Frequenting my reading across the blogging realm, the question of what constitutes modern manhood crops up. It’s a deeply troubling question for me because I feel so often that I fall very short of being a man. The most poignant times are when I consider what I am teaching my young son.

A conversation with comrades at work brought up a point when talking about the difficulties of getting students to get their work done. Much of the current young generation has grown up in a world where they were entertained before they were required to do anything. They get to play a video game first then do their homework when ready.

Writing that out makes me sound like an old fuddy-duddy who forgets what youth was about and whatnot. But here’s what struck me: they were talking about me.

Not directly, of course. But still, in all honesty, I’m closer in age to the middle schoolers than I am to many of the faculty. They watch television shows and play sequels of video games that I partook in when I was their age. And making sure I am duly entertained before work is a terribly habit of mine.

I don’t think I had ever been conscious of it before. Oh, I have definitely had my major bouts with slackerdom and procrastinitis. But now here is so obvious before me, like stepping out on the deck after a shower and having the wind whip your towel off. In the suburbs. In November. In Minnesota.

Silently, right there, I vowed to repair this flaw in myself. And I also need to make a conscious effort to help instill in my own son the virtue of good works that earn good times. Of course I have to also deal with the fact that my father is an exemplar of good virtues and look how I turned out.

Thanks, sarcasm, for always being there for me.

Santa Claus’ Gmail Account Exposed

(Found via Zeller.)

Continuing on a tangent from yesterday (does that work?), I have thought about the merits of working with only the power of my own two hands. Rather than the speed and convenience of power tools, I could work on projects with just the basics.

Part of the idea comes from seeing old wonderful things still in working condition, but new things are just mass-manufactured junk. This very morning, I could not even lift a hat off my daughter’s head without the poof on top coming clean off. Maybe since before electricity, and products were made with the investment of human time, those humans were not about to allow something their finite lives were spent making to crumble before them.

Of course, the other part of the idea could stem from my only power tool, a kind hand-me-down, finally stopped taking a charge. And yet I’m still able to use my screwdriver to its full effect. Plus, I’m definitely too cheap to go buying power tools right now.

Thanks, ventriloquist dummies. You make me laugh.

Yesterday I finally did some yard work … that was three years overdue. Yes, I have not trimmed the plant life that line the front of my house since its purchase. The lilac was a particularly monstrous beast, finally growing to nearly half the height of the house and completely overwhelming the other plants nearby. I’m talkin’ a 10′ reach as if with a spiked chain (there you go, Jaime.)

I did so well through the lilac after the first half hour that I decided to continue down the rest of the row. There are half a dozen bushes in all. And single-handedly, I demolished them all.

By single-handedly, I mean it was me and a large pair of scissors. No electrical or gas-powered mechanizations helping me out. Just my brute strength and gumption. There is now a line of cut branches larger than the remaining plants on my front lawn.

The point of this story? I am ridiculously sore. My back, my shoulders, my wrists. My whole body wasn’t exactly accustomed to doing much beyond lifting a baby-filled car seat. The hardest part is the wrists, namely because I didn’t see it coming. What a strange thing to have in pain.

Now I am taking in some Tylenol and looking forward to more pushups to at least carry my daughter around without grunting.

Thanks, pain medication. Big fan.

Alex Massie reflecting on our American Thanksgiving. I completely agree with the sentiment that this is what a holiday should be.

Most of all, however, July 4th celebrates abstract ideas and impersonal institutions. These have their place and their value, but Thanksgiving is a more intimate, personal affair, inviting us to focus on the connections and relationships that really matter, that really make a difference in our lives. In that sense too, it is a day for reflection, not action, and all the better for it.

The whole article is definitely worth a read. I can fully appreciate the sentiment of being a foreigner on Thanksgiving. I spent a Thanksgiving in Reading, England during college. Somehow, I and my fellow compatriots managed a small, not very well constructed feast. Each one of us hailed from a different part of the US, yet we were all together and quite thankful for it. I’m sure some Brits were along with us, and during these holidays, the world follows the proper sentiment of ‘the more, the merrier’.

I have so much to be thankful for that it defies numeration. One can see in the video below that I have even more to be thankful for now. My wife, my children, my home, my job, shoes on my feet, my talents, my skills, my fingers, my toes, music in all its forms. The very air filling my lungs.

Happy Thanksgiving, everybody! Just eat, drink, and be grateful; that’s all there is to it.

I know it’s old news, but Costco has new squared gallon milk jugs:

It threw me at first, but since it was still delicious, delicious milk inside (nectar of the Hindu gods, as I say), I didn’t mind it.

The only downside of the cubic jugs that I can see?

Drinking straight from them is so awkward as to make it now impossible.

There’s something about the comic Ballard Street that tickles me the right way:

Damn cats.

I missed Sunday blogging again. Oh sure, I could cheat and backdate the post, but nah. I like my weekend absences; they give more precedence to the week, for both my writing and hopefully your reading.

Also, weekends tend to be when I’m actively engaged with my kids or working on some household project that I wouldn’t want to take on during the week. This weekend I finally finished the basement guest room to the point where it seems welcoming to those who might stay with us for the first time since our roommate moved out over a year ago.

The finishing touch the room for now was finally hanging up some wonderful pictures my father had framed for me. One is the goofy picture of the marching band from my senior year of high school. In it are a large number of people whose names I can still recall. And me. Jumping. My tenor sax in the air and I am caught mid-flight off a set of bleachers.

The other is a jazz combo concert poster from college. It has a number of us in black with cool outlining effects, and there I am with my back arched and my tenor sax up in the air again. I like that poster too because it’s got one of my best college friends on there with me.

Hanging those up was a little bittersweet for me. I miss having music in my life right now. I’m feeling too worn out from the kids and work to do more beyond helping the beginning band students at the school. Part of me really, truly misses playing with my combo. Though we were only together for about a year, that short time meant worlds to me.

I know I can’t miss it all that much. I have my wonderful family because I left my hometown. It could not have happened had I stayed where I was.

Still, music is missed. I will indeed have it back someday.

And… Booyah!

This is a blog post.

The Aluminum MacBook under an x-ray:

(Found via Digg.)

Addition: This makes for a sweet desktop background image (when you download the high resolution version).

Incredible:

a Science Channel documentary in which scientists pour 10 tons of cement down a massive anthill, let it harden for a month, then carefully excavate it to demonstrate the internal structure of the colony. It took three days of pumping to fill the colony with cement.

I’m suddenly feeling a strange mix of being inspired for a D&D dungeon and looking back societal analysis through Star Trek.

As often comes up, my coworkers and I use as odd of language as we can in order to keep ourselves amused. So today the phrase ‘raring to go’ came up. We finished our conversation, then a minute later I pipe up with the question, ‘how do you spell raring?’

Sounds like fodder for a blog post to me!

So when I had a chance, I went a-Googlin’. Actually, first I hit up my handy-dandy dictionary dashboard widget. It took me a few tries to get the spelling right. My natural inclination was something more akin to ‘rearing’ or ‘roaring’, as in the verb ‘to rear’ like raising a child.

It turned out to be ‘raring’, the present participle of the verb ‘to rare’. The definition according to the New Oxford American Dictionary built into my Mac is thus:

raring |ˈre(ə)ri ng |
adjective [with infinitive ] informal
very enthusiastic and eager to do something : she was raring to get back to her work | I’ll be ready and raring to go.
ORIGIN 1920s: present participle of rare, dialect variant of roar or rear.

The definition matched my understanding of the phrase, ‘raring to go’. But the origin was still eluding me. What the heck did someone mean by using a verb form of rare? The origin given in the dictionary definition was leaving me short.

This is where the internet and Google can be argued to make people smarter. With a little bit of searching using the terms ‘etymology’ and ‘raring’, I found a forum discussing this very topic. In parts of Britain and Ireland, ‘rear’ is pronounced the same as ‘rare’, affecting the spelling. Now looking back on the original definition I found, things were making more sense.

So by all reason in American English, one should say ‘rearing to go’. But since the term originated out of a different dialect entirely, its spelling is duly altered.

I have always dug this sort of stuff. Etymology fascinates me, because it is history on the tips of our tongues. And while I know nothing of other languages, really, I find that English is so wonderfully full of idioms and influences and bastardizations and localizations that it is ceaselessly entertaining. It has so many synonyms available and varying definitions, my native language lives up to what I have always deemed it: best suited for law and humor.

I’m thinking I should apply for a gig in the Obama administration. Any ideas on what position I should try? Agriculture Department blogger? Ambassador to Paraguay? Secretary of Defense? Put your suggestions in the comments!

Addendum: I figured it out! Deputy Secretary of Corporal PUNishment.

Without really noticing it, it’s been a month since I quit drinking caffeine and soda. With it being a rough month of teething for my now eight month old (holy cow!) daughter, it probably was a poor time to do it. But since it started almost by accident, I think it was easier to keep up with.

I do get up easier and don’t get headaches anymore. That’s got to be the best part. I no longer feel like garbage for having not had a Dew by 8:30. This is especially noticeable on weekends when I did not regularly get a caffeine intake to start my days.

Part of me thinks I have this licked and that I can occasionally have a fountain drink with lunch. But I think I prefer the idea of cutting out high-fructose corn syrup in general. And though it is a false association, this article I found via McArdle, got me thinking:

You can observe this sort of thing in lab rats – if you infuse extra glucose into their brains, they stop eating, even under conditions when they otherwise would keep going. A few years ago, an odd result was found when this experiment was tried with fructose: instead of lowering food intake, infusing fructose into the central nervous system made the animals actually eat more. That’s not what you’d expect, since in the end, fructose ends up metabolized to the same thing as glucose does (pyruvate), and used to make ATP.

Now, to be fair, my change in food intake probably has more to do with me being a bit more conscious ofit since cutting out a part of it, than it does to the difference between glucose and fructose. However, I have honestly noticed more when I’m full and am more susceptible to feeling sick after eating too much. More than one plate of food and I’m heading for the strange tasting, generic Tums and an early bedtime.

The only really hard part is keeping myself alert while working at my desk. I do my best to get up and walk (as well as keep my eyes from the screens 100% of the time). But there are still those times when I’m doing my best not to keel over and wind up with a case of keyboard face.

Sunday night is a bad time to try to blog. I waited and put it off all day, and now I’m headed to bed. At least I got a ton of cleaning done. Well, as much as I could before both my kids lost their minds, simultaneously I might add, this afternoon. Nothing like cracking your knees on concrete while crawling under a stairwell when the lass is screaming bloody murder and the lad is making such a mess of himself that it requires an immediate shower.

To top it off, I didn’t handle it that well. Know what’s worse than salt in a wound? Shame.