Movies, Insurance, Sweat, and Bee Rocks…

• No offense Summer, but I need me a strong dose of Spring before you make your sweaty debut. I have jackets to wear, and books to read outside. I don't want to have to install air conditioners yet.
• Owen is terrified enough of bees, and he's already seeing them everywhere. Okay. They're usually rocks. He has an overactive imagination.
• Love and Other Drugs. Ladies, a few questions: So… it's okay for a movie to have gratuitous nudity and sex as long as it's still technically a chick flick? Also… it's okay for the characters to be incredibly shallow as long as there's some romance and someone matures by the end?
• Insurance work has been an adventure so far.
• Cold calling potential clients was a difficult thing to start.
• I've talked to hundreds of answering machines. I should try to come up with something funny to say. Maybe that would get me a few call backs.
• Have you ever noticed that people that are very patriotic don't like anthems that aren't the National Anthem? I would think songs of unity, even if they're not specifically American, would still hold some interest.
• I'm going to miss Michael Scott on The Office. For me, that's an almost perfect weekly dose of comedy. It's so well done now, I'm hoping they can keep the show going without him.
• I saw an article the other day referring to the present musical age as the "Post-Nirvana Era." Do you get the impression that some music writers graduated high school in the early nineties and got stuck in their own musical era? I seem to remember purchasing quite a few albums between 1993-2011 that had no resemblance to grunge or the nineties in any way.
• "New Superman movie villain revealed!" … And it's the same villain that appeared in the first two eighties movies … snore … General Zod again? He's basically evil Superman with a beard.
• DC Comics movies continue to fail with their antagonists. Okay. The Batman franchise has been pretty good lately. They had a lot to make up for though. Let's not forget the Bat-nipples and Jimmy Carrey as the Riddler. Didn't Prince do the soundtrack for one of those movies too?
• If they ever make an Aquaman movie, expect the villains to be a whale and General Zod from the Superman movies.
• Watching Taxi Driver for the first time made me feel unstable. Not because I identified with the main character in any way. More of a, I feel more unstable for having witnessed him, kind of way.
• The ongoing controversy of hell and what it might be like can shine some light on what people believe about other aspects of faith. Those who seem to be having the greatest difficulty with Rob Bell or NT Wright or even C.S. Lewis also seem to have the opinion that Heaven is somewhere else, not accessible now. They seem to neglect the now aspects and focus on whether or not we can "get in" after death.
• I mean no disrespect by pointing this out. If anything, it offers me insight and hopefully understanding into a viewpoint I previously had none.
• As much of a mess as Sucker Punch turned out to be, I loved the quote at the end… "Who Honors those we love for the very life we live? Who sends monsters to kill us... and at the same time sings that we'll never die? Who teaches us what's real... and how to laugh at lies? Who decides why we live and what we'll die to defend? Who chains us... and who holds the key that can set us free? It's you. You have all the weapons you need. Now fight!"
• I think they could have fixed the movie pretty easily. I think I get what the director was going for. He just seems to have left a few pieces out. Maybe those pieces will be replaced in the director's cut.
• I did really dig the sound track.

Random Things from My Weekend - May 17th

• Is it weird that I know why Hebrew National hotdogs come in a pack of seven instead of eight?
• Owen is going through a stage where many of the other kids at the parks and play areas we visit don't want to play with him. They're often family groups that don't play with any unknown kids. He doesn't really pick up on this well. He usually just tags along anyway. The hard part is, we pick up on it immediately. We often leave biting our tongues, wanting to say something to the effect of, "You all have man kids. It's been great spending time with them."
• On our way home from our neighborhood park last night I talked to him about deciding to be mean or deciding to be nice. One little girl had been particularly rude as we left telling him that he wasn't welcome at the park anymore. I looked at her father to see if he would add anything. He did not. On our walk home, I told Owen that it was okay for kids to decide that they didn't want to play along with him. He got really flustered and struggled to basically say, "What part of not wanting to play with me is okay?" I told him that everyone has the right to decide whether or not they want to play with someone else, but hopefully they'd express their decision in a nice way instead of being mean. I explained that I hoped he'd always choose to be nice to people.
• He's four, and I'm already having what feel like deep, meaningful talks with him.
• We attended a fun cookout this weekend. Our first of the year.
• Owen spent some of his savings money this weekend on a rubber snake from Target. The cashier screamed and literally jumped backward when it came down the line. She refused to ring it up. Her coworker had to come over.
• Both of our sons spent the night with grandparents Saturday. We're still in reprogram mode.
• I hate yard work (mowing, weeding, trimming), but I love planting and gardening. I planted grass seed this weekend.
• I can't wait to finish planting our garden next weekend. We've been trying to be "greener" for a few years now. Our garden saves us money, makes me feel productive, and in a round about way, lessens our carbon footprint. There's something about dirt, seeds, and my attention that feels so spiritual to me. It's like I'm participating in something… that I was made to do.
• I'm almost finished with How to be Good by Nick Hornby. It's fiction, funny, and British, but it deals very realistically with relationship/marital issues. I'm finding it very timely. It even has parallel themes to a recent sermon our pastor gave. Thank you Katie M. for the suggestion. I'm reading a few other books too. I don't usually read more than one or two at a time, but they're all so good.

Down in the Park

It's park/playground season again. At the beginning of last summer, I became a stay at home father. Two or three times a week, I would take my boys to one of the great parks in our county. I observed a lot of things, some of them trivial, but some of them a little disheartening.

Some of the fun or funnier things: Parks are full of discarded band-aids. People will knowingly bring their unfriendly dogs to child infested areas, which makes me think they want to be sued. People usually won't make any effort to clean up messes made by their children's leaky or explosive diapers. I'm not the only stay at home father. The number of men accompanying their children seemed to increase as weeks went on.

I also noticed that people don't tend to teach their kids to be more social or even nice. Owen is our oldest at four years old. He hungers for social interaction, and we love to take him to these public places because he gets to interact with a wide variety of children he doesn't know. As the summer progressed, he got steadily better at introducing himself and making quick friends.

Unfortunately, not every kid wanted to play with him. Some were quite rude about it. When I would notice this, because it was usually pretty easy to overhear, I'd call Owen over. I'd explain to him that not everyone wanted to play with him, that he should probably just avoid those particular kids.

Now, I'm not saying that children shouldn't have the right to pick and choose who they want to play with, but it still surprises me that, to this day, I've never had another parent call their children over to ask them to be more accepting of Owen. No one has told their kids that we're in a fun zone where everyone should be encouraged to join in together.

There was one day where I heard an older kid run up to his father complaining that a younger kid wouldn't leave him alone. The father advised his kid to get forceful if he had to, even telling him to give the kid a little shove if he had to. To be honest, that angered me, which is probably not the healthiest response in and of itself.

These public places offer a great opportunity for our kids to interact with different ethnicities and cultures. We're sort of proud of the fact that neither of our boys has ever pointed out another person's skin color or distinguishing attributes. When they played with Jewish and Muslim kids, they didn't even point out their unique attire. Okay, we have had Owen recently point out a few people that are tall and large, but it had more to do with him being impressed than judgmental. We love that they get to interact in this way.

I just wish that more of us were willing to pull our kids aside and instruct them to interact. I wish playgrounds were areas where our kids would get a starter course in acceptance, that they were encouraged to include everyone so that everyone walked away with a fun experience.