Hair today, gone tomorrow...

I'm sitting on the couch watching TV or surfin' the net (I can't remember which) and my nine month old son crawls over. He reaches under the sofa and pulls out a lock of hair. Peculiar... extremely. What really mystifies me is that I can't figure out the hair. Its is not mine... its too long. Its not my wife's... its too curly. It is not my son's... its too dark. Apparently, if we can be divided into a dichotomy of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's two most famous characters, then I am Dr. Watson.

Sometime later, I notice that my 3 year old daughter's hair looks different. I shrug it off as my being the effects of a redesign by my mother, who has been watching my son and daughter while I ran an important errand. I pinned my daughter's bangs up and left her long, flowing, curly hair down in the back (perhaps, fair reader, you have come to realize what I had failed to... but bear with me a moment longer).

My daughter's beautiful. Any father would say that, but I have heard many a person say that she is cute... even impartial and very blunt individuals. Perhaps her cuteness will not extend beyond the cruelty of puberty, but I think I can say, with as much objectivity that is possible for a proud father, that she is a cute little girl. Her most striking feature is her long dark curls.


My advice to those future and present parents who shall grace this blog is this: never put scissors in your child's art box!
Or else, your daughter shall look (as Mary the hairdresser says) like Joe Dirt.

My daughter's new, self-imposed,
hairstyle before emergency "hair" surgery.

Fortunately, there is a good hairdresser in our town and princesses have short hair, too.

Preface

It begins. Every thought comes from somewhere within us, is sparked from the senses, or is jogged by a memory. Most of the time our thoughts drift into our subconscious never to be heard from again. I guess that is why I'm starting this blog. I need to have a place to publish these thoughts. I need to see these thoughts out in the open, let them breathe a bit... and germinate. I want to see where my thoughts take me and the only way to do that is to write and write often. I can't worry about their awkwardness or their ridiculousness. I have to let them show.

I reached a wonderful point in my life. In many ways I feel like I have had my rebirth. That I have emerged from a cocoon of 30+ years. I think we often think we have these points in our life... these moments when we finally achieve wisdom and we have "arrived". I mean to draw a distinction from those points and the point I am now out. I am not at an end, a high peak of wisdom, or a mighty moment of clarity. Rather, I'm finally got some clue of happiness, some clue of meaning, and some clue of where I want to go or where I want to arrive.

After a 9 year career as a computer programmer I quit my job last May to finish up my bachelor's degree and go on to teach English. I had no connection beyond money to my former job. It was a means to survive. I had become an assembly line worker who instead of pushing along widgets in a factory I pushed along code in a mainframe. I had no interest in the product my company provided and I took no joy in satisfying either the customers or the stockholders. I had no ownership...sure, I had stock options like any other member of the company but there was no sense of ownership in the vision of the company I worked for. In short, I did not believe in the product I was selling. It has been said many a time that a salesmen is only as good as the product he is selling. Like it or not, in every job, it seems to me, that you must be a bit of a salesmen. So after 9 years I decided to find a product that was worth selling... education and more specifically literature. Literature is where I have found meaning in my life and it has effected me as a husband, a father, a son, and a human being. I hope as a teacher I can somehow share that meaning with my students. I feel like I have found the road I need to take. You can never be sure you are on the right path, but you do at least have to have peace with path you are on. I now have that.

So this August I will start a career as a teacher at my alma mater. This summer I am taking upon the impossible task of keeping up with my kids while I await to approach the chalkboard with chalk in hand and this time, perhaps, the correct answer. This blog is a chance for me to share my thoughts and share the funny tales of the suburbs, of being a husband and a father of two kids. Writing provides me a means to examine my thoughts, to see how they resonate, and to give life to my memories (and in turn the subject of those memories... children, wife, friends, family, etc.) In general, my subjects and content will be determined by where ever my life and my thoughts take me.

I will stick with a writing style that was used by the Beat Poets... "first thought best thought". I always felt the Beat Poets embraced this writing style not for its intellectually honesty, but rather out of laziness. Until I am further motivated I to will adhere to this style to a fault... so if the grammar errors or incoherence of my writing offends, I suggest you not read it. If I make a poor stroke with my brush, I am not stopping to cover it up. It is true a writer needs an audience to speak to (and I freely admit my lack of editing may run that limited audience off), but he also needs to actually publish something before he can have an audience. So I'll publish here (I'm aiming for at least once a week) and worry about my audience (or lack thereof) later.

David