Eleven

Today is our seventh wedding anniversary. Met her eleven years ago, in two days. I already wrote about the day we met, and I wrote about what happened the day after. So what else can I write about?

Sure, I can write about how she makes me happy, which is a little embarrassing, considering all the crap that's going on in the world and that Bush has been with us for 8 out of our 11 years together. I can write about how she makes me believe in the possibility of change from within through her hard work and professional dedication. I could write about that frickin' baby. He is cute, I'll give him that.

But the last eleven years have been about more than that. Because it's everything, really.

It's about stumbling over her shoes in the middle of the night and cursing silently so she won't wake up.

And it's the outrage I pretend to have when she sits down and then asks me to pass her the remote because I'm closer and she's already sitting.

And it's the way she made fun of my long leather jacket, calling me "Thor" and asking me if I wore it to my D&D sessions. And I won't admit it to her face but I'm so lucky, I would have even said blessed if only there was a God, to live with someone who actually cares about the way I look, because I don't, and because it shows just how much she cares about me in general, pushing me when I'm all but ready to give in to comfortable inertia.

And it's her never watching the Netflix movies on time, so what's the point of paying a subscription, I ask you? But it's also about finally watching the movies together in bed, covering each other's eyes when a Battlestar Galactica episode starts, because they show scenes from the upcoming episode at the beginning.

And it's because she's cute. And funny. And kind. And it's because during these past eleven years, the hard times have made us stronger as a couple, sorry about the cliche, and the good times have made us realize how great it is to share our fortunes. Like this guy.

And it's missing her when she's not here, and then when she's home but in a different room, being comforted by knowing she is around.

It's the comfort of Home and it's the never ending joy of living with someone who has never lost her edge and her passion for life's possibilities. It's love, that what it is.

Eleven years and counting.

Jacques Rogge is a dicque

I just thought I'd say that first, and that's all you're gonna get about the Olympics. Rogge, the President of The International Olympic Committee, didn't like it when Usain Bolt celebrated after his incredible victories. You don't get too many reasons to get on Yahoo! nowadays, but this article is worth it.


Congratulations, Rachel Maddow.



An Erection Day Special: of course I was completely (half) joking about that whole Hottest Daddy Blogger thing, but I'm not going to say no to this Hot Blogger Calendar thing after Shelli nominated me. So go there and nominate me again. Show them it's better to be follicly challenged than not to be challenged at all.

Remember, we’re taking nominations up until August 25th, at which time we’ll narrow down the field based on the number of nominations for each blogger. And then the voting begins!

Come on. You know I'm (half) joking.

And finally, knowing that with great power comes great responsilibity, I saw this book thing a while ago on Dan's blog, and I've been meaning to do it. Now, I could erase silly books like The Silmarillion and instead put great books like Three Men in a Boat, or the original blogger, Diary of a Nobody. Whatever. I'll just keep the list as it is. Maybe I'll add a comment if it's warranted.

The rest of the rules are the ones used by Dan: "The books I have read are highlighted in bold, the books I have started but abandoned are crossed out."

• Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrel
• Anna Karenina
• Crime and Punishment -- I was supposed to read it in high school but going to the beach was more fun. Did my finals by reading the cliff notes. Decided to give it a chance a few years ago. What an amazing book.
  
• Catch-22 -- Just didn't happen. I respect this book, don't get me wrong, but I just never finished it.
  
• One Hundred Years of Solitude -- Boooorrriiinnnggg.
  
• Wuthering Heights -- You know how it is. I read the good parts. The second half is redundant anyway.
  
• The Silmarillion -- Stopped reading it because I have self-respect.
  
• Life of Pi : a novel
• The Name of the Rose
• Don Quixote
• Moby Dick -- I wish I could say I was strong enough to quit this after a hundred pages, but I kept going. I could have spent the time better picking my nose.
  
• Ulysses -- Tried many times. I'm not ready. Not yet.
  
• Madame Bovary
• The Odyssey
• Pride and Prejudice
• Jane Eyre
• The Tale of Two Cities
• The Brothers Karamazov -- Okay okay, I have about fifty pages left.
  
• Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
• War and Peace
• Vanity Fair
• The Time Traveler’s Wife
• The Iliad
• Emma
• The Blind Assassin
• The Kite Runner
• Mrs. Dalloway
• Great Expectations
• American Gods -- Gaiman... We meet again... I did read Neverwhere, which means you owe me a couple of days of my life.
  
• A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
• Atlas Shrugged
• Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
• Memoirs of a Geisha
• Middlesex
• Quicksilver
• Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
• The Canterbury tales -- Or did I read it? I think I did.
  
• The Historian : a novel
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man -- Awesome. Brilliant. Great. Amazing.
  
• Love in the Time of Cholera -- I did like it, but I was a romantic sixteen-year-old when I read it. I don't think I would have liked it now.
  
• Brave New world
• The Fountainhead
• Foucault’s Pendulum
• Middlemarch
• Frankenstein -- Shitenstein
  
• The Count of Monte Cristo -- My favorite book.
  
• Dracula -- It's cool. I liked it.
  
• A Clockwork Orange
• Anansi Boys
• The Once and Future King
• The Grapes of Wrath
• The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
• 1984 -- Also had to read it for school, but this one seemed more manageable so I did read it.
  
• Angels & Demons
• The Inferno
• The Satanic Verses -- The only book here I read twice.
  
• Sense and Sensibility
• The Picture of Dorian Gray -- In my twenties, I was Dorian Gray. I don't think I was supposed to identify with him, but I lived a "the hell with anyone over thirty" kind of life, which meant Dorian Gray was my hero.
  
• Mansfield Park
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
• To the Lighthouse -- I'm not afraid of Virginia Woolf.
  
• Tess of the D’Urbervilles
• Oliver Twist
• Gulliver’s Travels -- Read it in the library in elementary school.
  
• Les Misérables
• The Corrections
• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time -- I don't usually read these new best sellers because I'm too pretentious to give an honest opinion. But someone bought me this book so I had to read it. Didn't like it, but that could be because I'm indeed pretentious.
  
• Dune
• The Prince
• The Sound and the Fury -- Tried three times before successfully getting over the confusion of the first few pages. It was worth it.
  
• Angela’s Ashes : a memoir -- 'tis silly.
  
• The God of Small Things
• A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present -- I can handle the truth.
  
• Cryptonomicon
• Neverwhere -- Gaiman!!!
  
• A Confederacy of Dunces -- Awwww. Another favorite.
  
• A Short History of Nearly Everything -- I know I'm not alone on that one.
  
• Dubliners
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being -- Required reading for teenagers. Preferably read while listening to Pink Floyd's The Wall.
  
• Beloved
• Slaughterhouse-five
• The Scarlet Letter
• Eats, Shoots & Leaves
• The Mists of Avalon
• Oryx and Crake : a novel
• Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
• Cloud Atlas
• The Confusion
• Lolita -- Okay, half-way there.
  
• Persuasion
• Northanger Abbey
• The Catcher in the Rye -- Of course.
  
• On the Road -- The book is guilty of making millions of wannabe writers think they can get away with writing about crap they think about when they're stoned. That aside, it's a fun book as long as writing students stop trying to imitate it.
• The Hunchback of Notre Dame
• Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values -- One day...
  
• The Aeneid
• Watership Down -- Many many many many years ago.
  
• Gravity’s Rainbow
• The Hobbit -- I hope the movie won't ruin it for me like the Lord of the Rings movies did.
  
• In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
• White Teeth
• Treasure Island -- I think I read it. But maybe I read the picture book version. Does it count?
  
• David Copperfield
• The Three Musketeers -- I swear, I have less than fifty pages left.
  

Do I have to spell it out for you?

This is Neil Gaiman. Not only is he an overrated writer, but apparently he's also a daddy. He's a hot daddy. He's the reigning hottest daddy, in fact.

Let's move on.

No disrespect, but this is the current number one:

Let's leave it there and move to the current runner up:

First of all, he has ads from BlogHer, which should automatically disqualify him. And other than that, he's what's-her-name's husband, so obviously people are biased in his favor.

And in number three, it's this guy:

Okay?

Now, they all have cute daughters, and the mothers are fine thank you, don't get me wrong, but how come--

No. I shouldn't say anything. Here's a couple of pictures of me, by the way.



Update:
Thanks, Shelli!

Seven

I've been tagged by everyone's favorite historian, Mark Stoneman. This one is a "Seven weird or unique things about me," which in lesser hands would have been a great excuse to tell the world that when I pee I can still recognize my first pube.

But not me. Mark is a historian, and as such, he deserves more. So here goes:

• Caught my parents once. Wait, that's not unique? It's at least weird, no? It's weird that I put it first at least?

• My father caught me once. These were different times, before a young man could lock himself in the room and go on Romanian chatlines. No. Those pre-internet days, if you were too tired or empty inside to use your imagination (or maybe you wanted to savor it for more important things), you had to go to the TV in the living room and watch MTV. Poor man opened the door, saw me, went back outside, waited a couple of minutes, opened the door again, and pretended nothing happened. As usual, nothing has ever been said.

• On vacation from the military, friends and I went camping in the Sea of Galilee. I was nineteen. Met a seventeen year-old English girl. We started a bonfire. I showed her three different ways to find the Northern Star. We made out, and in the morning I came back to my friends with her underwear. I can see the Northern Star from my deck and it still makes me feel pervy.

• Almost shot two of my friends in training in the army. I was the gunner in a tank-ish vehicle and I couldn't see anything, and the officer said, "Fire." I told him I couldn't see the target, but he insisted. Only after I fired I saw my friends running between the bullets. When it was over, they complained to the officer that someone shot at them, but the officer felt it was his fault, so like everything else in the military, it was silenced.

• This guy died from an electric shock caused by an exposed power line in Lebanon. It was a big scandal for a while because his father was a big deal in the military. The army promised to fix it. An investigation began. Four months later, a friend of mine got electrocuted by the same line. Because the officers in the military never cared. An army officer is a career, and you don't build a career by caring about those under your command. I went to visit him in the hospital. They moved part of his butt to his back. He had half an ear missing. And for nothing. Because the officers didn't care.

• Armed with these two stories, when I finally left the army and moved to England, I ended up for a while working for El-Al. I told a girl there that I thought all officers should be executed. It made her cry because her brother was an officer and she liked me and why would I say such a thing. At the time, I couldn't imagine something I said could impact someone like that. And I didn't know how to apologize. So I shrugged and stood my ground.

• When I pee, I can still recognize my first pube. It's longer than the others. And anyway, a man can tell.

The worst father award

It's not like I watch TV all the time. But I do watch TV. With my kid.

I fold the laundry on the bed and put MSNBC on because I don't know why. The TV is behind me. And suddenly my kid, who until that point has been content learning to crawl and to interact with teddy bears, is now tilting his head to see what fucking Pat Buchanan has to say.

But that's not the worst part.

See, my kid has never heard of John Lennon or Salman Rushdie or Bill Hicks or Jean Cocteau or Brian Wilson or Dostoyevsky or Chekhov or Joyce or Scorsese or even fucking Tarantino. And he doesn't know Willie Nelson or Gill Scott Heron or Chuck D. or Daniel Johnston or Spike Lee or Hitchcock Rembrandt Hendrix Coltrane or even Edward Hopper.

But he sure knows this cunt: