Around 5am on March 29, 2008, I became an uncle to Trevor Adam Harris, Jr. Below are pictures.

That’s my brother up there. Five years between us, and light years beyond that, but let me tell you, I’m proud of him for sticking this out. Life has not treated him well, and he could have taken many other paths than he has, but he’s doing pretty damn good.

Now, while I’m not really a first time uncle, as I have two nieces from my mother’s best friend, and two nephews from friends of my own, this is my first true biological nephew. I can’t wait to meet him.

Maturity comes in spurts. Where merely two months ago, going to see my old fraternity chapter would have been an event where I nearly demanded that attention be paid to me, today, I found I didn’t want to get in the way of things. I haven’t been around the chapter for working on a year, and while I miss them terribly, I find that my place is no longer with them. My place may not be with the fraternity anymore at all. It’s just interesting to sit with people who, not that long ago, were way pleased to have you around, and find that today, that’s not the case. Closure, in a way.

I’ve had the same problems with friends. Someone I’ve spent many long hours with usually gets on my nerves in large chunks. I can really enjoy her company, but she has her moods, and I don’t always work well with people’s moods. Actually, I never really tolerate people’s moods. But we were fairly close, and got to a point where things she would say just made me angry. I should have done something about it sooner than I did, but I didn’t.

So, now she’s half way to Antarctica, and everyone raves about how much they miss her, but really I don’t all that much. I suppose I shouldn’t feel so bad about it, but I sorta still wish things had been better. I talk to her online, and the conversation is very short and polite…we really didn’t click all that well: a missionary hopeful and a gay heretic..not the best combination.

Bah, what can you do?

People are how they are, and we are all just star-stuff colliding together in random patterns to make beautiful webs of nothing significant when its all said and done. The most frivolous and wonderful of beauty, and the core of our worlds.

The cousin of mine that goes to Oral Roberts University informs me today that she doesn’t get the Discovery Channel, Animal Planet, or the History Channel in her dorm. She doesn’t like this, and plans on requesting the change.

Now, here is the Wikipedia entry on Oral Roberts, founder and namesake of the university. Given how important visions and apparitions have been in the man’s life, it would seem that most of his activities and going-ons can be chalked up to misguided ideas and vulgar religiosity. Accusations aside, I think it is not any surprise that they don’t get “educational” television on campus. I wonder if they get PBS?

It is fucking spring break! That is all.

Dear Wisco and Sharp:

How did you ever do this?
Wait, wait, wait, let me back up.
I watched you teach for a multitude of hours. The both of you, that is. I watched you look down on 6th graders as though they were lesser beings, not even worth the phylum that was just forming in their little musician/tree brains. I watched you spill out knowledge and advice with the same patience and authority that a nun bears in a ruler, and the sagging eyelids and tight lips were no betrayers of your insistence that things be one particular one.

And the children loved you. I have never seen young people so exuberant around people who treated you such as you both did. Standing in the back of the room, I wondered what could everyone be possibly so excited about when they mentioned you as teachers? It wasn’t that you weren’t correct with your information, or that you were wrong to insist such things, but they way you insisted upon them was…rude, in my eyes in the back of the room. I thought I saw kids almost come apart in front of you, and you wouldn’t even let them. It wasn’t just “no,” it was an almost patronizing and barely sarcastic “no.” You both were firm. You were walls of brick and music and knowledge and you made me hungry.

I’m standing now before my own band, seventh and eighth graders, and wondering how you do it. A former professor of mine tells me I should insist on things more, and I panic, and I think of you. It is scary to call parents because I am worried that they might snap at me like the few before. It doesn’t help that my principal has be ferociously terrified of what the parents think of me because now, when I child misbehaves, I have my words with him or her, and leave it at that. How can I go on like this? More importantly, how can I get to the level of confidence that you possess?

A simple answer: do this longer and do it more. Something tells me that you have worked through hard times yourselves and have found what works, and have insisted upon it. Perhaps I am just too shy about what I want. Perhaps I just don’t know what I want. Often I have approached this question, and often I end up thinking that I know what I want, but not how to get it.

Word comes to me to recently that one of you is leaving the school. I will apply and hope I can fill your shoes, but more importantly, I hope you leave a little residue for me to cover myself in, and maybe I’ll learn something from it.

P.S.- I hate my job. Help me, Obi-wan.

Recently, over at International Detective Dragons from Outer Space, Anim5 posted an interview over Skype with one Mr. George Hrab, musician, podcaster, and all around funny sonuvabitch. Now, I’d heard of this guy before from Skepticality where he sang a song about a fish that swims up your penis and eats you alive. Or at least I think that was him.

Anyway, while I’ve allowed Everquest to completely devour my life, I’ve been listening to this guy, and he is genuinely very hilarious. He’s making rethink things, which is sorta pissing me off, cause for once I’d like to find a set of beliefs and practices that I could stick with for more than a month at a time, but otherwise, very nice, very cool. Plus, he occasionally geeks out on the music thing on his podcast, and I get all juicy when that happens. I love music shop-talk. Totally.

So, off to CD Baby I go to purchase an album. And I do. It costs me $12.50 after shipping. This is the cheapest album I’ve ever purchased, and its probably not full of shitty pop music that I can’t relate to. Very much worth the money, I hope. And in the email from CD Baby, I get this charming little message.

Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with
sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.

A team of 50 employees inspected your CD and polished it to make sure
it was in the best possible condition before mailing.

Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over
the crowd as he put your CD into the finest gold-lined box that money
can buy.

We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party
marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of
Portland waved “Bon Voyage!” to your package, on its way to you, in
our private CD Baby jet on this day, Sunday, March 16th.

I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did.
Your picture is on our wall as “Customer of the Year.” We’re all
exhausted but can’t wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Sigh…

Granted, this message is not from George Hrab, but from CD baby, but it’s just nice to know that someone cares about my purchases enough to relish it the comforts that I, too, bestow on all my things. The number of glass cases I have around here is astounding.

So, good music, good podcast, good thoughts. Oh, Geo, you sir. You. Go you.

Home at last! Sweet god or gods almighty, I’m home at last! Here, to sit in the quasi-light of my office/second bedroom, on my own laptop, in jeans and not pajama bottoms. That’s right, I have managed to get a pair of pants on that has neither drawstrings nor elastic. Blessed denim!

When I was on my way out of the emergency room on Monday last week, I called friends and had them move my car from the hospital back to my slightly better neighborhood so that I didn’t have to worry about what would happen to my car while I was away. I trusted my friends, I trusted they could remember where I lived.

I came back today to find: no car. Needless to say, I panicked every so slightly. To my luck, there is an apartment complex very near mine that is built almost exactly the same. That was where it was parked. Nothing like a small heart attack to welcome you home.

My mother and I went back to the clinic on Thursday afternoon to get a check-up. I was feeling fine fine fine, and the doctor said I was in pretty good condition, but that she wanted to take some x-rays anyway. She did, and it went fine. There I was, sitting half naked in the x-ray room, singing songs to myself because, despite illness and missing work, I have been so far from the stress of my day to day life, I couldn’t help but sing.

The x-rays showed abnormal gas trails in my abdomen, so she wanted me to get further testing done at the ER. We went after lunch, waited five-and-a-half hours, and finally managed to get in to see a doctor. We waited some more, waited and waited, and finally the surgeon came in to see me. Told me he needed to get his boss’s opinion. The answer came back, “cut it out.”

I was scared, naturally. I have never broken a bone other than my pinkie toe, and never had any medical complications that didn’t last more than a couple days, nor any surgeries. Antibiotics, an explanation of the procedure, a trip to the operating room. Since I wasn’t wearing my glasses, I has a vision that the surgeons were superheroes, there to help me. The anesthetist was kind, to the point, assured me I was safe. The lady to helped move me to the table had kind, bright eyes. The lady across the way waved at me very warmly. The operating nurse was funny and smiled at me a lot. I did my best to keep my temperment up, and cracked jokes all night.

The next thing I remember, I’m sitting in another, darker room, in pain, but not for long because I kept falling asleep. I’ve been working on getting up and down, taking myself to the bathroom, eating solid food again, cleaning the incision sites, bathing. It isn’t easy, but I feel accomplished that I can do all this by myself. When I first woke up, I was having to have people pull me up or out of the bed, my mother spoon-fed me, held the straw to my mouth. I didn’t move, I barely let my eyes open.

Now, here I am, sitting on my grandfather’s couch again, looking at another week off of work, and trying to heal the best I can. I’ve been told apple juice is the best thing to help me pass the gas from the inflation part of my surgery. I’m dabbing “monkey blood” antiseptic on myself in the mirror. I’m trying to get up and move around.

I wanted to make a joke at one point that I was just this much less a man than I was before, but I think its more accurate to make jokes about kicking out noisy neighbors.

A diet of only clear liquids has been a taste of…well, Sisyphus knows what I’m getting at here. Everything yesterday was about food. Everyone was eating or talking about it, and the only interesting thing on TV is the Food Network. I hold that it is always the only interesting thing on TV, but what do I know? So essentially, I laid on the couch, drank apple juice and ginger ale to my little heart’s content, and wished like hell I could have something solid to munch on.

Now, since I’m a lover of food and not quite so disciplined when it comes to my health, I am officially off the clear liquid diet today. Yes, I still hurt a bit, and yes I should probably still be sucking ice cubes, but I’ve always thought a fast recovery induced more in a return to normalcy than continuity of treatment. Good thing I’m not a doctor or a nutritionist, or my middle name would be “malpractice.”

So what’s on tonights palette? Steak.

I’m currently at my grandparents’ house. It is Tuesday.

Yesterday was Monday, as usual, and I decided after trying with much effort and strain that the pain in my side and in my back was far too much for me to handle. With it clear in my mind that I’d been unable to stand up and talk to the class for more than a minute at length and doing so much as answering a question was a severely taxing demand, I took myself to the emergency room.

The horrors of such trips were not prevalent. I sat in the waiting room about fifteen minutes, was quickly handed a small plastic cup and then attended to. Blood pressure good, pulse good, a bit of a temperature. On a scale of one to ten, the pain was a seven.

I was dressed in the fashionable attire of most hospitals: a gown that flattered by backside. I waited, they took blood, the offered me a blanket because it was cold. The doctor came in, punched my kidneys, punched the bottoms of my feet, and hmmed his way back to a desk somewhere. Before I know it, there is a wheelchair sitting before me.

The X-ray. The ultrasound to make sure I didn’t have testicular inconsistencies. The long wait on a flat bed the raised the pain to level of tears. They gave me a warm blanket afterward, and I was grateful. They couldn’t give me water, but a nurse gave me gum. She’s a nice lady, I think.

A CT scan, and back to sit in the waiting room. My mother is one her way, she sends a friend ahead of her. We chat. It is a nice diversion. She’s that friend my mother was always able to go to with any problem, and she would listen listen listen, and you always could feel better after talking to her. It remained true.

Mom arrives, and I’ve got twinges in the back of my head the turn me into a child again. I’m thinking of all the times women have told me that men are babies when they are sick. This is true, because I wanted nothing more than to crawl into my mother’s lap and sleep. The look in her eyes told me she would love to let me.

An IV full of drugs, and an antiboitic to prep me for surgery. The doctor says its early appendicitis. They are discussing things with the surgeon. My mother won’t let me stay her, so they unplug me, still doped, and we go back to her house, so I can sleep. With drugs, the two hour trip is uneventful and relaxed. The sleeping was short, but good.

And this morning, I’m sitting in a clinic with another health care professional and he’s telling me I likely don’t need surgery, and I should go home, rest, drink lots of liquids and see if this little infection will pass. I’ve had no surgeries up to this point, why start now?

I do feel better, but I still don’t feel well. I’m about to enjoy the first solid food in two days and its jello, and Giada De Laurentis is keeping me company on Food Network. Tomorrow will be Wednesday.