#SparksOfJoy: A weekly post about something that makes me happy

Flesh and Blood by Michael Cunningham

I read this book years ago in a book club in Chicago. Even though I was an English major in college I'd pretty much lost all interest in reading fiction by then--and still to this day--preferring instead to bury myself in books about social science and American and European history. But I DEVOURED this book for our book club. Then a couple years later I devoured it again. And for some reason, something reminded me of it a couple months ago. Then I had an opportunity to bring it up in a conversation soon afterward. If I still own my original copy, it's currently filed away in one of more boxes than I can count in my climate-controlled storage room across town. So I ordered another copy and it now waits patiently in my pile of unread books for a third devouring. Anyway: In Flesh and Blood, Cunningham crafts a richly complex family narrative that germinates literally from the imagination of an eight-year-old boy as he plays in his father's garden in pre-war Greece. That boy--mightily named Constantine Stassos--eventually emigrates to America, marries an Italian immigrant, and becomes the imperious and by degrees powerless patriarch of an expanding family dynasty whose story is told both as a beautifully messy, eminently human drama and as a faceted metaphor for the American Dream filtered through a prism of post-war immigration, the uncertain but dogged progress of cultural assimilation, and the inconstantly evolving boundaries of familial love and obligation. It's as engrossing as it is complex, and as beautiful as it is essentially American.

Movin' the chains

I’m home from another delightfully exhausting weekend, I have the house quietly to myself and an ice-cold cherry-lime La Croix on a coaster next to me, and I’m going to spend my evening listening to Mozart and reading a book. And being thankful for many, many things.

I SAY I WANT SOME RESOLUTIONS

Here’s last year’s list, amended with variations of CHECK! in front of things I actually accomplished and with updated/new things I have yet to accomplish:

CHECK! I will turn 50 in April (that’s not the actual resolution—it’s just the preamble to the resolution) and to celebrate I will run every race within 100 miles that’s been on my bucket list—plus any other races I discover that sound fun—all summer, culminating in a back-to-back three-day Disney 5K/10K/half marathon in November. [UPDATE: I was sidelined by injuries for two races and I opted not to run the 10K at Disney, but I’m still giving myself full credit for accomplishing all of this. And I can run faster than you if you try to chase me down and explain to me why I didn’t.]

I will finally run the Bix 7 in the Quad Cities this July.

And you should come with me, whether you want to run or cheer or celebrate together at the after-party.

I will continue making the gym and distance running an integral part of my life. Because I’m not getting any younger or less single.

PARTIAL CHECK! I will stop thinking PB&J and Diet Coke are an acceptable dinner.

I will continue enjoying PB&J at all opportunities and I will continue eliminating Diet Coke completely from my diet (14 days and counting!)

MOSTLY CHECK! I will stop launching scorched-earth social-media fights with cousin-curious Trump supporters to the point that I make myself angry every time I open my social media and discover that they still don’t know how to lose and shut up and go away like normal morons.

I will stop losing hours scrolling mindlessly through Facebook and use my newfound free time to pursue something—anything—more productive.

I will keep myself constantly updated on the current slang and the new small talk. And use it only in irony. Because I’m 50. And an adult. I think.

PARTIAL CHECK! I will figure out how to use the universal remote I bought for our TV. [UPDATE: I made multiple attempts last year, and I got it to do everything but change channels via the number keys. PLEASE COME OVER AND HELP IF YOU’RE FLUENT IN TECHNOLOGY.]

I will start (or finish) reading all the books I bought (or received as gifts) in 2018 (or 2017) (or 2016) (or before that).

I will continue to cultivate the wonderful friendships—and keep my distance from drama—that I’ve been abundantly fortunate to have found since I moved home four years ago.

I will quickly learn the names of people I meet, especially when we do shows together. But no promises—I’m mired in a lifetime habit of convincing myself I suck at names and therefore not even trying.

ONGOING CHECK! I will get the hint and cut my losses the first time someone shows me we don’t have much of a friendship and it’s never going to go anywhere.

SOMEONE PLEASE HELP ME PICK A COLOR BECAUSE I’M SERIOUSLY PARALYZED WITH INDECISION! I will bury my tinkle-colored bedroom walls in a deep, rich, handsome, masculine, adult color that I have yet to determine.

CHECK! I will nag and complain without shame or reservation until we replace our pinky-beige, mousy-blah, suburban-horror Formica countertops with something that doesn’t make me want to hide under the sink and slowly die of mousy-blah ennui hastened by poisoning from any store-brand Formica cleanser we have stored there.

I will continue to cull and integrate and sell and give away the two-bedroom-apartment contents of my storage unit ASAP so I can eliminate that $200+/month line item from my personal budget.

I will use my newfound storage-unit savings to pay for regular voice lessons [which I started in December!]

I will make practicing the piano a regular part of my weekly schedule to try and regain some of my long-dormant skills.

I will try to get a gig choreographing something smallish somewhere or finagling my way into playing in an orchestra pit somewhere. [YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE. CALL ME. LET’S TALK.]

I will more regularly give myself private tap lessons from all the YouTube tap videos I’ve found.

I will stop wasting time winding up the vacuum cleaner cord.

I will scoop the cat box twice a week instead of once.

I will finally visit the local museums I’ve been woefully absent from seeing: The African-American Museum, The Czech and Slovak Library & Museum, The Masonic Library and Museums, and any others I discover.

I will work harder (notice that I’m not giving myself any form of schedules or deadlines here) to post more frequent #ArtThrob essays about my favorite works of art.

I will stop accepting Facebook friend requests from strangers just because they’re cute.

I will stop accepting Facebook friend requests from strangers just because they’re cute.

I will stop accepting Facebook friend requests from strangers just because they’re cute.

I will reduce forgetting my bipolar meds from once a month to zeroth a month.

I will avoid the New Year’s Day Rose Parade. And all other parades. Just like always. Because parades are stupid.

A few years ago I made a resolution to say or text or email something nice to somebody—longtime friend or random Internet stranger—every day. The resolution has slowly evolved to also include just texting or emailing a random hello to someone I haven’t talked to in a while and to check in almost daily with people I know are struggling with mental illnesses themselves or in their families. I’m sure I’ve missed a few days here and there, but overall it’s become a happy little daily habit that’s kept me in touch or even reconnected with people from every corner of my 50-year (ACK! How did that happen?) life (except for a handful of guys I’ve had longtime crushes on because I’d die inside whether they did or didn’t respond—and, sadly, at 50 years old (did I mention I’m 50?) I’m still kinda scared of guys I have high-school crushes on). Crippling insecurities aside, I’m renewing my daily-compliment/hello/check-in contract for yet another year. And I encourage all of you to consider trying something similar. Because it’s WAY cheaper than flowers. Or therapy. Happy 2019!

I lost almost the entire day today sleeping off what seems to be a low-grade-but-nonetheless-still-exhausting cold

but I thankfully woke up in time to make it to my niece’s birthday dinner tonight. Then I think I finally got my dad’s birthday Alexa set up, even though I accidentally called it Siri twice and ended up having conversations with two disembodied robot women at once—JUST LIKE MY LOVE LIFE—but even though I couldn’t get Alexa to find 91.7 fm classical radio, it IS somehow playing classical music from somewhere that’s probably costing $7.99 a minute right now, and I’m going to try to knock out one more chapter of this fabulously gay book that I started reading in August because why read a book quickly when you can stretch it out over multiple sessions of Congress?

When you accidentally buy everything you’ve been storing in your Amazon shopping cart ... and the box finally arrives ...

SPOILER ALERTS:

The Lusitania sinks. There’s a war. Everyone eventually dies. I give the VERY AWESOME book to someone else to enjoy. Sondheim writes a breathtaking show that gives me the gay shudders. I start reading the book about it for the second time. I regret bringing a massive gallon of already-watery-already-flat Diet Coke on my plane home.

Seriously

Aside from the fact that the Lusitania and the U-20 submarine—which is down to just three torpedoes—are now in the same waters off the Irish coast, could this be any more perfect?

The sun has encroached on my porch-reading chaise longue

My lightly flavored sparkling water is consumed. The Lusitania is still defiantly afloat. Nap time is imminent.

The day is just PACKED.

The house across the street from my reading porch is new and stately and handsome and suitably-New-England-architecturey, but it seems to have an epic design flaw:

How the hell are they going to replace the shingles between those smooshed-together dormers?

Also: The Lusitania has FINALLY set sail. Its safe passage to Liverpool is secured!

I’m trying to enjoy a lovely(ish) read about a doomed passenger ship

at the dawn of a world war that is hardly a “world” war as the entire southern hemisphere seems to have been a bit of an afterthought but anyway I’m trying to enjoy a lovely(ish) read on my favorite porch in the world (including the entire southern hemisphere because *I* don’t see the world through the arrogant, entitled lens of Northern European privilege) but it’s too darn close to the beach and people with cute dogs keep walking by.

WHEELS DOWN! At the correct airport! Whose name is just NATIONAL, damnit!

The Lusitania is still afloat! My watch is still on Iowa time! Saying WHEELS DOWN just made me sound like a seasoned aviator!

Let the beachhousities begin!

WHAT IS THE POINT OF PROUDLY CELEBRATING THE FACT THAT YOU LANDED EARLY IF YOUR PLANE HAS TO WAIT ON THE TARMAC FOR THE OTHER PLANE AT YOUR GATE TO LEAVE BEFORE YOU PULL UP TO IT AT YOUR PLANNED ON-TIME-NOT-EARLY TIME?

Also: The Lusitania hasn’t sunk and I’m already on the fifth chapter. So I’m cautiously optimistic.

Also: Rogue-Iowan-in-Charlotte REPRESENT! Booyah!

My last vacation adventure started with a 19-hour-four-airport-plus-an-impromptu-four-hour-drive-with-total-strangers nightmare commute

This vacation adventure is starting with no Diet Coke in the you’re-trapped-here-and-this-is-your-only-option-I-hate-my-job-so-I’m-going-to-mumble-at-you-that’ll-be-shrvkorsln-dollars-please airport-gate kiosk.

I don’t know which is worse. All I can say is the damn Lusitania better not sink at the end of this book.

Also: Our gate agent just told us we have “free wi-fi available for purchase” on our flight.

Plus she just said we’re now boarding for our flight to Charlotte O’Hare.

Plus she pronounces it conci-air.

This commute is immeasurably worse.

I read Flesh and Blood by Michael Cunningham years ago in a book club in Chicago

Even though I was an English major in college I'd pretty much lost all interest in reading fiction by then -- and still to this day -- preferring instead to bury myself in books about social science and American and European history. But I DEVOURED this book for our book club. Then a couple years later I devoured it again. And for some reason, something reminded me of it a couple weeks ago. Then I had an opportunity to bring it up in a conversation soon afterward. And now I want to devour it a third time. If I still own my original copy, it's currently filed away in one of more boxes than I can count in my climate-controlled storage locker across town. So I ordered another copy and it arrived last week. And I can't wait to devour it again -- and since I've decided to forgo being in shows all summer so I can focus on training for all the Running Away From Being 50 races I want to do, I'm also going to attack the piles of books I've purchased over the last few years but have yet to even alphabetize by author on my shelves. Because that's how I roll.

Anyway, in Flesh and Blood Cunningham crafts a richly complex family narrative that germinates literally from the imagination of an eight-year-old boy as he plays in his father's garden in pre-war Greece. That boy -- mightily named Constantine Stassos -- eventually emigrates to America, marries an Italian immigrant, and becomes the imperious and by degrees powerless patriarch of an expanding family dynasty whose story is told both as a beautifully messy, eminently human drama and as a faceted metaphor for the American Dream filtered through a prism of post-war immigration, the uncertain but dogged progress of cultural assimilation, and the inconstantly evolving boundaries of familial love and obligation. It's as engrossing as it is complex, and as beautiful as it is essentially American.

#WeirdStuffICollectOnMyPhone

I say I want some resolutions

I will turn 50 in April (that’s not the actual resolution — it’s just the preamble to the resolution) and to celebrate I will run every race within 100 miles that’s been on my bucket list — plus any other races I discover that sound fun — all summer, culminating in a back-to-back three-day Disney 5K/10K/half marathon in November.

I won’t let up until I get a small group of runner friends to come to Disney World with me.

Plus any of their partners or spouses who want to cheer us on between days of helping us hobble through the parks.

You’ve been warned.

I will stop thinking PB&J and Diet Coke are an acceptable dinner.

I will stop lying to myself about giving up PB&J and Diet Coke for dinner.

I will stop launching scorched-earth Twitter fights with cousin-curious Trump supporters to the point that I make myself angry every time I open my Twitter notifications and discover that they still don’t know how to lose and shut up and go away like normal morons.

I will figure out how to stop my iPhone’s autocorrect from capitalizing Random (see? do you SEE what it’s Doing?) words in the middle of sentences.

I will figure out how to use the universal remote I bought for our TV.

I will use these accomplishments as the final credits I need to finally get my engineering degree.

I will start (or finish) reading all the books I bought (or received as gifts) in 2017 (or 2016) (or before that).

I will get the hint and cut my losses the first time someone shows me we don’t have much of a friendship and it’s never going to go anywhere.

I will bury my tinkle-colored bedroom walls in a deep, rich, handsome, masculine, adult color that I have yet to determine.

I will nag and complain without shame or reservation until we replace our pinky-beige, mousy-blah, suburban-horror Formica countertops with something that doesn’t make me want to hide under the sink and slowly die of mousy-blah ennui hastened by poisoning from any store-brand Formica cleanser we have stored there.

I will continue to cull and integrate and sell and give away the two-bedroom-apartment contents of my storage unit at least to the point that I can downsize to a smaller (cheaper!) storage unit.

I will not use my newfound storage-unit savings to binge on shoes.

Although one man’s “bingeing” is another man’s “stocking up.”

I will stop wasting time winding up the vacuum cleaner cord.

I will work harder (notice that I’m not giving myself any form of schedules or deadlines here) to post more frequent #ArtThrob essays about my favorite works of art.

I will stop accepting Facebook friend requests from strangers just because they’re cute.

I will stop accepting Facebook friend requests from strangers just because they’re cute.

I will stop accepting Facebook friend requests from strangers just because they’re cute.

I will finally join a gym. And maybe post some gym selfies once in a while to prove I’m going there.

I will avoid the New Year’s Day Rose Parade. And all other parades. Just like always. Because parades are stupid.

A few years ago I made a resolution to say or at the very least email or text something nice to somebody — longtime friend or random Internet stranger — every day. The resolution has slowly evolved to also include just texting or emailing a random hello to someone I haven’t talked to in a while. I’m sure I’ve missed a few days here and there, but overall it’s become a happy little daily habit that’s kept me in touch or even reconnected with people from every corner of my almost 50-year (ACK! How did that happen?) life (except for a handful of guys I’ve had longtime crushes on because I’d die inside whether they did or didn’t respond — and, sadly, at almost 50 years old (did I mention I’m almost 50?) I’m still kinda scared of guys I have high-school crushes on). Crippling insecurities aside, I’m renewing my daily-compliment-hello contract for yet another year. And I encourage all of you to consider trying something similar. Because it’s WAY cheaper than flowers. Or therapy. Happy 2018! :-)

Suck it, business majors!

#WeirdRandomThingsIJustFoundUnderAHugePileOfOldPapersByMyComputer

You will LEARN YOUR GRAMMAR!

My mom grew up in an era where apparently grammar was a blood sport, brutal playground violence was passively dismissed as "having things done to us" teachable moments and multiple pronouns led inevitably to multiple concussions. Naturally, she became an English teacher.

Her childhood "Grammar Can Be Fun" death treatise eventually landed in my impressionable autodidactic orbit, where I couldn't tear my eyes away from dead cockroach-ogres named Ain't and racist caricatures of Chinamen named Ing and inkblotty little spider-people who were doomed page after page to suffer horrifyingly violent deaths at the hands of invisible sharp-shooting hitmen who beaned them into broken, disfigured blots of catastrophic medical trauma using blood-red balls the size of their heads, or what was eventually left of them.

The book filled my young, sponge-like mind simultaneously with nightmarish horror; a lack of inspiration to draw any better than an alcoholic third-grader; and a damn-the-infidels, take-no-prisoners zealotry for parallel verbs, drafty kerning and horribly racist gerunds.

But it made me the man I am today: a needless-punctuation-eschewing, shameless-vocabulary-flaunting, always-silently-judging, endlessly-trump-mocking lapsed grammar columnist and grammatically conscientious tweeter who obsessively re-edits Facebook posts and who can't bring himself to forward even the most brilliant of memes if they contain negligible punctuation errors.

Oh -- and I also write stuff for a living.

Big. Gay. Gayness.

So Mom's in surgery and for reasons known only to the drugs she insisted I hold on to her lipstick for her AND I brought a mending kit to sew a button onto some shorts -- which I rocked like a boss, for the record -- AND I'm reading a big colorful book about big gay musicals AND my Diet Coke says Veronica AND I have a still-kinda-wispy disco-fantasy mustache so OF COURSE the anesthesiologist is totally hot and all but recoiled around me and my big gay gayness when he talked to us.

But hey -- look at that perfectly placed button!