Are We Still Cool? » culture

There’s new life in the Cool Duplex!

cool dad — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 02:55:04 +0000

There is much joy in the Cool Duplex. It’s a time for new sights and smells. New dishes to be done. New mornings and evenings, new life.

After several weeks of anticipation and rough mornings, it’s here. Little Proctor Silex is here – 4 lbs, 2 ounces, 12.5 inches, and white as snow. Our brand spanking new… coffeemaker.

Honestly, Cool Mum and I are not coffee drinkers [-3 cool points]. We never picked it up, even though coffee was a staple in our households growing up. But the Cool Roomies are thrilled and unpacked their new coffeemaker tonight with glee and relief.

CM and I are uncool for not being java junkies, but at least the Cool Duplex will smell cool every morning. I wonder how Cool Baby will react: “What’s that smell, daddy? May I have a jumbo large iced venti, daddy?” (and that’s probably not even a drink, which goes to show how much I actually know about coffee).

The best part of waking up…is seeing a happy Cool Roomie with their coffee cup.

Are you a coffee lover? Or have you resisted the lure of Starbucks, Dunkin Donuts, Stumptown et al?

Our dinner with fashion queens; I’m a pauper

cool dad — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 14:20:12 +0000

The other night, we hosted our friend Polina (aka Truly Cool Parent), who was in town for New York Fashion Week. She came to dinner with her wardrobe stylist-slash-art director Nikki. We dined on coconut chicken curry and the finest durn cupcakes in New York City (my apologies for rocking the worlds of Magnolia and Billy’s advocates).

Polina and Nikki are the queens of fashion photography in Indianapolis, so Cool Mum and I quizzed them on their line of work because the only thing we are more clueless about than parenting is fashion. We loved hearing stories as micro as working out details for a shoot and as grand as effecting cultural change in Indianapolis.

Since we moved up here, fashion has occupied more space in my consciousness. Not that it ever occupied much. (What do you mean Hypercolor shirts went out of style? You press the shirts, AND THEY CHANGE COLOR! These are shirts of the future, if anything.)

I even went on an online clothes shopping binge towards the end of last year. Winter was coming, and I didn’t want to alternate the same two sweaters that I did during our first winter here. Thanks to Slickdeals, I picked up better-fitting jeans, Merino wool sweaters, two corduroy blazers, a wool pea coat, and a crate of slightly irregular purple Z. Cavariccis (no i didn’t).

Despite my shopping spree, I still feel fashionably inadequate; my clothes just aren’t cool enough. It doesn’t help that a lot of friends here work in fashion and design and always look swank. And it especially doesn’t help that after dinner with Polina and Nikki, Cool Mum asked me if I think that my hairstyle is outdated. Apparently, she does because this is not a typical after-dinner cleanup question.

Even when I have decent clothes, my fashion sense is bankrupt. I could be the all-time champion of Project Run-away. One day I went to work sporting a nicer shirt (that happened to be striped) and my cool new pinstripe dress pants. CM pointed out (after work, of course) that I shouldn’t wear striped tops and bottoms together. I checked online, and one commenter on a forum called the combination “horrific.” That makes me long for the days when CM called my clothes choices “not bad.”

How’s your fashion sense: Fetching or retching?

Meet some Truly Cool Parents – Ben and Polina

Have you ever been on TV?

cool dad — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 14:28:31 +0000

Despite all of the neat things that God has let me do over the years, I’ve never made it to the small screen, meaning I’ve never been on TV. Well, there was the one time when the local news posted a 5-second sound bite for an event that I planned while they listed all of the important details wrong.

Cool Mum was on that beloved, controversy-free late night program The Tonight Show with Jay Leno a few years back. During a band trip to California, she met up with a good friend and they attended a taping. The two young ladies made it to the platform where Jay did his monologue, so she was front and center when Jay high-fived the crowd at the start of the show.

My best chance of being on TV is moving back to Florida and raising a shirtless ruckus when the COPS film crew is at the local precinct. I also wholeheartedly believe that ‘Shirtless Ruckus’ is a stunning name for a band.

Have you ever been on TV?

I’m not too cool for middle school

So we freaked a little over meeting ‘Jim Halpert’

cool dad — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 05:07:51 +0000

Concerned with the economic slowdown and the rising cost of paper and office supplies, we contacted Dunder Mifflin to see if they could beat our current supplier’s pricing and OK enough with the fake story. Yes, that’s us posing with John Krasinski, aka Jim Halpert of The Office. The non-profit that I work for had its annual benefit gala last night, and Mr. K was there to support his girlfriend Emily Blunt, who was honored at the event.

It was exciting and nerve-wracking to be around celebrities. I mean, just ask what John thought about his photo op with Cool Mum and Cool Dad!

Back on earth, I try to downplay being a fan, but when we saw people that we’ve seen on TV and film for years, we lost our cool. Since last night, I’ve been thinking about being starstruck. What is it about celebrities that made me so badly want a picture with them?

If given the chance, I would love to hang out with a celeb that I like, but this wasn’t even hanging out with John K. This was tag-teaming with another couple that wanted a picture with him and ambushing the poor guy when he tried to make for a food table. We exchanged approximately 1.37 sentences, the deed was done, and John was high-tailing it to the finger foods, relieved that we didn’t ask him to sign a body part.

I am reminded of something that Dave Trottier says in his book The Screenwriter’s Bible. When advising on how to sell a screenplay, he says not to be intimidated by Hollywood players. They’re people just like us lowly screenwriters except with different jobs. Well, big-time actors just have a different job than me – one that makes them millions of fans and dollars, but it’s still just their job.

As much as I want to love my job and do what I love to do, I don’t want to be solely defined as a person by it. I’d want to be remembered as loving and God-fearing first and then by my accomplishments second. So, I shouldn’t let someone else’s job totally embody who they are, especially to the point where I bum-rush their access to the California rolls.

Who are some famous people that you’ve met? How did you act around them?

Viva la road trips with friends to see Coldplay

cool dad — Sat, 23 May 2009 14:00:44 +0000

It’s Friday night as I write this, and ‘Lovers in Japan’ is cranked on my cheap headphones, which is fitting because tomorrow night, we’re going to see Coldplay in Hartford, CT!

We all know due to common sense and also some very sweet commercials from Johnson & Johnson last year or so that a baby changes everything. Just two years ago, we went to whatever lengths we wished to see a good show. Like driving 5 hours to see U2 in Miami. Or picking up last-minute tickets to see Keane in a half-empty Hard Rock Live. Or waiting all day in the sun for front-rail spots for U2 again in Tampa.

But figuring out this Coldplay in Connecticut thing has been a ride that’s been all sorts of stressful. As we’ve said over the last year, Coldplay’s latest album Viva La Vida or Death and All of His Friends has been in constant play in our household since it came out – mainly because it was the only CD in the house after we cleared it out before moving to New York. It’s by far Cool Baby’s favorite album and just last night, he started saying ‘Coldplay’ when he sees the iTunes window open on our laptop.

Well, Coldplay played NYC before we got here and played Orlando after left Florida. Songs like ‘Life in Technicolor’ and ‘Viva La Vida’ will be forever linked to these unforgettable months of our lives, so we felt crummy for not being able to catch them during this tour.

Then in March, they announced another US leg of the tour, and we just had to jump on. The only feasible show we could catch was in Hartford.

We got the tickets, convincing ourselves that we had a couple of months to train the boy to wear headphones to protect his hearing. He wasn’t having it. He dislikes wearing anything on his head, and he made it clear that he wasn’t wearing bulky headphones for 3 hours. Uh-oh.

Fortunately, a couple from church agreed to road-trip to CT with us and will watch CB while CM and I rock out to CP performing their latest CD. Incidentally, the girl is from CA.

My poor-planning self didn’t realize that every rental car in New York City would be taken for Memorial Day, so I was disheartened to find that out in the middle of this week. By God’s grace, the perfect car came available against all odds, and the trip was finally set.

If you would, wish us safe travels, good times with friends, and a sweet rock show!

Do you sign off emails with a Christian closing?

cool dad — Sat, 23 May 2009 01:32:28 +0000

Ever since I became a Christian and made Christian friends, I have been blessed by the Christian emails featuring Christian closings. For example, stuff like

God bless,
Susie

In Christ,
Dumbledore

The LORD bless thee, and keep thee: The LORD make his face shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee: The LORD lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace,
Bubba-John-Boy

Of course, I had to follow suit, but my Christian closings would vary between the non-committal everyday “God Bless” to the hip, hippie-ish “peace in Jesus!” Later in life, it may evolve with my advanced age like, “Tired in Him” or “Grumpy, Yet Grateful.”

How about you? Do you close you emails with a ‘faith-based’ closing?

Our beloved TCN ChicoBags work for us

cool dad — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 18:11:16 +0000

One of the coolest things that we did with Take Care Now was get reusable nylon shopping bags with our logo on them. In 2006, the craze about reusable bags had not quite hit yet, and we wanted to do something a little different to do with TCN.

Then Cool Mum found the ChicoBag online. It seemed like a smart way to counteract the mountains of plastic shopping bags that we would accumulate.

Made from nylon, ChicoBags are lighter and much cooler-looking than traditional canvas shopping bags. They are much stronger than the usual plastic bags. Here, I stuffed 22 lbs of groceries – canned goods and 4 jars of spaghetti sauce – into a bag, and it barely stretched.

This bag was so full that it deftly hid Cool Mum’s pregnant belly.

And the nylon lets the bag crumple into a tight little ball and stuff into its own bag that’s sewn into the side.

We ordered 100 bags in ‘06 and have been slowly selling them, giving them as gifts. or using them to barter services. We might have 50 or so left. It didn’t help when Publix and other stores started selling reusable bags for 99 cents when ours were going for $5 (now $3).

This could be considered a cheap plug to help unload our ChicoBag inventory. However, just like our microwave, scale, and cache of khaki shorts, all of the bags are in Florida. So we couldn’t sell them to you if we wanted to. However, if you really want one, we can probably dig them up on our next trip to FL…

This post is part of Works for Me Wednesday.

The music that inspires you to write

cool dad — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 02:30:00 +0000

For the last few nights of writing/blogging, I’ve plugged in the headphones (yes, the broken ones) to listen to some tunes for inspiration to write. Two artists that get me in the mood to write, while not distracting from my train of thought, are Brooke Fraser and U2. I’m listening to Ms. F right now.

Which artists bring out the writer in you?

Sinking into the Facebook trap

cool dad — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 03:02:00 +0000

It’s been a long and enjoyable day of trekking across Manhattan by foot, taxi, bus, subway, and ferry. I’m tired with a full week of work ahead of me. I should be in bed.

However, I’ve stepped into the pool of quicksand that is the Facebook Web of High School Friends. Recently, I advised Cool Mum not to get stuck in the trap of looking former friends just out of curiosity; that it’s an unproductive use of time.

However, curiosity’s got the best of me, and I’m finding old friends and viewing their friends to find more, maybe older friends. And man, is it addictive.

I’m sure I can find my whole graduating class by the time I have to leave for work in the morning…

LOST and Christianity: What do you think?

cool mum — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 23:30:00 +0000

In preparation for tonight’s show, I’ve been looking online for a list of LOST’s references to Christianity. What I have found is a lot of people writing about LOST who are annoyed by the thought of watching an allegory of the New Testament play out.

This is one of my favorite quotes that I found:

“…every time the show veers into Christian parable, it makes me want to gag (my reaction to organized religion in general). I understand wanting to reach into Biblical imagery and allegory for literary purposes, but if “the meaning” of Lost really turns out to be a death/rebirth story along the lines of the new testament, I WANT MY MONEY BACK. I have enough trouble with the name “Christian Shephard” as it is. But don’t let my crankiness fool you: I think this may be Lost’s best season yet.”

It’s fascinating to me that as a believer, I don’t even notice a lot of these things as I watch the show. “Christian Shephard”! Now that is funny. And the thing about the Lamp Post station being a reference to CS Lewis’ Narnia was another one that went over my head.

A separate article mentions Ajira Airways Flight 316, and the episode of the same name, and its possible association with John 3:16. I’m sure everybody caught that but me.

If you’re still reading and not bored to tears, these were the best links I could find on the subject: Lostpedia on religion and the Bible.

What references to Christianity have you noticed in LOST?