A Thousand Miles from Nowhere

Too tired to work. Too awake to sleep. Sitting in a dodgy Ramada Inn watching old videos on YouTube and feeling a bit melancholy. Time don't matter to me.

Word Up

I was just creating a Wordle image for a presentation to depict graphically just how fragmented our client's industry is. Afterward, I decided to throw my whole resume into the Wordle application to see what would happen.

Little Humdrummer Boy

As if the constant "What can I do?" interrogations aren't enough, Son #2 woke up this morning and announced, "I had a dream last night that I was really bored."

Santa, please make it stop. I'm hoping that Christmas should take care of this recurring issue (at least for an hour or two).

I'm bored, they told me
Humdrum pa rum pum
I have nothing to do
Humdrum pum pum pum pum
None of my friends are home
Humdrum pa rum pum
To play driveway hockey
Humdrum pum pum pum humdrum pum pum pum humdrum pum pum pum

So we placate them
Humdrum pa rum pum
With PlayStation

Doolittle

I finally, finally, finally got to see the Pixies last night at the Hammerstein Ballroom. An absolute dream come true. I looooove them. They, as expected, sounded phenomenal. They were unbelievably tight, Kim Deal's voice was haunting, Frank Black can still scream like there's no tomorrow, the guitar riffs were fantabulous, and so on. In an alternate universe, they would have rocked the house but, chalk it up to over-excitement on my part, they seemed almost . . . bored? Soulless? There was zero audience engagement except for a few random sentences from Kim. And the feeling was reciprocated. There was next to no dancing or even movement on the floor. I was expecting rapture, madness, joy, anything. Nope. I've honestly seen more bodies swaying at a church service.

Throughout the show, the Pixies had a vibrant screen of riveting, surrealist film images running behind them and their faces were dimly lit. I seriously think I could have saved a whole heap of money by simply listening to them on my iPod and watching my screen saver. At one point they had cameras lighting the crowd and capturing the first few rows of people on the screen behind them. Overall, it was definitely a cool effect but I couldn't help but feel the irony of paying to hear a band and instead watching the friggin' audience.

Other stage effects included giant, glowing, bulbous orbs and epic amounts of white smoke pouring onto the stage. My friend Petey likened it to a Great White show, "Let's get the hell out of here."

The Pixies have so many great, great songs but the Doolittle set only lasted one hour. The audience had to beg for each encore when it felt wholly premature for them to have exited the stage to begin with. And they were gone so long -- as we watched a film of them repeatedly taking bows -- that we were joking that they were probably already back at their hotel while a roomful of idiots remained clapping. (That could actually be an interesting social experiment. How long would people keep clapping?) But the encores, including Gigantic and Where is My Mind?, were mind blowing and most definitely worth the wait.

They may still be one of the best bands ever but, hands down, Wilco blows them away.

Ganondagan

I took my little scouts to Ganondagan last night. It's the hilltop site of a former Seneca community that once housed 150 communal longhouses and over 4K people. Today, there lies a reconstructed longhouse in the midst of beautiful, rolling hills with hiking paths through the woods.

Our guide took us into the longhouse and tried to direct our imagination back to life in the 1600s. As we were seated on the bottom bunks that lined the walls of the house and faced the firepits, she talked about how the structure was built out of elm bark, selling pelts to the traders, herbal medicines, marriage between different tribal families, hunting at the age of 12, etc.

My kids were bored, bored, bored. Much akin to our dreaded ride aboard the Sam Patch last summer, our family apparently doesn't like to learn about the area's rich history in our spare time. In retrospect, since most of my childhood was spent in abject fear of my parents foisting another achingly dull museum tour on us (with my dad eternally chiming, "some day you'll regret this," under the misguided assumption that we would one day grow up to be cultural sophisticates), I guess I shouldn't have been surprised. Like mother/like sons.

At the end, a few kids asked questions such as, "It's cold in here. Didn't they suffer from hypothermia?" but after a few minutes of Q&A, one kid finally raised his hand and asked, "Is this thing almost over?" Thankfully, he wasn't one of mine.

Unlike the scouts, I loved it. I could have stayed all night. I wanted to try on the deerskin dress with the fringe and wrap myself in a pelt. I would love to have taken off my shoes and felt the hard, cold soil against my feet. I wanted to light a fire and . . . yeah, okay, I wouldn't know how to cook anything. How did they survive without takeout?

But here's what amazed me the most: the men would walk to places as far away as the Mississippi River to hunt and gather skins to be traded. That's 1500 miles round trip, sans GPS, and they would find their way back to that same, obscure hillside in the middle of nowhere. I would get lost in the woods in two seconds flat-- nevermind trying to figure out which hill, of all the gazillion hills in upstate NY, my family lived on.

Can you hear me now?

Deliver Us From Email

Our family's latest Sunday ritual involves whining the following line repeatedly: Do I have to go to church?

Last Sunday, I said to Son #1, "Maybe you could attempt this week to listen to the sermon because it's usually pretty interesting."

He responded, "I tried that last time. It was so boring that I began praying to God that he would knock me out. Hit me over the head. Anything so I could black out and then come to again when it was over."

It served as a nice reminder to me of why God doesn't answer all prayers.

Mini-washout: haikus

mini-weekend thwart
heaps of data analyzed
workday almost done

eighty-eight worksheets
performance v. importance
gap analysis

revenue decline
profitability down
op costs sloping up

count if cell not blank
vlookup tables galore
i've become a bore

The Usual

My co-worker Jennifer is (thankfully) back from a week of NASCAR at Daytona Beach.

"Hey, what did I miss around here?"

Oh, other than a downed plane, a beheading and a killing spree, not much. It's always so quiet here in this bedroom community.

Rockin the Suburbs

I just read, or rather attempted to read, Restless Virgins, a story presumably about a sex scandal that rocked Milton Academy in 2005. The book is, more accurately, a one dimensional chronicle of teen hook-ups (I'm too old to care) and tracks a number of kids through their sexual exploits and/or teen heartaches. And the "scandal" -- which is nested in the center of the book and barely makes a dent in the reading -- seems like just another day in the life of these kids except that they got caught. Rather, the whole scene is scandalous and belongs in Penthouse Forum Junior (if there was such a thing).

I put down the book midway through and thought to myself, "I'm so glad that I never had to compete with my friends sexually." Things really were so much more innocent 25-30 years ago. Yes, I had some promiscuous friends but they were more the exception than the norm. I think.

Then I went out for a quick cocktail with my neighbors last night. Women who live in all of the homes surrounding mine but who, with the exception of a couple, I really don't know. Women who, I just came to find out, dine naked with their husbands IN THEIR BACKYARDS wearing nothing but red pumps. Women who apparently howl so loud with their husbands from their hot tubs that they caused a lot of laughter at the table last night. Women who boast about breaking their headboards.

I can't compete at that level. With the exception of my classically dressed next door neighbor and a couple of slightly more casual friends, I was also the only one not (as her husband later put it), "cougared up." My green t-shirt with bright pink belt on white cotton shorts was no match for all of the black-on-black ensembles I was seated with. Which also begs the question: Was this a casual night out for the girls or were they headed later to the Academy Awards? I somehow missed that portion of the invite.

Anyhoo, I'm thinking I should climb up into the tree house over the weekend to make some crazy noises. As Bonnie Rait once said, "Let's give 'em something to talk about."

Or maybe not.

Yay! Back to Work!

Yes, it's good to be back at work. Oh wait, no. It's Sunday. Whaaaaaaaaat am I doing here? Ah yes, enjoying the sunshine and warmth after a cold, windy trip to Florida . . . and deleting the majority of my 664 new email messages. No need for a replica watch, discount medications or penis enlargement.

My post on Disney World will have to wait until I have less work to catch up on. But here are a couple of my favorite conversations held at Disney last week.

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Kid to mom while walking past my kids who were swimming on a 60 degree day: "Mom, what are those kids doing in the pool?"

Mom: "They must be from Michigan."

Right concept. Wrong state.

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Teenage girl underneath large picture of Steven Tyler: "Ew. Look at that guy's huge mouth."

Her friend: "Oh, I think he used to be famous. It's what's his name."

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Bus driver: "Please be careful when disembarking."

Son #2: "Is disembarking when you suck all your puke back in?"

Me: "It's bark with a 'k' not disembarfing. It means getting off the bus."

Son #1: "Why didn't he just say that then?"

Good question.

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Son #2: "They should have a restaurant at Disney's Hollywood Studios called 'Straw Wars.' "

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Conversation in restaurant after I let my kids blend their own Sprite, Root Beer and Fanta Orange concoctions.

Older woman: "Are you boys having fun in Disney?"

Son #2: "Yeah! Our mom is letting us have mixed drinks."

Hello social services.

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And my least favorite of the lot . . .

Son #1 on day two: "I'm bored."

Hello Prozac.

Nature vs. Nurture

It's amazing to me how different two kids, same sex, same parents, roughly the same age, can be.

While the oldest, whose "brain is on fire with math," is content inside playing video games and watching Naruto on beautiful summer days, the youngest wakes up, opens his eyes and immediately says, "I'm bored."

He is in constant need of playing catch, going to the playground, hitting baseballs, playing basketball/soccer/hockey, riding his scooter, learning to ride his bike, etc. Every moment is an "Can I go outside?" moment. "Not yet Monkey, it's not even 8:00 a.m.; we don't want to wake the neighbors."

Yesterday, he spent the entire day making obstacle courses in the front yard, arranging and rearranging items, so that he could run, weave in and out, climb and jump. He and the little girls across the street were competing while I held the watch and timed them. Although he's pretty careful, he still takes some crazy chances -- especially when he's out of breath and should be resting for a moment but instead he's leaping off things and flying to the ground.

I just hope he can sit behind a desk for an entire day in first grade this year!