This one’s for me:

This isn’t one of those posts about not posting, except that it kind of is.

A couple of nights ago, Anne and I were sitting on the couch, Seamus between us, watching Modern Family. A fire in our fireplace warmed our living room, and both of our cats, who were stretched out in front of it.

Modern Family is one of my favorite shows on television, because it brilliantly fills a hole left by the Simpsons, when it stopped being about characters and started being about guest stars and whacky shenanigans: it’s a terrifically funny look at a family trying to be a family while their life happens around them. More often than not, it cleverly weaves together seemingly unrelated stories into a satisfying ending, and the writing is consistently clever and unexpected.

During a commercial, I thought about my kids, and my family. Ryan’s 25 and Nolan’s 23. We see them at least once a week for family dinner, but usually more than that. We’re a close family, we love each other very much, and every moment we spend together makes me so proud of all of us, because we struggled and suffered a lot for years at the petty and vindictive hands of their biological father. That we have anything at all is pretty remarkable, considering how relentlessly he tried to destroy our ability to be a family, and that we have something so special and rare makes all the suffering and struggling worth enduring, because here we are today, Team Wheaton.

I said this wasn’t one of those posts about not posting, except that it kind of is. During that commercial, as I thought about Ryan and Nolan and our lives together, I noticed that I don’t write about us as much as I used to, which means that I don’t write in my blog as much as I used to. More often than not, when one or both of them is over, I can take a picture and post it to Twitter, and it tells an entire story that would have once been saved for a blog post. Yes, I could still do that, and add the picture to the post, but that’s not the way we do things these days, and it feels like most people don’t read or comment on blogs, anyway.

So this isn’t a post about not posting, except that it is. It’s a post that reiterates, for me as much as anyone, that I need to write, because it’s doing the right thing, even when I feel like I don’t have anything to write about.

Runners run, even if they’re not in a race, and they run every day, so they’re ready for the race when they find themselves at the starting line.

Sometimes a nice jog, for the sake of jogging, can be a worthwhile thing. In fact, it’s worthwhile more often than not.

Last night, I was texting with a friend, and my phone’s autocorrect tried to change “non-judgmental” into “ninja”. I told Twitter that I felt pretty bad about not letting it make the change.

Then I got a stupid idea to create a character called the non-judgmental ninja, and this happened:

Yes, I spelled “non-judgmental” wrong on this comic that I drew in about five minutes (it’s one of those words that always gives me trouble, even though I should know by now), and I ran out of space on the panel and changed the lettering, but as you can see, non-judgmental ninja is there to tell me that it’s ok.

r/ObscureMedia is one of my very favorite subreddits, and while I was looking at it today (as a tiny puppy we’re fostering slept on my lap), I saw this Star Wars figure commercial that Redditor RidleyScottTowels posted. I commented that I’d done a Star Wars figure commercial when I was a kid, and holy shit Redditor VonAether found it (I’m at 6:10 of this video):

But wait, there’s more! I thought I’d done a single commercial with different toys in it, but it turns out that I’d done two different commercials; the one VonAether found, and this other one that TheBoredGuy found:

If you couldn’t tell who I was, I was Boushh in the first one, and C3P0 in the second one.

I don’t have a lot of clear memories of the commercials I did when I was a kid, and I’d forgotten that I’d done two Star Wars figure commercials (something that was incredibly cool for a kid like me who lived and breathed Star Wars figures, even though we were forbidden from playing with them on the set), but I clearly recall that, on one of these two shoots, one of the ad agency people was a woman from New York, who wanted me to read one of my lines in a very specific way. She wasn’t a director, and wasn’t very good at communicating to 9 or 10 year-old me what she wanted, so she just started giving me line readings, and telling me to mimic her. I was very good at following directions, so I did as she asked … perfectly recreating her very thick, very nasal, very New York accent. I remember feeling nervous, and  thinking she thought I was making fun of her, but  wasn’t, I was genuinely confused about whether I should do her voice exactly the way she sounded, or if I was supposed to do my voice with the inflections she was using.

It’s amazing to me that I can clearly remember sitting in the backyard of this house in the valley where we were filming, this woman standing above me, holding the script, reading these lines for me. I can hear her telling me, “That’s better, but don’t sound so nasal,” and  realizing that not only did I know what nasal meant, but that she meant I was not supposed to mimic her voice, but just the line reading she gave me.

That was a lot of stuff for little kid me to process, but somehow I got the job done, and thanks to the weirdness of this world we’ve made for ourselves, I can see the resulting commercial over 30 years later.

It’s finally raining in Los Angeles, the first real and meaningful rain we’ve had this year. Our local news will be wall to wall with breathless coverage of STORMWATCH!!!! or whatever they’re calling it this time, the roads will be even more congested by incompetent drivers than usual, and no matter how much rain falls on the city, it won’t make a bit of difference in our drought.

Still, I love it. I love the rain, and its almost total absence is one of the very few things I don’t like about living here. This is, after all, a desert that people have tried to terraform into something different for over a hundred years, with varying degrees of success.

I’d love to stay home all day today, put a fire into my fireplace, wrap a blanket around myself, open the patio doors, and write on my laptop while I listen to the rain. I’d love to go outside and stomp in puddles until my clothes are soaked through, and I can’t feel my toes. I hope we get a thunderstorm, but it never rains in Southern California.