Before you ask- no, I have no idea what happened to most of the images on this site.

That was a damn fine vacation. I spent the weekend fly fishing in Flaming Gorge (no, Flaming Gorge is not a homosexual sex act or a venereal disease. It’s a place), but had to stop early on Sunday because my stupid back hurt so much. Plus it was raining, hailing, and snowing, and I wasn’t catching anything. So I got in my friend Russ’s Truck and played Halo for about three hours while he and Mike kept fishing. Russ’s truck is outfitted with the latest in high-tech gadgetry, like the x-box and LCD monitors and stuff. The verdict? Halo is pretty overrated. Kill aliens; take their guns, repeat until you want to turn the gun on yourself.

During the beginning of the week I stayed at my sister’s house and played with my niece and nephew. They see me not as an uncle, but as a piñata/drawing machine. I was alternately hit with sticks and told to draw things. Someone also taught them how to execute a wedgie, so that was something else I got to enjoy from time to time. Savannah was sick while I was there, so all she wanted to do was watch TV and draw, which was absolutely fine with me. I’m all about lying on the couch, explaining stuff we see on the Discovery channel or drawing pictures of the little mermaid. Hayden, on the other hand, had a new game in mind every few minutes. We played checkers, memory, golf, basketball, and a few others I can’t remember.

Here are the rules of any game you play with Hayden-

The bigger person (in this case, me) cannot do much of anything that would garner an advantage. This includes holding the ball out of his reach or anything that takes more coordination than a three year old has. For instance, when playing basketball I was not allowed to dribble or pass the ball through my legs, as these were considered “moves” and strictly forbidden. When playing a game that involved throwing a baseball into a bucket, he was allowed to stand close enough to the bucket that he pretty much just dropped the ball in, while I had to throw it from the neighbor’s yard. Hayden also got 8 points for every successful bucket, while I got 1. Hayden destroyed me 48-2

The rules to any given game can change at any time without notice, particularly when Hayden sees an advantage. Checkers can be jumped two or three at a time, and can move any direction and any number of spaces as long as your name is Hayden.

The memory game is one where he really killed me without even changing the rules very much. We had about 900 cards with different pictures of Mr. Potatohead in different poses on them, all turned face down. You turn two of them over, and if they are a match, you hold on to them. If not, you try to remember where you saw them and I can’t believe I am explaining this game. Anyway, the cards were getting moved around, and Hayden peeked a few times, but he was always right. I was pretty bad at this game. At one point, he even looked at me and said “You’re not very smart, uncle Crusty.”

I had to agree.

At the end of a particularly intense game of memory, he had twice as many matches as I did. I know because he counted them and did the math and then told everyone in the house.

I helped Savannah with her homework. She is being home schooled and is about as smart as I am, which is above average for a six year old. The math problems she had weren’t the 2+4=6 math problems I remember, they were more like “This is an even number. It is the product of a double, and is less than 8 but more than 5. This number is____.”

She pretty much aced that stuff. I thought she got one wrong, but she showed me how to do it and she was right. I used to worry about the social skills of a home-schooled child. Then I went to a local Junior High School to see my old art teacher. I don’t think a kid’s social skills can be much worse than most of the products of our public education system. Yes there are exceptions, and I’m sure your kid is one of them, but you have to admit…

They do alright among themselves, but they are pretty unable or unwilling to talk to adults, and that can hamper one’s ability to succeed. Home schooled kids are very comfortable expressing themselves in front of anyone, and aren’t distracted by trite crap like what everyone else is wearing, so they aren’t intimidated by their peers. That is a much more likely recipe for a leader. Feel free to disagree. I’d like to hear some opinions on that.

Mr. Lee was my first art teacher. He is also the only person aside from my parents who noticed that I knew my way around a pencil and encouraged me to do something with it. That was when I was in 7th grade and he was in his first year of teaching, with a 3 year old daughter. Now he is four years away from retirement and his daughter is 23 and that seems like a long time but doesn’t feel like a long time. Hanging in his office he has a pen and ink sketch I did for him. It is eighteen years old. I bought him lunch since some of the stuff he taught me is now making me a decent living and I figured I owed him something aside from my lifelong adoration.

While Mr. Lee and I were driving around looking for a place to eat, he asked me “Have you gotten to the point in your life where you want to do something that people will remember? Make a difference in some way?”

“yeah. I think about that a lot.”

“What are you going to do? What are you doing right now to make sure it happens?”

I love people who make me think.

Speaking of which, a woman who teaches Literature at NYU and reads this diary (using it as examples of what not to do, I assume) sent me a book a few months back, and I just started reading it. It was written by a friend of hers, and I think he is possibly the best writer I have ever read. If not the best writer, definitely the best thinker. Just when I thought I was getting the hang of this writing stuff, I read a guy who makes me fully appreciate just how little I know. He’s not intelligent in the snobby liberal arts professor way- he seems to the real kind of intelligent: able to examine things from angles most people don’t even consider. He made my list of people I want to meet someday, and his name is Ron Rosenbaum. The book is called “The Secret Parts of Fortune”. It is a collection of columns he has written about everything from the flawed Zagat reviews to Hitler. Skip around the book and read whatever you feel like reading. It’s all good.

Here is an excerpt, reprinted without permission from the author. He is describing something I have tried unsuccessfully to describe, and that is my underwhelmedness at the side of art and theater that seems to only be appreciated by people with a need to appear somehow more erudite than the rest of us, disguising their prejudice and bigotry under a thin veil of pseudo-culture.

“…in one way or another, I always seem to find myself at the wrong performance. I always seem to be seeing plays that seem utterly unlike what everyone else seems to have seen. I’m forever going to things that have been raved over by critics, chattered about by the chattering classes, awarded prizes and grants, and finding myself thinking–in those moments when I can keep myself awake from the industrial-strength tedium they induce–that this is the most clichéd, empty, contrived piece of ranting I have ever seen. Afterward, I’d find myself wondering, Is it possible I went to the wrong theater; this second-rate, self-satisfied, soporific contrivance can’t be the same stuff that people are taking seriously, can it?
My growing sense that I was seeing the Emperor’s New Play over and over again began to crystallize a few years ago after I’d been stunned by the emptiness of an evening spent watching the almost universally rhapsodized-over Dancing at Lughnasa. Another leaden celebration of the virtues of “ordinary folk” which–to me–radiated a contempt for the poor folk it so condescendingly sought to empathize with, while smugly celebrating its own faux-Chekhovian compassion for their emotionally repressed plight.”

He also hits on the phenomena of urban snobbery, which I have referred to as the “Beatneck” society of urban rednecks in an article I have been working on for some time. Oh, even the most loudly self-proclaimed open minded free thinkers have fallen victim to illiberality. Pretty poetic when you think about it.

So go buy it or rent it or borrow it, but read his book. And to the person who sent it to me (I have since lost your e-mail address), thank you.

Trackback URI |