Goodbye my friend

Just over 20 years ago, I got a new neighbor, both in the dorm and over in the Fine Arts building where I taught music and he taught theater. "Kapoo" became one of my best friends and colleagues, a collaborator on fine arts programs, teaching English, D&D adventures, blogging, and assorted pranks and tomfoolery. Brian was the officiant at our wedding (and we couldn't have asked for a better guy to play director, stage manager, and best supporting actor for our big day), and then he and his wife were our neighbors in a freshman dorm our first year of marriage. With our connected apartments it was like one big family or some kind of commune.

My heart breaks as I try to find the words to honor and say goodbye to my wonderful, larger-than-life friend, but looking through old pictures to put together this post, I'm reminded of the joy and fun that he brought to, well, basically every situation. I'm one of so many who will miss him, and whose lives were made better by knowing him.

Stunned

I got word today that a friend of mine is in the hospital and is transitioning into palliative care. They don’t really know if he has days, weeks, or months, but it doesn’t look good. 

I’m in shock. We worked together in a boarding school for five years. We were literally neighbors, living for several years in the same dorm overseeing kids, and since I was the music teacher and he was the theater teacher, we also worded closely in the classroom, with the theater where he taught and the music room where I taught being adjacent. Not to mention collaborating on programs. The first year my wife and I were married, we lived in a freshmen dorm an an apartment that connected directly with the apartment he and his wife lived in. It wasn’t quite one big apartment, but it was pretty close. 

I was in the car with my 6-year-old when I got the call and I started crying and then I had to explain to her why I was sad. And it’s amazing how putting things into words makes them more real. Like, thinking “my friend is dying” is very different from saying it out loud. 

I’m going to head out to see him and his wife and some of our mutual friends tomorrow for a couple days, so if I don’t manage to blog, that’s why. 

Adult gifts

In my wife’s family, we decided years ago to have the adults draw names and just get one person a gift (everybody buys for all the kids). To facilitate this, we all send out a list of things we’d like, and this is the worst part of Christmas. 

I just have no idea each year what to ask for. I spent a solid hour h  free other day Googling “gifts for Dad” to figure out what I might like to receive on Christmas morning. Because I definitely want to receive a thing or two on Christmas. 

The problem with gifts for adults, I think, is that as an adult, if you want/need something, you either buy it for yourself or there’s a reason you don’t, such as it being ridiculously expensive. Like, a cooling mattress topper sounds super cool, but at like $800+ for something I’ve never even tried out? Yeah, no. I’d LOVE to have an in-home sauna but, again, very expensive. A new laptop? Yes please. Oooh, or recording equipment to put together a home studio. Or home gym equipment… the list goes on, of things I’ll neither buy myself nor request as a gift. 

I finally came up with three things: new sweatpants to support my work from home lifestyle, wool socks, and an Audible subscription. 

I’d love to get something totally unexpected yet absolutely perfect, but I’m not expecting it any more than I’m expecting to share cookies with Santa. It’ll still be a great Christmas, I’m sure. 

The Waker and the Sleeper

 I suspect that evolution has programmed us to seek out a mate with the opposite sleep tendencies of our own, so that one half of the partnership can wake up at the smallest twig cracking and protect the family from sabretooth tigers, etc, particularly during the child-rearing years, and the other partner can sleep like the dead and get a good night’s sleep to be happy, healthy, and live into old age. 

Certainly, I’ve always been the former while my wife has been the latter. When we were young and parenting only a small dog, she knew exactly who you come to in the middle of the night to go out to potty, because it was only possible to awaken one of us. 

And that’s why I’ve been awake since 6:30 on a Saturday, because our hungry-hungry six-year-old also knows who to wake up. 

There was a brief period in our relationship when this dynamic flipped: when any of our children were still breastfeeding. Then and only then my wife was on high alert to the needs of another living thing (a living thing that alternated between sharing our bed and sleeping right next to it). For that all-too-brief period, I was allowed to sleep pretty well through the night (unless the dog needed me or the baby REALLY started to cry). 

But those times are long gone, and none of the routine needs of our children is powerful enough to lift the weighted blanket of sleep from the other side of the bed. 

2022: The Year in Books part 3 (Non-Fiction)

I don't tend to read nearly as much non-fiction as fiction. I generally like history, but there was only one book that fell into that category this whole year. So it goes. Here are the highlights. 

It's been on my list for a while, but I finally read Open by Andre Agassi, and absolutely loved it. I started playing tennis in high school in the 90s, more or less at the height of the Sampras-Agassi rivalry, so it was both a bit nostalgic to revisit that time through Agassi's eyes and also revealing to get to know him and his journey through tennis. It's so well written, so authentic and rich--I would imagine that even people who aren't tennis fans would get a lot out of it. 

I read From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life after hearing an interview with the author, Arthur C. Brooks. Truthfully, I probably got as much out of the interview as I did out of the book, but both were good. The central insight is that our brains naturally change as we age, such that we may not retain the strengths that helped us in our younger years as we age, but we also tend to grow into other strengths, and the key is embracing those changes as we age to go, as the title suggests, from strength to strength. 

Another book I found after an interview with the author was Trauma: The Invisible Epidemic by Paul Conti. There's a quotation that's stuck with me from the writer Robert Anton Wilson: "Under the present brutal and primitive conditions on this planet, every person you meet should be regarded as one of the walking wounded. We have never seen a man or woman not slightly deranged by either anxiety or grief. We have never seen a totally sane human being." I think Conti would agree: under the influence of repeated traumas, both large and small, we are all suffering to one degree or another, even as we find ways to get by. This was a fascinating and helpful treatment of the subject of trauma, its effects, and how we might better deal with it. 

Far and away the most important and best non-fiction book I read this year was Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood by Lisa Damour. Our oldest officially becomes a teen this January, but she's already started on this transition. It was nice to see some of the signposts more clearly through Damour's analysis and to feel like we've got some help navigating the years ahead not just for our oldest but for the next two as well. I listened to the audiobook, read by the author, and it was particularly nice to hear the humor and warmth in her tone. But I also bought a copy, as I expect to return to it frequently in the next several years.  

Daily Habits

Obviously, here in December I'm trying to blog daily, and I've been doing pretty well at it, if I do say so myself, even if I got a late start. So, what are other things that I do (or try to do) daily? I'm glad you asked....

Today actually marks a 100-day streak on Duolingo, where I'm working on learning Italian. I studied French in high school and traveled to Montreal, Quebec, and France (mainly Paris, Nice, and Avignon). But I only took the required two years and then let it slide. My best friend in college took German all through college and picked up Italian our senior year, then went to live in Italy, so I had that as motivation to visit Italy, and in the process of several visits over several years I learned the travel basics of the language. Now my wife and I and our three kids are preparing for a trip this spring to France and Italy, so I decided to use that as motivation to try to refresh the little Italian I knew and learn some more. And it's also been a chance to try out a language-learning app. I'll admit that sometimes the vocabulary I'm learning doesn't seem like the most practical, but it does feel like it's all building and that I should be reasonably competent in a few months if I keep practicing. 

I've also maintained the Wordle habit that was so fashionable, though I don't inflict my results on my Facebook feed. In fact, I've got a sequence of related games I play pretty much every day: Wordle, then Quordle (solving 4 simultaneously), then Octordle (8). The last couple days I've tried out some Octordle variants: one where you have to solve them in sequence and one where they give you the first three starting guesses (which are intentionally terrible) and you have to salvage the game. Anyway, I enjoy the mental challenge. 

I'd like work out--not necessarily every day, because you do need some rest days in there. But this winter has been brutal. Back in the summer, I got a year-long membership at the local rec center and I went in 4-5 days each week. But that was in the summer when I generally wasn't responsible for anyone or anything in the morning until work started. Once school started, I couldn't go in the morning anymore because the gym doesn't open until 6:00, which is when I start marshaling the troops around here. I can sometimes go either right after my wife and kids leave for school or over the lunch hour. But sometimes I'm too busy with work, and it seems like in November and December there's just a constant stream of obstacles--one of the kids gets sick and stays home with me, or I get a frantic text that someone has forgotten something vital (usually the viola) and need me to bring it. Or I myself am sick or fighting off the lingering effects of being sick. 

I'd also like to establish a daily meditation practice. The closest I've come is that for the last couple weeks I've been doing some guided breathing sessions with a YouTube video and that's kind of like meditation, not to mention probably also valuable in its own right. I don't know.

On top of all that, I'd like to establish a creative practice of some kind. Writing and/or composing music. They are both things I've done in the past, but I'm very much out of the habit. 

What about you? What habits do you have or aspire to?

2022: The Year in Books Part 2 (Fantasy and SF)

Something like 2/3 of all the books I read this year were in this bucket, which isn't really surprising. Since I discovered Middle Earth and Narnia and the Forgotten Realms in 4th grade, it's probably been my most-read genre in most given years except while I was in college and right afterward. 

About a quarter of these books were re-reads. I went into a Discord dedicated to R. Scott Bakker's works and engineered a re-read of his Prince of Nothing trilogy and the follow-up The Aspect Emperor quartet. We're reading (theoretically 15-20 pages per day, and it's a bit of a slog at times, but it's overall been a good experience so far. It's a dense work with a lot of deep world-building. The writing is very good and doesn't spoon-feed the reader anything, so it definitely rewards a re-read, especially one accompanied by discussion to sort out the details. 

I also re-read Robin Hobb's Soldier Son trilogy. I should say I'm a HUGE fan of her Realm of the Elderlings series. Last year I did some re-reading in those 13 books and really appreciated it. Soldier Son I remembered as being overall inferior to Hobb's other work, but I was very pleasantly surprised by how good it actually is. It hit differently this time around and I really enjoyed it in a way I don't think I did the first time I read it. 

And then there were wholly new things I read! I think my favorite was Fonda Lee's Green Bone Saga books, starting with Jade City. It's kind of like The Godfather meets Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The characters are well-drawn and the plot can surprise you. 

I read the last several books of The Expanse series by James S.A. Corey. I read the first few some years ago, then I watched the six seasons of the tv series, and then I picked up the books where the series left off. Although there were some changes from book to tv, it was easy enough to slide right back in and see how it all turns out. By the way, this Corey fellow is actually two writers under a penname, and one of those writers is Daniel Abraham; here at the end of the year I read the first 3 books of his The Dagger and the Coin series. Very solid fantasy, well above average. It's not my new favorite or anything, but it's quite good. 

Right up there among the best fantasy I read this year was the last two-thirds of R.J. Barker's Tide Child trilogy. It's a dark world of vanishing sea dragons and ships made out of their bones. War and death and a fight for something better. 

No surprise, but Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the end of the Lane was just great. It was also wonderful to hear him read his own work live at Playhouse Square this year. 

I enjoyed the John Cleaver series by Dan Wells (starting with I Am Not a Serial Killer). The premise is basically a young sociopath who is obsessed with serial killers (and obsessed with not becoming one, despite his sociopathic tendencies) finds himself fighting supernatural serial killers. It was a really good series from top to bottom, and one thing I appreciated was the fact that Wells wrapped it up in 6 books rather than trying to milk the premise indefinitely (and, at the same time, I was disappointed to run out of books in the series!). 

I enjoyed Katherine Arden's The Winternight Trilogy with its Russian folklore. I enjoyed Laini Taylor's Daughter of Smoke and Bone series, though I didn't love it as much as her other series whose name escapes me. Tasha Suri's Books of Ambha was also notable. 

I didn't enjoy Nona the Ninth (3rd book in Tamsyn Muir's The Locked Tomb) as much as I hoped I would, but I'm still excited to read the next book whenever it comes out, because I enjoyed the first two books so well. And perhaps I'll appreciate Nona on a re-read. 

I also recently read book 3 of Naomi Novik's Schoolomance trilogy (The Golden Enclaves). Very good. It walks the line of being allegorical, in that the magical premise that threatens its world maps so well onto the problem of global capitalism, and I appreciated just how difficult the problem is in the books, mirroring real-world complexity. In that sense, it was a little disappointing that the solution is ultimately magical and not readily applied to our own real-world dilemmas, but there's something to be said just for people trying to avoid the horns of a dilemma and find a third way that's neither complicity nor resignation. 

One final thing to mention. I read several comic book collections this year. I got started because Robin Hobb recommended Dark Knights of Steel, which is basically a reimagining of the DC universe in the medieval period. I read the book that collected the first three or four issues and very much enjoyed it, but have not continued following it (maybe at some point I will). I was hardcore into comics from late elementary through high school and only stopped a year or so after I went away to college. In fact, I had subscriptions that were being delivered while I was away, and my local-ish comic shop was holding things for me, many of which I bought but never got around to reading. I felt moved to take several days organizing my much-neglected collection just to see what I had, and then I picked up collections to try to revisit some of the old X-Men storylines in hopes of re-reading the comics in my collection. I never did quite make it, but I did read some. It was interesting to see how mediocre the storytelling was back in the '80s in comics, even when there were some good bits. Still, it was a nice sort of nostalgia.