Manic Panic!

The title of this post comes from a bodacious and obnoxious hair dye that used to sell in the 1980s.
It has to do with the first celebration on which I will make just a brief social commentary: New Year's Eve in Times Square last night (was that LAST night? Yeesh!). No, I wasn't there. I was snug in a cozy house in Weidman, MI watching the spectacle unfold on national television.

I have never been a fan of Carson Daly (in fact, I'm not even sure that's how you spell it), but I now feel a certain connection with him, or a kind of affection, born from the fact that as soon as we turned on the TV at 11:30, there he was looking and sounding terrified as he held on for dear life to some metal contraption high up in the air. He was saying stuff, but it was hard to concentrate on what he was saying because he was also talking so much about how scary it was to be that high up in the air and how he couldn't wait to be back down on the ground.

Once he was back on the ground, the TV host rambled on about how nice it was to be on the ground instead of in the air. He RIPPED the thing off of his head that whichever pretty quasi-celebrity he'd interviewed had put there, and then his eyes locked in to the teleprompter and he read like a robot. I hope he gets some comp time, or free medication, for his trouble, and I will hereafter view him as a human instead of a symbol of the decadence of American society. I think. Maybe.

I haven't finished reading I Am Number Four yet. I'm about 60% through. There is this totally disgusting puppy-love relationship between two of the fifteen-year-old protagonists and I'm all like, "eew! Gag me with a spoon!" The author, however, again describes feelings of panic in vivid detail, just like Carson Daly did. So. Although this book is clearly geared much more for age 10 than for age 35, there is still something relatable and appreciate-able about it.

Something else happened last night, as well. Shiloh took part in a New Year's Eve show. Despite the world not having ended on the 21st, the Doomsday Dashboard is still up and running (pandemic is trending in 1st place at the time of writing. A close second? Surprise! Economic collapse). I am happy that none of these disasters will prevent us from enjoying the timely record release of Shiloh's 2nd album on February 5th.

In other news, the Northwest Indiana Times reports that New Year's Resolutions are better if you post them publicly, so let this be my public announcement of my official 2013 resolution to be...more balanced.

There you have it. Do you have a resolution, or do you resolve not to make resolutions?

The Ongoing Conversation

Here we are, already six days past our human deadline, and I'm having trouble letting go of zombies and Mayans, although the one is just a currently-more-entertaining-but-arguably-less-interesting-than-vampires social commentary and the other is a unit I've already taught and won't look at again until November 2013, if then.

Good grief, if such a beast there be. I kind of miss the vampires. They're queerer than the zombies.

As I have spent the day scouring the local arts associations and Hallmark stores and trolling the internets for blog fodder, I have also downloaded my favorite ten-year-old's (formerly?) favorite book, I am Number Four, so I can give it a read really quick before New Year's.

Flashback to Halloween weekend, 2012 (shameless self-hyperlink warning), when I was composing my post entitled "Revisiting." Over the course of a few days, the 10-year-old watched the movie version of the book that he'd already read, on a loop, about 17 times. I am happy to say that sometime during that weekend, I too somehow got to see the film in its entirety. I never watched it start-to-finish, but I did see all parts of it in a nonlinear fashion.

My Kindle tells me I'm 15% done. As I read, I can find many things within the story that are relatable to me because they are, or were, high school archetypes: the letterman-jacket clothed bully, the nerdy kid, the pretty girl...and I wonder what it is that the ten-year-old finds relatable about I am Number Four. What do the intervening 25 years of existence add to, or take away from, the experience of the story? I would love to discuss this with him, but I suspect that he will have moved on to a new favorite story when I see him here in a few days.

Will I be able, at a vantage that perches happily just five years away from my retirement to Springdale, UT or Barcelona or Panajachel or really ANYWHERE except San Bernadino...be able to convince the now-10-then-35-year-old to reread this piece and tell me what he gets from it? I'll probably be too busy skiing or surfing or kayaking (after an offering to San Simon) that I will totally forget to bring it up.

Let us be happy that such a far-out future does indeed exist.

As you can see, the Memoir of Narrow Escape is going to be a useless stream-of-consciousness raving until such time as I can sit down over tapas with Krista, whose Wannabe, I am happy to announce, is far more successful than Single...Apocalypse was, and figure out a plan, a path, a direction. I do love wordle, by the way, good job Krista! I know the head is from a different type of word art software. Perhaps my next post, if indeed the signals will let me compose one from Weidman, will be a Wordle of Resolutions.

Until then, may you look quizzically at the ten year olds in your own life and wonder what the heck is swimming around inside those heads of theirs.