Tuesday, January 24, 2012

This is your brain on A.D.D.

Today's post (once again following a massive time interval between posts just like the last one) I have a lot of things on my mind.  I started this blog to talk about our kids and post pictures of them so that our family and friends (and especially the doting grandparents across the ocean) can be a part of our life.  This is also much easier than a scrapbook, which is something I had told Emaley I would try to do (despite the relatively legitimate stereotype of such a practice being "girly"); she was the one who had suggested it might be easier and more realistic if I just start a blog and keep our family history that way.

This all made sense, of course, because no one's life is really private anymore.  We're all Facebooking and Tweeting and Blogging every second of our existence, while the godfathers of social media laugh at us for falling for the greatest practical joke of all time: their ridiculous terminology contrived for all this stuff.  (Seriously, can you picture Abraham Lincoln saying, "General Grant just tweeted me.  He says Lee has blogged about the South's hopeless position.  Will you please have the Secretary of War update my Facebook status to 'happy'?")

Blog.  Gene Roddenberry spent so much time trying to come up with cool terms for Star Trek, and all that time he could've been tossing out stuff resembling comic book sound effects.

But this is all completely beside the point!  I have several important things to BLOG about today!  Some of them about the kids, some of them about our family, some of them about deep meaning-of-life stuff, and some of them just random (like my entire introduction to this entry).

Heaven, God and Snot
You could totally make a quote-of-the-day calendar for the things Reese says.  There was the time a couple years ago when her goldfish died (appropriately named "Goldie") and was flushed down the toilet.  During the memorial service, as she and I stood at the toilet staring at the rippling water now refilling the bowl, she asked where her goldfish had gone now that it was dead.  I replied, "She went to heaven."  Then there was brief silence as the little wheels turned, and she asked, "Heaven is in the toilet?"

Recently, we were driving in the car, and she was in the backseat singing to herself (she's constantly singing or humming to herself).  Neither one of us had said anything for quite a while; and then out of the blue she broke the silence with, "I'm just so glad God made ice cream."

Me too, Reese.

And then yesterday morning, she woke up with a considerable amount of mucus in her nose, which created a whistling sound as she breathed (gross, right?)  Reese smiled at the sound, however, and said, "My nose sounds like 'Jingle Bells'!"



Separation is Natural - Shake It Up!
I recently bought an Odwalla drink.  I'm sure most of you have noticed the little couplet along the bottom of the bottle's label that says, "Separation is natural - shake it up!"  I won't be the first to draw some profound conclusion from the drink's directions, but it sort of hit me in a big way recently.  It's frighteningly easy to allow life's daily chores to insert their tentacles of mundaneness into what could otherwise be an interesting life.  By the end of each day, all Emaley and I want to do is lay back and be fed stimulation through a straw by the watered-down entertainment of TV and Hollywood.

But then yesterday we decided to take time in the middle of the day to go for a jog together, and then go out for sushi--just to shake things up.  I had a great time just hanging out with her.  We didn't have much time, however.  Immediately after lunch we had to quickly stop by the house to shower and change, and then I took her back up to her office, dropped her off, and then drove over to pick Reese up from school; life had said, "That's enough!  Now get back to earth."

On my way from Emaley's office to Hokulani Elementary, I felt like I did when we were dating--you know: that heady feeling you get when you drop the girl off at home and watch her go inside and then drive home with a big, stupid grin on your face, the whole time thinking, "I totally scored!"  I couldn't stop thinking about her the whole afternoon and it was a great feeling.

Maybe separation wouldn't be so common if people shook it up more often.