minor output

I don't have the intellectual energy to sustain a narrative today, so I'm going with the tried and true "Notes and Observations" format that served genial small-town newspaper columnists so well for decades. Anyone remember newspapers? They're what movie gangsters would use to wrap up dead fish.

--I experienced what I can only describe as a minor panic attack on Friday evening at Legoland, which I think may be the perfect place for a minor panic attack. It's a long story  but the question that provoked it, and the question that remains in my head, a little bit, is: What if I'm not a good father?

--I never really responded to Peter Pan when I was a kid. It seemed too...cute, maybe? Too neat? I liked my fairy tales a little messier. But now, at 35, I love it. I guess that one isn't too hard to analyze, actually. 

--Sometimes movie trailers are so good that I don't want to see the movie because I know there's no way they can sustain the brilliance of the trailer. Two recent examples: A Serious Man by the Coen brothers and Where the Wild Things Are. I can't figure out how to hyperlink, but go to the Apple trailer site and watch them.

--I had a bad weekend with food, the kind of bad weekend that can re-awaken cravings I thought I had willed away, the kind of bad weekend that can erase progress if it's implications aren't resisted. I am resisting, albeit weakly. But I am resisting. 

--The cognitive marching orders I've given myself lately are: Call it what it is. Even if you're only talking to yourself. Always try to call it what it is. Don't let yourself pretend you didn't know what it was. Take away that option. 

--I'd like to think I'm magnanimous by nature, that I tend to always see the good in people. Lately I've made a kind of crucial discovery: that's not actually my nature. I'm kind of cynical and pessimistic in a lot of ways, instinctively, and I have to do a fair amount of work to get past that, and that's the reason I tell myself that I'm magnanimous by nature and I tend to always see the good in people. It's my way of working to get there. Fake it until you make it, as the group I should probably be a member of says. And it's true. I've made real progress exercising my empathy muscle, so much that it almost looks like it's always been there. 

--I can drink a frightening volume of single malt scotch in one sitting without getting too drunk. I could be a competitive scotch drinker.

--I feel that it's time to discover a completely new genre of music that I've never listened to and lose myself in it. Afro-jazz, maybe?

--I love to *come home*. It almost makes going away worth it.