In Memoriam of "In Memoriam"

I have had this thought for a long time and I have hesitated to say it for fear of seeming insensitive. But, what the hay?

My heart goes out to all who have lost a loved one. I know the feeling, intimately and recently. It is horrible. And when we lose someone, we want to do something to make things feel better for ourselves and for everyone else associated with the loss. In my case, recently, that something was to write a post about my dad, which became his tribute at the funeral.

I think that people are losing an important concept.

Today, I was reminded again of this. I was driving to work past a VFW hall and there was this message on the sign: "In Memory of Lou Smith." Very often, too, I will see people with stickers on their rear windows: "In Memory of..."

Cable Free Living

Well, we finally ditched cable TV. I have told a few people this, and you wouldn't believe the shocked reactions I am getting. Real looks of horror/compassion/discomfort.

It really could be more dramatic. Even though I have voiced my displeasure with the TV as a source of amplified negativity, it really wasn't completely charged by that. That was part of it, but it was also a combination of cost versus use. None of us are big TV watchers. My wife watches a few shows and the boys like Spongebob and a few Nickelodeon shows, including, of all things, Full House which they show in rerun. I like to watch baseball and various things on the educational channels. But, all of these are available online and our TV has online capability, so...

...here we are. No cable TV.

Yet, it is a little odd. I have, in the past, been a junk-TV watcher. When I have time to kill -- like when no one else is home and I am eating lunch -- I will sometimes sit down and watch worthless TV; silly video shows and Cops -- that sort of thing.

Twice, so far, I have found myself reaching for the remote and then realizing the lack of quick access. To watch something, I would have to make a real decision and then search for it and...who has that kind of time? -- or energy? So, I did something else; or, I sat in silence and listened to the kids playing in the distances of our neighborhood.

That simple. And after a few days, I stopped feeling the urge.

How To Avoid Creating Pop Monsters

The other day, I heard a mother complaining about the music her four-year-old listens to. "Oh, it's all about Justin Bieber, to her..." she said, brimming with weary-parent frustration. "She has to have the shirts and the posters and..."

So...my question is: How did this happen?

She's four.

You, too, can help your kids choose this...

I've posted about parental doubt, parental mistakes and the occasional parental success on here from time to time. (In fact, my last post was an admission of failure. So far.) But, I just have to wonder how a four-year-old "gets into" music that a parent didn't encourage in some way.

Where does a kid who is not yet even in school get the idea to listen to the hottest pop stuff going? TV? That has to be it, I suppose; short of intentional parental conditioning: Listen to your Bieber young lady! Sure. It has to be TV -- but, we can control that, too, right? It's not that much work to do.

My wife and I knew all about Nickelodeon and Noggin when the boys were little and we would put on select shows for them. We also filtered shows out, usually on the grounds of not so much content as "insanity-level:" noise and visual chaos.) In short, if it disturbed us to watch, we wouldn't put it on for them. There was never any conflict over this. The boys didn't know the difference.

Deprogramming the Boy

I'm not one to admit defeat easily, especially when it comes to being a father. But something happened yesterday that might just be a sign of the futility of fighting the shift in paradigms.

I was playing a video game, as I am sometimes wont to do, and my twelve-year-old son was watching. I was complaining that Xbox wanted me to "log in" to "Xbox Live" in order to play. We installed this because my son wants to play games online with his friends.

It's what they do, you know? I want to straddle the line between making my kids independent thinkers and making them complete outcasts, socially. So, he has some decent friends and they want to play Minecraft together, online. No biggie.

But, "Why," I asked out loud, "do I need to log on to play a game if I am not playing it online!"

"So, just log in," my son said, munching on a Nutella-dipped pretzel stick. "What's the big deal?"

"The 'big deal' is," I said, "that I don't want people to know that I am playing a video game right now. I don't want people in my business. And I don't want to get 'party' requests from your sixth grade friends while I play because they think I am you."

(Turns out, I think, that I could play offline. I guess. I don't know. But I was already 33% into the game before I...kind of...realized this. But that's not the point.)

Pink Was Somewhere Under the Rainbow

Somewhere along the line, we have lost our way with the evaluation of singers. We have come to the conclusion that having "a good voice" makes one "a good singer." Worse, we have decided that people with the ability to sing loudly have "good voices". (I blame a certain flock of singers in the eighties and nineties for this; they were both good and loud but the public in general can only really seem to remember the loud part.)

We all  need to face the fact that "a good voice" is in the ear of the beholder. I just still think that "loud" should not be the only criterion (which it often seems to be), but I am not going to try to argue that I know what a good-sounding voice is and that you don't. That would be stupid.

But, a "good singer" is a good musician. Having a good voice does not cover it. You can put a Stradivarius in the hands of a novice fiddle-player, but that won't make him a maestro. Substitute the "good voice" (often, people will refer to a singer having a "good instrument") for the Stradivarius, and you will see my point. Having a good instrument does not make one a musician.

That said, I had the misfortune of hearing Pink sing "(Somewhere) Over the Rainbow" on the Oscars last night. It was not horrible. It was worse than horrible; it was mediocre. But it sure was loud! She has a big voice (a good instrument) and she "belted it out". Problem is, that song shouldn't be belted-out. To me, Pink sounded like the proverbial bull in a china shop. But that is what we do, today -- we belt things out. It's one of our few forms of expression, it seems.