59, Still a majority

This blog used to be all about politics. It hasn't been lately. Actually, it hasn't been, period.

But this night, the night of President Obama's first official State of the Union, is a good night for this blog to once again have a political bend.

I am not live-blogging the speech. I am way out of practice for that, but I will be following TPM's live blog and Sullivan's live blog during the speech. I am more excited for this speech than any other SotU speech I've watched before, not just because it is being delivered by the man I voted for, but because of the harsh political landscape. I think no matter how moderate Obama comes off as tonight you are going to hear nothing but criticism from the right. The right says that they'll take Obama seriously if he comes out with a moderate plan and approach to policies, but my feeling, and maybe I am way off, is that Obama would need to turn into a republican right before our eyes in order for anyone on the right to take him seriously. It is amazing how Obama really brings the nut jobs out of the woodwork. I have my theories on why, but that's for a later blog.

Additionally, I just wanted to point out what Jon Stewart pointed out last week and it is this...President Bush never had 59 senators from his party as President Obama does now (even after the loss to Brown in Mass.), and Bush did whatever the hell he wanted to...for eight years. I am sick of the talking heads acting like all is lost. All is not lost.

NYC - Day 4

I am continuing with the picture theme on here. Back in September and October I was sharing pictures from the trip to NYC over labor day weekend. I stopped at the end of our third day. Two more days to go...

Day 4

This artwork is over one of the entrances to 30 Rock. I think it is beautiful and very uniform and industrial looking. However, I am sure it is just there to brainwash me into thinking like a socialist by emphasizing wisdom and knowledge as good traits. I am waiting for Glenn Beck to rip this to pieces on his show. Tell me if he does because I don't watch.

A stained-glass window in St. Patricks Cathedral. It is so hard to get good shots without a tripod in massive dark cathedrals, but it is worth attempting.

Inside St. Patricks Cathedral.

We couldn't get enough of Central Park. I love the idea of this massive park surrounded by a city that never sleeps.

Towers near Columbus Circle on our walk to the Upper West Side for lunch. On the way, we saw a movie being shot outside the Plaza. We weren't allowed to get close, but I had a hunch it might have been the sequel to Wall Street. Why did I have that hunch? Just because I read something about them starting to shoot that movie the week we were there. No other reason.

The Guggenheim...we didn't pay to go in, just walked into the lobby took some pictures and walked out. It looked like a lot of people were doing the same thing. There are hot dog stands right outside the museum. Some people don't like that. Some people don't care.

This is in the modern art wing in the Met. I am facing a large circular mirror comprised of mini hexagonal mirrors.

Taking in some art....some modern art. Very simple. But I liked it.

Going out to dinner on our last night in NYC. The meal was great, just a little overpriced. I suppose we did pay extra for the location because it is in Rockefeller Plaza.

We went to Serendipity 3 for dessert. We weren't even hungry and I was served the biggest single serving dessert I have ever seen. I ate about a fifth of that. It was good. Kate got the apple pie. It wasn't great.

Kate outside the famous Serendipity 3.

Tonight on TV

I rarely endorse watching television, but this is the last week of The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien and so far it has been one of the funniest weeks of its agonizingly long run of .6 years.

His last show is tonight and if it is anything like the previous four nights he is going to have hilarious guests and a ton of jokes about how NBC got rid of the funniest man on any major network.

The man is restricted from being back on TV until September 1 so you might as well get your Conan dose while you can.

Deep Freeze Pictures

Actually, it is pretty warm in Milwaukee right now, at least for January. The highs are in the mid to upper-30s. There was a heavy frost over Saturday night and Kate and I ventured out to try to get some good shots. Here are some of them.

Florida Pictures

This is the beach the team spent a lot of time on. It is typically calm with little wind and waves as you can see. However, we had a lot of cold weather and storms blow through over the 11 days we were there. These waters weren't always this calm. In this picture you can see a buoy out in the water. Myself and a couple others swam to the buoy everyday, even last Sunday when the air temperature was 37 degrees. That was probably one of the crazier things I've done in a while.

These are our divers (some of them). They are really athletic and can do sweet things that all of us swimmers can't, like bust out backflips and actually land on their feet. It made for a good picture.

Sunrise as seen from my hotel room balcony.

Some of us spent some time "yacht shopping" in downtown Fort Lauderdale. We put in a couple offers but they were soundly rejected.

One of the more impressive yachts we wanted to buy.

A modest sail boat. You know, over 100 feet long, but less than 200 feet long and the mast looks only to be reaching the clouds and not piercing them. Obviously the owner of this boat is not very wealthy.

Swimmers digging a hole. Last year's hole-digging effort was much more impressive.

Our esteemed athletic trainer and volunteer assistant coach.

Kyle, Belton, and Bryce, a.k.a. The Three Amigos, or Beavis and Butthead +1.

Florida was great. The weather put a damper on some days, but for the most part I didn't let it affect me too much. We had a couple really nice days on the beach. The swimmers got in a good amount of pool time, weights, and dryland workouts. Now it is a sprint to the finish with three more dual meets and a conference championship in Chicago in the next six weeks.

Detox in Florida

I sent the last of ten MFA applications out on Monday. I flew with the swim team to Fort Lauderdale on Wednesday. We are here until the 16th. The trip is a great form of grad school application detox and I am spoiled to have it.

I hope to be a consistent blogger again in the months to come. I've really missed it and I never thought weeks would pass when I wouldn't even think about what I will write on my blog next, but that happened. And you know, I feel good about that because just applying to these ten programs was the hardest thing I've done since being in Milwaukee. That seems hard to believe, but it couldn't be truer.

That's What I'm Talking About

New Mexico Bowl

Wyoming is on ESPN right now. They finished 6-6 this season and were lucky to get a bowl game. They are playing Fresno State, who is favored by 14-17 points, but nonetheless, the Cowboys are up 7-0 in the 1st. Wyoming isn't on national television all that much, so, I thought it was worth blogging about.

I promise more blogs in 2010. College applications are still taking up a lot of time even though my essay is done. I sent the first two complete apps out last week. Eight more to go. I hope to get some more in the mail before Kate and I leave for New Mexico on Tuesday. We will be there through Christmas. We can't wait to relax, spend time with my parents, and to see their new home.

Merry Christmas!

The End

If I am blogging it means I am done with my grad school writing sample.

The music is blaring. I'm dancing from room to room.

I can't remember the last time I had such a good excuse to party.

Reason Enough

It's the fourth weekend we are on the road for swim meets. I am more than ready for Thanksgiving break, but before that we have a home meet next week.

My first MFA application deadline is in a month and two days. That's really hitting home this week. There is much work to be done and now not that much time to get it done.

I miss having the time to blog about anything, but I don't want to self-publish the rest of my life.

That's reason enough.

The Power of the Business Card

Perks of aging, that’s something you don’t hear all that often, but finally you’ve been able to think of one. When one ages, one might get a business card. You mostly fill your wallet with them and don’t use them all that much, but when you were at a Chipotle a few weeks ago you saw the fish bowl from which a Chipotle employee pulls one business card a month. The person listed on the card gets ten free burritos. So, you threw a card in, this being the first time you’ve actually used the business card. Those times you’ve “used” your card to hide them in your coworker’s office don’t count. This time does. It fell into the pile, sliding up against another card. You think there is no chance of it being picked out of the bowl. You think someone else is going to win because you just got your first business card, one thousand of them to be exact, and this is the first time you put one in the fish bowl. You feel like you just wasted one card and, even though you have 999 left, you feel bad about wasting the card.

Weeks later, when you are sitting in your office by the phone no one ever calls, it rings. Only Chipotle has this number. You pick up and you are told you won ten free burritos at Chipotle. You are ecstatic. You call your wife. You march over to your coworkers’ offices and demand they share in your happy day by taking one of the ten free burritos you’ve just won off of your hands. You write down their orders. You write down yours. There are five burritos left to order. You order five more for yourself. There is room in your fridge. And, there will be room in your stomach.

You set a date and time. Tuesday, November 10, 2009 at 11:30am. You will stop by and pick up your ten free burritos. You will drop one off at your wife’s work. You will drive to campus and carry in the box of burritos, feeling like Santa Clause.

It will be a good lunch hour.

Chlorine and Books

It's November already. Wow. Time has been flying by. I find myself so busy sometimes. This is odd. Not the finding myself, but the busyness. I'm accustomed to copious amounts of free time, but I haven't had much of that lately. Swim meets. Travel time on a coach. Swim practice. Husbanding, as in being a husband, not managing economically. Some grad school research. And a lot of wondering where all the time went because I haven't been using as much of it, at least as of late, to write, read, and put out a blog a day, or even a blog every other day.

I get scared sometimes that I am going to get so busy that I'll forget to do all the things I want to do. I'll snap out of it and it will be January or February and I'll have forgotten to send anything to the schools I want to attend next year. This is a little nightmare I have. I will not allow it to happen, but as I inch closer to deadlines I am prone to imagine worst case scenarios, like losing my mind before I get to sanely pursue writing in the best way I know how.

Something about writing...As soon as I stop writing to read through what I've written so far, I lose my train of thought. Whatever flow I had is now gone and I should retire. I just did that (read through what I had so far) right before I started this paragraph and what I read I didn't like and that put me in a bad mood about writing, but, admittedly, I was in a bad mood about writing before I even sat down to write this blog so I don't exactly know why I am writing it except for the fact that I haven't spoken to many people lately and I know that this is a way that you stay current on what I'm doing with my life and I know this is a run-on sentence now, but I don't care, I'm giving my blog and its readers a bit of an update. Tonight, screw the elements of style, the ap stylebook, and modern american usage. Screw them so much I can't even capitalize the names of books and italicize them.

So, on with the update. Swim season is busy right now. I've been out of town the last two weekends due to competitions in Iowa (last week) and Ohio and Michigan (this week). We beat a conference rival on Friday. Everyone had relatively poor times, but we outraced our opponent and they didn't take us seriously and we gave them a wakeup call. Last year, they came to our place and beat us up. It was better, not just good, to return the favor. We got to our hotel at 11pm. A catered dinner was waiting for us in the lobby. Yesterday, we were in Ypsilanti and I don't care if I spelled that correctly or not. You might want to know that's in Michigan, if you didn't know that already. I was told it is the ghetto of Ann Arbor. It didn't look like a ghetto, but it did look glaringly familiar like any Midwestern town, which is to say it was ugly. We lost the meet yesterday, but that one wasn't as important.

I remember a few months ago I was going to write about every classic I read as a part of my resolution for this year. Yes, how did that go? The writing part has gone horribly wrong. I can't remember the last time I blogged about the most recent classic. I realized that it wasn't important to be writing about that and that I needed to finish a draft of my writing sample. So, I finished a draft of my writing sample, but I have kept on reading. Although not exactly on my 11th classic now, as it is the 11th month of the year. I might be on my 9th or 10th. Let me count them...

1. The Grapes of Wrath

2. Meditations

3. The Fountainhead

4. The Razor's Edge

5. A Tale of Two Cities

6. The Iliad

7. On The Road

8. A Farewell To Arms

9. The Picture of Dorian Gray (Recently started and will finish.)

10. The Brothers Karamazov (Started, but as yet unfinished and after having honestly asked myself if I thought I was going to finish it before Dec. 31, I answered "No.")

So, if all goes according to plan, I will have read at least 12 classics of varying length and difficulty by the end of the year. This list may or may not include The Brothers, but that's okay with me as I am still confident on finishing 12 by year's end and I feel I have tackled some longer works, namely The Iliad and The Fountainhead, to feel a little pride that I didn't just pick a selection of, at the very least, thinner classics such as Dorian Gray (which has been made into a movie scheduled for release in the coming annum). Thankfully, I have read more than the books listed above in 2009, but the classics have gobbled up thousands of pages that would have been read in many more books than the eight I have completed so far. I do have fairly extensive thoughts on most of the books I've read this year and even though they have not come out in blog form, I have them written down and saved on my computer.

I've completely lost motivation to write anything else, but I feel I've summarized (in very little detail) two things in my life which I haven't written about on the blog in a very long time (my job as a swim coach and what I've been reading). Goodbye.

Quote of the Day

From a Newsweek interview with Maurice Sendak, creator of Where The Wild Things Are:

[Newsweek:] What do you say to parents who think the Wild Things film may be too scary?

Sendak: I would tell them to go to hell. That's a question I will not tolerate.

You go, Maurice.

NYC - Day 3 - Part 3

I didn't know the location of Apple's NYC flagship store. We just sort of stumbled upon it walking up 5th Avenue. I am glad we did. It's design is as beautiful as its machines. This is the entrance. You walk into the glass box, take a frosted-glass spiral staircase down and you are in the store, a giant one room basement filled with mostly tourists checking their email on computers and iPhones and Europeans buying all the Apple products they can get their hands on before flying home.

The aforementioned frosted-glass spiral staircase, which, by the way, was creepy to walk down because the steps are transparent.

At the bottom of the store, looking up at, I believe, one of Trump's Towers.

Next door to the Apple store is FAO Schwarz. We had to go in. I was here, once before, when the guards outside were my same height. They ran away as I approached, I could have easily carried Chewie here out of the store with me, they were so afraid, but we just opted for a picture and checked out.

In the Subway, waiting for a train to Rockefeller Plaza.

You might know this as the statue right in front of the ice rink at 30 Rock that you occasionally see in movies or parting shots of national newscasts. I used to know it that way, but now it's something real, a statue lit up during all hours of the night with pillars of water surrounding it. I know the buildings which surround it. I know the noise it makes and that the height of the water changes every few minutes. I enjoy this about traveling. There are places, famous works of art, streets, buildings, etc. that have been simulated so much in movies, books, pictures, articles, and paintings that you forget they actually exist somewhere outside all the simulation and artifice. When you come face to face with them it is refreshing and real. For me, this stirs the soul more than the best written descriptions or images ever could.

Anyhow, in the warmer months, it overlooks diners at a couple different restaurants. We would eat at one of them on our last night there. It was good but overpriced, even for NYC standards.

I've written on this blog about my dislike of the Today Show, but just thought I would put a picture up. This studio is so small. They make it look so much bigger on television.

NYC - Day 3 - Part 2

Day 3 is going to be in at least three parts. I can't believe the walking we did this day. I probably snapped 200+ pics on this day.

From the Brooklyn Bridge we went to Grand Central Terminal, which, Wikipedia says is incorrectly and popularly referred to as a station and not a terminal. Anyway, I don't care all that much. We spent our trip calling it Grand Central. The main terminal is staggering in size and has probably been photographed millions of times, but I couldn't resist. I do wish I had taken advantage of the natural lighting, but we were on the whirlwind tour. In the picture above, Kate pauses by the stairs right after walking into the building.

Main terminal and flag.

Widescreen shot of the terminal and flag.

This is the lighting I am talking about. I like this shot just because it was the only one I got of the floor, but I should have taken a lot more.

An office building, near Bryant Park, which slopes outward as it reaches the street.

The Chrysler Building as we walk toward the nearest subway station.

On that aforementioned walk by Bryant Park, some print on the opened back doors of a truck caught my eye. I live in Oak Creek, WI, technically. I call it the OC. It's not a big suburb. With a population of 32,000, one would not expect many companies outside of Wisconsin, let alone in NYC, to call upon a business located in the OC. But while we were in NYC, someone did. It looked like the library was throwing some sort of event and this company in the OC was in charge of planning or tents or catering. I don't know. I just had to take a picture.

New Belgium, not Budweiser

Overheard in a bar in Wausau, Wisconsin.

Customer: Do you know who brews Fat Tire? Is it Budweiser?

Bartender: Some company in Colorado.

Me: New Belgium Brewing.

(Customer gives me a funny look, perhaps somewhat appreciative of my response and maybe surprised at my eavesdropping.)

Kate (to me in a whisper): That’s sacrilege.

Bryce: I know. Budweiser, are you kidding me?

Getting to the frontier

Hulking masses of metal in the sky

You fly by every day

Sometimes I spot the gray letters on your side

I can read them from the ground

F-R-O-N-T-I-E-R, I used to live on the frontier

I’ve been stuck in Middle America

A day closer to middle-aged

I’m in the midst of committing

More years of my middle ages

To writing meaningful pages

The Shins and Starbucks

I just settled down into my regular writing table at the coffee shop and what tune comes on? “Phantom Limb” by The Shins. I am instantly sent back in time. I’m wearing a green apron. I’m closing up the store with Jarrod. We just kicked the last customers out and we’ve put on The Shins’ Wincing The Night Away. Our jobs are monotonous. We are bored. But we make the most of it. The Shins help our cause.

Reminding me of 9/11

So I am meandering through a security line at the airport recently. I am bored and to pass some of the time I read signs, even if they aren’t at all applicable to my travel. Traveling with kids? No. Traveling with gels and lotions? No. Traveling disabled? No, but I am freakishly tall, but you guys don't consider that a disability...jackasses. I read on.

I eventually come to a poster profiling the featured TSA employee at this specific airport or whatever…it’s not explained. You know the people though, they suspect everyone and think you are making a bomb out of everything and they are dressed like mall cops. Anyway, the employee featured on the poster is describing how he once screened a burn victim from the 9/11 attacks on the Pentagon. I’m thinking this is odd. Here I am, about to get on a plane, and there is a poster reminding me of 9/11 and I get this image of this poor bloke working at the Pentagon on a beautiful day in September and he gets knocked upside the head with a jumbo jet and burning fuel. I just don’t think it’s great to give me, or anyone else, this image. We are all aware that people joined TSA because of 9/11. You don’t need to share that with me. I don’t need to be thinking about that dark day when you are patting me down or when I am stepping onto an airplane.

There are words better left unsaid. And there are words better left off a TSA employee of the month poster. Tell us about your hobbies instead. There’s no need to talk about a day everyone remembers like yesterday.

Just a thought.

Scroll Down

I've been working on another NYC post. I started a few days ago and I just published today so scroll down for it.