RevSpork

Who knows when we shall meet again...

It is time.  My blog has reached the end of its nine year-plus journey.  It has served its purpose.  I finished downloading the blog, and over the next few weeks, I will finish adding any extras - such as photos - that didn't get downloaded, then I will shut the blog down permanently.  

It has been my pleasure to entertain you.  

 

9/6/2003 - 10/25/2012

Back to blogging

It's been a while since I posted anything other than a word-search puzzle.  Much of that was due to my six-week internship at the Chicago Tribune archives, which was an amazing experience.  Deep in the bowels of the Tribune Tower, I worked with boxes of old glass panes with photos from the long-extinct Chicago Herald-Examiner and Evening American newspapers from 1924-1935.  Despite the cold, dry environment and the sour smell of decomposing acetate (also in the boxes), it was an amazing six weeks.  Photos from the old Hearst newspapers were full of life: gangsters covering their faces in court; society matrons posing in their mansions; actors and actresses stepping out from the 20th Century Limited train en route to New York or Hollywood; flappers and sheiks strutting their stuff.  Typical of the photos I cataloged were the hundred or so photos from the 28th Eucharistic Congress held in Chicago in 1926.  It wasn't just the photos of the zillions of folks crowding Soldier Field for a mass that blew my mind; it was the photos of choir children packing both Wrigley Field and Comisky Park to rehearse.  

As much as I will miss the gig, I'm a bit relieved to be done as well.  I still have one library class to go before I pick up my Master's degree, and at the same time I'm taking an education course so I can get my certification to work in school libraries.  Although the education course is an intro, undergraduate-level course, I'm finding myself struggling to keep up in the class. I don't think being a teacher was ever just knowing stuff and passing it on, but the subject is far more complex than I ever gave it credit for.

In the meantime, I'm still married.  Still have two cats.  Still constantly edit while typing.  Everything is normal.  And I'm blogging again.

An old leftover

Note: I wrote this for Tori's crafting blog a couple years back, but for various reasons was never posted.  So here it is in its hilarity: picking a bridegroom for your wedding.

So you’re planning a wedding.  You’ve called your mother, the florist, the dressmaker, your hairdresser, the deejay, the minister, the caterers, your gay friend who dated the deejay, the baker, the baker’s florist, your mother’s caterer, the hairdress maker, and the caterer’s gay minister’s baked mother.  Moreover, you called at least four or five suitors for all these jobs and are now more intimate with your cell phone than any previous (and present) significant other in your adult life.  And how has your husband-to-be contributed to the wedding plans since he popped the question?  He mastered “Calling Dr. Love” on Rock Band 2 and won’t shut up about it. 

I’ll be blunt, ladies: if your fiancé has no interest in any aspect of the wedding, the odds are pretty good he has even less interest in being a groom.  Or, for that matter, a husband. 

I know, I know: he’s not as big into the wedding as you, and besides, the wedding is the bride’s big day.  Everyone is looking at her.  Smartass brides will frequently substitute other males for the groom at the altar – her father, her rabbi, her dog – just to see if anyone notices.  (They never do.)  But grooms are critical to the wedding process: without one, a bride is nothing more than a ludicrously-dressed woman surrounded by people who gave up a day of college football and “Snapped” marathons for free food and booze.  So if you’re going to throw a wedding, it only makes sense to have someone standing next to you, and it might as well be a guy you sleep with.

Despite the groom’s lesser presence in the wedding, it doesn’t necessarily mean he can’t contribute.  And maybe he even wants to contribute.  The key here, of course, is linking the requirements of wedding preparation to the groom’s interests.  Sure, your wedding doesn’t require a Nacho Muncher or a Bridesmaid Gooser, but I’m sure your future husband has some interests that can be exploited for wedding gain.

For example, does your groom-to-be like to cook?  No?  Just barbequing?  Ok, how about music?  Does he like listening to anything?  No?  How about alcohol?  Just Old Style?  And his idea of a bachelor party is playing Wii with his friends?  WHY ON EARTH ARE YOU MARRYING THIS BORING LOSER?  Replace him with another, more interesting groom.  Right now.  I’ll wait.

Okay.  While you break in your new groom, I’ll offer myself as an example of a groom providing valuable wedding preparation services.  As our wedding approached, I was involved with some – not all – aspects of the wedding.  Since I enjoy cooking, I participated in selecting a caterer.  I also love listening to music, so I helped my wife-to-be hire a deejay.  Choosing the wedding cake was also a cooperative effort.  The more I helped my fiancée, the more personally invested I was in the wedding. 

Given, I didn’t help with everything.  I was a passive observer at best when my wife looked into bridesmaids’ dresses, and I had nothing to do with choosing flowers.  Why?  I wasn’t interested in that stuff.  It was okay, though – I participated enough with the wedding that my fiancée wasn’t overwhelmed. 

Not every bride has a mother to advise her, or at least a mother she trusts not to drive her into a heroin habit by the time the bride’s wedding day arrives.  She may have sisters, aunts, best friends, cousins, and maybe an overenthusiastic co-worker, but the person she should turn to when a wedding problem wears her down is the person she’ll want to turn to after the wedding.  It worked out for me, and I’m a happier person for it.  Sure, I didn’t get to goose the bridesmaids, but the nachos I’ve gotten out of the deal more than make up for it.

7 years on this blog

Yep.  Seven years this day.  Not this hour, mind you: I posted my first blog entry a little after 1am.  My first blog entry was less than cheery:

Good morning. Here is my blog. Welcome, etc.

Sorry about being so short-spoken. It's 1am, and I really need to get to bed so I can make it through tomorrow with a minimum of neurons firing in my noodle. I'm not sure why this is so important. I work retail, for crying out loud. In a candy store. The only information I require for tomorrow is where I live (Chicago), where work is (the sixth level of Hell), and when not to drool (while stocking sour gummy bears). I don't even need to know my name; I can always check my name tag. And under my name, I can read the tagline, "Welcome to Our World," which probably sounded benign when I was nine years old, but positively chills me at 32.

Someday I'll tell you more about my exciting gig, but now is the time to sleep.

Welcome to my blog.

My grouchiness was annoying yet charming: within weeks I averaged well over a hundred hits a day, not bad for an unknown.  But that was when blogs were newer, when the few celebrities that blogged were geeks, pre-Facebook, pre-Twitter.  Nowadays I consider myself blessed if I get thirty hits in one day.  Hell, I can't get my own mother to read my blog.  

If you check out those first few blog entries, you'd also note that I posted a lot more.  I'd occasionally post three or even four times in one day.  By contrast, this is my first post in two weeks.  I was also ludicrously solipsistic: the first post that wasn't about me was my ninth overall.  I'd like to think I've improved as a person these seven years, but I also know I've got a long way to go before I become the fully mature, sober gentleman nobody will be able to stand being around, let alone reading about. 

Seven years is a nice chunk of change, time-wise.  I'll probably go on babbling on my blog for another seven years; by 2017 I presume I'll have two hits per day, partly because blogging went the way of BBS's and partly because I'm too busy to write.  As it is now, graduate school will most certainly take away from my blogging time.  I have a few "timeless" posts I'll drop into the blog now and again, but I doubt I'll post more than once a week until the end of the semester. 

To those who still read blogs and my blog in particular: thank you.  Keep reading blogs.  They're so much better than Facebook or Twitter.  Blogging rules.

Good morning. Here is my blog. Welcome, etc.

Sorry about being so short-spoken. It's 1am, and I really need to get to bed so I can make it through tomorrow with a minimum of neurons firing in my noodle. I'm not sure why this is so important. I work retail, for crying out loud. In a candy store. The only information I require for tomorrow is where I live (Chicago), where work is (the sixth level of Hell), and when not to drool (while stocking sour gummy bears). I don't even need to know my name; I can always check my name tag. And under my name, I can read the tagline, "Welcome to Our World," which probably sounded benign when I was nine years old, but positively chills me at 32.

Someday I'll tell you more about my exciting gig, but now is the time to sleep.

Welcome to my blog.

My grouchiness was annoying yet charming: within weeks I averaged well over a hundred hits a day, not bad for an unknown.  But that was when blogs were newer, when the few celebrities that blogged were geeks, pre-Facebook, pre-Twitter.  Nowadays I consider myself blessed if I get thirty hits in one day.  Hell, I can't get my own mother to read my blog.  

If you check out those first few blog entries, you'd also note that I posted a lot more.  I'd occasionally post three or even four times in one day.  By contrast, this is my first post in two weeks.  I was also ludicrously solipsistic: the first post that wasn't about me was my ninth overall.  I'd like to think I've improved as a person these seven years, but I also know I've got a long way to go before I become the fully mature, sober gentleman nobody will be able to stand being around, let alone reading about. 

Seven years is a nice chunk of change, time-wise.  I'll probably go on babbling on my blog for another seven years; by 2017 I presume I'll have two hits per day, partly because blogging went the way of BBS's and partly because I'm too busy to write.  As it is now, graduate school will most certainly take away from my blogging time.  I have a few "timeless" posts I'll drop into the blog now and again, but I doubt I'll post more than once a week until the end of the semester. 

To those who still read blogs and my blog in particular: thank you.  Keep reading blogs.  They're so much better than Facebook or Twitter.  Blogging rules.

Thoughts on five years of blogging

I had been bitching to friends about writing.  My writing had literally ground to a halt, and I was frustrated.  I wrote scarcely anything in my journal, and I felt empty.  I had just taken on a part-time job at a candy store along Michigan Avenue's Magnificent Mile, the worst job I'd ever had.  I was filled with frustrations about my crumpled professional life.  I had been dating my girlfriend for seven months and wondered if she could tolerate an underemployed grouch for much longer.  I needed an outlet.

My friend Kevin suggested I start up a blog.  He knew of this company that was starting up a new blog program, a program where I didn't have to whip up a web page and doodle with HTML or Perl or whatnot, so I dove in five years ago this very day. 

Blogging.  Weblog.  Yet another method of kvetching, except now you can kvetch over thousands of miles, over every continent.  It's amazing what technology can contribute to the art of bitching.  I love it.  Blogging had been around for a few years before I dropped my first entry, but it's a hell of a lot bigger now.  People have gotten fat book contracts based on their blogs.  That's pretty impressive too.

Five years ago. 

When you're young, time seems to go on forever.  When you're, say, five years old, a year takes up twenty percent of your life.  When you're fifty years old, it only takes up two percent, and seasons fly by like startled pigeons.  I'm nowhere near five or fifty years old, so instead of the years zooming or crawling, they seem to do both.  September 2003 feels like a zillion years ago, yet the road from then to the present feels like a trip of only a few weeks.  I cannot understand the paradox any more than I can understand how many angels can fit on the point of a needle, or if there are angels in the first place. 

September 2003.   My father, 52 years old, was watching TV in his basement apartment, probably checking out the nice pair of breasts on the female Telemundo anchor, inhaling the acrid smoke of a Marlboro into his lungs, where a group of rogue cells that would kill him within two years was just being born. 

September 2003.  It was less than two years since my suicide attempt; I was trying out different antidepressants, living in a cramped but cozy studio apartment, occasionally walking down to the Long Room for a gin & tonic or picking up a cheap pizza from the Papa Romeo's around the corner.

September 2003: The Wife was The Girlfriend.  Despite all evidence to the contrary, I was apparently a decent catch for this adorable vixen.  The fact she stuck it out with me during the down times is a testament to her total awesomeness.

September 2003: Not only was I working at a candy store, but I was constantly filling out additional applications to find additional part-time jobs.  During that month, I worked no fewer than four jobs, one of which I worked three days and the other I worked four hours.  It would be another few months before I finally found the full-time bookstore gig that would sustain me for the next four and a half years. 

So many zillions of years ago.  Most of my friends didn't have one baby, let alone two.  I had just plucked from my sideburns my first gray hairs.  Now when I grow out my goatee, the red highlights are likewise gray.  My body aches more, I find myself squinting more often.  I'm definitely hitting the middle age era of my life.  Some friends have moved away, others I've moved closer to.  Life is far from great, but it's fairly good.  I have a fantastic wife, two crazy cats, and many, many friends.  I can't complain, but I will anyway.  After all, that's what my blog is for.

There will be changes...

I have a temporary layout for the blog's fifth year, even more temporary than the temporary layout I set up over a year ago. I've decided I need a break from black background. My wife is working on a new banner which will totally blow your mind. And no, I'm not putting pressure on the wife - really, you'll like it. That gum you like is back in style. Again.

And yes, I'll be posting a little more this year. Yay?

Talk about neglect...

I haven't read anyone's blogs or LJs in over a week. I haven't even read my *own* blog or LJ in over a week.

I'm a lazy schlub.

I will have to make amends.

Yanked

I had posted a couple of choice comments about my previous post and my feelings about this so-called "outrage." However, after discussing the issue with my wife, I decided to backtrack. I not only deleted my comments, but the entire post as well. I did so with great reluctance, but the dialogue had reached a point where further comment would most certainly have done permanent damage to old friendships.

I think this issue has gone way overboard. My blog is a repository of tacky jokes; baby jokes are just part of the bill. I cannot and will not pare my writing style because a few people are offended. If you are hurt by the joke or by my attacks on Ms. Anonymous, I apologize for your hurt. In the heat of discussion, I pulled an innocent third party into the mix, and may have hurt her or her loved ones by doing so. I did so to my regret. The post was not intended to hurt the feelings of my or Tori's friends. I will not, however, apologize for the original joke, which was regarded by many others in the spirit of which it was intended and was in my opinion not offensive.

Finally, I decided to close the comments on this post. If you want to discuss this with me, I feel it would be healthiest to do so in private.

My little book capsule reviews

I don't know if anyone ever read these little tidbits, but I like writing them, so I'll keep posting them. However, I plan to bring a little sanity to the process. Instead of plopping a bunch in there every once in a while, I'll change them out once a month. I won't keep old ones up, so you have a month to read 'em. Of course, I'm also curious to know if folks actually read these books, so e-mail me and tell me what you thought of the literature in question, and I'll post about it later.

That's it. Go back to work.

Relaunch: Phase 1

Yes, I'm back. So far, so good. As you can tell, very little has changed, but the blog will continue to mutate over the next 6-8 weeks before looking absolutely the same, because I play too damned much Kingdom of Loathing, and holiday retail will yet again sap my energy. Hopefully, however, my humble blog will undergo considerable reconstruction. In the meantime, Phase 1 is complete: I'm writing again. Plus I changed the photo. Hooray.

Rejoice, beautiful people. I have returned.