Fairly Odd Parents-Present / 28.01.2006

I try to keep my sitters moving and talking, to make them forget they are being painted. This has nothing to do with extracting intimate secrets or confessions, but rather with establishing, in motion, an essential image of the kind that remains in memory or recurs in dreams. I could not do this if my sitter had to keep still... A person is not a still-life – not even a dead person.

Oskar Kokoschka

What to wear. In the pitch black of the early morning I lay here thinking, "What should I wear today?"

On weekdays my first conscious thoughts are usually about my dress. I sit up in bed, push my feet over the edge and sit there contemplating my wardrobe. It's not that I am a fashionista. My office uniform is, well, fairly uniform: shirt, optional sweater or sweater vest, and jeans. I just like to get this part of my decision-making day over with quickly.

But today's Saturday. I should be I lounging in that dawn between dreamful triumphs and early morning routines, not ruminating about my outfit. Slowly I focus. That's it. I'm having my portrait painted today.

Artistic Tendencies, Fairly Odd Parents-Present, Idiosyncratic Celebrations / 01.01.2006

My family and I usually spend New Year's Eve quietly together. No loud parties and no dodging the inebriated on the roads. We are not on everybody's party list. In fact, I don't think we're on anybody's party list --it's been years since we were invited to a New Year's Eve celebration.

So last night we decided to buck tradition, but buck it in our own special way. We still opted for a quiet night at home. But this year we invited our friends Liz and Doug, along with their daughter to join us for that sip of Zin to ring in the new year (fruit punch for the kids of course).

Early yesterday I made a beeline for Trader Joe's, our favorite self-serve party caterer. Our Trader Joe parties are legendary. We sit around the coffee table with hors d'oeuvres of Trader Joe's brie, Trader Joe's artichoke dip, plastered on Trader Joe's assorted crackers with a bit of guacamole (you guessed it, also from TJs). It's the modern family's recipe for a successful party: easy to put together, inexpensive, and it tastes great. With a little vino, we were all set.

At first we thought we'd make tacos for dinner. Fun for the kids and everyone could fill their tortillas with whatever they wanted (a good dish for our mix of light meat eaters and vegetarians). But then Susie had an even better idea. After filling up with pre-dinner snacks, was a big meal really necessary? Instead let's make use of our new cookbook: Salad People And More Real Recipes: A New Cookbook for Preschoolers & Up. Let's make salad people for dinner!

So we lined up all the ingredients (a little lettuce, pears, raisins, melon, cheese, olives, cashews, tomatoes, carrots, and some curly pasta) and let loose. Here are the results of our New Year's Eve repast:

Fairly Odd Parents-Present, Idiosyncratic Celebrations / 31.12.2005

New Year's Eve: a time to reflect on what was and look ahead to new possibilities. Well, I've never been one to follow tradition. Why, I've already started my annual January clean and tidy around Chez Gates and it's still December! Yet writing allows you to document these transitory points in time. Without them I would remain consumed with the moment-at-hand: working on my most pressing deadline or putting out sibling rivalry fires at home. And so today I took a few moments to reread my entire year's posts from Life Outtacontext. 2005 started with a trip downtown to a swearing...

Fairly Odd Parents-Present, Worker's Comp / 17.09.2005

Police Cordon Off DC during Bomb Scare

Another typical workday: a suspicious package left at Starbucks.

Every workday afternoon I log my activities and daily accomplishments into an Access database. We do this to track the amount of time each project takes. But the bonus is I can see just how I spent my day. It's a 21st century diary of sorts.

It occurs to me that at week's end I sometimes wonder just how I spent other parts of my life, the non-project parts. Did I experience anything interesting? Where did the time go?

Between a full time job and a full time family, it's easy to simply live in the present. When my head hits the pillow it's hard to remember anything but the pleasant unconsciousness that immediately beckons.

So at the end of this week I'd like to mention some of these off-hour occurrences, a typical week-in-review:


Fairly Odd Parents-Present / 13.09.2005

What would a contemporary family vacation be without a visit to a theme park. How about three theme parks? Yes, on our recent sojourn to Southern California we hit Sea World, Legoland, and the jewel in the theme park crown: Disneyland. The Gates family scores while Jeff photographs the whole incident. After Sea World and Legoland, my wife and I weren't looking forward to our trip to the Magic Kingdom. It was the day before our return home and we were already starting to segue to our previous lives on the East Coast. To say nothing of the cost: a family of...

Child's Play, Fairly Odd Parents-Present / 10.09.2005

Family vacations are so much fun. At least that's how I remembered them from my youth. The night before we left for "parts unknown" was full of hustle and bustle as my parents scurried about while my sister and I relaxed in front of the TV. Getting to bed early so we'd be in the car at 4 am, we'd traverse the desert in the coolness of the early morning dawn. All I had to do to prepare was be excited.

However, as a parent I now know the truth. Getting ready for a family vacation is hell. It's one thing to literally stuff the family minivan with every conceivable item you may ever need --in fact, everything you own. It's another to pack for a trip by air. For, of course, the airlines have consistently refused to allow us to stuff their cargo bay to the gills.

So two weeks ago when we finally deposit our luggage at airport check-in and wind our way through airport security, suddenly we are light-headed with the relatively little we are lugging around. That is when the vacation truly begins. We are on our way back to my ancestral home: Hollywood, USA.

Fairly Odd Parents-Present / 14.08.2005

Record heat all across the nation this weekend, especially on the east coast. In fact, it was so hot in Baltimore, Rafael Palmeiro [baseball player recently suspended for using steroids] switched to injecting himself with Freon.

Jay Leno, from his nightly monologue
Tonight Show, August 8, 2005

It was SO HOT yesterday I had a hard time completing my bi-monthly lawn mowing. Yes, that lawn. The temperature in Washington peaked at about 101º F (37.5º C). The humidity (as in "it's not the heat, it's the humidity") in our DC swamp made the temperature feel closer to 110. Add to this the region experienced its first "code red" air quality day for the year and you've got the best excuse to stay inside and watch anything on TV (even steroid-enhanced baseball).

Last week in this heat James C. McBride, a DC police officer drank too much water while training to use a bicycle on patrol and died of hyponatremia. Hyponatremia, also known as "water intoxication," is the opposite of dehydration. Your body has too much water --so much that your body can't get rid of it fast enough.

Many years ago when I was a mailman I suddenly found myself in a similar situation. Of course, at the time I had no idea what was happening to me. I was delivering mail in the San Fernando Valley in the middle of the summer. I was a 19-year-old college student spending my semester break as a "Summer Replacement" for the U.S. Postal Service.

Fairly Odd Parents-Present / 07.08.2005

We just returned from our annual East Coast beach trip to Wildwood, New Jersey. This is the ancestral venue for my wife's family and like swallows in Capistrano we dutifully return to this spot the same time each year. Growing up close to Zuma Beach in Southern California, spending both days and nights at the ocean is a bit alien to me. When we made our first annual trip back in August of 2001 I reported on the differences between West Coast and East Coast beach experiences. For the most part, nothing has changed since that post (except this year...

Fairly Odd Parents-Present, Idiosyncratic Celebrations / 17.07.2005

Apple's iCal Application Icon

Apple's iCal application icon displays my birthday.

I get that little tingly feeling (yes, tingly!) every time I see this icon on a Mac user's monitor. It's for Apple's calendar program iCal. And I feel like every iCal user is talking to me.

Ever wonder why this icon displays July 17 on your desktop? At first I thought every Mac user's birthday was displayed on this icon since July 17 is my birthday. What a nice touch. That Apple! Always taking the computer experience one step beyond. Microsoft would never think to do this bit of PR. I figured the display used some user identification we all had to submit when we registered our computers.

Then, as I made my rounds around the office, I discovered that every Mac was displaying July 17. It was as if all of you were remembering my birthday. It felt so nice to be loved by everyone. And it was a birthday gift I got all year round.

Fairly Odd Parents-Present / 29.05.2005



If someone had told me back then that when George Lucas completed his saga I'd be living in Washington, DC, working as a Web designer for the Smithsonian, living next to a suburban forest with my wife and two children, and that I would actually be happy about being bald I would not have believed them. My first question would have been, "What the hell's a Web designer?"

I survived my early angst with a little help from Obi-Wan Kenobe. I began to learn the ways of the Force. But I decided to stay down-to-earth. In the ensuing 28 years I have developed a philosophical skill set --a guide that helps me weather the complexity of ideas and changes that mark contemporary culture.

The opening of The Revenge of the Sith marks an important milestone in my life. It's a time to reflect on all that I've learned since Luke and I discovered the Force: