The overwhelming and overarching fact of my life this year was welcoming a second child in May. We’ve been living in the wake of that event ever since, for better (cuteness, brother silliness) or worse (his reflux and terrible sleep).
On the professional front:
In January my job got reduced to half time with a day’s notice, so…
I had to pick up a second, full-time job to stay afloat. Worked not-great hours between both jobs for about two months, until…
My original job went back to full time. However…
After that experience I started looking hard for different job, and…
Finally got one, which I started in June and am very happy at.
Enjoyed hangout times with friends and family
Saw a shooting star at one of said hangout times
Saw the Okee Dokee Brothers at Ravinia, and were first in line to get a vinyl signed and picture with the Bros
Many visits to the children’s museum and local pools
Went to a carnival and did a spinny ride for the first time
Took him to his first minor league baseball game and on the way out one of the parking attendants gave him a foul ball that had been hit out of the stadium
Did Halloween trick-or-treating in the snow with a fussy infant in tow but still managed to have a good time
Got an electronic adjustable desk for my home office so I can work standing up or sitting down
Read 15 books and watched 102 new movies
Watched some good TV (Quarterback and Emergency NYC on Netflix) and great TV (The Bear)
Added more quality discs to my collection, including the Back to the Future trilogy on Blu-ray, a Babylon SteelBook, and Criterion Blu-rays of Malcolm X, Summer Hours, Inside Llewyn Davis, and Sound of Metal
If you’ve been to a movie at AMC in the last two years, you’ve seen their now-legendary in-house commercial starring Nicole Kidman where she walks into a theater extolling the magic of movies, moviegoing, and AMC:
It’s sincere, borderline saccharine, and immediately after its debut in September 2021 became a lightning rod for hot takes and memes and parodies—all of which I read and enjoyed.
But a funny thing happened when I went to see a movie for the first time in a while: I realized just how true and meaningful that ad is.
“We come to this place for magic.”
I recently stumbled upon an old writing assignment of mine from 9th grade called This Is My Life, where we had to write a short paper focusing on important aspects of our lives. The title page told the story best, with its grid of posters from Back to the Future, Memento, Unbreakable, Saving Private Ryan, and other favorite movies showing what mattered most to me at that time.
That assignment happened over 20 years ago, though I loved movies long before that, traipsing through the Disney canon as a kid before venturing into more adult fare as I got older (shoutout to my dad for bringing me to Mission: Impossible at 9 years old). In middle school I discovered Back to the Future, my first and abiding cinematic love. And from there my palate kept expanding into almost every genre, era, and region. While I didn’t become a cinematographer or director as I’d planned and indicated in that assignment, I did remain obsessed with movies and continued watching and loving and writing about them ever since.
That includes co-founding Cinema Sugar last year as a place to celebrate the movies we love, why they matter, and how they connect us all. Watching great movies is something I’d be doing no matter what, but Cinema Sugar provides the impetus for contemplating them—and appreciating them—more deeply as we build Top 10 lists and even consider our all-time favorites.
“That indescribable feeling we get when the lights begin to dim.”
All of that was stewing in my subconscious when I recently got out for a rare trip to the movie theater as an early birthday present. With a full-time job and two young kids at home, I haven’t been able to go as much as I’d like or used to before kids. The entire summer movie season had passed me by: Asteroid City, Indiana Jones, Past Lives, Barbie… all movies I would have gone to under different circumstances.
But at last I was going to Oppenheimer, and deeply grateful to be. I savored the short drive to the nearby AMC on a warm summer morning. After using up the last of a gift card on the ticket, I literally ran up the grand staircase to the second floor. Not because I was late, but because my body just needed to express the kinetic energy I was feeling inside.
I was going to a movie! I thought. It’s something I’ve never taken for granted, even during my single days or child-free phase. Going to the movies is a gift, no matter when, and that felt especially true that day as I sat down just before Nicole Kidman’s entrance.
I knew it was coming. What I didn’t know is that this time around, this video I’d seen many times before would give me goosebumps and suddenly make me feel like I was watching it for the first time. Only now, I saw its sentiment not as cloying but profound: Movies are magical. Moviegoing is important. And all the snark about the ad betrays a tragic lack of gratitude for what it’s telling us.
It also gave me déjà vu, because I’d seen a similar epiphany play out before on screen at the same theater.
“Somehow, heartbreak feels good in a place likе this.”
Less than a year ago I went to see Damien Chazelle’s film Babylon, wherein Manny (Diego Calva) is a laborer in 1920s Hollywood who happens to make connections with both the ambitious ingénue Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie) and aging film star Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt). He uses those connections to climb the studio ranks as an assistant, producer, and eventually director.
Over time he witnesses a lot: Nellie’s meteoric rise and fall, Jack’s slow obsolescence, an industry struggling to transition from silent movies to talkies—not to mention his own poor decisions gone terribly wrong.
(Spoilers ahead—skip to past the photo if you want to avoid them.)
Decades later, we catch up with him when, long out of the business, he returns to Hollywood and visits his old studio. But it’s not until he ends up in a movie theater showing Singin’ in the Rain when memories start to resurface, the movie’s title song triggering a torrent of flashbacks to his formative times with Nellie and the industry he’d loved—both of whom didn’t quite love him back.
We see those flashbacks intermixed with a time-jumping, fourth-wall-breaking montage of clips from a whole century of cinema. Manny would not live to see most of it, but what he and Nellie and Jack and countless others did make in their time served as the essential foundation for films to come.
“I’ve always wanted to go on a movie set,” he’d told Nellie way back when. “I just want to be part of something bigger… Something that lasts, that means something.” Helpless before the shining silver screen, he breaks down in tears at the realization that he got what he wanted, that what he lived through had transformed into something much bigger than himself—and he was the surviving witness to it.
“And we go somewhere we’ve never been before—not just entertained, but somehow reborn.”
Sometimes I wonder if all this time and attention I give to movies is worth it. They’re just stories after all, a series of images that flash before my eyes for a short time and then disappear. The world is full of real people who are struggling—what good are movies to them? Dedicating my focus to moving pictures can often feel frivolous at best and morally negligent at worst.
There’s a scene in Back to the Future Part II when Doc discovers Marty’s plan to use 2015’s sports almanac to bet on games back in 1985. “I didn’t invent the time machine for financial gain,” Doc says:
The intent here was to gain a clearer perception of humanity: where we’ve been, where we’re going, the pitfalls and the possibilities, the perils and the promise. Perhaps even an answer to that universal question: Why?”
That’s why movies matter.
Movies are us. They show us our history and our future. They celebrate our wins and illuminate our sins. They beckon us into a reality completely different from—or exactly like—our own, and by doing so tell us more about others and ourselves than we could have discovered alone. They are something bigger than us.
That epiphany is what made Manny weep with bittersweet awe in Babylon. It’s what has for so long drawn me to movies as constant companions on the perilous journey through life. And it’s what I chase every time I press play on a Blu-ray or sit in a dark theater, eagerly awaiting Kidman’s earnest invocation.
There’s a quote I discovered floating around Instagram Reels that people use as narration for clips of their little kids:
You have little kids for four years. And if you miss it, it’s done. That’s it. So, you gotta know that. Lots of things in life you don’t get to do more than once. That period between 0 and 4, 0 and 5, there’s something about it that’s like a peak experience in life. It isn’t much of your life. Four years goes by so fast, you can’t believe it. And if you miss it, it’s gone. So you miss it at your peril, and you don’t get it back.
(I was surprised to learn the speaker is Jordan Peterson, whom I’ve never read or even heard speak before. Not interested in litigating Peterson as a whole, just taking this quote for what it’s worth.)
I was talking with an older coworker about kids and how mine recently turned 4. His are all grown now, he said, but he would do anything to have just one day when they were 4 again, to do bathtime and all the other kid things that fill your life so intensely for a few years before the kids grow into other phases.
It’s a sentiment I’ve heard often, usually in the form of parenting clichés like “The days are long but the years are short” and “They’re only young once.” The annoying thing about clichés is that they’re usually both trite and true, and I’m grateful for when they tap me on the shoulder at just the right time.
A recent example: I was sitting with my 4 year old playing with his Carry Around Robot Town as (who else?) The Okee Dokee Brothers were on in the background—this time their 2018 album Winterland. He was immersed enough in the game that he actually let the album play through instead of wanting to jump to his favorite tracks, and that allowed me to enjoy some of their quieter, more reflective songs he’s usually not interested in.
We got near the end when on came “New Year,” a beautiful tune in the form of notes back and forth between two friends inquiring about their lives and children.
Here’s the lyrical exchange:
Hey say, Happy New Year Have you had much snow And how’s that new baby boy of yours, Joe
Happy New Year to you The snow’s still deep And he’s our little roly-poly I sing him to sleep
Say how’s the weather Have you had much rain And can that new baby sing your refrain
The weather’s changing It feels like spring And as he falls asleep We can hear him sing
Have the leaves changed Where does the time go And now how old is that son of yours, Joe
Leaves blow away Time goes on He’s all grown up now, singing this song
Perhaps you can now see why the combination of this song and the moment—cozied up next to that son of mine while he cutely played—made me tear up: I envisioned the time that has already passed in my life with him and how in a snap more time will pass and he’ll be all grown up and singing his own songs, only I won’t be cozied up next to him.
It was a moment of mono no aware, a Japanese phrase I love that indicates “the awareness of impermanence or transience of things, and both a transient gentle sadness at their passing as well as a longer, deeper gentle sadness about this state being the reality of life.”
That concept cuts both ways. Everything in this stage—and in life—is impermanent: the good moments, the hard times, the drudgery, the occasional euphoria. “Nothing gold can stay,” wrote Robert Frost. And that’s why it’s so important to love them at the age they are and every year they grow, because they’ll never be that age again.
There is one workaround for this: have another child. Our second is due in late May, so I’ll get another chance to start at zero and bask in this unique time once again. And you better believe I’ll be working extra hard to enjoy bathtimes while they last.
As I’ve been going through my old journals and digitizing the entries—a tedious and time-consuming process that will eventually yield a much more accessible and searchable archive—it’s been fun and enlightening to rediscover things I was thinking about at any given time.
Like this entry from March 10, 2020:
A few pop culture references have come to mind as the coronavirus COVID-19 marches on:
the general escalation of uncanny surreality in Signs, as things progress and get ever close to home
Arrival and its shaky coalition of countries trying to understand an opaque, unsettling presence
Station Eleven [the book] and the global pandemic flu that paralyzes the world and makes humanity wonder what it is
Idiocracy with its president so not equipped for the moment
I hadn’t seen Contagion at that point, otherwise that would’ve been there too.
I love how I wrote “the coronavirus COVID-19” as if I’d possibly get it confused with another global contagion sometime in the future. But hey, I’m all about clarity.
(Not visible: the buffalo plaid pocket square accompanying the bowtie.)
The biggest thing that happened to my family this year was trying to have a second child. It was a long and demoralizing journey that ultimately ended successfully (due in late May), but it’ll take more than a bullet point to say why.
Beyond that, we just kept on livin’. Here’s what that looked like this year:
Got to see our cute, curious, cuddly, (sometimes) cantankerous 3 year old:
get familiar with the neighborhood birds, including hawks, cardinals, herons, woodpeckers, and blackbirds
get his second-ever haircut
get COVID (was basically fatigued for a day then back to his usual self)
take classes for t-ball, gymnastics, tap/ballet, and various other sports
giddily explore a few different children’s museums
Saw these movies in the theater: Barbarian, Nope, The Fabelmans, The Banshees of Inisherin, Avatar: The Way of Water, and Babylon
Added these cheap used DVDs/Blu-rays to my collection: The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Apartment, Arrival, Brick, Brooklyn, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Cast Away, Casino Royale, Do the Right Thing, Hell or High Water, High Noon, In the Heights, The Irishman, Looper, The Matrix, Ocean’s Twelve & Thirteen, Out of the Past, Paris Texas, Red River, Remember the Titans, Roma, Titanic, and The Usual Suspects
Added these (not cheap Christmas gifts) Criterion Blu-rays: 12 Angry Men, The Night of the Hunter, The Lady Eve, and WALL·E
The playground at the park near my parents’ house is getting renovated, which means the place as I knew it from ages 11-18 will be no more.
I’m glad for the memories I have from there, many of which are shared with my childhood best friend, Tim, who also lived a block away from the park. We logged countless hours at the basketball court and amidst the playground, making up spy games and other shenanigans.
The shenanigans have continued into the next generation, with my son and his cousin having romped around the same structures I did. Here they are last summer on the very old and rusty slide:
They took many, many turns on the slide, engaged in a constant loop of climbing up, sliding down, and running around. The next time we visit that slide will be gone, replaced with another slide for adventures anew.
After nearly 7 years, today is my last day at my library job.
It was my first full-time library position after a few part-time jobs out of library school, and for that alone I am immensely grateful.
Whenever someone asks me how I like working at a library, I say I love it because every day is different. It’s been a blessing to be able to do so many things that were both personally and professionally fulfilling:
put together the weekly email newsletter, which directly led to my next role in email marketing
Including grad school, I’ve been in the library world for over 10 years. And though I’m leaving it for the time being, rest assured I’ll remain an avid library patron and advocate. You can take the boy out of the library but you can’t take the library out of the boy.
We celebrated Little Man’s third birthday this week (well, fourth if you count his actual day of birth). While looking through my photos of him I noticed a motif of capturing him from behind as he ventures forth at varying speeds.
I like this vantage point for a few reasons. Since we don’t post his name or face on the internet it’s a convenient angle for sharing. But it’s also an accurate representation of me watching him discover his world over and over again.
Most of the above shots are from very familiar places: our backyard, our local park, our regular family getaway spot. For me as a jaded adult visiting them can get monotonous, but there’s really no such thing to a toddler. Everything can be new and adventurous no matter how many times he’s encountered it.
That’s why I consider it a privilege to follow him into his great daily unknown. All I can do is hope to continue capturing these views, fleeting as they are.
As a drummer in my college’s jazz program, I once got recruited by one of the jazz guitarists for a paying gig he’d gotten at a local restaurant.
I was interested not just because of the money, which was negligible (not that there is such a thing for broke college kids) but because the idea of being paid to perform with an ad hoc ensemble felt very adult and professional. It was a unique feeling for an introverted 20 year old who was still unsure about his abilities and place among his peers.
The night of the gig, I’m getting situated with the guitarist and bassist, another college-aged recruit whom I’d never met. We’re about to start playing.
I’d drummed publicly many times before: high school jazz band, high school garage band, church services, college jazz ensemble. But this time felt different. Suddenly, the allure of being a very adult professional dissipated and, struck by imposter syndrome, my insecurity leaked out.
I said to the bass player, “You know, I’m not really a gigging musician…”
He gave me a kind of wry smirk. “Nice little disclaimer there,” he replied.
The guitarist counted us in and we were off. I pretty quickly settled in and regained confidence in my abilities and right to be there. The gig went fine, and I certainly appreciated the cash.
This memory has stuck with me years later because it gave me a valuable life lesson:
No disclaimers.
Don’t kneecap yourself before you begin whatever it is you think you can’t possibly do. Even if you suck (which you won’t), just do it and then move on. That’s all you can do.
I deserved the bassist’s smirk. How could I not be a gigging musician when I was seconds away from playing music at a gig?
If you think you aren’t ready, you are. If you think you aren’t good enough, you are.
With the day off from work, I spent the morning traipsing around our snowy yard with Little Man. He introduced me to his snowman (above), we threw snowballs at trees, and rolled down the small hill in our backyard. Lots more snow is on the way, apparently, so we’ll be out there shoveling again soon to welcome the new year.
I don’t have an overarching thesis of my 2021. In most ways it was just like last year: COVID, living with a rambunctious and hilarious toddler, and doing the little things of living every day. Sometimes that’s all you can and should do: shovel snow when you have to, and roll down a hill when you can.
A few highlights:
Celebrated 15 years of blogging!
Read 31 books and watched 57 movies
Got to see Little Man:
get potty trained
attend a (chaotic, barely structured) park district soccer class for 2-3 year olds
take swimming lessons and learn how to play in the public pool
encounter the fauna of Brookfield Zoo and the flora of the Botanic Garden
share endless hours of ball play in our dining room with the Okee Dokee Brothers in the background
Finally wrote about my undying love for the TV show Boomtown, not once but twice
Watched some good TV: Ted Lasso, Schmigadoon, Bluey, Love on the Spectrum, The Great British Baking Show, The Underground Railroad, The Good Lord Bird, and currently Station Eleven
Added these cheap used DVDs/Blu-rays to my collection: Jaws, WALL-E, The Count of Monte Cristo, Red River, Apollo 13, Columbus, The Death of Stalin, Jurassic Park, Knives Out, Paterson, Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse
I was playing soccer on the front lawn this evening with Mr. Two Years Old when the moon, waxing crescent, caught his curious eye in the encroaching darkness.
I asked him if he knew why the moon glowed. We’ve read books about it before, but he said he didn’t. I explained in the simplest language how it was sunlight he was seeing, and that it only hit part of the moon because it was round, like a ball.
After my brief lecture, he grabbed the ball and brought it next to one of the solar-powered lawn lights that illuminates our front walkway. “I want to make the soccer ball glow,” he said.
It was an excellent opportunity for an object lesson. We looked at how the ball was lit up only on one side, where the light was coming from.
I managed to photograph the view before he kicked the ball away for more scrimmaging:
I never know how much of what I explain actually makes sense to him or sticks in his mind. But I should know by now never to underestimate his intelligence and curiosity, because two year olds are made to be learners.
Matt Haig’s novel The Midnight Library asks: What if you could explore every what-if of your life, specifically those that turned into regrets? How many of your other lives would actually turn out better than your real one?
It’s an intriguing philosophical question that quickly turns personal for the book’s protagonist, Nora Seed, who comes to learn that each book in the titular library—rendered as a kind of metaphysical manifestation of purgatory—represents one of the infinite versions of her life.
Adventures in space-time
The idea of exploring what-ifs through magical realism or sci-fi isn’t new. It’s the narrative foundation of some of my favorite films (It’s A Wonderful Life, Back to the Future trilogy) and other intriguing cinematic counterfactuals (The Man in the High Castle, The Last Temptation of Christ, About Time).
But rather than focusing on (as Doc Brown would call it) one specific temporal junction point in the entire space-time continuum—what if George Bailey had never lived, what if Biff stole the Almanac, what if the Nazis won—The Midnight Library extends its ambit to the many sliding-doors moments in a single life.
Nora is given countless opportunities to choose and experience parallel lives where none of her regrets came to pass. “I stayed with that ex-boyfriend” and “I didn’t give up swimming” and “I pursued my dream of becoming a glaciologist” all get a spin. But none of these supposedly ideal realities live up to her expectations.
While she’s able to shorten her list of regrets—an immensely valuable gift in itself—her pursuit of happiness doesn’t solve the deeper existential crisis that plagues all of us at some point: per Mary Oliver, what will you do with your one wild and precious life?
4,000 Weeks
That question infuses another of my recent reads: Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman, an approachably philosophical exploration of the wily, incorrigible thing called time and our dysfunctional relationship with it.
I have an extensive list of quotes from the book that make for good ponderin’, but there are three specific ones that would fit right into The Midnight Library. (Synchroncity knows no bounds, temporal or otherwise.)
First, a reality check:
The world has an effectively infinite number of experiences to offer, so getting a handful of them under your belt brings you no closer to a sense of having feasted on life’s possibilities.
Therefore, Burkeman writes, you have to make choices:
Once you truly understand that you’re guaranteed to miss out on almost every experience the world has to offer, the fact that there are so many you still haven’t experienced stops feeling like a problem. Instead, you get to focus on fully enjoying the tiny slice of experiences you actually do have time for—and the freer you are to choose, in each moment, what counts the most.
And once you do that:
If you can hold your attention, however briefly or occasionally, on the sheer astonishingness of being, and on what a small amount of that being you get—you may experience a palpable shift in how it feels to be here, right now, alive in the flow of time.
That “astonishingness” of being alive in the flow of time doesn’t arrive on command. You have to reorient your mind and your attention to create the conditions that allow for it to reveal itself.
In The Midnight Library, that process looks like an anguished young woman replacing her perceived unworthiness with gratitude for mere existence. (Just like George Bailey.)
In Four Thousand Weeks, that looks like embracing temporal limitations rather than resenting them.
And in my life, that looks like treating the things I love—my wife and son and family and friends and typewriter collection and bike rides and movie nights and library books—as the temporary gifts they are, for however long I live.
I’ve been on a fiction reading tear recently. In the last fortnight I’ve finished The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai, The Great Glorious Goddamn of It All by Josh Ritter, and The Midnight Library by Matt Haig—all with a mix of print and audiobook. I just started The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller on audiobook and am hopeful about it.
In the midst of this streak I texted my buddies that I was resolving to read more fiction.
“It’s an ongoing struggle,” I wrote, “to come to terms with the fact that I won’t be able to learn everything I want to learn via nonfiction books, so I might as well start to nourish other parts of my consciousness too.”
My friend Steve replied: “I feel like I learn a lot about the world from nonfiction, and I learn a lot about myself (and my relationship to others) from fiction.”
Couldn’t be truer. And when I said I typically tilt much farther toward the world, he replied: “While vast, it is sometimes less daunting.” Compared, that is, to ourselves.
Wendell Berry:
Fantasy is of the solitary self, and it cannot lead us away from ourselves. It is by imagination that we cross over the difference between ourselves and other beings and thus learn compassion, forbearance, mercy, forgiveness, sympathy, and love—the virtues without which neither we nor the world can live.
Angus Fletcher:
Whatever the power of truth may be, literature’s own special power has always lain in fiction, that wonder we construct.
Wedding season has got me thinking about what I learned from my own experience putting together a wedding six years ago. Here’s what I got.
Pick four things to really care about.
Wedding planning is chock-full of choices, but you can’t care about everything equally unless you want to have a mental breakdown. Pick four things that really matter to you and invest some thought/time/money into making them happen. For my wife it was a good photographer (see below) and good flowers, and for me it was enjoying the time with our friends and having a fun reception. Everything else we tried to keep in perspective. (You will fail at this. Just try.)
Invest in a good photographer.
We considered and met with a few photographers before landing on the final choice, who also did our engagement shoot. Outside of the venue, this was probably the single biggest expense but what we got were exceptional photos that captured the whole experience beautifully and remain treasured artifacts from the day.
Do the receiving line leading into the reception.
Don’t go around to each table during the reception assuming you’ll get to talk to everyone. You’ll get stuck in chitchat, waste valuable party time, and won’t even talk to everyone. If your venue and schedule can swing it, do the receiving line leading into the reception so everyone gets face-time and then it’s out of the way.
Have a buffer day between wedding and honeymoon.
I do not understand the people who fly out the night of their wedding or even the next day. Not only did we have a bunch of stuff to bring back from the venue to our place, we also had to repack for the honeymoon and have some time to decompress and process the incredible day we’d had. You’ll appreciate that transition time before heading off onto the next adventure.
Pick the rightspouse.
This will make everything easier and much more enjoyable.
Though it was fun to watch Little Man experience fireworks for the first time, my personal highlight was being able to see the clear night sky without much light pollution for the first time in a while. And, man, was it glorious to behold.
All that love’s about
It echoed a moment that stood out in our recent rewatch of WALL-E, which we decided to try with Little Man after he gravitated to a WALL-E toy at Target (probably because it looked like a truck).
In the film’s transcendent first act, WALL-E pauses during his garbage collection routine and looks up to the sky just as the otherwise dense smog clears just enough for him to see stars. “It Only Takes a Moment” from Hello, Dolly! underscores the moment, specifically at the line “And that is all that love’s about.”
This is a lovely bit of foreshadowing for later in the movie, when WALL-E and EVE perform their fire extinguisher-fueled space ballet among the stars—a scene I love so much I named it one of my favorite movie music moments. (The movie itself is #2 on my best of 2008 list.)
The robot toddler
Another takeaway from the movie this time around was something I couldn’t have realized before having a kid: WALL-E embodies all the best characteristics of toddlers.
He’s diligent, curious, enthusiastic, loving, loyal, temperamental. He’s a tinkerer who tosses aside a diamond ring because he’s more interested in the box it came in. He’s eager to show EVE all his toys when she visits his home. He basically has two speeds: inching along or sprinting. He’s charmingly clumsy, quick to make friends, and an accidental agent of chaos—but one that ultimately brings life to those around him.
In short, an excellent role model, and not just for kids. Here’s to all of us being more like WALL-E.
We’re finally, finally, doing stuff in our yard and garden areas. Some of it is remedial caretaking—fertilizing and weeding the lawn, removing dead bushes and trees—but a lot of it has focused on beautification and planting vegetables we’re not totally sure will thrive but are giving a try anyway.
I gotta say: I’ve really loved it. Perhaps because the work is the polar opposite of my digital, desk-bound day job: it’s an ancient practice, outside, requiring arduous physical labor, with visual progress toward to an end goal but no screens whatsoever.
The key reason we’ve been able to do so much thus far is Mr. 2 Years Old is now old enough to help, and boy does he enjoy it. We got him his own set of tools so he can work along with us, both for real and in the little dirt area we set aside just for him to romp around in. So far it’s collected a bunch of rocks and sticks, though we also set him up with a geranium to water.
As is the case with homeownership writ large, the list of things to do is seemingly endless and grows longer the more ambitious we get. Who knows what we’ll actually get to this year. That said, I’m kinda shocked by how much progress we’ve made with only partial weekends and the scattered weekday morning at our disposal.
Next up on the list: laying down a goodly amount of fragrant cypress mulch!
In his latest column “Are Face Masks the New Condoms?” (paywalled), Andrew Sullivan reflects on how difficult it is to change pandemic-induced behaviors:
With HIV, as with Covid, a transformation of the facts did not necessarily mean a transformation of psychology. Human psyches take time to adjust to new realities; fear and trauma have a habit of outlasting our reason; and stigmas, once imposed, can endure. Camus noted how his citizens in The Plague were oddly resistant to the idea that their pestilence was over, even as the numbers of deaths collapsed. Reactions to the good news were “diverse to the point of incoherence.” But for many, “the terrible months they had lived through had taught them prudence,” or imbued them with “a skepticism so thorough that it was now a second nature.” They had become used to their new routines, and the sense of safety they gave. However bizarre it seems, they became attached to their plague experience.
Sullivan is specifically referring to some people’s resistance to going mask-less outdoors despite the latest science condoning it. But his larger point about the stubbornness of human psychology and becoming emotionally attached to the pandemic experience rang very true for me.
Marveling at masks
Not long before lockdown last year, wearing a mask was still liable to be seen as paranoia even as the specter of the pandemic lurched ever closer. Yet now, long after mask mandates went into effect, it’s not wearing a mask that attracts suspicion and consternation—at least in the Chicago area where I live. (Obviously it’s a different story in other parts of the country).
And that’s one aspect of pandemic life I’ve become not necessarily attached to, but certainly appreciative of. Anytime I go to a store or other indoor public place, I see every person wearing a mask, even young kids, and think, This is pretty cool.
It’s pretty cool that all of us—whether willingly or begrudgingly—are undertaking collective action to benefit the health of our neighbors and nation. Again, whether you see it that way or not is irrelevant; it’s the fact that it’s happening at all and on such a grand, widespread scale that’s a bit of a marvel to me.
It makes me feel a kind of kinship with my fellow countrymen and women, an esprit de corps that makes the frustrations of pandemic life a little more bearable. Or, as Matt Thomas tweeted:
(Notably this tweet was from before we knew COVID transmission was far more likely through air droplets than direct touch, but the sentiment remains valid.)
To be clear, I’d rather not have to wear a mask. Once mask mandates end and the prevailing, science-based wisdom allows for a more normal life, I’ll celebrate with everyone else. But until then, I consider masking up something to embrace as a small but significant action I can take to nudge this plague in the right direction.
(That and getting the vaccine, which I’ve now done.)
In this together?
“We’re all in this together” started the pandemic as a motivational motto that even yours truly deployed, but over time kinda curdled into a cheap slogan of hackneyed false optimism due to the decided un-togetherness fostered by a very tumultuous 2020. We all haven’t had the same COVID experience.
I’m one of those people for whom there was very little that was negative about it. I didn’t lose my job. I got to and continue to work from home (saving a bunch of money on commute fuel, among other things). I avoided catching COVID, as did my immediate family and friends (knock on wood). And above all I got so much more time with my wife and 2 year old than I would have otherwise, which was a priceless gift.
For those reasons I’ve very much become “attached to the plague experience.” The new routines it generated will be hard to kick. Slowly, as more people get vaccinated and another summer outdoors approaches in relief, maybe a new mindset will take hold. (I for one eagerly await going to a movie theater once I’m past my post-vaccine waiting period.)
My annual top-10 movie lists begin in 2007, so I thought it would be fun to start going backwards from there and create lists for each year retroactively.
First up is 2006, which is now 15 years ago and a notable year for me in several ways: it’s when I graduated high school, went on tour with my band (RIP Ice Cap Fortune), entered college, and started this blog.
I also have a lot of movie-related memories from that year, including:
seeing Brick at my beloved Hilldale Theatre in Madison not long before it closed permanently
going to my first and last midnight screening (Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest)
suffering through some truly awful movies (X-Men: The Last Stand, Superman Returns, Lady in the Water)
But the abiding memory from 2006 was the day I saw five movies in a row.
My mediocre movie marathon
This may be a common occurrence for film festival-goers or professional critics, but for me it was something I did just to see if I could pull it off—both as a tactical feat of avoiding detection by the theater staff and as a moviegoing stunt.
I walked into Marcus Point Cinema in Madison, WI, for a 12pm showing and reemerged into the darkness just before midnight (paying for only one ticket—yes, I was a teenage scofflaw). It’s not the best lineup, but here’s what I saw:
The Pursuit of Happyness
Rocky Balboa
The Nativity Story (an unplanned addition but it fit perfectly between other showings, and my mom joined me with some contraband McDonald’s)
Blood Diamond
The Good Shepherd (my dad joined me for this one)
I never did this again and would not recommend it. By Blood Diamond my eyes were getting blurry and my butt hurt, so I don’t think I could fully appreciate that or The Good Shepherd. But it was bucket list cross-off and gave me a story to tell on my blog 15 years later.
Anyway, on to the list…
Top 10 of 2006
I suspect this won’t continue to be the case as I move back in time, but I saw almost all of the films in my top 10 in theaters at the time. By then I was an ardent cinephile with a job and a car, so I was able to see a lot of movies. And there were a lot of great ones. Here are my favorites:
Honorable mentions: The Prestige, Borat, Little Miss Sunshine, Idiocracy, Half Nelson, United 93, Marie Antoinette, Shut Up and Sing, Monster House, Old Joy, This Film is Not Yet Rated, Mission: Impossible III
“I love you at the age you are, and every year you grow / into more the special someone I forever want to know.” — I Love You All Ways by Marianne Richmond
I love that line (from a board book that’s in his regular rotation) because it reminds me not to focus on hitting benchmarks or anticipating his next phase of life. Love every age, every stage, because you’ll never get them back again.
Happy birthday to my tiger-tastic, truck-loving, snow-trekking two year old.
