Man, I am really into non-profits

I had an odd moment today I thought I'd share quickly.

I was at work when a co-worker came up to me and asked if he could have a cookie. I gave him my WFT look and he said I had plates and plates of cookies in the passenger seat of my car.

Indeed. Right now I have two plates of cookies, 24 cookies on each plate, on the passenger seat in my car. Last night I went to pick up Jordan, my Little Brother through Big Brothers/Big Sisters, and we made cookies for Habitat for Humanities cookie walk in a couple weeks. I plan to drop off the cookies to Habitat after I give blood this noon hour at the Red Cross, after which, I will return to my job at a publicly funded museum.

God Damn I like non-profit agencies. I'm a non-profit geek, a NGO bitch, a fiend for 501 (c)3s. I enjoy the gooey embrace of those trying to actually doing good on this earth, and while I don't have the guts to do good myself, I'll give a big, sloppy kiss to those who do.

Weird, huh?

Feelgood Monday: I Believe in a Reasonable Rate of Return

When I was younger I took guitar lessons from a guy named Dave. He was the typical musician sort, with a tangle of black hair, a teaching style that mirrored his social skills and a fret board mastery that revealed exactly where his priorities were. I remember several lessons very distinctly, and one of the big bright memories involved me walking into class to find Dave cussing at a piece of paper in his hands. I mean really cursing.

As he was all too willing to share with me, his bank was charging him for a variety of infractions. Overdrafts and other costs were bleeding him and he didn't care who heard. Damn banks. F-chord them all the G minor.

I thought of Dave today when I fulfilled a goal I set for myself. I have grand ambitious of "getting my shit together" after I turned 30 in a variety of ways - stop eating junk food, build a skill set, organize my finances and other such nonsense.

Only I find myself doing them. I'm actually getting my shit together and acting like an adult. And today, after meeting with my financial planner (yeah! I have a financial planner) and choosing the best growth stock mutual fund for my retirement situation and setting up two 529 Education Savings Accounts for my kids, I walked out of a bank having accomplished something positive. It felt good. I wasn't going in to clear up a charge or make an emergency deposit. I was building something.

Part of me feels really good about educating myself about the financial world and then acting on it. I'm too late for some circles and not nearly late enough for others, but it felt good to me. It felt like the right time to do something like this. It was a good feeling, and hard to explain. What surprised me is I also didn't feel like I was losing anything, like a part of my freedom or childhood or whatever. It felt like it was time.

And I thought of Dave as I walked out. I wonder if he ever made friends with the bank. Probably not.

Of course I decided to invest in a borderline recession and have now entrusted my financial future to crooks and those who would step on the neck of an old lady for a profit. I don't really have an answer for that. Oh, yes I do...I'm a tool. But a grown up tool.

In God We Groan

We all get obnoxious little e-mails pushing us to "pass this on." I got one today, the text of which I've printed below.

Please help do this... refuse to accept these when they are handed back to you. I received one from the Post Office as change and I ask for a dollar bill instead..the lady just smiled and said way to go, so she had read this e-mail. Please help out...
Our world is in enough trouble without this too!!! U.S. Government to Release New Dollar Coins You guessed it " IN GOD WE TRUST " IS GONE !!! If ever there was a reason to boycott something, THIS IS IT!!!! DO NOT ACCEPT THE NEW DOLLAR COINS AS CHANGE Together we can force them out of circulation. Please send to all on your mail list!!!

Aside from being written with the syntax that suggests heavy use of mescalin, a quick trip to Snopes.com proves what any free thinking person can easily figure out - it's bullshit.

It's not the bullshit-y-ness of this e-mail that galls me, though. It's the fact that there are enough people who believe "God" on our currency somehow gives us magical powers to stop men with box cutters, who have God on their currency...it's just not our God. Even though no such thing as "our God" exists.

The general conceit that kills me is that God needs us to do anything for him. The way I see it, if God is all powerful, he doesn't need a million PR people on Earth making life painfully for some of his lowliest children by refusing to take change. He's a big God. He can take care of himself.

I think it would be fun to find this list of folks and give them a list of things they probably should be caring about, in their style.

US Serviceman Refuses to Say "God Bless You" after man he's waterboarding sneezes! Sign this PETITION and have him DISCHARGED! THIS IS IT!!!

or

Homeless Veteran holds sign that says "HAPPY HOLIDAYS." MEET with me at 7 a.m. on THRUSDAY so we can kick the POOPY out of him! How dare he not mention Christmas while begging for our bloated scraps. THIS IS IT!! JESUS NEEDS US!!

or

CHILD with no arms from Iraq is creeping us out on the news. WRITE CNN and tell them to get this kid off our TV. This is Christmas, the time when we're with family and can't be forced to watch armless children cry about how we made them armless. JOIN TOGETHER. PRAISE GOD! THIS IS IT!!!

I seriously don't get people sometimes.

Refrigerator Moment: Star Trek 2

Since Star Trek has been in the news lately as the re-boot starts shooting this month, I've been in a few discussions recently about the cult show. I have to say, the new Spock looks good with the ears, even if the whole cast is a little 90210 for my taste.

Anyways, Star Trek is home to one of my favorite "Refrigerator Moments." For the uninitiated, a "Refrigerator Moment," is after you've seen the movie, enjoyed it and gone to bed, you get up for a glass of water. While the refrigerator door is open you think to yourself "wait a minute, what was THAT about?"

Here's my favorite Star Trek refrigerator moment. At the end of Star Trek 2, Spock has died saving the Enterprise and they shoot him into space, on a photon torpedo, into the planet pumped up on Genesis, while Amazing Grace plays on the bagpipes in the background. It's a very effective scene with a infinitely mockable Shatner moment.

"He was the most...sniffle....Human."

Real men don't cry, even over a Vulcan.

Anyways, my moment came when I got up, opened the fridge and thought "wait...why are the playing a traditional Christian hymn on the Scottish bagpipes for a Vulcan funeral?" Surely the planet Vulcan has it's own customs, it's own songwriters. There must be a pointy eared Lee Greenwood on Vulcan, going on and on about how we may bleed blue but our ears stay sharp, or something like that. Was "Amazing Grace" for the crew's benefit? For Kirk's? If so, how selfish. They're not slowly rotting, ready to be fired into the great beyond on an instrument of Klingon destruction. Nimoy ate radiation like Shatner eats doughnuts for God's sake, give the Vulcan a Vulcan song and kick Scotty's ass if he goes near those bagpipes again.

I guess, at the end of the day it's for the audience. They couldn't just play something Jerry Goldsmith pulled out of his ass.

I wonder what else they could do, using their musical selection criteria. How about "Flight of the Valkeries" as Praxis explodes? Maybe the Doors "The Other Side" as the Enterprise traveled back through time?

Or maybe I should just shut the fridge and go to bed.

Rock Chalk Jayhawk, Solo

Last night, right before bed, the wife and I were casually watching the Kansas Jayhawks beat the Oklahoma State cowboys, paying as little attention as possible. That was, until we saw a sign held by a fan that I wished I remembered ver batim. Basically an Okie State supporter was holding a sign that suggested "our coach is thinking shut out, their coach is thinking Arbys."

That's pretty funny. Mark Mangino, Kansas' head coach, is upwards of 350 if I had to guess. Usually, I don't make fun of folks with weight issues - hell, I'm one of them - but a guy in athletics pushing Fat Bastard territory, that's funny. Also, he beat the hell out of my team, so yo' momma's fair game.

As we've been punchy all week due to lack of sleep, the wife and I both started making Jabba the Hut jokes simultaneously. Stuff like:

-"First and Tenuna, Solo"
-"I wonder if his offensive coordinator has huge ears, a beak and jumps when shocked by droids"
-"I bet Brent Musburger dresses up in a gold plated bikini after the game."
-"That's not a football, that's a Thermal Detonator!"
And, for good measure
-"And I thought they smelled bad on the outside!"

I know it's from Empire. Sue me.

Anyway, that's what last night looked like. I haven't laughed that hard in a while.

Patriotism Scares My Kid

Got the popcorn, got the tickets, got my 4-year-old literally skipping down the carpeted hallway and I'm ready to get to our seats and watch Jerry Seinfeld's "Bee Movie." I love going to the theater with my daughter who also loves the experience.

Our butts hardly hit the seats when the lights go down. "Hmm," I think. "It's a good 10 minutes early. I wonder what's up." Then I find out.

Apparently the theater company in my fair city has allowed a five-minute music video from the National Guard to be shown before all movies. While I'm all for allowing recruitment wherever they're allowed to market, movie theaters included, this struck me as odd. First, there's the fact that this commercial in the guise of a music video is 4 minutes long. In real time, that's a while, especially with a sleepy 4-year-old on your lap.

Secondly, the production itself was...odd. It starts with some generic rock band singing about citizen soldiers and then gives us an extremely redacted tour of US military history. You have guys with muskets shooting at red coats. You have the dirty grunt kissing his wedding ring before storming the beaches at Normandy (I'm pretty sure his corpse is shown later on in the piece). Then you have generic, highly trained soliders kicking in a door, their automatic weaponry gleaming. The whole thing is on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJRthpxDM10

So what's my beef? Here are a few questions my daughter asked during the commercial.

-Why does that guy have a gun? Is he going to shoot that guy?
-Is that guy sad?
-Why is he screaming?
And my favorite
-Are those good guys or bad guys?

Then, during an intense scene, she buried her head as if scared. It probably had something to do with the scenes of combat we endured while waiting for the GOD DAMN KIDS MOVIE to start.

"Saw 4?" "American Gangster?" Any other R rated fare? That's fine. Show the piece. I've long since given up on the movies as any sort of "experience" anymore with the exception of midnight screenings and going to movies with friends. But spare me the mildly intense jingoistic but certainly bombastic propagada while I'm waiting for my light-as-whipped-topping entertainment for my child to enjoy. Any chance?

For the record, I didn't care for Bee Movie, but I really liked watching my daughter watch it.

Baby Round Up

Take a look at that. If you had told me a mere 10 years ago that this was a possibility I'd have chuckled like a loon. "Are you kidding?" I'd say. "I'm shiftless, I don't have any money...I go to movies all the time. I like the girl in that picture, but we're just having a good time right now and...kids? I really doubt it."

Look at that. It's hard to find the adjectives to describe how amazing that is, but it's not lost on my just how amazing it is.

Tessa Danielle Bockoven, born at 2:02 p.m. Saturday, November 3 was born at half time of the Nebraska Cornhuskers worst defensive performance in nearly six decades. She was a product of planning, as much as a child can be a product of planning. Emotionally, a strange thing happened to me as my second child gestated.

With Emaline, my first daughter, I had ample time to be very gooey and melodramatic about her appearance. I'd speculate about how I was preparing for fatherhood, how I had a philosophy about my role in her life. I went on and on ad naseum, I'm sure. Then she was thrust into the world in a pile of biological goo and I began the hardest month of my life. She hardly slept, so we hardly slept. She messed her diaper, we got on the job training in changing them. We devoted more time to her and other parts of our life withered on the vine.

With Tessa, it's already different. We're confident in our ability to keep the child alive, which is something. She's an addition instead of a paradigm shift. Yes, we're not sleeping and rediscovering our time management and diaper changing skills, but life isn't so different, it's just...more. More family, more begging for your attention, more to consider.

I'll take it. I'll cherish it. She's amazing and my wife is amazing for pushing her out with minimal pain management. It's amazing she's here and it's amazing I'm here with her.