July 2008

I live in Southern California, have my whole life, so the word earthquake has been in my vocabulary only a slightly shorter time than the word milk.  

I don’t even remember learning the word, but I do remember being at preschool when I was three, and being told what to do in case an earthquake ever happened.  I remember crouching under the tiny desks and covering my ears with my elbows.

It’s a memory I haven’t thought about in years, but yesterday I had good reason to recall.  

As we’ve already discussed, we’re all connected, so I’m sure anyone reading this already knows that Southern California was struck by an earthquake yesterday.  At the time it happened, Daisy and I happened to be dancing with the children.  The music was loud, the toddlers were thumping their feet on the floor, and for a second, neither of us were completely sure that what we thought might be happening, actually was.  

Our eyes met and, without a single word exchanged (and only a single second elapsed since the first tremor), we both started clapping our hands and laughing.  

I said, “You know what would be fun?”  Miss Daisy said, “An earthquake drill!”  So I yelled, “Earthquake!” and all the children screamed, “Yay!” as each one ran to his or her appointed spot.  

Now I’m fairly certain that most of you don’t really care to hear about the happenings of a nursery school that’s hundreds, if not thousands of miles away.  

But I promise, I have a point.  

Our pre-school has earthquake drills every so often, not because we expect the worst, but because it would be negligent not to be ready.  And children are wonderful in the way that they’ll let you teach them just about anything, as long as you frame the lessons inside a game.  

Every time we have a drill, that’s all it is: a game.  One of us yells “Earthquake!” and the children all scamper to their spots.  

Even after it was over (the entire event, start to finish, lasted only seconds), the children had no idea that a real earthquake had just happened, and not one of them (except for Mia who is six and wise to our methods) even asked.  They just thought they’d had what may have been the best dancing session the world had ever known.  

So good, in fact, that it moved the house and prompted an earthquake drill.  

My point is this:

We can learn a lot from the way children learn and think.  We should render the necessary drills and practices of our own lives into an equivalent amount of fun.  Then, when life throws us an earthquake, we’ll be prepared, and smiling as we face it.  

Writer Dad  

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A few weeks back, we took our children on a small, Summer adventure.  The only requirement for our outing was that it needed to be something different than we’d done before.  After a couple of weeks of brainstorming, we’d whittled it down to two finalists: a day at Knott’s Berry Farm (our children had never been) or an afternoon on Catalina Island (twenty-six miles across the sea from where we live).  The cost for either adventure was the same.  

We went for the floating rock.

Here are five reasons that going to Catalina (or any similar adventure) might be better for your family than going to (just another) amusement park:

1) You’ll feel like you traveled: Catalina Island is, though nowhere near as exhausting, much like a day of travel.  We handed over our ticket, crossed a soggy dock, then stepped into a boat that, though it only cruised for a total of twenty-six miles, dropped us in another world, floating in the middle of the sea.  Even in small measure, that’s the definition of travel.  Spending time in traffic, fighting for decent parking, then rushing inside to hurry up and wait, sounds to me like just another day of living in Southern California.

2) No lines:  Regardless of what amusement park you throw your money at, you’re bound to spend much of your time (our most precious resource) shuffling from one line to the next…then waiting.  On Catalina, we spent our time doing things, and going places.  Even when we were doing nothing, we were looking across the sea at civilization that, from where we stood, could only be pondered. 

About the only thing you’re probably daydreaming while waiting in a sweaty line at an amusement park, is for it to move a little faster.

3) A much needed break from the norm:  It was rewarding to give our children some different, more enlightening things to see; sights unspoiled, rather than factory assembled.  Everywhere I crane my neck at an amusement park, my eyes fall on things recently rolled from an assembly line.  Providing our little ones with natural things to look on, and then discussing what they saw, was an invaluable learning experience (for all of us).  On Catalina, our children gazed on a landscape built by the indelible architect of nature, that framed houses and boardwalks constructed without masses of traffic in mind.

4) Quiet cleanliness:  I don’t know about you, but my everyday world doesn’t have nearly enough of either one.  Amusement parks are filled with big, metal behemoths, and screaming, tantrumy children, kicking and crying until they get their way.  The prevailing sound on Catalina was the endless rolling of the ocean’s constant whisper.  One day there, away from the cacophony of the city, and I felt like I’d been away for a week.

5) A higher grade of memories:  Why do we take our camera with us whenever we go on vacation (or outside the house, for some)?  Because we want the memories, or at least instantly accessible representations, as though the pictures are proof of how much fun we had.  Choosing an outdoor adventure will help to build better memories.  By ushering our children out of their usual, and probably tired, environment, and plugging them into something wholly unfamiliar, we give them more to think about, more to question, and something more specific to recall later, rather than allowing one childhood experience to simply bleed into the next.

It doesn’t matter what your adventure is, just think about it.  

Don’t do what you think you’re supposed to do, or get caught in the trap of doing what you’ve always done before.  Take an adventure with purpose, and ask yourselves ahead of time; would you rather have this:

OR THIS:

Writer Dad

My first week of regular posts was a terrific experience, and an absolute success.  My sincere thanks to everyone that contributed in any way. The communication was a lot of fun, and I’m truly excited to see where this takes us.  I’m sure this adventure will have no shortage of surprises, but today I’d like to talk about my biggest so far.  

Last Monday was the first time that I’d made any effort to get Writer Dad under the eyes of anyone other than Daisy.  But good communication doesn’t exist in isolation, so it was time to clear my throat and step to the podium.  

Now, I imagine that to do this blogging thing well, you have to be at least the teeniest bit geeky.  

Check, no problem there.  

Throughout the week, I spent a few moments here and there, studying my feedburner numbers; more out of curiosity than anything.  I’m still trying to figure out how all this works, and I know I won’t improve if I don’t absorb as much as I can.  So, I started looking through the stats.  On Monday and Tuesday, I saw pretty much exactly what I expected to see - a bunch of random looking hits from across the United States.  By Wednesday, Canada was saying, “Eh.”  By Thursday, the United Kingdom was saying, “Cheers.”  

By Friday, I was looking at feeds from The United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom; as well as Australia, Russia, and (I kid you not) Uraguay.  

Wow.  

I don’t want to kick a dead horse in his teeth, but the internet is a pretty amazing place.  In fact, it runs right past amazing while he’s off staring into space, then rockets around the world in an instant, so he can sneak up behind amazing and slap him on the back of his head.  And, saying that, I don’t think most of us even realize how primitive it still really is.  

Not since Guttenberg introduced movable type has there been such a quantum leap in communication.  

Now, anyone can have a voice.  Someday, probably, everyone will.  When Andy Warhol said that in the future we’d all have our fifteen minutes, he couldn’t have had any idea how right he’d turn out to be.  

With so many views screaming for attention, one might argue that the odds of having a single voice make the impact of Martin Luther with his 95 Theses, or Thomas Paine with Common Sense are slim.  

I strongly disagree.  

History works in cycles.  Always has.  

Truth finds its voice, and then power starts to shift.  Right now, power is shifting.  If someone has something new to say, relevant to moving us all forward, and they articulate it with enough truth and clarity, people will listen.  

Art and ideas have never been exchanged so efficiently.  We’ve never held so much potential.

Our world is at the brink of another Renaissance, but it’s only ours if we demand it.

Writer Dad

Yesterday, Vered from Momgrind made a comment that got me thinking.  Of course, that’s not hard.  The wind whistling past my ear will detour my thoughts, as long as I think it might be saying something different than it did the day before.  

But if something’s bouncing about my brain without much intention of leaving, than I have to believe that there’s something there worth considering, and Vered’s comment was rattling around for a while.

She mentioned that it’s pretty natural to scan articles while reading online.  

She couldn’t be more right.  

When I first started doing a lot of online reading, I allowed my eyes to float over every set of syllables.  Now, I swallow them as quickly as I can, as if they were the last hot waffles coming from a kitchen that’s closing in five minutes. 

I can’t imagine reading a book this way. 

Can you? 

Really? 

For me, it’s day and night.  A book isn’t something to race through, it’s a first date; slow and thoughtful and considerate.  The internet is like coming home and decompressing at the end of the day, after you’ve been married for twenty years:

Just the facts, Ma’am, just the facts. 

When I crack a spine, I want to be lost in a story, but when I lift the lid of my laptop, I want INFORMATION, and I digest it like a hungry alligator, chewing without swallowing, bouncing from one website to the next, in some insane race with myself to see how much I can consume, and how quickly I can do it.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not condemning the behavior.  I love to learn this way, and a large part of why I go online thirty-seven thousand times each day is so that I can go to sleep slightly smarter than I was when I woke up, but I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t sometimes get a chill wondering about the information overload my children will be facing in another ten years.

Look how much the internet’s evolved in just a few short years.  This September, a good percentage of kids going off to college have no memory of life before the ubiquity of the internet.  What’s it going to be like for the pre-school set now?

My hopes are sky high.

For now, I choose to believe that some major sea change is right around the corner.  Our educational institutions are going to have to wake up and realize that they’re teaching in a way that was out of date back when I was sitting behind the desk making up funny limericks about my teacher.  

The internet’s still in diapers, and together, we share the task of raising it.  But as we shape that alternate landscape, so we shape ourselves.  My children see me on the computer a lot, but I make sure that at least once a day, they also see me with an old fashioned book in my hands and a quiet smile on my face.  

The internet is amazing, but we must never forget what got us here.

Writer Dad

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Even when I’m old and wrinkled, lying in bed wanting to do nothing but eat candy and complain about everything, I’ll still consider one of the biggest surprises of my life as the one that happened nearly one year ago:

The shocking discovery that I was writing a book.

Writing a novel wasn’t in my schedule.  In fact, a year ago, I barely wrote down my shopping list.  Last year, with little reason and less warning, I started to write.  The first thing I tapped out was a short story about…well that doesn’t matter.  It was terrible; a real embarrassment to the tongue.  It was about fifty pages long; maybe ten were good.  Of the ten that were good, about three were great.  

Two of those were amazing.  

I remember thinking that, though the story was hideous on every conceivable level, there was some fuse tangled up in the filthy little mess that I wanted to spark. 

So I did. 

I lit it and let it burn for three and a half months, all the way until it detonated in the last week of December.  My short story had grown into a five-hundred page behemoth.  Wow, I thought.  Now what am I going to do with all this?

Back in October, when I first realized that the first short story that I’d ever written was slowly morphing into the first novel I was ever going to write, it was the oddest epiphany, and one I’ll never forget. 

I never planned on becoming a writer, but then there it was in front of me like a color you can’t argue with.  

I took a break in January and wrote a handful of children’s stories, reading them to the children during daylight and to Daisy by the stars.  They were fast, fun, and the total opposite of what I’d been doing.

In February, I picked up the novel and cleaned up the language.  I tend to be wordy.  It’s probably my biggest weakness as a writer, other than having a tendency for truly terrible analogies (I mean terrible, like - I should probably just wipe my hard drive now before I die and someone discovers them and then also dies, but from laughing at my idiocy - terrible).  I added a couple of terrific elements to the draft while trimming it by a neat hundred pages.  I finished the second draft on the last day of March and expected to begin the third on the first day of May.

It’s July and I’m just getting started. 

Instead of starting to rewrite as soon as the April fell from the calendar, I did something I hadn’t yet done.  

I read my book. 

Reading and writing are not the same exercise.  I needed to read my document - straight through, without stopping every two minutes to tinker.

Did I like what I read? 

Sure, some of it.  Some of it I hated, and some of it I thought was immature in an almost staggering way. 

Some of it, though, I thought was fantastic.  

Since I wrote the book on accident, I’d never given thought to an outline, so I’ve spent the last couple of months taking notes and gathering ideas.  I started writing a couple of weeks ago and it feels amazing.  

There’s an old Greek fable about a ship that sails off to War.  The ship is gone for so long that by the time it returns, every sail and board have been replaced.  Is the ship that returns to Greece the same ship that left?  If it has the same frame, designed by the same engineer, and is sailed by the same captain, then I would have to say that it is indeed the same ship.  

The second draft added to the story.  The third cleaned it up.  This one tears it apart sentence by sentence, then strings them back together. 

I can’t wait to see what it looks like when it’s all finished.

Writer Dad

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The internet is overflowing with superlatives for the Dark Knight, and there’s probably not a single word to disagree with.  Movies are a lot like video games; they used to be a fixture of our rituals, and now not so much.  We tend to our Netflix queue, but the movies we actually buy a ticket for are few and far between.  

But there was no way we were going to miss Batman putting a pounding on the joker.  

Since we were already carving out time for the movie, we figured we’d see it in style.  We bought our tickets online a full week early, so we could make sure that the shows in IMAX wouldn’t be sold out.  Now, if you don’t mind taking a squeegee to your eyeballs, and collecting splintered pieces from your shattered eardrums off the sticky theater floor on your way out, then IMAX is definitely the way to see this movie.  The screen is six stories high, and the Dark Knight isn’t one of those movies converted to IMAX, merely to double the noise and ticket price.  There are moments when Batman is standing at the edge of skyscraper and the 70MM camera pans around him with what I believe is the full intention to give the viewer motion sickness.  I don’t get motion sickness often; in fact I’d say almost never.  But I kinda felt it after this one.  

Daisy, who spent a year exploring Asia, said that it was kind of like being packed (standing room only) in a tiny relic of a boat, outrunning a storm on the outskirts of the Philippines, but far more exciting.  She spent the weekend in recovery.

What made the Dark Knight so special for me, was that I spent two and a half hours in front of the kind of Batman movie that I didn’t think would ever have a chance of getting made.  I’ve loved Batman since he had to share my Saturday mornings with the Smurfs.  As I grew older, I cast aside the version of Batman that was, I thought, campy and silly, and embraced the mythologies shrouded in shadow.  

I always preferred the Batman as the boogeyman of the bad guys; the dark creature that inhabited the scariest ghost stories passed in a frightened whisper from one criminal to another.  I liked seeing Bruce Wayne use his powerful position and mind, even more than I loved the gadgets and gizmos.  

Christopher Nolan’s first try with Batman was good, but his second is a classic.  

Every single note played in perfect tune with the very best of the character’s nearly seventy year history, and yet it was also absolutely believable.  The Dark Knight required no more suspension of disbelief than most other movies, and less than any other super hero film ever put to celluloid.  

When Christopher Nolan was announced as the director of the Batman reboot a few years back, I was giddy that the guy who directed Memento (a twisted story of insane obsession, beautifully told with a broken narrative) was getting a shot at the darkest of super heroes.  With the Dark Knight, Nolan fulfilled his promise; even if he left Daisy a crumpled mass, lying on the floor.

Writer Dad

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Whenever Daisy and I reflect on life before children, there are two subjects we can never exhaust: time and money.  It seems we were sick with both.  Unless you’re lucky enough to be one of the fortunate few, once you have children, it seems like someone comes into your house while your sleeping, hits you over the head, and robs you of everything you were stashing under your mattress.  

And that goes for both assets.

Back when we were only two, we often combined our excess time and money into the unforgiving time waster of video games.  Saying that we stayed up late, playing until our eyes bled is only an exaggeration because such a thing isn’t possible.  The lack of blood wasn’t due to a lack of trying.

Daisy married into my obsession.  Before me, it was only Pac-Man, Centipede, and the occasional game of Galaga that rocked her world.  That all changed on September 9, 1999.  

Yeah, I remember the date.  

Sega released the Dreamcast on 9/9/99.  I wanted one, badly, but I couldn’t take off work to waste my time in line.  Daisy surprised me by wasting hers.  When I got home, I had a brand new system and three games waiting.  We popped in Soul Caliber and never went to sleep.  

One of my passions was now one of Daisy’s addictions.

Games became part of our ritual, and we would often talk about that day, far in the future, when we would be playing games with our own children.  I’ve never been one of the camp who believes that games are rot on the minds of the young.  I’m from the school who thinks that everything must be age appropriate, and in the proper measure.  I wouldn’t allow my child to play video games for two hours straight any more than I’d allow them to play Grand Theft Auto (well, maybe when they’re thirty).  But video games, at their best, are wonderful tools for teaching problem solving, hand eye coordination, and spacial relationships.

Life happened, and Mia was born.  We moved, and the game systems were packed away for a long hibernation.  

We have game nights on Mondays and Saturdays.  Last night, Daisy suggested that we blow the dust off the Dreamcast and see if it would still light the screen.  

It did.

We spent thirty wonderful minutes watching our old childlike expressions, newly expressed through our offspring’s eyes.  We watched Max tentatively hold the controller while making careful decisions about what to do next (his job was to make his character drill through the Earth without running out of air), and we could see Mia feel the excitement as she raced her car around a track at a hundred and fifty miles an hour without any possible danger to herself.

It was beautiful - a reminder of who we once were, who we are now, and how close we hope to always stay.  I’m glad my children can make me feel like a child and a father all at once.

Writer Dad

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Alright.  I’ve caught up on all the little things, and now I’m ready to jump. 

From this day forward, I commit to posting, at least once a day, Monday through Friday.  Weekends are for reading, gathering my thoughts, and cuddling those closest to me.

I’ve read the books, made my tweaks, and now I’m ready to make this place the best that it can be. 

I’d like to thank Darren Rowse for his book ProBlogger.  I’d also like to thank Chris Pearson for the outstanding theme Thesis, which you are now looking at, and Chris Brogan for the suggestion. 

Lastly, and most importantly, I’d like to thank Leo Babauta at Zen Habits.  I’ve been reading his blog for almost a year, and he, more than anyone other than my own wife, has succeeded in quietly convincing me daily, to finally become the writer that I guess I was born to be. 

If Daisy convinced me that I could get it out from my head and on to the page, Leo convinced me that I could post it online.  

So, if you’re a dad, join me.  If you’re a writer waiting to get published, join me.  If you’re an established writer bursting with advice, then please lay it down.

 I’m listening.

I’m excited to see where this adventure takes me, my family, and all the people I’m lucky enough to meet along the way.

Cheers,

Writer Dad

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Two years ago, when Daisy and I were first looking for a school for Mia, our main criteria was finding an environment where she wouldn’t be bored.  Fortunately, we found a fantastic public school in our city that had a Dual Immersion program where ninety percent of a Kindergartner’s day is taught in Spanish. 

Surely, that would keep her eyes open.

There aren’t a lot of schools like this, at least in our district.  There was quite the waiting list, and though we collectively wore the armor of optimism, Daisy and I were silently worried that our alternative education wasn’t going to happen.  

Fortune prevailed and Mia was accepted.  Her school year is over, and now we can reflect.  

The school year was so much more than we ever imagined.  Mia grew beyond our expectations, and learned a mass of lessons that we could not have taught her.  

Daisy and I each wrote letters to Mia’s primary teacher, as well as her principal.  In addition, I wrote this little verse for the two of them.  I thought I’d share.

Names have been changed to protect the innocent:

Dear Maestras,

I knew we were lucky, though I had no idea, what a year would be like with Señora Mochila.  As the curtains draw closed on my first year as a dad, with a child at Lincoln, I’m a little bit sad. My children grow older (it seems faster than me) and one day their changes will get harder to see, but the changes this year I can not even count, because they arrived every day in a countless amount.

We’ve watched our girl grow from inquisitive and ready, to just over six, now skillful and steady.  Before, she could not roll the “R” in burrito.  Now she orders in Spanish when we’re at El Torito.  We’ve lost nine pages from the calendar since her first day in dress.  May I have a moment Maestras, so that I may confess?

Daisy and I harbored no second choice.  It was Lincoln we desired to give our girl voice.  We waited and lingered with anticipation for a letter of acceptance to provide us elation.  We received our letter in the post, but the program was filled and a small part of my spirit was a little bit killed.  But it doesn’t come close to stinging my pride to tell you straight up, I actually cried.  

I called on the phone and asked, “What can I do?”  Sra. Reina said, “Be patient Señor; just see it through.”  So I listened to her, swallowed my tears, and allowed encouraging words to flood through my ears. 

Two weeks passed, then on Good Friday it was, we unfolded another letter and read with a buzz.

We stayed unerring, sound in our choice, and now we could finally begin to rejoice.  Not only for Mia, but for our Maxwell as well.  We were so happy, we started to yell.  A wonderful institution had become in our reach where our children would learn things that we could not teach.

The next four months fell like leaves in the Fall, taking Mia that first day we’ll always recall.  Señora was perfect.  She had command of the room, like a pregnant mamí has command of her womb.  We knew without doubt, as we knit hands with our boy, that our next nine months would be brimming with joy.

And they were, mis maestras, es todo verdad.  Nunca en su escuela es una facade.  Mia’s learned how to read and then how to write in a new tongue by doing assignments each night.  She’s learned how to sing with such beautiful grace, I can easily picture my gone grandmother’s face.  She knew how to learn, but now she digests, and she does it all with such flawless finesse.

Lincoln’s a school that’s surpassed expectation by providing a solid, substantial foundation, and that is the bedrock of great education - a group of teachers who offer such deep dedication.  Please believe me when I say: this is no aberration.  You have earned our family’s sincere admiration.  It would be a benefit to the whole of our nation, if such practice were applied to the next generation.

We wanted for our child to be challenged, not bored; a wish which was granted, instead of ignored.  Thank you kindly for all that you do.  Daisy and I are so grateful for you.  From nuestras corazones, quiseramos to say.  Gracias por todo hacen every day.

Writer Dad