Prompt 2: A Photo of Yourself and a Description of How Your Day Was

First, a photo of me, taken on this very day

What is noticeably lacking here is the really stellar sunburn
I've since developed.  Photo is courtesy of Kara

And now a description of my day: 

It was sort of up and down.

I began by waking up at 7:30 am which was vulgar and unacceptable.  So I dozed more and less deeply till 9:00 when I woke up properly and commenced worrying about arriving at Thanksgiving Point on time to meet Kara at 11.  This proved to be both completely unnecessary and also very on point when Kara texted to tell me she was running late and we should bump our rendezvous back to noon...and yet, despite having been ready to go in time to make the original appointment, I still managed to arrive 20 minutes late.  

The plan was to catch the last day of the Thanksgiving Point annual tulip festival.  Tulips are Kara's favorite flower, so she tries to go every year.  I had never been, but it sounded lovely so I decided to make the pilgrimage.  Unfortunately, it seems that every other human along the Wasatch front had the same thought.  The place was crawling with humanity.  

Since I had previously informed Kara of my need of a picture of myself to post today, we were planning on taking one amongst the tulips.  The hordes of humans, however, proved an endless source of annoyance to Kara's photographic sensibilities.  Nevertheless, we perservered and took several pictures.  I also learned that over the last several months I have completely lost the ability to smile on command.  When I try I start thinking about each muscle that I'm using to form the expression and suddenly it feels like a completely unnatural shape for my face to be in and I can feel my expression sliding from smile to terrifying grimace.  Apparently my natural response to this experience is to assume what Kara not at all affectionately refers to as "The Face."  The Face, so I'm told, appears to express my extreme confidence in the stupidity of the person at which I am looking.  Unfortunately, it seems The Face comes of its own accord and without my conscious knowledge or effort.  It appears to be the product of me striving for a non-grimace-like expression.  I'm not sure what that says about me, but I know it must be something...

There was one good thing, however, which came out of my loss of facial abilities.  At one point a woman, overhearing Kara yelling at me to smile like a normal person, stood behind her and started making ridiculous faces at me to make me laugh.  Even more awesome, this then inspired a completely separate random Indian couple to also start making faces and giving me jazz hands.  This is possibly the most fantastic thing any stranger has ever done for me.

Hordes, grimaces, and some really unseasonable heat aside, the tulips were quite lovely.  Nothing makes me quite so happy as flowers.  I found myself missing Kew Gardens quite a lot as we ambled.  

After the tulips my day took a turn for the incredibly boring and mundane.  Much of it was spent resisting the urge to take a nap.  I wrote my blog post for yesterday, finally started reading Way of Kings (Mike lent it to me about 50 years ago), and chatted with Kara and Matt.

It was when Kara sent me a few of the pictures for this post that things took a dip.  When I look at myself in the mirror I don't think I look skinny, but I also don't think I look gigantic either.  But the first thing I thought when I saw these pictures was how I just looked like a morbidly obese blob.  Was that really what I looked like all day?  I thought I looked ok...

It was on that depressing note that I took off to satisfy my week-long craving for fish and chips.  And while I normally have no problem going out to eat alone, having set out already primed for melancholy, it hit me hard throughout dinner.  I had chosen to bring along a really abysmal book called Love Walked In (when the waitress asked why I was reading a bad book I explained that I hadn't wanted to get anything on any of my good books) which spends the first 30% of its pages describing a completely ridiculous romance.  Ridiculous though it was, even with such painful prose, I still got all pathetic and wistful.  The Lonlies plus the Loathings are a dark combination...

And that brings us to right now.  

You'll be glad to know that I am forcing myself to look at those pictures with a positive outlook.  I am trying to put my ideals into practice, as it were, in terms of self-love.  It's a struggle, but as you can see, I posted one of them, as instructed, at the beginning of this post.  I feel like that is a step in the right direction.  Against all expectations, my mood is looking slightly up (I feel like there's a Sunday School lesson in there for anyone who wishes to tease it out into full development) and I plan on watching a movie before I go to bed.  

Coming up tomorrow we have prompt 3: My Idea of the Perfect Date.  That should be interesting, so stay tuned!

Day 1: Are Writing Prompts Always Stupid? I Hope Not...

You guys, I'm already behind.  This is so sad.

Ok, so I am officially starting the 30 days of prompts.  Prompt #1 was to post a picture of something I ate today...or, in this scenario, something I ate yesterday.  That is the world's stupidest prompt and since facebook is already swamped in food selfies, I refuse.  Also, I ate very little yesterday and have pictures of none of it.  So I shall instead write about...

Day 1 [as suggested by Kara]: my most poignant/evocative smell

I've never really considered my sense of smell to be terribly keen, to be honest.  But I can tell you that there were two smells that instantly came to mind when Kara gave me this prompt, and they both come from my grandparents' old place in New Mexico.

The first is the smell of my grandma's food room.  Imagine a dark, mysterious room out in the barn that you've only ever been inside a few times.  In my memory it was lit with a single low-wattage bulb, giving me only partial view of lines and lines of jars from ceiling to floor.  Those jars held magical things like canned peaches and pears and cherries and surely many many others though I have no idea, now, precisely what.  We lived in New Mexico, but that room was always cool, no matter how hot it was.  I'm realizing now, thinking back on it, that she must have packed oodles of insulation on the walls, which would explain why I remember the door being so thick, like the door to a vault.  Somehow it smelled cool in there.  I don't know how.  But it was the smell of cool, just ever so slightly damp soil, mixed with glass, and a hint of dust.  As a child it was purely exciting to me, signaling my presence in a room as mysterious and promising as Lucy's wardrobe must have felt.  Now that I'm an adult, I still get that same feeling of expectant excitement, as though I can find a treasure if I explore long enough, but I also feel utterly comforted and at home.  I judge all food rooms based on the presence or lack of that smell.  My mom's food room in Union has it.  The last time I was in my aunt Marge's it also had it.  Those are the only other places I have found it.  But it makes them two of my favorite places in the world.

As for the second smell...let me tell you a story.  Perhaps the most revolting of all of my habits as a wee toddler was the intense joy I had in sucking on my grandpa's watch.  Mind you, my grandfather's primary business, as I remember it, was selling bolts and nuts, and his spare time was devoted to manly tasks like clearing land or simply washing his hands with grease and machine oil.  Thus, his watch was absolutely caked in years of collected oil, dirt, and other grime.  Sitting on his lap and sucking on that disgusting watch I apparently absorbed, all unknowing, the scent of machine oil straight into my amygdala where it lurked in secret till last year, when Caleb bought his CnC mill.  He put it in his garage, where it sat for a day or two seeping the smell of machine oil into the entire room.  I opened the door and it was as though I was walking into a hug from my grandpa.  I literally stood in the doorway inhaling deep breaths for minutes.  It smells a little bit like gasoline mixed with dirt.

Thusfar, those are the two smells that have had the most profound visceral effect on my memory.  Interesting that they both are related to my grandparents, and I described both as reminding me of dirt.  I don't know what that means.

Coming up next time (later today) is prompt #2: Post a picture of yourself and describe your day (seriously, who is writing these???)

A Brief Thought About Presents

So I decided that, as I am newly graduated and free to bestow my time however I wish, I wanted to try a blog challenge where I post every day for a month.  I then promptly forgot to post anything yesterday, aka the first day of the month, simply, I presume, to prove to myself that I'm not the boss of me.  But it actually works out.  I have one serious (ish) post that I want to write, and then I have this blog-meme my friend Laura gave me one billion years ago with 30 days of prompts that I've wanted to do for said one billion years.  So this way I shall write my real(ish) post for yesterday as though it isn't actually part of the month, and then start with the goofy posts from there on out.  

So, without further ado, here is my non-prompted post of yesterday (just pretend like it's May 1st, ok?)

~~~

...

hm.

I wanted to write a post about gifts, and how I feel about them. Because I love them, and I feel like so many people have a really hard time with them. I had this big long post all written out and I kind of hated it. Then I was talking to Caleb about it and he said that he dislikes getting presents. When I asked him why he thought about it and then told me about a miniature ship his parents brought him back from a vacation, and the little wooden airplane stocking-stuffer he got one Christmas. He said those were his favorite gifts he's ever received. Gifts that were a physical representation of  people he loves and cares about thinking of him. I feel like this sums up everything I wanted to say. That is exactly why I love presents. They tell me that someone loves me and cares about me. They could be ridiculously over the top like a graduation iPad, or as small as a pint of chocolate milk for no reason at all. No matter the size or the cost, when they simply express someone's love they are literally the best.  And I guess that's all I have to say about that.

Graduation: A Summary

I am a college graduate.

In a matter of two days I crossed the threshold from student to…bachelor? Plain old label-less human? At any rate, not a student. Thursday, out-going university president Cecil Samuelson “bestowed” upon me and one or two thousand others a degree, the physical manifestation of which will arrive in a couple of weeks via the thoroughly unceremonious United States Postal Service. Friday I was handed an empty vinyl cover in which that magical piece of paper will eventually reside.  I shook the hands of men I'd never before laid eyes on and walked from one side of a stage to the other. Thusly was my education declared complete and my life, as a student, pronounced over. 

If all of this sounds like I am terribly prosaic and unsentimental, I am. If you recall, I have previously declared a complete apathy for engaging in the ceremonial hoop-jumping known as walking for graduation. To me a nine year bachelor’s degree feels less like something to celebrate than something to just get over with as soon as possible…    

The problem is that, though probably less so than it was in high school, a student’s graduation is by no means an achievement which belongs solely or even mostly to them. Even a relatively self-sufficient person like me is still indebted to her parents to some extent, albeit perhaps more in intangibles than otherwise*. Hence I feel that all this pomp and circumstance surrounding graduation is not so much for the graduate’s sake as for the family’s. Which is why I decided not to let my graduation pass silently in the night like my brother. Well, that and I was hoping for congratulatory cash donations. Because I’m classy like that. And poor. Mostly poor. 

Unfortunately, letting your family celebrate your achievements isn’t exactly fun for them when you yourself couldn’t care less about them. In fact, I can tell you from my own experience that it’s actually incredibly irritating and insulting. So it behooved me to strive after some level of engagement in the hoopla which, after all, was specifically for me (and also Dan). 

Alas, behoovement does not engagement make. 

It doesn’t help that there are apparently only two questions anyone can think to ask you post-graduation.  “Do you feel any different?” and “So what’s next?” These are especially trying when you have weaned yourself out of school as gradually as I have. I had exactly zero changes pending the ceremony and, in fact, slightly resented it for awkwardly interrupting my regular schedule. If nothing else, this makes for dull conversation—though I discovered on Sunday that it is still preferable to the guy who uses his congratulations to humblebrag about his own self-funded education, graduation, and consequent disposal of student debt 25 years ago (after his fourth or fifth assertion of hatred at the idea of dragging that debt around with him I was forced to reply “Oh really?  Because I just love it!” because I can only handle so much humblebragging)

In the end, I guess I can be grateful to the fifteen year campaign my brother and I have inadvertently waged upon my mother to strip her of any vestige of hope for a nice family moment. Sadly, we not only lack sentimentality for educational milestones, but for pretty much every other thing my mom cares about. Because my mom is practically nothing but sentiment. Poor woman was somehow cursed with two pragmatically stoic children who could never satisfy her need for heartfelt and teary-eyed moments. But despite my mom’s enduring optimism on this front, Dan’s and my war of attrition has, at least, conditioned her to accept an incredibly low level of participation as satisfactory. She’s like an emotional migrant worker living through the Dust Bowl years of her children’s lives—she can make do with practically nothing. 

This is not to say that I didn’t try. I sincerely tried to glean wisdom from [stay awake through] the speeches, even the incredibly pompous student speaker on Friday. I rebuked myself when snarky commentary about all the arbitrary traditions rose, unbidden, to my lips. I even pulled out Rory’s graduation from Yale to strive after inspiration.

Alas, it was all in vain.  I am as I am; incredibly unimpressed with the ceremony of graduating college.

Luckily, as anyone who has ever talked to me about my birthday can attest, I do love any occasion where my friends and family get together, especially if it involves presents and/or food (as we all know, food is kind of like a very frequent gift to your mouth, so they’re basically the same thing).  Therefore, on that front—that is, the front where tradition dictates the giving of some sort of graduation gift—I found the weekend to be quite nice.

Of course, I admit this with some embarrassment, though my feelings on being an enthusiastic receiver of gifts should probably wait for another post.  Suffice it to say, I have a feeling that it is generally deemed tacky to openly admit that you look forward to events for the presents.  But in this case my natural tackiness came to my assistance, buoying me up to find some enjoyment in an otherwise boring and rather inconvenient weekend.  If I couldn’t muster a tear for the ending of an era, at least I could easily smile for the bouquet of lovely flowers I received to commemorate it!

Thus my favorite part of my graduation weekend had nothing to do with actually graduating, save that it was the occasion that brought us together. And that was our big dinners Thursday and Friday nights. All four of my parents were there (a first-time experience that I very much enjoyed) as well as some of my closest friends. There was delicious food and even a couple really fantastic gifts. 

I am left wishing that it didn’t require some arbitrary ceremony or “milestone” for people who love each other to get together and eat and even give each other presents. If I had the money, I would make weekends like this happen far more often…only without the polyester robes, ridiculous hats, and time wasted in uncomfortable chairs. Perhaps then I wouldn’t be left with a vague feeling of failure at the end. Regardless, I am glad that I got to see my family this weekend, and even that I graduated, though that’s more in an abstract, reasoned sense than any sort of emotional response. That’s how I feel. 

And before you ask, I don’t know what’s next…

*Let us pause a moment for the obligatory disclaimer about how I’m making some assumptions here and that I acknowledge that actually there are plenty of kids who may not have anything at all to thank their parents for and I’m sorry if they’re feeling marginalized right now and they have my sincere apologies

Current Events

Guys, I'm legitimately curious about something.  A while back I saw something about OKCupid calling on all of its members to boycott Firefox because of Mozilla's appointment of an "anti-gay" CEO (I have no idea what criteria they used to declare him as "anti-gay").  Today I saw a headline declaring that that same CEO has resigned due to that boycott, employee protests, and upper level management resignations.  This reminds me of the uproar over Orson Scott Card writing for Superman (not to mention the production of Ender's Game) despite his outspoken condemnation of homosexuality.  Again there were resignations and protests and calls for him to lose the job (I don't know if he actually did or not).

While I definitely appreciate that people have the right to withhold their business from those they find offensive, and I also appreciate that companies can hire and fire who they like, and I even agree with many of the underlying beliefs with prompt these people to protest....I can't help but feel uncomfortable with these stories.

Particularly when I see celebratory comments announcing that this is a win in the fight against hate.

Is it?  Because...I'm not exactly feeling a lot of love from the protesters...

This is the OED definition of "coerce"

To constrain or restrain (a voluntary or moral agent) by the application of superior force, or by authority resting on force; to constrain to compliance or obedience by forcible means; 'to keep in order by force'

It concerns me that when you cost someone their job because you disagree with their personal beliefs--beliefs that thusfar have had no demonstrable effect on that job--you are possibly crossing the line from expressing your own opinion to coercing those who disagree with you.  

So my question is, in the quest for equality are some lines being crossed that maybe ought not to be?  Or am I just suffering the pangs that all privileged individuals feel when their privilege begins to be taken away?  Is it coercion to actually stop someone working because you disagree with them?  Does it matter if it is?  I'm not sure...

What do you all think?

Divergent diverges not very far at all...

Guys, how long has it been since I wrote a movie review?  Since The Great Gatsby I think. Wow, that's a long time.  Probably because I hardly ever see movies in the theatre anymore.  But I did last night.  Saw Divergent with my good friend Mike.  We were both inspired to see the film after we read this article about the "rape scene" in the film (in the interest of accuracy, it's not exactly a rape scene).  Aside from that article and one other, I literally knew nothing about either the books or the movie--nothing about the plot or the themes or the characters.

So I came to the movie as an almost entirely clean slate.  And the overall reaction?  It was pretty good.  But it had a lot more potential than it actually fulfilled.

Quick summary (there be spoilers ahead), for those who want it:  Post the traditional "devastating war" society has once again withdrawn behind a great big wall that shields them from the mysterious "other side."  To maintain peace after said war society was divided into five "factions" which each are built around a specific characteristic: Amity (they're nice), Abnegation (they're selfless), Erudite (the smarties), Candor (totes honest), and Dauntless (brave).  Each faction is in charge of certain aspects of life that suits their strengths.  At 16, after taking a test which supposedly tells you in which faction you belong, you then get to decide which you will belong to for the rest of your life notakebacksforever.  Enter Beatrice "Triss" Prior, born Abnegation, but super conflicted cause she just doesn't naturally let people take advantage of her.  This is reinforced when she takes the test and, instead of neatly fitting into one faction or another, qualifies for three: abnegation, erudite, and dauntless.  This is known as being "divergent" and is apparently real bad.  At the ceremony she makes the difficult decision to abandon her family and join Dauntless (faction over blood so she's basically leaving them behind forever).  Having joined Dauntless she enters into a rigorous training program because the Dauntless are the police force.  Smaller and weaker than nearly everyone else, she struggles to keep up during the first, physical phase of testing.  But in phase two, focusing on mental training, she suddenly shoots ahead of everyone.  It is here her "divergent" qualities emerge as she is able to deal with the mental testing far too easily.  But this is also dangerous, because the better she does in the tests the more evident it becomes that she is divergent....and oh my gosh, the bad guys (Erudites...because everyone knows that heroes are strong and villains are smart) are hunting down divergents cause they're dangerous...because reasons.  Obligatory Love Interest (hereafter known as Eyebrows and Lips because his real name is equally stupid) teaches her how to beat the tests like a true dauntless, however, and she manages to pass her final test undetected and graduate from initiate to official Dauntless.  Just in time for the climactic fulfillment of the evil Erudite plan...which is to drug all the Dauntless into mindless drones who will obey the Erudite's orders to go massacre the Abnegations...because no one can stand those selfless bastards anyway.  But handy!  When you're divergent you're also magically immune to the drone drug!  So Triss and Eyebrows and Lips (who is a sort of...intentionally cultivated divergent?  it's not clear) break away, shoot some people, get captured, Eyebrows and Lips is taken away by Darkest Timeline Kate (Winslet), but Triss is saved by Action Hero Ashley (Judd), also known as her mother who turns out was born a dauntless.  There's fighting and Triss rescues Eyebrows and Lips and together they save the day and then run away with a few friends outside the wall into exile to await the sequel where they'll, no doubt, lead a rebellion/revolution. (end of spoilers)

Shailene Woodley plays the main character, Beatrice (shortened to Triss early in the film).  Ms. Woodley also played Alex King in 2011's The Descendants, which you may know as a movie that I absolutely adore.  This was the only other thing I knew about the movie and I'll admit that it was a big draw.  She had done an incredibly good job as the struggling but ultimately good daughter in The Descendants and really impressed me.  And she did an equally good job in Divergent.  Triss could very easily be ruined in the translation to the big screen, becoming one dimensional and irritating--an especially alarming possibility since the entire basis for the character is that she specifically isn't one particular thing but many).  But Shailene really managed to create a complex character who is both brave AND self-sacrificing AND intelligent.  And even more impressively, she did so in a way that made her believable.  This was augmented by giving her believable physical abilities--namely, she, a tiny little girl who has never hit anyone in her life, is pretty consistently owned in every physical fight she gets into.  Let's all take a moment to celebrate the non-existence of any "waif-fu" in this movie.  By the end she does manage to hold her own for at least a few minutes before being laid waste but that feels more like a realistic development of her abilities due to hard work over time.

Shailene is supported by a nice cast of surrounding characters.  Eyebrows and Lips seems a little too beautiful (hence his name here) but puts in a pretty solid performance for a generic character.  But my favorites were Triss's friends.  They gave great performances and their relationships felt realistic and grounded.  I particularly liked Zoe Kravitz (yes, Lenny's daughter) who looks like a cross between her daddy and Kerry Washington.  She delivered her "candor" lines believably and she and Triss worked off each other nicely.

And as the original article I linked to discusses, the movie is definitely an impressive effort at bringing a real "strong female character" to the screen.  Triss's bodily autonomy is zealously defended.  She is independent and able to enforce her own decisions.  She manages to be a fighter without being completely cold and emotionless, which seems to be a very common trend in characterizing "strong" women.  And while she retains a great deal of selflessness, a solid argument can be made that it is the product of her upbringing rather than her gender.  Overall there are some really worthy ideas that they're tucking into the film.

But guys...there's some issues.  The premise itself seems pretty deeply flawed to me, and then the specific plot was kind of arbitrary.  Apparently the Abnegations run the government because they're selfless, but the Erudites want to seize control because...they want the power I assume?  But that's never stated, instead you have Darkest Timeline Kate, apparently the architect of this plan, asserting that she believes in her cause--indeed, she is willing to die for it.  But...what is her cause?  Because being willing to die for power doesn't quite make sense.  So what is she so passionate about?  I mean, she says several times that Abnegations are going to destroy the peace...but she never explains how.  There's just a whole bunch of sort of implied accusations and nothing concrete.  It was frustrating.

Additionally, it was painfully predictable.  I don't know how many times I leaned over to Mike and called exactly what was going to happen in the next moment.  I am, however, sort of lenient with predictability in films because the opposite problem--twists simply for the sake of twists--is infinitely more grating to me.

I did find the idea interesting.  Telling people what they are and then shutting them into societies built around that one trait so that they never try to develop any further aspects of themselves has some really interesting potential.  But I'm not sure that they followed through on the full possibilities of it.  They touched on it a bit with Eyebrows and Lips when he says that he wants to be more than just one thing.  But perhaps that further development will happen in the second story?

I think that in the end my biggest complaint is somewhat more meta than just this one film.  It is a complaint about the way YA books are adapted into movies, over and over again.  Let's look at some trailers.  First, here's the trailer for this movie:

How about The Hunger Games

The Host

Do you notice how all of these kind of feel the same?  Let's try one that's a little more fantasy

Those are all pretty recent, let's look at one that is sci fi and based on a pretty classic book

Huh...it somehow still looks...just the same.

Now lets look at a trailer that was just released for one of the greatest YA books ever written, The Giver

.....


....

....

wow.  Exactly the same.

Now, if any of you have read The Giver, and I sincerely hope you all have, you know that if ever there was a book that did not fit in the "heroic action adventure" category this is it.  The Giver is about reason and emotion and decision making and many fantastic things...but it is definitely not about action.  And if anyone had, for some reason, called me up and asked me if I had any ideas about how to make a movie of The Giver I could have given you plenty.  Creative and different ideas that would work with or maybe even enhance the natural strengths of the story.  I'm not being arrogant here, I'm pretty sure that any fan of the book could do the same if they tried for 10 seconds.  But what do we get here?  Perhaps the most egregious example of the same movie that they've now been making for years, with an almost insulting effort at ill-deserved legitimacy in the casting of some big names (but really Meryl...it actually hurts me that you're in this).  Say what you want about the source material being similar (I won't argue that there's a disturbing lack of innovative creativity in contemporary YA lit), if The Giver is being steamrolled flat into the same exact movie as the rest then it is clear that the source material has only the very most cosmetic influence on the actual move.  As my brother said "we based this movie on the title of a popular book."

And that was my biggest complain about Divergent.  Instead of trying to make a complex interesting movie that excels in different or unusual ways, they made the only kind of movie they think you can make--pretty people fighting in exciting action scenes.  And sure, the book may be a generic entry into the Hunger-Games-inspired dystopian YA genre (I'll let you know once I've finished reading it).  But the thing is, and this is the most frustrating part, you can still see the echoes of interesting and unique ideas; however they're like over cooked vegetables...recognizable as something that once had nutritional value, but now just a soggy mess.  

But as I said, that is more of a meta criticism leveled at Hollywood in general.  If I set aside that overarching annoyance I can say that I liked this movie more than I expected to.  I went in fully prepared to enjoy myself MST3K style, but ended up appreciating the movie for its merits rather than its mockable potential.  So maybe go see it...but I support you if you decide to wait for it to hit the dollar theatre.

Hal Steinbeigle

It was my dad's birthday last week.  I've been thinking about this post for a while now, but I think it was his birthday that finally prompted me to put everything into words.  I'm kind of nervous to share this because, while I meant it to be happy, and I feel like I said the good things I wanted to say, I am aware that there's a long of hard stuff here.  And I don't want to hurt my dad's feelings anymore than I already have in the past.  But I also really feel like I want to say all this aloud, so...dad, please take this as I meant it--and that is with the very best of intentions...

Several years ago I had a different blog on a different website.  There were only about three people who read that blog and to be honest, I thought of it more like an online journal that a couple of my friends happened to read than a public forum.  But apparently I had, at some point early in the blog's history, given the address to my dad and, unbeknownst to me, he was reading at least some of my posts there.  He read one, in particular, that I regret to this day.  I'm not really sure what it was about, but in it I talked about how sad I've always felt that I never got to have the doting father/daughter relationship I would see in movies or books.  I talked about it at some length because it honestly has been a sore point to me for most of my life.

Some time after that, during one of his weekly calls, my dad brought that blog post up.  He had read it and he was sad and I think a bit hurt by what I'd said.  Understandably so.  He told me that he'd always loved me and doted on me.  I don't remember exactly what I said to him but it was something along the lines of "it's ok dad, don't worry about it" and I left it at that.  I don't think I particularly believed him, but I didn't really think about it.

You see, I've long believed that, despite what they say about divorce--how it's so terrible and hard on the children and it inevitably leaves scars--my parents' divorce was the lone exception to that rule.  I didn't think  that I had any of that baggage that they say every kid picks up.  That might sound stupid, but that is legitimately what I thought for many many years.  But you're right.  It was stupid.

I say that with all due respect to my mother.  I know that she and my dad both did the very best they could to keep me and Dan out of the divorce.  But unfortunately, there's only so much you can do in a situation like that, and so some of my mom's feelings got passed along to me.  And I think I picked up a few on my own.

Because I had a hard time with my dad growing up.  Not a dramatic hard time.  We didn't get into screaming matches or have knock-down-drag-out fights.  But that may just be because that is neither my style nor my dad's.  Instead, I just didn't like him.  I went through a very distinct phase of disliking my dad at every age.  I remember explaining that, though I loved my dad--you have to love your dad--I didn't like him.  I hated it whenever anyone would tell me I was like him in anyway--that I looked like him or acted like him or thought like him.  I didn't want any part of him.

And I thought I didn't have any baggage from the divorce?

Once I hit college I thought I was over my childhood issues with my dad.  We talked fairly regularly and I didn't dislike him anymore.  I didn't really have any opinion about him at all.  He was just there.  I could honestly tell him not to worry about it when he called upset about a blog post where his daughter complained that she hadn't felt loved by her daddy...

I'm sad to say that it wasn't until these last few years that I've finally begun to really look at my relationship with my dad.  Rather, I've finally begun to really look at my dad himself.  Because I think that has been one of the biggest problems for me...

I haven't ever looked at my dad as an actual person.

Some several months ago I asked my dad for the first time ever why he went inactive after he and my mom got divorced.  I was surprised when he told me that it was because he felt ashamed and embarrassed...just like my mom had felt.

During a Thanksgiving visit (either last year's or the year before) dad and I were walking together, just the two of us.  I think I asked him about how my Uncle Phil and Aunt Vickie had started dating, but he ended up just telling me stories about all of them in college.  I had never heard any of them before.

And then there was the time maybe a year or two ago.  We were talking on the phone.  I have no idea how it came up, but dad told me about one of his favorite memories of me when I was a baby.  He said he loved to come home from work and put on music and sit with me on the floor and I would "dance" the way babies dance.

That conversation was the turning point for me.

I know it was probably just a bit of conversation for my dad, but the fact is...I cannot remember any sweet simple moments like that with my dad.  Beyond that, I can't remember him ever even telling me about any thing like that.  Until that conversation.  At that moment I realized that I didn't really know anything about my dad, either when I was a baby or at any other time in his life.

I had an epiphany about the divorce and my baggage, and it was that I had it.  I had picked up my mom's pain, and my own, and from a very young age my dad had ceased to be a person and had instead simply become a sort of blank figure that had failed to be around.  And for the first time I could see that and how it had warped my opinion of him from my earliest memories till that moment.  And I realized that I was not happy with that fact.

I can't really explain a process or describe an overt effort.  I don't even know if, should you ask my dad, he would be aware that anything about our relationship has changed in the last few years.  But I can tell you that it has.  Because I like my dad now.  And I love him--not just because everyone has to love their father.

I found some letters over Christmas that he and my mom had written to my Uncle Adam while he was on his mission.  I discovered that my dad's cursive handwriting (at least at that time) looked exactly like mine, and it made me happy.  Because I no longer hate the idea that any part of me comes from my dad.  I am sporadically and strangely left-handed, which I can only assume comes from him.  We both enjoy walking instead of driving.  We both like debating with people (some might call it arguing).  And we have a shared love of books and movies.  I know that my love of analyzing and evaluating stories comes from him; he is the best and only person I call to have those sorts of conversations.  After twentysome years of rejecting any similarities with my dad I am at last appreciating each and every one I can find.

I know this seems like more of a painful blog post than a happy one to dedicate to someone for their birthday.  Unfortunately, the past is the past and I cannot change what was.  But I wanted to make it clear exactly where I have come from so that it would be in context, with it's full significance, when I say that I love my dad and I am grateful to have him as my parent and friend.  I may not have known it growing up, but I know now that he loves me.  I am sorry for my behavior as a child, a teenager, and a young adult.  I'm sorry for my insensitivity and ignorance.  And I want to thank him for enduring all of it.  He has stuck with Daniel and I the best he could and I am lucky.  I admit, sometimes I'm a little bit jealous of my little brother Seth.  He's getting the childhood with my dad that I never got to have.

But the good news is that we get to have the rest of our lives to make up for that.