Florida Family Thanksgiving 2009

It had been a long time since I was in Cape Coral at my mom’s for Thanksgiving, long as in since 2001.  The past few Thanksgivings were spent at the Pink Cow in Tokyo.  Before that I cannot remember.  Despite the time away I did try to revive some of the old customs, like playing football before dinner.  This year it was running around a baseball outfield wrestling with Kiki (above).

This was Aya’s first ever Thanksgiving in the U.S. and as seen above my mom started showing her how to make all the traditional Thanksgiving dishes.  With the pumpkin pies and stuffing already made, all that was left was to make the corn muffins.  Well, that and the tofurky!

As with all Thanksgiving dinners, the waiting is the hardest part.  Kiki took it particularly hard as it was also her very first Thanksgiving too and she had no idea how long the wait could be.

Finally, after 90-minutes in the vacant apartment next door’s oven, the tofurky was ready to be carved!  I had long heard of tofurky, but never eaten one and was very stoked, though a little skeptical it would be enough for me as its size did not look that large.  I was dead wrong.

The tofurky provided three full meals of satisfied sustenance for Aya and I.  It was totally delicious too.  Absolutely no reason for millions of turkey birds to be murdered anymore.  It’s an outdated ritual that’s time has past.

We closed the holiday by driving out to Pine Island and watching the sunset.  I made this family portrait using the self-timer on my Nikon D300.  This Thanksgiving was much smaller than those of my youth where extended family gathered together, but it was still a very pleasant and stomach filling one.

Skimboarding 2009 Sessions 01 & 02 “Golden Flair”

My 22nd season of skimboarding began and ended in 7 days.  True, I have been on my skimboard many times in 2009, but those were not skimboarding sessions.  This may seem unfathomable as one of the main reasons I moved back to Florida was to once again skimboard on my beloved Sunset Beach, the place I love most in the world.  This is testament to the challenges returning to the U.S. after a 9-year sojourn have inflicted upon me.

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UP [2009] review

“They’ve done it again,” should be the official tagline for Pixar animation studios because with 2009’s UP, they have indeed done it again.  WALL*E was a perfect masterpiece of a movie to me.  I can still feel watching it.  The premise for UP did not have me believing Pixar could even get close to the mastery of WALL*E and I was left wondering how UP would awe and entertain me.  I was blown away after the opening scenes.

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WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE [2009] review

Why?  It is the one question I thought the most while watching the weirdly mesmerizing and somewhat off-putting emotional exploration that is the 2009 film WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE.  As most kids of my generation, I can recall holding that oddly shaped hardcover book.  The illustrations almost seems to shuffle in your eye with a natural twitch.  The movie version did not replicate that twitch, but it did very successfully bring the monsters to life with amazing puppetry and only the necessary CGI.

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PRETTY IN PINK [1986] review

I like that when you see a movie made in the 80s set in the 80s, you know it’s the 80s.  The 80s had its own look.  As did the 70s and 60s, and maybe even the early 90s.  After those times though, will we be able to say, “that is so 00s?”  This is perhaps why, especially for teen movies, classic ones like PRETTY IN PINK just cannot be replicated anymore.  This decade has no identity, no distinctiveness.  I really wonder if we will ever feel nostalgia for the 00s like we already do for the 80s and long have for the 60s?

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FERRIS BUELLER’S DAY OFF [1986] review

I had been wanting to re-watch FERRIS BUELLER’S DAY OFF for over a year now.  It is unfortunate that it took the passing of the film’s writer and director, John Hughes, to finally get it to be in my movie queue.  I have no idea when the last time I watched this movie was.  Maybe I only ever saw it once.  This 80s movie totally holds up in 2009 and remains the classic I always remembered it as in my memory.  It is a prime example of why the 80s were, unquestionably, the best decade for a kid to grow up in.

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Time, Sunday, Midnight, Music [poem]

• Written at:  Saint Petersburg, Florida, USA
• Where exactly:  my desk
• Written with:  MacBook (black)
• When:  Monday July 27, 2009 @ 12:21pm

Time, Sunday, Midnight Music

Time just does not STOP

Though every day I keep EXPECTING it to

Guess I cannot catch up then.
So many things almost in grasp.
Now fading further to half-dream status.

I still feel their memory, on Sunday nights.
In between blinks I almost see her then too.
So archived now is the time before the damage.
Filed neatly into a decade that is almost two past.

Music finds paths to these archives, involuntarily.
On purpose in doom moments when physical form becomes too taxing.

Forecasts for the future have jurisdiction only in day.
And today is over.

Past midnight is the wild.
Who could ever die in the day?
Surely we all fade after midnight on a predetermined Sunday.
Surely.

The Thin Memories [poem]

• Written at:  Saint Petersburg, Florida, USA
• Where exactly:  my desk
• Written with:  MacBook
• When:  Thursday June 4, 2009 @ 1:02am

The Thin Memories

Ever do these words echo in my mind…

“Teenage angst has paid off well, now I’m bored and old.”
I hear them all the time,
But mine own angst lingers,
Keeping me from getting old.

Purity of emotion peeks in adolescence.
Angers and wrongs incurred in such times
Are not yielded lightly.

Decades later, adult decisions are deferred, by design.
Ghosts wonder.
Physical pursuit ends, astral begins.

Selection of thin memories,
Engage the time meant to be bored and old.

Results are restless and stilted.

Memories that hurt are too valuable to give up.

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