Help A Fellow Writer Out...

...and head on over to agent Carrie Pestritto's blog. Leave a critique on the posted query and help the writer potentially receive a 100-page critique from Carrie. I can tell you from experience that Carrie does excellent critiques. And as I've said ad infinitum, critiquing queries is an invaluable experience for the critiquer as well as the critiquee.

I am exhausted after a long, eventful weekend (a very positive long, eventful weekend). If I can get my act together on this, I will post about it tomorrow. See you then, and stop by Carrie's. Thanks!

A Short Quiz

A short quiz for today--no Googling, please:

How many of you non-football fans out there know why New England quarterback Tom Brady was in the news all summer?

How many of you non-hockey fans out there know why Chicago forward Patrick Kane has been in the news since early August?

One was accused of masterminded a scheme to tamper with game equipment.

The other was accused of rape.

One was the focus of an exhaustive league investigation, which resulted in a 100+ page report and a suspension.  He appealed, lost, and took the case to federal court, where his suspension was set aside.

The other was welcomed to training camp this week.

One was no doubt targeted at least in part because his team has a history of stretching, finding loopholes in, and out-and-out breaking the rules. This is, of course, an affront to the integrity of the game and must be punished.

The other was not targeted, despite having a history of bad behavior, which includes an arrest for assault, a weekend in Wisconsin that is the stuff of frat boy legend, and now a rape accusation. But hey, it's okay, he's only 20/23/26 (his age at the time of the respective incidents), right? I mean, boys will be boys, right?

Granted, in the one case, the investigation turned up actual wrong-doing, while the rape case is still at the grand jury stage and no charges have been filed. It says something, however, that screwing around with footballs is much bigger news than rape.

Now you may Google away.

Insensitivity

Years ago, when I lived here...

...we received permission to throw a party. We sat down to plan and arrived at the only weekend date between Thanksgiving and Christmas that was available. That day turned out to be December 7, Pearl Harbor Day, which commemorates those who died in the Japanese attack in 1941.

The people I lived and worked with at the big house there were all shaped to a certain extent by World War II. We all had relatives who fought in the war or grew up during it. My father was 5 when Pearl Harbor was attacked. Two of my uncles that I was close to served in the US Navy; so did my grandfather. Another uncle flew combat missions in the Army Air Corps. I have three close friends whose fathers fought across France and Italy against the Germans. And, it turns out, my future father-in-law (though I did not know him at the time) was a Pearl Harbor survivor.

We knew our history, and we knew, at least on an intellectual level, the horror of Pearl Harbor. It did not stop us from capitalizing on the day. The invitations we sent out said "Come and get bombed at our Pearl Harbor Day party." We decorated the hall with cutout airplanes and falling bombs on the walls. No one complained. If they had, we might have told them:


There was no harm in it, as far as we could tell. We were young, and full of the insensitivity and tactlessness that young people can be famous for. The party was a blast, and that house was every bit as good for a party as you might imagine.

Flash forward 20-something years. On Friday, while Rapi-scrolling (TM) through endless images on Facebook of the Twin Towers intact and the Twin Towers burning; of dust-covered firemen, and flags tattered and whole; a post from my cousin caught my eye. It showed the Twin Towers, with the Statue of Liberty in the background. But what really got my attention were the words. Said my cousin:

"I was surprised, angered, and disappointed when somebody called out 'Happy Remembrance Day!' this morning. Before I could stop myself I blurted out 'What's happy about it?' Later on, driving through [town name redacted for privacy] I saw an electronic billboard that was listing all the victims 9/11 by name. Most appropriate."

Honestly, I had no idea what Remembrance Day was, or even if it was. In looking it up, I came across something I did not know: in December, 2001, Congress declared September 11 to be Patriot Day (not to be confused with Patriots' Day in Massachusetts, which commemorates the Battles of Lexington and Concord in 1775). Furthermore, each year since 2009 President Obama has signed a proclamation declaring September 11 as "Patriot Day and National Day of Service and Remembrance." I guess I'm just not up on these things.

September 11 was a world-changing day, our generation's Pearl Harbor, and needs remembrance. Ironically, as my cousin's experience indicates, giving it an official designation on a calendar may actually make people think about it less. After a while, it just becomes another blip on the calendar, like National Boss Day or National Frozen Food Day--or, worse yet, a day that everyone looks forward to because they get the day off work and stores are having sales. I can envision a cheesy animation of the Twin Towers falling while a Crazy Eddie-style announcer shouts, "Our prices are COMING DOWN!"

A story I heard on NPR on Friday afternoon made a surprising point. "9/11 is already ancient history on some level," said Alice Greenwald, director of the National September 11 Memorial Museum. The story noted that approximately 25% of Americans now living either weren't born yet on September 11, 2001, or were too young to remember it. Time marches on. And I suppose I have to get used to the idea that there will be those in the near future making jokes about September 11 because the impacts to them will not seem visible. It doesn't make them bad or wrong or stupid--it just makes them young, without the same frame of reference and emotional response that those of us who lived through it have. I note that for myself, my own level of respect and reflection for Pearl Harbor Day, Veterans' Day and Memorial Day has increased over the years; I suspect it will for them, too.

And Now...Deja Vu

Three (!) years ago, I wrote a piece here called The Second Week Blues, in which I chronicled how The Magpie had done great at school for the first week plus, then hit a bump. What I didn't tell you is that there was more to the story. Yes, she had picked up a nasty computer virus which kept her up late into the night, but around the same time, there was something else that kept her up all night as well. And I woke up early (as I tend to do) on a weekend morning and found a message on the answering machine from her, a very unhappy message that was left after a very unhappy incident involving one of her suite-mates that pulled The Magpie in because the walls are thin in those dorms.

Flash forward three years. Yesterday morning it was The Catbird leaving an early-morning message, again due to an incident involving a dorm-mate that began around 3 a.m. and left her a little shaken. The good news is no one was hurt as far as I can tell. Alcohol was involved in this case, as it was in the incident in The Magpie's dorm 3 years ago, as it is in so many things that go wrong on college campuses these days. How this one will play out remains to be seen, but it raises a question: How do you know the difference between being homesick and knowing that a place is not for you? (This is not The Catbird's question; despite the incident, she's still pretty solid)


The person in the incident in The Catbird's dorm has a very bad case of homesickness and has declared her intention to leave school. My wife and I are in agreement here: one week is not enough to know (in most cases, at least); you need to give it more time. But how long is long enough? How much time do you need to power through to the other side? At what point do you go from saying, "Give it more time, you'll get over it" to "Okay, come on home"? Everyone is different, so the answer will vary for each person, but it IS a good question, an important question. Some people are not ready for life away from home at 18, and some people are not suited for every place. I do not envy this person, or her parents. Withdrawing from a college is a big decision, one that should not be made lightly, and I hope they make the right decision.


And now, music. Something melancholy, I think, given the mood.


Finally, I should point out that Agent Carrie is once more open to submissions for her Query Critique Contest! If you've got a query ready to go, check out her blog and find out how to enter, and then check back to critique the query when it's posted. Critiquing queries is a great way to hone your own skills at writing those oh-so-difficult beasts that are oh-so-necessary.

That's it, have a great week!

And Now We're Empty

One week ago today we left home to take the Magpie to her penultimate semester at college (no telling if next year we'll be taking her to grad school, but I seriously doubt it). This was an easy trip, as her campus is a little over an hour away, and easy also because by this time, she knows what to bring, what NOT to bring, and how to pack it. We moved in, helped her get partly set up, went out for lunch and to pick up a few more items, and that was it. The tough part was the fact that we just got her back after her year abroad, but at least we got to spend a couple weeks with her before she left again.

Thursday was the Catbird's turn. The Catbird is going to college about 4-1/2, 5 hours away, in a whole other state! We had to board the dog for the night (never a fun thing) and leave at 7 a.m. to get to campus at the appointed move-in time of between noon and 3 (the Catbird's college decided to stagger the arrival time, presumably to ease congestion around the dorms. I'm not sure I would follow that rule again, knowing what I now know, which is nothing bad. Just that, with orientation activities for students beginning somewhere in late afternoon, the kids arriving in the morning had more time to put things to rights and maybe relax a little.).

The Catbird's school had 2 days of "activities" aimed at parents, so we stayed overnight, which we might have anyway, because who wants to do 10 hours of driving in a single day? In hindsight, the 2-day "orientation" for parents really wasn't all that necessary. We ended up missing the one session that might have actually been useful because we were dealing with a problem with our motel, which amounted to this:


Apparently, every school in town decided to have move-in day at approximately the same time, and the motel ran out of rooms. I'm promised a reimbursement check for the room they ultimately found me in another hotel elsewhere, and I'm hoping I don't end up having to go through a big runaround on this. We'll see.

At any rate, despite some concerns over what and how the Catbird was packing, things went smoothly there as well. As we waited at a traffic light to turn into the campus, we were greeted by a small cadre of students on the sidewalk, jumping up and down, cheering the incoming students and calling out things like, "Welcome home." The freshman class is ~500 students; there were at least 100 upperclassmen on hand to help move in (they were on our car like ants on a cracker), to lead new students to and in orientation activities, and to help everyone feel welcome. It was a great way to start.

For my own part, the emotions I expected to cause problems were pretty under control. This is one of the benefits to being busy, I suppose: it's hard to dwell on the changes in life that are coming if you're running around doing a bunch of things. The kids were kept busy, too, with meetings and trips and group activities. Last night we had our first 3-way Skype session, which was an oddity to say the least, but both my girls look happy, and that's the best I can hope for.

Droning On and On

When I was a kid, one of the coolest things anyone could get was a free-flying, radio controlled (RC) airplane. No one I knew had one, but I recall one of my friends was building a model airplane (one of those made out of a forest of balsa wood, covered in tissue paper) that he was hoping to outfit with an engine and controls. I don't recall if he ever finished it or not; if he did, I was not around for the flight, because I'm sure I would have remembered that.

On the way to the beach we used to go to was a town park. Almost any time you drove past that park you would see RC planes flying around over the treetops from the parkway. There was a club of some kind that met down there, or maybe that was just the only place you could find sufficient open space to actually fly the things.

You never saw those things flying around in the neighborhood. You couldn't fly those things around the neighborhood. While the streets we lived on had plenty of room for take-off and landing, the big trees, telephone poles and electrical wires overhead were a serious obstacle. The big park was wide open, so you didn't have to worry about that. But even if someone had been making an RC helicopter (and I don't remember seeing any of those back then; the closest we got to that was this), I don't think we would have been allowed to fly them around. You see, those airplanes, they were noisy. Imagine a team of landscapers arriving next door at 6 in the morning. Now imagine them flying back and forth over your house. Common sense of the day was that you didn't disturb the neighbors like that. If we had, the neighbors would have gone to our parents to complain, and I think it would have been an easy decision for parents to make: keep the peace in the neighborhood. Fly the planes in the county park.

Fast forward forty (!) years. Now we have drones, which are glorified RC helicopters. They take off and land vertically, so no need to try to find a gap in the ever-increasing traffic on suburban streets. They're noisy, but not as noisy as those RC planes. And they're relatively cheap--I just found a model available for $80. And they can be equipped with nifty little cameras, which means everyone and their uncle in the YouTube generation has yet another means of striking gold with a viral video.

Is anyone restricting these things right now? Last month, a Kentucky man was arrested after using his shotgun to blow a drone out of the sky over his backyard. He says it was hovering over the yard where his 16-year-old daughter was sunbathing. Last week, I read a story in the Washington Times that stated pilots have reported nearly 700 instances of close encounters with drones. Earlier in the year, a drone was used to drop contraband in a prison yard. And finally, there's this video, which shows people largely harassing animals with drones.



As kids in the time and place I grew up in, I believe we never would have gotten away with the kind of crap . The first time a neighbor came to our parents and complained about us hovering the drone over their house, outside their bathroom window, or buzzing their pool, that would have been it. We would have lost our drone privileges. And probably been grounded, AND had to go and apologize directly to the person or people offended. In many cases, however, these are adults who are flying--and abusing--these things, and the sense of entitlement trumps and respect at all for the people or animals around.

Drone technology allows us to do some great things. Last month, I saw a presentation in which a drone was used by a grad student at a local university to make maps, and to monitor things like stream bank erosion and sedimentation in a lake. There are a lot of good things they can do. They can also be used for fun, but we've got to show more sense in doing so, because there's also a real potential that someone's going to get seriously hurt.


Have you had any close encounters with drones?

Monday Musing, Full Nest Edition

Well, it's been a while.


When I posted last, I kind of thought I'd be back last week, but time and circumstance worked against me. It was rather low on my priority list during the week.

The big news is we picked up the Magpie at JFK airport on 8/7. After almost a full year in Japan, she had finally returned. There was much rejoicing. We spent the night with some friends who live near the airport and were gracious enough to once again open their homes for us, and then we drove out to the east end of Long Island for a long weekend with family. Our relatives throw an annual bash called Lobsterfest, which involves much eating, drinking and socializing. It was a bit of a whirlwind, I think, for the Magpie, who had to deal with the effects of jet lag and didn't get the luxury of having a few days of recovery before being dropped in the middle of all of this. A splendid time was had by all.

And so now our nest is full, though that is a temporary state of affairs. I'll be back at work today, we have all this week with both girls home, and then next week (either Sunday or Monday, I'm still not quite sure which) the Magpie is off for her senior year. Late next week we take the Catbird off for her freshman year, and the house will be empty. It will be a bigger adjustment for us to make for sure.

Funny thing, after sending the Magpie off on her Japan adventure last year, I said to my wife, "Albany is going to be a big come down after spending the year in Tokyo." I don't really know what the campus looked like at her university there, but I know what U Albany looks like--quite frankly, it's hideous. The campus is loaded with buildings that would be perfectly at home in Stalinist Russia. It's a dystopian future world as envisioned by a campy 1950s sci-fi film. And, of course, she will not be surrounded by Japanese people and Japanese culture. I know she'll work hard to retain her Japanese, but it will be a lot tougher to practice the language skills she's worked so hard on.

One thing I had not thought of when she departed last September is that she wouldn't want to be here. Neither of my girls are party animals (and this is not just me being a naive parent). Both have been perfectly content being homebodies. But now that the Magpie has tasted life in Tokyo, I think it will be much harder for her to want to be around here. Our little pocket of central New York is beautiful, but it doesn't necessarily have a lot to offer young people right now--especially someone with a major in Japanese. We've known for some time that she's going to have to move eventually to get a job. I just don't think we (okay, I) imagined that she'd really want to. Now, I can't imagine her wanting to stay around here.

It doesn't make me sad. Not yet, anyway. This is part of the natural order of things. Children grow and become their own people with their own lives, separate, yet intertwined with their parents. For now, I'll enjoy the nest while it's full.