Category: Ramble

Just writing stuff about things, and things about stuff.

Heeling / Healing

Pavowski8 Comments

It’s no secret that my blarg is about as focused as a toddler with ADD. I write about what occurs to me, and while that’s usually writing, occasionally I stray into the muddier waters of product and television reviews, or sometimes into the less-muddy, more-poopy waters of parenting, and still other times into the not-so-muddy-at-all but rather likely totally uninteresting waters of my personal fitness.

I can’t help but wonder if my blog might garner more views if I chose a focus and stuck to it. Then again, I phrase a doubt like that and then the Ego-Writer chimes in and reminds me that on a personal and intellectual level, I don’t really give a sharknado about my views and follows and likes and all that other crap. So what if my drivel reaches ten people, or a hundred, or a thousand? (Spoiler alert: it hasn’t.) It’s all so many droplets in the ocean, so many swirling grains of silica in a desert sandstorm.

I don’t care about views really; I care about giving vent and voice to what’s on my mind, so LindaGHill’s stream-of-consciousness prompt for this weekend is timely. It’s heal/heel, which is funny, because this week I’ve been particularly concerned with the healing of my heel.

No, really. Back in the early days of this blarg, I tweaked something in my left heel, and since then I’ve had a long road of injuries culminating in a similar but entirely different and more treatment-resistant issue with my right heel. Maybe it was my Vibrams, maybe it was the fact that I pushed up too quickly after my injury, but my feet have been fargoed for a while, and I’ve had enough of it.

Now, when I’ve had enough of feeling unproductive on my book, I can force myself to sit down and work on it. When I’ve had enough of being behind at work, I can sit down and grade until my fingers curl up like burned spiders and get caught up. When I’m feeling too much like a sloth, I can haul my blubbery self out for a run or a workout. When I feel like I’ve had one too many chili dogs (okay, I don’t eat chili dogs, but feel free to insert slices of pizza or cheeseburgers or scoops of ice cream) I can starve myself the next day. I can fix most problems of excess by realizing the excess and shutting it down. Not so much this excess of pain.

I shouldn’t say excess, though. Since visiting the podiatrist back in October (I think) I’ve had varying levels of discomfort, but nothing that could really qualify as pain. I get tweaks and twinges and aches, but nothing that keeps me from walking around, nothing that keeps me from getting out for a run, nothing that I wouldn’t feel silly classifying as “pain.” That said, even on the best of days, I’m aware that all is not right with my heel; it’s always there, nagging at the edge of my consciousness like a burn on the roof of your mouth or that faint whiff of baby poop whenever I pass my hand in front of my face. (Seriously, I washed my hands MULTIPLE times, where is it COMING FROM??) It just won’t go away.

It’s so persistent, now — I’ve been dealing with some level of this ache in my foot for the past six months now — that I’m wondering if it’s not just something I have to live with. Like, I’m almost 35… well past the time when I could, for example, sprain the sharknado out of my ankle, then eat nothing but Cap’n Crunch and occasionally rub a piece of ice on the affected area and bounce back like the goldfingered rubber band man. I want to believe that I can shake this off, but I’m starting to wonder. I’ve been afflicted with this thing for quite a while… so long it’s just starting to feel normal, which frankly is not something I’m okay with.

I think it’s doubly frustrating because I’ve been redoubling my efforts at fitness in other areas and I’m making strides at a ridiculous rate. I’m pushing up my reps and my difficulties. I’m doing a ton of extra walking (my wife is partly to blame for that, since we compete now with our little step-tracking-gizmos. “Compete” is the wrong word. She stomps me in this “competition” every day). I’m losing weight again, faster than I have any right to. All of which is fantastic.

But I can’t shake this thing with my heel.

It’s troubling. Partly because I feel like my ability to run regularly and for long distances has kind of become part of my identity, even though I’ve only been doing it for three years. Partly because I feel like just about every challenge I set for myself lately, no matter how insurmountable it seems at first, feels like little more than a speedbump as I coast past it. I mean… in the past year alone, I decided to write a novel, and I finished a first draft in less than six months. I gave up sodas over the space of three or four weeks. But I can’t overcome this thing with my heel.

Tomorrow’s another long run. If form holds, the heel will feel shaky as hell for the first half mile, then loosen up and feel great for three or four or maybe five miles, then tighten up as I head into mile six and seven.

I really don’t know how to end this post. I usually like to end with some sort of turn toward optimism or at least some cheeky snide aside, but all I can muster on the issue is doubt. This issue is such a small issue in the scheme of things, but it’s still hanging over my head like a set of particularly heavy storm clouds after so many months.

Anyway… this post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday.

Finish Line Full of Magnets

Pavowski2 Comments

I’m not a big fan of biographies, but I read Andre Agassi’s autobio a few years ago. Some fantastic stories about how much pain he was secretly suffering through the last years of his career. Some insane tales of a father who made him hit something like five thousand tennis balls every day (if you hit a million tennis balls in a year, you can’t help but become the best in the world!). But for some reason, the thing that most stuck out for me was his take on winning a match.

I noodled around with tennis a little bit, and even an idiot like me can grasp the wisdom of what he had to say. I’m butchering his words, but he likened winning a match to a magnet: You’re in the match, and then you catch a little bit of a break and all of a sudden you can’t lose. The closer you get to the finish, the more it pulls you along. But, just like a magnet, the closer you get, the more it resists you, the more it pushes you away, until you’re right at the brink of winning and you can’t conceive of any possible way to get there.

Things, as I may have mentioned before, don’t always have to mean things. Sometimes a bit of wisdom about tennis is just a bit of wisdom about tennis. Then again, I’m an English teacher by trade, which means I can draw meaning from the swirls of foam in toddler vomit. So off I go generalizing:

Finishing this first edit is like winning a tennis match. I struggled mightily for months to find a foothold. I thought my ideas were terrible, my draft was terrible, the plans I had for fixing it were actually breaking it. (I still harbor doubts, but it’s getting a little late for that.) Then — and I couldn’t pinpoint the moment for the life of me — something changed, and I gained in confidence, and I found the work coming easier and easier. It flowed like so much blood from a severed artery.

And then I realized how close I was to the end.

Not the end. The first edit is only the first step in a journey that will no doubt leave me footsore and sweaty, bloody and probably a little disoriented. But the end of a pretty important step. A step at the end of which I am going to unfetter my little creation and let it flap out into the wild, presumably into the maws of several prowling beasts.

I’m going to let people read it. Other people, outside of the insulated, well-padded room I built for myself in my brain, are going to read this story, meet my characters, and start sticking pointy things in their soft bits. And that’s a highly encouraging thing, because I need some serious feedback if I want to make sure the story works. But it’s also a terrifying thing. Like, it might turn out that the story is as compelling as a pile of gerbil turds. Maybe the characters are as likable as Maleficent, you know, before they flipped it and told the story from her side.

Maybe, in short, I’ve spent the past nine months writing, and I’d have been better off doing, I dunno, ANYTHING else. Collecting stamps. Growing a garden. Learning to crochet.

And what felt like a magnet pulling me toward the finish line now feels like a magnet pushing me away from it. I’m terrified to finish, so I’m hiding from the work. It’s easy. There’s no shortage of excuses and reasons to keep me from working on it. But I think the sad, simple fact is that I’m terrified of turning it over and letting it out of my little cage.

But I guess I have to let it go eventually. Cut the cord. Empty the nest.

I’ll probably be done with the edit in a couple of weeks. And that’s awesome.

But terrifying.

But mostly awesome.

But still terrifying.

…But awesome.

Smoke Rings

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Chuck’s challenge this week: “Who the F*** is my D&D character?” The challenge links to a character generator that rolls up ludicrous characters with a mouthful of abuse. Good fun. I lucked into “a halfling wizard from a company of sellswords who doesn’t believe in magic, EVER.” (Profanity redacted.)

As I was writing this, my wife pointed out how rather much like fan fiction this topic was. I argued at first, but ultimately I can’t help but agree. Fantasy is not really my schtick, but I’ve always loved the Lord of the Rings and I felt compelled to press on with this topic anyway. For a first challenge of the year, it was good fun. It ran a little long, but I just couldn’t bring myself to cut any more.

Here, then, is “Smoke Rings.”

 

Smoke Rings

“Did I ever tell you about the time your uncle, Glorfindel, and I fought off the goblin hordes?” Klobo puffed absently at a pipe, then blew out a fantastic ring of cloying purplish smoke.

Kludu coughed but didn’t wave the smoke away. Klobo had told the story many times, but Kludu loved to hear his granddad spin a yarn. “Tell me again?”

“Your uncle and I were coming back from a grand old adventure. Elves and orcs and all that. Treasure in hand, we were making our way back through the Mirthless Marshes of Misander –”

“I thought it was the forest out back of the Vale,” Kludu broke in. And indeed it had been, at the last telling.

“No, it was the Marshes, I remember it distinctly.” Puff, puff. “The rest of our company had gone their separate ways the night before, of course, so it was just old Glorf and me, toting our haul down the Marsh path.”

“Don’t you mean …”

“Don’t tell me what I mean, thank you. Now, it’s unusual to see goblins that far south, but we were holed up in an abandoned guard tower, and we saw them coming out of the woods.”

“Last time, they came from the Marshes.”

“For pity’s sake, Kludu. We were in the Marshes, the goblins came from the woods. I was there, after all.”

It was getting to the good bit, so Kludu left it alone.

“There were fifty of them, if there were five. Have you ever seen a goblin up close, my boy?”

Kludu bit his lip and shook his head, his shaggy hair flopping furiously.

“Of course not. No reason to, at your age. See to it that you avoid them, if you can. Horrible creatures. Tiny daggers for teeth. Greenish grey skin, like the fog off the hills at twilight. Breath like rotten pumpkins.” Klobo shuddered, but his eye twinkled and he winked. “We were in the tower, your uncle and I. Nowhere to go. And Glorf — fool of a Pikelander as he was — sneezes. Can you imagine? Sneezes! Goblins can hear a mouse break wind at a hundred yards, you know, so of course they knew exactly where we were.”

“What did you do?”

“Well!” Here Klobo leapt to his hairy feet and gave a horrific halfling battle-snarl, brandishing an invisible axe. “There was nothing for it, was there? They climbed the tower, one by one, and one by one, we started lopping off their heads. Whop, whop, whop!” He swung and chopped with his imaginary axe. “But even such exceptional and fearless hobbits as your uncle and I can’t fight forever, and those goblins — a hundred of them! — kept swarming over the walls like ants on one of your grandmother’s sandwiches.”

The goblins had gone from fifty to a hundred in the space of a few minutes, but Kludu was rapt; nobody told a story like his granddad.

“We thought we were finished. They had us surrounded, back to back, just your uncle and I and our bags of dragon-gold.” This was patently ridiculous; Klobo had never faced a dragon. Everybody in town knew it, but there was no stopping him now.

“That was when your uncle bumped into the powder keg. Quick as a flash, I struck a spark off the stones, the powder caught, and … BOOM!” Klobo was ninety, but as spry as any halfling in the Vale. He leapt two feet in the air and spread his hands, and despite having heard the tale dozens of times, Kludu still flinched. “They said it was raining goblin arms and legs for weeks in the Vale after that.”

The Marshes were nowhere near the Vale; the story was ludicrous. But Kludu had just turned thirty-three, and he was feeling adventurous. He didn’t argue about the Marshes (even though the tower in his granddad’s story had been located, without question — blasted top and all — in the forest). He wanted to ask the question all his friends and relations had told him never to bother asking.

“Granddad?”

Klobo, a little winded from the telling, was sitting back in his rocker and puffing again at his pipe. “Yes, my boy?”

“There was no powder keg.”

“Don’t be absurd. Of course there was.”

“Glorf says there wasn’t. And if it happened thirty years ago –”

“It did.”

“Well, there was no powder in these parts back then. Not until the Martinsons took over in Parth and started importing it from the East.”

Klobo huffed out a puff of smoke through his nostrils. “I suppose, then, you’d like to tell me what a barrel of powder was doing on the guard tower in the middle of the forest?”

Again, Kludu let it pass. “Uncle says there never was any powder. That’s why you and he didn’t get blasted to hell along with the goblins. Uncle says you’re a …” He stopped. Klobo’s temper was well documented.

Through a fiery eye, Klobo stared at Kludu. He seemed to be smoking, no longer from his pipe, but rather from the top of his head. “A what?”

“A wizard.” Kludu braced himself, picking up grandmom’s basket of knitting and holding it in front of him as if that might protect him.

Klobo fumed. His breathing intensified and his eyes took on a fierce shade of red. Smoke was very definitely now curling up from his head, and also his fingertips. He seemed to grow a few inches as he crept toward Kludu. “Wizards don’t exist,” he whispered. “Magic is the stuff of children’s stories. It’s not real!” With that, a crackling fire leapt up in the fireplace, and there was a howling from the wind outside. Thunder shook the walls and Kludu dove for cover beneath the armchair, his tiny hairy hands folded over his head.

A moment passed in silence. Feeling rather silly indeed, Kludu crawled out to face his granddad, who seemed to be his normal size again. He wasn’t a wizard. Couldn’t possibly be. There had never been a halfling wizard and there never would be.

“I know there are lots and lots of stories about your old granddad, but don’t believe them.” Klobo was patting his pockets; his pipe had gone out. Kludu leaned his head to the side, stared at the pipe. The leaf within had been ablaze not a moment ago. It seemed such a silly and small thing to…

“OUCH!” Kludu yelped and pressed a hand to his forehead. There had been a great heat there for an instant, almost as if his brain had caught fire.

“Goodness, my boy, what’s wrong?”

“Sorry, I…” but Kludu found it very hard to focus on anything except the suddenly blazing embers of his granddad’s pipe.

Surreal Cereal

Pavowski4 Comments

Man, I just love cereal, don’t you? The way each individual froot loop tastes exactly the same as every other froot loop in outright defiance of the concept that the colors represent different froot flavors. The way Cap’n Crunch leaves the roof of your mouth with wicked road rash. The way that Corn Flakes literally taste more like cardboard than cardboard (and honestly, who in their right [or wrong] mind would eat corn in flake form?).

Yep, cereal is awesome.

What’s that? Oh. OH.

This post is about Serial. No, no, don’t get up. I’ll save you the trouble and deduct ten points for opening my post with that terrible joke.

''Serial'' (podcast) logo.png

In case you’ve been living under a rock, Serial is a spinoff from This American Life which focuses on a murder trial from 1999 Maryland. When I first heard about the show, I thought it was a fictional piece stitched together to look (or rather, sound) and feel authentic, but it’s not. It’s an actual case which has actually been tried. Headlined by This American Life’s Sarah Koenig and following the trial of Adnan Syed for the murder of Hae Min Lee, Serial has done for podcasts what The Daily Show did for news, which is make you give a damn about something that you were tired of.

As is the requisite with any sort of review post, I should disclaim that there are spoilers ahead, but they are minor. Essentially I’m only going to spoil the ending, which sounds like the worst thing I could do, but if you listen to even a couple of episodes, you will probably have an idea of how the thing will end, and you will probably be right. I’d also remind you of the ridiculousness of getting upset at having a series that’s over a month old spoiled for you. It’s out there. It happened. It’s over. It is not our fault if you get the ending spoiled for you at this point. So, SERIOUS SERIAL SPOILERS AHEAD.

I’ll start off with the effect that the show (I feel compelled to call it that, even though ostensibly it isn’t, but whatever) had in my household. I heard about Serial and silently filed it in a “to do one day if I ever get around to it” folder. It sounded interesting, but nothing I couldn’t put off. Then my wife heard about it, and since she’s finished her Masters’ program and is looking for things to do with her newfound free time, she loaded it up and had a listen to it while out for a run one day.

Then she got home from that run but kept her headphones on to listen to episode two while puttering around the house. She asked me if I’d heard of this Serial thing. I said I had, but I didn’t know much about it. She put her headphones back on and went in for another episode.

By the next day, when she had her headphones on again, I was feeling a little put out that my wife was spending more time with her podcast than with me, and she was dying for me to get on board, so we both listened to the first episode (she for the second time). I heard it. I processed it. I resisted.

She asked me what I thought, and I tried to get into this whole metatextual analysis of whether or not the format is right for what they’re trying to do, and why this is any different from any existing true-life crime show. Hemming and hawing about how I had kind of enjoyed it but didn’t really see what the big deal was, I excused myself. Later that night, she tried to say good night to me, but I didn’t hear her, because I had my headphones on in bed, listening to episode two.

For the next two days, we didn’t share much conversation at home aside from “What’s for dinner?” and “What episode are you on?” while we both poked around the house listening to Serial on our headphones. Finally, yesterday, we both finished (and I’m ashamed to admit that I finished ahead of her thanks to my work commute and some stolen time on a lunch break) and resumed normal human interaction.

I’ll say this. There’s nothing particularly novel about the show, or even the case it examines. If you’ve watched any true-crime show, it’s pretty much like that, minus the crime scene pictures and mugshots. The host shares her thoughts on this or that aspect of the case, then there’s a cut to an interview with a witness or an audio playback of a police interview or courtroom testimony, and then it’s back to the host. Nothing special.

And (here’s your spoiler) the ending is entirely unsatisfying. Koenig spends 12 episodes of anywhere from 30 to 55 minutes each agonizing over whether Adnan is guilty or not, and at the end of 12 she’s no closer to a concrete answer than she is at the end of about three episodes. Which is to say, he was probably wrongly convicted (based on the overwhelming dearth of hard evidence of his involvement in Hae’s death), but he is also probably not completely innocent either (there are too many coincidences and too many things people know that they couldn’t possibly know for him not to have been involved at least in some way). To sink in the requisite hours to listen to this thing and then not have a big climactic reveal at the end feels like a terrific let-down (a sentiment the host herself admits having misgivings about). Koenig and her team put in all this work — we the audience put in all this time listening — it seems like everybody deserves an answer, and the show doesn’t offer one. (They offer theories in the ultimate episode, but for each theory, they also offer perfectly feasible rebuttals). It’s frustrating.

But. (There is always a but.)

For some reason, when I was listening, I just couldn’t stop myself. I’d go back like a rat in a maze for the next tidbit, sneaking in five or ten minutes between meetings at my workday on Monday, kicking back during my lunch hour, listening on the way to and from school, just to hear the next piece of the puzzle. It establishes some sort of hold on you, like a leech suctioning itself to your thigh, and just won’t let go.

I’m not sure exactly why I found it so compelling.

Each episode focuses on one particular aspect of the case: there’s one episode, for example, where Sarah and an assistant drive around the town trying to recreate various possible sequences of events for the day the murder was committed. This microscopic rather than macroscopic view gave me the feeling that there was always something else to know, something just out of sight to be covered in the next episode. The soundtrack is quirky and sparse, never getting in the way but cleverly accentuating the feelings of doom or doubt that creep in as certain bits of evidence are revealed. The host’s certainties echoed my own as she learned more, but every time she seemed convinced, there was a new piece of evidence to swing the pendulum in the opposite direction. I was personally convinced of his guilt and innocence about four or five times over throughout the series. And finally, the case has so many moving parts and entangled elements … well, it’s easy to see why the producers chose this case to build the series around. The (alleged) killer and his victim were from overbearing families that didn’t want them to see each other. There’s a friend who gives up the killer to police with a story so improbable it seems impossible to make up, but wait — he’s a drug dealer and social misfit who’s not exactly trustworthy in the best of times. Friends at school alternately can’t believe Adnan was involved in the murder or aren’t shocked in the least, depending on whom you ask. And at the center of it all is Adnan himself, whom Sarah interviews regularly on the phone. He’s charismatic and charming and intelligent and eminently likable, and somehow the show introduces and entertains both possibilities: that he’s a good guy who’s been the victim of the worst luck in the world, and that he’s an insanely smart psychopath who plays the nice guy so well it’s impossible to detect the snake lurking under the surface. Oh, and this all happened about fifteen years ago, so everybody Sarah talks to has a memory like a bag of potato chips (mostly empty, and even the solid stuff at the bottom isn’t really good for you).

And as for the series not giving you any sort of resolution for the story it’s told… well, that’s life, innit?

Like I said, the series poses no answers, for all its trying. But I think the swings between certainty and doubt, between liking Adnan and hating him, between trusting the evidence and not believing a shred of it, are themselves evidence of a narrative that’s been masterfully crafted to rope in readers and keep them listening week after week. (Heck, it roped me, and I thought I didn’t like it after the first episode.) You need only google “serial theories” to find yourself in the midst of entire communities of people arguing, sometimes vehemently, about the case and why Adnan is irrefutably guilty against people who fervently believe he is untaintedly innocent. Granted, that’s arguing on the internet for you, but the fact remains: people across the country have had their lives consumed with this thing.

As for myself, the unabashed cynic and hater of all things popular, I didn’t want to buy the hype. I thought it’d be, as so many other stories that take the nation by storm are, like ice cream: delicious and sinful and in no way having any depth or beneficial to your health. But there’s something more to Serial. I have to say it’s worth the time it takes to experience it. I might even say it’s brilliant. Certainly it’s well done and compelling. However it holds up as a story, it certainly holds up as a podcast. And, love it or hate it, millions of people are talking about it, which basically puts it on the same level of pop-culture import as Kim Kardashian. Probably higher of late if she hadn’t done that thing with her butt. Without hesitation I can declare that anything to do with Serial is a better use of your time than anything to do with Kim Kardashian or her butt. It hasn’t just left a mark in the landscape of podcasts, it’s left a smoldering crater. Serial, I mean; not Kim’s butt. Incidentally, “smoldering crater” is the end I’d picture for Kim Kardashian.

And her butt.

 

Happy, Happy, Happy

Pavowski6 Comments

My wife pointed out to me that I’ve been using the blarg to do an awful lot of complaining lately. I argued that complaining has sort of been the bread and butter for the blarg since day one. She saw that, a little bit, but she made another observation which sort of rattled me.

“It’s just a lot of negativity for you.”

Which is true.

I’ve mentioned before that the blarg here is sort of like a pressure release valve on an overtaxed water heater, and I do probably more than my fair share of complaining about life’s injustices (rarely) and inconveniences (okay, all the freaking time) here. But it’s rare for me to exude that negative energy outside of this space. Generally I’m a pretty nice guy. I mean, I’m a jerk, but I’ll say my jerky things in a nice way and keep my cool about it.

Still, having had it brought to my attention, it’s hard to overlook the tone of negativity around here, especially in light of all my Grinchly posts about New Year’s and such. I guess I get frustrated when I see seething masses of people engaging in counterproductive (at best) idiotic (at worst) behavior. Maybe it’s because I’m fighting hard against some bad habits of my own. Whatever the reason, it’s there, and it needs some balance. Here, then, is a thing that brings me phenomenal joy.

My daughter is awesome.

This is a pretty cool development, because up until recently (and I’m going to make my wife mad with this, but it’s the truth) I hadn’t really bonded that much with her. This is partly, I believe, because the child was breastfed and I can’t really do anything for her in that department, but also due in no small part to the fact that she has her brother to compete with. Not that her brother is better than her, and not that they’re competing in any meaningful way. But he can run and jump and sing and have conversations and pee in the potty and chase the dog and ask for hugs and kisses and dance and he’s just freaking AWESOME. My daughter is a little miracle too, but … she’s an infant. Her best trick up til recently is to roll over, and, hey, not to diminish or anything, but I could teach my idiot dog to do that if I could be arsed.

To clarify, the sad fact is that all the little things that we (I should say I) thought to be so miraculous about our son when he was born are present again in our daughter. They’re just overshadowed for me by the new heights my son is already soaring to. Sort of like if aliens looked at our entire human history in reverse. They’d see all the crazy sharknado we have in the modern era only then to be presented with things like the stagecoach and the aqueducts and the advent of fire. “Sure, that stuff is nice, but did you see this Google Glass thing they have? It’s amazing!”*

*Nobody would ever say this, ever.

It’s not her fault she came second, but big brother totally stole her thunder on all the infant stuff. However, the last month or so has brought a couple of changes for the little dear.

One, we got to spend a lot of time together without mommy around over the break, so she had to learn to love me a little bit at least. Once she figured out that I actually could provide food to her (albeit not in the manner she prefers), she learned to tolerate and even enjoy me. Then, once she learned that she actually liked being tossed around and dipped and danced, she really started to like me. She still prefers my wife, let’s not play games; but she’s decided that I will do in a pinch, which is a step up from where our relationship once lived.

Two, all of a sudden she’s unstoppable. This change took place in the space of about a week, wherein she went from barely able to roll over to tirelessly screaming around the living room on all fours, babbling and leaving a slime-trail of drool in her tiny, adorable wake. What this means is that she can terrorize the animals, chase her brother, and play with toys in a whole new way.

Three — and this is the thing that really sets her apart — is that she has developed her own entire language of communication by means of blowing the raspberry. That little pink sliver of tongue creeps between her gummy lips and PBBBBLBLBLLBLT and her eyes go all wide and then she looks at you as if for approval before her mouth draws back in this adorable toothless grin and her face lights up and angels descend from the heavens and club you senseless with their enormous phallic trumpets because they, too, are overcome by how awesome she is. Somehow she can create entire worlds with this salivary expulsion: she can say everything from “omg daddy that was so funny make that face again” to “wtf is this toy get it away from me” to “hey that was delicious I’d like another bite of that vaguely flavored goop” to “HOLY CARP I’M SO EXCITED” to “HOLY CARP I’M SO SCARED” to “HOLY CARP I’M JUST A BABY AND I DON’T AT ALL KNOW HOW TO FEEL ABOUT THIS DINOSAUR MY BROTHER IS WAVING IN MY FACE”. Sort of like Eskimos have over fifty words for ice (though I recently heard that that old adage was total bunk), she has the inverse ability: over a hundred concepts expressed in a single non-word.

In short, she’s finally turning into a larval human, and that’s pretty freaking awesome, and it’s worth getting excited about even amidst all my cynicism toward all this New Year’s Resolution crap that got me so in a twist over the last week or so.

So there is happiness in my life. Now that balance has been restored to the force, I can perhaps return to more interesting programming. Perhaps my new (albeit late) preoccupation with Serial? My wife’s and my obsession with our new Jawbone thingamajigs?

The possibilities are endless. It’s my New Year’s Resolution to explore them all.

*Clubs self with a teething ring*