Graduation

My sister's going through finals, my wife's birthday is Sunday, and for some reason I'm in a reflective mood.

The following words are from David Brooks, a columnist from the New York Times. He's trying to figure out what to tell people as he speaks at the graduation ceremony of the high school that he graduated from 30 years ago.

"At the moment, I’m thinking of talking about the chief way our society is messed up. That is to say, it is structured to distract people from the decisions that have a huge impact on happiness in order to focus attention on the decisions that have a marginal impact on happiness.

The most important decision any of us make is who we marry. Yet there are no courses on how to choose a spouse. There’s no graduate department in spouse selection studies. Institutions of higher learning devote more resources to semiotics than love.

The most important talent any person can possess is the ability to make and keep friends. And yet here too there is no curriculum for this.

The most important skill a person can possess is the ability to control one’s impulses. Here too, we’re pretty much on our own.

What young people really need is a lesson in how to choose a spouse and how to make and keep friends.

These are all things with a provable relationship to human happiness. Instead, society is busy preparing us for all the decisions that have a marginal effect on human happiness. There are guidance offices to help people in the monumental task of selecting a college. There are business schools offering lavish career placement services. There is a vast media apparatus offering minute advice on how to furnish your home or expand your deck."

Interesting comments. I would second all of his comments without reservation.

I'd also like to express my gratitude for the institutions that did teach me those important lessons: good parents, church and the other members, and a couple of very good role models at school.

While I'm still working on the ability to control all of my needless impulses, I think I'm doing a pretty good job at the friends one, and I totally hit a home run with the spouse thing.

Shoreline, WA has a great library and is part of the King County Library system. One of the adventures that Torrie and I like to do is check out movies from the library…for free!!! We just request them and when they come in, they send us an e-mail. So over the last few months we've seen a number of movies.

After watching the A&E version of Pride & Prejudice one weekend (my copy, not the library's) Torrie decided to go on a British Victorian Novel Movie Rampage, also known by it's acronym, BVMPR. As we have gone through several of these, we have had the good ones (Wives & Daughters, pretty good) and some bad ones (Bleak House).

However, even more fascinating than the actual movies themselves, is what Torrie does during the movies.

She predicts what happens with such accuracy that I swear she must have seen them before, several times. Last night was a great example.


After watching the third period of the Pens beating the Red Wings, and the last two minutes of the Magic beating the Lakers (have to prove my masculinity) we began to watch the Masterpiece Theatre version of "The Secret Life of Mrs. Beeton". Unbeknowest to me, but Mrs. Beeton wrote a very famous cookbook in the mid-to-late 1800's and EVERYONE in England knows about her. Kind of like the Victorian version of Betty Crocker.

Anyway the movie was a semi-autobiographical story of her life, meeting her husband, writing the cookbook, two babies die, blah blah. (Warning. Spoiler Alert! If you or someone you know may have or potentially could contract BVMPR, you may not want to read any further.) With about a half hour left in the movie, Torrie turns to me and says:

Torrie: "This is boring, let's turn it off."
Logan: "Are you sure? The back of the movie says that she died very young because of a 'deep, dark secret'. Don't you want to find out what it is? The suspense is killing me?"
I said this in a half-joking manner, the same that I always have when talking about Jane Austin-type movies. As a man, I have to make fun of them, but deep down I usually like most of them. I also hate not knowing what happens in the end.

Torrie: "Meh, it's boring, and I bet her husband gave her some disease from that trashy girl in his wild pre-marriage days."
Logan: "Are you saying that he gave her syphilis or something? Where did you get that from? That prediction came out of nowhere."
Torrie: "That's exactly what I'm saying. Maybe that's why their first two kids died. Let's go clean the dishes."

We went to the dishes, while I went to wikipedia to see what really happened to Mrs. Beeton. And I quote:
The TV drama seemed to imply the speculation (put forth in Kathryn Hughes' biography) that Beeton suffered from syphilis contracted from her husband, and that this may possibly have led to her death and those of her two children, although there is no firm evidence for this speculation.

Are you kidding me??? How could Torrie have possibly known???

Just some good ol' fun

I feel the need to comment on one of the more enjoyable trends that is taking the nation by storm. It is also a brilliant story of a brand reinventing itself and finding new opportunities for growth.

I'm talking, of course, about the Lego Video Games.

What a great idea. Lego remains to be relevant. (Not that it was becoming irrevelant, although it was to me, but that's because I'm 25 now and don't want to play with Legos anymore, it's a part of growing up.) The different video game systems make money. The stories (Star Wars, Indiana Jones, etc.) make money. People spend the money and have fun. Everyone wins!

Torrie and I have a Wii, and every once in awhile we'll pull it out and play a few levels of Lego Star Wars. The puzzles are just hard enough to be fun, you don't have to worry about dying, (although Torrie gets really mad when one of us dies and we lose all the little studs). It's also fun to go through the different star wars movies, and I love how they fashion all of the different characters/props out of legos.

I've made a concerted effort not to play too many video games, especially now that I'm married. Who wants to be married to a boy who would rather play video games then spend time with you? I thought so. Every once in awhile the boyish dorkish urge grows and I have to suppress it - the season and a half I played of Madden (It's from like 2005, Brian Griese is the Denver QB, I took the team to two undefeated seasons) while Torrie was gone for a few days got the video game phase out of my system for awhile. So my rule is that I can only play if we play together, which is about once a week, maybe a little less often if we have other things going on. So we'll get done with it…probably around Christmas. Maybe. Anyway that's a good amount, and if you think about it, it's a little more stimulating then simply watching like a reality show on TV or a movie that you've already seen ten times, at least you're doing something.

Although I love batman, I'm not familiar enough with the stories to be truly excited to get lego batman, but maybe I will someday, on a good deal or something.

Lego Indiana Jones I think will be fun.

They also just announced a Lego Harry Potter. I think that one is going to be cool, too.