Easters have gotten less important with time, like birthdays. It has little to do with baskets full of shredded green plastic grass or cheap chocolate molded into fertility demigods; it is the meaning that has faded, not just the trinkets. I haven’t had an Easter basket since I was 10 or 12. Maybe younger. My childhood was spent with more browbeating about meanings than presents and it stuck. Every Christmas and Easter I go through this mental obstacle course, trying to remember to focus on the meanings of the holidays rather than the accoutrement that dress them. And every holiday I fail. I forget, or I remember but feel nothing. I tend to want to spend those days alone; cloister myself into meaning. To be completely honest, I get more emotional about Independence Day than I do about Easter. The brilliant bursts of light in the sky, the hand over the heart, singing Francis Scott Key: this is a holy day to me. This I understand. There is life and bright color and hope and joy.
As my faith has faded to more muted tones so has my guilt about my lack of holy on holidays. I appreciate the day, I get why it is important. I just don’t feel anything about it but a vague sense of gratitude and an even fainter sense of loss.
Monday, April 13, 2009
Monday, April 6, 2009
He's a Race Fan
As seen at the NASCAR race. This is their actual license plate. They love Mel that much.
Thursday, April 2, 2009
Weekly Ponderosa
After 20 months of trying, we finally came in first in Quizzo. We have come in second many, many times and each time we are thrilled, but to finally come out the victor is, well, totally sweet. We didn't know what to do. At the end of four rounds we were tied with one other team, and thus there was to be a shout-out best-out-of-three challenge for all-out victory. Of course the tie was with the ever-present (and ever victorious) Smartypants, a team we revile but a bunch of people we quite like. Doug manned up and took the shout-outs and after a tense few rounds the victor was announced and it was us! If you don't play trivia with the same team week in and week out it probably isn't too interesting, but for those of us who have had this Monday tradition, it is a pinnacle.
Last Saturday I was driving from Wedge Brewery to Nathan's house and there, standing on the corner of Hillard and Biltmore in the pouring rain, was a no-armed midget. Just standing and staring. It was almost 11pm. Ian said it best, “I felt like I was suddenly in a David Lynch movie.”
My old teachers are in town this weekend and I can't wait to take them out.
I can't believe how fast the day goes when I'm working on something I like.
Nathan has the Playstation 3 karaoke video game (as does Ian and Tammy) and for some reason I'm quite good at it. Except after a few hours of beer and singing “Total Eclipse of the Heart” I lose my voice.
Jane got new bookshelves and I finally unpacked books that have been in boxes for nearly three years and I swear I could hear them sigh. I love owning books; I have reread most of them at least once and I do use them as references or recommendations. I love the library but there is something so important to me about owning a book.
There is a White Stripes song that has the line, “It's the truth and it don't make a noise.” For some reason I'm been mulling over that for quite a while; wondering what sort of noise truth doesn't make. I guess lies are more the rustling type. I think of them as sound like a bag of chips, where no matter how hard one tries, they are going to make a whole lot of very recognizable noise.
Last Saturday I was driving from Wedge Brewery to Nathan's house and there, standing on the corner of Hillard and Biltmore in the pouring rain, was a no-armed midget. Just standing and staring. It was almost 11pm. Ian said it best, “I felt like I was suddenly in a David Lynch movie.”
My old teachers are in town this weekend and I can't wait to take them out.
I can't believe how fast the day goes when I'm working on something I like.
Nathan has the Playstation 3 karaoke video game (as does Ian and Tammy) and for some reason I'm quite good at it. Except after a few hours of beer and singing “Total Eclipse of the Heart” I lose my voice.
Jane got new bookshelves and I finally unpacked books that have been in boxes for nearly three years and I swear I could hear them sigh. I love owning books; I have reread most of them at least once and I do use them as references or recommendations. I love the library but there is something so important to me about owning a book.
There is a White Stripes song that has the line, “It's the truth and it don't make a noise.” For some reason I'm been mulling over that for quite a while; wondering what sort of noise truth doesn't make. I guess lies are more the rustling type. I think of them as sound like a bag of chips, where no matter how hard one tries, they are going to make a whole lot of very recognizable noise.
Start Your Engines...
Every now and then I get a few days of outlandish.
It takes on several forms, be it impromptu trips to the beach (for a day), brew tours, a caving trip gone wrong by rednecks or just Waffle House at an ungodly hour. Yet each and every time I am struck with the same feeling of hilarity and awe—hilarity at the characters and situations, awe that I get to live it.
Two weekends ago the outlandish took the form of a ½ mile oval track called Bristol Motor Speedway, which is, I have now learned, is one of the more revered NASCAR tracks out there. Nathan and I first had to stop at Wal-Mart to pick up various sundries for the journey: ear plugs, size-specific coolers, tailgating chairs and the most ostentatious shirts we could find emblazoned with our token driver upon it. After fifteen minutes in Wal-Mart we were both itching to leave as quickly as possible. It was the people...that's when we realized how snobby we were. And how we were judging people by their clothes, their weight, what was in their cart or the rowdiness of their kids. I was sort of OK with snobby because of the stigma of Wal-Mart, the great homogenizer of the US. Hypocritical? Absolutely.
So after our forays into Wal-Mart and our subsequent judgmental rantings we met up with Cara and Anthony, who were coming off of a stay at a cabin near Hot Springs for their anniversary. Anthony's family has property and connections in Bristol and graciously let the four of us crash on various couches and air mattresses.
Saturday night we stayed out much too late at Anthony's cousins house, drinking PBR in cans and smoking cigars in the frigid night. One of the guys kept assuming I was married to Nathan and I/we didn't know how to tell him otherwise. I was keen to go along with it and would have probably made up a fantastic story about our wedding if I was assured the friends who knew better would have gone along with it.
We began tailgating around 9am at a campground less than a mile from the track. We fired up the grill and began to cook our brats and drink our beers and quietly play our music, like every other person there. I was laughing internally because though we were looking mighty redneck, the music we were blaring was bluegrass, not country. Our brats were from the organic grocery and were called things like “bison chiorzo”. Even our beers were microbrewed porters or organic ales. It was like we were just playing dress-up.
What can I say about the race? It was mighty loud, it was dizzying, it smelled like oil and rubber and my driver won. There was no conversing with the people around, no trash talking, no cheering on a team. The crowd was silent. Eerie to be in a stadium of 170,000 people or so and have it sound so ambivalent to the goings on. We did nothing but spectate; it might as well have been on TV.
Would I go again? Maybe not to a 'short-track' race. I have heard that longer track races allow time to actually speak to those around you, and that would be exactly the experience for which I was looking.
It takes on several forms, be it impromptu trips to the beach (for a day), brew tours, a caving trip gone wrong by rednecks or just Waffle House at an ungodly hour. Yet each and every time I am struck with the same feeling of hilarity and awe—hilarity at the characters and situations, awe that I get to live it.
Two weekends ago the outlandish took the form of a ½ mile oval track called Bristol Motor Speedway, which is, I have now learned, is one of the more revered NASCAR tracks out there. Nathan and I first had to stop at Wal-Mart to pick up various sundries for the journey: ear plugs, size-specific coolers, tailgating chairs and the most ostentatious shirts we could find emblazoned with our token driver upon it. After fifteen minutes in Wal-Mart we were both itching to leave as quickly as possible. It was the people...that's when we realized how snobby we were. And how we were judging people by their clothes, their weight, what was in their cart or the rowdiness of their kids. I was sort of OK with snobby because of the stigma of Wal-Mart, the great homogenizer of the US. Hypocritical? Absolutely.
So after our forays into Wal-Mart and our subsequent judgmental rantings we met up with Cara and Anthony, who were coming off of a stay at a cabin near Hot Springs for their anniversary. Anthony's family has property and connections in Bristol and graciously let the four of us crash on various couches and air mattresses.
Saturday night we stayed out much too late at Anthony's cousins house, drinking PBR in cans and smoking cigars in the frigid night. One of the guys kept assuming I was married to Nathan and I/we didn't know how to tell him otherwise. I was keen to go along with it and would have probably made up a fantastic story about our wedding if I was assured the friends who knew better would have gone along with it.
We began tailgating around 9am at a campground less than a mile from the track. We fired up the grill and began to cook our brats and drink our beers and quietly play our music, like every other person there. I was laughing internally because though we were looking mighty redneck, the music we were blaring was bluegrass, not country. Our brats were from the organic grocery and were called things like “bison chiorzo”. Even our beers were microbrewed porters or organic ales. It was like we were just playing dress-up.
What can I say about the race? It was mighty loud, it was dizzying, it smelled like oil and rubber and my driver won. There was no conversing with the people around, no trash talking, no cheering on a team. The crowd was silent. Eerie to be in a stadium of 170,000 people or so and have it sound so ambivalent to the goings on. We did nothing but spectate; it might as well have been on TV.
Would I go again? Maybe not to a 'short-track' race. I have heard that longer track races allow time to actually speak to those around you, and that would be exactly the experience for which I was looking.
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