Eleven months in, and he's becoming a romantic. Hoping to make his teenage years less awkward, he is practicing making out with the couch, dishwasher, fridge, the dog's cage, the oven and other people's glass doors. I plan on showing every one of his future girlfriends this.

This pose is also how I picture him looking when he was in the womb, collared shirt and all, smooshed up against the placenta.

I knew the day would come when Jonas would finally coerce Liam into doing his bidding. We've come to expect this because Jonas is devious and conniving and smarter than most third graders. I just didn't realize it would come this soon.

Yesterday morning, having gotten banished to his crate for doing something he shouldn't have, Jonas sat sulking and protesting his sentence with his usual facing backwards. He does this, throwing looks back over his shoulder as if to say, "I am governed by a higher law, a law of hunger which your brand of justice can do nothing to satisfy!" He holds little regard for the Faust penal code.

The baby must have been miffed at the incarceration of his mentor, or else he simply knew that it was time to execute the plans that Jonas had carefully detailed in their Emergency Preparedness Meeting earlier in the week. In a burst of excitement Liam took off, crawling over to the cage and pulling himself up into a standing position where he toddled over to the door, flipped up the latch and released our ninety pound hairy toddler Jonas back into freedom. This was so perfectly executed it is as if they had secretly rehearsed this before. Several times. Blindfolded.

Needless to say proper measures have been taken to ensure that another prison break does not happen again, and all shanks and spoons have been confiscated from underneath Jonas' mattress. I just hope Liam sees his big brother for precisely what he is, a mastermind of manipulation. Because once Jonas had escaped he wanted nothing to do with his little partner in crime with opposable thumbs. I knew that dog was corrupt. He's like the Dillinger of the dog world.

I swear to God if he starts wearing three piece suits I'm calling the FBI.

A few months ago I stumbled across this video clip of comedian Louis CK on the Conan O'Brien show. I watched it, chuckled as I nodded my head in agreement, and then went on with my life of taking everything for granted. But slowly, the general thesis of "everything is amazing and nobody is happy" keeps creeping back into my mind.

Yesterday while at work, as I skipped lunch like I always do to get more work done, it hit me how true this is. Technologically speaking, it's unfathomable what we take for granted. Everyone I know who doesn't understand 99% of the technology in their life doesn't think twice about it except when it breaks. People my parents' age chalk it up to "everything has to do with computers, which I've been told are complicated." Do we ever stop to think about what brilliant minds had to come up with the ideas, the execution and the delivery behind something so seemingly simple as Skype or antilock breaking systems? I blush because I know despite my efforts, my appreciation often gets swept away by cynicism and a jaded outlook on life. Because really, crappy bandwidth speeds shouldn't still cost $40/month. It's 2009! But I digress...

"Appreciation is not something wholly innate, it is something I think is at least partially learned"

But even when applied to my job, this tenant holds true. In my office, nothing is remarkable. I took on over 50% of another person's job three years ago for no extra pay, without being assigned it, and it's seen as something I "should have naturally done." If I work weekends, holidays or late into the night, well above and beyond what someone at my pay grade or job level should be expected to do, I'm met with the same nonchalance by superiors. It seems as if today everyone is informally-yet-formally expected to work well past the default 40 hour weeks without second thought, and if you don't you're branded "lazy" or "not wanting to get ahead." There is no such thing as amazing performance or a job done well enough to earn recognition. In my own case, the largest portion of our website that gets 3.5 million pageviews each month was something I designed on a lunch break, as a personal design exercise, for a part of campus I'm not responsible for, yet it landed my design on the cover of a book as part of a case study on great usability in higher education websites. My initiative was met with apathy, and my employer didn't even offer to purchase a copy of the book for me. In fact, I never even got a word of congratulations or thanks. I was reprimanded instead. Nothing is amazing, everything is ordinary. Nobody is happy.

I often wonder if cutting out art & music programs in so many schools has helped erode an entire generation's ability to appreciate things. Appreciation is not something wholly innate, it is something I think is at least partially learned. And my generation was never taught how to listen to a Bach song and soak in the intricacies of the string sections, or look at a Pollack painting and see anything more than some splattered paint. And now we've grown up into a work force where someone responding to your email at 11:30 at night isn't a sign of commitment (or even sadness), it's simply expected. Nothing is amazing, everything is ordinary. Nobody is happy.

It's a sad world to live in. There's so much in the world to be in awe of, yet so seemingly impossible to hold on to a notion of gratitude for more than a shimmering moment or two. But I guess if appreciation is something we have to practice, to learn, to become accomplished at...I should try harder, and I should teach my son to do the same. I want to be happy. I want him to be happy. And seeing him happy is truly extraordinary.

Last week I was sitting outside on the front porch with Liam enjoying a nice evening of pleasant weather. Not surprisingly, the little guy seems to have inherited his pop's love of people watching (I hear stories of him just sitting and watching all the other kids at daycare. I suppose there are more troublesome ways to pass the time while there...). So as we soaked in the cool breeze and he waved and cheered for every car that drove past our street, I noticed a young girl come walking towards our cul de sac.

As she got closer, I could tell that she was carrying her cell phone with her, hard to miss since it was bright pink. Sad, but not surprising, it seems as if every kid in my neighborhood from seven to seventeen doesn't leave home without it. But as she started up the driveway of the house a few down from ours, I witnessed something remarkable.

The girl bounced up to the front door and then just stopped and stood looking at the front door. She didn't ring the bell or knock. She just stood there. After a few seconds, she glanced down at her phone and pecked at the keyboard before immediately glancing up to a bedroom window. Peck, peck, peck, stare. This went on for a minute or so, all the while she never once physically engaged in knocking. And then she walked away in a bit of a huff.

It took me a second to register what had just happened: this girl had come to hang out with her friend, but instead of knocking and asking the parents if she was there, she sent her a text message. When she got no text response, she simply left. What the heck? There were cars in the driveway, so people were definitely home. What if this girl had just gone to the bathroom? Or left her phone on the kitchen counter while she watched TV? So because this friend was too lazy to interact with adults, neither will have the chance to hang out and play? What a waste...

Shaking my head I playfully chided Liam to never be so detached that he couldn't knock on a door, but he was too busy cheering gleefully for the bees buzzing around to notice my fatherly advice.

"Kids today..." I muttered to myself before realizing what had just come out of my mouth. Wait. Have I gotten that old? Has a mere 11 months of fatherhood turned me into a cliche-spewing, jaded old geezer? I felt badly for passing judgement on this girl, so Liam and I retreated inside for bath time.

But wouldn't you know it a few days later a different young girl came skipping down our street and did the exact same thing? Lazy punks...

1. Heineken commercial follow-up - Crap beer, but this is a follow-up to their last round of ads, which I found humorous. Can't tell if it's legit or not, but regardless...
2. Texts from Last Night - This week's F My Life, but somehow feels less contrived. Maybe it's the 140-character succinctness. There are some gems: "You Definitely drank the goldfish bowl like it was a giant margarita"
3. Esquire shooting cover images with video cams - This month they shot Megan Fox with a RedONE setup (*drool*). Very interesting idea that I think has the possibility for web versions of magazines.
4. A greener pizza box - I like the idea. Handy, enviro-conscious and hackish. Now if only Hometown Pizza here in Louisville would switch to these.
5. Stevie Wonder drum solo - You read that right. He's blind yet he absolutely kills it on the drums. He has help walking back to the kit while the rest of the band plays along, making you think "awe, this will be a cute little attempt" and then BAM! There goes Stevie, making me feel 1000% even less talented at being human.