Getting Started

So, this will be the first post on my blog. Obviously, I'm a little late to the party on the whole blog scene. I guess you could say I was just waiting for all of the trendy people to move on to the latest thing. Plus, I don't how dedicated I can be to this. But, I'll give it a try.

Now, first of all, I guess I should introduce myself for the one person reading this that doesn't already know me. I'm a guy in my late 30's, who's married to a beautiful woman (Lacey), with two school-age children. I think I'll leave it at that, otherwise, why read any more posts?

Since I just finished a book, I'll start off writing about that. Today I finished Little Children, by Tom Perrotta. This was made into a movie, which came out last year. I enjoyed both. The movie sticks pretty close to the book, although there are minor characters that are more fleshed out in the book than in the movie. Both Lacey and I actually read his latest book, The Abstinence Teacher, prior to seeing the movie. We both really like it and once I realized that he wrote Little Children, I wanted to read that, too.

Anyway, the basic plot is that a man and a woman meet at a playground where their children play and have an affair. Obviously, it's the characters that are important in this one.

To me, the title refers not to their children, although all of the characters' lives are centered on children, but how their lives are affected by events in their childhood or at least at a younger change. And it's not that they had great tragedies in their childhood that 'made them what they are', but that how in their mundane lives, they are reminded of certain events (a remark by a former boyfriend, things that happened in college), and that these events influence their decisions now. This was one of the things I liked, because I could identify with these "blasts from the past" popping up and coloring how I look at things now. There is also a character that is a sex offender that was treated in a realistic way and I think this lends an interesting twist to things.

Now, I'll leave you with a link to some concert footage of Talking Heads circa 1980. Enjoy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6g8lFmsCXhg