Block

Wow!  Sorry for all of the lack of posts lately! Vacation plus a massive tooth issue both threw me out of orbit and it's been hard to direct time back at the blog.  Oddly, I also had my first brief encounter with writer's block.

You see, at a panel at a panel at Norwescon, one panelist I saw spoke about writer's block, stating that most people who think they have writer's block don't.  Her point was that not writing is not writer's block. Writer's block happens when you have been writing and then you suddenly can't.

To put this into my own perspective, I usually operate with about 20 half finished blog posts. I'll throw them into my phone when I'm out in the community waiting at the hospital or for police or I'll start one in order to track an interesting thing I saw on the web. It's kind of like seed starting for gardens where you grow seedlings under a grow lamp and take them outside once they have sprouted. When I'm not feeling innovative, I'll grab one of those and type away at it to finish it.

Except... that wasn't happening.  I'd grab one with the intention of typing, but just sit there staring at it.  I'd type a line, delete it out of frustration, and give up on the post.  This started happening prior to the vacation. While it's really only a glancing blow of writer's block, it was genuine.

This then got lost in the vacation and then the haze of dental pain I've been in. Since the dental pain incident, however, this has not been writer's block but instead was avoidance. That's something I'm much more familiar with and just requires getting back in the saddle and writing. I'm not sure when the writer's block ended and the avoidance started, but I'm sure I'll get more used to identifying this kind of stuff as the blog rolls on!

The Curious Case of Clint Dempsey

As an American and an Arsenal fan, there's few things more conflictual for me than Clint Dempsey.  Dempsey has been linked with transfer rumors to Arsenal for years. At this point he is the best player that the US has ever produced, leading Fulham and scoring the 4th most goals in the English Premier League; breaking the record for the amount of goals an American has ever scored in the EPL. No American field player (not counting goalies) has ever represented us at a top Championship League club (Man U, Barcelona, Inter Milan, etc) as anything more than an experiment. At 29 with only one year left on his contract, a lot of us in the States view this as our last, best chance for a while to see one of our own competing at the top level of football.

And yet.... many Arsenal fans don't want him there. Some of this is simply anti-American bias. They feel that American fans overrate him or that he is not young enough to benefit a team upon. These are really laughable points. On the first, he scored 17 goals last year! For the second, look at Ryan Giggs. Thirty eight years old and still playing for Man U. These days, only speedsters have an age 30 expiration date. The skillful and gritty can go for a long time. The only point brought up that does bother me is where he would fit in at The Emirates.

Dempsey plays either a winger, an attacking midfielder, and sometimes as striker. Arsenal is filled to the gills with wingers and has an assortment of attacking midfielders. Until striker and club icon Robin van Persie made his shocking announcement recently that he is done with Arsenal, there was really no room for him.  As an American fan, though, I still would be worried about playing time. Without consistent time on the field, it's possible he would fade.

The development of Americans in Europe is storied.  For every Clint Dempsey who goes to Europe and becomes a star, you have a handful of guys like Freddy Adu, a player with potential who sees it go to waste while riding the pine. This isn't just an American problem.  In Mexico, for every Chicharito, you have a Giovani dos Santos or a Carlos Vela; unquestionably talented players who cannot find time on the field.

Jozy Altidore. No longer his natural habitat!

To be a star, a player needs two things: 1) to play at the top level they can and 2) to get sufficient field time. What happens in the case of guys like Jozy Altidore is that they overshoot point one and end up with none of point two. It doesn't matter if the club can afford a bench made of fine polished agarwood or cheap pine, you don't get better by sitting on it.  Thankfully Jozy has figured this out, and instead of being a benchwarmer in a top league like La Liga or the EPL, he is content to be a starter in the Dutch league which is a technically a step down from the others but has done wonders for his skill.

Sadly, all of this hemming and hawing about Dempsey for Arsenal have left an opening for Liverpool who might swoop in and get him.  I've never been a huge fan of the Reds, but browsing their forums indicates they, at least, would appreciate him. Throw in Liverpool's stance to become one of the few professional sports teams in the world to openly declare their support of the LGBT community and march against homophobia and I'll be forced to HAVE to become a Liverpool supporter (Thankfully Arsenal and Liverpool aren't direct rivals like, say, Tottenahm or Chelsea).  Of course, Dempsey might never get a local bar named after him like Brian McBride did, but at least he would be playing on a high profile team!

Purge

Over the years, H and I have gone from being two people living in two apartments to one couple living in one small apartment. This has involved various accommodations for our stuff.  As someone who has moved in with a girlfriend in the past only to have it fizzle leaving me to sleep on a friend's couch because I did not have a bed, I was reluctant to suggest that we get rid of stuff in the beginning. So we had two sets of a lot of things for a time; one in the apartment and one in storage. As George Carlin states, we ended up with "too much stuff".

Some of these resolved themselves. TV's, DVD players, pots and pans... with all of these we have gone through the initial, the spare, and acquired a new one. Most things, however, required a purge. Since H and I have been together, we have moved six times. Each time has required an evaluation of stuff and a truckload or two of trips to Goodwill or selling things on Craigslist. We've done what I feel is pretty good job of whittling the stuff down. I'm more of a minimalist than H, so we have power struggles about bringing new things into the home vs reducing what we have, but for the most part I figured we had made our last mega donation trip.

We did not, however, account for a third person.

Faced with the reality that we HAVE to make more space, we are now in the midst of a possession purge that is truly brutal. So far we have taken this ruthlessness to books. Long ago we got rid of unfullfilling novels bought on whims, books we didn't really like that much, duplicates, and textbooks that were useless or outdated. More recently we had gotten rid of books we only kind of liked as well as textbooks and informational books that we were logically never going to use. Now we cut dangerously close to the emotional quick.


I really enjoyed "The Darksword" trilogy at one time, but I have not bothered to re-read it and there are other trilogy's I have re-read that I would rather keep... so into the bin it goes. "Healing the Soul in the age of the Brain" was an eye opening read and I loved it, but honestly I will never read it again... so into the bin it goes. Yes, I am very happy that I read "The Unbearable Lightness of Being", but the truth is, I'm mostly hanging on to it as proof that I did read it... so into the bin it goes.


Coincidentally, there is a lightness that comes about from shedding these possessions. After the pain of choice, the pain of getting rid of them, and the anxiety of having lost them, there comes the relief. The sigh you make upon seeing an empty shelf, ready to house children's books.

And then, on to the closet...

Failed Save vs Crappy Movie

No sooner do I invoke the name of the DnD movie than I am exposed to this: the trailer for Dungeons and Dragons the Movie 3: the Book of Vile Darkness. It is really, really sad.

So I pointed out in my post on a few weeks ago that fantasy movies don't specifically have to be bad. Yet the D&D ones consistently are. Why is this? Simple: they are not paying attention to what is different from a generic fantasy movie and D&D.

D&D is composed of two things. One part is the plot and the heroes who quest in a land of danger, magic, and destiny. The other is about the people who sit around a table (possibly drinking Mountain Dew) while rolling dice. You film one without the other and you end up with either a bland fantasy movie or a boring documentary.  Ah, but you put them together and you have... Dungeons and Dragons!

Dead Gentelment Producations (last I checked, these are local boys stationed out of the NW!) the creators of  The Gamers and The Gamers 2: The Dorkness Rising understood this. In both of these movies, there are two stories going on:  the story of the Gamers and their personal conflicts in the real world, and the story of their campaign where the same actors are acting out a fantasy movie. They use this primarily for comedic effect and execute it brilliantly considering the low budgets they were working with.

As the worst Futurama movie, it is still 10x better than
the D&D movies.

Another way to handle this duality is a concept that is actually right there in front of the guys at WOTC: the gamers somehow end up actually in the game world. If it seems like you may have heard this before, it's because you have. It is basically the same thing that happened in the D&D cartoon, except they used a carnival ride as the plot device instead of the actual game to make it more Narnia-ish; likely to appease book burning fundamentalists who were overly focused on D&D at the time. It's also reminiscent of what happens to the Futurama crew in Bender's Game.


It doesn't have to be that cheesy or ironic though. Joel Rosenberg used this mechanic in his 1983 book "The Sleeping Dragon", which became the Guardians of the Flame series. In this book, a group of college students playing a D&D-like game suddenly become their characters in a fantasy world. He does a good job of capturing the real reactions actual people would have such as panic, anger, despair in addition to wonderment. One character that enjoys it too much and treats it like a game ends up dead early on, establishing the gravity of their situation. You could also soften it up, but gritty material like this could also go over well now that Game of Thrones has set the stage.




So there we are. Two effective ways of making a D&D movie. Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and WOTC chose neither, tromping out into the wilderness without supplies and ignoring the baying of hungry wolves. And that has made all the difference.

Supergirls

So I recently got a book for little Kidney (that's our current nickname for her) called "My First Wonder Woman Book".  Gotta say, I love it.

Thick blocky pages and an ending featuring a tinfoil mirror so the kid can see their own reflection as Wonder Woman. Then I started thinking "I want more!"  But... there isn't much more. There are LOTS of Spider Man, Batman, and Superman things floating around the book area, but not a lot of superheroines.

And really, are there that many to choose from? At least, as far as iconic ones go.  From DC we have Supergirl, Wonder Woman, and Batgirl. Marvel we have Shadowcat, Ms. Marvel, Rogue, Jean Grey, and Storm. Supergirl is the only one to try a solo movie and Wonder Woman's 1970s TV show is so bad that it's something I plan on featuring on TGIS.

I do have high hopes for Lauren Faust's (the person who revamped My Little Pony) Super Best Friends Forever series and I'm hoping it'll become more than just a series of shorts and blossoms into a full blown show. I really need some more superheroine stuff for Kidney!

Kidney

(I wasn't sure if this post was ever going to see the light of day, but since things are looking better I thought I'd throw it out there)

The hours after the ultrasound were some of the happiest of our lives. We were having a little girl! Five hours after, though, and we were both a mess. The docs called back and said that the kiddo has one kidney that is slightly larger than the other, stating that it could mean anything from a faulty contrast setting on the ultrasound to Down's syndrome, but they wouldn't be able to tell us anything until we had another ultrasound the next week. We live in an information age, but H and I are quickly learning that more information does not necessarily mean more answers.

If I had to describe the sensation of getting this news, it's like going out for a special occasion (birthday, anniversary, etc), having the most fantastic meal of your life, then coming home, turning on the TV, and finding out that the chef was arrested an hour after you left the restaurant for performing deviant sex acts in the kitchen. Whether or not this has contaminated your food or not is irrelevant, since it has now ruined the entire experience.


So then came the waiting game. Five long days of suspense. For me, I would repeatedly go through the stages of grief (denial, anger, sadness, bargaining, and acceptance) multiple times times over the course of a day. The thing that sucks about having an advanced psych degree is that you can recognize it, but can't do anything to stop it.  I'll be biking along, railing in my mind against the fact that I work with crack addicts who have 14 healthy kids all living on government assistance while I don't get even one healthy child and realize "Oh.  I'm in anger with some transition into bargaining" which doesn't do a lick of good.




We both coped in our own ways.  H cocooned up with books, I was out of the house a lot.  The day of the news I played pick up soccer at the indoor arena until after 11pm, leaving me kitten weak and cramping up just so I could pass out from exhaustion when I got home. I'm not sure if it helped or not to work over the weekend, but it did keep me from stewing.

And the thoughts. Over all of it was the specter of having a developmentally disabled child. I think H and I would do okay with a child with a physical disability, but if the child had Downs or something... how would I cope? There is no question that H and I wouldn't love the kid, because we would. We would dearly love her. Yet how much resentment would I also carry around with me though? Deep down resentment that is under the surface of everything? How could I get past it? How strong would we be able to be for her?

Today we had the followup appointment. The good news is that outside of the kidney, there is nothing wrong with the kid! The bad news is that one kidney isn't looking so hot. Still not a lot of answers regarding that kidney, but as long as she's got one good one we are told that things should be okay. Honestly, if you had told me two months ago that I would receive news that my kid would have a potentially damaged kidney and that I would be relieved and happy about it, I would have had you transported to the hospital. Can't say I approve of the girl's choice to have organ problems, but I suppose if she had to then it was good to pick the one that carries a spare. More appointments in the coming months and likely more stress, but on the plus side, that means more pictures!

One kidney is okay.
 (Okay, I was just looking for an excuse to post this picture of Torres and his daughter after Spain won the Euros.  Have you ever seen anything cuter?)