backyard to get to the street. My neighbors ex-husband is living with her and her boyfriend right now. He's older and he has terminal cancer. He's living his last days with them. As we walked through their driveway he was in his car smoking pot, something he does to settle his stomach so that he can eat. Some people would just smoke and get it done with, but he likes to chill in his car and listen to loud music while he does it. I guess it's a throwback to when he was younger. Nicole and I are pretty cool with this since it's always around dinner time, never later than 7, and he has pretty good taste in music. Little Man and I wave to him in his car and we make our way down to the baseball field. His music has faded by the time we make it to the corner. I thought it would last a little longer. It's cool out. It's in the upper 60's but it seems like it should be hotter. Dog days of August, global warming. Why isn't it hotter? We're both wearing shorts but could easily be comfortable in jeans. I put Jonathan down and he runs for a few dozen yards. They've planted grass on the base clearings and lowered the pitchers mound. Soccer goals are up, but netless, and lines for soccer are on the field. He swings in the tot swing behind the dugout for a few minutes, but then wants to get down. We walk back into the field. In short center field, I sit for a minute and then lie down on my back. It's about the area where a bloop single might fall in between the second baseman and a center fielder playing too deep. I hold Jonathan above me for a few seconds and watch his giggling smile, then I rest him on my chest. When I put him down I see the sky, thick gray overcast clouds with small patches of blue poking through occasionally. I turn my head and see it's clear to the north. Jonathan slides off my chest and wanders around me, staying within arms reach. The cool weather and the clouds remind me that it's the end of summer. Technically there's still a month left, but you know when it's over, you just know. Jonathan sits down and leans his little back against my left side. He grabs my arm to position it around him. He experiments with a few variations but then find exactly where he wants my arm to be. The he goes to work on my fingers and after he has them set he slides his arms down behind mine so he's totally contained, and therefore totally content. "Don't ever stop needing that." I say out loud to him. "Don't ever stop wanting to be near me." He wiggles out and walks around to my legs, lying down and resting his head on my thigh. The state fair started today. I could see the rides in motion on my way home from work. It's the last rest stop on the road to Autumn. Jonathan rolls over, lifts up my shirt and zrrbts my belly. I giggle and he does it again. I sit up and he wanders away a bit and lies on his back propped up by his elbows. He looks a lot older in that position, like it's something too old for a one year old to be doing. I walk over and pick him up and he clutches me. By the time we get to the road I've put him up on my shoulders and we can hear the old man's smoking music. He's not done quite yet.
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
Thursday, October 6, 2011
Inspired
Christmas day 1983. I am six, just a few months younger than my son is now. Under the tree is an Apple IIc computer. 128k of RAM, a display that is green on black. This is my introduction to the world of computing. I use it every chance I have. I love every second of it.
October 5th, 2011. I am on my bed, reading tweets on my iPhone. My son Jonathan comes upstairs. He wants my phone to play Fruit Ninja. "Not right now." I croak out. He can tell I'm sad and asks what's wrong. I tell him someone has died.
"Was he your friend?"
"No, I never met him, but I would have liked to. He inspired me."
"What does inspired mean?"
I tell him that inspired means that I saw what he did, what he was able to do with his life, and it made me think of what I can do with my own life. I tell him how he changed the way people view technology. I tell him how scared people were of trying to use a computer.
"Why?"
I try to tell him what computers were like in the early 80's and before, how hard it was to use a computer, and how very few people could do it. I try to describe how you had to type in lines of text to make the computer do anything. No music, no pictures, no games, no movies.
He has no idea what I'm talking about.
He can't even picture it, the whole idea is so foreign to him. He's lived his entire life surrounded by futuristic technology that sprung from the mind of this man I mourn. We've always been able to play full-color games on phones and talk to grandma on the computer. We've always been to listen to any song we wanted whenever we wanted. We've always been able to discover a restaurant we've never heard of, in a city we've never been to, get directions there, and then have our friends meet us there, in seconds, with just a few taps on a screen.
I tell him how the world has changed. I tell him how people use technology in ways they never knew were possible back then. I tell him how I meet amazing people I never would have met before. I tell him how they use it to create the cartoons he loves. I tell him how they use it to make music, like my cousin Dan does, and how they make movies and buildings and fight diseases, all of it on computers. I tell him how all of it came from the ideas this man had about making computers accessible to everyone and it revolutionized the world and how someday, he could revolutionize the world too, and how that is what it means to be inspired. It means to think of something that no one ever thought was possible and make it a reality. I tell him we have the tools to create amazing things and that we stand on the shoulders of an icon.
Jonathan tells me about how Spongebob and Patrick accidentally knocked down Squidword's house. He cuddles up to me and gives me a hug. "Wasn't that funny? See, now you're not sad anymore."
And I'm not. And I love every second of it.
October 5th, 2011. I am on my bed, reading tweets on my iPhone. My son Jonathan comes upstairs. He wants my phone to play Fruit Ninja. "Not right now." I croak out. He can tell I'm sad and asks what's wrong. I tell him someone has died.
"Was he your friend?"
"No, I never met him, but I would have liked to. He inspired me."
"What does inspired mean?"
I tell him that inspired means that I saw what he did, what he was able to do with his life, and it made me think of what I can do with my own life. I tell him how he changed the way people view technology. I tell him how scared people were of trying to use a computer.
"Why?"
I try to tell him what computers were like in the early 80's and before, how hard it was to use a computer, and how very few people could do it. I try to describe how you had to type in lines of text to make the computer do anything. No music, no pictures, no games, no movies.
He has no idea what I'm talking about.
He can't even picture it, the whole idea is so foreign to him. He's lived his entire life surrounded by futuristic technology that sprung from the mind of this man I mourn. We've always been able to play full-color games on phones and talk to grandma on the computer. We've always been to listen to any song we wanted whenever we wanted. We've always been able to discover a restaurant we've never heard of, in a city we've never been to, get directions there, and then have our friends meet us there, in seconds, with just a few taps on a screen.
I tell him how the world has changed. I tell him how people use technology in ways they never knew were possible back then. I tell him how I meet amazing people I never would have met before. I tell him how they use it to create the cartoons he loves. I tell him how they use it to make music, like my cousin Dan does, and how they make movies and buildings and fight diseases, all of it on computers. I tell him how all of it came from the ideas this man had about making computers accessible to everyone and it revolutionized the world and how someday, he could revolutionize the world too, and how that is what it means to be inspired. It means to think of something that no one ever thought was possible and make it a reality. I tell him we have the tools to create amazing things and that we stand on the shoulders of an icon.
Jonathan tells me about how Spongebob and Patrick accidentally knocked down Squidword's house. He cuddles up to me and gives me a hug. "Wasn't that funny? See, now you're not sad anymore."
And I'm not. And I love every second of it.
Saturday, April 9, 2011
I live at home
The last 18 months or so have not been easy. Things have happened in my life that I never thought would come to pass. Nicole, Jonathan, and I moved to Minoa in November 2009 after selling our house. Nicole was (still is) going to nursing school and needed to quit her full-time job. My independent contracting business had taken a major hit since my job sub-contracting for an IT services company had dried up when the main contract ran out. We were moving into a house with an in-law apartment. The plan was for us to move there so that we could help my parents, who had recently had to sell their condo. My father was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease about 5 years ago and hadn't been able to work as much. The medication was screwing with his sleep cycle (and he'd already been in a decade long funk since my grandfather died that he refused to get help for, but that's a story for another time). It had the makings of a good plan. They buy the house (STAR exemptions keeping the property taxes significantly lower than if we'd bought it), we pay the mortgage. We take care of the lawn and shovel the driveway, my mom watches Jonathan after school. Everything works out. Unfortunately, my parents selected a house the needed a large amount of reconstruction done to the main portion of the house. They moved in July 2009 (moving them was a herculean task helped by an all-star team of Syracuse twitter folk and assorted friends whom I will never fully thank enough). Work began shortly after that but was going very slow due to them hiring an extremely nice and very capable builder who, by all accounts, did great work, but insisted on using a manual hammer instead of an automatic one and oh, got there at 10 and left at 4 and took an hour lunch. So work dragged on. And on. We sold our house and the time came for us to move and work was nowhere close to being finished. So we all, Nicole, Jonathan and myself, crammed into the second bedroom of the house. Jonathan slept on an air mattress wedged between our bed and the wall. A month later they ran out of money to pay the very nice builder and Nicole and I had a house with no walls. My brother came up from Pennsylvania and taught me to hang sheetrock. So I did, at night and on weekends. Sometimes it looked nice and sometimes it looked shitty but up it went. Friends came by when they could and helped. When I accidentally broke my wrist, my friend Matt came over to give us some much-needed help with putting down new floors. Nicole learned to spackle. I learned to install sinks.
I was doing a lot of self-blaming. Reviewing the wrong choices I had made that left me in a position where this was my life. I could've taken that crappy job that I turned down a while back. I could've done a lot of things. Instead, I'm hanging sheetrock on my weekends. Living in my parents back bedroom with my son on an air mattress. No space of his own. No space of our own. I'd find myself saying aloud "This is not the life I should be living." The stress eventually caused me to break out in shingles on my scalp.
This burden of helping my parents rests with me because my siblings have moved away and I am the one left in Syracuse. I didn't blame them, you grow up and get your own life going, that's what you do and I hadn't. I started resenting the city instead. The whole area, really. I wanted to flee. Just go. Fall through the earth and come out the other side. I'd see my friends on Facebook going places and envy them. Anywhere. I'd go anywhere. As far away as I could get from this was too close. Turns out I wasn't the only one with plans to leave.
Because apparently things in the house weren't tense enough, my mother announced in March of last year that she was leaving my father for a man from North Carolina she'd met on Facebook. I knew they'd been having problems for a while, but I'd figured that as long as my mom had decided to move from the condo she was going to stick it out. Again, I couldn't blame her, people have a right to seek their own happiness. Nicole could. She was ready to rip shit and was frustrated with me for my lack of anger at the situation. All I felt was anger at myself for allowing myself into this position. Curiously, strangely, excruciatingly, nothing much happened after my mom announced this. She continued to live with us. She didn't seem to have much a plan for how this was going to go. It wasn't until three months after the announcement that she moved to North Carolina with the man she'd met.
Right about that same time, I took a job working for a technology services company in Ithaca. I'd been looking for a full-time job for a while since contracting work had gotten scarce. It's a pretty long drive every day, but the money is good and it's steady. About that same time, we finished work on the house enough to move our stuff into it and finally have our own space. Which was extremely fortunate, because very soon after that the in-law apartment became infested with fleas. We eventually got rid of the fleas, only to be plagued with mice. My dad, as is the case with many bachelors, is not the best at keeping his space clean. Nicole and I had a plan though. After her graduation in May we would be moving to Ithaca. Again and again we'd tell ourselves, "Only x more months, we can do this." Who cares if it was just down the road a ways, it was somewhere that wasn't here, and that was all that mattered.
Nicole took a job late last year as a Healthcare Technician in the Medical ICU at SUNY Upstate. She's gained tons of experience above and beyond her nursing school clinicals, and the management there loves her. She looked for jobs at Cayuga Medical center and they were pretty thin. Overnights mostly. Housing in Ithaca wasn't looking much better. $1500/Month for anything livable. We made a few exploratory trips down there to look at apartments. Nothing within a half-hour was affordable. I'd get a dozen emails every day for places she'd seen on Craigslist that she wanted me to look at. Everything was either too small, too gross, too expensive, or too far.
In late summer I would bring Jonathan with me on my way to work and he would stay at my friend Lisa's house in Cortland where her oldest son would watch him during the day. On the way home he would always yell "It's Syracuse!" when we crested the hill before the Onondaga Nation exit. One night last month on my way home I came over that hill and saw the city. I did every day, but that day it looked different. I heard him in my head and I knew I was looking at my home. The MONY towers. The Civic Center. The Dome. They're my MONY towers. My Civic Center. My Dome. I talked to Nicole that night and we decided we're going to stay in Syracuse. We like the school Jonathan goes to and we have a lot of great new friends we've made in the area through twitter. She's been hired as an RN at SUNY Upstate as soon as she passes her boards. As for me, I'm going to keep working in Ithaca for the time being. Things aren't perfect, my dad is still a slob, though we have vanquished the mice with a combination of a psychotic cat and D-Con. I'm not saying we're going to live in Syracuse forever, but we're not running away from anything anymore. We're going towards something. I don't think we know what exactly, but it will be of our choosing. In the meantime, everyday I crest that hill and I know I'm finally home.
I was doing a lot of self-blaming. Reviewing the wrong choices I had made that left me in a position where this was my life. I could've taken that crappy job that I turned down a while back. I could've done a lot of things. Instead, I'm hanging sheetrock on my weekends. Living in my parents back bedroom with my son on an air mattress. No space of his own. No space of our own. I'd find myself saying aloud "This is not the life I should be living." The stress eventually caused me to break out in shingles on my scalp.
This burden of helping my parents rests with me because my siblings have moved away and I am the one left in Syracuse. I didn't blame them, you grow up and get your own life going, that's what you do and I hadn't. I started resenting the city instead. The whole area, really. I wanted to flee. Just go. Fall through the earth and come out the other side. I'd see my friends on Facebook going places and envy them. Anywhere. I'd go anywhere. As far away as I could get from this was too close. Turns out I wasn't the only one with plans to leave.
Because apparently things in the house weren't tense enough, my mother announced in March of last year that she was leaving my father for a man from North Carolina she'd met on Facebook. I knew they'd been having problems for a while, but I'd figured that as long as my mom had decided to move from the condo she was going to stick it out. Again, I couldn't blame her, people have a right to seek their own happiness. Nicole could. She was ready to rip shit and was frustrated with me for my lack of anger at the situation. All I felt was anger at myself for allowing myself into this position. Curiously, strangely, excruciatingly, nothing much happened after my mom announced this. She continued to live with us. She didn't seem to have much a plan for how this was going to go. It wasn't until three months after the announcement that she moved to North Carolina with the man she'd met.
Right about that same time, I took a job working for a technology services company in Ithaca. I'd been looking for a full-time job for a while since contracting work had gotten scarce. It's a pretty long drive every day, but the money is good and it's steady. About that same time, we finished work on the house enough to move our stuff into it and finally have our own space. Which was extremely fortunate, because very soon after that the in-law apartment became infested with fleas. We eventually got rid of the fleas, only to be plagued with mice. My dad, as is the case with many bachelors, is not the best at keeping his space clean. Nicole and I had a plan though. After her graduation in May we would be moving to Ithaca. Again and again we'd tell ourselves, "Only x more months, we can do this." Who cares if it was just down the road a ways, it was somewhere that wasn't here, and that was all that mattered.
Nicole took a job late last year as a Healthcare Technician in the Medical ICU at SUNY Upstate. She's gained tons of experience above and beyond her nursing school clinicals, and the management there loves her. She looked for jobs at Cayuga Medical center and they were pretty thin. Overnights mostly. Housing in Ithaca wasn't looking much better. $1500/Month for anything livable. We made a few exploratory trips down there to look at apartments. Nothing within a half-hour was affordable. I'd get a dozen emails every day for places she'd seen on Craigslist that she wanted me to look at. Everything was either too small, too gross, too expensive, or too far.
In late summer I would bring Jonathan with me on my way to work and he would stay at my friend Lisa's house in Cortland where her oldest son would watch him during the day. On the way home he would always yell "It's Syracuse!" when we crested the hill before the Onondaga Nation exit. One night last month on my way home I came over that hill and saw the city. I did every day, but that day it looked different. I heard him in my head and I knew I was looking at my home. The MONY towers. The Civic Center. The Dome. They're my MONY towers. My Civic Center. My Dome. I talked to Nicole that night and we decided we're going to stay in Syracuse. We like the school Jonathan goes to and we have a lot of great new friends we've made in the area through twitter. She's been hired as an RN at SUNY Upstate as soon as she passes her boards. As for me, I'm going to keep working in Ithaca for the time being. Things aren't perfect, my dad is still a slob, though we have vanquished the mice with a combination of a psychotic cat and D-Con. I'm not saying we're going to live in Syracuse forever, but we're not running away from anything anymore. We're going towards something. I don't think we know what exactly, but it will be of our choosing. In the meantime, everyday I crest that hill and I know I'm finally home.
Friday, March 25, 2011
Pure Fantasy
My mom loved making costumes for us. I don't think I bought a costume for Halloween from the time I was 5 until...well until I was done trick or treating anyway. She made some crazy stuff. I was a refrigerator one year, I was a Nintendo cartridge another. My sister was a banana, a piece of pizza, and a potted plant. For some reason my brother always went for store bought zombie and wolfman stuff, but my sister and I would be planning cardboard, foam and chicken-wire monstrosities every year.
So anyone who knows me knows I dig comic books. Starting when I was around 10, I read Batman, Superman, Teen Titans, Justice League and pretty much whatever else I could get my hands on. For those of you not familiar with him, and that would be pretty much everyone in the world, Wild Dog was a late 80's vigilante hero who had a 4 issue mini-series and then has really never been heard from again. He looked like this:
All summer before fifth grade I read and reread the Wild Dog mini-series and thought he was so cool and such a bad-ass and couldn't wait to be him for Halloween. So I convinced my mom make me a Wild Dog costume. The costume was spot-on accurate. Camo pants, boots, blue jersey with laughing red dog on it worn over a long sleeve black shirt. Hockey masks for Halloween were easy to come by and probably still are. I think I may have even had the yellow piping, such was my attention to detail.
No one knew what the hell I was supposed to be. Only one other kid at school did and he was any even bigger comic book geek than I was. My teacher was mystified. I was disappointed. "I'm Wild Dog. You know...Wild Dog. From...from comics." Didn't anyone else visit Time Frame, the local comic shop in Fayetteville Mall, on a weekly, if not twice-weekly, basis? Didn't anyone else have their world shaken from the Anti-Monitor's attempt to destroy the Multiverse just 1 year ago in the Crisis On Infinite Earths? Supergirl and The Flash died for fuck's sake! Was it that I skimped on the lasso and the pouches?
Trick-or-treating wasn't any better. Most people assumed I was Jason and didn't know what the hell the dog was about. All they saw was an 11-year-old in a hockey mask with an Italiafro. I didn't give a shit by that point. I had acquiesced to being whatever people thought I was, but still holding out hope that my taste in heroes would win out in the end. Give me your candy, sure, yeah I'm Jason, whatever, but listen, next year when Wild Dog is huge and there's like a Wild Dog movie starring Jean-Claude Van Damme you'll think "Whoa that kid was really ahead of the curve on this whole Wild Dog thing" and I'll be like "Yeah, goddamn right bitches! WILD DOG!".
Come on, the superhero genre has proven immensely lucrative for Hollywood. Green Lantern, Thor and Captain America have movies that are coming out this summer. Supes and Spiderman are getting reboots. Wonder Woman will be on TV again soon. Yes, the timeline for the Wild Dog media storm I predicted in fifth grade is longer than I had anticipated, but I'm confident I'll be proven right in the end.
Wild Dog, bitches. Wild. Dog.
So anyone who knows me knows I dig comic books. Starting when I was around 10, I read Batman, Superman, Teen Titans, Justice League and pretty much whatever else I could get my hands on. For those of you not familiar with him, and that would be pretty much everyone in the world, Wild Dog was a late 80's vigilante hero who had a 4 issue mini-series and then has really never been heard from again. He looked like this:
No one knew what the hell I was supposed to be. Only one other kid at school did and he was any even bigger comic book geek than I was. My teacher was mystified. I was disappointed. "I'm Wild Dog. You know...Wild Dog. From...from comics." Didn't anyone else visit Time Frame, the local comic shop in Fayetteville Mall, on a weekly, if not twice-weekly, basis? Didn't anyone else have their world shaken from the Anti-Monitor's attempt to destroy the Multiverse just 1 year ago in the Crisis On Infinite Earths? Supergirl and The Flash died for fuck's sake! Was it that I skimped on the lasso and the pouches?
Trick-or-treating wasn't any better. Most people assumed I was Jason and didn't know what the hell the dog was about. All they saw was an 11-year-old in a hockey mask with an Italiafro. I didn't give a shit by that point. I had acquiesced to being whatever people thought I was, but still holding out hope that my taste in heroes would win out in the end. Give me your candy, sure, yeah I'm Jason, whatever, but listen, next year when Wild Dog is huge and there's like a Wild Dog movie starring Jean-Claude Van Damme you'll think "Whoa that kid was really ahead of the curve on this whole Wild Dog thing" and I'll be like "Yeah, goddamn right bitches! WILD DOG!".
Come on, the superhero genre has proven immensely lucrative for Hollywood. Green Lantern, Thor and Captain America have movies that are coming out this summer. Supes and Spiderman are getting reboots. Wonder Woman will be on TV again soon. Yes, the timeline for the Wild Dog media storm I predicted in fifth grade is longer than I had anticipated, but I'm confident I'll be proven right in the end.
Wild Dog, bitches. Wild. Dog.
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