So I’ll get to the reasoning of the title in a minute. But first I must say "howdy-do" and "hola", and explain my absence.

The short explanation is "I’m getting married." The long explanation is "I’m getting married, wrangling my kids through their last quarter of school, making arrangements for the wedding, changing jobs, looking for a house, and generally not having much free time." It continues to be a good busy, and should calm down in about a month. One of the happier times of my life really.

So about the title for this post. Last night was daughter #2’s last band concert of the year. Or ever. She’s wanted to quit band for while because she much prefers choir, but I told her she had to stick it out for the year since I paid actual money for that clarinet. But I digress. It was the last concert of the year, and the closing number was "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious". I think I spelled that right. The song started up, and as my brain is wont to do, a thought immediately came. I leaned over to my other kids and said:

"Super cows and fragile pigs explode and are delicious"

And then I had a couple kids sitting on the floor, falling over in hysterical laughter. Fortunately we were sitting just behind the timpani, so nobody could hear us.

After the concert, in the parking lot, I shared the rest of what had come to mind.

Super cows and fragile pigs explode and are delicious.
If you cook them well enough they’re even good with fishes.
Don’t help in the kitchen and you’ll wind up doing dishes.
Super cows and fragile pigs explode and are delicious.

I talked with my bride-to-be later on in the evening and shared it with her. How great is it to find someone who not only thinks it’s funny, but that it’s cool my brain throws these things out?

Fortunately my long absence hasn’t been due to a deep-space screw-up by Dr. Smith. Of course I don’t have a robot sidekick to hang out with either, and goodness knows there isn’t a tech geek that wouldn’t love to have one of those.

So it probably goes without saying that I’ve been busy. Busy busy busy. But it’s been a good busy, and I’ve been having very positive things happen in my life. Let me recap what has been the best thing to happen to me in a while…

In Columbus we have this great thing called Skybus. If you’ve never heard of it, it’s a discount airline that sells seats for as little as $10 each way. My mom and I had scored some of those really cheap seats to go visit my brother while he was doing an internship at Microsoft last year, and so when a new block of seats went on sale last September I determined that I would grab a cheap seat for a trip to Los Angeles. In January. Yep, I booked five months in advance for a trip out west just because it was exceedingly cheap.

So fast-forward to January and I nearly cancelled my trip because I didn’t have any real plans for anything to do out there, and since the ticket had been so cheap it didn’t really matter. But something just wouldn’t let me do it. A little something in me kept saying I should take the trip, and a family that used to live in our area found out I was headed their direction and invited me to stay with them. Free room and board, so I was set.

Meanwhile, around Christmas I had joined eHarmony. It was like a switch flipped in me and I was ready to journey into the world of experimental non-singleness again. Sure, I’d dipped my toe in the water a couple times over the past few years, but with only mixed success. I liked eHarmony though, and how it handled matches and so forth. Very much more a service, rather than feeling like I was hanging out in an online bar trying to attract people with pithy comments.

So yeah, I met someone on there. Several someones actually, but one of them in particular I was being a bit more chatty with. She lived in Las Vegas, but I really wasn’t minding because retty much everyone I was matching with was in and around the Utah area. Limiting yourself to “only Latter-Day Saints” seems to do that. Then a couple days before heading out to L.A. on my little excursion I got a lesson in west coast geography and learned that L.A. and Vegas really aren’t all that far apart. So I dropped a quick note about how I was flying out there in two days and if she was interested it might be fun to get together somewhere.

Get together we did, and had a nice time, if not slightly overwhelming. The other Mormon’s in the room will be the one’s to appreciate this, but because of a previously scheduled ward outing, I wound up being invited to join in a trip up to the Vegas temple. To do sealings. For a first date. Everyone assumed we were married, which was only slightly awkward (a lot) but we both had a good sense of humor about it. Then we had dinner with her one sister and brother-in-law that also live in Vegas, whose house I then crashed at for the night. In the morning her brother-in-law invited me to help with an Elder’s quorum move, so I went. Why not? It was just all kind of surreal, so I was just going with it.

And the weird thing was that, though it all caught me a bit off guard, I like it. Most guys in that situation would have found a door as quick as they could, never looked back, and never called again. And while I did eventually excuse myself back to L.A. later that day and got my head around what an over-the-top first date it all was, I was by no means wanting to pretend it never happened and close that chapter.

We’ve talked since then. A lot. Every day or two, for hours at a time. She’s visited out here since then. My kids love her, and so does my family. I’m headed out there in a couple weeks to meet more of hers. Probably in shifts since she’s one of sixteen kids, which is nearly impossible for me to fathom. The thought of one person having that many kids makes my uterus scream in anguish, and I’m a guy. Guys don’t have a uterus after all, and yet somehow I have one in phantom form that’s just screaming at the top of its lungs. Go figure. But from what I’ve gotten to know of her family so far it obvioulsy has worked very well for them.

So I seem to be on a good path here. Someone I really get that really gets me, shares the same values, probably has more experience raising kids than me given that she’s number five of the Family von Trapp, and isn’t a closeted lesbian. Like I said, we’ve been talking a lot, which accounts for me not being around here much. Hard to type up an entry when you’re on the phone until midnight since the other person is three hours behind.

All in all I’m feeling pretty good with things. There are some other things brewing too, but I can cover those later. No midnight calls tonight, but I do need to get some catching-up sleep from the others I’ve had recently.

This post could also be titled "Being For The Benefit Of Mrs. B", but then it wouldn’t be a KISS reference as much as a Beatle’s reference. And the KISS reference is important here.

My mom is something of a saint to me. Since my ex (insert double entendre here) over three years ago, my mom has been coming to stay a couple days every week to help with my kids while I’m at work. It’s not a small thing since she lives a bit over an hour away. She wathces the youngest who will start school next year, she helps with homework, and more than anything else…she spends time on the phone.

She’s a township trustee, and a good one. It’s something of a thankless job, having to deal with local weasels and whiners for little pay. And it consumes a lot of phone time. She’s also pretty conservative in her tastes. It’s really getting her out of her shell to have her watch some lame reality television with us. But hey, family bonding time is family bonding time.

So imagine my surprise when I came home from running some errands the other evening with one of my daughters and found my mom, plastic guitar slung over her shoulders, playing Guitar Hero III. Specifically ‘Rock And Roll All Nite’ by KISS.

Her defense was "I’ve never played before and wanted to try it." I didn’t really care what her reason was. I just thought it was great she was playing.

So I grabbed the other guitar and we spent the next hour or so playing a few songs I’m sure she didn’t know or recognize the lyrics for. This is the woman who used to go around singing lines from Sublime’s ‘Santaria’ because she thought it was catchy after all. She never seemed to get to those bits where they sung about poppin’ a cap in the guy hitting on the girl. So I got some fun out of pointing out "Remember all those crazy posters we had in the basement when I was a kid? That was Iron Maiden, and this is one of their songs." Yes, I had my mom playing the bass line on ‘Number of the Beast’.

And then her phone rang in the middle of a song. And just that fast the band was broken up. She was on the phone talking about issues with the local fire department and our audience booed us off the stage.

But for a while, we were rockin’. And after all these years, my mom showed she had a bit of cool in her.

My brother “gave” me my Christmas present this evening. Not a present really, other than that of time, but that’s good too.

He had told me on Christmas day that he wanted to watch something in particular with me. Something that we, as brothers, could bond over.

What he didn’t realize, and I couldn’t have forseen, was that he gifted me with my warm-down lap I was complaining about the other day.

“How so?” you might ask. Simple. He had located the Star Wars Holiday Special, in its unholy entirety, online. This show is a thing of myth. Legendary in its fecal prowess. The kind of thing that prisoners in Guantanamo are subjected to when waterboarding doesn’t prove to be successful.

In short, it’s a painful piece of dreck that George Lucas wishes had never been produced. And with good reason.

Feel free to watch the first few minutes (or the whole thing if you’re a masochist), and keep in mind that the breakneck pacing in the first 10 minutes is kept up throughout the whole of the show.

For those of you also requiring a holiday warm-down lap, enjoy!

A couple weeks away from the blog again. It’s been the end run for Hallowchristmagiving, and it’s been busy. Work parties, making cheesecake to take to said parties, buying gifts, etc. etc. etc. All the good and great stuff we all love to do, but that really winds up meaning I don’t have much time in the evenings to sit and put thoughts up for public consumption.

And then, suddenly — abruptly even — it is all over.

I didn’t want it to be all over. I wasn’t ready for it to be over. I was enjoying it too much. I had a great time with my kids and my extended family. I kept to a good budget but still wound up being super-dad in the gifting department. I enjoyed everything about the season this year, the entire way through. And I wasn’t lonely, even when I was alone. This was my third Christmas as a single person, and it felt "normal".

So I was caught off guard when it ended so cleanly and surgically. I was at my parent’s with the kids, and stayed through the day after Christmas. Then I left the kids there to visit while I came back home to finish out the work week, and as I was pulling out of the driveway I turned on the radio to listen to Christmas music. And it wasn’t there. It wasn’t anywhere. Every station had stopped playing any music relating to the holiday season, and was back to a rotation that would have been considered lame thirty years ago.

The music has to stop at some point, I know. But consider when it started. I began driving my oldest daughter nuts a few days before Thanksgiving by listening to Christmas music. I loved it. Sure I’ve mocked the commercialism of the fourth-quarter retail money-grab for the past couple months. But I love all the rest of how this time of year makes me feel. The build-up was great! The subtle infiltration of holiday cheer and spirit into the nooks and crannies of my day-to-day life felt fantastic, and the big day itself was thoroughly enjoyable.

So being dropped like a rock is a bit of a stunner for me this year. And it doesn’t really help that nobody…and I mean nobody…in any stake or congregation in this area seems to have any plans for a New Year’s get together of any type. That’s when the official end of the season is supposed to be as far as I’m concerned, and instead it’s been cut off at the knees. Though I can admit to having some moderately high standards for New Year’s, as my all-time favorite was going to Time’s Square and meandering around Manhattan.

Sidebar: For some perspective on just how fun New Year’s in Manhattan is to do, consider this. I did that with my ex before we were divorced, but after she had started living the gay life and leaving me panicked and wondering why things were in such shambles. So it was so good that, even when life sucked and I felt like absolute hell, I still had a good time. Everyone should go do it sometime, and I fully intend to do it again someday, though preferably as part of the all-evening party in Bubba Gump’s Shrimp.

So I don’t feel like I’ve been allowed my cool-down lap after Christmas. Somebody flipped a switch somewhere and palpably turned everything off, and I’m just not reconciled with it yet.

As General Waverly in "White Christmas" would say, "Don’t just leave me standing here. How do I get off this stage?"

I keep saying I’m going to do this more than once a week, and yet here it is a week later. Again. Good thing I’m not trying to generate any ad revenue. Google would probably have me owing them money if I were. Not that they aren’t already selling my soul online one small piece at a time.

Side thought: If Google if mining me for information, should I feel guilty enough to talk to my bishop? I should probably just feel guilty for seeing innuendo in things like that. (heh)

Anywho…speaking of innuendo, this post’s title is loaded with it. I’ve had it in mind for a while now as I’ve held back this story for a bit. So the story goes something like this:

My oldest (the Model) has a cell phone on my dime. It makes it handy to get in touch with the kids since their mom doesn’t see fit to (a) have a home phone number and (b) ever answer her own cell phone when called. After a surprise bill one month thanks to the fine folks at "Joke-A-Day" though I disabled instant messaging and so forth on her phone. She knows not the vastness of her own power to inadvertently cost me $45 in a month without hardly trying.

At least, I thought I had completely disabled instant messaging on her phone. Perhaps I have. It’s kind of hard to say really. Because one evening she received a picture message from her mom, although because of the block she couldn’t see it. Instead she received a blurb telling her that she had one and needed to go to a web site from my carrier to view it.

When she received the notice I was on the main computer (yes, as in there are multiple) at home, so she asked if I could open the web site for her to see the message. I was happy to since I wanted a distraction from the side-project I was working on. So I type in the web address, punch in the code to access the message, and get…

A tight shot of a big-chested woman wearing a t-shirt that says "I (heart) You". And almost before I can realize it’s an animated image, and definitely before I can finish thinking "This won’t end well" off comes the shirt and a second of bouncing commences.

So there it is. My oldest daughter receives a booby-shot message from her mother. Her very overtly, "you need to love me no matter who I am", gay mother.

As fast as my fingers would move, I closed the web browser. But it was too late. It had been seen, and the damage was done. Reflexes, as those of us old enough to remember from WKRP, have their limits. And those limits can only be exceeded when alcohol is provided to Dr. Johnny Fever. I neither drink, nor am I Dr. Johnny Fever. So there it is.

Brakeback did tell me later that the message must have somehow sent by accident from her phone. It was definitely her message though, as a "friend" had sent it to her. My oldest immediately knew which friend that must be, who I shall simply refer to as "The Flake". That didn’t help her feel any better about it.

So the moral of the story is this: if you have friends that send you phone porn, make sure you keep your keypad locked so it doesn’t accidentally forward to your kids, or your boss, or someone else important that might form a negative opinion about you.

Or, better yet, just avoid phone porn altogether I guess.

I’ve been busy this week. Really…freaking…busy. Yes, with work. And not in a bad way. I’ve been coding up a demo for an executive board presentation and loving every minute of doing it.

Right right…I’m an experience designer and not a developer officially. Doesn’t mean I don’t still have the strong skills, and frankly I think a really good UI experience designer should know how to do this stuff. How can you tell someone what you want built if you don’t have some notion of doing it yourself?

Anyway, by Friday I was ready for the weekend. I wanted to unwind, hit up a couple of activities I planned to attend, and write something here (which I need to make the time to do a little more frequently in a week). Friday night was just about having dinner with a small group of others that have had to deal with a spouse going gay on them. I don’t go much because, frankly, people that go are usually pretty new and therefore feeling pretty raw, or have been coming for a while because they’re “still angry, after all these years”.

Wait, that’s not quite how Paul Simon puts it, is it?

I’m not a person who holds on to anger much at all really, so hanging out regularly with angry people just doesn’t work for me. I do want to be supportive, but I have my limits.

Saturday’s activity seemed to hold more promise though. The Single Adults on the southern side of the city (the better of the programs in our quad-stake area) were having an open house social, follwed by a trip to the local ward to view some nativity stuff. “Excellent!” I thought. Get out of the home, meet some new people, do a little socializing, and engage in some of the festiveness of third-trimester Hallowchristmagiving.

Parts one through three of that plan went reasonably well. Again, nobody in my demographic was in attendance, unless I was looking for a hot time involving a trip to the local Ponderosa followed by an evening of stories about someone’s cats. All nice people, certainly. Just not dating material. But it was still good to get out.

So then part four, checking out the nativity displays. At least I thought the information said “displays” in the plural. I’m still confused. Because this is the part where things went sideways for me, and at least figuratively Billy Graham took over at the local ward. Because what we were going to see was a live nativity performance.

This wasn’t your typical, Mormon roadshow style performance either. Someone in that ward obviously has some sort of theatrical background if not a job in the theatre. This was a performance done in scenes, with staging, sets, and props both inside and outside the building. Thirty to forty people in the ward were involved in the performance. It was a big deal.

But it left me feeling really, really awkward. A kind of “What the hell was that doing in a Mormon building?” kind of awkward.

We were effectively being led on a tour of Bethlehem around the birth of Jesus. So starting in the “Israelite marketplace” in the cultural hall was all well and good. Watching Joseph and Mary and their donkey (yes, a real, live donkey) walking outside to the inn was okay too.

But then we got the the shepherds in something of a culvert on the one side of the church property. With a live fire roaring. And a flag pole with a star on top and a stuffed angel perched on the top of a ladder. Live with me for a moment the thoughts that went through my head when the narrator told us about the angel appearing to the shepherds in the field:

Wait a damn minute, that angel isn’t stuffed! It’s a live person! And he’s got a stage mic booming over a speker system outside when the gun light hits him! What the hell?!

I was pretty flabbergasted and embarassed. Maybe I shouldn’t have been. I don’t know. But there were Elders there and this was a missionary activity, with non-members in attendance. This was like bringing an investigator to church for the first time on a Fast Sunday when someone gets up and starts going on about how the Spirit revealed to them which of the stars in the sky is Kolob.

True story from my mission, by the way.

The next stop was the manger scene, back inside the church (thank goodness, because my bald head was absolutely freezing by this time). The scene is surrounded by people that are supposed to be angels, representing different periods of time. So of course there are vikings, Musketeers, and a nun. A nun, inside a Mormon church.

None of it prepared me for the last scene though. The final scene was staged in the chapel, which had been prepped to be the ancient, Jewish temple. Including pillars and a Mennorah on the pulpit. The men playing the parts of the temple elders were going through the rituals of kissing the robes, wearing praryer boxes, and enacting the blessing of children.

I was stunned.

I get that it was all meant to be a semi-accurate depiction of the events as they really took place. I know that there was nothing that wasn’t scriptural on display. So maybe I’m just a bit out of touch, and stuff like this has been done in other congregations, but I just didn’t know what to make of this. At all. I was so overwhelmed by how out of sorts this all was with my world view that I didn’t feel the Spirit in it. And when the performance was over and everyone was heading for refreshments, I headed for the door and left.

I didn’t start life as a Mormon. My mom joined the church when I was seven years old. Up until then, if and when we went to church, we were Presbyterian. My friends growing up were of other denominations, mostly evangelicals. And this was the sort of thing I was used to seeing in their congregations. It felt really weird to see that in one of our own buildings.

One of these days though, I’m just sure I’ll come away from a Single Adult activity thinking what a great time it was and how it met all my hopes. Of course, by then, I’ll probably be sixty and being happy with the activity will make sense.

*sigh*

The third trimester of Hallowchristmagiving is almost over, and the tryptophan is wearing off. So what to do next? Dream of the Big Dance, of course. Do the shopping, trim the tree, fire up the oven (yes, I do my own baking…and I’m good at it), and dream of having a "special someone" with which to share a smooch under the mistletoe.

Add all that together, and this morning’s conversation with my youngest makes complete sense. Not that we haven’t had these conversations before, but when I’m wishing there were someone with whom I could share a couch, a blanket, some popcorn, and a movie it’s just a little more poignant.

(Oh, and bear in mind that my youngest, "Z", is all of five years old)

Z: When are you going to get married again?

M: I don’t know. I’m not even dating anyone. (My last date was back in March)

Z: I know.

M: Do you want me to get married again?

Z: Yeah. And when you get married again, then I’ll have a step-mom, right?

M: Yep. Are you wanting a step-mom?

Z: Uh-huh. And when I do, she’ll be happy to play "Break the Ice" with me, won’t she?

The answer, of course, was "absolutely". We then broke into our own round of games for a half-hour or so before church. The great things about playing the game with her are the interesting house rules and hammer techniques. Does the big block with the bear go in the middle of the field, or more toward one side? Do you carefully tap a block out, smash it with one stroke, or use the hammer in more unconventional ways?

Whatever style of play one might prefer, I think it’s a pretty good quality to look for. And not just because it’s my daughter’s favorite game. I like it too, after all.

Many, many days since last writing. Kanye went quiet after his mom’s unexpected death, so no new lyrics (though reportedly there will be a new batch for the impending second trimester celebration). Without that extra bump of energy, how can I be expected to keep up here when there’s been so much going on?

The biggest part of my free time has been taken up with Single Adults. Yes, I seem to have finally caught some kind of vision for the program. My vision is that what we have right now really does suck as bad as I’ve always said. But beyond that I also caught a vision for how it only sucks as long as I, and the other singles that could benefit from it, stay away.

Here’s a quick story. I am the SA rep in my ward pretty much for one reason: everybody else had already been asked and turned down the calling. Very "Night Court" really. So I’d be like Harry, except that I’m bald, which would be like Bull, but I’m not that tall and imposing. So at least I’m not Roz.

By the way, if you didn’t just get that whole reference then you’re probably too young for me. (Drattit)

So of course once you have a vision for something, you need to start acting on it. So I did. Lots of putting together mailers and e-mails. Lots of organizing contact information. And all culminating in helping put together a last-minute Thanksgiving dinner for any single adult in the area that wanted to come. We had about thirty people show up, so for something executed in five days we all felt pretty good about it.

The weekend continued to be good from there. Good college football (home team wins, beating the big-time rival), time with some friends, and some of my kids asking to go to church even while at their mom’s. Life has been good.

So why haven’t I been around here lately? I mean, besides being busy of course? Like all things, computer parts have a defect rate, and that rate caught up with me. Now, after paying for and installing a new motherboard things are better than ever.

So now both the first and second lives of Señor Monkey are right and good. Sweetness!

So Kanye called today. I asked where he’d been since we’re running behind on the Hallochristmagiving verses, especially having passed the first trimester mark a full week ago. He said he had gone out that night all costumed up, and wound up going through too many tricks and getting ill. I corrected him and said he meant "treats" of course. He said I was too white, and then made some comment about being rich now and personal doctors compared to free clinics. I didn’t understand it.

Anyway…I have this odd thing with my personal train of thought. It often winds up playing out like a game of Chutes & Ladders, though usually not involving dice. I’ll start out with one thought, which then reminds me of something and jumps me to another thought, etc. I consider it more of a blessing than a curse since it’s often a source of creativity, but it can lead to the odd moment of me looking faraway at awkard times. Jim Davis of Garfield fame did a sketch of me once in that state during a project meeting. Priceless stuff.

So today I’m driving home from work and I wind up behind a car with a bumper sticker that says "Darwin Loves You". Next to that is the requisite Darwin Fish of course. And then my mental game of Chutes & Ladders kicked in and lept me to this thought: Ever notice how the Darwin Fish people are usually part of the tree-hugging crowd?

"Why sure," I thought back to myself (because talking to yourself doesn’t mean you’re crazy unless you wind up in an argument).

Then my next thought was this: Isn’t that ironic, given that Darwinism and evolution are all about survival of the fittest?

"Whoa. Yeah, that is ironic. Pretty hysterical actually."

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not advocating going out and polluting randomly, or killing anything that crosses your path. But if you’re strict about survival of the fittest then we’re at the top of the chain baby, and nothing should stand in our way. It’s all about who’s the strongest, and having the strongest exercise supremacy over everything else until something stronger comes along and begins to shift the balance of power.

Instead, the Darwin Fish crowd typically advocates the exact opposite. Don’t kill any cute and cuddly critters they say. We should respect and revere them, and put their needs above ours. Now I don’t think you’d see a pack of wolves saying, "Sure our pack is stronger than that deer, but we should put it’s need above ours. Let’s go steal nuts from a squirrel instead. Oh, whoops! Can’t be doing that either, now can we?"

So do the Darwin Fish types really believe in survivial of the fittest or not? I feel one of the great things about the gospel is that it doesn’t box me in to an either / or scenario. I’ve long held the position that science and religion, when we have a perfect understanding of it all, will meet up completely. No loose ends. So I’m free to accept those things that the Spirit touches me as being true even in areas of science.

Yeah, that’s right Darwin Fish types. Religion sets you free rather than tying you down.  Crazy, huh?