Month: December 2003

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the dead housewives’

saturday i took pam to see “mona lisa smile”. i wasn’t really forced to go to this film because i’m not really one of those guys who absolutely refuses to go to a “chick flick.” as a matter of fact, i have actually enjoyed a few movies in my life time that many people refer to as “chick flicks” (i’ll never admit to which films these were though). of course, when we got in the theater it was a good guess that some of the guys there had been forced by their female companions to come to the movie. pam turned to me and asked “i wonder exactly how many of the guys here were forced to come to the movie by their dates.”

now, i view the role of a husband as being the protector and provider. therefore, when pam brought up the question it became obvious to me that my role in our relationship was to find out the answer to that question. i decided to ask the guys in the room “how many of the guys in the room have been forced to come by their woman?” it was a risky question because the women in the room could turn on me, but being the provider and protector in tails a bit of risk. so i took up my role and asked the question. immediately several male hands in the room went up and almost as fast several female hands popped, slapped, and hit their dates. truth has it’s consequences. thankfully the other men in the room, rather than me, had to pay the price for their truthful answers.

anyhow, “mona lisa smile” was pretty good though it was a direct rip off of “the dead poet’s society”. of course, “dps” was still much better than “mls”.

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sports parents

many of you (not really sure why i say “many of you” since basically only two people read this thing, but it still makes me feel better to say “many of you”) have heard the stories about parents being way too involved in the sports lives of their kids. you’ve heard of the football parents who started yelling fights with parents from the other team over a call made during the game, the baseball parents who beat up an umpire over a call they disagreed with, and the hockey dad who killed another parent over how his son was playing. these are all terrible events and awful examples of parenting. yet, i think i have found the worst. my kids, adam (9 – almost 10) and noah (7), joined a bowling league for kids. it’s allot of fun to go and watch them. they’ve gotten quite good. i think either one of my kids could probably beat at least half the members of the youth ministry without cheating. of course, there are 10 and 11 year olds there that are much better than either my kids or myself. i regularly bowl in the 160s and 170s. these kids are bowling 180 without breaking a sweat.

their parents are the ones i really enjoy watching because they get into the games more than the kids do. just like at baseball, football, soccer, and all the other kid sports you’ll have parents shouting out encouragement and others who are just shouting. the shouting is the same, but what is shouted is quite different.

“count your boards!”

“which point are you staring at?”

“remember your thumb is your steering wheel!”

“get serious! do you think this is a game?” (my personal favorite one)

it’s all fascinating to watch. on a whole most of the parents are very supportive of everyone and a great deal of fun to be with. it is a just a few of the parents who think this is the pro-bowlers’ tour. their the ones i try to egg on. i figure we’ll get on network news if we get a fight during a kids’ bowling league. then i can jump in front of the camera and say “i knew there was going to be trouble as soon his son aimed three boards off the first point rather than two boards off the second. rather amateurish. when the other players pointed it out the dad just went bezzerk. some people just can’t take the pressure of competitive bowling.”

it’s a dream i have. maybe one day.

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return of the idiot

midnight tuesday i decided it would be a fun thing to see the early viewing of “return of the king”. so i joined a few friends and went to the grand cinema to watch an excedingly long but still very good movie. the whole thing ended at 3:30 a.m. and i made it back home around 4:00 a.m. i went to bed and then woke up in the morning and went to work. it was wednesday which meant a busy day but i made it through it. that’s why at 8:30 p.m. i decided to take adam, my oldest child, to see “return of the king”. this time the movie ended at 12:00 midnight and we made it back home around 1 a.m. now i’m really tired and thinking that it was pretty stupid to stay out so late to watch a movie. i’m too old for this.

btw, “return of the king” is really good and if anyone is going late me know, i’ll consider going again.:)

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world library wrestling

last night i was going to a small christmas party to make an “appearance” (a.k.a. a very short stay just tell the people who were putting on the party that they are important to me and then a rush back home to go to sleep). pam, my wife, asked me if i could drop by the library and return a book on CD/DVD that was due today. it was overdue according to the note we received from the note re received in the mail which said it was due 10 days ago, but according to the stamp they placed in the DVD itself it wasn’t due until the 15th. normally this wouldn’t be a big deal. you are charged .05$ a day for an overdue book and i would gladly give the library .50$ as a contribution. the problem is that DVDs have a late charge of $1.00 per day thus making the late fee on the DVD we had $10. while i would gladly give $.50 for someone else’s mistake $10 is an entirely different story.

so i decided to go to the library and correct the problem. surely any reasonable person would see the stamp inside the DVD and realize the mistake an say “no problem”. of course, i didn’t realize that my problem would be that the library doesn’t hire reasonable people. i went to the jones creek branch of the baton rouge public library and presented my DVD. the male librarian took my borrowed movie/book and then asked me for $10. i told him that there was a problem because the DVD/book had been stamped as being due the 15th and thus not overdue. he said he would look at it and then immediately turned to his computer. he looked at it and then told me “nope, it was due ten days ago.” i grabbed the DVD and showed him the stamp. he looked at it and then said “the computer says it was due 10 days ago. that will be a $10 fine, sir.”

i could continue but i won’t. needless to say we went back and forth like this for awhile. he would say it was due 10 days ago and i would point to the stamp and say it was due today. after innumerable repeats of this scenario i became tired of the whole situation. i reach the conclusion that there were only three options:

1. be a wimp and pay the $10 fine.

2. be a wimp and never go back to the library and continually run from the library collection agency that would be after me.

3. take matters into my own hands and give the librarian an attitude adjustment.

option #3 seems the best so i grabbed that 70 year old man and began to hit him repatedly. he fought like a tiger, a very old tiger but still a tiger, and after knocking over 4 or 5 stacks of books he said i could take the matter up with the main library downtown. victory is mine … i think. it felt good to forcibly convince the guy to let me talk with another person. sometimes you just have to be forceful to get psuedo-results.

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baton rouge brainless driving

i believe i have finished yet another blogging hiatus – actually this was a blogging, journalling, and book reading hiatus – though i did get addicted to a magazine called “relevant” and read it constantly during this episode. these things happen to me every now and then. what happens during them is that my mind sort of cuts off for awhile – it is my belief that during these times my brain actually takes a small holiday to an meditterean beach and relaxes for awhile – this is good for my brain but bad for me. when it happens all i’m able to do is watching movies and play gamecube. i spend the rest of my time walking through life without a brain and therefore running into random objects and making odd sounds every now and then. i walk around all day dazed and confused function on my brain stem only and not participating in any high level functions of humanity.

the weird thing is that i have found through these episodes that you don’t really have to have your brain in order to make it through most of life. in fact, there are sometimes where it might be an advantage not to have a functioning brain – i found that without my brain i now actually understood the drive in window order speaker at burger king, a feat which i can’t do when my brain is working right. the fact that my brain was on vacation until earlier this morning didn’t seem to effect most of the conversations i had with people. i simply nodded and said “oh really” every now and then. this seemed to be all that i really needed to add to most conversations and thefore everything went well without my brain being involved in the process. hearing some people without my brain actually made what they said made sense for the first time.

the coolest of all things was that my baton rouge driving improved dramatically while my brain was off sunning itself. when i was driving without a brain everything all the other drivers on the road did made sense to me. now that i have my mind back from holiday i think half the drivers in baton rouge are homicidal, before i had my brain back i thought they were very good drivers. yesterday, a car racing to get to a stoplight before anyone else seemed reasonable to me. now it just seems stupid.

anyhow, now that i have my brain back from the beach – with a light toasting on it – i can begin to blog again (and journal and read books – though i will continue to read relevant because it’s a pretty good magazine). of course, i’m going to be shouting at insane drivers once again but that a small price to pay in order to have a brain.