ZUMBIES!!

I don't know if its coincidence or attention bias or what, but it seems like as my age cohort has achieved prime procreation age, zombie literature has proliferated.  Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, The Walking Dead, Warm Bodies; the corpus seems to be piling up thickly and quickly.  To add some frosting to the cupcake, the Zombie genre kicked off in earnest in the late 60's with George Romero's Night of the Living Dead, right about the time Baby Boomers would have been hitting prime procreation age themselves.  As a new parent and a recent initiate into the genre of zombies (I'm about 20 episodes into The Walking Dead for my first foray), I've found myself with niggling, deep and mysterious thoughts about attempting to connect the two ideas.  But how?  How could you possibly connect hoards of mindless, relentless shambling creatures seemingly bent on consuming your very life's blood with zombie movies?  Okay, so maybe the connections aren't that obtuse.  As much as it makes me feel a little like a bad parent to admit it, though, the more I think about it the harder I have to try and convince myself the connections aren't there.

For me, at least, there is something somewhat existentially terrifying about both the Zombie Hoards and the Toddling Hoards.  They may represent different spectrums of Sir Elton's great circle of life, but they both seem to have the same basic goal: supplant the current regime through relentless expansion.  They are both notoriously insatiable.  They both seem to be more active at night.  They both have finicky diets.  They both drool a lot.  Both inadvertently remind us that death and immortality stalk us all, and are well beyond our control.

I'm not sure what it means for me personally to think about children in the context of zombie literature yet.  I've just started my hamster churning on the topic, but the best I've been able to come up with so far is to be more motivated to confront the fears that I have about childrearing (of which there are many) head on rather than sublimating them into horror films.  Utilizing my community of support, taking the time to examine my own thoughts and behaviors as a father, guarding the time for self-care behaviors and diligently communicating with my wife about our lives as parents are all parts of making sure that I stay ahead of the herd.  That, and making some time to watch The Walking Dead.

You've Got a Friend

At a party a few years back I was explaining to a guy that I was in the Master's program for Marriage and Family Therapy.  "You mean you want to be a therapist?" he responded incredulously.  "Like a shrink?!  Don't you think people can work out their problems with just good friends?"  The guy was a realtor, too.  I mean seriously, talk about the kettle calling the pot names.  I declined to illuminate the irony for the guy and instead gave some puerile riposte about how people need safety to change and not everyone has close friends blah blah blah; I was hardly a year through my program and had no idea what it really meant to be a therapist.

If I had it to do over again, though, I would tell him this: My therapist and my friends are like my paycheck and all the cool things I get to do with said pay, respectively; I don't need the paycheck to have fun, but it makes it a whole lot easier and gives me a lot more options.

I have been exceedingly fortunate, too, when it comes to good friends.  I seem to be, as they say, peculiarly rich in them.  Of the many superb friends that I have, however, two men stand above the rest.  We have sat with one another through the uttermost depths of despair and danced together (metaphorically) over the apex of ecstasy, and this past weekend we got the opportunity to hike up a snowless Yosemite Valley in January.  We talked about life, the Universe and everything, as we are wont to do, kicking around the world's problems like cherished curs.  We didn't come up with any answers per se, but on the other hand, maybe we came up with the only answer.  And at the end of the day, what other solution is there other than friends being friends?  And yeah, I can honestly say that I'm a better friend for the therapy that I've done.

All in the Family

Its a funny thing getting married.  There are all the things that you know that y'all don't agree on, and then there are all the things that you had no idea that you disagreed on because the fact that someone could even think differently on the subject was on par with saying Jimmy Carter was an effective president or that Megan Fox was a talented actress.  One of those Fox traps for Christy and me was grandparents.  When it came time to think about where we wanted to live after grad school with progeny on the intermediate horizon, I suddenly came to the realization (with Christy's help) that being close to potential grandparents was going to be more important that I had previously realized.  Not growing up with grandparents as an everyday essential part of my life, the thought of predicating the position of our pad on the proximity of parentals was a bit strange to me.  For example: at our wedding there were 7 grandparents.  None of them were mine.  It was difficult for me to generate a context for the necessity of having grandparents in the immediate vicinity.

Over Christmas, I had the chance to take my burgeoning brood to Gainesville, GA to spend the holiday with my mother in law's family and stay at The Farm.  The Farm is 20-some-odd acres of pasture and woods north of Gainesville in a town called Rabbiton which is presided over by Papa Kit and Carolyn.  Papa Kit was a doctor from the 50's on into sometime in the late 20th century, has had both knees replaced several times, knows more dirty jokes than the US Navy's 7th fleet combined and used to hunt religiously several times a week.  Carolyn cooks without recipes, puts up with Kit's dirty jokes, has more common sense than every advice columnist combined and takes in stray dogs whenever her heart gets the best of her head (which is often).  They are American Gothic 2.0.  After four days of spending time with them and the family, the wisdom, support and direction that these people have obviously provided to their children and their children's children is something that I reap the benefits of on a daily basis through my relationship with Christy.  Needless to say, nearby grandparents are no longer optional.

Watching my own parents with Madeleine has been a slow unfolding of the possibilities that having grandparents in the equation could bring.  Spending time with the Walkers was an opportunity to see the thing in time-lapse, and seeing Madeleine grow up with her grandparents is now one of the things about having her that I am looking forward to most.  And what is marriage for if not for filling in the gaps that our own lives have left us?  

In the Image of God They Were Created

I've struggled with feminism for a long time, and have felt generally schizophrenic about the whole idea since probably junior high.  It's been hard for me mostly because if you say that you're not 100% on board with feminism you tend to get lumped in with the misogynists, and that's certainly not descriptive of me; that being said I am certainly not 100% behind feminism as I have often encountered it. What's stuck in my craw with the majority of the feminist approaches I've found is that they seemed to have sprung up as as a polemic to misogyny and as such they end up turning into righteously indignant misandry masquerading as real change.  I very much believe that gender equality is an essential component of a healthy psyche and society, but as long as the discussion is predicated on a polemic paradigm I don't foresee much progress in the future.  If it were possible, however, to move towards a more dialectic approach to gender relations ... well, then, we might could be getting somewheres.

The upshot of all this thinking about reworking the antagonistic concepts in gender relations has me thinking about the whole idea of pitching women's rights to men.  In my experience, presentations about gender relations have focused on the damage that inequality has wrought on women and I completely agree that gender inequality has visited a host of evils on the women of our culture.  I am not a woman, so I can't fully empathize with the experience, but I fully believe that cultural messages about the feminine have a profound impact on self esteem, efficacy, and perceived vocational options for the females.  This approach no doubt has moral justification, but can easily end in the polemic and antagonistic mess mentioned above.  What gets lost in the shuffle, however, and where the dialectical approach brings some wiggle room is how damaging women's inequality is to men.  Discrimination necessitates dehumanization, and dehumanizing the feminine is a profound tragedy.  Dehumanization of the feminine is devaluing the love of a mother, discounting the exhilaration of erotic connection, and denying the joy of providing nurture.  No wonder so many guys today hide their faces in microbrews and fantasy football stat sheets and interminable rounds of Halo ODST.  Men: Gender relations isn't about being guilted or intimidated into acting in a politically correct manner, it's about recognizing the incalculable value of the feminine in both the women around you as well as in your own self.

I'm still polishing my ideas on the subject, and if you're a guy or a girl or know one of either, I'd love to hear what you have to say about the topic.

Adjustments

I watched The Adjustment Bureau over the weekend; I enjoyed the film, and along the way came to a few conclusions.  1: If Emily Blunt and Matt Damon had a child, they would produce the cleftiest chin known to mankind.  2: Men in fedoras are inherently suspicious.  Yes, this includes hipsters.  3: I was somewhat disturbed by the central premise of the movie.

Talking to his guardian angel (who, 4: Anthony Makie looks a LOT like Will Smith ... long lost brother?), Matt Damon is told that he cannot be with his clefty dream girl because to do so would ruin both of their dreams.  He would never run for President o' the United States; she would never become Dancing Jesus.  The explanation proffered is that to be with one another would blunt their ambition.  To very closely paraphrase the movie, being with one another would 'be enough,' and they would no longer need to be driven to succeed.  SPOILER ALERT: SKIP TO THE NEXT PARAGRAPH IF YOU'RE ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE.  So the movie goes on to have the mystical 'Chairman' rewrite the plan of the world for them to be together and it's all very lovey dovey, but it never goes on to address the question of whether or not them being written back into one another's stories precludes their destined accomplishments.

The message, however, is trouble to me.  Is it really impossible to achieve greatness AND be in a fulfilling relationship?  The picture often portrayed in cultural institutions (films, politics, etc) is that balancing family and work is an impossibility.  Even films which emphasize the importance of family over work often have the protagonist give up their professional ambition in favor of caring for their families.  My daughter is 4 1/2 months old, I have been married to my wife for 6 1/2 years, and I really feel like I am driven to succeed because of them.  Not because I need to prove anything to myself or to them, but because I want to be successful.  This is the difference between wanting to challenge myself and needing to chase a phantom to prop up a sense of self worth.  And most days I believe that.  Some days, though, some days I wonder if Hollywood don't have it right ...

Commitment

My best friend James and I have known each other for about half of our lives so far; everything from this point onwards is going to be us knowing one another longer than we haven't.  Two years ago today I had the profound pleasure to be his best man as he was married to the most amazing and inexplicably perfect woman in the world for him, and below is the text for the toast that I gave that night.

The night before he got engaged, James told me, "I think I could handle not being married," waited a beat while I looked at him with a cocked eyebrow, and finished, " ... but I'd probably end up pretty weird."  And that's part of the genius of language, the flexibility of definitions.  A mutual friend of ours, James Lyons, once showed James and me a giant brass soy bean he had sculpted for his future wife and explained to us that as a person handles brass the oils and moisture from their hands will patina the metal.  The trick being that everyone's touch results in a different patina depending on their diet and nutrition, body chemistry, etc and has its own unique impact on the way the brass ages and changes.  I'm not sure what kind of effect dozens of powdered doughnuts and gallons of mountain dew have on a brass patina, but I do know that as [James] and Patrisha begin to share one another's joys and handle one another's challenges, that you will uniquely impact one another.  In effect, you will be weird.  Not the pale, long goatee wearing, wood-shaving sprinkled weird you would be left to your own devices for the next 80 years, but weird in a glorious way you never could have achieved on your own.  I'm proud to have done my part in making you as weird as you are today, and pleased to have the honor of watching that processes continue to unfold between you and your wife. So here's to growing old and weird with the ones we love.

I have been very happy to be not only a part of their wedding, but a part of their lives for the past two years.  I look forward to the day that they can both look back to Dec 5, 2009 and realize that from this point on they will have been married longer than it took them to find each other.

My Christmas Conundrum

Sometimes a worm ain't the only thing at the bottom of a tequila bottle.  What do you figure the over/under would be on how many drinks you'd have to get into Joseph of Nazareth before he admitted that he was pretty pissed about being God's cuckold?  I mean, as far as being a cuckold goes ... being one to God is pretty much as good as it gets, but he couldn't have been 100% thrilled about the situation, right?  Yeah, the Bible talks about him balking and deciding to divorce her quietly; that is, until he is strong-armed into staying with her by an Angel of the Lord.  I know he gets a lot of credit for being a stand-up guy and all, but it kinda makes me wonder if the Angel said "Don't be afraid to marry her," or if he really said, "Be afraid not to marry her."

Maybe this is all heresy and I'm going to Hell for it ... but these are the things I think about now when I listen to Christmas carols ...