Sitting in my chair at the table, Bookzilla crawls into my lap. Since she is now 14, 5’9″, 120 lbs, this isn’t the same as when she was little. I worry that the chair, a resin arm chair, will break under the strain and try to keep her from wiggling around. JMan has a rich [...]
I’m sitting outside on the balcony of our condo in Kailua and JMan comes up. He asks if Bookzilla can play music on the laptop. I had been singing “Fly Like An Eagle” by Steve Miller while pouring coffee to take out to the balcony. He asks, but it is a wild, scratchy, chortling voice. [...]
JMan has an easy laugh. The other kids like him. He is up more than he is down. I was sitting out side with him on Friday, at a table in front of a Thai restaurant in downtown Kirkland. The waitress had taken our order and I started talking about the future. He stopped me. [...]
At a party recently, I discovered that I was one of the few men who read advice columns. Most of the women read multiple columns, most of the men did not. I started to read them when I got divorced, trying to figure out what happened. What happened is a different story, not to be [...]
JMan is at dinner and his feelings were a little crumpled around the edges. Bookzilla laughed when he started to talk. His feelings got a little more dinged. He started to talk again and Bookzilla waited and zinged him with a laugh at just the right time. I called her on it. I told her [...]
I’ve experienced this. I have not yet characterized it. Scientists say juggling e-mail, phone calls and other incoming information can change how people think and behave. They say our ability to focus is being undermined by bursts of information. These play to a primitive impulse to respond to immediate opportunities and threats. The stimulation provokes [...]
Change happens. Sometimes it happens when you expect it sometimes not. Sometimes it happens even when you thought it never would. Obama getting elected was something that I thought would never happen. DADT ending is another. When I was a soldier, I wouldn’t say that I was homophobic, but it was close for me. [...]
From the Times: Martin Gardner, who teased brains with math puzzles in Scientific American for a quarter-century and who indulged his own restless curiosity by writing more than 70 books on topics as diverse as magic, philosophy and the nuances of Alice in Wonderland, died Saturday in Norman, Okla. He was 95. From Scientific American: [...]
I’m listening to Jakob Dylan’s album, Seeing Things. Up On The Mountain, in part: Oh, here it comes and there it goes The unbearable sound of the earth making men out of boys First you learn and then you’ll teach About that bright, bright light Making its way On up the mountain night and day [...]
I love my brother, but I am tired of it. I am tired of trying not to upset him. He is a conservative Republican Christian, as is most of the rest of my birth family. We can’t seem to discuss anything political peaceably. He is older than me and there has been a history of [...]