Juliette has made cleaning out the office closet one of her summer projects, which meant that this past weekend I had the opportunity to go through some boxes that I haven't opened in probably five years.

I always love these little trips down memory lane, rediscovering all the little treasures from my past. Being able to touch them, having a physical connection, always brings back the associated memories much more strongly than just thinking about them.

For example, there's the rocks that I found under the deck at the cabin my family used to rent in Tahoe every year. Turning them over in my hands, I remember how fascinated I was by the flat orange color on the top and the clear, ice-like crystal structure on the bottom. More, I remember the bite of the cold air in my nose, the crunch of snow under my feet, and the layer of pine needles and fir cones that littered the ground under the deck.

I especially enjoy it when these little forays into my "treasure boxes" turn up things I thought I'd lost. I actually let out a little cry of joy when I found a big stack of old RPG manuals and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles graphic novels that I thought had been lost or donated years ago.

On the other hand, there's also a certain embarassment that comes with some of the things I find. I have a tendency toward being a packrat, and why I save some things baffles even me. A selection of some of the useless or forgotten things I don't know why I saved:

• A mostly full box of perfectly good staples, tucked in between some old harmonicas instead of, you know, being put into a stapler.
• My "Intro to Systems Engineering" notebook, completely blank.
• Ten or twelve rolls of old Pez, most of which weren't even still packaged with their dispensers.
• An old micro-butane torch I bought for a project for my high school physics class, long since empty and broken.
• A bunch of empty cigarette lighters.
• A giant pile of old homework, some of which dated back to my freshman year of high school.
• A 1985 nickel.
• A green permanent marker that looked like it was about 15 years old, completely dry.

I started having flashes of those hoarder interventions you see on TV, with the host aghast at the piles of garbage and the hoarder breaking down in tears saying "I don't know why I kept it!" I shuddered and made a silent vow never to become one of those people. Not that Juliette would ever let that happen, anyway. But still.

Anything I found that I couldn't remember at all and had no immediate use, I tossed. I actually even got rid of some stuff I did remember, deciding that I didn't really need it or wasn't going to use it. By the time I was done, I'd cut my pile of stuff by almost half.

This is a big step, people. I may actually turn into a grown-up yet.

Seven years ago, today, I got all dressed up and then proceeded to have the best day of my life. Tonight, Juliette and I are going to celebrate the occasion by getting dressed up (though to a lesser degree than we did that day seven years ago), dropping off our son at our friends' house, and going to a fancy restaurant for a nice meal and some time alone with each other, like real couples do.

The seventh anniversary isn't one that people usually make a big deal over. Traditional folk give each other gifts of wool or copper; modern types give each other desk sets. I don't know about you all, but I had to look those up. All those anniversary gift themes tend to run together for me--I have a vague recollection of paper for the first, silver for the twenty-fifth, and gold for the fiftieth, but in between it's all fuzzy.

I'll tell you what, though: the seventh anniversary does have a bit of a special note in our case. This will be our first time celebrating an anniversary when we've been married longer than we were dating.

Actually, the day we passed our dating time happened a few months ago--March 16th, to be exact. Neither of us noticed at the time, but then we'd just had Juliette's birthday and anyway, these days our attention tends to be taken up a bit too much by everyday life to notice obscure milestones passing.

It's kind of an odd feeling, realizing that we've now been married longer than we dated. I've always thought of us as having been together forever, but only recently married. Now, though, and forever after, the bulk of our relationship will have been post-wedding. Even having done the math, I can hardly believe it; it still feels like just the other day that I saw her walking down the aisle toward me.

There are still some big moments to come, of course. In 2012, we'll have been together for half of Juliette's life. In 2013, half of mine. In 2020, we'll have been parents longer than we were together without kids. And, of course, there are all the normal birthdays, anniversaries, graduations, weddings, and so on.

The past seven years have been filled with work and play, laughter, tears, time together and apart. I've come to understand that the most important part of life is the people in it, and so spending your days and nights with good people who you love and who love you is crucial. Me, I couldn't ask for a better person to spend my time with.

Happy anniversary, Juliette.

4:26 PM, June 17th. Roger Ebert says via Twitter: "Find me a person who would value any video game above 'Huckleberry Finn,' and I'll show you a fool.'

4:28 PM, June 17th. I respond: "So tell me, which movie should I value higher than Beethoven's Ninth? Or higher than 'Huckleberry Finn,' for that matter?"

Ebert doesn't respond.

6:37 AM, June 22nd. Ebert quotes a Morning news article: "Video games don't yet (and maybe never will) replicate the experience of reading a good book."

9:37 AM, June 22nd. I respond: "Movies also don't replicate the experience of reading a good book. You of all people should know that."

Ebert doesn't respond.

9:41 PM, June 22nd. Ebert links to a survey he created, asking people whether they value Huckleberry Finn or a great video game more.

10:06 PM, June 22nd. I ask him: "Which do you value higher, Huckleberry Finn or a great movie?"

Feeling frustrated and pissy and degenerating into passive-aggressiveness, I follow that with: "I'm not really sure why I bother asking, since you clearly aren't interested in a dialogue. Or even intellectual honesty."

Obviously, Ebert doesn't respond.

Why on Earth am I talking to Roger Ebert? Why do I even care what he thinks about video games? Why is it so difficult for me to just accept that he's more or less being a troll at this point, and then move on with my life? Why am I becoming the kind of guy that people feel the need to throw that XKCD link at? I don't know, but for whatever reason, this whole Ebert/video game thing really has my panties in a bunch.

Well, that's not entirely true. I know why. Here's a man who can write a sensitive and honest appraisal of race and racism, who is willing to share a wonderful and personal remembrance of his father. A man who can produce writings that are familiar, insightful, and that inspire me to be a better writer. That he can also be pigheaded and unreasonable frustrates me.

Maybe I'm looking for someone to idolize. I don't have a lot of heroes, so maybe that's a void that I want to fill. Maybe I just want people (and, by extension, the world) to make sense. Maybe this is just the family tendency toward obsession and compulsive behavior coming out. I don't know.

What I do know is that trying to get anybody to be what I want them to be is a waste of both my time and theirs. Roger Ebert doesn't know me and has no reason at all to care whether I read his blog or follow him on Twitter. It's time for me to stop acting any other way.

What about you folks? Do bloggers and Twitterers ever get under your skin this way? What do you do about it?

"Raising Respectful Sons: A Father's Reaction to the 'Slampigs' Scandal":

Back in the early stages of my wife’s pregnancy, before we knew we would be having a son, people often asked me whether I wanted a boy or a girl. My response usually went something like this: “Well, I’d be happy either way, I think, and I don’t have a preference, really. I don’t want one more than the other. Honestly, though, the idea of having a daughter kind of terrifies me.” That’s the thought that occurred to me again Monday morning when I ran across this article in fellow Life As A Human author Schmutzie’s Twitter feed.

Somewhere around 10:30 or so every evening, my dog, Cooper, lets me know that he has to go out. By this time, Jason has been in bed for several hours, and usually even Juliette has said her goodnight. I will be sitting alone on my living-room couch, the room dark except for the one dim lamp on the side table. Sometimes I'm writing and sometimes screwing around on the Internet. Sometimes I'm just putting off going to bed. The house is quiet, except for the sound of Cooper breathing, and the occasional smack of Jason's foot against the side of his crib as he rolls over in his sleep. I'm usually oblivious to the world, ensconced in whatever it is I'm doing on my computer. Then I'll catch a glimpse of movement out of the corner of my eye, and I look over to see Cooper staring at me expectantly.

"Do you have to go outside?" I ask? He responds by running to the back door and sitting, his nose pointed at the door handle.

I unlatch the door and slide it and the screen open. "OK," I say, and Cooper rushes out, his fur tickling my leg as he brushes by me.

As I step outside, my yard is a featureless shadow--my eyes haven't adjusted yet, and not much light makes it out from the lamp in the living room. I step over to the edge of the patio, feeling the cool grit and cracks in the concrete under my feet. I cock my ear toward the side yard where Cooper does his business, listening for the telltale trickle. The evening air is cool but not cold, and has that subtle scent that I can never quite pinpoint or define, other than "Southern California on a summer night."

In front of me is the fence that separates my yard from the neighbor, which reaches to just below my eye level. There are never many stars out, and never any really bright ones, not like the ones I used to see back home. But when I look out over the tops of the yards in my neighborhood, south toward the shops and movie theater, eventually toward downtown and then Mexico, there's this soft orange glow that warms the bottom of the marine layer fog, silhouetting the rooftops and palm trees and eucalyptus that surround my house.

Looking out at that light, the surest sign that I live in a city now and not the little country town where I grew up, I sometimes feel like I ought to feel resentment or disdain. After all, this is another part of what we call "pollution." I never do, though. I just can't deny the beauty of it, different from what I ought to be used to, what ought to feel normal and right. A sense of peace, calmness comes with that sight.

I've been realizing that this moment has become one of the high points of most of my days. I rarely think about it until it's happening, and my immediate reaction when I notice Cooper looking at me is annoyance at being interrupted. Then I step outside and my attitude shifts.

It's a lonely time, though. I always find myself wishing that someone were still awake to share it with me, someone other than the dog, who, well-meaning and affectionate though he is, can't really appreciate the spectacle. At least he can't tell me about it.

It's usually not long before I close up my laptop and head to bed. When I slide under the covers, the sheets are already warm from the heat of Juliette's sleeping body. It's not as familiar or fulfilling as a hug, but I don't want to wake her, so it will do.

Yesterday I finished and sent off my latest piece for Life As A Human, an examination of the game Heavy Rain and why it appeals to me. (It hasn't gone up yet as of the time of this writing.) This is now the second article I've written for them about video games, and so far I'm the only one there to write on that topic. It makes some sense, probably, since I think I'm the only guy of my generation (or younger) writing for that site, but it's still a little odd for me because I haven't been much of a gamer for quite a while now.

The last game I played while it was still current and a big deal was probably Mass Effect, back in '07. Which I loved, don't get me wrong, but even at that point I was pretty far behind most of the rest of the gamer world. Consider this (non-exhaustive) list of hugely popular or influential games over the last five or ten years that I did't play (it's lengthy, so feel free to skim or skip): both Deus Ex games, Grand Theft Auto 3 & 4, all of the Metal Gear Solids, all of the Elder Scrolls games after Daggerfall, both Gears of War games, all of the God of War games, all of the Halos after the first, Shadow of the Colossus, both Bioshocks, Braid, Fallout 3, Flower, Heavy Rain, Uncharted 2, all of the Final Fantasies after 7, Super Mario Galaxy, Katamari Damacy, Little Big Planet, all of the Battlefield games, both Modern Warfares, Dragon Age, all of the Splinter Cells, Mirror's Edge, Left 4 Dead, Spore, Civ 4, Geometry Wars, Dead Space, both Assassin's Creed games, and basically all of the post-SNES Zeldas.

I'm obviously aware of the gaming industry, at least to the point where I know what I'm missing, and yet I spend less and less time actually playing games. The "pile of shame" I listed up there--slightly misleading since I don't actually own them--gets a little bigger every year, and it's to the point where I don't think I'd ever actually be able to catch up.

Moreover, I'm finding that I care less and less about the fact that I'm missing out. As with most of the things that have fallen by the wayside in the past couple of years--games, TV, movies, etc.--the pull has slackened a lot. In some cases, like with TV, it actually feels like kind of a chore to keep up, and I actively look forward to the ends of series that I've been following for a while.

The strange thing is that even though the allure of games seems to be falling off for me, my interest them isn't. I spend rather a lot of time each week reading gaming sites, listening to gaming podcasts, and thinking about games and the game industry. It seems that I've become more interested in games as a phenomenon than as art or entertainment that I actually intend to experience. Which seems a little perverse, if you ask me.

My relationship with art and media is always changing as I age, which is, I suppose, inevitable. But it leaves me curious to know where it will go from here. Will I ever get back into gaming? Is it something that I'll eventually abandon entirely? What is it that's holding my attention about gaming now? I don't know, but it's interesting to think about, anyway.

What do you think?

Before this week, I hadn't been to the gym in almost two months. Between trips and work and family illnesses I had been too busy, too sick, or too far away to go. Finally, though, I managed to get healthy and rested, and finished a big project at the office, and picked up my exercise routine where I left off. In a lot of ways it has felt like I'm starting all over again; the routines and people feel unfamiliar, and, of course, I've lost a lot of stamina during my hiatus. But it's good to be back, if for no other reason than for being reintroduced to a phenomenon that had managed to slip my mind over the course of my absence.

It all came back to me Wednesday morning, when I reintroduced myself to spin class. By about the twenty-minute mark (in an hour-long class) I was really starting to labor. My thighs were burning, sweat was pouring down my face and stinging my eyes, and my breath was coming in ragged gasps. I found myself repeating that familiar mantra in my mind: "Just two more songs. Two more songs and I'll have been here a respectable amount of time. Two more songs and I can quit for the day."

I was almost ready to quit when something strange happened, something that I had forgotten in the past two months. Completely unprompted by anything going on around me, images of Jason suddenly popped into my mind. In my mind I could see the way he holds up his arms when he wants you to pick him up out of bed, hear the gleeful sound of his shrieks when you tickle him. And with those images, this incredible feeling of peace came over me, and I found the corner of my mouth turning up in a smile.

I don't know if this is what people mean when they talk about "runner's high" or if it's just a weird trick of my consciousness, but this imagery and the Zen-like calm that comes with it is something happens to me a lot during that spin class, but rarely seems to happen elsewhere, if ever. Just when I'm feeling like I'm about to hit the wall, I'll think of the weight of Jason's head on my shoulder when he's tired, and the softness of his hair on my cheek, and I'll be recharged. It's a fleeting thing, too, something that I can never quite seem to summon on my own, or hold onto once it's there. It's usually not long before the instructor decides to kick it up to the next level, and then there's no room left in my head for anything other than the exertion.

But, man, it's worth it. If this is what marathonners experience when they run their races, I can really see the appeal.

Juliette and I have a nice little system for figuring out our nightly chores. When Juliette cooks, I do the dishes. When I cook, I do the dishes. It works out perfectly because Juliette gets some time to relax in the evening and I get the peace of mind that comes from knowing that the dishwasher has been loaded properly and the dishes have been cleaned to my standards. There is one thing I hate about doing the dishes, though. I hate the utensil caddy.

You may be thinking, "But Mike, why would you hate your utensil caddy? All it does is sit in your silverware drawer and make sure that your salad forks and dinner forks stay separate. Surely you don't hate your utensil caddy. After all, what could it possibly have done to you to inspire such strong emotion?" I do hate it, though. And I'll tell you why: it's because I'm a crazy person.

I hate that my utensil caddy is made out of widely-spaced wire mesh, because it means that every time I open the silverware drawer, the butter knives slide through the spaces in the mesh grid and stick there. I end up either having to unstick them before taking them out to use them or remembering to open the drawer very slowly every single time. Or deal with bent butter knives. People, this is not a choice I should have to make.

As annoying as that is, it's not such a huge problem. After all, I could just go get a new utensil caddy, one with smaller gaps, or which lacks gaps entirely. (I shouldn't have to do this, but it's still an easy enough solution.) What really drives me up the wall about my utensil caddy is something common to every caddy I've ever seen. It is an inherent design flaw.

Imagine that you have finished washing and drying your dishes, and now must set about putting your utensils back where they belong. If your house is anything like my house, you've probably got two or three forks to put away, maybe four, and perhaps six or eight clean ones already in the drawer. So you drop your nice, freshly cleaned forks back into their neat little caddy spaces and go on about your business.

Some time in the not too distant future, you will need a fork again, of course, so back to the caddy you'll go. And most likely you'll take the fork from the top of the little pile in the fork space. But, people, that is one of the forks that you just put back in there. What about those six or eight forks sitting on the bottom of the pile? Odds are, you won't get down to them at all unless you have company over, which at my house, anyway, happens no more than twice a week and usually a lot less. This means that a small minority of your forks is being used at least 2.5 times more than the rest, and is thus accumulating that much more wear than the rest.

Of course I recognize that you can easily avoid this problem by either always taking the fork from the bottom or by always putting away the clean forks on the bottom of the pile. But that is completely unsatisfying, because either way it means you have to take out all of the forks to get to the spot you want and then put them all back every single time. And that's just unacceptably inefficient.

Look, I already told you that I'm a crazy person.

Like most crazy people, I'd like to blame it on my parents. I know that's kind of a cliché, but in my case I think it's probably true, since this particular sort of crazy seems to run in my family. Trust me, if you've ever seen the look on my aunt's face when someone says that they may have accidentally spilled a drop of spaghetti sauce into the crack between her stove and counter, you'll know that I'm not making this up.

I'm convinced, though, that it's not just me and my mom's family who are crazy like this. Somebody else out there has gotten worked up about stuff just as ridiculous as a utensil caddy. So tell me: what's your bit of crazy?

Juliette, Jason, and I were in Virginia this past week, visiting my mom and stepdad. Now, I could go ahead and tell you all the details of what we did, where we went, and what we ate. (I swear I gained five pounds on this trip.) I'm told, though, that a picture is worth a thousand words, and I think that this one nicely sums up the whole experience:

What I love about this photo is the unbridled joy on Jason's face. It's a sight that I got to see a lot over the past week, which was a wonderful thing. But as I look at it now, I can't help but feel a little sad as well.

I had been a bit anxious leading up to this trip about how Jason would react to his grandparents. After all, he'd only met my mom a few times, and my stepdad only once, when he was just a few weeks old. Of course, he's a pretty outgoing little guy and very adaptible, and Juliette and I would be there to give him an anchor, but still, we were going to be in a strange place, seeing people that he mostly didn't know. I wondered what I'd do if he couldn't sleep at their house, or if he decided he didn't like being there, never really coming up with any answers.

It turns out I needn't have worried. Jason took to my parents and their house right away. He fussed, of course, but mostly because we wouldn't let him climb up and down the stairs as much as he wanted. By the third night, he was asking for "Gamma" to read him his bedtime story, something he normally wants Juliette to do. And on the plane ride home, he repeated over and over, "Gappa, Ay-go. Gappa, Ay-go." (For those of you who don't speak toddler, that's "Grandpa, San Diego.")

And that gets to the reason for my present bittersweet feelings. It's always nice to come home and to resume the familiar routines of my life. I know that Jason will respond well to being back on his regular schedule. But it broke my heart a little to hear Juliette trying to explain to him that, no, Grandma and Grandpa live in Virginia, not San Diego. He never seemed to quite grasp the idea that they'd be far away, but I'm not sure whether that makes it better or worse. Jason is, like all small children, a creature of the moment, and things don't have to be out of sight for long for him to be onto the next.

This is something I've struggled with a lot over the past couple of years. San Diego is where our life is now. Our careers and wonderful friends are here, and we've begun to put down some real roots. But the closest of Jason's grandparents, aunts, and uncles lives 450 miles away--the ones we just left are on the other side of the country. It's important to me that he have a relationship with his family, but with everyone so far away, it's hard to see how that can happen, at least not in the same way that I had when I was young. Juliette keeps reassuring me that the distance might make things different, but not necessarily worse--after all, she grew up 3000 miles away from her grandparents and still managed to have a very close relationship with them. I still can't help but feel sad, not so much for Jason, but for the rest of the family for not being able to see him as often as we'd like. In the end, he'll hardly remember this part of his life, if at all, and what will stay with him will be times that come later. But I know that now is a time that will always be special in my memories, and I'm sorry that so many of the people that are important to me won't get the same time with him as I do.

While I was visiting, I helped my mom pick out and set up a new computer, and got her a Skype account while I was at it. I'm hoping that regular video chat sessions will help keep Gamma and Gappa fresh in Jason's mind. It's not the same as a trip to see them, but it's what I can do for now. My question for you is this: if you've raised kids far from your family, or if you grew up far from your parents' families, how did you deal with it? Were you able to overcome the distance?

I hope to hear from you.

I mentioned before that I've been going to a spin class at my gym. I'm enjoying it pretty well, or, rather, I enjoy having done it but think it's akin to torture while actually doing it. I've come to terms with wearing bike shorts and having special shoes, and I think I'm even relatively comfortable with the fact that I'm sure I make ridiculous faces when I'm working hard. There's still one thing that's weird, though, and that's that I don't know where to point my eyes.

This class, like most group exercise classes, is mostly women. Most of whom don't wear a lot, and most of what they do wear is either tight-fitting or revealing, or both. Which, when you're working and sweating as hard as you do in that class only makes sense--sometimes I wish I could wear that little. But the upshot of all this is that there are very few places I can look where I won't be staring at someone's butt or cleavage. I'm not actually ogling anyone, and, actually, I couldn't even if I wanted to because I can't conveniently wear my glasses during that class. And without my glasses I can really only make out vaguely human-shaped forms around me, with little in the way of detail.

I try to get to class a few minutes early, wearing my glasses as I walk in. And I keep my glasses on while I warm up, only taking them off when we really get going. The idea is to let everyone see that I'm nearsighted so hopefully they won't think I'm a pervert if I accidentally stare at them. I know this is a ridiculous thing to think about, but it seriously does go through my head every time. I even make a show of squinting when I look up at the instructor.

I often wonder if I'm the only person at my gym who has these kinds of anxieties. It seems like there must be someone else thinking about it, but to all outward appearances everyone is just completely nonchalant about everything. I mean, take the locker room for example. I'm used to there being nudity in a locker room. I mean, this is the place specially sectioned off for people to change and shower in. Of course people are going to be naked in there. But for whatever reason, guys aren't just incidentally naked in this locker room. It's like a little miniature nudist colony in there. There are guys just relaxing, sitting around naked. Guys watch TV in there, totally naked--at any given time there will be two to five guys standing and sitting around the TV in the buff. No more than one of them will even be holding a towel, much less have it wrapped around himself. And guys will be standing around having long naked conversations, standing closer than I'm comfortable standing near people even when all parties are clothed. There's one guy that seems to be on a similar schedule to me, who every day has something like a ten-minute conversation with his friends, one foot up on a table while he rubs lotion on his legs and groin area.

Now, again, I know that there's going to be some amount of nudity in a locker room. I just don't know how it happens that people are so completely casual about it. Like, do you just get to a certain age or something and completely stop caring? I mean, if I'm naked there is no person on this Earth, male or female, old or young, familiar or a total stranger, who I could talk to while standing within arm's reach without being painfully aware of my nudity the entire time. And it has nothing to do with sexuality, either--when I don't have any clothes on, I feel... well, I feel naked. Isn't that where that expression comes from, "feeling naked"?

The thing I want to know is if people really are that nonchalant or if it's just that no one wants to be the only one to admit that he's not. I certainly try to act like it's all completely normal for me, just so I'm not the one to make it weird. Maybe everybody else is secretly thinking "I'mnakedi'mnakedi'mnakedi'mnaked" while they're talking about stocks or worrying about not accidentally ogling some woman during spin class. I have this sneaking suspicion, though, that it's really just me.

What do you think?