I Like the Pretty Lights

Every time I've gone to visit Karen's for the past few weeks, I have seen fireflies, and I have marvelled. There is something fantastic about having a sea of stars winking in and out, when that sea is located at eye level across the fields in front of you.

So cool!

BTW, apparently the light of a firefly is somewhat green. Or at least the ones I'm seeing are :-)

Reflections on Manhood

Yes, I know, not really a topic I have any personal experience to refer to on. But I just finished a book called Self-Made Man by Norah Vincent, which was extremely thought-provoking. She spent a couple of years pretending to be a man in a variety of situations (in a bowling league, as an internet dater, in a monastery, as a door-to-door salesman), and wrote a book about her experiences. It has a lot of really bleak things to say about the way that men interact with each other and with women.

I'd like to think that most of the men of my acquaintance do not resemble the men in her book, in terms of their drives and conflicts and emotional life, but I believe enough of what she says in her book to be certain that I'll never really know.

And her descriptions of women and their various dating neuroses are certainly easy to recognize in the real world.

What I find most interesting is how much trouble I am having holding on to any of the reactions (fears/discomforts/recognitions/agreements) I had while reading the book. It's like something that your brain doesn't want you to see, so you simply can't see it despite how often your eyes scan the area.

My work intranet site has a puzzle posted at the moment where you are supposed to count the number of f's in a sentence wwhere most people can't see the f's in the word 'of'. Heaven knows I couldn't see them, and I went over it multiple times because I'd seen a similar puzzle some time earlier and knew there was a trick to it!

I'm going to have to try to go over it again and extract something I can hang on to before I return it to the library.

I must say, although my talent for forgetting the details (or for that matter the summaries) of books and movies does come in handy in that it allows me to read/watch the same thing over and over again with just as much enjoyment as the first time, I'd like to learn how to hold on to this information long enough to discuss it with friends.

Listen! Do you hear the creaking?

That'd be my bones and my very sore muscles fighting with each other.

I don't think I'm cut out for ultimate tournaments anymore. Not even the one-day "we're here for the barbeque" kind of tournaments.

Either this is the end of an era, or I've got to get really serious about my gym time.

Inspiration!

I've never really quite gotten the point of vanity plates. Aside from one lone example several years ago that I thought was cool ("XCLBR" for the record) they have always seemed like a really boring way to spend money needlessly.

However, driving down Riverside the other day, I finally conceived of a vanity plate that I could not only stand behind, but which I think my friends would argue also represents my attitude as a driver.

CLR D LN

Fabulous!

Ulti News

I'm afraid our second game didn't bear posting about; as we managed to lose it by one point while playing against a team that could only field 6 players. I mean, I know that traditionally my team doesn't really play defense, but even so!

Fortunately, we started to catch last night, and won our game handily 15-5... and yes, definitely the only change was that we started to catch. I personally put up tons of swill that were only saved by the consummate skill of my teammates in pulling down crappy blades; and I wasn't the only one.

Maybe next week we'll all remember how to run too. I can definitely tell that the team is getting older - with the exception of Bird; who through her efforts of training for the half-marathon has somehow gained speed. Not what I would have expected from endurance training, but there you go. To paraphrase Chris exceedingly loosely: 'I'm sorry I kept looking you off, Bird, but you were going so fast I didn't recognize you. I kept thinking 'Who is that blonde streak running across the field? Can't be someone on our team!'"

It definitely changes the dynamic of the game for me when there are two toddlers on the sidelines. My multi-tasking skills don't seem to be up to the challenge of keeping myself mentally in the game and playing with Rohan and Catherine on my points off. Gotta work on that.