Everything New is Old Again...

So been away for awhile tending to this guy:



Besides having my hands full, I hadn't figured out a way of commenting on both fatherhood and my personal interests...until now!

Being the father of a newborn is akin to certain public media events this week that were strange yet echoed of familiarity. The trifecta of Rep. Wilson's "you lie", Serena Williams's temper tantrum and Kanye West's interruption of Taylor Swift were all moments of public shock, yet were also completely un-shocking in their cultural continuity with media events/phenomena of the past. The cyclical nature of our personal and communal narratives pretty much fated that these events would happen. Which doesn't diminish their impact so much as contextualize them. Here are some compare/contrast examples:


Obama (still really bad, there seems to be no precedent for the heckling of a president in office by a state representative, but it is nonetheless a semi-common occurrence in politics)











Serena Williams





(a funny match and pun, since McEnroe has regularly criticized both Williams sisters for being "disrespectful" of the game)




Kanye West (only the greatest ego of pop music today could evoke...himself)







And as a tangential coda, Jay Leno has supposedly re-branded himself and the concept of primetime television with a nightly "comedy show" at 10pm. In reality, he's simply made an annex for his version of The Tonight Show, using the same band, skits and set design:

The Tonight Show with Jay Leno


The Jay Leno Show




So getting back to my original point: new fatherhood interjects shock to the familiar. But it's not a shock of outrage like the aforementioned media trifetca, or the shock of watching a program carefully simulate change while actually having none. In this case, the shock is of discovering previously untouched levels of emotional commitment, love and fatigue while still sorting through the familiar banalities and occasional victories of life.