My Grandfather Could Teach Howard Dean Solitaire July 8, 2008
Posted by wes285 in Uncategorized.Tags: Cards, Family, Grandparents, Howard Dean
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My grandparents lived with my family for a period of time while my mom was sick and for a few years after. They used to keep the TV on at night. I’m pretty sure half the time they weren’t even watching, since my grandmother used to read the Chinese tabloids and my grandfather would continually play solitaire while sipping on Remy Martin or Johnnie Walker.
For whatever reason, my grandfather had decks and decks of cards from Northwest Airlines. He lived with my older cousins for years before that, and he had those decks even then. If you open the drawers in my parents’ guest room (their old room) there’s probably you’ll probably still find an unopened deck of Northwest Airlines cards. I’m not sure how he got them, but every card game I played when I was younger was played with a deck of Northwest Airlines cards. He was an accountant into his 70s, so maybe one of his company’s clients was Northwest. Who knows. Usually I would just sit and watch him play. Every once in a while I’d reach onto his nightstand and grab a deck. He always had more than one deck on the nightstand. I got so excited to deal out the cards so the solitaire game would be all set up. I’d play for about 10 minutes and get stuck. My grandfather would glance over at my game, hint at a move I was missing and go back to his game. In the time it took me to finish one game, he probably finished three. But I digress.
Most of the time, I would crawl into their bed just so I could watch TV. I didn’t really even go in to watch TV. A lot of the time, they were watching the Chinese news, which I understood almost none of, since it was all in Mandarin. It was more along the lines of, if my grandparents would let me watch TV, there’s nothing my parents would do about it. Really, I just went into their room because I liked sitting in between my grandparents. I think my parents let me be, because they liked that I liked to spend time with my grandparents and it allowed them to worry about one less kid while they were trying to get my younger brother and sister to bed.
I used to have a habit of sitting in front of the TV mouth agape (that’s a funny word). My grandfather used to always tell me to close my mouth, telling me that that was something only the lower class did. I don’t do it anymore, so it must have worked.
Which brings me to what I originally meant to write about (tangents are great). Howard Dean clearly didn’t sit next to his grandfather while watching TV. If you stumble upon him on one of the cable news shows, watch for about a minute and you’ll see what I’m talking about. If they go to a split screen and the other talking head is, well, talking, Dean can’t help but to leave his mouth open. It isn’t exactly gaping wide, but it’s open, and it irritates me. Am I the only one who notices this? And, after years and years on TV, shouldn’t one of his staff have mentioned this to him and have it fixed. It looks like he’s getting rid to suck on a pe, errr, popsicle. He ran for President. Was his image consultant a complete mook? “Keep your mouth closed when you’re not speaking.” That has got to be part of public/media relations 101, right?
Skinned Knees and Family (Just Breathe) June 3, 2008
Posted by wes285 in Uncategorized.Tags: Bikes, Childhood, Family, Skinned Knees, Training Wheels
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I was home all weekend for my godparents’ 35th anniversary, a niece’s birthday and a family dinner for my cousin’s engagement. Firday night I stopped by my aunt’s house for a quick dinner with my cousin’s family. We were sitting watching TV after dinner and my 3 year-old nephew was sitting with me. Out of nowhere he looks up at me with his innocent big brown eyes and asks me “Are you okay byu cao foo (uncle)?” I was taken aback by the straightforward worry that only a child can have before all the naivete is stripped away. I think I answered something like, “yeah, I’m just really sleepy.” In truth, it has been an brutally long few weeks for me. I haven’t gotten off work before 8 but for one Friday over the past three weeks, often working well past 10. That, coupled with a mini-meltdown last week, and I am just beat. I’m just trying to find a second to breathe. It’s amazing how perceptive little kids are. There are times where I wish more than anything else I could go back to then. It’s good to go home.
My parents live in a cul-de-sac up a small hill. I remember when I had just learned to ride my bike without training wheels. It must have been right around the time I was in kindergarten. We had a grassy circle in the middle of the cul-de-sac with a big oak tree in the middle. I wasn’t allowed to ride my bike any further, so I my riding area was limited to riding around the circle and up my neighbors’ driveways. I wasn’t exactly the most daring kid, but I wasn’t a sissy either.
One day I decided to ride my bike as fast as I could round and round the circle. The frame of the bike was probably close to a 45 degree angle from the ground. I found that if I went fast enough, the bike tires would skip an inch or two off the ground. It was the most terrifying, yet exciting, thing I had experienced up until then. Naturally, I decided to see just how fast I could really go. I guess twelve inch tires aren’t exactly meant for constant hopping at a 45 degree angle. Or maybe it was my insufficient balance at the time. Either way, at one point, the tires decided they had had enough and I fell over. I skinned my knee pretty badly and started bawling. Naturally, I was back on the bike the next day, riding around the circle with a few Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle bandaids covering my skinned leg. Being five years old is pretty damn good.
Running Around in Circles March 9, 2008
Posted by wes285 in Appreciate the Prose.Tags: Family, Growing Up, Home, Life, Mistakes, Running in Circles
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I’m halfway through my life and I’m never quite sure if I’m doing anything right until I’m completely done doing it wrong.
-Danny Concannon from The West Wing
Okay, I’m only about a third of the way through my life and I’m pretty sure it isn’t everything that I’m doing wrong. Just a lot of them. I wish there was a guidebook that told you what you’re supposed to do in any situation. But this is real life, and I guess it’s part of growing up. I’m just afraid one day I’m going to wake up and be 50 still wondering if I’m doing this right.
I turned 23 about a month ago. Ever since I’ve been walking around in a bit of a daze wondering what the hell I’m doing. It isn’t that I feel lost. It’s that I’m walking around in circles and every time I make another round I notice another new thing that I don’t like. That new thing makes me force myself out of the circle. But, somehow, I always end up back on the beaten path. I don’t know. Maybe we are just the way we are. There are the little things that we can change, but the major things, that’s just who we are. Part of our personality. What makes us the individuals that we are.
One of my good friends was back home this weekend, so I was back to see him. I ended up staying at my parents’ house for the night and spent most of the next day back home running errands I had planned to do in D.C. They’re only about a half hour drive away and its a nice change of pace. I find it’s a good place to go when I’m in one of my moods. I don’t always come back with the answers I’m looking for. But for a short time, I’m able to put down whatever weight I have on my back and let things be.
Both pairs of my dress shoes needed a shine, so I brought them back with me to use my dad’s kit (yes, I shine my own shoes, it’s what sophisticated gentlemen do). Like a responsible adult, I put newspaper down on the floor so the polish wouldn’t get all over the kitchen floor. My dad walked by, and being my dad, told me to make sure not to let the polish fall off the newspaper when I was finished. I gave him my usual quizzical “what do you think I am?” look to which he responded with an anecdote from when I was about 5 years old. I was eating a cookie or something and like a proper 5 year old was dropping crumbs all over my shirt. My dad and I had the following exchange:
Dad: Be careful when you get up. You have crumbs all over your shirt.
Me: Don’t worry, they’ll just all fall to the ground when I get up.
He didn’t say what happened after I made that comment. But I’m willing to bet that I got up, dusted my shirt off and went to go find a toy.
Like I said, I can just go home and let things be.
————-
Appreciate the Prose:
Angels Unawares, I found this through another blog, The Last Spartan, that I read regularly. Listen to what the old lady has to say.
Naked Texting on a Segway While Eating Spaghetti January 4, 2008
Posted by wes285 in Blogging, Family, Food, Hilarious, Ice Hockey, Observations, Plain Strange, Politics.Tags: Barack Obama, Capitals, Family, Mooks, Power Rangers, Segways, Spaghetti, Texting
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This year I actually made New Years resolutions. I made 102 of them to be exact. Let me list them out for you. They’re all up in my head. Oh wait, I can’t remember any of them. Nevermind.
Anyway, I used to, occasionally, write posts with several different two sentence thoughts (wow that sentence sounds awkward). This was before, of course, I became the eloquent writer I am today. Since I don’t really have any one topic that I could make a cogent post about, I’m going to blog like its 2004.
Little kids are amazing. I have five nieces and nephews between the ages of 1 and 5. I was at my cousins house for dinner a month or so back. We were having spaghetti. My 3 year-old nephew ChrisTopher comes running to the table and my cousins tells him in Chinese “take your clothes off”. He gets this big goofy grin and proceeds to awkwardly undress with some assistance as only a 3 year-old can, hop up into his chair, and attack his spaghetti. I guess its a good and amusing way to not have to wash tomato sauce out of clothes. Would have been more amusing if it was a Swedish model sitting across from me. A boy can dream.
Topher is also starting to get really into Power Rangers. Though not quite in the way you would think. He was playing with two Red Rangers. I thought they were fighting until I got closer and heard a smacking sound. Yeah, the Red Ranger was making out with the Red Ranger and my nephew couldn’t have been any more satisfied with himself. Hmmmm.
The Caps started out the season 3-0-0. As a long-suffering Washington Capitals fan, this was great. But then they proceeded to stink up the joint getting Coach Glen Hanlon fired after a 6-14-1 record, good for worst in the whole league. Since Hanlon’s firing they’ve gone 10-6-4 and gotten themselves back into playoff contention. No doubt this has something to do with new coach Bruce Boudreau. But I’m convinced it has more to do with Segways. You read correctly. Segways. Check this out:
Mom, I want a Segway for my birthday.
Texting while driving is set to become illegal in Virginia. Okay, logical enough. But, the ban would also extend to texting while riding a bike, riding an electric scooter, and operating an electric scooter. What? Well, Andy had this commentary on it (I would like to note, he has to pollute my blog with his thoughts because he shut down his blog. Something about a tv show and a girlfriend, but not his girlfriend, his friend’s girlfriend, because he doesn’t have a girlfriend. Yeah, I was that confused when he was trying to explain it to me):
My buddy’s girlfriend crashed her car into another while texting one night in DC. No one was hurt but when I heard the story later, I wondered if there was really a worse state her intelligence could have dropped to. I mean, if trying to compose “lolz no u r my snuggly wuggly” whilst manuevering a 2 ton metal vehicle through the already clusterfucked streets of NE at 2 in the morning doesn’t inherently seem like a bad idea to you, I don’t know that there’s much to be done. Oh, and not being able to text from your wheelchair? You better hope you end up on the island from Lost if you ever want to use your phone again
And some other commenter on the dcist message board had this to say:
Also, Barry Hussein won the Iowa Democratic Caucus. A certain person who shall remain unnamed thinks that means I owe her a homecooked gourmet meal. But really, she owes us all a streak across McKeldin Mall.
Happy New Year everybody.
….while driving, is the point.
Should it be specifically illegal? Maybe. Maybe not. It would be like passing a law SPECIFICALLY prohibiting the whole caveman battleship scenario. Do we really need to legislate against suicidal foolishness? Evidently….