Snowmania

Had a good day as stay-home-Dad, after yesterday which may have been my worst parenting day ever. Me, Paavo, and Svea were all cranky and unsoothable yesterday...so much so that Dawn came home early from work to bail us out. But today was great. Kiddos in wonderful spirits, and me feeling rested and happy. I took Paavo outside to play in the snow for the first time this Winter. It was ideal snowman weather...warm, and the snow was sticky and perfect. I haven't made a snowman in YEARS, and it was totally fun. I think Paavo and I built the greatest snowman I'd ever been involved in. Soccer cone hat, rotten potato eyes and nose, copper pipe mouth. Raised arms.

I'm reading an actual book. Chuck Klosterman's "Fargo Rock City" (thank you Santa). I'd seen reviews of it calling it one of the best rock music books ever written, and now I believe it. Klosterman must be my age exactly, and his descriptions of music fan-dom in the '80s are precise and delightful. It's a book about heavy metal, which I didn't like back then, but the book resonates far beyond genre. Maybe more than music, it's a book about the rural Midwest, and the awkwardness of being a teenage boy.
Speaking of Klosterman's book, I just read today in my friend Nate Houge's blog that he, too, likes Klosterman. Nate Houge has a lot in common with me: music fan, Lutheran, songwriter, stay-home-Dad. Nate and family are away for a year while his awesome wife Jodi is on internship, so I've got one less peer to hang out with. Today I posted on Nate's blog a realization that I've just stumbled upon: I've been enjoying the writing of this blog very much lately, probably because I have no real human friends to hang around with these days ('tis the curse of being a stay-home-Dad), so the best I can do is converse and share my life with an invisible friend-group on the internet via this blog. Pretty pitiful, I think, but it seems to give me some sense of comfort and community (false, tho' it may be). It's a wonderful sight to see Dawn walking home from work to spend her evening at home with us...finally, another adult to talk to!

Now that I've plunged into the "new normal" of life in 2007 I hope to do something deliberate about the rather lame state of my social life. In that recent issue of Time magazine "the year in health" I noticed a statistic saying how Americans have an ever-decreasing number of close friends (the average being three, including spouse!), and I thought "sounds familiar!" And to tie this into my deeping connection to my ancestral homeland, the countries of Finland and Sweden have the highest percentage of citizens who live alone, in single-person households. I wonder if this issue is in my genes. As Brian Hennemann of The Bottle Rockets says "Maybe it's something in my genes, maybe it's something in my jeans."