Family History

It is a curious thing to experience, the realization that my family has fully transitioned into another phase of life. My parents are more GRANDparents than parents. My brothers and sister look like real adults. There are growing numbers of little people around and they ask me questions like, "Are you my dad's sister?" in a tone that implies their heads can't really stretch big enough to grasp that their dad is also a brother.

I've been thinking a lot about how much history my parents and my grandparents have that I've never heard. I never asked. I think about the fact that there is a very good chance, likely even, that I will never have children and I'm basically OK with that, except that I always wish I had someone to pass our stories and common history to.

Every time I've been out to visit my parents, I've been purposefully asking them about their past and about their parents and grandparents. I want to know more than just the few stories I remember from when I was a kid (many of which I'm not even sure are true stories or if I imagined them...for example, I swear my dad told me I was related to Amelia Earhart, but he looks at me like I'm crazy when I bring that up now.)

My dad woke up early on Saturday to drive Bonnie and I to O'Hare airport to catch our flight back home to Providence. After our Dunkin' Donuts coffees were near finished and we were awake enough to start chatting, I asked him for more details on how he met the two Vietnamese boys that are now my adopted uncles.

Here's the story:

My dad was drafted into the army near the end of the Vietnam War and was stationed near Saigon. Identical twin Vietnamese boys, roughly around the age of 7, lived among the soldiers on the base. The story at the time was that they were orphaned, but whether they were deserted or were runaways is still unclear. In any case, they learned to speak English and hung out with the soldiers all the time. A family in New Jersey was supposed to be working on adopting them, but that fell through and the soldiers they had befriended started to get reassigned.

My dad, who had mentioned the boys on several occasions in letters to his parents, recorded a tape where he laid out the failed adoption attempt and before he even got to asking, my grandpa had turned to my grandma and said, "Before this tape is over, he's going to ask us to adopt these boys and that's going to be a big decision that's going to require serious thought."

Sure enough my dad asked if they would adopt the boys. My grandpa said he was prepared to think long and hard about it, but about five minutes after they had listened to the tape, he came to the conclusion that they had already had five children and they never had to stop and think long and hard before having any of them. So they made up their minds then and there that they were going to adopt these two Vietnamese boys.

Of course, it wasn't like there was a legal process to adopting Vietnamese street kids. It was always a matter of knowing who to contact and who to pay.

About a year and a half went by and my dad had either been assigned elsewhere or was already back in the states and they lost the whereabouts of the boys. My grandpa asked my dad about them and my dad told him to let it go. There was no way he'd be able to find them. They have no permanent address. None of them spoke Vietnamese. It would be difficult to get them here legally, etc. Grandpa Garrett said, "Look, if those were my sons, I would never give up looking for them. I'm going over there and I'm going to find them."

He brought along one of my dad's army friends, flew to Saigon, and knowing that the boys hung out at the zoo a lot, went straight there to start asking street kids if they knew where to find identical twin boys who knew how to speak English. It's unclear who did the talking; I assume the army friend knew enough to talk to people. Within six hours he had found them.

Understandably, the boys didn't trust that some Americans were there to adopt them, so one of them went to meet the visitors while one hung out around the corner in case it was a ruse. They recognized my dad's army buddy though and realized it wasn't a trick.

My grandpa went to the American embassy, which only granted visa's on a day-by-day basis. They denied my grandpa a visa to stay long enough to work out a way to get the boys to the US, which required a lot of phone calls to an Illinois representative (who I don't know). Luckily, my grandpa was the editor of a town newspaper The Mendon Dispatch-Times and simply told the people at the embassy that he was staying until he had those boys on a plane to the US and if they threw him in jail, they could explain to the media why. (I'm sure he was rougher than that; my grandpa has a reputation for getting his way.)

He got his visas and worked it out so that they adopted the two boys. My dad suspects his unauthorized time away from work contributed to his losing his job shortly thereafter, but that's all I know about that.

I'm glad I asked.

Universal Wireless Internet

Google is asking people to sign a petition requesting the FCC to open up the unused radio airwaves for general usage after all of the TV networks switch over to only digital in February. Oh god that would be amazing.

http://freetheairwaves.com/

Projects From My Photoshop Class

I thought it'd be fun to post two of the projects I worked on for my Photoshop class this summer.

One assignment was to choose a background and merge several subjects into it.

I chose a birch tree forest that I scanned from a book on China as my background.



Then I started scanning some images from a book documenting 1968 in America.

I ended up using

Elvis:




Jim Morrison:



And some creepy, vacant 60's fashion models:



And merged them into one.




This was done through the use of channels and masking to create the people selections, and a little tinkering with opacity to make Elvis' feet blend into the ground a bit better. I also cleaned the image using levels.

Another project was to choose a magazine cover and recreate it without using any of the cover images or text. This one was a lot harder. We could use images on the inside of the magazine, provided that they weren't the exact same photo from the cover. I chose Dwell magazine, another one that happened to be chilling around my house. I lucked out because the house that was on the cover was featured in the inside article. It was a different photo (taken from a slightly different angle, with different people standing on the balcony, at a different time of day.)

This is the original cover:



Here is my recreation:



The image from the inside of the magazine was on a two-page spread, so I used the stamp tool to merge the left and rights sides of the house back together.

I used the gradient tool to recreate the sky and the coloring on the word "DWELL". Using the pen tool, I outlined the original "DWELL" text to make it a selection. For the rest of the fonts, I just chose the closest I could find that were already installed on my computer. I had to do this in one night given my time schedule that week, so I didn't really bother making the text absolutely perfect.

The photo from the inside article had one man leaning on the railing of the balcony. I managed to take him out of the image, but I ran out of time to insert other people. If I were on less of a tight schedule, I would have found some people in suits to merge onto the balcony. All in all, I am happy with how this one turned out.

Vermont

Remember when I just moved to Rhode Island and I was really excited about it and updated on an almost regular basis for a little bit? Yeah, sorry I've been absentee.

I've been a busy kid. During August, all I have is work at the bookstore and perhaps a few movies to review, but I am otherwise schedule-free...which is ultimately me at my happiest. I hate a heavily scheduled life.

I am currently in Vermont for the first time in my life. I LOVE traveling. I love seeing new areas.

We are in a hotel in Ludlow (technically Proctorsville, but it is right on the border and the closest town center is Ludlow). This area is basically a ski resort, so lodging is super cheap right now since it is off-season. Bonnie and one of her co-workers like to plan pretend vacations during their slow moments at work, and she showed Bonnie this little package deal that her and her husband are going to take. Bonnie, having remembered that my birthday is coming up and that I have been sighing and saying things like, "I just need some sort of vacation that requires nothing but down time" decided she was going to take me on a one-night "vacation"/road trip to Vermont.

So for approx. $100, we are staying a night at a hotel in a very beautiful mountainous town in Vermont, with complimentary chocolates and champagne (cheesy but fun) and a gift certificate for $25 off a four course meal at the Castle Inn Restaurant. There is more expensive lodging in an actual castle on this property, but since we are lower middle class, we are staying at the more traditional hotel nearby. We also get a discount on a massage, but I have no plans to get one since my girlfriend already gives the best massages ever.

To top it all off, I slept in today and then woke up around 11am and started getting dressed/packed. Bonnie called to tell me she was running a few errands and then would be home. I stopped her in the middle of our hallway to ask her something and noticed she was holding her hand behind her back while leaning against the wall. She wouldn't let me see what she was holding until it was ready.

She bought me a new digital camera. I love it. The last one sucked for two reasons: the rechargeable batteries only lasted about 20 minutes and it had sand in it and basically sucked at working on a regular basis. This new one is perfect.

I feel mildy guilty since her birthday was about a month ago and all I got her was a vinyl version of the New Pornographers album "Challengers". She tries to make me feel better by saying that this road trip and the camera are for her as well.

Anyway, I'm happy and I'm going to go read now.

Don Days

I need to write about Chicago's Don's Coffee Club.

In late 2001, my now girlfriend had just moved to Chicago from Greenwich Village, NYC. She had the luxury of living there when there were still a significant number of grungy coffeehouses and lots of hole-in-the-wall diners and assorted venues. She loved to discover the lesser known hidden gems of Manhattan.

So she brought that same energy with her to Chicago and did some research into some lesser known places that she would try to make her own personal homes away from home in Chicago.

She discovered Don's tucked away in a small dingy building in the Roger's Park neighborhood. The neighborhood was borderline safe...a place that had lots of great art and people, but also an area that I learned not to walk around by myself too late in the evening...even to walk only a few blocks from the el to Don's.

She went there by herself the first time she tried it out. We were experiencing one of our Cold Wars, so I was not in the picture that time. A little while later though, when her and I was in a better place, she brought me there. Apparently, she had made her first Chicago friends who were a motley looking crew who invited her to join in their game of cards and smoke cigarettes non-stop.

This basically became our social life, as this group was somehow ALWAYS sitting on a small raised platform in the window of Don's, smoking, playing cards, and talking shit. We never called to meet up there, we just showed up knowing that they'd always be there. Don wasn't even the owner by the time we came on the scene; it had been sold twice since then. But it was still the same old smoky small place, with jazz music and maybe five other "customers" at any given time. I had no idea how it stayed in business as long as it did because one of the best parts about it was that there were so few OTHERS. It was always OUR place and it was awesome. The owner at the time, Bob, wouldn't even charge us for our drip coffee that he refilled while we hung out for hours. I remember that we all had to keep track of how much we drank and owed, because it wasn't like Bob was ever going to actually ASK us to pay.

Around the same time, Bonnie also happened upon a truly disgusting diner a block from her studio called Standees. Its sign consisted of a flashing arrow pointing to the door. It consisted of a small counter, maybe 8 booths, and a kick ass jukebox. $5 bought fifteen songs and we'd basically stay there with a few of our other young regulars until none of us could afford more songs. There was a guy named Dennis who was ALWAYS sitting at the counter. He never really spoke, but once we came in often enough to qualify as regulars, he'd do that head nod thing. And then there was the waitress Julie, who was basically Tammy Faye Baker with a smoker's voice and a bitchy attitude. For better or worse, it was another home away from home (which says a lot about the state of my living situations in Chicago).

One day, Bonnie was sitting there when one of the workers was chatting with her about life in general and how she was enjoying Chicago. It was an older guy wearing a Hawaiian shirt and he asked, "Have you ever been to Don's?" To which she replied that she had and in fact she went there all the time.

"I'm Don!"

"What?"

"I'm Don! That was my place!"

And so, Bonnie met Don of Don's Coffee Club during his brief stint working at Standees. For anyone familiar with these two joints, you understand how absurd this is. But lets just say that they were both places that are not easy to come by and I still can't really figure out why Don was ever working at Standees in the first place.

Anyway, Don seems to be a bit of a legend amongst a quiet cadre of writers. I was reading "The Time Traveler's Wife" by Audrey Niffenegger and all of a sudden her two main characters are meeting over coffee at Don's Coffee Club and Don, complete with Hawaiian shirt, makes a guest appearance. Awesome.

Now I found this and you need to read it because it captures Don quite perfectly (scroll down to the headline "A Don For All Seasons".)A Don For All Seasons

Standees bought an espresso machine, which I think was what made Don quit. He grimaced at it every time he looked at it. It was just "too much!"

Straight Acting

I went to a baby shower on Sunday. Baby showers have a way of making me feel REALLY queer, in two senses of the word. There is the awkwardness of trying to converse with strangers when the only thing you know about them is that they happen to know someone that you know. "Sooooo, how do you know so-and-so? Oh that's great! We work together." I don't really care how they know aforementioned so-and-so, and I also know that they don't care how I know aforementioned so-and-so. But it's just how those things go.

They also make me feel uber-homosexual, and not because there are tons of women there. It's because there are tons of straight women there. There is a sort of assumed female bonding "girls only" sort of thing that happens. The talk usually revolves around babies, the differences between men and women and related topics. I always get the weird feeling that I am like a guy that is eavesdropping on the bonding rituals of the other half and its not my world and I'm not supposed to be there.

I don't really do dresses, or shopping, or boys, or babies. I'm not judging! I'm just sayin', my life is largely void of such topics. I always feel completely out of my element and I feel like a poser. It's so weird. Other situations that make me feel similarly queer: Bridal showers, mall shopping (particularly anything that involves dressing rooms), and wedding receptions.

Speaking of feeling like a straight poser, is it cheating to go along with people when they talk about thinking some male movie star is hot? I was recently talking about the movie Chocolat and a female acquaintance said, "Oooh, and Johnny Depp was so hot in that!" And I was like, "Oooh yeah." But then I realized that this woman probably doesn't know I'm a homo and doesn't understand that I actually mean, "Ooooh yeah, he is totally hot...but I wouldn't actually want to sleep with him." Is this dishonest? I know what I mean, but I also know that it probably reads completely differently and maybe I have some sort of obligation to make myself more clear? I don't know; I've just been thinking about it and I decided that if I feel like a guy is hot, I'm still going to say it, even if it makes me sound way straighter than I actually am.

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Mmm, I'm so enjoying having a lighter schedule now that school is over (minus my one project that is still due). I actually finished a book! I read "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" and I highly, highly recommend it. It's about a painfully nerdy/geeky boy(Oscar) born in the Dominican Republic who is the exact opposite of what a "typical" Dominican man should be. He's not macho. He sucks at sports. He speaks Elvish. He's an unhappy, overweight virgin. Then he moves to New Jersey...and nothing gets better. It's basically a character study (and not just of him, but several members of his family as well). If you can handle using context clues to figure out the heavy dose of Spanish words and phrases thrown in (never mind if you are already down with the Spanish) and if you don't mind an occasional interesting footnote, then I think you'd like it. I wouldn't understand you if you didn't.

I'm also half way through Twilight by Stephenie Meyer and enjoying it. The writing isn't the best, but I like the characters a lot and its pretty funny, so it's still a good read.

Values

I've been thinking a lot about my values and the choices I make on a day to day basis. Maybe it is simply that I've left the urban lifestyle behind after six years and now live in simpler parts, but it seems to me that the general population is much more aware and concerned with the environment than even a year or two ago. Energy conservation seems more mainstream again. I'm sure that the price of oil is a huge part of the awakening consciousness. I've seen a lot less SUV's out on the roads. There are still quite a few trucks, but I understand that a lot of people need those for the type of work that they do. But who really needs an SUV? I have a neighbor who has five SUVs. FIVE. I find it hard not to judge him fiercely.

Besides, I'm no green angel. I take long hot showers. I turn the heat up higher than I need it. I honestly would probably be too lazy to recycle as much as I do if I didn't have a thoughtful girlfriend who calls me out whenever I choose convenience over principles.

But I am improving and I'm definitely thinking about it a lot more. There are really easy small things I've been doing. I have lit a fire instead of turned on the light and heat (although, the smoke that it produces makes me question the value in this tactic. Anyone know which is generally better?) I use cloth napkins. Bonnie bought these good reusable cleaning rags that I've used a lot more for cleaning. We carpool when we can. We use the more gas efficient car (even though the sterio is broken!). We try to buy organic and local, etc, etc.

Working at a book store, I have the awesome power of book display and have wielded that power for the greater good. All of last month, the first thing friendly (and a few unfriendly) patrons saw when they entered the store was a lovely display of environmental books. A few were moved to buy. Who knows if they'll utilize some of the ideas in the books, but a seed was probably planted so to speak. One cool thing happened last week when a regular family came in and the dad asked me where the kids version of the Inconvenient Truth book was moved to because he saw it on the display earlier and wanted his kids to read it. Score.

I can't remember how I came upon this family (I think it was in a newspaper I was reading), but they are a relatively young couple with a 5-year-old and a 6-month-old and they are donating the vast majority of their possessions and making a life changing move to live sustainably. They are chronicling their experiences and experiments on a blog, Cage Free Family. They are at that very scary pivotal period right now where they are making final arrangements before they go for it. Apparently, there have been a fair amount of ridiculous negative comments directed at them from stupid people. Why would anyone have a problem with someone at least attempting to live their life in a better way? No one is perfect, but thank god some people do what they can to make good choices. They need support (and they are also needing to barter some stuff, so if you have something you think they could use, leave them a note).

I'm glad whenever I find people that are actively embracing a move to the simpler way of life. Sometimes I feel like I'm weird for not having aspirations for a bigger house or better cars, like it seems like I either don't expect good things for myself or I'm too simple-minded to know that there is better out there. But I'm actually just happier living relatively simple. I remember when I moved into my first studio apartment, I was so happy to live in a space where everything I needed was within 15ft, no more of that annoying having to run upstairs to get something I forgot or search several different rooms to find something I lost. Life was just easier. It didn't mean I became more simple-minded, I was just less distracted by stupid stuff. And I have never understood the concept of working to gain more money. I work to sustain my lifestyle. I'd eventually like to earn enough that I will be able to afford health care for myself and/or Bonnie when the need arises. I'd like to be able to contribute my fair share in taking care of my parents when they are too old to do it for themselves. That's why I work. I don't work solely to buy more and more and more stuff.

I have lots of memories of moments growing up where I felt confused or disappointed when I didn't see what all the fuss was about when other people acted like something was such a big deal. Weird examples: I vividly remember Michael Jackson being a household name, someone as popular as the pope or the president. I was at a neighbor's house setting up Nintendo when a video of Michael Jackson's came on the tv and she told me that was Michael Jackson. I honestly didn't believe her, because, well, he was just a dude. He sang and danced really cool and all, but still, he was an entertainer like thousands of others. I didn't get why he was such a big deal. I felt that way when I really understood that to be a model meant you get to be one of those people that pose for advertisements in magazines. I mean, really? Why do we care? (Before I get hate mail, I should admit that I understand the underappreciated art that goes into fashion and fashion photography and a lot of work that models do.) I just don't see why it is on such a pedestal and why anyone would spend so much of their lives trying to be one. For some reason, I expected a model to be way cooler, like being Miss America (which, actually, was another disappointment). I can feel myself being vague and weird right now, but I'm not sure how to fix that. So...moving on.

The point is that I'm getting more and more aware of and comfortable with my real values. And I understand that a lot of people feel alone or weird for not being too materialistic or for not being a workaholic or whatever. But that's just silly.