Stimulating Television

Lately I've developed a mild addiction to Man vs Wild. I don't feel compelled to seek it out, but if I'm scrolling and it is on, I am unable to not watch it. I think a new season has just started so the show is more visible, though just from watching the episodes, you'd never know if it was the newest or the oldest in the series. I'm not actually sure how they plan to keep running new episodes, actually, since it seems like every one follows a predictable pattern, and it's hard to tell the difference between the survival skills he displays whether in the Amazon, Panamanian, Chinese, or any other random jungle locale.
The thing that I noticed not long ago as I was watching one of them is that it isn't actually a how-to show. Sure it is somewhat informative, but for a show who's premise is teaching the viewer how to survive, it contains precious few moments of teaching. The real point of the show is to entertain, of course, to show Bear Grylls doing nasty things like eating snakes or rubbing mud in his ears, or wild things like jumping off a 50ft cliff or swimming under an ice sheet. I'm not saying they're not in there, but to actually ingest usable survival skills while watching the show, you have to be attuned to them and to already have a little knowledge of wilderness techniques to begin with. This from a show who's whole reason for being is presumably to teach.
What I'm getting at here is that there are shamefully few shows on TV that a viewer can learn anything from. There is a whole goddamn network called "The Learning Channel," but they fill up their hours with crap reality shows about midgets and irresponsibly pregnant women. Every so often there is something medical that might pass off as informative, but even then it's more by accident. Why is it that there are so few places to learn things on TV? Why does it all have to be for simple entertainment? Ideally, the informative shows would also be somewhat entertaining, but you never see any of these "entertaining" shows provide anything informative.
The only place where you see consistently informative programming (I means shows that are conceived and executed with a consistent focus on teaching) is cooking shows. Why nowhere else? Cooking shows aren't ratings gold or anything, but they've been around and heavily watching for a long time, prominently enough to sprout a whole network devoted to them. Their informative nature doesn't prevent them from succeeding as a business model. So why nothing else?
I feel like the History Channel used to be better and providing useful programming, but over the years has turned into the same kind of crap you see everywhere else: dedicated not to really captivate a viewer and give him a reason to watch TV, but more to simply hold his attention while he happens to be watching TV anyway. Someone is surely pulling the strings here. Some focus groups must tell network people that it's better for ratings this way. That's bullshit laziness.
The market for substantive TV is there. I know I'm not alone.

A Folger By Any Other Name

We know now with almost complete certainty that Sara's fetus is a girl. Which is bad news because of the names that she has been floating my way. The girl ones have all been pretty terrible.
We decided that we wouldn't put much effort into names until we knew the gender, so I guess now the floodgates are open. The only thing that we ever did talk about was two names that we both liked: Theodore and Macdougal. Both boy names. Macdougal comes with a whole story involving her pet name for me, while Theodore has been my pick for a while. Both names are solid. Not totally unique but also not exactly popular. They pass the sound test, and work well with Folger. They also both shorten very nicely, to Ted/dy(1) and Mac. But again, they're both boy names; we don't have any legit girl names ready to go.
There are three names that Sara has liked enough to present to me prior to this gender-unmasking: Minna, Matilda, and Veda. Maybe you find those names attractive; I do not. The first one is to pay respect to a relative of hers. Fine, use it as a middle name. Matilda is just an ugly name(2), and Veda sounds like the name of one of Capt Kirk's conquests on Star Trek. I looked up Veda and it's an Indian name, as in India. I actually like Indian names(3), especially for girls, I just think my wife happened to pick out one the worst ones.
I'm sure we'll find a nice name for our future girl, it just seems a lot more difficult at the moment. Assuming you are not going the traditional route, girl names seem more complicated and diverse than boy names. Maybe I'm inventing this, I don't know. I actually like using masculine or neutral names for girls. Names like Dakota or Murphy or Bill. (Just kidding on the last one, wouldn't that be something.) It feels like cheating, and it's just my lazy brain playing tricks on me, but I actually really like Theadora for a girl. The shortened forms aren't as good though: Dora or Thea, I assume, with Thea being either "thee-ah" or "thay-ah." Not bad, but not perfect either. The big problem is that if we use Theadora now, we couldn't use Theodore on a future boy. No, we're not going to be those weirdo parents who name their kids all similarly (though Dora and Teddy disguise their root similarities nicely).
It's a lot to think about.
I used to be really good to coming up with fake names to be used as aliases. You'd think that skill would translate to baby-naming, but I'm not sure it does. My favorite personal aliases are Mordecai Sinclair, Sebastian Parker, and of course Chuck Swanson. Those are A+ names. They also don't include the one name that is a prerequisite for our kid: Folger. Folger is not a perfect surname to match first names with. Phonetically, it's kinda heavy with the g in the middle. I've never had a problem with my own full name except that if you use the long form it does whatever is the opposite of "rolls off the tongue." It seeps into the tongue like leaves in a compost pile. We'll need to keep that in mind.


1. Here is where we had an honest disagreement. We both like Theodore, but Sara was somewhat adamant that the diminutive should be Theo, while I was just as adamant in favor of Teddy. My main point of argument: you can't have a white kid going by Theo. A white adult, most definitely, but not a kid. "The Cosby Show" pretty much killed that for all caucasians. Plus, doesn't Teddy just sound awesome for a little boy?
2. No offense to Ryan or the waitress at Bondi's, who is herself not ugly.
3. I had an honest infatuation with a girl for a couple years a while back, and while she was certainly very attractive, hindsight forces me to consider that a big part of it was her awesome name: Rajika. That is an attractive name.

Another Kind of Love

Last week Sara was on the phone and her sister put on her two girls (our nieces). Sara--not on speakerphone--talked to them briefly and then said "I love you" before hanging up.
This might not be thought-provoking to you, but it really was to me.
If I had been on the phone then I would not have ended the conversation that way; in fact, it never would have even occurred to me to end it so. Part of this is because the two nieces are 2 years old and nearly 4 years old, so they were around both before the wedding and even before I really knew Sara. Also, they live 800 miles away from us and I've spent less than ten days in their presence at this point. I don't know them all that well and they don't know me much either. In fact, though they are very warm with Sara they mostly react to me like I'm a hairy-faced unfamiliar adult, which is exactly what I am. The older one is old enough so that she warms up to me after some time, but the younger is definitely not there yet.
And yet this is my family now. After we move to Chicago next year, they will be close family that we see often and regularly for an indefinite amount of time. They will become friends and frequent play-partners with our unborn children.
"Love" is an appropriate word to use, then, if you think about it in this macro sense, but that doesn't change the awkward feeling that I would have when presented with it in the moment. There are different kinds of love, and I'm not just talking romantic vs familial. There is the inner love that we effortlessly produce for other people, and there is also what I'd call the outer love that is part of circumstance that we pull from to give to other people. The love I have for Sara comes from within me that I created (or that her presence or my belief in her wondrousness created in me--deep romantic love can never be fully explained in words), while the love I have for any family member came originally from our shared environment.
My own aunt and uncle tell me that they love me, and nothing seems odd about that. They are family that I've seen consistently throughout my life. Of course we feel a love for each other.
Is it ok that I don't currently feel love for my young nieces? Is it ok to grow into it? I think it should be. Think about it another way: if you are either recently-wedded or have had a partner for a few years, how would you feel if one of your in-laws passed away? If you have not had the time to build up the natural feelings of love for the person, how do you react?
I guess I honestly wonder about this, because my disposition with regards to this stuff is reservedness. I don't quickly come upon love, and when I find it (with one big exception--thanks, wife) I am slow to acknowledge it, especially verbally.
I am a classic midwesterner is this regard. My mom always says she loves me at the end of phone calls, but I rarely return the comment (in fact Sara always pesters me to say it so I do it more often now). I of course love my mother. I have always loved her outwardly and very early on in life I learned to love her inwardly, too. But still I don't always like to offer it up: "I love you."
When my mom talks to me on the phone she does so via the speaker so my dad is almost always there too. At the end of the call, he hardly ever adds his own "I love you." My father of course loves me. But he doesn't always like to offer it up. When he does, I find it more amusing than comforting, because he'll deliver the words in a louder, clearer voice, almost like he's reassuring himself that he says it often enough, changing his cadence as an involuntary way of marking a change in substance, like a writer using CAPITAL LETTERS.

I feel like I need a summary of this post. Everyone loves their parents because they're mom and dad, but not everyone really loves them because they love them; but presumably every husband loves his wife because he really loves her.
A man can let his heart find him a woman, but not a set of parents.
To truly love a person is to not need to use empathy to have emotion for him. I think this is how you know if you love an in-law or a relative.
Is it ok to love a relative only as a relative and not fully emotionally?
Is it normal or acceptable to fully love some relatives and not others?
Does biological immediacy require clean demarcations of emotional attachment, or would it be normal to love a distant relative more than an immediate one?
Is there an initial grace period with new relatives to let love build naturally, and if so roughly how long do you have before wondering if it might not happen?

Stress and Irritability and Marriage

When I went out to get lunch today I encountered a giant asshole trying to hail a cab. I mean like how people do it on TV, running toward the street and screaming "Taxi!" over and over. No one actually does it like that in real life, not even when they are in a big hurry. But this guy was different. He came bowling around the corner toward Park Ave, with his fat ass and big black jacket and flowing brown scarf, all big-faced and jowly with longish wavy hair slicked straight backward, like an asshole. He was maybe 50 and was also dragging one of those suitcase-on-wheels that assholes use in midtown to display to the world extreme pride either in their own laziness or their ability to acquire worthless and frivolous items. On top of everything, the two cabs that he was soliciting from 30 feet away were both very clearly about to be occupied by other more timely and discreet individuals.
As I saw this sorry scene develop, a real rage built up inside me very quickly and I had a sudden fantasy of picking up my walking speed and ramming the fuck into the guy's chest like a linebacker, just laying him out and watching his crap go sprawling while the crowded sidewalk full of people mocked him. I even had to physically bite my tongue to suppress the violent urge, something that I find myself doing every now and again.
So my question then is have I become a more stressful person? I don't remember ever really having to bite my tongue as a way of diffusing frustration. Is it possible that my lifestyle has finally gotten to be stressful? My disposition for all of my life has included the least amount of stress that I think any person has ever felt. I'm extremely reserved and patient and generally unconcerned of all outside stimuli. I always assumed that this was just a permanent character trait, something that I was born with, so that the idea that this might be slowly changing is interesting to me.
I think a general assumption would be that, if anything, a person's stress levels would decrease as he ages as he becomes more confident in himself, settled in his life, and generally wiser or more experienced. Maybe that is true in a linear sense, but from a little personal experience I can add to this, such that maybe the stress level through life is more of a bell curve.
Now that I am positively married I share most of my life with a reasonable person, which over time reinforces itself so that more and more I have interactions with a like-minded person (my wife). Also this thing called love will cause her to perhaps agree with me more often than normal. The effect that this seems to slowly produce with me is that I don't have as much patience with things or people that I find to be irrational or sociopathic. In addition, the amount of time I have to share with the world around me has been greatly reduced due to the added time I spend with my wife. This means that I'm much less patient with a person who I feel might be wasting my time, and can add to my irritability. Any enemy of logic has more often become a real enemy of me, instead of just a curiosity or a source of amusement.
I guess what I'm saying is that it seems that marriage has indirectly caused me to be a more stressful person.

Film Review: Crazy Heart

Two weeks ago I saw Crazy Heart, and now I'm finally going to share my thoughts. It should be noted that I didn't need to wait this long: it wasn't such a powerful experience that I needed to fully digest it before producing a reasoned response. It was just laziness.
Usually at the end of the year there are a whole list of awards-bait movies that I want to see, but this year was different. There was Crazy Heart, and then maybe Nine, though I've soured a little in my excitement for that one. That's it. Congratulations on being uninteresting and uninspired this year, movie industry.
Anyway, for a person who liked The Wrestler so much just a year ago, it's impossible for me not to compare Crazy Heart to it. A washed-up entertainer slumming around trying to reclaim past glory, while having hit-and-miss experiences with family/lovers, all held together by a dominating performance by the lead actor. Yes, Jeff Bridges really is pretty great in this. Unfortunately for the film, nothing much else about it rises above the level of average.
First, like a lot of people, I will always have a special fondness for Bridges thanks to his appearance as The Dude. (There is actually an obvious but great homage in this movie about thirty minutes in involving sunglasses and a trash can.) His Dudeness though tends to help obscure or marginalize the fact that he really is a good actor with interesting abilities, which are on full display here. He plays simple about as well as anyone, and by "simple" I don't mean dumb but rather uncomplicated. This is a lot tougher and nuanced to act out than you might at first think. One way to think about it is to conjure the stereotype of Oscar-bait roles: handicapped or other obviously-challenged people. Jeff Bridges excels in roles that are just the opposite: people who project no dominating characteristic, other than simply being themselves. That he may have succeeded in this task so much as to be an Oscar contender is all the endorsement you should really need.
Aside from Jeff Bridges, I can't really recommend much else in this film. It stands up as an average one, not a failure or anything but only notable for his presence. Unlike The Wrestler, there was nothing in it's style or delivery that I found interesting, and its ending was ridiculously inferior. As a side note, I'll comment briefly on Maggie Gyllenhaal, who is weirdly cast as Bridges's love interest. She seems to be a pretty trendy actress right now, someone for whom it is fashionable to say you really love and respect as a thespian. I don't see it. She's not bad or anything, and is perfectly capable of giving you a passable performance, but I've never been impressed. She seems to still be fairly young so maybe she'll become something worth talking about, but as for right now let's not make her out to be something she isn't. She's kinda like a less-accomplished female Matt Damon.
My final note here is only slightly relevant to Crazy Heart. Robert Duvall plays a small role as the friend of Jeff Bridges's character, and while he does a typically fine job with it, the role is small and the character is not very interesting or essential to the story. Ultimately forgettable, though that's not Duvall's fault, which brings me to my point. It's time for Robert Duvall to get a big lead role in a film, a role that should either be written specifically for him or that fits him like a glove. Duvall has been an excellent actor for a long time and I'm not sure he's really fully gotten his due. Even better, in his later years, his on-screen persona has really taken on a life of its own. I'd like to think that Duvall was choice #1A for Tommy Lee Jones's character in No Country for Old Men, because he would have been perfect for it. He's gotten to the point in his career where he doesn't even need to act much if you give him the right role. I mean that as complimentary, not like how you might disparagingly say the same thing about Denzel Washington. Duvall has an irrepresible screen personality, and he's clearly capable of using it to dominate a film.
So after I mentioned most of this to Sara she went to IMDB to check him out, and reported back to me that Duvall is scheduled to play the role of Don Quixote in an upcoming film. I can only hope that his part is the lead, because that actually sounds like exactly the kind of forum I'm hoping for.

Random Observations

1. I have a perhaps irrational hatred of Jack in the Box commercials. First, I don't get the Sleepy Hollow-like "pitchman." Why the stupid spherical head with the crooked hat on a normal body? What could be the meaning of that? I don't like his eternal smugness either. I'm not an advertising expert, but I can't think smugness field tests very well among fast food customers. Even the way he constantly gestures out with his hands the same way every time no matter what he's saying annoys me. I'm not sure I've ever seen a Jack in the Box store, but I'm sure that if I did, I wouldn't eat there. Assholes. You know who wasn't smug? Dave Thomas.
2. Colt McCoy's interview after the game last night was damned impressive. Either he's going to win an Academy Award for acting in his second career or he was as honest as I've seen an athlete in an interview in a long time, and the context made it all the better. The guy's whole career basically built up to that one game, and he goes out on a fluke injury five plays in, then he watches his team look helpless only to mount an ultimately failed comeback? Amazing. At this point, there is still nothing more than a lot of speculation about what happened or especially why he wasn't able to return, so I won't comment on whatever sinister or conspiratorial events were taking place in the training room that required his father's presence (ok maybe I will, because you have to at least wonder if ol dad was summoned because he could have played through the injury but it would put him at a greater risk in the future; ie he would be hurting his chance at more money in the draft). That aside, McCoy managed to answer every question both honestly and with the necessary acknowledgments of the other team's superiority. He did this while pausing to choke back emotion, emotion that didn't get in the way of his responsibility in facing the questions. That's a man that is fit to lead. I always figured him to not quite have the goods for the NFL, but maybe he's got a sneaky Brees-type career in him after all.
The secondary comment I have on this is about the interview itself. I generally hate postgame or halftime interviews with any athletes (especially the literally breathless ones given to track athletes--ridiculous), but I guess I'll put up with hundreds of worthless ones if it might eventually lead to something like McCoy's. That actually added to the broadcast in a meaningful way.
3. I have a friend who won $150 on one bet on last night's game. I won $20 on the same bet. This, along with general overconfidence and delusional thinking, is why I always end up losing overall when gambling online.
4. Jon Heyman is a dickbag. Read this and tell me you don't agree. There is a similarly stupid article on SI's site from Dan Shaughnessy, but I'd rather bitch about Heyman. They both are purposefully ignorant writers who are way over on the wrong side of history, and curiosly proud of it. Arrogant, actually. But that's just the baseball Hall of Fame vote. What makes me pity Mr Heyman even more is that he is one of a handful of guys who, over the last couple months of baseball's offseason, has constantly put out articles and statements and twitters trying to scoop about which free agent is signing with which team. Basically, Heyman's status as a journalist is that he is one of this small group of guys who comes up with these scoops. I'm sure the job is tough--he has to make phone calls pretty much constantly and always keep up on the latest gossip (let's face it, that's all that it is), but it's also totally unecessary and irrelevant. Maybe 10 or 15 years ago, there may have been an honest need for a guy to tirelessly monitor a group of contacts to stay informed, but in 2010 there is this thing called the internet which happens to have shrunken the news gathering timeline to zero. So what I'm saying is that scoops are a total relic of the past. The only thing that benefits from Jon Heyman being the first to report that Mike Cameron signed with the Red Sox is Jon Heyman's ego, because if he didn't report it, then someone else would have, usually within minutes. It's mid-December and you are a baseball fan. you learn that Mike Cameron has signed with the Red Sox. Really, what good is this information to you? What good is it to you right now? It's worthless. You could be lost at sea and only learn about the signing a month later and it would really make no difference. The whole enterprise of digging for scoops in the baseball offseason bothers the hell out of me, so when I see one of the posterboys of it write such haughty uninformed garbage as Heyman does in that article, it really gets me.

Reaching Out

Here is what happens when your wife is pregnant: when you go to CVS, in addition to buying such normal items as sponges and milk, you also buy a stool softener for her constipation (it is what it is, which isn't always pretty), a long-handled shower brush for when she isn't able to reach everything anymore, and a can of mixed nuts to help keep her vegetarian protein levels up.
We had our third visit with the obstetrician on Tuesday. She was in her 15th week(1). That's early in the second trimester. We will continue to see this doctor every four weeks for a few more months. I say "we" because I've attended all three so far. From what I gather, the standard is usually for the man to attend the first visit and then the big "anatomy" visit somewhere around the 18th week, when they do the only important ultrasound and you learn what the gender is. Sara is happy to have me at these visits and so far I've been happy to go, even though the last two have mostly been simple check-ups, consisting of "how are you feeling?" a weight check, and a quick look for the fetal heartbeat, followed by answers of any questions or concerns from us. I'm pretty sure I'll be skipping at least the next visit with this primary doctor. The big anatomy visit, conducted by a separate doctor in a different facility, is in just two weeks, and though we're going a little early so I'm worried we won't be able to find out the gender, I'll be attending that one for sure.
There was really an amazing amount of excitement leading up to our first visit, when Sara was only 6 weeks along. Probably unsurprisingly I'll say that I was waiting for some confirmation at that first visit because it didn't seem totally real yet. The doctor brought out the ultrasound and, not knowing what to expect(2), I was actually a little unimpressed. The doctor didn't hesitate calling it a baby when looking at the black circle in the sea of grey noise on the screen. She moved around the internal ultrasound probe, and the black circle moved around and sure I could see a few whiter smudges or streaks inside the circle, but nothing comprehensible. Finally she stopped moving it around and got out her pointer, making tiny marks on the screen in a couple spaces and claiming that she could see the heartbeat. Now, I was sitting across the table about eight feet from the screen, so I didn't see squat, but then she printed out the image and gave it to us. Sara framed it, naturally, but I still didn't see squat. I'd hate to say it was disappointing, because I had no real idea what to expect, so maybe I'll go with "underwhelming." There was nothing human in that image, and barely anything biological, only if you had an active imagination.
The second visit was different, both in my expectations (lower) and the results (wow). This time, the doctor did the more classic external ultrasound, and after some brief abdomen searching, there it was. A very noticeable fetus(3). It seemed almost implanted to the edge of the black circle, like it's back were pasted to it, and the head and neck were pretty distorted, but it had an honest-to-goodness body. The real kicker, though, was the arms. They were fully extended, like grabbing for something. By this time, with Sara at 10 weeks pregnant, I'd seen a lot of ultrasound pictures online. I don't think I ever saw one with outstretched arms. For me, those arms were important. Without them, the image was still mostly inert and abstract, but with them it became animated and very human. For the first time, I could see it and imagine that it was something, that eventually I would be able to touch it and speak to it. Pretty great.



1. I just learned that you don't say it like that, you count it like you do a person's age. So in her 15th week, she's just 14 weeks along. As of today, she is 15 weeks pregnant. 15 weeks and zero days, though you don't say how many days. Anyway.
2. My aggressive online research-gathering hadn't yet begun at this point.
3. Let me be extraordinarily and unnecessarily political now. As a pretty staunchly pro-choice individual, I think I'm going to try to stick with the nomenclature of "fetus," instead of lapsing into calling it a "baby." This will be difficult to sustain, so forgive me and try to remember the intention I'm laying out now. Pretty much the only logical (religious concerns are never logical) argument for a pro-life stance is to draw a hard line around the killing/life issue. So for you to call something that doesn't have independent life a "baby" would be misrepresenting it. Sure, if you have no intent of aborting it, then eventually it will become a baby, but so long as it's in the womb it's still a fetus. So that's done then.

Happy New Year!

Today was welcome back to work day for most of the people around my office. And since today is January 4th, it also means that it was "Hey! Happy New Year!" day for most people. "Happy New Year" as a greeting stikes me as very stupid, but when delivered in conjunction with an overall huge sense of excitement and energy by a person who has not worked in 10-15 days and therefore wants to burn five minutes mindlessly talking to you every time he/she sees you, then it can drive me crazy. First, to me that greeting loses it's novelty around 6pm on January 1st, so to hear it over and over in that forced chirpy way people deliver it in workplaces three days after the fact is too much. Second, I've been back in the office for a full week, people. I don't want to share details on how my holidays were anymore. I had a whole week to do it at work plus a whole three-day weekend to do it amongst friends and social acquaintenances. I don't want to do it anymore. Finally, and maybe the worst aspect of a seemingly banal phrase, "Happy New Year" has only one acceptable response, and of course that response is: "Happy New Year." What's the goddamned point, exactly? Yes, your vocal chords can pronounce four syllables in our shared language, and so can mine. I'm glad we just sorted that out. At my alma mater, Ohio State, there is a pastime among students and especially graduates to greet each other by spelling out the letters O-H-I-O. The first person calls out "O-H" and the second person responds "I-O." I hated this. I hated this from the first time I heard it. Even in the company of friends when a friend will start this greeting (to be fair--often out of spontaneous sports-watching excitement) I will go out of my way to ignore it or even say something disparaging about it. If how alumni choose to distinctly greet each other were the top criterion for choosing a school, then Ohio State would have been near the bottom of my list. The point here is that "Happy New Year"* is basically the same thing as "O-H-I-O." They're like telling a knock-knock joke but without the punchline. Terrible, stupid, a waste of time. Worst of all, people use them as excuses to pile on fake enthusiasm where it has no business.

*I'm excepting all exclamations within 15 minutes of midnight on New Year's Eve, of course. That's about the only time when it makes sense, and doesn't require a rejoinder.