Further thoughts on recent posts:
1) A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the ten year anniversary of meeting my ex. It's odd, because I don't miss her anymore, and the point of the piece was to explore my feelings about a marriage that ended, and how that feeling of, for lack of a better way to describe it, failing can affect a person. That fear of failure has unfortunately hovered over nearly everything I've done in the five years since we split.
And yet, now that I find myself with Tabbatha, I find myself constantly surprised by my willingness--no, my desire--to be part of her life. She just landed a new job, and I found that I was insanely happy for her--a feeling of selflessness with which I'm not acquainted. (I'm a selfish bastard, and I've never really pretended to be otherwise.) Also, the hours of this job will require me to spend much of my time on Kid Duty--and I couldn't be happier.
In other words, this relationship is leading me, at forty-one, to finally live like an adult. About time.
2) Nothing to add to my previous post, but I want to say it again: Go see Pan's Labyrinth.
3) When I wrote yesterday about the divisive rape story playing out in Iraq, I didn't mention where I'd read about it, because I figured it would be a big enough story, everyone would be covering it. And as long as you read The New York Times (or any number of international papers), you would have heard about it.
But if, like me, you live in Iowa, and your primary source of information is the once-revered Des Moines Register, you'd never know. There were a couple of local stories of real interest on the front page, but there was also a story about some local yokel wanting to guest host Today, page two was full of celebrity gossip, and page three had a wire story on Anna Nicole Smith.
Buried further into the paper were the stories on the federal appeals court denying basic human and constitutional rights to prisoners at Gitmo and the Supreme Court tossing out punitive damages against Big Tobacco. Hey, it's not like those are important stories.
And of the rape story, nary a mention. Surprise, surprise.
