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Song Info (from Beatlesongs):”Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” is on the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album, and was 80% written by Lennon and 20% by McCartney. John said, ‘My son Julian came in one day with a picture he painted about a school friend of his name Lucy. He had sketched in some stars in the sky and called it Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. Simple.’ For the rest of his life Lennon consistently maintained that his four-year-old son Julian’s name for a painting inspired the title, which many thought was a reference to LSD. [Personal note: I believe it, since other songs that were about drugs The Beatles said, ‘Oh, yeah, that one’s about drugs.’ Wouldn’t make sense for them to not cop to all of them.]

If Hollywood has taught us anything, it’s that horrible things happen all the time, and even the good things that happen usually have horrible stuff happen along the way before it turns good.  It’s a rare movie where good things happen, and then more good things happen, and then everything ends up good.  Rambo never gets trained, gets in, gets the job done, and gets out – no, he’s gotta get captured or wounded or both before he can finally win, and even then the winning is usually tempered with some other Horrible Thing, like jail, or his girlfriend dying, or something.

Even romantic comedies suffer from this, but in different ways.  If the main girl is in love with a good guy at the beginning of the movie and meets a jerk 20 minutes into the movie, you can pretty much bet that by the end of the movie she has dumped the nice guy (who, in typical nice guy fashion, understands that she’s following her heart and so let’s her go because he values her happiness over his own) and proclaims her love for the jerk, who has loved her since that first meeting, even though he didn’t let on.

In the rare movie where a guy and a girl have been happily dating and are planning to get married, the Horrible Thing ends up being one or both of their families.  Has there ever been a movie where Boy tells Girl’s father that Boy wants to marry Girl and Girl’s father has been thrilled?  Usually the father hates Boy, or thinks Boy is not good enough for his daughter, or kills the Boy, or something.  It never goes well for Boy at the outset.  No wonder most guys dread telling the girl’s family he intends to marry her – the only model they’ve ever seen of it has always been something worth dreading.

I’m happy to report that real life isn’t necessarily like that.  Now, I’m kind of giving away the end of the story, I guess, but I think it’s okay in this case.

Earlier this year, I set up a meeting with Megan’s dad, mom, and sister.  They live about an hour and a half away, and I left right after work on a Thursday.  We met at Applebee’s, ordered dinner, and chit-chatted through dinner.  I kept looking for an opportunity in the conversation to segue into the little speech I’d prepared, but the opportunity kept not showing up.  I will admit to some nervousness, but there was no dread.  I’d been looking forward to this, and Megan knew where I was and why, even though she was not along for the meeting.

Finally, after I’d finished my meal and before the waitress came around to see if any of us wanted dessert, I decided to just jump in.  “I suppose it’s not really a secret why I wanted to meet with you all today, but I thought maybe I should tell you just so we’re all sure.  I love Megan and I’d like to mambo dogface to the banana patch.”

That may have not been exactly how it came out… I was nervous, but I don’t think I was that nervous.

Her dad, being a dad, asked me a few questions.  I answered them honestly, and he considered for a few minutes before saying, “Well, I don’t have a problem with it.”

That’s a direct quote.  I like it – it’s not a ringing endorsement necessarily, but it’s along the lines of “I think you’re an all-right guy,” and that works for me.  After that, Megan’s mom said she was okay with it.  She was more excited about it, but I don’t remember her exact words, I’m afraid.  Megan’s sister wasn’t allowed to disagree, I told her, but she and I get along pretty well, and I think if she were pressed, she’d say she was happy about it, too.

So then the question became, “How are you going to ask her to marry you?”  I didn’t quite know that just yet and said if they had suggestions I’d be happy to hear them.  Megan’s sister suggested I ask her at the top of the highest drop on a rollercoaster because that would be “awesome.”  Some other ideas were bandied about, but nothing was set in stone.  I headed back home, happy  and excited, but nervous about finding the exact right way and time to ask Megan to marry me.

It wasn’t too long before the right time presented itself.  Megan was visiting friends one weekend and wouldn’t be back home until Saturday night.  I knew having something set up and waiting for her was what I wanted to do, so it was just a matter of figuring out what.  She knew I was going to ask some time soon, and she had a pretty good idea that I had the ring already, so the only thing left to surprise her with was the way and time.

Once the time was set, I hit upon a way pretty easily.  Now it was just a matter of implementation.

On the morning of the Saturday in question, I went to a florist to get a dozen roses and another dozen roses’ worth of petals and then took them over to Megan’s apartment.  Then I went back home an nervously waited for Megan to call and let me know she was on her way home.  She was about two hours away and it takes me 20 minutes to get to her apartment, so I knew how much time I’d have to get everything set up when she called.

She called a little before 8p. Perfect.  But then I discovered she hadn’t called me right away, and was about 20 minutes into the drive already.  Okay, not a problem.  I still had time.  But then we ended up talking a lot.  And more.  And more.  Normally this is a good thing, right?  Not today!  I start freaking out a little.  I wander past my roommate and mime “What am I going to do?!?  AAAAGH!!!” which he finds to be somewhat humorous.  Somewhere around 45 minutes into talking, she says, “Oh, I need to call my dad back.”  Cool as a cucumber I say, “Oh, okay. Why don’t you give me a call when you get home so I know you made it home safely?”  I am the smoothest dude ever.

As soon as I get off the phone I quickly gather up the remaining stuff and run out the door.  Twenty minutes and three flights of stairs later I’m setting up her apartment: a dozen roses on the dining room table, with three candles lit, and a computer with a video file loaded and a Post-It that says “Press Play.”  From the door to the table I scatter the rose petals, and then I go sit in the laundry room, with plenty of time to spare.

I sat in the laundry room for about 20 minutes, the first ten of which I was nervous as a cat in a roomful of firecracker-laden rocking chairs.  I finally started calming down, and by the time I heard Megan’s footsteps on the stairs outside, I was excited but relaxed.

To hear her tell it, when she opened the door it took her a few seconds to figure out why there were rose petals on the floor and lit candles on the table.  It was probably around that same time after she opened the door that I heard her use my name as a question, but I held my ground and stuck to the plan and didn’t emerge.

I left the door of the laundry room open a crack, just enough that I could see her when she went to the computer and pressed play.  I had made a video slideshow of pictures of us and memories we’d made together, put to the song “Love Changes Everything” by Andrew Lloyd Webber and sung by Michael Crawford.  Even though I couldn’t see the screen from my vantage point in the laundry room, I could tell when she got to the last slide, because she laughed. here’s what she saw:

I wanted to be sure she wouldn’t freak out or mace me or something, you know?  You can never be too careful.

So I exited the laundry room on cue and got down on one knee in front of her and said a few things and then asked her to marry me.  It certainly looked to me like she couldn’t say “yes” fast enough, which was all right by me.

We are planning to get married on June 26, which isn’t very far away.  Things are coming together pretty well, but there’s plenty left to do.  It’s fun to make plans and talk about it, but I’ll do my best to keep this blog from becoming an “all wedding, all the time” sort of thing.  If I slip up, though, and write about it more than I plan to, I hope that your response will be somewhere along the line of…

“I don’t have a problem with it.”

Song Info (from Beatlesongs):”Revolution 1″ (more commonly known just as “Revolution” was 100% written by John while The Beatles were in India in early 1968.  It was released as the B side to the “Hey Jude” single on August 26, 1968, and got as high as #12 during its eleven-week stay in the Top 40.  Paul didn’t like the song.  “In the lyrics, Lennon comes out against violence on the single version but is equivocal on the White Album‘s slower version, following ‘count me out’ with ‘in’.”

UPDATE: Mandy is our mug winner!  I picked the winner old-school style: printed out the names and had Megan choose one at random.  Mandy – get me your address!

The date on the last redesign of my website was February 23, 2005.  Five years ago?  Really?  Seems unlikely.  I was really, really into green and gray at the time.  Actually, I kind of still am.  In fact, one room in my house is painted in a similar green as was in that design.

Anyway, if you’re reading this, that means the newest design is live.  As before, I had a lot of help from Brian, who was once again very good about dealing with all of my “What about this?” and “Hold on, I changed my mind about that” nonsense.

The main reason for the redesign is that Blogger no longer supports FTP publishing.  My choices were to stick with Blogger but use one of their URLs or switch my blogging software, which is what I ended up doing.  While switching all that, I’m also changing my hosting situation to Dreamhost via the aforementioned Brian.  Lots of changes!

I’m very pleased with the new logo, and I have Rock Band to thank for it.  A screenshot of my character in the game got edited down into the glasses-and-goatee you now see, and it’s almost exactly what I had envisioned at the outset, even though I had no idea how to produce it.

Most everything transferred over pretty well from Blogger, and there’s a pretty good chance that most of the links to stuff still work, even.  And, since the archives are actually working now and seem to be a little bit better organized, now’s a perfect time to catch up on all the stuff you’ve missed in the now-7 years I’ve been writing.  Yikes. That’s crazy to me, too.

Don’t neglect to scroll all the way to the bottom – all the links that used to be on the sides are down there now, and I’d hate for you to miss the store or something.  And make sure you update your feed readers – the RSS feed has changed.

To celebrate the new design, let’s have a little giveaway.  Leave a comment on this post telling me your favorite topic here on the blog and I’ll pick a random commenter to receive a MadMup.com mug or T-shirt with the new logo on it.  Let’s make the deadline 6p Eastern this Friday.  Multiple comments won’t increase your chances, so don’t try anything funny.

Now here’s hoping (once again) that a redesign sparks more writing.

Song Info (from Beatlesongs):”For You Blue” is on the Let It Be album and was 100% written by George Harrison. The song was inspired by Patti Harrison, and George said, “[It’s] a simple twelve-bar song following all the normal twelve-bar principles, except it’s happy-go-lucky!”

Back in September I started something I’ve been wanting to do for over (and you have no idea how weird it is to me to think it’s been this long) twenty years. I couldn’t exactly tell you what started the urge in me, but I suspect it was a combination of the Ninja Turtles and Bruce Lee that first got me interested in martial arts. There was something almost graceful and certainly beautiful about the way masters of the various arts could disarm, disable, and defeat their foes, and it appealed to me from the get-go. I have a vague recollection of borrowing a movie from a friend that was about a “Kung Fu Finger Book,” (this is most likely it, but who knows?) a movie that had everyone fighting over some sort of book that apparently contained instructions on a deadly form of kung fu that apparently involved fingers. Pretty much the only thing I remember about the movie is that people were constantly asking other people if they knew where the kung fu finger book was, seconds before a fight broke out.

Regardless of where the interest sprouted, I never had the opportunity to study any of the arts. The closest I got was writing a paper on the rise in popularity of the martial arts in America, and borrowing The Tao of Jeet Kune Do from a friend’s dad who studied karate. I didn’t really understand the book back then, but I knew it was way awesome that Bruce Lee had invented his own martial art.

The more years that went by, the more any idea of studying a martial art seemed silly. Sure, I knew that old and older people still practiced, but they had started young and I, like Luke Skywalker, was too old to begin the training.

I met a fellow named Gary in the improv troupe, and found out pretty soon that he had a Tae Kwon Do studio, but it took me about three years to talk to him about it. We met for lunch early in September and talked about what all was involved with a fellow my age starting out, and he not only convinced me to give it a try, he pointed out that there was a class that was held at the Community Center at my very own church. Huh. I’ve never been one to notice things.

I checked on it, and sure enough, the next sessions were to begin in two weeks. I signed up, figuring the worst that would happen would be that I’d hate it and be done with it. I didn’t figure anyone got beat up in their first couple of classes. When I showed up, I was given a white belt, which I soon figured out meant “guy who has paid for classes.”

It was a little surreal, that first class. I was being taught things that I already knew, at least to some degree. I would never say that I learned a martial art by watching movies, of course, but I did learn some things about martial arts – terminology, philosophy, the fact that you bow to your sensei, that kind of thing. Actually doing those things, though? So weird.

Tae Kwon Do has the belt system, like many martial arts – White to Orange to Yellow and on up. My teacher explained it to me early on that the belts were kind of like grades in school, with a black belt being similar to graduating from high school. The degrees of black belt past that were analogous to college, grad school, and beyond. Each belt requires the learning of specific skills and these are incorporated in a form, a series of skills performed in sequence. The form we were studying in this session was 28 moves long.

Now, I felt I was understanding the moves themselves -not that I could perform them that well – but it turns out I was foiled by something I didn’t know I’d have to deal with: memorization! I could not remember the sequence of moves for the life of me. If someone called them out, I could perform them semi-correctly, but left to my own devices I quickly became a statue, frustrated at my inability to remember the series.

It was when I learned that we were learning a form that I experienced what can only be described as rebellion. See, although I never met Bruce Lee, I had learned some things from watching his movies, reading his books, and reading about him. See, he wasn’t just a movie star, he changed martial arts in a lot of ways. His philosphy, the aforementioned Tao, was that a fighter shouldn’t memorize forms, a fighter should gather moves from whatever worked. So he might take a kick from karate, a grapple from judo, and a punch from boxing and mix them into his Jeet Kune Do (which means “Way of the Intercepting Fist”). He was very very adamantly against students learning forms. Even though I wasn’t in Jeet Kune Do and never had Bruce Lee as a teacher, it was a tenet I had grown to accept over the years, a viewpoint that made a lot of sense to me. Yet here I was, learning a form. It was surprising to me how much that bothered me. I guess, though, in one sense, I shouldn’t have let it bother me, what with the fact that I never really learned it…

I was the oldest white belt in the class, and only one of the two youngest people was a white belt. The other one was an orange belt, and the day he chose me to practice a move on, I was reminded of the episode of “Seinfeld” where Kramer was taking karate. Elaine discovered he was in a class of kids, which explained why he was “dominating the dojo.”

The class ran for two months. On the last day we took our belt test, with the assurance that we had already earned our belts, this was just an exhibition. If our teacher didn’t know we were capable, he wouldn’t let us take the test, he said. Since I couldn’t remember the 28-move sequence, I took some comfort in that. On the flip side, though, I also felt like I didn’t deserve the belt upgrade because I couldn’t perform the sequence.

The next session starts in January, and I am planning to sign back up. I enjoyed 90% of the classes, and didn’t mind the workout I was getting while in the class. I think it could eventually be a thing I really like, but I’m also planning to take it a step at a time and see how it goes.

I’m still going to feel a little guilty when I watch Bruce Lee movies, though.