Category Archives: true life 2008

That whole yin and yang thing

I’m ridiculously organized. Martha Stewart doesn’t scare me. Sometimes I fear this could lead me to do bad things – like crime or drugs or scrapbooking.

Husband, on the other hand, has never met a piece of paper he didn’t love. He’s by no means a horder, but let’s put it this way: Remember way back in high school when you took the SAT and the registration form had that section that you were supposed to keep? It said, “Retain this form for your records.” Guess who still has that form in his records?

Yeah.

Despite me extreme tidiness, we do somehow have pockets of clutter that accumulate and every once in a while I sort through them and file or shred or otherwise dispose of things we no longer need. I was on hold today for an interminable amount of time, which did have the minor benefit of giving me time to sort through one of these clutter-pockets. It’s at these times that I discover things like commendation letters that my extremely modest Husband forgets to tell me about. My current favorite is one I just found from then-Vice President Al Gore that basically says, “Hey Eric – thanks for being you.”

If I had more than 30 free seconds today I’d tell you about the “Darth Vader baby pictures” incident.

Friday Five: FishInnards Edition

Today is Husband’s birthday so I thought I’d do a special FishInnards Friday Five edition.

Husband’s website is fishinnards because once upon a time he asked me to register a name for him and I asked him what name he wanted and he said, “Surprise me.” I didn’t think of it entirely on my own, however, I was inspired by this truly horrendous smelling fish innards curry he made on morning to take to the monks at the Thai Temple. Despite the fish innard curry, he’s a very good cook, which is good because I’m not.

Hey – here’s his blog post with the recipe. I just read his notes at the top of the recipe and had a laugh, Husband is the master of understatement: “It kinda stank up the house in a weird way.” Um, yeah.

You will note the recipe doesn’t contain either the imaginary ingredient “curry” nor the yucky grocery store concoction known as “curry powder.” If you ever want to see Husband turn several shades of purple, pretend that there’s one common ingredient in all of the curries of the world (there isn’t) and that you don’t like it. For advanced fun, tell him all curries taste the same. Then you should prepare to sit a spell, because you’re in for a very long lecture.

When Husband isn’t feeding me in the manner I’ve become accustomed (read: no fishinnard-based food stuffs), he makes music with his current band, Astroknotics. We’re supposed to be recording a project of our own, but we haven’t even started it, so I won’t link to that because it doesn’t exist yet except in my head, but you really don’t want to go rooting around in there.

He also produces the Indiefeed Dance channel, which itunes put on their “best of 2008” list for audio podcasts, so it must be good!

He’s also DJ to the beautiful people, and he shares his schedule and also the occasional mix with the rest of us via his myspace.

This is a really boring post, isn’t it? I was going to list some of the other things he’s really good at, but this being a family-friendly website, I won’t. Wait, it’s not family friendly at all. Ah well, that’s none of your business, anyway.

Have a nice weekend, kids!

Checkers

I believe I’ve finally scrubbed all of the historical political speeches from my ipod. I’m such a political nerd I had hours and hours of them, but no matter what I did I couldn’t keep them out of the shuffle. Nothing wrecks the rhythm of a run more than having your ipod shuffle from White Zombie to Richard Nixon.

Things

My brother has spoken approximately 27 words in his entire life. It’s possible he speaks at work, when he’s deep in the bowels of the Pentagon creating the dinosaur-human hybrid super-soldiers that you must pretend to know nothing about, but I can’t vouch for that.

He gets this lack of verbosity from our father.

Among my mother and her legion of siblings, there has not been a documented break in the conversation since 1932. There are rumors that there was a moment of collective silence at a Church service in 1953, but lacking credible eye-witnesses, I choose not to believe it. Conversations in my mother’s family are like the audio recordings NASA pumps into space, they will be floating far out into the Universe long after our sun explodes and our galaxy is snuffed out in a fiery cataclysm.

My father, on the other hand, was a man of few words.

I don’t mention these conversational contrasts because I worry that someday life-forms in a distant galaxy are going to pick up an argument over cheeze-it flavors on their radio telescopes, which will have far-reaching implications for their civilization.

I mention it because my father had an effective method for dealing with busy bodies – those people who won’t take no for an answer and demand to know what else you need to do that could possibly be more important than what they want you to do.

The conversation would go something like this:

“But surely you can stay for a few more hours.”
“No, I’m sorry, I have things to do.”
“What sort of things?”
At this, my father would lean in, repeat simply, ominously, in very hushed tones, “Things.”

And then, he would smile.

It was the unexpected smile that sold it. If you’re curt and rude you just seem socially inept and boorish. If you smile and are polite as you brush them off, it unsettles them a bit and allows for a graceful get-away. I highly recommend it.

It might help if, like my father, you’re very large and heavily armed and otherwise never say a word, Regardless, I say go for it. If nothing else, maybe politeness itself will be enough to confuse them.