Ready, Set, Prom

The Up-do made a reality
Originally uploaded by CyberJazzDaddy.

Yes, it's true. She's off being a princess for a night. She's been so looking forward to this for months. Reminding me of the "days till" countdown every day for the past six weeks. And now it's here.

I love living in the Internet age. I took photos before she left, and then put them on my computer and sent them to a photo processor, bought prints and frames, set them up in her room and took one to her grandparents as a surprise, uploaded them to flickr and blogged one----all before they would have even finished dinner!

What a world.

Twitter Nation

You may have noticed a new blue badge in my side bar.

That's my Twitter badge.

Twitter is the latest Internet 2.0 craze. First there was Blogger, then Flickr, then Podcasting, then MySpace, then YouTube. . .and now it's Twitter. As you can see with all the 'er' endings on Internet services, the Internet is becoming a verb. I like that. It's not like T.V. in which you are passive and just let it wash over you. You are active. You are social. The Internet just removes those nasty inconveniences like time and space.

Twitter gives you the ability to put a little one sentence post out there, and follow other people's one sentence posts. On the net, by email, on your phone. Whatever. Most people just give a little note about what they are doing at that particular moment. Consequently, some have labeled this victim assisted automated cyber-stalking.

Others, more hospitable to the service have described it as really slow chat. It must be fairly addictive though, because it's only a few months old, but already it's been blocked at work---and they only do that with sites whose company wide visits throw up a productivity impact red flag. Very Interesting.

I like to think of it as micro-posting. I'm using it to try and keep it from feeling like I've abandoned my little corner of the web when life gets busy. I may not have time for a complete post, but I can chuck a sentence up once or twice a day.

So if I seem kind of quiet over here, look for the Twitter badge. I'm probably tweeting at you from over there. :-)

It begins

It begins
Originally uploaded by CyberJazzDaddy.

A milestone for a young boy on his way to world domination. . .the day he realizes he's finally taller than his mother!

So, the other day I spent the entire night running from the mafia.

Or rather not running from them.

I had a dream that a high school friend of mine (who wasn't at the last reunion, oddly enough) came to the reunion and was sad to inform me that I had infracted upon some technicality in the mafia code, and so he regrettably was going to have to kill me execution style. But because he liked me, he gave me a month to get my affairs in order.

I was devastated to hear this, of course. And my wife was deeply distressed that I was just going to let it happen, without running or fighting or reporting it to someone to get help or something. I begged her to understand that it was coming for me, no matter what, and if I resisted in anyway, they would torture me to death rather than just executing me with a shot to the head.

I woke up with a start, gasping, sucking in the reality of the room even before I had consciously realized that it had all been just a dream. Relief flowed through me like a drug.

This may be my punishment for being a movie snob, I think (see last post).

My daughter goes to see the new Will Ferrel movie--I rent Munich and watch it at work during my lunch hour on a portable DVD player over several days. Then I criticize. It's as if my subconscious was shaking it’s head at me for being so condescending as to feel like an ethnocentric father whose daughter was dating outside of our race.

Like it was saying, “Hmmm, I bet she’s not shivering in her sheets after having dreams about ICE SKATERS.”

I went and rented a copy of “Best of Saturday Night Live: Will Ferrell” on DVD. In an interview with Ferrell they played a clip from his satire of Bush’s Axis of Evil speech, and I remember accidentally catching that late one Saturday night and finding it kind of funny. So I thought, I just need to give it a chance. I popped in the DVD last night and. . . nothing. I was kind of chuckling because I wanted it to be funny, but really, it wasn't hitting me in the sweet spot. And this was the BEST STUFF, and still, it was totally missing the mark for me. No hope. (They didn't even have the Axis of Evil speech on there!)

I really didn't intend to be a cinema version of Jack Black in High Fidelity. But as you can see, somehow a variation of that happened (with even my metaphors being hip movie references).

But I should at least get some points for restraining myself and not grounding her for a week from all non-subtitled movies.

This morning, a change. She came into the bathroom and asked me if a Tusken Raider (from Star Wars) could be a Jedi. I don't know if she was just throwing me a bone or what, but I spent a few moments guiding her thoughts on the subject.

In any case, now things are feeling a little better.

What did I do wrong. . .

My daughter went to see "Blades of Glory" yesterday.

And she liked it.

How is that possible? MY daughter.

Then I had a fleeting hope that she was simply doing an April Fools on dear old daddy. Cheeky girl.

Alas, she still liked it this morning.

I feel I've failed as a parent. I should have never let her listen to N*Sync when she was little.

Can methadone treatments be far behind? It's a slippery slope, you know.