The World's Largest Clarinet

Every year at the band banquet, one piece of the entertainment (in addition to me setting things on fire) is the band banquet video.  The video consists primarily of photographs of the year, both official and personal (but not, y’know, personal; what happens on band trips stays on band trips, amirite?) with musical accompaniment (often the real versions of field show or stands tunes from the year, which means at least we get rid of the incredibly long Tatgenhorst endings…); in short, a pretty standard awards ceremony montage. 

However, breaking up the stretches of photos is a skit, which is performed and filmed by band members.  It’s usually pretty funny (or it’s intended to be funny, anyways…), and the topic changes every year.  I honestly don’t remember most of the skits, although I do remember one about a quest to find out what the “J” in “J. Bradley McDavid” stands for.  (For those of you not in HMB, JBrad (also known affectionately as “Buddy-buddy-buddy”) is the director.)

And in my rookie year (yes, the year of the burning napkin), we nearly did a skit about the World’s Largest Clarinet.

Why?  Well, our bowl game that year had been against Purdue, which boasts of having the World’s Largest Drum, and has a whole little, I don’t know, cult around it.  And we felt like making fun of that.  (Along with their silly salute during their fight song.  Seriously, whose idea was this?

(It’s a bit ridiculous how much both my high school and college careers involved schools boasting “World’s Largest Drum”s, or at least really big drums.  Kennewick High has one.  Purdue has one.  Texas has one.  With all of the bowl games during my band tenure being against either Purdue or Texas, there was literally a “World’s Largest Drum” at every bowl game I went to.  Seriously, people, overcompensating much?  And none of them are actually the World’s Largest Drum.)

In all honesty, we probably thought the idea was funnier than it really was, but that’s not our fault.  Exhaustion, dehydration and impending sickness will do that to you.

For those of you who have never done a full Rose Bowl trip… actually, I’m just bragging, because I know that’s most of you.  Anyways, the day of the game itself is… let’s say “long”.

 It starts off with getting up around 3 am, because you have to leave the hotel around 4 am to head for the parade staging ground.  Once you actually step off (which could be hours later, because the overriding motto of marching band is “hurry up and wait”), it’s a 5.5 mile route.  If you’ve ever walked 5.5 miles straight, you’ll know that’s not all that bad on its own.  But now imagine doing it in a heavy wool suit, in sunny, 85-90 degree weather, while playing an (often heavy) instrument and performing choreography the entire way.

I am not exaggerating when I say that at the end of the parade, I was able to scrape solid sheets of salt off of my rather sunburned face.

(Now that I stop to think about it, what I thought was a quirky HMB tradition of shaving facial hair before the Rose Bowl actually makes a lot more sense.)

After that, you get a quick lunch and head off to the stadium itself, where you do a pregame show (and fantasize about spraypainting “Jones” onto the state flag that the Purdue band hauls out in addition to the American flag because how selfish is that?  Where’s the Washington state flag?), a halftime show, and four quarters of screaming and yelling and playing.  By the time all the postgame stuff is over, it’s well into the evening.

However, our day didn’t end there, because winter quarter at the illustrious University of Washington started, in the Year of Our Lord MMI, on January 2^nd.  (Remarkably, they changed the policy after that so that classes start no earlier than the 3^rd, and often a day or two after that, depending on where things fall on the calendar.  Only took them 140 years to figure that out…) And that meant we needed to get home that night.

So, we all piled back onto our buses and headed for the airport.  Unfortunately, it was so foggy at the airport that we had to sit on a road near the charter plane for a couple hours before we could leave.  As best as I can recall (and working backwards from the fact that I got back to my dorm room at 2am), our plane took off around 10:00 that evening, by which point we’d all been up for around 19 hours, marched in a burning hellscape of a parade, had a full game day after that, and had very little to drink (seriously, I don’t think most of us got more than about 24 oz. of fluid the entire day) along the way.  It’s no wonder half of the band was sick the following week.

(However, this has nothing on the worst bowl trip ever, which was a couple years later.  I’ll post that story in the near future.)

At any rate, that’s why we were exhausted, dehydrated and getting sick.  But as I’m sure most of you have experienced at some point during your lives, at a certain point in this cycle, everything gets incredibly funny.  And thus, the idea of the World’s Largest Clarinet skit was born.

So what was the World’s Largest Clarinet?

The skit would have been filmed in a documentary style, covering the history and ritual of the World’s Largest Clarinet, and including interviews and footage of the World’s Largest Clarinet in action.

There would have been four poles attached to the World’s Largest Clarinet so that four people could carry it while marching, while another couple people would run along behind and take turns trying to play it. 

The carriers would have been spectacularly outfitted in knee-high striped socks, short shorts (even the guys), some sort of shirt (I’m fuzzy here) and colanders on their heads.  They would also have spoken their interview lines in chorus.    (This will make more sense if you go look at the folks wheeling around Purdue’s drum.)

The joke, of course, besides those outfits, because how great would we have looked in those?, would have been that the clarinet itself would have just been a regular clarinet. 

So apparently the answer is yes, this was way funnier at the time.  In fact, in my head, it’s still hilarious.  Sorry.

I don’t really remember why we didn’t get around to making it; I think laziness was probably a big part of it.  But I still think it would have been awesome.  Because who cares about a giant bass drum?  It’s still just a drum.  It goes “boom” when they hit it.  Woo.  (And their choreography sucked, too!)

Dads

I saw this article the other day (thanks Trixie!), and it prompted several thoughts.  As I've said before, I don't really want this to be a parenting blog, but parenting is kind of a big part of my life now, so it would be silly to pretend it'll never come up.  Call it scope creep, maybe, or just a digression.  Either way, you'll just have to deal with it, because I write what I want, and y’all can’t stop me.  (However, I do not have an 808 in my heart beat.)

First of all, I think it's fantastic the number of articles I've been seeing lately about how moms need to lay off each other and feel okay admitting that life is hard sometimes and not everything is perfect.  And not just articles, but entire blogs, even!  I think our society places a ridiculous amount of pressure on mothers, especially, to enjoy every minute because this is just the most perfect time of your life, etc., etc., etc. 

And the more that women can speak up and say, "This is crap, and it's not true, and it's okay to talk about how things really are," and read things by other women saying that, then the more women will actually be able to enjoy parenting, because they won't be weighed down by irrational guilt for feeling the (perfectly normal) way they do.

However, what I haven't seen nearly as much (hardly at all, really) is similar articles and blogs for fathers.  (I'm sure they're out there, but I don't think they're anywhere near as common.)  And this article started me wondering why that is.  Why aren't there any articles out there addressed to the furious dad in the parking lot, telling him it's understandable to mad at his kids every now and then?  Because every feeling, every reaction, that's described in the article I linked up top? I've felt them too.

So why aren't dads talking about it, too?  Is it that, as men, we're just not as comfortable sharing our feelings (or even admitting to them)?  Is it that men are in these circumstances less often by dint of being less involved?

I think it's at least a mix of both these things (and probably some other reasons I haven't thought of), and neither of them is okay.

I get furious with my son sometimes.  And often over really stupid stuff, too, because I'm tired, or it's left over from work, or just because I'm fed up.  Then I feel guilty about it, and like a terrible parent, because what kind of a parent gets mad at their kid for simply being curious and enjoying the world around them?  And it's doubly worse every time my son yells at me to stop something, because I know that he's learned that from me.  So I resolve to do better next time, and the next time, and the next time...

One of the best pieces of advice we got before my son was born was that being a parent helps you to understand why child abuse happens.  Of course, the vast, vast majority of parents would never actually abuse their child, because there's a huge difference between understanding and doing.  But I also think most parents, if they're being honest, would admit that the idea crosses their mind when their baby won’t stop crying, when their toddler is being outrageously stubborn, when their little kid breaks something valuable that you told them roughly 153,897,205 times not to touch/play with/throw things at.

So yeah, it sounds like a terrible thing to say (and awfully flippant about a horrible thing like child abuse, to boot), but it's true, and just hearing that sort of thing from someone else, that you'll feel this way, and that it's normal, is incredibly reassuring.  And I think it's just as important for dads to hear that as moms, because we’re all parents, and we all feel these things for the same reason, and it’s normal for all of us.

I am a co-parent.  I love spending time with my son.  When I get home from work, I'm the one who gets him up from his afternoon nap.  I play with him, I cook dinner with him, I give him his bath, and I read him bedtime stories and tuck him in.  On weekends, I'm generally the primary caretaker.  And I'm happy to do it, because I want that time with him, and I'm able to have that time with him, and because my wife, being a SAHM, is with him the rest of the time and needs some time to herself.  I get grown-up time at work, and she doesn't.

Do I get a little bitter sometimes that I have less free time?  Of course I do!  There are times I don't want to do anything after I get home from work, or that I want to be able to do whatever I want on the weekend.  And if it bothers me enough, we can generally work something out.  But as a parent, taking care of my son is just as important of a job as anything else.

Society doesn't seem to really consider dads as co-parents with moms.  In many ways, we really haven't progressed all that far from the 1950s stereotype of a dad coming home from the office, and putting his feet up with the newspaper and a martini until dinner is ready.  Being a co-parent often seems to be considered un-manly, or even feminine.  And I think that's crap.

I do not “babysit” my child.  I do not “help out” with him.  I do not “watch” him for the day.  I’m his parent!  And being a parent to him is just as much my responsibility as it is my wife’s.  It’s a sign of how ingrained this mindset is in society, though, that it’s hard to even find ways in the English language to talk about a dad being the one present with his child instead of the mom that don’t involve the phrases I used above.  By default, we seem to assume that dads spending one-on-one time with their children are somehow going above and beyond.  That’s not okay.

Look, I’m not here to be all Judgy McJudgerson at other dads, especially given what I said above about moms laying off each other.  There are about as many different arrangements as there are families.  There are SAHMs, SAHDs, families with both parents working, families with parents working long or odd hours, single parents who are freaking superheroes because how on Earth do you manage, and so on.  It’s up to each family to decide what works best for them as a family.  That can require a lot of negotiation and give-and-take.  Relationships already require that, obviously, but kids magnify any underlying issues exponentially.  As long as both parties can agree on an arrangement, then more power to them.

But this is why I’m starting to think that somehow we need to get rid of “mother” and “father”.  I mean, seriously, when have gendered labels ever helped things?  And these terms, especially, carry a huge weight of societal history and baggage.

(No, I don’t have any good suggestions for alternatives, and a kid certainly needs something to call their parents.  I’m not saying I’ve got it all figured out.)

Really, I’m in favor of pretty much getting rid of all societal expectations of gender roles (barring those that are biological, obviously, such as pregnancy), and we’ve made a lot of progress in that area (and still have a long way to go).  And gendered terms carry an implicit understanding of gender roles, which is why areas where gender roles are disappearing tend to also lose their differentiating gendered terms (consider steward/stewardess to flight attendant, for example).

It’s up to each of us to determine what kind of parent we’re going to be, based on our personalities, our desires, and our relationships.  If you really want to maintain traditional “mother” and “father” roles, and that works for you and your parenting partner, then go for it!  But do it because that’s what you want and what works best for you, not because there’s some sort of expectation that it’s what you’ll do.  And if you want to mix things up from the “traditional”, you shouldn’t have to feel like you’re fighting against expectations.

I don’t want your expectations that I have to be the primary breadwinner (I am, but because that’s what works for us).  I don’t want your expectations that because I’m just the dad, that it’s okay (or even expected!) for me to work long hours or otherwise be gone from my family.  I don’t want your expectations that when I’m at the park with my son, or running errands, or otherwise being the parent responsible for him at a given time, that I was “stuck” with him, or that I’m going above and beyond to humor my wife’s supposedly selfish desire for time to herself.

In the end, we’re all just parents. With whatever roles and responsibilities we want and need to take on.  And all in need of the same support and validation.

Plus, I'm tired of reading articles for moms to get my validation.  Way too few sports analogies.

#Gamergate

(This is sort of a loose Part II to my last post.)

For those of you who don't know what Gamergate is, (a) you're lucky, and (b) let me give you a quick primer.  For those of you who do, you should probably read this too, so that you know where I'm coming from, just in case you happen to be on a different side...

#Gamergate is about a guy getting dumped.

Ultimately, it's that simple, and I think that summary neatly captures both the fundamentals of it, as well as the (generally) banal pettiness of it all.  (More on that "generally" in a bit.)

But I suppose you might need a little more information for this discussion to be practical, so I'll set aside my customary brevity (snort) and give you this:

A guy dating a female game developer got dumped.  Rather than acting like the adult 24-year-old that he was and simply going out and getting drunk or seeing some strippers or something (I don't know, what do dumped 24-year-olds do?), he decided to trash her life as much as possible, and wound up posting a huge blog rant that included allegations that she had slept with game reviewers to get good reviews for her game.

This blog post set off a movement amongst gamers, as well as the usual sort who capitalize on such movements.  (Much to my disappointment, it appears that the #gamergate tag was actually started by Adam Baldwin of Firefly/Chuck/ID4 fame.)  Supposedly, this movement is about ethics in game journalism.

The problem with that spin is that (a) it's been disproven that the woman had actually been sleeping people with reviews (I'm sure you're all shocked by that development), and (b) most of the activity under the Gamergate hashtag is not actually about ethics in game journalism.

What it's actually about is:

- Harassing female game developers, at least two of whom have been driven from their homes by death threats;

- Harassing anyone who suggests that sexist/racist/homophobic/etc. content in video games isn't, y'know, great (but especially the women who do this, like Anita Sarkeesian);

- Harassing sponsors of any game journalism websites that disagree with #gamergate into pulling their advertising;

- And, as a distant fourth, some actual discussion about ethics in game journalism, although they're generally wrong about what constitutes ethics, and also are going after the small developers, rather than the actual journalists or the big-name game developers (EA, Activision, Rockstar, etc.), which casts some doubt on how much they really care about it.

In other words, it really comes down to a core of supposed "hardcore gamers" who feel that feminism, amongst other things, is ruining their games and corrupting game journalism.  They even have a name for their opponents: "Social Justice Warriors", or SJWs. The SJWs are somehow going to take away everything that's "fun" and make them all... sensitive or something.  I don't know.  But apparently "fun" is the freedom to be racist/sexist/homophobic/etc, and the SJWs are going to make them realize how hurtful that is, or some buzzkill like that.

Let's do a little thought experiment.  Imagine, if you would, that video games existed 200 years ago.  Is it much of a stretch to imagine that some game developer/publisher might come up with a game like "Plantation Tycoon" in the vein of, say, Roller Coaster Tycoon, but running a slave plantation?  Might be a little controversial, sure, since slavery wasn't universally accepted, but it certainly wouldn't be against all societal mores.

But if someone were to try to make such a game now, how long do you think they'd last under the inevitable onslaught of, like, everybody?  And why is that?  Because society has changed, and that sort of thing is no longer acceptable at all.

Similarly, racism, sexism, homophobia, and the like, are also becoming less acceptable in society.  And maybe that ruins some people's fun, but I don't really think that's a sort of fun we ought to be supporting.

As you can probably tell, I don't think much of the #gannondorf "movement", so instead let's turn to the people involved in it.

First of all, let's acknowledge right up front that there's a core of just really-not-nice people.  Entrenched misogynists, far-right-wing reactionaries resistant to ever having to change their ways, Men's Rights Activists (blech), etc.  You will not find a more wretched hive of scum and villiany.

These are the people who threaten and harass the anti-#arglebargle women and other SJWs, or who, say, wish for people who film all the catcalls they get just walking through NYC to get raped.  There's not much to say about them, and not much to do about them, either, unfortunately (at least until they do something to get themselves arrested or whatever).

However, there are plenty of others that aren't beyond reasonable hope of redemption.  Some truly believe it's actually about ethics in game journalism, and are well-meaningly No True Scotsman-ing away all of the misogyny and harassment.

And others are, I think, simply being swept along in the tides of gaming culture.

As I'm sure most of you have some experience with (heck, the comments on news articles could stand in as a reasonable approximation here), many online gaming communities tend to be rather... "Good old boys club"-like. It's a bit odd to be describing it that way, given the differences in the people you'll find in either place, but the air of casual misogyny, homophobia and general misanthropy is similar.

However, it doesn't have to be that way. I've heard (anecdotally) several stories about people calling participants on the crap they're spouting without even really thinking about, and the environment actually improving. It's quite similar, in a multitude of ways, to the idea of standing up to bullies.

And this is where I tie things back to last week's post. I mentioned how fortunate I was to have had plenty of positive exposure and examples to keep me from heading down this path. I don't think many of the people in these gaming communities, or in (the tamer side, generally, of) #gamergate, were so fortunate.

And without such positive examples, they've fallen, basically by default, under the sway of the prevailing gamer culture, or even of the hardcore really-not-nice people.

I say this not to justify anything they may have done; you'd like to think that everyone would have the basic moral compass to know that certain things are just wrong.

But there's a difference between justifying and understanding, and I can understand how some of these folks got where they did (especially the younger ones, who simply don't have the life experience, even as teens, to necessarily know better). And understanding can help us try to reach them. (I'm trying to avoid too many patronizing salvational metaphors here.)

The tragedy of #gamerridiculousness, to me (aside from the people terrorized, obviously), is how polarizing it's been. I get the sense that many well-meaning gamers on the pro side are feeling so attacked that they may wind up more entrenched in the stereotypical gamer culture, and thus less reachable. And I also think that those gamer stereotypes have been reinforced on the anti side and in the general public, making them less understanding and willing to reach out.

When games were seemingly becoming more mainstream and with a more diverse audience, this is a huge step backwards. And all because a guy got dumped and threw a temper tantrum. Talk about entitlement.