Pickup Artist

Gwendolyn Oxenham was a college soccer player of consequence: She was a starter and leading goal-scorer at Duke who had a stint playing professionally in Brazil before getting her MFA in writing at Notre Dame. She also wrote a book I would have loved to have written about experiences I would have loved to have experienced. 

Oxenham and her boyfriend—himself a former Division I soccer player—traveled to 25 countries over three years searching for pickup soccer games. Their search took them from Caribbean beaches to Bolivian prisons, from pavement games between Arabs and Jews in Jerusalem to rooftops in Tokyo, and from the slums of Nairobi to many other locations in between. They also filmed their excursions for a documentary, which I’ll later watch and review.

Fair-Weather Fans

The air temperature was positively kiln-like during the local art fair, and so we spent more time sampling cool treats than artistic creations.

Brown Out

Write Knuckler

R.A. Dickey is an accomplished pitcher for the New York Mets whose big-league career has fluttered and progressed as slowly as a knuckleball, his signature pitch. In fact, he didn’t make a regular rotation until 2010 at the baseball-ancient age of 35. He has been nearly unhittable this year, going 44 1/3 innings without allowing an earned run. In that stretch, he threw back-to-back one-hitters, and his hot start earned him his first selection to the Major League All-Star Game.

Dickey’s unlikely rise to prominence in the baseball world would have made for a compelling read alone, but the fact that he’s a humanitarian whose causes include raising awareness and funds for the victims of human trafficking and providing aid for impoverished Latin American communities—issues typically outside of the purview of professional athletes—make his life story that much more intriguing. His empathies are informed, undoubtedly, by his own experiences with sexual abuse as a child, all of which he courageously chronicles in this book. It’s also clear that he’s a man of deep religious conviction, and he credits his faith for his success and with getting him through his darkest moments.

Given all R.A. Dickey has gone through personally and professionally, you can't help but root for him—even if you're a Yankees or non-sports fan.

Disguise the Limit

Along Came Polysemy

Polysemy [pol-ee-see-mee] is the linguistic term for a diversity of meanings for a given word. Bow, table, and jar are polysemous words, as is the example below.

play
noun 
          a dramatic performance, as on the stage: The girls collected autographs of the stage actors after a dress rehearsal of a Shakespeare play.

play 
verb 

          to exercise or employ oneself in diversion, amusement, or recreation: Reed likes to play on the swings with his dad.

Scattered Shots

As the sun continues to dry our parched lawns and used-to-be-green-spaces, here are some sundry pics of the kids out and about today.

By the Book

Going to our local library and reading in bed are two of our most favorite activities.

Game-Time Decisions

 

The kids often opt for the king—and queen, rook, bishop, knight, and pawn—of board games (Reed calls it "chest"), while I prefer the letter-perfect word game of Scrabble, the electronic version of which saw my player rating creep north of the previously elusive 1800 mark for the first time today. This means nothing to anyone but the most ardent Scrabble enthusiasts, and even they would contend that these ratings are inflated because of an on-line player’s access to dictionaries, best-play tutorials, and unlimited attempts at finding playable words—all of which are not found or allowed in traditional tournament play. But alas, this sort of thing means a lot in my circle of hard-Scrabble friends, and I consider this recent achievement to be tombstone material.

How Art Thou Fair?

Fair-ly good, I’d say, although it felt as though we were in a giant pottery kiln.

We stopped by the expansive Ann Arbor Street Art Fair, where we sought various forms of relief from the hot and humid conditions.

Fared Well

This crew is no worse for the wear after their week together. Many thanks to G and Aunt Liz for watching our lovely and lively children during our ten-year anniversary vacation.

Jump Street Knowledge

This movie is crude, full of juvenile humor, and extremely raunchy. In other words, it was the perfect date-night choice for me and Beni. (She wants me to note that Channing Tatum’s starring role might have played a major part in her approval of the film.)

American (Girl) Dream

Olivia asks to visit American Girl stores the way I imagine my younger self pressed my parents to stop by Hard Rock Cafes during our family vacations. I remember the cachet those logo tees held. Rocking one of their shirts at school after a recent trip to a big city netted you some coolness points, and owning several all but ensured you a place high in the social strata. (Unless, of course, you wore a bootleg version purchased from a street vendor by the convention center.)

I’ve never owned a (real) Hard Rock shirt in my life, but my parents deserve no blame for my uncool schoolboy status as a result of their refusal to pay what was clearly an exorbitant markup on a plain tee that bore the logo of a restaurant in which we’d never dined. So why can’t I practice my parents’ brand of fiscal discipline when navigating an American Girl store and their life-size prices?

Maybe it’s that I’ve bought into the notion that children can discover and love the subject of history through their interactions with these dolls and their backstories. Or maybe I’m a giant pushover.

Either way, I’m glad that I’m not the sole financier of this pricy operation. Olivia’s grandmothers have been very generous toward her efforts to build up her doll collection. On this super-hot summer day, my mother-in-law scored some major cool points with her granddaughter after treating her at the American Girl store in St. Louis.

Fine Art-ist

The Artist was my final selection of a triad of movies I was determined to get through on our flight home from Hawaii. It needed to keep my attention, which is a tall order given my general vacation exhaustion and specific sleep-disorder affliction. The odds were steep—steeper yet when you consider that the film is bereft of color and sound—and so one measure of The Artist’s greatness is that it kept my somnolently inclined self from sliding into a slumbering state. This film is a true masterpiece.

Home Is Where the Heart Is

Every once in a while, there’s a movie that unexpectedly makes your heart flutter—perhaps the butter-and-salt-rich movie popcorn is to blame—and Jeff, Who Lives at Home is one of them. It stars Jason Segel, who plays a slacker whose destiny is not limited to the basement of mother’s house. The film is far from perfect, but there’s enough here, and especially at the end, to pull at your heartstrings.

Do Do That Tautou That You Do So Well

I wish I could double major in Audrey Tautou films, but I can’t because I’ve already taken most of her classes—aka watched the movies of her filmography—prior to this year of the 50/50 project. And so I’m going to have to consider any of her newer stuff as progress toward my graduate degree. She is resplendent once again in La Délicatesse, in which she plays a widowed French woman who is courted by a Swedish co-worker. She lights up any screen, even the tiny one you get in the coach section on your long flight home from vacation.

Aloha Also Means Goodbye

This is the last day of our Hawaiian vacation. We have had a lovely week. Consolation for leaving paradise and entering into an extended period of air travel is getting to see our children at the final airport—and the thought that we might be back here as a family in several summers.

Shave (Ice): the Best for Last

As I’ve noted before, the memories of our travels are forged by the foods we consumed while away. Given our specific food needs/preferences—vegetarian, sometimes gluten-free, lots of local sweets—I researched our island options ahead of time. Nothing obsessive about that—right?

Here are a couple requisite food shots:

Maui’s food gem is Ululani’s shave ice, which is apparently immune to the law of diminishing returns. We frequented Ululani’s every day of our vacation, sampling their many flavors—grape, mango, pina colada, green tea, and tiger’s blood (vegetarian!)—and toppings such as ice cream, snow cap, azuki beans, tapioca pearls, and mochi balls. As they say, not all shave ice is created equal—and we concur. I could go on and on, but . . . actually, I will.

Ululani’s ability to get the finest shave of ice—so fine, in fact, that some (read: I) suggest they’ve created a fourth state of water, one that’s between solid ice and liquid water—and their commitment to use only finest, often local, ingredients for their purees and toppings mean this: In the future, when we tell you we’re planning a trip to Maui again, this time with the kids, please disregard our stated reasons for wanting to go back—the incredible beaches, breathtaking views, and fantastic outdoor activities—because they’re all lies. Well, maybe not lies as much as obstructions of truth. Because it’s mostly about the Ululani’s.

For Purple Hillsides Majesty

The silver (purple?) lining of our sunrise-views-on-the-volcano debacle was that we were in an area of the island, once we made our way down the mountain, whose elevation and climate are ideal for farms and wineries—and tours of those farms and wineries. We made a stop at an organic lavender farm, and the herbal expanse provided us with some much-needed therapeutic benefits.

Volcano-No

In retrospect, awaking my sleep-deprived wife so that we could navigate countless hairpin turns up the side of a volcano in total darkness for the opportunity to catch some pictures of the sunrise with dozens of fellow shivering vacationers was not my best call. The views were spectacular, but they were definitely not ones worth risking my marital status over.

Lobbyists

We like hanging out in our hotel’s open-air lobby: