OK, then what happened?

In the mix of finger pointing about irresponsible bloggers and posts that only fed page views because of shock value, I've noticed that mainsteam media outlets have been just as guilty.

Case in point is a video clip from the front page of this morning's Chicago Tribune which takes you to the video of a woman falling in front of a train in Boston. The link simply says: "Raw video: Woman falls in front of oncoming train in Boston" and drops you off here without any background or follow up on the incident.

For any sort of in depth reporting, you'll need to surf to the Boston Globe web site, hunt around a bit and find a story about the train's conductor, who has been honored for stopping the train in time.

I have a problem with this setup. Primarily, with the mainstream media dismissing bloggers and smaller sites for not doing enough research or reporting and then turning around and doing something like this.

It's not OK to stamp a video as "Raw Video" and failing to provide any background whatsoever. When the link has more information (such as the location) than the video page, that's a major problem with the system.

I will be the first to admit that blogs as a whole are still rough around the edges and for a quick fix, many people will just click away to see a woman fall in front of a speeding train. Without any background, this is a little sketchy for my tastes as it's hard to defend posting something like that as newsworthy without any actual news attached.

When we hit a point that a major metropolitan newspaper is simply tossing out links without any background - and especially something as strangely compelling as this - it's time to consider where the web product went astray.

Especially in a city like Chicago, where the El plays such a major role in most people's daily lives, a video like this will certainly draw attention. However, without any sort of context it's a pretty blatant grab for eyeballs and does a lot of harm to any newspaper's only real commodity - the trust it has from its readers. When they start throwing up odd, macabre links like this without any deeper meaning, it gets hard and harder to justify that trust.

(Image from Boston.com)

Less is gore

Wired put together a list of 10 Creepy Video games for Halloween and while I don't think I have played many of them, I did see a kickass new trailer for Bioshock 2.

I'm not going to lie - while playing through the first one, I hit a point in the game where, late at night, something jumped out at me and I shrieked like a little kid. I may have peed on the couch a little, I can't really remember at this point.

It looks like the new one is going to be much worse for our furniture:



So between this game and Fallout 3, there's a cool new trend that's much different than what I grew up with in my games - the use of downtime to build suspense.

Someone pointed out in a Fallout review that the game made them sad. Set in the greater DC area after a nuclear war, they recognized the landmarks and subway tunnels they saw daily, but devoid of people and felt down after playing. It wasn't about the gore (trust me, there's plenty) that made people take note, it was about the wait.

In both cases, you have games that are fairly violent on their surface, but make use of minutes between killing things to really mess with you.

I really dig that about these games, especially as someone who grew up in an age where Mortal Kombat pissed everyone off because you could rip out a character's spine if you pressed the correct sequence of 27 buttons at the right time.

I find it interesting that while game designers have infinitely more computing horsepower at their fingertips, at least some of them have decided to use that memory and graphical output to tell better stories (Bioshock) and lay out ambitious storylines (Fallout 3).

While a certain degree of this is certainly a result of more sophisticated gamers and designers, there was a time not so long ago where the thought of dialing back the gore factor and expanding the scope of the game would have been strange. Whoever made that decision the first time is a freaking genius.

Things I will not miss about the city

1.) Cubs traffic - there are hundreds of roads other than Lake Shore Drive, so why do you have to add 20 minutes to my commute?

2.) Street parking - Especially if you own a larger vehicle. One of the plusses to our old neighborhood was plenty of street parking, unless it was a Friday or Saturday night.

3.) Rush hour on the El - Once a month, I'd melt down after being packed into a noisy metal box and wonder why I didn't move someplace nicer.

4.) Crappy little restaurants - While the burbs are trashed for their chain-friendly attitudes when it comes to dining, the city's dark side contains awful little restaurants that are only kept in business by adventurous diners hoping to find a diamond in the rough. Many times it's just an awful restaurant that no one goes to more than once.

5.) The smell of urine on the bus.

6.) Random traffic at any hour of the day or night - When you hit a jam at 11:30 p.m. on a Sunday for no real reason, it can be a bit much.

7.) Bike theft.

8.) The assumption that because you live in the city, you've heard of cool, edgy restaurants (work only) - No, I haven't eaten at the Hawaiian/French Canadian/Peruvian fusion restaurant. I eat burgers at the corner bar, just like you would if you lived here.

9.) Richard M. Daley - There was a saying that as long as the trash got picked up and the streets got cleared, he'd be mayor for life. The streets stopped being cleared last winter.

10.) The rats - Man, do I hate the rats.

The trouble with Randy (How I learned to stop worrying and love the short sale)

The months of waiting are over and my wife and I closed on our first home this afternoon. None of this (big picture wise) is possible without my wife, who thoroughly rehabbed my credit score (that's another story), spearheaded a house hunt while caring for a newborn and quarterbacked the network of agents, mortgage brokers and lawyers from start to finish.

The story ends well, with us in a new home and with plenty of reasons to buy new and dangerous tools. This is all any red-blooded American boy wants. It's the middle that makes things more interesting than any of us wanted it to be.

While my son is too little to remember any of this, I smile when I think about buying the home where he'll take his first steps, hunt for Easter Eggs and probably learn to ride his first bike (hopefully because he wants to be just like his dad.)

Not that it matters much, as the only concrete memories that I have of my parents' first true home is that the sweet older couple that was moving out gave us a cake shaped like a lamb. My folks remember meetings, home viewings and endless worry (and hope) - I remember cake. It's all about perspective, I guess.

First, a little background - our real estate agent warned us gently that people only did short sales once. The waiting and headaches are worth it if you're looking for a break on a house when you're first getting started, but no one really wants to repeat the process. On the other side of this divide, we can say that, no, we will not be volunteering for this again in the future.

(Short sales are those in which the seller is about to go under on payments and approach the bank with a proposition - they will try to get the best offer possible for the house, if the bank agrees to take less than the full amount that is owed. In short, no one on the seller's side is happy with the situation. This is generally the step before the bank forecloses on the property.)

In our case, we found a pre-approved short sale (same rules, but the bank has a magic number in mind that they will agree to if a buyer offers it), offered said magic number and waited. We did that "waiting" step for a while. Then, we sent e-mails to move things along and waited a bit more. Purgatory doesn't have a more apt twin on the mortal plane than a short sale.

In the midst of all this, we had our seller, Randy, who most definitely did not want to leave, but had little choice in the matter. In speaking with his parents, the legal owners of the home, we found out that they had taken over the house in name only and that they were totally shocked at the condition of the house as a whole. When you are apologizing for the actions of your grown son, it probably makes for a downer of a day, just saying.

Coming into the home stretch last week, we had a sneaking suspicion that today would not be easy. For one, every rock we overturned seemed to reveal a new, unpaid bill. From utilities to taxes to homeowners association dues, something was unpaid. We were hell bent on not paying a dime on this, but had very little wiggle room, as the house was sold "as is" with the bank being able to shrug and tell us to take it or leave it. As a buyer, this is a very interesting position to be in. It also makes you very nervous and more attentive to every line item on a contract. Our lawyer loved this - instead of sitting with eyes glazed over, we tore into the contracts and came loaded for bear. In the end, the seller's legal team ended up eating a few bills they'd missed.

We quietly did victory dances in our minds.

After closing this afternoon - and learning all sorts of gossip from pretty much every party on the seller's side, my wife and I were faced with a decision about whether or not to call in the authorities and halt the move or extend a few more hours to let the seller finally leave.

Seeing as they had already tried to leave with the washer and dryer, had refused to fix a gas leak we noticed and reported since our first viewing in July and smashed into the top of the framing on the garage (someone forgot to close the tailgate on their SUV before backing in), we were really in no mood to do them any favors. Additionally, as the house was sold "as is," anything in it at the time of close was technically ours.

With a son in the picture, we were more inclined to take the high road and give them a few extra hours to finish moving out. The high road sucks, campers.

Suffice to say the highlights of the afternoon included the Randy telling me with a straight face that there were no keys to the house (none whatsover), throwing a shoulder at me as I stripped the door hardware to install new deadbolts and referring to me as "rude" for having the stones to use my own bathroom after he tried to body block me from entering my on home so he could eat.

Other highlights include:

* No garage door opener turned over. It either spontaneously combusted, fell in the trash or was eaten by a half dead goldfish. The simple fix for this was to unplug the garage door before we left.

* Noticing that the rear patio door had been left unlocked and unbarred after I had shut it down earlier in the evening. Shady business.

* We now own a Pop-a-shot machine (score) with no basketballs (no score), a copier (full-sized office grade), a stash of temporary tattoos (no idea), a collection of zoning maps for every town in Illinois (?), various paperwork for his business (including bank statements and credit card mailings and a giant vase that sits atop the entryway, like an offering to Ikea, the goddess of questionable decorating decisions.

* Instead of moving full bags of trash to the garage or curb, they were thrown in the space where the washer and dryer were just hours before. Additional overflow seating for trash was moved to the guest bathtub. I failed to check if the plate of nachos, dog bed and coffee cups still reside under the sink in there. I can update any interested parties tomorrow.

* If you think the trash would go in the trash bins, you'd be wrong. This is because you don't have a Randy at your house, packing full trash cans onto a trailer. As this wasn't in our contract, we couldn't do anything about it.

At the end of the day, my brother-in-law, Jeff, and I saw everyone out and I was quietly pleased that this was done without incident. There was at least a 50/50 chance of the situation escalating over something as stupid as taking the washer/dryer, further damaged to a mildly mule kicked home or my losing my cool after having my wife, father and mother-in-law treated as interlopers in my own home.

On recapping the evening, my wife and I couldn't be happier. We have a wonderful home to raise our son in, closer to family and friends and with a big enough floor plan to grow. While the Randy's of the world have their days, we're confident that we'll be telling the story of our family in the years to come with only a slight flourish of the craziness of the day.

With that in mind, I really doubt we'll be getting that lamb cake.

(Image from: YourRealEstatePrinting.com)

I am a person like me

On the night my son was born as I waited anxiously for the nurses on duty to finish running a multitude of lines, I wandered about in the halls of the University of Chicago's Comer Children's Hospital's Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU).

Over the course of eight hours, I had gone from the mind-numbing boredom that comes from managing a tour company in Chicago in February to a new father, worried about his son who had to be delivered three months early. After crossing the threshold into the third trimester on a Sunday, my wife needed an emergency delivery on Tuesday to give both her and the baby any chance of making it through the night.

To see that sentence hashed out so bluntly is still quite a shock. It seems better suited to a subplot on an ER rerun than to my life and the disconnect is still nearly as wide as it was on that night this February. Months after the fact - and with the added security of a healthy baby boy and a wife who rebounded spectacularly in a matter of days - my wife and I would have a few discussions about what happened that day and how neither of us chose to focus on the danger she was in, only on the months that our son would be forced to fight in the hospital. We agreed that neither of us would ever fully understand just how bad things could have been and that we were each OK with that possibility.

That night, though, I was antsy and off-kilter and tasked with juggling two families who wanted to see their grandson or nephew and struggling to learn the rules of the NICU and what we needed to do in the meantime.

In the hallway, on the wall across from the elevators and just around the corner from the restroom was the huge quilt seen above. I immediately thought it looked like one of the kids from the Rugrats cartoons, only with a hospital band and a few more pieces of hardware. On some level, I thought it was cute and touching and was likely put up to make little folks feel more comfortable about their stay at a childrens' hospital.

It wasn't until weeks later that I made the connection that the only difference between that baby and my own was that my baby usually looked a lot less cheerful and had thousands more dollars of equipment in his pictures. There and then I was taken by a sudden and unmistakable feeling that I was not simply passing through this floor on my way to another floor - this was our life.

My son is coming up on six months old - less than that for those familiar with terms like "adjusted age" - and shows no signs of anything out of the ordinary for a baby of his "ages." Recently, I poked around the pictures taken since February and even I am amazed at just how far he has come.

In between, my stance on health care and the hospital experience has changed in some regards and been steeled in others as I came across families in the NICU and throughout the hospital who were just like us - in a place they didn't expect to be and trying to make the best of it.

I'll save the long-winded, impassioned plea for health care/insurance reform for later when I have more time and energy, but given the occasion of my son's six-month birthday, I was really struck by just how much things have changed in six months.

More than that, things changed without my being fully aware of it. When I hear the back and forth on reform, I'm amazed at how much of the debate is based on the premise that if you don't smoke, don't drink, are generally good health and have some form of insurance, you become bulletproof. You're not. My wife falls under all of those headings and we still had reason to worry for months on end.

The bottom line is that no matter how bulletproof you think you are, there's always that chance that you'll become a different person overnight.

Being a better main character

Years ago, I was assigned a writing exercise that was designed to give the writer focus in an attempt to better approach daily life. We were tasked with writing our own obituaries, not to make us better writers, but to make us pause for a bit and try to outline an arc of our next 50 years.

I've done this a few times since then - less lately, because my wife found a copy once when we were dating and it totally creeped her out - and depending on when I write it, the end products are wildly different from each other.

Like I said before, I now see the reasoning behind such exercises, but my frame of reference keeps shifting and the results move accordingly.

A few weeks ago, I flew back to Minneapolis for funeral services for a friend of mine who had passed away. Maggie was my mentor at the training school, where she taught me pretty much everything I now know about dogs. She is gone far too soon, but has again given me reason to pause and reconsider and try to figure out where that elusive perfect arc should travel.

A few hours in airports and on planes left me with ample time to think and as I am prone to do in these types of situations, I am amazed at how different the experience of another's passing is for everyone (and I mean everyone) involved.

There's a great sequence in both the novel and movie versions of High Fidelity where each character is progressively less interested in the passing of Laura's father. I notice that a lot more than I have in the past. Much of every individual's life is spent as the star of their own television show, with everything impacting them and not enough thought devoted to how the same events are playing out in everyone else's little shows.

While I was very much in the moment and focused on trying to reason with the loss of a friend, I also had the white noise of a flight to catch that evening, timelines for returning the rental car and phone calls to return from work while I was away. It may have been a funeral episode in my life, but the overall story of the Matt Show needed to keep moving forward, too.

I consciously try to focus on the departed as intently as I can, but always end up as everyone does - deeply engrossed in my own show. Not that any of this is bad or wrong, it's just something I become acutely aware of whenever there's a big event like a birth, wedding or death.

What really grabbed my attention at the memorial service was the frame of reference that was applied, depending on the circumstances where Maggie met different people throughout her life.

Those who knew her as a mother thought she was an amazing mother. Those who met her at the training school knew her as one of the best trainers. Those who worked with her raising money to fight domestic abuse saw her as one of the best fundraisers and bosses.

In short, I don't expect Maggie was much different than you or I and that she was the star of the Maggie Show, but damn if she wasn't one of the best main characters I've ever met. While her day to day life was probably no more exceptional than anyone else's, she did it all with such grace and perspective and a wonderful sense of humor that the whole was worth much more than the sum of its parts.

In the past, I've filled out my obituary with dreams of opening my own newspaper (not a strong business plan these days), having a house full of children (working on it) or writing well past my golden years (still on the table).

Having seen Maggie's friends and family say goodbye, I have a new goal - to be the best and brightest star of the Matt Show. To be the best father for those who knew me as a father. To be the best writer to those who knew me as a writer. To be the best friend to those who knew me as a friend and to be the best boss to those who knew me as a boss.

It's a tall order, but one that's totally attainable. I've seen it happen before.

Life is rarely a neat little package

In college a few years back, I had the privilege of taking afew courses taught by an exceptional writer who was also very talented as a teacher (an odd combination, to say the least). One of the more lasting comments she'd written on a short story of mine boiled down to a suggestion that the reader didn't need everything tied up in a neat little bow.

Life is rarely black and white and I was trying too hard to draw connections that weren't there or make everything fit inside the confines of very rigid stylistic parameters. Obviously, this was a problem for a 20-something writer who thought they knew more about the intricate workings of a human life than they actually did.

Still, when there are chance occurrences that fall into line, it overjoys the part of my personality that craves order and straight lines. Sunday was one of those days.

On the surface, it was just another busy day in what has become normal life for my wife and me. The morning was a visit to the NICU to see my sister hold my son for the first time, followed by a dinner with both of our families in the afternoon. On the ride home, things took a different path when her folks called and asked us to come to the hospital, where her uncle had taken a turn for the worse and the family was gathering.

Looking back on a groggy Monday morning, I decided that if someone landed on Earth and wanted a quick course on the human experience, there would be worse days than Sunday to show them to get the broad strokes.

In the morning, I was there to see a newborn baby still meeting his immediate family, family members still awed by his arrival, the minor hustle and bustle, scheduling conflicts and adjustments and insignificant disagreements that were quickly forgotten by everyone.

That afternoon, both sides of the family and a few close family friends got together to laugh, eat and debate the relative merits of the new Chevy Camaro. Dinner was loud and warm and subject to moments of goofy fun, like throwing dinner rolls across an immacculately set table.

Our late evening was spent driving through the snow to go and see Uncle Mitch in what ended up being his final hours. The family sat together in a hospital waiting room and traded stories while we waited. In an odd juxtaposition, his immediate family congratulated us on the birth of our son before we could sputter out clumsy words to help them feel better on what was supposed to be a somber evening.

As I've learned, it's more often shades of gray than black and white.

Aside from the very linear storyline of the day, going from birth to death, the mix seemed eerily balanced. It was the sublime facets of a good life, like joy and love that were sandwiched in between mundane issues and broken wiper blades. I have no better handle on any of this than I did years ago when I knew it all. I've heard hundreds more songs that have offered fleeting, imperfect glimpses into how it all binds together, put more miles behind me literally and figureatively, met all sorts of different people, gotten married and had a child.

I only know this for sure - in order to enjoy the first two parts of the day, you need to also accept the third. The real trick seems to be sorting through all of the white noise that fills the space between. More than that, it's usually the day to day nuts and bolts that keep me from driving out to see my parents or from taking time to grab dinner with my sister and her husband. Work, school, picking up the dry cleaning and making sure there is food in the fridge are all important and obviously need to be addressed, but on days that play out as broadly as Sunday, it's a lot harder to take them seriously.

It's also a lot easier to see why it's all worth it.

(Image from FreeFoto.com)

Socialism and other dirty words

The reason for the sudden content drought here (aside from simple laziness) has been the birth of my son, who arrived a month ago today. While this event usually throws a wrench into the best laid plans, his birth has been particularly jarring as it was three months early.

Needless to say, it's been a hectic four weeks.

Through all of this, my wife and I (but mainly my wife) have received a crash course in premature babies, accepted leave policies and the paperwork associated with giving birth to a child in the United States. As a side benefit, quiet nights in the NICU give you time to think and by virtue of being there, we have a lot of time to ponder the health care system here.

I intend to work with this in the theoretical realm, so feel free to keep statistics comparing wait times to the United States, horror stories of health care in Europe and Canada and anecdotal evidence supplied by your neighbor to yourself for now. There's certainly a time and a place for that discussion, but this post is not designed to be that time or place. (Also, this was the premise of debate team competitions in high school, where Frankie was a member and I was not, so I fully anticipate an ass-kicking in the comments section, but that's OK. We'll still be buddies after that.)

More to the point, I got into a little Facebook back and forth with a conservative friend today, who bemoaned the wait at a local hospital and jokingly told everyone in his friend network to expect that to happen everywhere with a socialized system.

After a bit of friendly dissension, another friend jumped in, pointed out how much doctors paid for medical school and asked us to question Canadian cancer patients about their experience. That certainly rubbed me the wrong way.

I looked up numbers both supporting Canadian supremacy in the field of health care and others that showed slow response times, especially dependent on which province you were trying to receive care in. Through that process though, I still fail to see why this is a bad system in principle.

A few weeks ago, a similar situation arose (again on Facebook, as I am apparently unable to interact with other humans outside of the digital realm) where someone offhandedly commented on a friend's page that they didn't want to be paying for someone else to "not work" and receive health care.

You'd think with the economy in flux and white collar workers being laid off en masse that there'd be a little more sympathy these days.

The crux of that arguement falls short for me as well. Medical insurance is essentially a group of workers, banded together to cover the costs of that group. The understanding is that younger workers (men and women in their 20s) will get sick less, need primarily checkups and help defray the cost of older workers who are having babies and might have more serious ailments down the road.

This was illustrated by an employer of mine years ago that I was told pulled a few high risk employees into their own coverage to drop the overall price paid by the rest of the office. To oversimplify, risk assessment is done to keep the balance in an office or an overall pool that assures the insurance company that while a few people may need more care or more expensive care, the rest of the pool is pretty stable and so it's a fair bet that they will turn at least some profit.

So, while it's accepted that you will be paying your premiums to help Bob in accounting get the extra tests he needs with his high blood pressure without going bankrupt, it has somehow become unacceptable to do the same if another person doesn't work in your office or company.

Again, setting aside the numbers, what is so bad about that system? I understand that feeling of busting your hump to provide for your family and having that resource pool drained by others who won't return the favor because they refuse to work. I also understand that people who can't work or can't find work are under a tremendous amount of pressure to find health care coverage in case something happens.

My brother in law is one of those people because he was laid off. I suspect a new friend of ours at the hospital is as well because she is legally too young to work. I was once one of those people because it was too expensive to get insurance when I was working as a temp.

In what way is it better to have the uninsured cut adrift than to pool as a country and try to help some of these people? Shouldn't we expect more from ourselves than to simply play defense when it comes to our nest eggs and health care coverage for our immediate family? If we're paying indirectly for emergency care that have the costs passed along to us in the form of higher bills, shouldn't we at least pay that out in the open and be able to feel better about the whole process?

(As an aside, I wholeheartedly reject the premise that millions of Americans would quit their jobs, kick back and refuse to do a damn thing if offered free health care. It has been my experience that many of these hypothetical situations have more than a hint of racism surrounding them.)

Getting back to the original point, I was more put out by the subtext that "socialism" was the problem in the equation. I don't deny that any system is subject to red tape, abuse and shortcomings, but I rarely hear discussions about how to improve that system here in the United States.

It seems most discussions about universal health care begin and are bogged down in the early stages with disagreements of the relative virtues of things being state-run and the possibilities of governmental incompetence. (I am starting to call this the "DMV Defense.) I guess what I'm asking for is a little more intellectual room to run - to set aside the entire disagreement over the merits of socialism or the possibilities of a full government takeover and actually examine the nuts and bolts of the systems in the rest of the world, find ways to tweak those systems and see if it's a possible fit for the country.

What disappoints me is the rejection out of hand because it's "socialist" without giving any serious thought to the upside and downside of the possibilities of such a system. This bothers me more each day on the practical and theoretical sides as we edge closer to nationalized banks. If I were to walk down the street from my office tomorrow and ask people if they would prefer to be issued a magical health care card that would enable them to walk into any hospital or clinic in the nation for treatment when they didn't feel well or if they would prefer to keep the current insurance card in their wallets, I can't imagine I'd have many takers on the second offer.

We like to lean on our Chevy truck ad vision of what it means to be an American. We drive out in the middle of a thunderstorm to help mend a fence and rope missing cattle, we send blankets and prayers after a massive hurricane comes ashore in the South and we send buckets of money during concerts after 9/11. We like to see ourselves as generous people, always willing to help out as best we can when our neighbors have a problem.

For me, this begs the question - How big is your neighborhood? Does it go to the end of your street or does it extend to the borders of your zip code, city or state? At what point do you stop seeing neighbors and start seeing individuals who are other people's problems?

(Cartoon by Patrick Chappatte)

Two sides, one coin

We're spending a lot of time in class this semester discussing the logic behind how we think. I'm pretty sure this is to better frame the concepts of adult education for us, but it's interesting nonetheless.

With this comes discussions of Robert Kegan's orders of consciousness and how we see the world in relation to ourselves. In a gross oversimplification, can we see the forest or are we constantly bogged down by seeing everyone's individual trees?

My wife is entering the seventh month of pregnancy this week, which puts us in the home stretch for the baby on the way. In addition to the usual butterflies about late complications and strange things that happen outside of anyone's control, I have been fighting the good existential fight about being a good dad and resigning myself to the reality that I will probably not be able to provide a life for my child free from want, hurt or disappointment.

Bummer.

Honestly, I wasn't ready for that. I've spent over 30 years trying to be a good son without giving a second thought to what my parents were feeling on the other side of that. I now worry constantly about making mistakes - both catastrophic and utterly insignificant - that will disappoint my kid. It's not quite "pressure" in the traditional sense of the word, but that feeling many of us have where no matter how old we get, we just don't want to let our parents down.

I'm not necessarily worried that I'm going to screw up my kid in any lasting, serious way - just in the fun, mildly permanent ways - or that I'll suddenly flake out and become utterly unreliable, but the whole experience has been really interesting to me from an outside perspective.

You spend 30 years just assuming that the onus was on you to prove yourself as a son or a daughter and don't realize just how strangely self-centered that perspective is until you find yourself as a parent one day (and react just as strangely and self-centered as you did in the first place).

Seeing as this is all new to me, I've developed a simple plan for dealing with this new situation. First, I'll fall back on instinct as my folks did a great job with me - it wasn't perfect, but they are only people and did the absolute best they could. I am sincere when I say that I have nothing but appreciation for the job they did and I could do worse than to simply follow their playbook.

Secondly, I need to remember that my dog turned out pretty well and doesn't hate me and that's saying something given our battles when he was a puppy hellbent on destroying my home.

Third is to just keep doing what I have been doing from the other side of the equation. I'm just going to keep working under the assumption that it's up to me to keep the whole thing moving forward, even when I know that's not necessarily true. I'm just going to put in the work, do my best based on what I know and hope for a few lucky breaks along the way.

That basic formula has worked out better than I've deserved so far.

(Image is my son/daughter)

Has it come to this?

I saw this option pop up on my TiVo a little while ago, but just assumed it was an early April Fool's joke.

Apparently not.

On Hope, Change

I am on my lunch break right now, watching the Inaugural luncheon and getting ready for the parade to tie a big bow on the meat of the day's events. Sure there are plenty of parties to keep an eye on tonight, but as far as the big ticket items go, we're getting to the end of the road.

From election night to today, I've been thinking a lot about the man I helped to elect and how all of this fits into the big picture. More to the point, I've been keeping an eye on how the transition unfolded with regards to the people around me who didn't vote for Obama this time.

Of the endless Facebook sniping from both sides it boiled down to two refrains:

1.) Anyone who voted for Obama is blindly following his cult of celebrity and variants on the Internet rumors.
2.) Anyone who didn't is a close-minded racist who was an idiot for continuing to support former President Bush.

None of these ideas are fully formed for me yet, but I have a few rhetorical questions that I keep coming back to:

* What's so bad about idealism? I know it's shorthand for youth, inexperience and blind stupidity, but at its base levels, what is so bad about aspiring to the ideal?
* For that matter what's so damaging about a candidate who trades in hope for the country and its citizens? I can see skepticism, but on its own, hope isn't such a bad thing.

My wife watched the Oath of Office from a crowded waiting room at the University of Chicago Hospitals in Hyde Park and said she was moved by being in such a diverse group as they watched the ceremony.

I was in the Pioneer Court in the shadow of the Tribune Tower with a small group of people who gathered to watch on two mobile big screens set up for the event. Many people brought their children to watch the event and more than a few tears were shed as President Obama addressed the country for the first time.

While much has been written and discussed about this being a new day for the United States and the sea change in America's political and social landscape, I believe that any president has a hard time making sweeping changes. That's not a bad thing, it's just the way our government is constructed and I wouldn't change that if given the chance.

To all of those who claim that he hasn't done anything of substance and doesn't deserve the adoration, that's a valid point. However, making a change politically is quite different from making a difference in the culture at large.

When it comes to that point, convince me that he hasn't done so already.

One more day

Above is the reaction of Robert Kennedy, addressing a crowd of supporters on the evening the Rev. Martin Luther King was shot in Memphis. I heard a story about this a few weeks ago and the fact that Kennedy basically spoke off the top of his head and appealed to our better nature.

He was already scheduled to speak in a rough neighborhood in Indianapolis when he received word that King had been shot. He insisted on going ahead to the campaign stop.

From what I've heard, there was virtually no violence in that neighborhood that evening.

Additionally, Kennedy said:

So I ask you tonight to return home, to say a prayer for the family of Martin Luther King, yeah that's true, but more importantly to say a prayer for our own country, which all of us love - a prayer for understanding and that compassion of which I spoke.

We can do well in this country. We will have difficult times. We've had difficult times in the past. And we will have difficult times in the future. It is not the end of violence; it is not the end of lawlessness; and it's not the end of disorder.

Below is a piece of King's Mountaintop speech, that he gave a day before Kennedy's and obviously, a day before he was killed. Much is made of the speech because he alludes to not being around to see the changes he was forcing and some people see that as oddly prophetic.

I've included it to dovetail with the Kennedy call for compassion and his realization that there had been tough times in the past and would be tough times in the future.

While President Obama is happy to link himself as a historical heir of Lincoln, I think he shares just as much with King and Kennedy in his calls for sacrifice and realization that the world doesn't change simple because millions of people voted for a black candidate.

With all the recent talk of race in America and what it means to have a black president, I've been a little confused. Honestly, I can't make a logical connection between Obama's election and the end of racism in our society. Many people have been eager to look to King's speech about having made it to the mountaintop and declare that we're there as of tomorrow afternoon.

I think even the most idealistic of us know that it's not that simple.

The night before he was killed, King spoke about where he would like to be if God would place him anywhere in history:

Strangely enough, I would turn to the Almighty, and say, "If you allow me to live just a few years in the second half of the twentieth century, I will be happy." Now that's a strange statement to make, because the world is all messed up.

The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land. Confusion all around. That's a strange statement. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars. And I see God working in this period of the twentieth century in a away that men, in some strange way, are responding — something is happening in our world.

The masses of people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannesburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; Accra, Ghana; New York City; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; or Memphis, Tennessee — the cry is always the same — "We want to be free."

And another reason that I'm happy to live in this period is that we have been forced to a point where we're going to have to grapple with the problems that men have been trying to grapple with through history, but the demand didn't force them to do it.

Survival demands that we grapple with them. Men, for years now, have been talking about war and peace. But now, no longer can they just talk about it. It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it's nonviolence or nonexistence.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
April 3, 1968

While it's a nice quirk of history that many people are home today on MLK Day and Obama will be sworn in tomorrow, there is still a great deal of road to cover as alluded to by all three men. This will require hard work, understanding and, in the immediate case of the President, probably a few false starts and the need for patience.

Does his election mark the end of racism in this country? Certainly not. But it's a definite sign that it is dying.

Doors swing open, doors slam shut

One of the best things parents do for their children from the day that they're born is to lie to them. Regardless of race, age, social status, region or religion, almost every child with a parent present is told the same thing, "You can be anything you want to be."

We're all adults here, we know that sadly isn't the case. It's still one of the greatest things that a parent does for their child.

We get older, we find that we're just not suited for some of the jobs we want. Most obviously, you can work as hard as you want, but if you're five feet tall, you're never going to be the starting center for the Knicks. Now that Zeke is gone, you've also lost your shot at backup as well.

Life is full of smaller hurdles as well. Perhaps you really want to write the Great American Novel, but you can't keep thoughts in your head long enough to get a solid start on it. Maybe you'd love to be a high-powered Hollywood agent, but can't wrap your mind around numbers.

The point is that from a very early age, there are plenty of things that stand in your way between what you want to do and what is realistically available to you.

I've swung wildly across this spectrum from my highly idealistic days as a college freshman, where I felt that my post as the Burke Hall vice president could certainly lead to a better world for my fellow man (one pizza party at a time, I suppose) to heated discussions in my mid-20s where I passionately argued the point that "most people just do whatever job sucks the least."

While we can't all be the cowboy/astronaut/ballerina/princesses we'd dreamed of being in kindergarten, I think that part of growing up is realizing that the time, effort and sometimes money required to get from Point A to Point B in our professional lives just isn't worth it for a lot of us.

We find apartments we like in cities we like and hopefully marry a person we like and that's enough to keep us happy. Sometimes, we buy dogs. We're not drones and most of us settle out into areas that we enjoy on multiple levels, but if you were to sit down and sketch your top five careers you'd choose if the aforementioned time/money/skills, would the title on your business card be there?

Mine wouldn't.

This stems from course reading I'm doing this week to prepare for Thursday night's class as I begin the second semester of my adult education career. I need to map out my custom-crafted major with an eye on some greater goal. That can be grad school, a new job or pretty much anything else I choose. I tend to think that if I was goal-oriented, I wouldn't be there in the first place, but I'll play along.

It's not like they have the Big Book of Awesome Jobs open in the main office and you go down and pick one out. It does take time and effort and a desire to fight and work towards that goal to get to a place where you're doing a job that you wouldn't trade for anything in the world.

That seems to be the piece most of us miss somewhere along the line. Again, sometimes the effort honestly isn't equal to the opportunity costs. Why trade on the time and money you could allocate other places unless it's really worth it?

This is a bigger issue as we get older. In addition to the investment up front, there's always the possibility that you emerge on the other side and can't find anyone to pay you for your newfound knowledge and skill set. It's one thing to get your business degree and use it to leverage a better position or paycheck with the same company, it's quite another to be dumped into the job market with people who weren't in kindergarten when you were in high school.

However, some people are willing to take those risks and do something dramatic to shake up their station in life. For them, I have nothing but respect. For someone like me who clings to routine and familiarity, I can't think of many things that are more terrifying that chucking everything and forging out on a new course.

While I think I have the requisite courage to make moderate course corrections on my career path, I can't fathom the stones it takes to decide you're tired of being a bank manager and enroll in clown college the next week.

Still, I've been pretty content today to pore through course materials and wonder about what can be. While I have the lion's share of coursework complete for an English degree, it's been a satisfying exercise to stretch my legs and wonder what it would be like to strike out in new directions, regardless of their practicality or earning potential.

If you think of your career path as a hallway, it's not outrageous to say that doors are constantly shutting for a variety of reasons. You need to pay for daycare and dozens of doors that would have been really fun to walk through close. Your friend goes nuts with her cell phone camera on a long night for you and the political doors close. Just getting older closes its share of doors.

It's been interesting to go and reopen dozens of them today. What major do you pick to be the head coach of an NFL team? I think I'd like to give that a run.

(Image from: LSSU.edu)