Twitching

One of the weird things to happen this summer occurred to my eldest boy. He came home from his freshman year of college in May. Slowly over the next 6 weeks, he developed a twitch. This wasn't a minor twitch. He threw his right arm over his head (whalloping himself occasionally) and stamped his left foot. Now, at the end of July, the twitch has moderated/evolved to extending his right arm out and tensing his hand in an oddly contorted manner. We've seen beaucoup neurologists from local guys, to our priest's father, to Mayo Clinic, to Shands Hospital. He's been poked, prodded, scanned, and graphed. The consensus is that he has Tic Disorder. I've decided that that is medispeak for Idunnoitis. They think that in time it will pass. How much time is anyone's guess. The weirdest thing is that my son is totally unphased by it. His attitude is "Oh, okay. I've got a twitch." It must be nice to be that young and accepting.

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Adventure

One of our family mottos is "Some people have fun on the weekends, we have adventures." Finding adventure in everyday life is something I inherited from my father. In career, he was an orthodontist, but there was a hidden spark of derring do that smoldered within him. Mom gave him a copy of Craig's _Danger is My Business_ because of that. As for me, I'm an accountant, but I enjoy and relish adventure. When my children and I go out on our hunts, things are seldom uneventful. We can find interesting things to make epic tales every time we hunt.

But, this last week was an exception. My company sent me to Las Vegas for a conference. If there is any place on earth where one could come back with great stories, I would expect it to be Vegas. Instead, I found it the most boring, mundane place on earth. I could hardly find anything memorable other than Hoover Dam to discuss. I guess Chesterton was right. He said, "[O]ddities only strike ordinary people. Oddities do not strike odd people. This is why ordinary people have a much more exciting time; while odd people are always complaining of the dulness of life." Vegas isn't odd, it is contrived. The glamour and the glitz is darkened by the holloweyed shadows of the slot lizards scuttling from machine to machine. I'll take the adventure of stepping off the levee into a dark marsh at 4:00am any day over one spark of Nevada neon.

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