November, 2007

We got a new video camera as an early christmas present (and just in time for sg's first birthday). Here's our very first video. It's not clear to me whether sg is expressing excitement or a desire to smash the camera. Feel free to ignore the booger.

Hair day at day care! That's a lot of spray wax, dear. You had a SPI (serious poop incident) at school that day, and I'm not sure whether it was a protest against the getup or a pre-toddler bid for anarchy. But you came home in your bunny shirt.

Just an addendum to my last post: this is steam rising from the industrial facility across the tracks from the Candler Park MARTA station. This is on my way to work in the morning.

Ok, here's a little dollop of daily life. Just about every day lately, I've been taking the train to work. I get up around 5:30 and prep your bottles and sippy cups and walk down to the MARTA station.

I get off the train at Arts Center Station. (Arts Center and Midtown are both about the same distance from my office, and the walk from Arts Center is much steeper, but I have my choice of two pretty good Starbucks if I go that way; there's no coffee on the walk from Midtown station. And daddy needs his coffee.)

Anyway, the whole reason I think this story is even worth the telling is this victorian house on 15th street that's wedged between two high-rise office buildings and is across the street from the High Museum of Modern Art. It sits above the street on a stone foundation and carriage house, and it appears to be deserted. I don't know who owns it, but it would be pretty sweet to live here &endash; no commute!

This house would be a pretty good start to a description of Atlanta, which is a town where sprawl means 90% aggravation and 10% wonderful surprises. There are some photos below.

So after the house, it's coffee, then two blocks south on Peachtree to work. In the picture below of the orange and blue buildings, mine is the orange one.

sg,

It's been a while since I've had much time to put stuff here, but tonight I processed a bunch of pictures and I'll put up some stories this weekend.

[Note: lots of Wikipedia links in the first paragraph, then a bunch of YouTube links.]

sg, your father's first concert ever (that didn't involve folding chairs and the VFW or being with my mom or dad) was They Might Be Giants at the Variety Playhouse in Atlanta. IM and I saw them touring in support of John Henry (which, damn it, is a fine album) and had a lot of fun.

AT and I went to see They Might Be Giants last night at the Variety Playhouse and had a lot of fun. There was a whole drawn-out "phone calls from beyond the grave" bit that seemed to be in place only to give people a chance to get another beer, and there were a lot of songs from the new album that didn't make me want to buy the new album (although "Withered Hope" was pretty cool).

Anyways, it struck me last night how very few of the hundreds of songs TMBG play don't fall into one of two buckets:

1. Novelty songs, such as the Alphabet of Nations, Why Does the Sun Shine and Meet James Ensor, and
    
2. Songs about death, isolation and/or psychosis, like, well, almost everything they've written and Meet James Ensor.

You could listen to TMBG for a long time without realizing that you were spending so much time in bucket number two. (And this will be doubly true for you, sg, as your iPod overflows with TMBG.) Because what comes through so much more clearly than the morbidity behind the lyrics is the sense of fun, the refusal to take any of it too seriously. This, I think, is why there are so many of us so dedicated to this band. Maybe we came to them through Istanbul or Particle Man, but if we stayed for Put Your Hand Inside the Puppet Head or Where Your Eyes Don't Go it was because we found that TMBG helped us make friends with our teen angst. And in a way that emphasized the value of some of the things that were making us angsty! (Like how, in my case, I was uncool because I was so smart and handsome and rich and suave that the other kids, in collaboration with Nazi in exile in Argentina, were developing silent self-esteem disruptor beams and flouridating the water supply.)

Anyway, here's to TMBG. Making death, isolation and psychosis fun since 1982.