reflections on fatherhood

Corwin turns 1 on Wednesday.

Megan is creating, as a continuing project, a scrapbook for Corwin. Recently she asked me to come up with a short 'blurb' for the page devoted to Father's Day; this is what emerged after surprisingly little thought:

Sometimes I like to explore places that we've never seen before, and trust that we'll be able to find home again. These pictures were taken on a night walk that Megan, Corwin, and I took on [his first] Father's Day; we spent about an hour being lost in fields and construction areas.

Being a father is kind of like that.

(It is also, of course, like a number of other things. But one of the big things that it's like is going to strange places with little notion of destination, and little familiarity with how things work or what problems might crop up, and just trusting to our native capabilities (rather than specific knowledge) to get us out of any trouble we encounter. Come to think of it, that reminds me of our trip to Europe in 2004: we rarely worked out ahead of time where we were going to be staying or what we were going to be doing, and it was surprising (and gratifying) how well it all worked out, nevertheless.)

short films by Neill Blomkamp

courtesy of Boing Boing:

Alive in Joburg (Google Video)

A short film depicting a grittily realistic documentary set in a fictional world with extraterrestrial refugees in South Africa.

Showreel (Quicktime)

A series of short clips which apparently act as a sort of portfolio. (It starts out with a dancing car video which you may have seen; I think I linked to it a while back.) The progression of themes is very interesting.

TempBot

A short film that's a sort of slice-of-existence of a robot employed as a temporary clerical worker. Very odd, not least because no one seems to think it odd that TempBot never says anything.