Cranky Cuss's Open Salon Blog

I'm Not Depressed. The World Just Sucks.

Fri, 11 May 2012 10:05:46 -0400

I’ve lost my sense of humor. When not even Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert can make me laugh consistently, I’ve got a problem. I’m not depressed. The world just sucks.

Much of my unhappiness is entirely personal: nagging health issues that make me realize that the concept of the golden years is a crock; the sad realization that a couple of people I considered friends are not; the stress-filled atmosphere at my wife’s job which has her returning home many nights looking like a beaten dog. A lot of it, however, is too much contact with a culture that feels increasingly vapid and rude, especially the toxicity of public discourse.

I can’t surf the Internet, whether it’s the blogosphere, news sites or even my goddam email inbox, without feeling like I’m under assault. The Net gives everyone a forum and everyone takes advantage of it by airing their outrage about everything, whether major or trivial, and they expect me to share it. Either it’s something Barack Obama did or didn’t do, or something Mitt Romney did or didn’t say, or else it’s some offensive thing some Republican hack or some unpaid blogger wrote, or else it’s some very important issue that’s being overlooked or some issue that’s getting way too much attention, or it’s some politically incorrect ad nobody’s seen for some product nobody wants, or it’s who got eliminated last night on American Idol or .. God, enough already. There are six billion people in the world and there will always be someone doing something unpleasant. I just don’t have that much outrage in me and often I’m only outraged by how easily people are outraged. I’m suffering from outrage overload.

I’m tired of reading screeds by people who are so cocksure that their opinion is right that you must be a fucking moron to … wait a second, let me change to language they’ll understand … YOU MUST BE A FUCKING MORON TO DISAGREE. I have strong opinions about many things, but I’m not cocksure about shit. I am always aware that I’m a flawed human being evaluating flawed human beings by using flawed knowledge to build flawed analyses, and frankly anyone who doesn’t feel that way frightens me. Too few essays I read today indicate a writer wrestling with his or her thoughts. Well, I wrestle with my thoughts all the time.

The atmosphere has gotten so vitriolic that if either Obama or Romney discovered the cure for cancer, there are people who would be angered by it. We’ve gotten so antagonistic that now we’re arguing about dumbass shit that Romney did as a teenager – because we know that teenagers doing dumbass shit is so rare – and we’re arguing over what Obama ate as a child in Indonesia. What next, which candidate as a baby peed on his mother when she was changing his diaper? Election Day isn’t until November, so we have six more months of this bullshit and it’s going to get worse.

Political discussion inevitably brings out the worst in people. We may tolerate widely varying opinions and tastes in any other venue – “You love punk rock, I love Baroque composers, but we’re still BFFs!” – but air the smallest disagreement on Obamacare and we’re reaching for the knives. Yeah, I know outrage and overreaction have been par for the course ever since God got pissed off at mankind and instructed Noah to build an ark, but only in recent years has the 24/7 cable-Internet combination turned our rancor into a nuclear cloud that constantly chokes our lungs.

The anonymity of the Web allows people to infect even innocuous forums with their abuse. Recently I read an online article about Will Smith and wondered, “How many comments will I have to read before I encounter one that’s blatantly racist?” The answer: two.

We feel a need to make every difference sound apocalyptic and we reward the commentators that are the loudest and most outlandish, like Rush Limbaugh. Really, Bill O’Reilly is the “Worst Person in the World” while Charles Manson and the butchers in Darfur are still drawing breath? We have a “war” on religion and a “war” on women; I wonder what the PTSD-affected soldiers returning from the Middle East, or the parents of soldiers who never returned, think about us comparing our political disagreements to mortal combat.

The tipping point for me happened when I watched MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, so angry about George Zimmerman’s lawyer leaving the studio before a scheduled interview that he yelled questions at an empty chair. I know O’Donnell expected me to share his outrage but all I thought was: Please, somebody slap me silly if I ever act like that big a fool.

I am 61 years old. I don’t know how much time I have left on this planet. 25 years, hopefully. 25 days or even 25 hours, possibly. I don’t want to spend that time with bile in my throat and anger in my heart, so I’ve been spending much less time online and I’ve stopped participating in any discussion that has the potential to grow caustic. I’d like to believe that I can hold an opinion without thinking that someone who disagrees is a moral midget. I’d like to believe that I can feel disdain for the political views of candidates like Mitt Romney without feeling the need to trash him and his family as human beings. I’d like to believe that I can have critical thoughts about public figures who do stupid things without feeling that they are evil personified. That probably makes me a fucking moron.

Stop the world. I want to get off.

June 28, 1969 (Repost)

Wed, 9 May 2012 18:05:51 -0400

(In honor of President Obama finally declaring his support for marriage equality, I am reposting what I wrote two years ago about my own “evolution” in thought.)

June 28, 1969. I was beginning my last summer vacation before heading off to college. I was also enjoying the new driver’s license I’d just received. Perhaps I was having a pizza with some buddies, talking about social issues that bothered us, like Vietnam and racial injustice. Probably we were chatting about girls we thought were hot and out of our league. Certainly we were talking about our big plans for our lives and the wonderful things we hoped to accomplish. Our futures were bright.

Homosexuality wasn’t even a word in my vocabulary.

June 28, 1969. Gay men in a West Village bar named the Stonewall riot when police make one of their regular vice raids. At the time, homosexual acts are legal in only one state, Illinois. Homosexuals everywhere, even in liberal and tolerant New York, were forced to keep their attraction behind locked doors with the windows covered, out of sight. Gathering places are frequently raided by the authorities, with people arrested just for fraternizing. Being arrested at a gay gathering place could cost the arrestees their jobs and ruin their lives. The uprising at the Stonewall, which lasts for three days, is the first time gays have resisted authority, and it is considered the “Rosa Parks moment” of the gay liberation movement.

Homosexuality wasn’t a word in the media’s vocabulary either. There are few news photos of the events and mainstream coverage, when not demeaning, is mostly nonexistent.

Mid-1970s. I meet my first openly gay man at the manufacturing firm where I worked, except that when I first met Ronnie, he was struggling to stay in the closet. Unhappily married – there was a rumor about his angry wife putting broken glass in his sandwich – Ronnie was difficult to work with. He came to work every day with a lunch box featuring Peter Pan and a logo that read, “I Refuse to Grow Up,” and it was appropriate. He had a sense of humor not unlike mine, but he was often testy, uncomfortable around co-workers and somewhat unreliable. Once I found him wedged into a small space between a machine and the wall, hiding from co-workers, and you don’t need to be Freud to analyze that sight.

I don’t remember when Ronnie accepted his homosexuality. There was no great proclamation. What I remember is that he suddenly became happy. He was more reliable and more pleasant to work with, even getting a promotion. I certainly didn’t understand this same-sex attraction thing, but I was a child of the Sixties and if it made you happy and didn’t hurt anyone, then hey, whatever floats your boat.

Summer 1980. I spend six weeks bumming around the country. In San Francisco, I head out to the Castro for an afternoon to check out some indie record stores. I know it’s the center of gay life in Frisco – I’d followed the murder of Harvey Milk - but I’ve spent a lot of time in Greenwich Village and I’ve seen gay couples before, so I’m cool. Or so I thought. Until I discover that nearly every couple walking around the Castro is gay. I’m curious in a sociological sense but also a little uneasy. It takes a while before I realize that my unease arises because, for the first time in my life, I’m in a community where I’m the minority. It gives me a quick slap in the face about what life must be like every day for gay people.

November 24, 1984. I get married. Denise and I spend the evening celebrating our heterosexual love with our friends, dancing, drinking, eating and laughing. I don’t spend one second considering that if Denise and I were of the same sex, we couldn’t have such a celebration sanctioned by the state.

Mid-1980s. I meet my first HIV-positive man. He works in my sister-in-law’s video store. I don’t know him well, but he provides a recognizable face for this “gay disease” that’s been decimating their community. We begin making contributions to groups fighting AIDS. I’m not completely free of homophobia, though. I’m alarmed to find myself now appearing on the mailing list for gay-oriented products, and when something of an erotic nature arrives, I call the provided phone number and ask to be removed from the list.

Mid-1990s. Like a good liberal, I preach tolerance. I go to see, and talk up, the movie Philadelphia (even though I secretly consider it a little crappy). I’m outraged when Bill Clinton signs the Defense of Marriage Act (even I though I’m not quite sure about this same-sex marriage thing, I just don’t want to rule it out).

But I fall in love with the music of the Pet Shop Boys, particularly their album Very. It seems to follow the singer’s progression from closet to gay pride, and the message goes down easily with irresistible, danceable rhythms and with yearning, intelligent lyrics. It closes with a cover of the Village People’s “Go West,” produced with an orchestra and choir, that feels anthemic. Love is beautiful, I realize, no matter who the lovers. I play the record repeatedly.

The ‘00s. I’m proud that both of my daughters get involved with the high school’s Gay-Straight Alliance; Nicole acting as President. They participate in seminars and retreats, and teach me to say “LGBT.” They begin school campaigns to eliminate epithets and ridiculous statements like “that’s so gay;” I vow to never allow epithets in my presence ever again. They have close friends, delightful kids, who are gay or bi, and they shrug their shoulders, considering the difference in orientation to be as insignificant as someone my generation would a preference for the Rolling Stones over the Beatles. I vow to follow their lead. I strive to remove anything from my conversation that implies that same-sex relationships are any less legitimate than my own.

June 21, 2010. At the Film Forum in Manhattan, I purchase a ticket for Stonewall Uprising, a documentary about the famous riots, and chuckle that walking into the theater alone to see a gay-oriented film, an act that would have made me self-conscious not that long ago, now feels as normal as apple pie. The film recounts the events of June 1969, but also stuns me by portraying the hostile atmosphere toward gay people at the time. It plays clips from anti-homosexual public service announcements from the 1950s and 1960s that seem even more deranged than Reefer Madness. It plays clips from a 1967 CBS documentary, hosted by Mike Wallace, who declares in one of many travesties, “The average homosexual, if there be such, is promiscuous. He is not interested in, nor capable of, a lasting relationship like that of a heterosexual marriage.” The clips seem so stunningly ignorant in retrospect that it’s as if CBS gave the Ku Klux Klan 60 minutes to explain black people.

I come home, sit down at my keyboard and type in the things I’ve learned in the nearly 41 years since Stonewall. I’m anxious to say a few more things:

That “homosexuality” is part of my vocabulary now, as much as “love” and “family” and “marriage” and “equality.” That the arguments against legalizing same-sex marriage seem as desperate as the Church’s insistence, after Copernicus and Galileo, that the sun still revolved around the earth. That the legalization of same-sex marriage is inevitable, and that the continuing debate over it reminds me of a movie where the ending is preordained, but the script keeps throwing ridiculous obstacles in the way to drag out the viewer’s misery. That, while I’m a patient man by nature and even more patient as I age, I am grossly offended that my gay friends have to wait longer to experience the same legal sanction of their love that heterosexuals like myself take for granted.

That I’m tired of this idiotic argument, and that I want this story fast-forwarded to the inevitable happy ending right now, so we can go on to discussing issues that are actually complicated.

Random Thoughts

Wed, 9 May 2012 10:05:13 -0400

Dear Mr. Romney: I was quite amused by your statement criticizing the Obama Administration for not standing up strongly enough for the human rights of Chinese dissident Chen Guancheng at the very same moment that YOU were NOT standing up strongly enough for the rights of your aide Richard Grenell, who was being hounded from his position for being openly gay. When an honorable man speaks to injustice in the world, he looks into his own heart first. I was also quite amused at your refusal to chide a questioner who said President Obama should be tried for treason, which fits with your refusal to chide Rush Limbaugh for his insensitive remarks about Sandra Fluke. When your definitive biography is written some day in the future, I’m guessing its title won’t be “Profile in Courage.”

Dear Mr. President: Can you dispense with this fiction that your views on same-sex marriage are “evolving?” If someone said that his opinions on the rights of racial minorities or women were evolving, you’d laugh, wouldn’t you? Using the word “evolving” indicates that you know are heading in a direction, and since we all know where that direction is going to take you, why not just go there? Joe Biden’s and Arne Duncan’s stated positions endorsing marriage equality make you look duplicitous by comparison. And if after the election, you suddenly embrace a pro-gay marriage stance, it will prove that you were duplicitous. I understand that sometimes you have to walk a political tightrope and that you are worried about the votes in swing states like North Carolina, which just voted for an anti-gay marriage amendment, but perhaps your hesitation gives the signal that it’s okay to be resistant. I respect you, Mr. President, but sadly, I don’t think your biography will be titled “Profile in Courage” either.

Gotta love the formality of The New York Times. I still chuckle over its coverage in the 1970s of the Sex Pistols tour, reporting on the antics of “Mr. Rotten” and “Mr. Vicious;” unintentional humor at its finest. I’m now chuckling over something in this past Sunday’s book review. The paper always includes a brief identification of each guest reviewer, so the Times felt compelled to explain to its readers who the reviewer of Robert Caro’s new biography of Lyndon Johnson was: “Bill Clinton was the 42^nd President of the United States.” No shit, Sherlock!

Speaking of LBJ, his response to ascending to the Presidency after John F. Kennedy’s assassination was to push sweeping civil rights legislation, even though it would piss off his Southern brethren. I don’t know if that qualifies as a “profile in courage,” but it’s closer than anything our current leaders have done.

Speaking of Clintons: Hillary is traveling throughout Asia, talking to the leaders there and negotiating the future of a Chinese dissident, but the big news in some quarters is that she appeared in public without makeup and wearing glasses. WTF? We’re not a post-racial society yet, and we’re obviously not post-gender either.

I will say that Obama will be happy with his portrayal in Peter Bergen’s Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for bin Laden From 9/11 to Abbottabad. I just finished reading it and it’s a real page-turner (spoiler alert: the good guys win) and Obama’s cool-headedness while making the decision to send in the SEALS is reassuring; as one person said, the evidence that Osama bin Laden was in the Abbottabad compound was less compelling than the evidence that Iraq had WMDs.

However, the one word that stuck with me after reading the book was “ignorance;” not stupidity – though there is enough of that – but lack of knowledge. I’m not just referring to America not having a clue where bin Laden was for several years; I’m referring to bin Laden and the culturally sheltered Mullah Omar not believing that American soldiers would ever set foot in Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks, even though Omar’s Ambassador to Pakistan insisted they would. Isolation from one’s opponents makes one more likely to miscalculate. It strengthens my conviction that refusal to engage enemies like Iran and North Korea in conversation is counterproductive macho bluster that makes the world less safe, not more. By that logic, SWAT teams would handle hostage situations by grabbing a megaphone and yelling, “Hey, asshole!”

Some things I’m tired of, i.e. things that have jumped my personal shark:

The White House Correspondents Dinner as a source of entertainment. (Comedian pokes fun at POTUS. POTUS pokes fun at political opponents and celebs in the house. Everyone laughs. Partisan rancor and lapdog journalism continues. Repeat next year.)

The Roger Clemens perjury trial. (Despise the man and loathe what steroids have done to sports, but it’s still a waste of Federal money when none of the Wall Street jackals who caused our financial collapse have been prosecuted. And wait, you can be prosecuted for lying to Congress but not for lying in Congress?)

Superhero movies. (Until a month ago, I thought the new Avengers movie was going to be a remake of the 1960s TV series. Guess I should pay more attention.)

Those AT&T 4G commercials showing a bunch of smug d-bags just standing around looking at their phones while saying “That was so 14 seconds ago.” (I’d love to write a new ad in which they’re walking while looking at their phone and step into an open manhole – “that was so twenty-threeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!”)

My wife’s new boss, a walking, talking bundle of stress production that makes other Type A people look like slackers.

“OS improvements are right around the corner.” (It wouldn’t be “unusial” if Salon gave birth to a new OS but subsequently suffered “post-partem” depression.)

I love football, but as I learn more and more about the long-tern health effects of the constant physical contact, I wonder if my descendants will think me a barbarian for enjoying the sport, similar to the Romans with the Christians and lions.

Finally, I was amused to check my book on Amazon yesterday and learn that a couple of sellers are offering used copies of my book for $37-38. First, the book is print-on-demand, so you can get a pristine copy for $9.99, so why would you order a used copy for four times more? I doubt they even possess a used copy (but if they do, I’d dust the book for Paust’s fingerprints). A week ago, both Linda Seccaspina and I found a seller offering our books for $888, which had to be some kind of scam. As I said on Facebook at the time, if someone was willing to pay $888 for a copy of my book, I’d declare myself a polygamist and marry that person, regardless of gender. (Note: offer not valid in the state of North Carolina.)

My Self-Publishing Experience, Part II

Thu, 3 May 2012 11:05:15 -0400

“Kindle” is the appropriate word. Halfway through converting my book to Amazon’s e-reader, I wanted to hurl stuff into a fireplace.

Before I bitch and moan about Kindle, let me say that, on the surface, it is as easy to create a Kindle book as it was with CreateSpace. You upload your text, wait a couple of minutes while it converts, and then view the pages on an on-screen “device” which simulates an e-reader screen (and on which you can adjust the text size). CreateSpace offers to do the conversion for you, but they charge $69 (which may end up being more than your total royalties) and offer a time frame of 4-6 weeks. Meanwhile, you can do it yourself for free and – theoretically – have an e-book available the next day.

Once I had successfully formatted my book in CreateSpace, I assumed it would be a snap to format it for the Kindle. Well, you know what they say about “assume.” I spent parts of several days formatting it, while formatting new combinations of four-letter words.

My main problem was line breaks between paragraphs. When I type in Word, I always place one blank line between paragraphs. However, when I uploaded the text to the Kindle software, I got some chapters with no blank lines, some with one, some with two, and many with variations within the chapter. Apparently there is a lot going on behind the scenes in Word and unless you’re Word-savvy – I’m definitely not – you haven’t a clue.

I wish I had met fellow OSer Froggy a few weeks sooner. When she visited New York last month, she gave me a copy of the book Kindle Formatting: The Complete Guide by Joshua Tallent. It would have saved me some time and aggravation. While reading the guide recently, I used one of my OS posts as a demo and discovered that, of the piece’s 31 paragraphs, 27 had one format while 4 had another. I don’t know how this occurred, since I typed it all at once without copying and pasting from another piece or website, but the different formats indicate that the Kindle software is liable to handle them differently.

Eventually, I fiddled around with the source text of my book enough that the breaks were fairly consistent. Close enough, I said. Only one chapter continued to give me a problem. Unfortunately, it was the first chapter.

The Kindle software is notorious for difficulties converting non-paragraph text: bullet points, etc. And my first chapter is entirely in a quiz format: 45 multiple-choice questions. For example, here is one of the questions:

12. Why is the Republican race like an Etch-a-Sketch?

a) Because the voters keep shaking it up, hoping to create a more appealing picture

b) Because only a child would find it intellectually stimulating

c) Because their ideas are rooted in a previous century

d) All of the above, not to mention that the product used to be manufactured in the U.S.A. but is now built in China

Unfortunately, when I uploaded it to Kindle, it added blank lines between each possible answer:

12. Why is the Republican race like an Etch-a-Sketch?

a) Because the voters keep shaking it up, hoping to create a more appealing picture

b) Because only a child would find it intellectually stimulating

c) Because their ideas are rooted in a previous century

d) All of the above, not to mention that the product used to be manufactured in the U.S.A. but is now built in China

With the limited number of lines per screen, the narrow margins and the text indentation, it was difficult to get a single question to appear in its entirety on one screen. I assumed that the paging would be exhausting for the reader, and who wants to piss off a reader in the very first chapter? Nothing I tried made it significantly better. Some changes would eliminate the spacing problems for some questions, but not all of them. Another changed a), b) etc. to 1), 2) etc. I even tried reconstructing the entire post from scratch, creating the 1a, b, c, d format over and over in the exact same manner, then cutting and pasting each line of text into the new format. Didn’t help. I would spend an hour or two, get frustrated, hurl imprecations at the Fates, and then put it aside for the next day.

After several days, I ended up with a version with no line breaks between the answers but two blank lines before each new question. Combined with the removal of the indentation for the possible answers, I decided it was the least imperfect version and declared victory. I don’t remember what I did to achieve it, but it probably involved death threats.

Unlike the print version, I didn’t go through the Kindle version line-by-line, so there may be other mistakes there. I wouldn’t be surprised; I’ve read a few of my friends’ books on the Kindle and occasionally see a blip, like a line or two of text at the end of a paragraph that isn’t left-justified but instead is centered like a chapter title. C’est la vie.

Once I gave the OK, it was less than 24 hours before the e-book version was available on Amazon. There was one last problem, however. Because the CreateSpace and Kindle versions had been done separately, the book titles were spaced slightly differently and thus didn’t appear on the same Amazon page. Fortunately, the Kindle creation website has a useful help section, and with a quick email, the two pages were combined within 48 hours.

Next time, I will relate my experience with promoting the book. I’m saving it for the Open Call about not-so-awesome stories; it is sadder than the moment in Titanic when Kate Winslet releases her grip on Leonardo DiCaprio’s corpse. One quick story: as soon as the Kindle version was available, I sent a PM to every one of my OS favorites. Because my rare blogwhore PMs have often ended up in spam folders, I sent the PM to just ten or so recipients at a time, hoping that would prevent it from being interpreted as spam. No such luck. The PMs ended up in spam folders anyway. Good old OS!

21 Years Ago Today

Wed, 2 May 2012 10:05:02 -0400

21 years ago today, I held a baby in my arms, moments after she had entered this world. My wife and I had already decided we were going to name our younger daughter Nicole, and give her the middle name Rita, after my mother. Here are a baker’s dozen highlights from 21 proud years:

1. She came into the world kicking and screaming. In fact, she had been kicking and screaming six weeks before her birth when my wife and I attended a Paul Simon concert at Madison Square Garden. As the heavy percussion of “The Obvious Child” started up, Nicole began doing an imitation of a Rockette in my wife’s womb. I’d like to think she was dancing.

(Nicole at age two.)

2. At age four in 1995, she was riding in the car as we listened to a news report about the O.J. Simpson trial, and she suddenly blurted out, “Why do they keep saying my name on the radio?” Nicole Brown had turned into an infamous name. Many years later in high school, Nicole had to do a report on a famous trial and chose the O.J. case, giving special dramatic flair to the phrase “slashed Nicole Brown’s throat.” Yes, my daughter has my twisted sense of humor but, thank God, not my looks.

3. She is a natural actress (and a master at voices) but seems too shy to pursue it. While in elementary school, she appeared in my wife’s community theater group when they performed a series of scripts from old radio shows. She played the part of Teeny from the old “Fibber McGee and Molly” series, giving the little girl a delightfully squealing voice. When the group performed a Christmas episode for a regional radio show, she played hooky from school for the day in order to participate. We still have a cassette of the broadcast.

4. I will now relate all her disciplinary problems growing up:

5. She was an excellent student and a member of the National Honor Society. She also served as President of her high school’s Gay-Straight Alliance.

6. She has long been fascinated with Japan. In middle school, she spent two weeks in Japan as a member of a People-to-People delegation.

(She has also been to Europe.)

7. She had an unfortunate adventure on the Disney World monorail:

It was 1999. Michelle was 13, Nicole was 8. We were getting on the monorail to take us back from Epcot. The four of us crowded into the last car and it was pretty full. My wife looked through the window at the car in front of us, saw that it was a little less crowded, and said, “Let’s move up to that car.” Michelle and I, being cautious by nature, said, “No, we’re staying here. It’s a short ride.” My wife and Nicole, being rasher, said, “Let’s go for it” and dashed out of the car, back out onto the platform and raced toward the previous car. Being in such a hurry, my wife didn’t hold Nicole’s hand and ran in front of her, getting into the car just as the doors were automatically closing, leaving Nicole stranded on the platform.

Michelle said, “Oh, shit, Mommy really messed up.” The other people in our car were staring bug-eyed because we had abandoned our child a thousand miles from home. I was sure there was a visit from Social Services in our future.

As soon as the door closed, Nicole stepped back away from the train for safety. Still, we're in a train with our eight-year-old daughter locked out, and she has no idea where we're heading. This was before she had a cell phone. My heart sank. Fortunately, one of the Disney workers saw what happened, pulled the switch to stop the train and opened the door to let Nicole in. Then he gave my wife a scowl. In all my time at Disney World, I have never seen one of their employees ever give anyone a scowl.

From that day forward, just saying the word “monorail” in our family will trigger gales of laughter.

8. One Saturday night her senior year, I picked her up after a party and she brought out a trash bag of beer cans, saying, “Let’s take these to our dumpster so my friend’s parents don’t find them. By the way, how can anybody drink Bud Lite? It tastes like shit.” I don’t know what her first legal drink will be, but it won’t be Bud Lite. (Actually, she seems to have little taste for alcohol and is dismayed by friends who seem prone to binge drinking.)

9. Her freshman year in college, her emails were so funny that I posted a selection of them. An excerpt from one of our exchanges:

From: crankycuss
To: Nicole
Sent: Thu, April 8, 2010 8:14 PM
Subject: RE: house work

Moving desks this weekend.

Replacing TV will have to wait for budgetary reasons. A lot of money spent on cars and dentistry.

Did not send the Zappo shoes yet. Mommy misplaced the labels and just found them today.

From: Nicole
Sent: Thu, April 8, 2010 8:32 PM
To: Crankycuss

Subject: RE: house work

okay i know you're really into your blog life, but you can't be so busy that you can't write a full sentence or two. man up pussywillow.

i just sent the labels, you have to print them off the computer before you send them.

i paid on the credit card for the shoes.

maybe i should write this in a way you understand:

sent labels. paid money. peace.

10. She’s met Joan H.

11. I trust her taste. She broke down my resistance to Lady Gaga, showed me the wonders of Harold and Kumar, and is now committed to turning me into a fan of the TV show Community.

12. She became a dedicated foodie a few years ago - except for an occasional bit of chicken, she doesn’t eat meat – and has overseen a healthier cuisine in our household (tofu, yum!) She left college because she decided she wanted to be a pastry chef. She has been accepted into the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park and will begin attending next year.

(Posing with the Food Network's Alton Brown.)

13. In the meantime, she has been amassing work experience in her chosen field. Currently she is working at the café of a local health club. After only a few months’ employment there, she was promoted to a supervisory position (a source of stress, considering that her “subordinates” are mostly two or three times older than her). She has a very adult sense of responsibility. How responsible? She works the 7:00 a.m. shift and wakes up on her own; do you know how hard it is to get someone so young up that early? How responsible? She is spending her birthday at work, even though she wanted the day off, to cover for a co-worker who is receiving dialysis today.

Parents always worry about how their kids will turn out. I got a much better kid than I deserved.

(With her proud papa.)