League of Married Gentlemen: My Power Revealed At Last!
As you know if you've been following my blog over the past several months, I've been trying to find out what kind of special powers or abilities my wedding ring has granted me. I've been really eager to take my official place in the League of Married Gentlemen!
I can finally say that I've discovered my special ability, and it's incredible: I have the power to create life.
Yes, it's true. There is, right now, a new human being growing inside my wife, and it's my doing. I'm a hero!
I'm thrilled. Couldn't be happier. This is better than super speed or strength, the ability to fly, telekinesis... Anything. I'm going to be a daddy!
We're due in early April, and so excited. Our families are excited, too. For my parents, it'll be the first grandchild, and for Larissa's parents it's their third.
Now I just have to think of a good superhero name to go with my newfound power. Any suggestions?
League of Married Gentlemen: Reflexes
Who would have thought, at this point, that I might come across a lead for such a mainstream power as heightened reflexes?
I've been trying for almost five months to find out what special abilities have been locked away in my wedding ring. As time has passed, I've been getting more and more antsy, trying to figure out where I will fit in to the esteemed League of Married Gentlemen. Every time I think I've uncovered a clue, it turns out to be nothing.
Maybe not this time!
Yesterday was the first day of the new ball hockey season. On Mondays a bunch of guys from church and some of our friends gather in a small gym to do battle. After a long summer of inadequate exercise, I had a tough time catching my breath, and I was huffing and puffing after only a few shifts. That'll get better in a week or two, though.
Image from cheezburger.com.
At one point in the game, though, I was back-checking and stepped on the blade of an opposing player's stick. My feet were taken out from under me and I spun through the air, landing completely unharmed on my side. (Well, I was a tad winded, but that was as much psychological as physical, I think; I was startled!)
What I took out of that event was that in a moment of extreme danger, some kind of cat-like reflexes saved me from landing on my head, which would have been certain doom. Now all I have to do in order to confirm my danger-induced super reflexes is jump off the stairs around the back of our apartment. My instincts will kick in, I'll land on my hands and feet, and the newest Super Husband will join the fold!
Wish me luck.
...
Ok, I got scared and didn't do it.
League of Married Gentlemen: A Camping Trip — Am I Unworthy?
Larissa and I spent the weekend camping with some friends. Thanks for coming up with the idea, Dan, and I'm glad Nick and Jenny came along and brought their baby Isaac. We were at the Stoltz Pool campground along Cowichan River. It was a lot of fun. We had great food, including such camping staples as pancakes, hot dogs, and smores. We even invented smOreos, which is where you put a marshmallow and chocolate between two Oreo cookies (either before or after removing the icing; your call).
During the camping trip, I kept an eye out for any developing ring powers, of course. It's hard for me to keep my mind off of what powers my wedding ring has to have given me. I really feel like they should have manifested by now. It's been three-and-a-half months since we got married, after all.
Our tents all lined up in a row.
The first day we arrived, I thought I might be on to something. I only saw two or three mosquitoes, even though other people said they were getting lots of bites. But for the next two days, I was inflicted with my fair share of itchy bumps--thankfully not all that many, overall--so I don't think my ring has granted me any insect immunity.
Cold water still feels cold to me, too. We went swimming (well, more like wading constantly against the current) on Sunday afternoon, and the water felt pretty chilly. It was a really hot day out, though, so it was nice to get cooled down. Then I sat on the rocky beach for a while and did some reading (I'm still working on A Tale of Two Cities), and my back got sunburned just like normal, so there's nothing there, either.
At this point I'm really starting to feel like all of my leads turn out to be nothing, and I haven't hit on anything solid. A few times over the weekend my ring actually felt loose, too, almost as though it was trying to slip off my finger. Maybe I'm not worthy of a ring power, and my ring is trying to abandon me!
I'm going to have to do something to make sure it never gets away from me. I think I know a guy I can talk to. I'm not ready to give up yet.
League of Married Gentlemen: Discovering Awesome Names
While working on my thesis earlier this week, it occurred to me that the name of one of the sociologists whose work I was citing was really pretty cool. That sociologist's name is Donatella della Porta. I think that's an awesome name. I said so on Twitter, and received this reply:
In the interest of testing the theory that my wedding ring has granted me the ability to find and identify awesome names, I did a search for "awesome names" and found this baby name page. On that page there are a bunch of names that are supposed to be "awesome," but I can't say I agree with a lot of the choices. Maybe I'm in the minority; the choices were supposedly based on popularity ratings, after all. So that's a strike against the theory.
Slavoj Žižek has an awesome name.
To explore a variation on the theory, I looked up an old 50-word story I wrote called Proceedings of the Juvenile Court, in which I invented several names. The names I created for that story were, and still are, completely awesome (I especially like Fkaisl Ipsidav), but I invented them before I was married, so that can't have been an ability granted to me by my ring. Strike two.
As my last attempt, I went to the Wikipedia page that lists sociologists, to see if my ability might just be tied to finding cool names among sociologists. This tactic showed some promise. A quick glance-through allowed me to identify Stanley Aronowitz, Enzo Faletto, Rick Fantasia, Tariq Modood, and Slavoj Žižek. You are obligated to agree that all of these sociologists have awesome names. Especially Mr. Žižek (some of whose work I have actually already been exposed to through various classes).
I still can't be entirely sure that the awesomeness of sociologists' names isn't something that existed before I got married, but there may be something here to keep an eye on.
League of Married Gentlemen: Music Repellant
Today Larissa and I walked downtown after she got off work, so we could check out the Victoria International Buskers Festival. I was interested in seeing whether my wedding ring had granted me any music-related powers, though I wasn't sure what those might be. I asked Twitter for some suggestions of what a superpower related to music might look like.
I didn't really get a chance to test anything out, though, because the only musical buskers we saw were guitar players, and guitar-playing buskers can be kind of boring sometimes, so we walked past them all. We did watch parts of a couple of shows, one involving an Argentinian guy juggling soccer balls, and another involving three women doing acrobatics on aerial silk. (Also, one of the women used a bull whip to knock a piece of celery out from between a volunteer's legs. It was weird.) And there was a woman in a cowboy costume covered in bronze paint doing the "moving statue" thing.
At one point I saw a tweet by Matt Wiggins, a friend of mine from LoadingReadyRun, saying there was a saxophone quartet a couple of blocks away from where we were, but by the time we got there, they were packing up.
Then I had a thought: maybe my inability to find anyone playing anything other than a guitar was related to my ring. What if my ring power is the ability to repel non-guitar musical instruments? That would be awful.
I really hope that isn't what it is. Someone tell me I'll see real live music again someday!
The weather was really nice, either way.
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