It looks like I'm ending it 9 years later.

The last post I wrote was one of the best pieces of writing that I've done in years. And not only did I get no comments at all, I got just one person's response on Twitter. I've long since abandoned all the blog sites ... Cre8Buzz which will always remain in my heart, BlogAdvance, BlogThis, BlogMad, BlogCatalog, BlogTheOther.

I neglected, in my "heyday" if I really had such a thing, to join up with BlogHer. Maybe that was the fatal mistake.

Or, maybe, it was the lack of updates.

The lack of responses.

The exhaustion I felt when I realized promotion of the blog was far more effort than writing posts.

The fact remains that I wrote the most intense blog post in years and as far as the stats can tell me ... I got about 30 hits ... and zero comments. One mention on Twitter about being a good writer.

I'm pretty sure that all things told, I am the one who fucked up.

What I do know is ... it's really not worth the trouble of keeping up with blog software anymore. It's just as easy to do this as a webpage ... and fewer hackers ... for the lack of response.

It makes me sad, to be sure. But again ... I think it's my fault.

I'm sorry.

But this just isn't worth the trouble if I'm only talking to myself. And so ... Red Monkey blog ... I think it's time to say goodbye.

You've outlived your purpose. You've opened up vulnerabilities that are no longer worth my time.

Vaya con dios, mi amigo. Vaya con dios.

My drive home because there was construction by the highway and people are afraid to merge in construction in New Mexico. Though that sentence shouldn't bother me, it stays in my mind for an uncomfortably long time. It's a good day. I'm in a good mood. I don't want to fight people trying to merge, or worse, people feeling like they can zip to the front of the line and then force their way into the line. I don't want to have an accident.

On a whim, I decide to go by the volcanoes instead. It's a pretty day and no need to ruin it with traffic because people are such slaves to habit they won't leave the slopes of their home volcano even when it starts to smoke and rumble. I have to drive west for a while on old Route 66 and seeing those signs always makes me smile. I feel home here. My window is down. I'm taking the scenic route today, the weekend starting off right.

The speed limit quickly climbs to 55 because there's nothing out this way. Except, up ahead, there's a little strip mall area. The speed limit doesn't drop, but I ease off a bit. I'm in the right lane, I think, because I'm going to have to turn right up ahead a ways. While there's a bit of traffic now, it's light. Nothing like my usual route with the steady hum of traffic, the squealing of brakes and tires, the harsh changing of gears as the little sports cars shifted up and down, revving their engines loudly as they zipped around the bigger cars, jockeying for position.

And then, for a split second which did not, contrary to popular fancy, last any longer than a normal split second, there was another vehicle coming into the intersection, interrupting my perfectly green light. Someone else had already gone through the intersection. This light was not newly green. It had not turned yellow. It was green and that car, that car was not supposed—

The sounds were muffled, really. As if I were watching it on tv with the volume turned low. And it sounded like a movie, metal rending against metal, tires squealing, glass shattering. Something loud like a gunshot, both distant and immediate.

I remember that brief interlude of there's a car where there shouldn't be and then white cloth in my face and my sunglasses being torn off my face, but my regular glasses staying put, just somewhat askew. I knew there'd been a wreck and that this was no little fender bender. I tried to open my door, but it wouldn't budge. It was locked. It wouldn't unlock. How do you get out of a car if your door won't... the passenger door. Crawl over - oh hey! Look, there's smoke coming out of the vents, yeah, I didn't turn the car off yet. I sag back into my seat and turn the engine off, then start, wow, the car's kind of a mess, I really should have cleaned it out last weekend.

Standing in the bright sunlight. My sunglasses are still in the car, but I don't want to grab them. There's something I'm supposed - oh I should call 911. I think I started to do that when I was in the car, but I forgot how and then the engine and I couldn't get out. It's bright. I need to turn the contrast up and it takes me three or four tries to remember how to call 911.

The instant before the collision there was a white car where there shouldn't have been. And then I saw white. I turn around for the first time and look for the other car. It's a silver Jeep Liberty. It will be days before I realize that the split second of time merged vehicle and air bags into one scene because that faint image has a cloth seam in it. White airbags, silver Jeep Liberty, seam.

And I am talking to 911 even though someone driving by said someone else has already called 911. But you're supposed to call after a wreck and so that is what I do. I do what you're supposed to do.

And a man comes up behind me and raises up my left hand.

"You're bleeding," he says.

Oh. Huh. I didn't know. Doesn't look too bad. I twist up my arm so I can see it. Really, just a puncture. Another person driving by thrusts a wad of napkins out their passenger window. The man runs over to grab them and presses them to the puncture where blood is still dripping out onto the sidewalk. I blink at it. Someone's going to have to clean this up. It freaks people out when they see blood in public places. Ever since the 80s, people see a speck of blood and they just panic as if the HIV virus will leap through time and space and force its way down—

"Is anyone hurt?" the 911 operator is asking.

I realize I don't know which is not like me at all because I feel compelled to help people.

I look over at other car. The silver Jeep Liberty, not a white car at all. He is outside the silver Jeep Liberty and he won't look at me. But he is standing. He is walking, even with his cast on. So I guess he's hurt. No. He was hurt before. He's got a cast on, so he's better - geez, that must suck to be in a wreck when your left leg is already in a cast. Poor guy.

"I don't think so," I reply.

The nice man holding my arm above my head and pressing napkins into it so I stop bleeding all over the sidewalk and freaking everyone out says, "Tell them to send the paramedics anyway. Always tell them to send the paramedics."

"Oh. This man here says you should send them anyway."

The nice 911 operator continues talking and I'm really not sure what she's saying. I already told her where the wreck was and that this man in the silver Jeep Liberty must have turned left in front of me because I cannot think what else could have happened. It all happened so fast. Time did not slow down and come to a standstill. There was no moment of realization and then the molasses time where you know what to do and nothing is moving fast enough to avoid the inevitable and you just can't—

The police are here. The 911 operator says something and then I ask the officer if I can hang up on 911 now because they are here. I have to ask him twice and he just blinks at me and nods. "Yes. I'm here now."

He asks me something and the paramedics come up at the same time and the officer walks away before I can answer him. There are either a hundred or four paramedics and they are swarming around me like ants at a picnic. They keep asking me if I have diabetes or high blood pressure and I keep telling them no and then another one comes up and asks me the same damn thing do you have diabetes? What about high blood pressure? And I still say no and then one of them comes at me with the blood pressure cuff and the little pulse thing that goes on your finger and I wonder for a minute about why they didn't take my temperature, too.

I don't remember the exact number. It was something insane like 196 over 120, numbers I have never ever heard in my life in reference to my blood pressure. I'm not sure this paramedic, who suddenly looks like he's barely 18 has seen these numbers before because his eyes widen as if he's looking at a ghost and he blurts them out to another paramedic. The two on my left are hovering even more intensely although they don't step any closer. I think they're waiting for me to fall over.

Thank god for the older paramedic. "Do you have high blood pressure?" he asks for the 18th time.

"No!"

He just looks at the young guy. "Check it again in a little bit." He meets my eyes, then looks at the boy again. Nods toward my car, the implied conversation seems to be "Look at the car, you moron. Your blood pressure would spike if you'd been in that, too." And he walks away.

Another paramedic comes over and I show her my left hand because I have just noticed it's about twice its normal size and already impressively purple. "Hey, my pinky is kind of cold."

She seems disinterested. "Do you have high blood pressure? Diabetes?"

I am bored of this question and quickly look down at my phone. I should probably call someone. But my partner is likely driving home right now and I don't want to call her when she's driving. And she'll probably freak out. It's not good to make someone freak out when they're driving. I text a coworker.

"Can u come pick me up?? Central and 98th"

"Sure. Everything ok?"

I look at my car and back to the phone. "Car totaled"

"Shit be right there. You ok?"

I suddenly realize that I haven't talked to the cops yet, really. I'm not sure if I can leave yet and I don't want my coworker to have to stand around and wait. "Mostly. Don't know if I can leave yet"

"On my way"

And I feel bad for asking her to leave work early. I look around. There's the cop. I fish around in my back pocket for my wallet. Pull out the driver's license and insurance card. What the HELL? I know the insurance is up-to-date, but the card's not. Dammit. Fuck.

I hand them to him, "I can't find the right insurance card. I know it's valid, but this is the last one, but all the information is correct and I always have the right card and I don't know why it's not in my wallet—"

He just smiles and nods and takes my information and heads over to his car.

The paramedic boy checks my blood pressure again. It's been maybe five minutes, but it's coming down. 160 over something stupid now. I officially refuse going to the hospital and have to sign the little computer saying I refused to come in. I am appalled at how crappy the signature is and wonder if the handwriting software is that bad or if the screen just isn't very sensitive. I hold out my hand. Rock steady.

I look around. The nice man who had held the napkins to my arm until the paramedics arrived walks back up and hands me his business card.

"Did you see the wreck?" I ask suddenly realizing I had no witnesses and this was not my fault.

"No. But here's my card. If the police give you any trouble, you give me a call anyway."

I thank him and he walks off.

I look at my car. Walk around to the driver's side. The tire is shredded. And the car is sagging. I bet the axle is broken. Definitely not drivable. And the driver's side door is crinkled and ... kind of pushed back. No wonder I couldn't get it open. The mirror is gone. Sitting inside the car. That's probably what hit my hand.

I look over at the silver Jeep Liberty. The wheel well is messed up on the driver's side, but it looks like it might be drivable. The driver is on the sidewalk. Staring at the ground. He won't look at me. The cop calls him over. A woman is standing next to me.

"Someone rear-ended him last week on his motorcycle," she says quietly.

"I wondered why he was in a cast. Is he okay?"

She nods.

I begin getting the most important things out of my car so I'm ready when my coworker gets here. I don't want to make her wait. It's a beautiful day out now, but it was cold this morning and I hope I didn't drip any blood on my coat. It's a tan corduroy coat that I love and I'd be really pissed if there was blood on it. I drop it on the sidewalk next to my bag. I'm hoping there's still an empty bag in my trunk to get the rest of the stuff out. If the car is totaled, I need to get everything out.

There is a bag. The bag I made fun of a few months ago, a freebie from work. I shove everything from the glovebox in there. Clear out the arm rest container, the trunk. Pull out the two six-packs of Diet Pepsi I'd bought this morning. The kitty litter. I make a pile on the sidewalk and feel bad about taking up room on the sidewalk. And that I can't move my car further over. It's in the right lane, all the way through to the west side of the intersection, so at least the road is kind of clear.

"What happened?" the cop asks quietly.

"I was driving west," I said. "And then he turned left in front of me. But I had a green light. Other people had already gone through."

He nods.

"Are there any witnesses?"

He shrugs and I pale. "He said the same thing."

I am incredibly relieved. What a rarity for someone to own their mistake. He still won't look at me. The top of his head seems attached to a string pulling his head down to the sidewalk. Waiting for the ground to swallow him whole.

I see my coworker and wave. I pick up some of the lighter things, my bag, the hiking sticks, my coat and she grabs the other bag, the Pepsi and the litter. I feel bad for making her carry heavy things and as I try to protest, she insists with a look at my left hand, swollen and purple.

I ask another officer if I can go. He's surprised, but amenable. He hands me the paperwork for the towing of my car. I walk away.

We pass the other driver. He cannot raise his head.

I put my arm gently on his shoulder and say softly, "I know we've both had a shitty day, but I want to thank you for telling the police the truth. That means a lot."

I walk away. I don't look back.

We put my things in my coworker's trunk. I check my arm. I don't want to bleed on her car, in her car. She's got a damn nice car. It's stopped bleeding. But I have dry blood all over my left arm. Huh. Didn't realize I bled that much. I mean there were drops on both airbags from where I climbed out and everything. And some on the sidewalk, big drops.

And the paramedics didn't even give me any gauze or anything. They didn't even just run some water over it. Huh. I thought they did that kind of thing.

We begin the drive north to the little 'burb where we live. Neither of us quite knows how to get there from this particular road, but she soon gets us back to the road we both normally take home. She drives the speed limit so carefully. She's a lot like me and knows when to talk a little and when to just let the silence sit comfortably around us. She offers me her water and even though I'm really thirsty all of a sudden, I tell her I'm fine. We talk a bit. I don't want to talk much about the wreck because I know she's had a few traumatic ones and I don't want to make her think about them. Except I can't really think of much else to talk about. There wasn't supposed to be a car there. And then there was and I'm okay. I mean, really, not all that much damage for being in a 55mph zone, if you think about it.

My poor car.

Everyone walked away, though.

At some point, I realize my partner is probably home by now and I call her. "I'm okay," I say. "But Y is bringing me home."

"Why?"

"I'm okay," I repeat and she interrupts with "I heard that, what happened?"

"The car is probably totaled. Someone hit me."

We eventually pull up to the last major intersection and I realize I am probably going to faint if I don't get some water. I really don't want—

"Actually, would you mind if I have a sip of water after all?" I'm pretty sure if I pass out in her car, she will freak and take me to the hospital.

"Of course, go ahead."

I take a long drink. And then another. I don't feel so much like I'm going to faint any more. It's kind of a near thing, but I'm good now. I give her plenty of warning for each turn in my twisty little neighbourhood. And then I apologize because I'm quite sure the dogs are going to be loud, obnoxious little brats. They get cranky when I get home late plus they won't be expecting company.

And they are just incredibly loud. You'd think they were German Shepherds instead of miniature dachshunds. We get everything inside, I apologize for the state of the house, for the dogs' behaviour and then she's leaving. I feel bad. Damn dogs are so obnoxious, ruining the one time she's come over. My partner scurries me into the bathroom to look at my wounds, ready with the implements of cleaning, disinfecting and bandaging.

I look in the mirror. No black eyes from the airbag. My face looks fine. It's just my left arm, I think.

The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things that you get ashamed of because words diminish them—words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size they they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it?

The bruising will come later.

The first four paragraphs each have a quote or near quote from a different book. The next-to-last paragraph is a quote from a fifth book. The quote in the first paragraph came to me out of the blue and I just went with it. Then I thought it was a kind of fun thing and kept it up for the next couple of paragraphs ... and then I got into the piece I was writing and went with the flow until the last quote also popped into my head. Sometimes life just works that way. Be shocked if anyone can guess which five books.... :)

The real problem ... is that kennels are ugly ... and this needed to go in the living room. I've seen some kennel-tables for sale, but they seem to be $200-$300 and they really don't match our decor at ALL. So I decided to make my own. I didn't think about doing a step-by-step originally, so I don't have a ton of pictures, but several folks on Twitter asked, so I'll do my best to describe it.

First off, I snagged this kennel from Amazon. (Not an affiliate link.) So that's about $30. Then I picked up 2 packs of 4' wainscoting from Lowes and 2 square lengths of poplar.

I measured the exterior of the kennel longwise, making sure to find the longest spot. This kennel has some small protrusions and if this was going to work, I had to make sure I took that into account as well. To make sure I'd made this with enough clearance, I added another 1/4" to length. I measured the back of the kennel the same way.

I measured the height the same way as well. I wanted those poles to be a tad taller than the kennel itself. The idea is that you'll have four square poles on the inside of the structure, boards on the outside creating the wall and then a "ceiling" or tabletop that rests on top of the poles with the sideboards covering up its edge.

So, after measuring the kennel height, I cut the square poplar poles. The next step was to cut at least 4 of the long side pieces and two of the short side (the back). Don't think about the table top just yet.

If you've not worked with wood much, this next part is tricky and requires patience and probably a little help to keep things balanced as you work.

On a level surface, lay two of the poles down. Take one of the pieces of wainscoting, square it up carefully with the edge of the pole and the bottom of the pole and drill a pilot hole through wainscoting and into the pole. You MUST drill a pilot hole first or your wainscoting piece will split and crack. Then screw the wainscoting into the pole. It's probably moved now, so square it up again ... and then square up the other side with the other pole. Drill a pilot hole and screw that side into that pole. 

Repeat with another long wainscoting piece and the other two poles.

Now it's tricky. Stand both of those structures up - if you have a friend who can hold them steady, that's even better. Take one of the back pieces and square it up with one of the structures. Drill a pilot hole and then screw that piece in. Do the same with the other side and the other structure. At this point, it's VERY unstable as it will pivot around those screws. The next step will stabilize things.

Now, the wainscoting I bought is tongue-in-groove which means that I slid the next piece into the first piece. Drill pilot holes (just like before, just one screw on each end) and screw that in. Do the same on the second long side and then the same on the back. 

The structure is mostly stable at this point.

Now, for the third level, I did not screw in one long side and the back piece. Depending on how you cut the boards, you can slide this piece in and out, creating a "window" that can be opened or closed for ventilation (see the last picture below). Or, you can continue with the pilot holes and screwing in the wainscoting. For the fourth board on each side, I screwed those boards in.

At this point, I got a large piece of kraft paper and made a pattern of the top, paying special care to keep the back of the table as accurate as I could. Then I traced that pattern onto a piece of 1" thick plywood that I had in the garage. 

Next, I placed the plywood on the structure and squared it up, drilled a pilot hole through the plywood and into the poplar pole in each corner, screwed it in, countersinking the screw. (If you're not a woodworker, that just means getting the screw's head part way down so it's not raised above the plywood.)

After that, I cut two more long sides and one back side. I slid each one into place, then took a pencil and drew a line to see where to cut. I wanted the plywood dropped down into the sides of the table rather than on top. After that was cut, again with the pilot holes and screwing those planks in.

Sand it until it's nice and smooth, fill in any gaps with a stainable wood putty and then, last up - a couple of coats of stain. And voila! Kennel table!

Scout seems quite happy with it. It cost about $60 - half of that wood and half of that the new kennel itself. The table is stained to match our decor and the wainscoting is a nice match to our style as well. (The pictures don't show it well - bad lighting, but the colour of the stain matches that bit of wood on the wall to the left - it's just got some more gloss on it than the wall and reflected light enough to make it look white instead of stained.)

No shit, Sherlock. Where have you been for the last 5-10 years (at a minimum), Captain Obvious?

And the answer I've heard repeatedly from well-intentioned, well-off folk with fancy insurance benefits is a saccharine, "Can you really put a price on your health?"

As if that is the end-all, be-all of health care. You SHOULD pay a lot because it's obviously WORTH a lot.

Yet these are the same assholes who think education is over-funded and under-performing. But can you really put a price on education? 

Particularly when we are asking teachers to do more and more with less and less. When we insist they don't need much money because they love what they do and besides, they only work 9 months of the year. (They don't, by the way, only work for 9 months. They just spend 9 months with your kids.)

And with all of that free time, you know, they should take more classes so they can get better at their job. What? Well of course we shouldn't pay for that through taxes. They can pay for it. In fact, they can pay for school supplies, too. I mean, after all, it was their bright idea to need crayons and glue and paper. Ridiculous to make regular people pay for that artsy-fartsy crap.

Back to health care. Don't you know that doctors have even more debt than teachers do? I mean they go to school WAY longer and med school is even more expensive. We SHOULD pay them more so they can pay their debt off faster and then go hit the links.

And you know what else? The days of the old country doctor are over. Maybe back in the late 1800s a doctor could afford to spend some time with a client and really puzzle out what's wrong, but that's only because towns were small and those doctors didn't have good business managers to make this work the American way - show me the money, baby. Screw Grand Junction, Colorado.

No, today, you need a good business manager to make sure that the doctor doesn't spend more than 15 minutes with any one client. There's staff to pay, you know. 

Not all doctors believe this, of course. Not all business managers for doctors are soulless money-grubbers, either.

But what I'm experiencing more and more is exactly those scenarios. Complete disdain for teachers from preschool through university and complete kowtowing to doctors despite their shorter office visits. And the doctors are screwed because they have to kowtow to the insurance "collectives" in their area because no one can afford to go without the health insurance.

So who is running our health care system? First, we have no "system" - we have a chaos of capitalism. Beyond that, as far as I can tell, it's the health insurance companies and the pharmaceutical companies. And despite noises about how much they give away or provide at a lower cost, it quite often does NOT reach the people it needs to reach.

For example, in 2001, if I had not just received health insurance the previous September, I would not have received the bone marrow transplant I needed. There was no way I could have gathered the money for the 18 day hospital stay, much less any of the treatment. I was damned lucky in 1999 when a semi-retired doctor at a "doc-in-the-box" clinic realized I was not just a little sick again. I was lucky that I was assigned to a compassionate doctor who treated me knowing damn good and well that I would not be able to pay my medical bills. If the 1999 doctor had insisted on payment up front for each treatment, I would have died. I never would have gone in for the next round of chemo. And the bone marrow transplant? They wouldn't even TALK to me at the hospital until they not only found out what insurance I had, but they had spoken with them and made sure that I was covered.

If I hadn't been incredibly lucky, I would be dead right now.

And who is running our education system? 

No one. There is no system for education either. There's a loose conglomerate of state minimums which are a constantly moving target. And even that changes from school system to school system and even smaller, from school to school.

If you know the Meyers-Briggs test, I am an INTJ. I mention this because INTJs are referred to as system builders. I began puzzling out school systems, designing my own, in junior high. How can you balance what needs to happen (learning particular skills, facts or ways of thinking) with developmental stages, with shifting cultural norms, with different styles of learning ... and doing this with a minimum of 30 kids who are diverse and wildly different in an hour?

You sure can't do it through standardized testing of students or teachers. Not even standardized observation of the teacher in the classroom tells a true picture.

When I was in high school, our district had begun this classroom observation crap. What happened is that the best teachers had a "reserve" lesson plan that they practiced at home and whipped out on the day of the observation because they wanted to do well. It was a lesson plan that hit everything they were to be evaluated on.

You know what the shitty teachers did? The same bullshit they did every day except they weren't blatantly rude to us.

So it disrupted the learning process in classes with good teachers, with conscientious and diligent teachers, the ones who were creative and effective ... and did not a damn thing in the other classrooms.

You cannot actually standardize good teaching.

There are some shitty teachers out there. I can rattle off name after name in my own experience. But I can also rattle off a bunch who truly cared, who were good, who tried. Some of them I didn't mesh with, but they were still good teachers. Mrs. Scarr was a darn good government teacher, but she and I clashed more than once and quite frankly, she was a jackass to me. But her teaching was good even if her "bedside manner," so to speak, was not. Mrs. Deterly, on the other hand, was both a jackass and a horrible teacher. I know from extremely painful experience that whilst some of my students loved my class (inasmuch as they're going to love a required freshmen writing class), but some of them consider me a Mrs. Scarr or worse, a Mrs. Deterly and they never even saw the effort I put into making that class helpful, valuable and fun. (And yes, thanks for noticing. I did NOT use the Oxford comma there because I find it ridiculously unnecessary - so maybe that did make me a horrible writing teacher after all.)

And I think that much of our current attitude toward teachers comes from people remembering their worst teachers and forgetting the good ones. I think we're letting the bad experiences overshadow the good so much that as a culture, we're painting an entire profession with tar and feathers.

Despite being a system builder, I don't have all the answers to either health care or education.

But I do know that it's time to stop tearing each other apart. It's time to stop blaming doctors for being money-grubbers and teachers for being idiots.

I truly believe that if we continue to go down the path that we are on, continue to tear each other to shreds, continue to believe only "X is right and if you don't like it, you can leave" ... 

if we continue to divide ourselves into smaller and smaller camps, we will implode every bit as much as the Soviet Union did.

Democracy should not be about Republican or Democrat. It should not be Tea Party extremism. 

We should be working together to find the compromises that we hate the least. And the more we work together to find those compromises, the less we'll hate them.

And the more we stand our ground and insist on getting exactly what we want...

...well, the more divided we'll become.

United we stand

Divided we fall.

It really is as easy as that. Let's please, please find ways to work together. To take responsibility for things larger than our selves, to agree to take on responsibility for each other without turning everything into an us and them situation.

Let's find some middle ground again and build outward from there.

I'm not really sure why it's national news that a college football star might have manufactured a girlfriend story and then manufactured her death. Or maybe he was scammed into it.

I'm not really sure why whether or not Mark McGwire, Jose Conseco, Alex Rodriguez used steroids to achieve great things in baseball is news. Or why it's news that Lance Armstrong doped, but Armstrong's and Te'o's stories have hit at the same time and it seems that everyone is talking about it.

Why?

We are none of us perfect and yet we are often pushed hard to be perfect. And the more you are in the bright hot spotlight of celebrity in this country, the more you are expected to be perfect and the more scrutinized your life becomes.

Why would Te'o manufacture a girlfriend? Maybe because at Notre Dame it's expected that a football player has at least one girl. Maybe he wasn't ready for a girlfriend and simply started saying he had a girl back home. But then people want details. And you either keep the lie going or say you broke up. And when you're getting ready to be under more scrutiny for going into the NFL ... well, you have to end it because eventually someone is going to figure out she doesn't exist. Your grandmother just died of cancer and in the heat of an interview where you're already sad and not at your best, you blurt out that the fictitious girl also died. You've gotten out of the innocent little white lie that got you through school. It's all good now, right?

This is completely a made-up story on my part. I'm not saying this is what went through Te'o's mind or that this is what happened. I'm trying to show how something innocent turns into a trap. I'm trying to show how easily we let ourselves be trapped by caring too much what others think of us. (And having been to ND for grad school and then teaching there for 9 years, I can tell you, there is an INTENSE pressure to fit in at that school. There's not much room for people who are different in any way.)

Now. Another totally made-up story.

You're the kid of a single mom. Pretty good kid, but you've got a lot of time on your hands. You live in the 'burbs where you're looked down on because you don't have a ton of money. Damn yuppie kids always better than everyone else. You start racing your bike and doing well. Suddenly you're special. You work harder.

Grow to adulthood, now riding that bike for a living. You're good, but you're one of the pack. Your determination and hard work only takes you so far. But you have to prove yourself.

And then you get cancer. A really serious cancer with low survival rates. And as if that weren't enough, it's the kind of cancer that eats at your identity. You screw up everything you've learned about hard work and determination and NOT giving in ... and you kick that cancer squarely in the ass.

And you're determined to kick that damned race that you were all right at as well. There's got to be a way to get that licked as well. After all, you've just kicked cancer. You can do this if you work.

You just need a little help.

Again with the traps we walk ourselves into. And if you've walked into those traps because you want to prove yourself or fit in somehow ... you are so, so trapped. Because to admit that you lied or cheated or were wrong is to admit that you don't fit in. That you're not part of that group. And no matter how strongly you deny wanting to be one of the fellas ... everyone suddenly knows that's all you ever wanted.

You're exposed.

You're vulnerable.

And you're outcast.

It's no good saying, "Oh, well, I would never do that." You're not in the same position those people were with the same baggage and the same pressures.

Believe me, I'm not saying the people in my made-up scenarios made the right choices. But I'm calling the rest of us out on this public anger and shaming of people who have proven they are only human.

Who are we to be angry at someone so broken or scared that they continued lying for 10 years, building themselves a fictional life to show just how innocent and "one of the regular folk" they were?

It's a fiction we tell ourselves that we don't do the exact same damn thing. We may not take it to the same levels, length of time, but most people have some skeleton in the closet they've perpetuated.

We tell ourselves when we leave the house in the morning that our house and our stuff is secure. It's a fiction we tell ourselves because we must. But we know, at the very same time, that windows are vulnerable, doors can be kicked in ... planes can fall from the sky and open up us.

But we also cannot live in constant fear. It's a fiction we tell ourselves in order to keep moving. That's okay and in fact, I think it's necessary to live a healthy life.

These folks in my made-up stories simply took the fictions they told themselves ... and us ... to a different level.

They may have lacked integrity in our eyes. But it was a fiction they needed.

And who are we to cast stones?

They are only human. We are fallible.

Let it go.

...(well, I wanted to be like [Kit Carson] 'til I found out he was responsible for the Navajo's Long Walk, then I'se just mad), or or how I'd like to be ole Walt Disney (well, okay, bad example, but I didn't know then that he was some kind of C.I.A. or F.B.I. spy and a McCarthy-ite to boot), or Kermit the Frog (there, see, I found one that is still good and if you know somethin' 'bout him I don't, I don't even wanna hear it).

If there was something about Jim Henson, Max - and I - didn't want to know anything about it. Leave me one hero.

People are complex. We don't live in a vacuum and we aren't as clearcut as most fiction leads us to believe. We get backed into corners or sleep-deprived or we believe the webs other people weave for us and we make poor choices. We get lost in a moment and make choices we don't think we can ever back out of, ever undo. Choices, which, when brought out into bright sunlight, we can't even fathom how we would EVER make that choice.

However naive or stupid or blind or plain dumb this makes me - I don't want to know about Lance. And I still wear my Livestrong bracelet.

I grew up primarily in Arlington, Texas, but Austin was where I started school and was my heart-home for years. Arlington and Plano had a lot in common. Lots of Texas yuppies. I didn't fit in any more than Lance fit in. Mom started telling me about this kid, just about my age, who was doing all this stuff on his bike. And why wasn't I like that? 

Of course, that was because I wasn't allowed to ride my bike more than a mile or so from home, but that's another discussion completely.

By college, I'd forgotten about him. And then he got cancer. And after that, he started winning. And then I got cancer. And I wound up in the same hospital he'd been in. A colleague lent me It's Not About the Bike.

Lance and I? We still kicked cancer's arse. Grew up a town over w/damn yuppies where we didn't fit in. Went to same hospital for cancer.

Anything else? I don't wanna know. I just don't. He's still the guy who worked harder than any other cyclist, practicing longer hours, faster, up higher mountains weeks before anyone else.

He worked hard. Smashed cancer. Started Livestrong.

His work ethic is something I admire.

And beyond that ... I don't wanna know what corners he felt he'd been backed into. What temptation he could no longer turn down.

So don't tell me what he's said now. I'm weaving a fiction of my own, a plot that helps me believe what I need to believe: that an underdog from Yuppieville, Texas, can, with great determination and a lot of work, ride to the top of the world and live strong, live free.

We have millions of stories about how the mighty fall, how they're "only" human.

I choose a story to inspire me instead of remind me how fallible we all are.

I will not cast stones because we all live in glass houses.

I found the entire series just brilliant.

My fault for judging the book by its perceived popularity. At least I did finally come to my senses and when I gave it a chance, I gave it a fair chance, an open-minded chance and found a clever new world to play in.

Another thread in this tapestry.

I don't usually like American sit-coms. In general, they insist that I turn my brain off and be vapid for thirty minutes. In addition, I tend to be character-driven in my stories (be they written or acted). Most American sit-coms create caricatures rather than characters and I generally don't give a crap about the characters and thus the show. Seinfeld was one such show for me. I know a lot of people loved it, but because the characters were empty to me, I couldn't care about the show.

I don't know if any of that is true for most geeks and nerds, but it's an important thread in what I'm about to say.

I am a geek. I am a nerd. I am proud of those things.

I love The Big Bang Theory.

I have read more than a few geeks and nerds ripping on the show in the last year or so. (Before that, I had only heard praise.) Hey, difference is the spice of life. You don't like it, that's cool. But I find some of the reasons people are complaining about it to be ... well, honestly? A bit disingenuous.

Complaint 1:
Real nerds are not like Sheldon, Raj, Howard or Leonard. (Oddly enough, Bernadette and Amy Farah Fowler are usually left out of this.)

Oh FFS. Seriously?

Look. Nerds come in a lot of flavours. And, The Big Bang Theory never said ALL NERDS ARE LIKE THESE GUYS. Nope. They said, these particular physicists and this engineer are like this. And you know what? I know people like each one of these guys. I know sleazy dudes like Howard. Dudes who still live with their folks - often because their folks need taking care of - and who think they are awesome at picking up the opposite sex. 

I know guys like Raj. Sweet as can be, but can't quite get over the opposite sex. Guys who like to talk about the possible symbolism of ponytails in Avatar or exhaustive details of The Two Towers.

Sheldon? Know nerds like him, too. Leonard? Again, yes! Hell, I'm a nerd like Leonard and like Sheldon.

When the movie Philadelphia first came out, I heard the same kind of complaints. "All gay men do not love opera!" was the oft-heard lament. Agreed. That character did. Nobody said all gay men love opera in that movie. The same thing goes for The Big Bang Theory. No one said all nerds are like these guys. I think you're taking your fiction a little too seriously if this is your complaint.

Complaint 2:
Everyone is laughing at us and we're not all like that. Nerds are cool, dammit.

This is the most frequent complaint I've seen recently. Of course, it's usually phrased differently. "We're not laughing with the geeks, we're encouraged to laugh at them." Or even "we're not made to like these characters, we're made to be the bullies who laugh at them for being idiots."

Poppycock.

Well, that's how I feel, anyway, and I think feelings are key in this complaint which is why I phrased it "everyone is laughing at us" [change in emphasis intentional] - I think that "us" is the telling word here. I think they're interpreting the humour of the show through some pretty serious baggage of their own. The humour has always struck me as self-deprecating rather than a bully pointing and laughing. I love Sheldon because I see myself in some of what Sheldon does. It's comedy, so that behaviour is taken to a ridiculous (or aspergian) extreme, but dammit, I'm laughing at myself. 

I have not, for example, told someone they cannot sit in my spot because it's the perfect spot, where:

"In the winter, that seat is close enough to the radiator to remain warm and yet not so close as to cause perspiration. In the summer, it's directly in the path of a cross breeze created by opening windows there and there. It faces the television at an angle that is neither direct, thus discouraging conversation, nor so far wide to create a parallax distortion."

But I damn well laugh when Sheldon goes into this oft-used explanation because I do have oft-used explanations for things I have thought FAR too much about and other people just think I'm being silly. Or stubborn. Oppositional. Overly attached to routine or ritual.

I laughed when Sheldon was just a few days past his haircut day because he started blowing his hair out of his eyes. The hair which was nowhere near his eyes - it was just not that long. And yet, today? Today, I kept trying to toss the hair out of my eyes. It wasn't in my eyes. I was just a week "late" for my haircut.

I'm laughing at myself, not pointing and laughing at someone else.

Complaint 3:
The show isn't funny. The humour isn't laugh material. If there was no laugh track, no one would know when to laugh.

This one, frankly, has the most validity as a complaint. And whilst I obviously disagree, humour is a subjective thing. I have laughed at the YouTube snippets where they cut the laugh track out. I have laughed before the laugh track (or studio audience) laugh. Obviously, I find it funny. But hey, that's just me and my sense of humour. Yours is different and that's a good thing. We just disagree is all.

Look, if you don't like something, don't watch it. I didn't like the few episodes of How I Met Your Mother that I saw. I don't whine about the show - it just wasn't for me. I can't watch Game of Thrones. I ought to love it - from all I've heard, it's a great fantasy show. But, for personal reasons, my own personal baggage, I can't watch it. I can't get past my baggage. That's okay. I'm glad the show is out there even though I don't watch it. But I own that. It's my own issues that cause me to not watch it. I'm not going to go on some kind of soapbox, high-horse tirade about how it's a bad show because I don't watch it. I have no concrete complaints.

The reboot of Battlestar Galactica I understand was excellent science fiction television. I can't watch it. I grew up with the original show, and dammit, Starbuck is a man. (And where are Boxi and Daggit, dagnabit!) I can bemoan those choices, but the reason I can't watch the show is because I cannot get past my own baggage. And I own that. 

So really? I don't care if you don't like The Big Bang Theory. You don't have to. 

But come on. Be an adult about it. Own your baggage. Don't fall into silly traps like claiming not all nerds are like the main characters. 

I get this distinct feeling from the self-proclaimed and aggrieved nerds I've read ranting about the horribleness of  The Big Bang Theory that they either are simply reacting to something popular (there's no substance to their rant, nothing concrete, but I do see a trend of "it's so popular"), or they're bringing their own baggage to the show (the show is bullying me and I am not either like any of those characters) or a very pedantic "not every nerd is just like the ones in this show." 

All of these - with the exception of the very simple I don't get the humour - seem far less like reasons to rant about the horribleness of a show to me and instead say far more about our own very human insecurities.

The show, like most, is not perfect. This season hasn't been my favourite, but tonight's episode ("The Egg Salad Equivalency") was just brilliant and I laughed all the way through it.

But that's just me.

Content and eager.

I drove in to work, marveling at the mountains, the sun playing with the crevices. Oranges and pinks playing in the tiny bits of wispy clouds and reflecting down on the mountain. Driving down the mesa until the sun just POPPED out from a crevice, brightening the remains of the volcanoes to the west. 

I was singing along with Los Lonely Boys at the top of my lungs and looking forward to my day.

Once I got to work, I almost forgot to clock in, my mind already spinning to the various things I had to get done, wanted to get done today.

Eager. Anticipating. Enjoying.

Later in the day, the new guy came over. He was afraid that I had thrown the little cake he brought me first thing this morning away. I was horrified. Of course not! I showed him it was in the fridge. I was thinking I would take it home to share with my partner tonight. He smiled - he's a very smiley kind of guy, his face just lights up - and said that he was going to make that suggestion earlier. He thought it would be nice for us to share that cake. A nice moment together - sharing a treat.

It wasn't until later that I truly marveled over that gesture - not just the cake, but for us to share it together.

You see, I know I grew up post-Christopher Street, post Stonewall. I know that my life has been easier than so many. I was never hassled by a cop wanting to know if I was a male or a female. Never asked how many "gender appropriate" pieces of clothing I had on.

I know that I've had it easy. I've had friends who were gay-bashed - one who suffered a severe brain trauma and despite the bleeding from his head, the cops turned away and wanted to know what the problem was. (He'd been hit deliberately by a car as the driver called him a faggot.)

Matthew Shepherd was murdered while I was in college.

Pat was a popular SNL sketch throughout my high school and college days.

I've had a couple of times when some random stranger wanted to let me know they disapproved, but nothing major. A postal worker refused to pick up a medical bill because of the rainbow sticker on the front door and a bit of Dr. Pepper which had gotten spilled onto the bill. He was certain it was AIDS.

I had a doctor insist he should run an AIDS test instead of a plain, old CBC (basic blood count test). 

Mostly just ignorance without real malice. Still dangerous, mind you, but nothing like what others have been through.

But I didn't realize just how guarded I'd become until today. This happy, joyful day when I was so relaxed and in the moment.

When my new coworker not only sweetly brought me a small birthday cake, but hoped that I would take it home to share with my partner of 13  years.

It wasn't until later in the day, when he insisted on washing a dessert dish that another coworker had brought for my birthday (I tell you again, I am so blessed right now - it's unreal), that everything came together for me. I thought I was doing well to get it back to her that same day. I forgot that there's a sink where we can wash well-scraped dishes. This new guy insisted on taking the dish in there and washing it.

Incredibly thoughtful. (I actually take my dishes home to wash them - I seriously forgot that little wash area was even there.) It was thoughtful and sweet of him to do that. I told him so and thanked him for taking the time to do that. 

He replied a few minutes later that one of his ex girlfriends had once told him he was very feminine. I scoffed and said he was kind and conscientious.

And then it occurred to me. While I told him I was gay and talked about my partner, I didn't expect such a matter-of-fact acceptance and inclusion. I grew up Catholic and Texan. Most people I knew back in the day might have decided they liked me, but would ignore that I was gay and had a partner. I wasn't truly included.

You experience something often enough and you come to expect it. I didn't even realize it, but I expect for people to only superficially "accept" me. I expect there to be a holding back, a staying apart from my supposed "differentness." And I'll admit that I expected a latino man raised Catholic to not accept me.

That was the best birthday present this year. To recognize that guardedness and to realize I need to let it go. To realize that I have to stop assuming that the Focus on the Family folks, that the Westboro folks, that the Family Research Council and the National Organization for Marriage are not the only folks out here. They don't represent the bulk of Americans who can see me for me and not for what they assume I do in my own home.

It was the icing on the cake he brought me, the whipped cream on the trifle another coworker brought me.

Yeah. It was a damn good day today.

And tomorrow, I get to go back to a job I adore, work with people I love and learn something new.

I love my life.

There will be spoilers. If you haven't seen it and you don't want spoilers, come back after you've seen it.

First, I have to say that I've been a fan of Celtic mythos in general since I was a wee li'l monkey. I read tales of Cuchullain, the Red Branch. I found Morgan Llewellyn's stories of Fionn MacCumhaill. Amerigan the Bard. I decided around the age of 6 that since my mother would not tell me "what we were," that I was Irish. I liked the sound of Ireland. It just sounded nifty. And I was fascinated with red hair. And islands. It just seemed a fit.

Eventually I branched out into tales from Scotland and Wales, but it was always... well, that's not really about Brave, is it? Right then. The point being, I've a fair background in celtic legends. Now Brave is not exactly a re-telling of any celtic legend I know and I suspect it's not a retelling of any particular one. Instead, it's a coming of age story told Pixar-style, but I think it's also Pixar's coming of age as well.

Pixar, from the beginning, has been grand about making a kid's animated movie that adults also want to see. I think they slipped a little with Cars 2 - not that it was a bad flick, but it was more ... empty? than other Pixar flicks had been. It was a joyous romp through Cars and spy movies, but that's all it was. (Not that this is a bad thing, mind you. Sometimes we just want entertainment and that's fine.)

Brave is a return to deeper thoughts. And whilst it's still a kid's movie, in some very fundamental ways it is not a kid's movie at all. Oh, they can watch it, don't get me wrong, but it may be a bit scary for little-little guys.

The basic plot is simple: oppressed kid fights with parent, says and does things not truly meant, magic changes parent, kid and parent bond as they struggle to get the magic off the parent and eventually triumph, which naturally changes both kid and parent.

It's a coming of age story and I think in many ways it's a coming of age for Pixar as well. It's as if the movie itself is an adolescent, one minute a child, running free, chasing bears, shooting random arrows; and the next it's quite a deep story about relationships and how difficult it can be to love family and want to change them and to be our true selves all at the same time.

I wonder, though, how much of the script was left on the cutting room floor. I would guess at least 30-45 minutes. It seemed to me that every time I would get deeply - at an adult level - into the story and characters, it was as if Pixar suddenly realized, shit, this is a kid's movie. And they'd go back to a chase scene or humour with the triplets or the like. 

A perfect example of missed characterization is one pointed out by Gedeon on his blog. Both mother and daughter during their early fight, hurt something that the other holds precious. The mother throws Mirada's beloved bow into the fire. Mirada cuts the mother's tapestry of the family. Now, the rest of the movie weaves around the tapestry in a really beautiful way and I'm sure many academics are going to have a field day relating all of that. But after Mirada runs out of the room in shock when her mom throws the bow in the fire, we see the mother realize what she's done and pull the bow out. She puts her head in her hands and sobs not just at the fight she's had, but at her own actions as well. It's clear she realizes that she has not just been petty, but unbelievably cruel with that action. Her daughter's rending of the tapestry was largely the overly grand gesture of an adolescent, not actually trying to cut her mother's tapestry. But she took her daughter's most prized possession, the thing that meant most to her as an object and as a representation of all that was important to her - and she deliberately threw it in the fire, as if that didn't matter. 

What the daughter takes from that is that SHE doesn't matter. Nothing she holds dear matters. And quite possibly her mother might as well have thrown her in the fire.

The mother doesn't mean any of that, of course. And we see the mother realizing what she's done and what it meant. As usual, Pixar tells this part of the story beautifully. But as Ged points out, it's then dropped completely from the story. There is no moment (although there is the opportunity at the end) when the mother returns the damaged bow or even gifts her daughter with a new one. Instead, the girl finally repairs, albeit clumsily, the tapestry that she accidentally sliced, and makes amends ... but not the adult. Why did they leave this out? Very un-Pixar-like as they generally pay close attention to such details. Was it cut to keep the film short enough for children? Or was the message intended to be that children should make up to their parents, but parents don't need to make up to the kids? (I doubt that, but it's still a bad omission which could give kids that impression.)

There are other moments that likewise seem like shortcuts and I wonder if this kind of jerky movement from kid's movie to adult's movie back to kid's movie isn't an adolescent growing pain of Pixar's. The story feels caught in that adolescent limbo belonging neither wholly kid nor adult. In some ways I love it more for that, but mostly I just wish it had been longer and actually filled in some of those gaps.

All of that said, I adored the movie for tackling this parent-kid theme in a way I have never really seen before.

As I spoke of the theme earlier, I specifically used gender-neutral language. Kid and parent. I have always been one to ignore gender. A story about a boy playing baseball, in my mind, can just as easily be a girl playing baseball. A story about a girl becoming a dancer could just as easily be about a boy. In my head, anyway. There are biological plot points - Steel Magnolias could not have the exact same plot and kick if the daughter was actually a son - the whole pregnancy and diabetes bit would fall apart. You could come up with a similar plot, however, and still have the same essential story. Stand By Me could possibly have been four girls going to see a dead body and could have still shown how the four were both bonding and drifting apart. Many of the plot points would likely have been different, but the essential story would be the same. The emotional flavour of the movie, however, would have been completely different.

Brave could have been about a boy and father disagreeing, but as with Stand By Me, many plot points would have been different.

I have never, however, seen a movie truly get to the heart of an acrimonious mother-daughter relationship as Brave; not YaYa Sisterhood, not Steel Magnolias or Fried Green Tomatoes. YaYa comes close at times, but it really just scratches the surface.

But this kid's movie delves far deeper in. And that is stunning to me.

Neither mother nor daughter are bad people. The daughter is an adolescent and in her adolescence does something as equally stupid as the mother, although without truly realizing it. I disagree with Ged on this being a weak point in the plot, however, and find it a strong point instead. He compares Merida to Arial from Little Mermaid, and I think he does make some good comparisons there. Arial does the magic to herself and it takes a certain amount of bravery to take that life-changing magic onto your self.

He goes on to say:

Our heroine, the person we've just spent the entire first act getting to know and love, suddenly feels it's perfectly okay to possibly poison her mom. Feeding the pastry to Queen Elinor isn't an act of bravery, it's one of cowardice.

I disagree with the first sentence and agree with the second. And it's my perception of the first sentence which led me to greatly enjoy the movie whereas his interpretation of her act led to his disappointment (I think). Now, neither one of us is wrong in our interpretations. I don't think Ged is wrong or I'm right. This is a story and we all bring our own life experiences to bear on every story we see or read or hear and that's what keeps every writer and actor in business because we all see and interpret them differently according to our experiences.

I saw Merida the adolescent completely trusting in magic. She, if we go fully with this being a celtic tale, has grown up with stories of magic. She has been told that will o'the wisps can lead her to her destiny. They led her to this witch. I saw a child trusting that magic would "fix" everything. Now as an adult and a voracious reader of science fiction and fantasy, I know damn good and well - as do most adults - that this is going to backfire in some fundamental way. But Merida is a child on the cusp of adulthood. She thought she had found an easy answer in the archery tournament and was dismayed that things were more complex than that. She's not ready to accept that there are no easy answers. And look! Here's a trail to her destiny! And a witch! She must feel like she's won the lottery - a quick and easy answer to all of her problems.

The witch attempts to warn her and you can, I think, see on her face that struggle between adult and child thinking. But, the child wins and she rushes home to have her cake and eat it, too. You can see misgivings on her face as her mother becomes ill. And then the child resurfaces and she begins the childish "are we there yet" questions about whether her mother has changed her mind about the betrothal yet. We see it more as she tells bear-mother that "it's not my fault" that it's the witch's fault.

This made the movie far more powerful and realistic to me, rather than making me dislike the main character. Now, that's a fine line, no doubt.

In addition, as I said earlier, there is an intense realism in the relationship between Elinor and Merida. The talking at cross-purposes, the two totally different points-of-view on life, the "what a lady is" rules, and possibly most importantly, the absolute inability to communicate and reach the other is stunningly wrought. The way the relationship builds from the beginning to their time catching fish in the stream rivals, in some ways, the beginning of Up (which I think is honestly the best cinematic story-telling ever). This goes beyond adolescent rebellion. It is a parent who is so rules-bound she cannot see her daughter any more and the scene with Merida in the court dress is the epitome of their relationship. Everything that makes Merida who she is, is hidden and constricted by the rules of ladyhood. It is a child so out-of-sync with her time/society that she cannot continue within its bounds.

What is joyful about Brave is that mother and daughter are able to change and to see each other as separate people. Merida is not simply a lady. She is not simply the queen's progeny. She is not a chess piece. And, by the end, Merida can see that she must balance self with duty, neither giving in completely to selfish "I must be me," nor so stifled with duty that she herself disappears. Likewise, the mother learns to relax and attempt to balance the life of the queen with some of her daughter's favourite activities. And Merida learns some of her mother's as well (the new tapestry combines both aspects).

What makes Brave, in the very ending, come back to a child's movie is that faery tale ending. Everything is fixed in the end. And that's okay. Sometimes it does happen that way. And it is a very Pixar ending.

But that ending also once again brings back the tension of child or adult movie? After getting into deeper adult themes of this familial relationship, it backs out of the difficult story and goes back to being legend, faery tale, happily ever after.

And those of us who have struggled with similar familial relationships (and I sort of suspect this *might* even be specific to mother-daughter relationships) are left a bit cold. Wishing despite the selfishness that there was a magic spell which could change our mothers until they recognized us for who we are (and rather forgetting that Merida also changed...). For us, it can be a very melancholy ending to the movie because that change has not happened and may never happen.

My mother will never stop complaining that I don't dress as she thinks I should. That my life is not the gender-appropriate life she thinks I should have. She laments that I "must" work. She hates my hobbies because they are not "appropriate" to her worldview of how I should be.

Likewise, I find her fear of the world infuriating, her weakness maddening, her constricted views of how people should behave, the roles they should have insane.

I adored the ending to Brave because it gave a closure to the movie that I will never have myself. It felt good.

But I fear it also ripped open old wounds in friends who also shared Merida's essential storyline because at that crucial moment, the movie, Pixar, backed away from adulthood and like an adolescent, retreated back to childhood for a crucial moment and handed us a sweet to make everything all better.

What's the phrase? One step forward and two steps back?

It's a stunning film. Beautifully wrought. The landscape shots at times look like photographs, they're so real, so beautiful. And then it pulls back to a gorgeous animated feature. Tensions between art and photorealism. Tensions between adult and child.

Yes, I think this movie is Pixar's coming of age. And I'm eager to see where they go next.

Quite a while back, Mike Rohde hooked me up with JetPens. I'd never heard of the company...but now that I had, whoa.

So, JetPens primarily makes available to the US the awesome pens available in Japan. Since I prefer rollerballs at a REALLY fine point, this looked like a good fit to me.

It's been a while and in the spirit of full disclosure, I've placed multiple orders with JetPens since that first introduction. They're a relatively small and niche company, but don't let that fool you. For the pen connaisseur, the artist or just an aficionado of good pens or pencils, JetPens is a site to be aware of.

A week or two ago, I was contacted by one of the JetPens folk. They asked if I would be willing to review a product here. I had no idea what they would send, and wound up getting a piece that I have little experience with — a brush pen.

Now, to be honest, I use technical pens most of the time. I don't have the steadiest hand. I prefer to pencil first and then, when it's "perfect," I go back over my pencils with Copic Multiliners or Pigma Micron markers. The thought that JetPens wanted me to review a fancier brush pen than anything I'd ever touched before was a little intimidating. But I figured if I couldn't get the hang of the pen, one of my friends would.

When I opened the mail, I saw this:

I am a sucker for a good box and I'm totally in love with this product's looks at any rate. Besides the nice little balsa box/case, the presentation here is really well done. I like that it ships with the cap off so you can see the brush right away and that they took the added precaution of the plastic sleeve to help protect the brush as well.

I popped the cartridge in and tried to snap a shot of the brush filling up.

Then it was time to do pen-only doodles and evaluate how it handled. First up were these little guys. Not good doodles, but they did give me a feel for the pen and just how unsteady my hand is on long strokes.

Which then led to this guy as my hand got somewhat steadier:

Then, I waited a week. I wanted to know just how the pen would respond to being left capped but unused for a while. The bit on the left is another pen-only doodle, but the one on the right was a little guy I'd been playing around with for a while. This one I penciled first and then inked. I was curious to see if I could manage the thin lines I wanted with the brush pen and I was truly startled at how fine a line I could coax out of it.

You can see the pencils underneath the little guy on the right. Here it is after cleaning up the pencils:

I had a tiny bit of smearing around his hand and the foot on the left, but otherwise, worked just fine.

The pen itself is awesome. It's definitely been a great introduction for me into brushwork. I am not overly fond of the ink it comes with and I've seen others with the same complaint. Since I have a somewhat slow hand, I had issues with bleeding sometimes, even on my good bristol. The ink also sometimes dried oddly so that areas looked only partially covered. (You can see this in the thicker lines near the bottom of the little guy on the left above.)

I've seen other folks claim that the Winsor & Newton ink cartridges will fit well in here and they seem to be a more universally appreciated ink. I'll have to try that next.

All in all, I have nothing but praise for the pen itself. The ink flowing off the brush was smooth, it didn't dry out in a week (even though I live in a desert) and it felt good in the hand. I obviously still have a lot of practice to do, but that's not the fault of the pen.

I also brought it up to work to let one of my co-workers try it out. She uses a lot of brush pens herself and was intrigued by a cartridge-fed brush. I'm pretty sure she actually fell in love with it. She handed it back to me somewhat regretfully and said "It makes me want to draw. I mean, I would just sit here all day and draw!" In the interest of work productivity, I took it back. Her only concern was she prefers multiple size brushes and while the tips are replaceable, there's just the one size.

So, looks like JetPens has another hit on their hands. I wasn't sure that I was going to keep it since I'm not great with brushes, but playing with it for a week has convinced me to keep trying!

The nice folks at JetPens sent me an awesome brush pen to review. I've used it a bit over a couple of days. I want to see how the ink does before I publish my review, though, so expect that to happen soonish.

Other than that, I've been working my behind off lately. Still loving my new job even though I've started getting into the politics that inevitably occur when you have an organization of more than 10 people. I don't have to like politics and the games people play (even at a place where they try REALLY hard to limit such things), but it's all good. We're all heading in the same direction, just different ways of trying to get there! I'm good with that.

I've taken over the emailer program there (don't worry, it's not spam, it's opt-in!). It's wonderful to be running something, looking at the metrics and trying to adjust things to get better responses. The copywriter I work with is great - we've managed to knock it out of the ballpark several times this year and sell out of product in a short time. In fact, today, we actually sold out in something like 4-6 hours!

At the same time, producing and sending 3-4 HTML emailers is exhausting. I barely have time to do anything else and I really fear that my HTML and CSS coding skills are getting rusty. Making HTML emailers is a lot like coding in 1999. It's all tables and very little of the stuff that makes being a web designer/interaction designer fun. I'm trying to crank through a month's production in two weeks, giving me two weeks to do other things.

I did get one landing page re-done and it's something I'm proud of. We had a problem with needing a landing page that showed family groupings of tote bags and merchandise bags/envelopes. However, these items turn over quickly as certain patterns or materials are discontinued. Photo simply couldn't keep up with all of the requested re-shoots and it really wasn't fair to them. Nor was it fair to the customers to leave these family shots with 3 of the 4 items discontinued so that when they clicked through to look at those bags, they'd see 1 that was on the previous page and maybe another 2 that they'd not seen. My solution was to use illustrations which clearly showed the most important features - shape, handles, etc. Then there's a "sidebar" showing the available colours. An example is here on Dribbble. It's easy for me to add a new colour swatch when things change - much easier than it is for Photo to get all of the items in that family, re-stage, re-shoot, re-colour-correct, re-submit, etc, etc. I'm hoping that the customers dig it and find it useful.

All right. Kind of boring post. Thanks for hanging in with me whilst I get all this software and hacking mess cleaned up.

Gotta say, for the HTML/CSS editing that I do via iPad, this Diet Coda will be a godsend. Still have to see if I can stand for it to replace Dreamweaver. Probably can, but $50 (today only) for Coda 2 seems hefty. And if I wait, it'll be $100. I don't tend to use more than TextWrangler any more, though, so that makes me question whether I really need anything more complex than a text editor any more. Of course, it's always nice to be able to see where in the page I am ... but with responsive design, is that really viable anymore? Maybe it's time I give up the visual cue of the page and just code.

Meanwhile, back when I was attending the Neilsen Norman Group's Usability Week, I tweeted:

Eventually, the theory of responsive design (however it plays out), will finally get stakeholders to realize web is not print. It will get them used to the fact that a site design can't look the same in every screen and thus will also mean it won't look the same in every browser. I see progressive enhancement/graceful degradation & responsive web design theories blending together eventually. #webdesign

I've been thinking a lot about how my work has changed so much in such a short time. After all, the web as a mainstream entity didn't really exist when I graduated from high school and was only starting to gain traction outside of computer nerds as I graduated from college. I started designing websites haphazardly in 1997, I think, although I had a site a year or two earlier. I mean, if you can call it a website....

I have "grown up" as a designer as the web has also "grown up." When I started, the "best" way to make a site was shove images into table cells. It was a hack then and everyone who cared about how the site rendered  (users, designers) hated it. Everything was boxy to the user and kind of annoying and designers hated keeping everything boxy and hated marking up the page even more.

But the worst was "This site looks best in..." which was practically required if you had a complex design - it always seemed that a complex design simply was never rendered "the same" from browser to browser. You'd think that this fact alone would have been enough warning to us to realize that we were not working with the same media as print, the same constraints and rules. But, of course, we are creatures of habit far more than creatures of innovation and change. And our stakeholders were often even more convinced that this was just electronic print.

In the mid 90s, I was teaching first-year writing. I was one of the first in the department to put my entire syllabus on the web. I begged the head of the department to let me take over the department's site design from the undergrad who'd originally built it. The site was not bad by the standards of the time, but each page was different. Without any class in human computer interaction, no lectures on usability, no formal training in information architecture, not even a single design class under my belt, I knew that websites needed more coherence than the department's name up at the top of each page.

I threw up a site more quickly than I preferred using a piece of free software called NaviPress, an early "WYSIWYG" program. The intent was to go back and learn HTML as soon as the spring semester was over so that I could "do it right." The first site was ugly, simple and usable enough. It was a backup of the paper syllabus. My students were, by and large, privileged and most had computers with them. The school had multiple 24 hour computer labs for those who did not have computers and all of them had computers at home. I was smug in the thought that my students could never claim to have lost their syllabus - it was online.

I had the entire site backed up on disk and the first day of class, two IT guys wheeled in the cart with the computer setup but were unable to connect to the internet.

No problem, I was practically giddy with my foresight. I whipped out the disk and proceeded to get through the class, showing them the website saved locally. The IT guys were surprised and grateful. The students were curious. 

That summer, I taught myself HTML a little more systematically. I didn't buy a book, I didn't take a class. I simply viewed a lot of source code. I chatted with a few people in the rec.toys.misc newsgroup who were also interested in the web. For the longest time, I thought web guru Eric Meyer and the Eric Meyer from RTM were one and the same. By the next summer, my website's ugliness embarrassed me. I had taken "staff classes" at the university where I taught as an adjunct and learned a little Photoshop, a little Dreamweaver and a fair amount of Fireworks. I was also starting to pick up Flash as well. I was well and truly hooked.

As a teacher, I strove to know my audience. After all, the clarion call of the writing world has always been to know the audience. You must pitch your writing style, your vocabulary, your points to a specific audience in order to reach them, persuade them. I saw teaching the same way. Yes, I had a slew of topics I was supposed to cover, but every semester was different, presenting different people with different skill sets, different needs. I was always a semester "behind," spending any time in between semesters tweaking the class according to evaluations and other feedback from the students. More than once, I completely stopped class to get feedback as to why something wasn't working and what we as a class needed to do to get things back on track.

It was not long before my website embarrassed me. I had learned so much in a short time and I was beginning to truly understand the power inherent in the medium. I could do more for my students. So one summer not long after I began putting the basic syllabus on the web, I planned out a new version. I spent time first deciding what should be on the web, how it should be organized, what types of formatting the different pieces of content needed. I agonized over how my students thought, how I could best present the most important information like due dates and daily schedules. I wanted them to have no excuse for not knowing the information they needed.

Then I went to work on the look. I don't recall now if I did a full mockup in Fireworks; I do remember that some pieces (like the buttons) were template specials, not created from scratch. I was so proud of the finished product. I'd used everything I'd learned about my past students. I'd provided multiple routes to the most important information in order to catch their different ways of thinking and processing and searching.

And two-thirds of the way through the first semester using it, one of the students finally blurted out that he couldn't find a damn thing on the site.

I'm pretty sure that my jaw actually fell off of my face and hit the ground.

I wish I recalled that student's name and I hope that he got half as much from my class as I did by his single statement, because he taught me the most important maxim of my web career:

Your website is never done.

You will always be tweaking your designs, your architecture, your content, your layout. Always. The web is a living document in a way that your print syllabus is not.

The web was much the same as teaching a class. The best instructors were fluid, adjusting to their students' needs on the fly and still striving to reach all of the curricular goals, but tailoring them as they went. It was a philosophy I embraced whole-heartedly, but I had originally made the mistake of thinking the essential layout and architecture were somehow exempt from that. 

That was my first lesson in what I have come to think of as holistic web design. The second lesson revolved around a tension between design, usability and audience. 

And I think that stakeholders are finally starting to learn the same thing now. You can view a site on a multiplicity of phones, tablets, computers. They all use different operating systems and different screen sizes. None of them looks exactly the same — at least, not without spending a ridiculous amount of time and effort and extra code to get that effect. Whilst I know that some poor managers simply assume that a coder's "inability" to get a page or detail to look exactly the same in all browsers is either laziness or incompetence on the coder's part; I firmly believe it's becoming easier to convince them that you don't WANT the site to look exactly the same on every screen. You want a comparable experience. You want it to be easy to do whatever task the user wants. But the context is as different as the screen size in most cases. And the more we push for well thought-out responsive design, the more I think they will agree with us.

That said ... it's past time for me to redo all of my sites. None of them are responsive. All of them adhere to fixed pixel designs. I need to make time to practice what I believe.

Truly, your website is NEVER done.

If I'm working on something, I don't do interruptions well. So, I had nothing to work on. My job was to be available to them the instant they needed something. So, I perused my favourite toys website: RTM. There, in full colour, glorious in a way I'd never seen any other toy:

Where the Wild Things Are

I gasped. A student walked up for help, saw my expression and was puzzled.

"What's that?" he asked.

"Where the Wild Things Are action figures."

Blank stare.

I was appalled. How could anyone not know this book? Not know Maurice Sendak's work?

The day before Spring Break, I brought the figures and the book in to class. I ended class early and told my students, "you are free to go if you want. But if you've never seen this book before, I hope you'll stay."

We sat down on the floor in the front of the classroom, for all the world like an overgrown kindergarten class, and I read to them about Max and about the wild things. We roared terrible roars and gnashed terrible teeth. We rolled terrible eyes and showed terrible claws.

We sailed back over a year

and in and out of weeks

and through a day

and into the night of our very own rooms

where we found our supper waiting

and it was still hot.

And some of my students rolled their eyes, a few left, but a bigger chunk of them than I had expected at a school where the students prided themselves on being above anything "childish," a lot of them stayed and enjoyed the book. Some for the first time, some quite obviously for the millionth time as they mouthed most of the words along with me.

A brilliant, dark light has gone out of the universe and we are the poorer for it.

Sorry, blog software still uninstalled, so no comments. You can hit me up through the contact form at the top if you want to let me know what you think. I'll manually publish comments if you indicate you want me to do so.

Sorry, blog software still uninstalled, so no comments. You can hit me up through the contact form at the top if you want to let me know what you think. I'll manually publish comments if you indicate you want me to do so. Click to look.