A BLISSFUL AFTERNOON: A PHOTO ESSAY“Oh, how I love to escape to the Malibu canyons for a bike ride!.” In the late morning of November 15, 2009 I drove to the Malibu canyons to ride along the Santa Monica Mountains. It has been a long time since I had been here. Before marriage and larger life responsibilities, I used to escape to these canyons above Malibu for looong bike rides just about every weekend! Even as they physically exhausted – and even traumatized – me, they were spiritually relaxing and restorative. Here again for the first time in a year or two, the effect is the same. Above is a…

DOING MY CIVIC DUTYAfter voting on November 3, 2009 local election… I wrote the following letter to the editor for our local newspaper but was persuaded not to send it. It was considered impolitic. Alas, I resort to posting it here: I would say a few words about the candidacy of Monique Dollone for the Ventura Unified School Board. My wife, Maria Geib, was hired as a long-term substitute teacher at Montalvo Elementary School and eventually became a full-time teacher there. It was while Monique Dollone’s daughter was in Maria’s 4th grade class that Monique was arrested for violating a restraining order. I heard all year long from her about…

ELIZABETH ANNE GEIB 18 weeks, One Day My Dearest Elizabeth Anne, Elizabeth! Finally, I can call you by name! My second daughter, Elizabeth Anne Geib. It is now some two months since we were informed that we were to have another girl. As the doctor told me this I felt a bit dazed, immediately having a vision of myself in fifteen years: a household with two teenaged daughters, a wife, with myself retreating to my “man cave” in the garage to life weights. “Death by estrogen!” one friend joked with me. I also had a moment’s sadness when I realized I would most likely never have a son. My family…

HELLO! 11 weeks, Five Days Oh, second child of mine! Three weeks until your mother and I can discover your sex. You are now some three months old, and I for one am impatient to meet and start to get to know you. Your mother has had a different pregnancy than that of your older sister; hormonal surges, nausea followed by hunger and then nausea again – exultation and then crankiness. Whew! But now with your second trimester these discomforts have moderated and we look for calmer seas ahead. There will soon be the “quickening” stage, then viability, felt movement in the womb, and then childbirth. Time will move slowly…

JOY! Flowers for My Family On the “Big Day” Dear Second-Born Child, Hello! Welcome to the world! We have not yet met, and, indeed, as I write this you are gestating in your mother’s womb: a quick online search describes you as the “size of a sesame seed” and “resembling more a tadpole than a baby.” (It also tells me next week you will start developing your heart and circulatory system! Hurrah!) But even though you are still in an incipient stage, your DNA is as complete as ever it will be: you are yourself, though less so than in the future. Your mother and I expectantly await you. In…

THE MUSIC INDUSTRYThe American popular music business is not what it once was When digital technology in the form of CD ripping and file sharing ravaged the music industry, I did not mourn. I would see all my high school students take their music collection out of their backpacks and all the CDs were copied, and I would just cheer inwardly. “Yeah, America! Pirate away!” When album sales plunged and the record companies lost billions, I applauded. “Couldn’t happen to nicer people!” I thought to myself. I had always figured there was a level of hell reserved for greedy, exploitative music executives. A few years later it happened to the…

A DYING CHILDCheryl and Michael Haggard cradle their son, Maddux, before he died at six days old in 2005. I read an article in the newspaper this morning about “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep”, an organization that helps parents to grieve the deaths of their infants by taking high-quality photographs of them. The article and photographs left me in tears in the booth of the restaurant where I habitually sprawl out and read my three Sunday newspapers. It has been like this for some time, and I don’t completely understand it. Whenever I read about a stillborn child or see a couple pushing a Down’s Syndrome baby in…

Are the Star Wars films overrated? Do they age well? Movies for teenage boys? The first Star Wars films were iconic, meaningful presences in my childhood. The sage of the Skywalker family, the Empire, the Rebellion, and the Jedi captivated my pre-teen imagination. Star Wars, the first of these films, opened in theaters in 1977. I was 10 years old. Some twenty years later the second slew of Star Wars movies were released, and I hoped to enjoy them as much. But I was a different person by then. In fact, I was 32 years old when “Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace” appeared in 1999 and I hoped…

“You can never know. Not for sure – one gropes in the darkness and does the best one can – this incredibly humbling job of “parent.” It grieves me to my core to hear my daughter cry. I look at her tears and hear her plaintive sobs as she struggles to catch her breath amidst waves of wails, and it wrenches my very soul – I can describe it in no lesser terms. I would do almost anything to sooth her – to ease her anxiety and to take away the pain. It seems I can do little, if anything. Standing there helplessly I want to cry with her but…

It has been a long winter. The first week of this year 2008 I gnashed my teeth at trying to take care of a child with pneumonia at the same time as write no less than 20 college letters of recommendation. What an ugly blur of a week that was! I felt I had to choose between taking care of my sick daughter struggling to breathe clearly and taking care of my students and their college needs (taking care of myself was not on the agenda). It was dark and rainy; I didn’t sleep much; all I felt was pressure and stress. It was much more “crisis control” than considered…

DEMOCRACY IN ACTIONGovernment rebates coming to citizens soon. I read with interest and curiosity this morning that the federal government intends to cut my wife, myself, and daughter a $1,500 check as a means to boost consumer spending, stimulate the economy, and ward off a looming recession. While any unexpected monies are welcome, I think I need the money less than the government. Maria and I live within our means and don’t live mired in debt; this has been a bedrock principle of our marriage and family, and it results in better sleep at night. We live without the burden of heavy credit card debt weighing us down, as do…

A SICK CHILD Bags under her eyes as Julia recuperates from pneumonia. There I was, the living stereotype: the worried parent hovering over his sick child and looking down with concern and fear. All day long Julia had not been her usual self. Her cheeks were flushed. She did not giggle or play with her parents: she laid there with a blank expression on my face. She had once become so lethargic that she could not sit up, or even hold her head up: she was like a rag doll. For the first time in her life, Julia was really sick. She had bacterial pneumonia. Julia had particular trouble sleeping…

NEW ERA OF HIGH-DEFINITION VISUAL MEDIAMaria browses the Internet on our new HDTV. My Internet service provider, Time Warner, has always probably held that I was a strange customer. When I first called them up to order service, they were incredulous that I wanted only Internet service and no cable access for television. They had all sort of special deals, the customer representative explained to me, to bundle high-speed cable modem access to the Internet with all the cable TV stations. “No,” I was patient but firm. “I just want a contract for Internet access but NO cable TV.” I got what I wanted. For almost two decades I have…

2008: A FRESH START“They say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.”Andy Warhol My New Year’s Resolution’s have traditionally seen spectacular successes that made the whole exercise worth it – and a few utter failures which are recidivist in nature. In focusing on the failure, I wonder at why I just don’t get it done. Much of it, I think, has to do with work. The new semester begins and I am so traumatized in terms of trying to get a handle on my classes that three months pass before I can even contemplate my own life. I am in “survival” mode. But that does…

ASSASSINATION SERVES THE CAUSE OF DISCORD“Someone shot Bhutto in the neck and chest, initial news reports claimed, and then the assassin blew himself up.” DECEMBER 27, 2007 at 6:47 a.m. An unquiet mind drove me from my bed this morning. An acute personal disappointment of the previous day, and then brooding and anger over the War in Iraq and disappointment with George W. Bush and the Republican Party (and the direction of my country in general), turned over and over in my mind in the darkness after I woke up around 4 a.m. For two hours in the pre-dawn darkness I “knitted the old knot of contrariety” and tossed and…

NEONATAL FACEBOOK PAGE: A FULLY DIGITAL LITTLE GIRL“Born in March of 2007, my daughter Julia will lead a 21st century life.” CHANGE VS. CONTINUITY: A FATHER AND HIS DAUGHTER The other day I read yet another cover article about the “threat to privacy” we Americans supposedly suffer. In 2007 we enjoy over a decade of popular use of the Internet access, but it is the proliferation of “social networking” sites such as Myspace and Facebook in recent years that have launched this new alarm, it seems. Perhaps it is only when you cannot swing a cat without hitting someone with a Myspace page that you have “mass use.” Or perhaps…

Of Bees and Men: A Tragic Collision OUCH! If a person bicycles enough, they accumulate stories. Most of the time I bike through the desert canyons and citrus fields of Ventura County without incident. It is just me and the occasional car passing by on a rural highway. My legs work, my lungs burn, and my heart pumps: I reflect on my life and finish refreshed, most of the time, and that is the point. I enjoy the solitude, and I enjoy an unremarkable trip on the back roads and farmer’s fields of western Ventura County. But there are exceptions. For example, while biking Southern California streets over the past…

Mother with child on vacation in Pacific Grove, California. “CHILD-CENTERED”? The social changes stemming from women entering the workforce in large numbers towards the end of the 20th century and the rise in the cost of living find more American families nowadays juggling the world of family and the needs of family. American women, in particular, find themselves struggling to juggle the demands of career and the those of family. Not surprisingly, contemporary couples have fewer children than in the past. Families don’t need more kids to help on the farm as in the past, and Americans barely replace themselves — a bare 2.1 children per couple. It is in…

“It was as if the light falling to earth was put through an orange-colored filter, and the sun was a raging red orb.” AN UNUSUAL SUNDAY AFTERNOON Upon awakening this morning we felt and heard the vicious winds whipped up against the side of our house, as well as the trees bending and straining against the winds — news reports clocked the winds at around 50 mph throughout Southern California. This was of interest to, but we were not alarmed. I went to a restaurant, ate breakfast, read the newspaper, and sat down to write. The usual early Sunday afternoon routine. By noon there was a very distinct smell of…

VLADIMIR PUTIN“Russia needs a strong state power and must have it. But I am not calling for totalitarianism.” What exactly is he calling for then? “A GOVERNMENT OF LAWS, AND NOT OF MEN” The past few years have seen the rise of a handful of authoritarian leaders around the world who have taken great strides to eliminate any checks to their power inside their nations. They have outlawed alternative political parties and muffled the press towards portraying almost exclusively government-sponsored messages. These leaders have sought to make themselves almost synonymous with governmental power, and they have largely succeeded. There are no significant opposition political parties in Russia or Venezuela. Newspapers…

ARTISTIC MASTERY“Hewitt is one of these world-class musicians whose live performances of even the most technically difficult music do not contain any mistakes of note, yet still I was a bit dislocated at hearing such a different interpretation of this music.” So I saw Canadian pianist Angela Hewitt at the Orange County Performing Arts Center last night play all 24 of the preludes and fugures from Book I of J.S. Bach’s “Well Tempered Clavier.” She played them all, one after the other, as in a trance. No sheet music, either. She had them memorized. I am not kidding. I was lucky enough to have fourth row seats just behind her,…

3:45 IN THE MORNING“…something tells me I shall miss these late evenings with daughter Julia.” Maybe it was the psychological trauma of baby Julia’s second day in a new day-care center. New faces, new noises, new smells – a new place surrounded by other babies and toddlers — it was a lot to take in for a baby in a world which already is so large and overwhelming. Maybe after a whole day of this Julia’s brain was overloaded with stimuli. Maybe this resulted in nightmares and uneven, restless sleep. Or maybe Julia was just teething. Whatever the reason, Julia woke up around midnight crying. It was not the whiny,…

GUANTANAMO BAY DETENTION CENTERReasonable measure to secure our country? Or overreaction and judicial “black hole”? ON TERRORISM AND CIVIL RIGHTS: Today is the sixth anniversary of the terror attacks on September 11th, 2001. It is time to opine on a topic increasingly on my mind these past several months: civil rights in the context of the age of spectacular terrorist attacks. For several years I have struggled to make up my mind about the detention centers in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where the US Government has held thousands of suspected terrorists swept off the battlefields of Afghanistan and elsewhere. This has been a keystone policy of President Bush’s “War on Terror,”…

Worth the read every single day? TO READ OR NOT TO READ? I read two newspapers everyday. It is the one ritual I promised to keep after the upheaval of becoming a father, the daily activity I would keep to bridge the gap the life between the “before” and “after” metamorphosis of becoming responsible for a baby. “I am the same person as before; I am still me,” I tell myself, as my day retains a semblance of its earlier pattern. The ritual anchors my life in the vertiginous upheaval which is new parenthood. Some people stop at Starbuck’s on the way to work or do a crossword puzzle over…

Thieves broke windows in late night school burglary. CLASSROOM BREAK-IN I arrived to my school as usual yesterday morning, Friday September 7, 2007. But as I turned the corner towards my classroom I encountered not the empty twenty steps of sidewalk that leads to my place of work but instead a throng of school district employees and concerned administrators talking into their radios and cell phones. I pulled up in surprise as Principal Joe Bova explained to me there had been a break-in at around 3:30 a.m. The burglars smashed a window, entered the classroom, stole a computer and LCD projector, and then attempted to break into another classroom in…

USC crunches Idaho 38-10 in 2007 season opener SPORTS AND BOOZE So last night my father and I walked around Balboa Island in my hometown of Newport Beach, California. The moon beamed down on us as we walked and talked in the darkness, and the air still had a touch of the heat that had baked Southern California during the day. It was around 10:00 p.m. on a balmy late summer evening in late August 2007. Part of the deal on there is that when walking on the sidewalk which circles the island one can hardly fail to see into the houses bordering the water. Everything is so tight together…

“…and now i own and run porn sites.” So I receive the below message on Myspace the other day from a student who I taught digital video (Adobe Premiere and After Effects) and graphics (Photoshop) to a few years back: I had you for vizcom and now i own and run porn sites. you were the only teacher that taught me anythig i still use today, Thanks Tyler..R A dubious compliment, to be sure! “you were the only teacher that taught me anythig i still use today,”

“BRILLIANT DISGUISE” A man looks into the camera and sings his song of confusion and heartache. The entire music video is just one shot, and the camera slowly zooms in while the artist looks you straight in the eye and sings from the heart. No special effects. No lip-syncing. Just the singer and his guitar. Authentic. Real. This is what art is supposed to be and so seldom is nowadays. In this simple black and white music video there are no special effects. There are no scantily clad women gyrating to the beat. There are no rappers talking about how tough they are. This is music for adults. Music about…

FATHER AND DAUGHTER DURING NAP TIME Summer of 2007 As a teacher, I have my summers off. To be more specific, my last day of work was June 15th and my next day will be August 15th (not including one college class I taught Tuesdays and Thursday evenings for six weeks). I will have had eight and a half weeks off. What a gift! What a blessing for my family! This summer I have been incredibly blessed to have had plenty of time to spend lazy afternoons with my baby daughter, Julia. This – and only this – has allowed me to get to know her moods, her body language,…

“THE GOOD IS THE ENEMY OF THE GREAT!” “There was nothing I was not up for teaching…boundless energy and ambition!” THE PRODUCTIVE DECADE OF ONE’S THIRTIES I used to tell myself I was one of those relatively few people who loved their jobs. For me teaching was more vocation than job, and the boundary between what I did at work for pay and did at home for pleasure was very blurred, if it even existed at all. I spent my free summers as a teacher working on American history curriculum and developing what I hoped would be innovative, exciting, and challenging assignments for my students. I read books for pleasure…