Fatherhood

Since being recently inducted into the not so exclusive club of fatherhood, I have been barfed on, peed on, screamed at, and on more than one occasion had my body parts pulled in ways that they were not designed to accomidate. And the strange part is I love it. Everyone tells you that being a parent will be a grueling, scary experience, and that no matter what you think, you will have no fucking clue what you are doing. And that may be true, certainly I worry whether I am doing the right thing when I let her listen to rock music and dread the day when she brings her first boyfriend home. But it seems like all of that worry is nothing compared to the joy that raising a child brings you. It's strange how once the child is yours, you actually enjoy doing all of the things that you would hate doing with someone else's child. Changing diapers isn't bad, because the whole time she will be squirming around making funny faces at you, and it seems like you can't keep from laughing. Getting barfed on isn't really that bad either because of the hilarious expression on her face when she's done. Even getting woken up in the middle of the night isn't bad, as it gives you an excuse to take her out of her crib and bring her into bed to comfort her.
Another thing that seems strange about having a child is how you begin to notice kids everywhere. You begin watching their movements and behavior. Guessing thier ages. Trying to see the traits their parents passed on to them. This is not something I ever used to do.

Chernobyl

I'm not sure whether this is an affliction shared by others of my age in the "internet" generation, but whenever I hear about something I don't know about or understand, I feel compelled to investigate it (possibly a result of my reading plenty of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as a youngster) until my internal hard drive and imagination is fully sated and sleepy from the overzealous consumption of information. As a perfect example of this gnawing hunger for information, I recently discovered Chernobyl. Now this may come as a surprise to those of you who were actually alive for this incident, but I had only been dimly aware of the name... a shadowy presence of disaster, until I recently played the game S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl. After exiting the game, I immediately called up my friends Firefox and Google for an intimate discussion on the subject. And what I discovered was that the makers of the game didn't have to stretch their imaginations very far to come up with a nightmarish and moody environment in which to place the storyline. The idea of a community being abandoned by it's residents is certainly not a new one. Ghost towns in western America are visited with frequency... and their shells are admired with a sense of history and poetic loss. In reading about Chernobyl however, I was stuck by a different sort of sensation; one of fear, anxiety and immediate loss. To quote wikipedia: "In order to reduce baggage, the residents were told that the evacuation would be temporary, lasting approximately three days. As a result, Pripyat still contains personal belongings." Can you imagine? This would be akin to a modern day Mount Vesuvius; "hey, the mountain is about to explode, but we'll let you back to get all your shit in a couple days", after which you find that all your knicknacks are buried with the rest of Pompeii under a million tons of ash and rock. Oh, and by the way, you aren't going to be able to live there for another 600 years, sorry. It's hard to imagine, let alone empathize with, the people who have lived around disasters like these, but it's not as if this is an isolated incident... It's just that in the case of Chernobyl, the result can be attributed to human error.

Here are a couple of interesting links relating to this post:
Photos of the area
An interesting Chernobyl poem

First Post

Figured it was finally time to start up a blog. First, A little about me. I am a 26 year old web developer and graphic designer, and I hope to use this blog as a place to post some of my recent art/design work, and possibly discuss some of my current ideas for work. When I'm not glued to my computer at work or home, I love spending time in the great outdoors, hiking and camping. Recently acquired a bike, so I'm hoping to start peddling around as soon as the weather becomes a little more pleasant.