Category Archives: Life

Grawlixes (or: “Dabid’s Entry About Swear Words ”)

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One of my biggest hang-ups in life that I’ve never been able to get past pertains to swearing/swear words.

Throughout my younger days, my father used to angrily swear at me, my mother, and a plethora of absent people he perceived as having wronged him (whether they were people he actually knew or not) during his frequent, explosive outbursts. That’s my earliest recollection of such language.

I don’t think I had any comprehension of what “obscene” words actually were or meant as a pre-teen, but nonetheless I am certain I never swore in front of my parents (or later, my wife’s parents) in my life. I don’t know if I would have been scolded or not as a kid for cursing, but anything that might get me abandoned in the woods wasn’t worth trying. And something intrinsically also prohibited me from doing so.

In fact, I don’t think I ever said a profanity at all in my life until I was in high school, and I didn’t start to become genuinely comfortable using such scandalous vocabulary in private conversations even with my closest friends until I was an adult. 

I see the world in a very polarized manner of absolutes (ie right and wrong). Since there were certain words not permitted within school that I saw other children being reprimanded for using, I quickly internalized that such words were clearly “bad” and I resolved not to ever use them (as I didn’t want to be “bad” as well).

In my middle school Home Ec class (maybe the course I performed worst at during my entire childhood—I hate any kind of craftwork to this day), I can remember myself and a classmate ratting out another student for swearing in the classroom in a conversation with someone. The elderly teacher called us up and asked us to whisper in her ear what he had said. My classmate was delighted to comply, but I staunchly refused. I was shocked that the teacher would ask me to commit the very rulebreaking offense that another student was about to be punished for. This sort of subjectivity just did not make sense to me as being logical (then or now).

It even bothered me as a kid when characters in pro wrestling, comics or cartoons would swear, even in the form of grawlixes (the word for a string of typographic symbols used in place of obscenities—yes, there’s a real word for those, believe it or not). The idea that a hero like Spider-Man could occasionally spout punishable words like “hell” and “damn” was stunning to my young self.

This sort of inflexibility is a recurring theme of my life, and not using the favorite words of every other kid in my school really made me stick out even further (although I’ve always stood out for being different regardless of my choices of diction).

At one of the year-end awards ceremonies in middle school, I won the “Citizenship” award. My classmates said they’d voted for me over more notable or popular students because they’d never heard me swear. I now realize I should have felt alienated by this, but at the time I was proud that it was reinforcing and validating my Lawful Good alignment, which became a deeper-set part of my identity. Ultimately, I think this just further “Other”-ed me and made others uncomfortable around me. But unfortunately, I’m only realizing that now, decades later. 

Even so, despite my “do-gooder” ways, I was still a teenager myself and secretly admired the freedom and rebelliousness of my classmates for their perceived wicked ways of speaking. 

I wanted to rebel against myself and my “pure and good” manner of speaking badly, but it proved to be difficult for a number of reasons. 

First, I didn’t like breaking the rules (I still don’t) and didn’t want to get into trouble. I felt that a lot of my success in school was dependent on my teachers liking me, and I didn’t want to jeopardize that by being a “troublemaker”. 

Secondly, my personal experience with cuss words at home was primarily my parents hatefully spewing them at me or each other. I hated my parents—and the possibility that I could use language in hurtful or inflammatory ways like them really troubled me. 

And thirdly (and most impassably), after I had shamefully learned to say a few mild cusses like “damn” or “ass” to myself independently during high school, on the rare occasions that I got up enough willpower to utter such a word in front of a classmate, they  generally reacted either with shock or by teasingly chastising me for being “corrupted “. 

This loudly set off my Lawful Good sensibilities and made me feel like I was doing something sinful, so I mostly gave up on the idea of using the vernacular of everyone else my age until I got to college and was surrounded by people without existing conceptions about me.

I really did try hard to imitate cursing like my classmates in college, but my informal training in this discipline went astray.

Most of my cursing “skills” developed over the course of playing hundreds of hours of Super Smash Bros. 64 with my best friend in our dorm room, where I picked up on what words were “appropriate” to use in battle and under what circumstances. It never “felt” right, though—it’s just not a thing that comes naturally to me, and it always sounds rather fake and hollow as a result.

I know all the cuss words and think they’re super cool and can say them (with some effort), but I feel like I’m missing something inside of me everyone else has that makes using that vocabulary automatic and authentic for them. When I insert cuss words, it’s like going through the motions.

Being able to throw in swear words in conversations with friends and in my dopey unboxing videos is a big sort-of-win for me (such as it is), but I feel like I’m still lacking something intangibly human. I feel dishonest having to consciously think to purposely pepper expletives into my speech (and I detest feeling dishonest).

 I am intensely jealous of other people who can get angry and unconsciously release that pent-up frustration with a good, powerful swear that comes to them naturally and expresses a negative (“bad”) emotion.  

I’ve begun to sort of accept that I just don’t have that kind of power within me, though. Even after having a quadruple stroke, being tortured in the ICU for a week and a half and going mostly blind, I still can’t find it in myself to forcefully emit an emotion-filled, vociferous curse word to express my feelings at this outcome.

Dangit.

baby Switched! (Or: Dabid’s Dad)

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Since I went mostly blind and largely useless, I may have suggested to my wife a few times that she drive down to the woods and leave me there if I become too much of a burden. She asked where I came up with such an idea, which made me think about something I rarely spare any thoughts to: my parentage. Specifically, my dad.

I haven’t seen my dad in about a decade and a half now, and he’s been dead for half that time. So my memories from 15+ years ago (and before 4 strokes ago) are getting a little hazy. But while I was rolling around in bed all night pondering what enhancements to make to the deck of my Gloomhaven Savvas Elementalist, Avatar Drew I, I had some flashes of recollection. Since this is a book about my life and people may wonder about the genealogical background of someone they’re reading about, I suppose I might as well fill in a few blanks.

I remember my dad telling me about how there had been a newborn next to me in the nursery at the hospital—Zachariah—and that the hospital must have made a mistake and given my parents the wrong baby by mistake. If I didn’t shape up, he threatened, he’d take me to the orphanage and exchange me for Zachariah. (I think it must have been really hard on my dad having a son wired so completely differently from him who he didn’t understand at all. )

I remember my dad holding me down and not letting me go. 

I was instructed I had to behave as I was told or my dad would drive me down to the woods and leave me there. (And people wonder why I’ve spent my life so firmly entrenched in Lawful Good.)

My dad did manual labor as a carpenter as his profession, but he was always full of rage when he’d rant about how he was so much smarter than all his peers and would have been a huge success if everyone hadn’t dissuaded him from going to college. 

I recall my dad being gone until after midnight most nights of the week because he was out gambling. That was fine. I liked not having competition for the TV. 

I remember being shoved against the wall with my dad’s hand on my throat (picture Itachi choking Sasuke from Naruto episode 85–it’s funny that way). 

Though I’ve long since forgotten the exact words, I can still feel the intensity of my dad’s daily hate-filled diatribes, filled with screaming and swearing about anyone who wasn’t a straight white man with his belief system. He would have absolutely loved four of the last five years in America. 

I remember someone (I think a relative on my mom’s side who clearly could make a more informed judgment than me) telling me my father was a good man. 

I don’t believe I ever saw my dad kiss or even hug my mom in my entire life. He must have loved her, though. He didn’t take her down to the woods and abandon her or anything.

Spilled Pepsi (or: “Dabid Almost Dies II)

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At some point another Doctor Mask and Light told me that I was at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and had had multiple strokes (whatever ”strokes” were). I couldn’t talk because my teeth were biting down into something hard that was crowbarring my mouth open . I don’t have solid memories of this period, as I’d later find out I was heavily drugged up on somethings called fentanyl and propofol.

More Doctor Masks and Lights made me squeeze their hands, give thumbs up and try to lift my arms and wiggle my toes (I could do none of the above on my left side). But mostly, I was just oblivious to the world around me during this time. Thank God.

I heard voices in the room assert that”The wife was insistent that he not be woken up unless she was here”.

Clearly they botched that, since I was awake to hear their discussion.

I was also cognizant of something foreign in my throat that I didn’t like and set to work trying to rip it out. The Doctor Masks must not have liked that, because I went totally unconscious again at that point and they affixed some sort of glove to my hand to inhibit my ability to pull out the object running down my throat.

On September 18th 2021, my wife raced home from work early to find me passed out and unresponsive on the couch. She knew something was wrong when I didn’t immediately respond to her text messages hours beforehand about ordering something online (if there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s spending money online)and continued to not respond throughout the afternoon .

After finding me, my wife quickly called the paramedics, who burst into our house a few minutes later and took me away in an ambulance (there’s an experience I can scratch off my scorecard—booyah) to a nearby Emergency Room. I’m told that while the paramedics were trying to revive me and set me up on the stretcher, they knocked over and spilled my untouched(but uncapped) daily 20 oz. Pepsi that was on an adjacent table. What a waste.

The Principal’s Office (or: “Dabid vs. Net Nanny”)

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Attending prom wasn’t the only unforeseen event that occurred because of my being part of the newspaper staff during my senior year of high school. For the one and only time in my public schooling career, I got called into the principal’s office.

For this school year, a “web-nanny” software had been installed on the school computers to keep students in the computer labs from going to websites with objectionable content not suitable for minors (stuff like pornography and… well, I don’t really know what else, but apparently porn is a big concern with high schoolers). It also blocked what I considered to be perfectly acceptable websites about video games and action figures, which raised my ire as needless censorship.

School Safety Filtering Internet Censorship

And so, as my justice-loving self, I decided to write up an editorial for the school paper decrying the content-control software as being unnecessary censorship. I don’t think anyone had said I was “cool” since I was briefly super-popular as a Freshman, but I did get some props on that article from classmates who wouldn’t normally engage me.

Some time after my article was published, during one of my morning computer lab classes my classmates discovered mysterious, thin scraps of paper on the floor. Each of them had a URL written upon it—a URL that when entered into the school web browsers, would allow the control software to be bypassed so that students could visit wherever they wanted on the internet.

My righteous teenage brain saw this as justice prevailing through some sort of divine intervention, so I immediately and enthusiastically went and told one of my newspaper staff mates about it and gave her one of the papers. She, in turn, told other students about the bypass method, who came to me asking how to utilize it. Within an hour or so, every student in the school computer labs was happily bypassing the content-controls. And shortly thereafter that, there was a teacher tapping my shoulder and escorting me down to the administrative office. 

As an adult, I can look back and see how this must have looked to the school administration: a senior student who had publicly denounced the school ‘s Internet content-control system caught distributing information to potentially hundreds of other students on how to circumvent that software. In retrospect, this seems like an open-and-shut case and a suspension.

In actuality, I had a brief and honest chat with the assistant principal, where I explained that I had simply found the papers with the workaround for the filtering system randomly on the floor during a class, and that I saw no issues with distributing it to other students as there weren’t any school rules prohibiting sharing website URLs. I wouldn’t know what “Lawful Good” was another two decades, but I was definitely exhibiting it here, working within the boundaries of the school rules toward a result that I was dead certain was good and just.

The assistant principal cited my editorial and tried to convince me that despite my optimism and good intentions, some of my fellow students might try to visit harmful or inappropriate websites. But I stood firm with my simple argument: that I didn’t believe they would do such a thing (which I whole-heartedly believed to be the truth).

I’m legitimately not sure the assistant principal knew what to do with my (delusional) genuineness, because I was dismissed in a sort of agree-to-disagree fashion with no punishment, teachers were alerted to be on the lookout for students using the censorship bypass, and the issue was never brought up to me again. And so ended my only public schooling run-in with The Man.

Lawful Good vs. Lawful Neutral (or: “Why Dabid Hates Dwight Schrute”)

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I’m presently watching a sitcom called “The Office”, a few episodes per week, because it is a favorite of several of my friends and I have been told that it is a sort of modern cultural touchstone that it will be useful for me to have an understanding of when interacting with others. This has been a bit of a difficult show for me to relate to, as I’ve never worked in any kind of office/cubicle environment, and the majority of the characters all seem like unbelievable caricatures to me.

Volunteer Depute Dwight Schrute in The Office Drug Testing Episode

Of all the characters, the one I instantly hated on sight was the Assistant to the Regional Manager, Dwight Schrute. His fussy need for logic and structure and his obsession with following rules and laws annoyed the crap out of me immediately, and I hated his awkward ways of trying to strengthen his bonds to people and his single-minded loyal devotion to his duties.

And then a terrible thing happened: my best friend said that I didn’t like that character because he behaves in a lot of ways that I do. And then I REALLY hated Dwight Schrute.

The episode I watched most recently, Season 2 Episode 20 – “Drug Testing”, serves as a good illustration of why I hate this character. Upon discovering evidence of illegal drugs on company property, Dwight begins an investigation to determine which of his friends or coworkers may have broken the law and company policy. He goes as far as even serving as the catalyst for drug testing being done in the office, an action that could potentially lead to one of his friends being fired or even arrested.

This sort of black-and-white, polarized thinking made me angry—both because of how it could lead to harm for people Dwight cared about, and also because of the fact that I could EASILY see myself doing the exact same thing at points in my life if I wasn’t careful.

Remember when I talked about role-playing games a couple entries back? In those types of games, there’s something called “character alignment”, which is a system of categorization for a character’s moral and ethical perspectives on life.

The character alignment in role-playing games that I like the best is “Chaotic Good”—characters who act according to their own conscience for what they see as the greater good, regardless of whether or not it goes against societal expectations.

So it’s no surprise that I outright dislike Dwight Schrute, who I believe is confined by a “Lawful Neutral” alignment, intractably obeying rules and laws, even if those structures will cause harm unnecessarily to people he cares about.

The resolution of the episode briefly gave me hope for Dwight, however, as he broke the rules by helping his supposed closest friend—the perpetrator—to subvert the drug testing and get away with his technical misdeed. A devastated and conflicted Dwight then resigns as a Volunteer Sheriff’s Deputy out of shame and deference to the law, which disappointed me since he was ashamed of deciding to surpass the structure of laws he’s ruled by in order to help someone close to him.

Regardless of any comparisons made between me and Dwight Schrute, I am resolute that my natural alignment is different from his. My ethics certainly also veer towards “Lawful”, as my instant inclination is always to follow the rules as they’ve been set out, and it makes me upset to see other people circumventing them and acting “illegally”. However, my moral compass points toward “Good” and not “Neutral”. I strive to work within the laws to find loopholes and ways of using the rules to achieve what I think is ultimately morally right–I’m unwilling to be a puppet to the rules.

I don’t particularly like the lawyer-like boring predictability of being “Lawful Good”—my ambition is to become something much cooler like “Chaotic Good”. But given my own savior complex and ideal of wanting to save everyone, I definitely can’t accept any “Evil” or even “Neutral” alignment wherein someone would abandon others in need out of deference to rules and regulations.

And THAT is why I hate Dwight Schrute.

Normie (or: “Dabid Watches Stuff”)

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I’ve been trying to put in an effort lately to expose myself to some media (you know–movies, TV, books, video games) that I ordinarily would not pay attention to—or would actively avoid—for a couple of purposes.

Because of the fact that my brain primarily fixates on toys and collectibles, it’s typically difficult for me to dredge up enough interest to sit still and watch something that doesn’t have any merchandising I’m interested in. There are exceptions to this when a story manages to gel with another one of my interests (my mind is not entirely one-track), but for the most part I avoid things that look scary, boring or “normie”.

For that last descriptor, please note that I’m not saying or meaning it in a derogatory fashion—it’s just that I have a difficult time relating to a lot of mainstream tastes and perspectives, and I’ve traditionally been too unmotivated (or lazy) to try to learn anything about those types of media. If there’s not a hook somewhere that manages to catch my attention, it’s a real battle to force myself to stay still and watch a thing, whether it be 22 or 220 minutes.

However. Having driven my friends and acquaintances practically insane an uncountable number of times over my life with my sheer obliviousness and inability to recognize references to popular shows and movies, I am beginning to understand the value in experiencing these things that “everybody else” (hyperbole) knows about already.

I’m not saying that everyone everywhere should try to watch, read or listen to stuff that they have zero affinity for, but I’ve discovered that having a lack of what’s considered common popular culture knowledge is an issue for at least me specifically. Why? Because it further isolates me and distances me from others, when I don’t actually want to be isolated. I think.

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t love all social interaction (I dread a majority of it, honestly). But I also don’t want to be so ignorant of common knowledge and poorly-versed and inexperienced at being social that I alienate people I do want to interact with.

In addition, if you care about a person, it makes sense to me that you can learn more about them by learning about the things they love. So if a show or song or movie or video game is important to someone else, you can get to know that person better by consuming that same media to try to discover why it is important to that person and have a better understanding of them overall.

And so, I have begun my study of certain pieces of media that have been recommended to me that I otherwise would have outright rejected. Things like Alien (which apparently has a cutely named sequel named Aliens). Things like Beastars (which, incidentally, I’ve included a related Dabid Unboxes! video alongside this entry). And things like The Office. Which, strangely enough, is going to tie together these two latest entries…

Complementary Video: Dabid Unboxes!: Beastars Original Soundtrack OST – Satoru Kosaki 3x LP Vinyl Record Set

Zero Cool the Mysterious Rogue Hobbit (or: “Dabid’s 1st ‘D&D’ Character”)

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In 2017, I somehow ended up playing several games of Pathfinder, a Dungeons & Dragons-like role-playing board game. I say “somehow” because these types of games generally require social interaction with multiple other people (which I am traditionally quite poor at and anxious about partaking in).

Even so, my best (and only) local friend had ambitions to serve as a “Dungeon Master”, and somehow my wife and I ended up roped into attending a few sessions of table-top adventuring with him and two random people (“a few sessions” because the campaign abruptly ended without resolution).

Dabid's First RPG Character Sheet Zero Cool Pathfinder D&D

My first character I ever created was a Hobbit (I rejected the use the official name of “Halfling” that the game tried to insist upon for the race): the mysterious Zero Cool, a thief and opportunist of the Rogue class. I chose the name in honor of Lelouch vi Britannia’s masked identity from the Code Geass anime, Zero, who became a symbol of rebellion and a messianic figure to the subjugated Japanese (you may have noticed by now that I have a real thing for saviors).

It was uncomfortable for me having to work on a “team” where I didn’t know half the other people at all and they weren’t familiar with my quirks or personality, so I don’t think we gelled very naturally. I actually don’t have a very solid recollection of those games at all, beyond that Brienne of Tarth the Paladin was in our party (played by a dude) and my wife was playing as some classic (I think Ranger) that could control a bird as an animal companion. Had we kept playing, I have little doubt she would have eventually had a dinosaur familiar. Alas.

I’m not sure how the “Cool” part of Zero’s name came about, but I’m guessing it was someone else’s suggestion–I would have wanted the name kept as one word to make it simpler and more enigmatic, I think. I had all sorts of potential plot twists and story arcs masterminded for Zero, but none of them were ever able to come to fruition during our brief campaign (since we ultimately only played about 3 or 4 quests before the party fell apart forever).

Even so, in just a few hours of role-playing I had developed the template and playstyle for all the future characters I’d play in other tabletop RPGs: the trouble-making rebel who breaks off from the rest of the party, striking out on their own to claim every treasure chest for good and devastate all of the enemies in the name of success for the group as a whole, regardless of the characters’ actual attributes or intended gameplay.

Rebellious in all manner of unexpected situations, confident in their own abilities and comfortable breaking the rules, this is the type of character that I naturally gravitate toward liking and playing as. It’s the kind of personality that’s always appealed to me and that I’ve always sort of envisioned as having myself.

But as much as I love role-playing that type of person in a game, doing so also highlights to me the fact that the actual ethics and morals hardwired into me that I can’t get past are nowhere near as cool as those of the made-up characters I can take control of and briefly live vicariously through. It’s a bitter reality, but having knowledge of and being reminded of it pushes me to work to grow and change so that I can surpass my limitations.

Blogs (or: “Dabid’s Blog 2.0”)

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Shortly after the events of July 24, 2010 (I’ll get to that eventually), I started my first official blog. Previously I had had a Livejournal–and I made daily posts on various defunct forums and newsgroups for years before that–so I was no stranger to writing on the internet. But this blog was a little bit different from what had come before, because I was a little bit different from my previous life.

Dabid's Blog Header Kon

Titled “Dabid’s Blog“, it was a hodgepodge conglomerate of various random things I crammed into it, including toy and comic book reviews (of course), lists of worthwhile things I had done on any given day, song lyric interpretations and music analyses, a discussion of the merits of Pepsi Throwback, chronicles of my first experiences with coffee and baseball, a trip to Chiji’s restaurant and much more. (Though not necessarily much more of substance, mind you–I was pretty shocked when I revisited this blog.)

By early 2012, though, something went askew inside me again. I gave up on experiencing life outside of collecting and let it fully consume me (again). I created and published a multitude of toy-related blog sites, and was quickly having my work read by millions of collectors every year. Eventually, I let Dabid’s Blog die and allowed the domain name registration I’d purchased for DabidsBlog.com to lapse without a care, as I never thought I’d be writing a personal blog again.

It took almost a decade, but at some point over the last year (and largely for reasons still to come in this book), my heart changed again. I knew I was going to write a book about my life (beyond but including collecting, which is a core component of me, after all), and eventually I settled on this blogging format.

I briefly planned on re-registering “dabidsblog.com” and reviving that site for this project, but something unexpected occurred: the Internet has changed somewhat in the last decade, and someone had already purchased that domain name–for the intent of selling it for about a thousand dollars to some poor schmuck named Dabid who wanted to have an on-the-nose domain name for their blog.

While it was a bit irritating at first to see my old domain name being used in such a manner, ultimately I decided a new title would be best for my book anyway. I toyed with the idea of “Collecting Life”, but that domain name was already being scalped for $2500–and I’m glad it was, since it not being available forced me to the final title I came up with.

What I like about “Penguin Dome!” as the title for this book is that it’s an idea I had that says a lot about me as a human (if that’s really what I am)–and it’s also the idea I’ve had that’s most personal to me and not about collecting. If not for others, it’s at least good for me to be reminded that there is more to my self than just collecting.

There’s one more metaphorical reason I’m really content with the “Penguin Dome!” title, but it hinges on something we haven’t come to yet.

But I have said enough to start filling in some of those blanks in the header image and tagline for the site, so I’ll document the original and revised versions here before we move on.

Goodbye, “Penguin Dome! – A Blog About __________, Life, ______, ____, ______, _____ and ____ “.

Hello, “Penguin Dome! – A Blog About Collecting, Life, ______, Toys, ______, Anime and ____”.

I wonder what we’ll fill in next…

Prime (or: “Dabid’s Birthday”)

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I was born on September 4th, 1982 (or 9/4/82).

For most of my life I have had a strong dislike of this as my birthday for a variety of reasons, not least of which that none of the separate numbers that make up the date (9, 4 and 82) are prime numbers. 9 and 4 are perfect squares of the very first two prime numbers, which is kind of neat, mind you, but that’s simply not as compelling as being prime numbers themselves. And 82, well… that number is just boring.

In addition, no genre-defining, generational movies that would spawn decades of imagination-capturing toys and merchandise would come out in 1982 (instead, we got E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial—a movie that to this day looks creepy and I have no interest in, despite having ridden an outdated amusement park ride themed for it and being intrigued by the legend of the millions of copies of the Atari video game adaptation allegedly buried in a New Mexico landfill).

Hasbro wouldn’t unleash Transformers upon the US for another two years (although it would become the first love of my life when they did), and even the inaugural year of 3.75” GI Joe: A Real American Hero action figures wouldn’t be upgraded from unusably limited “straight arms” that only moved at the elbows to having the new “swivel arm battle grip” until 1983.

Disney opened a new park in 1982, but even that isn’t as big of a landmark as it could be for me, as it’s “just” EPCOT (“Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow”, although it has strayed quite a bit from that as its defining concept over the years). In theory, EPCOT should be one of the most fascinating theme parks ever envisioned, but the reality of the park–especially in its current state–has left me disheartened and discouraged. But more about Disney later on in this book.

So what historical things did happen on my birth date…? A handful of relatively obscure anime characters not worth mentioning have birthdays on September 4th, and a few franchises like Tron, My Little Pony and Buffalo Wild Wings (BW3, or “B-Dubs” as I affectionately call it) that would eventually have varying degrees of relevance to my life came into existence. But overall, it is a very insignificant and uninteresting birthdate.

Basically, it is an ordinary day. And if there’s one thing that drives me crazy, it’s being ordinary. Not because I think I’m better than anybody else, but because I’m bad at being similar to everybody else. My mannerisms, my speech patterns, my behaviors, the intensity of my interests, what and how I eat, the ways that I feel and communicate… they’ve all been deviant from societal norms for as long as I can remember. And if I’m going to be so wholly different from others, I feel like I should have a birthday that stands out in some regard too. Not in a way that’s “special”–just “apart”. I don’t like doing things halfway.

But alas. Life is full of little disappointments (as well as lots of positive surprises, too, hopefully). And if the humdrum historical context of someone’s birth date was even worth ranking amongst the disappointments in their lifetime, that’d have to be a pretty good life.

Whether or not my life has been so unspectacular–or blessed–that something as lame as a birth date is worth mentioning on my list, well… let’s read on and see.

The Penguin Dome (or: “The Best Idea of Dabid’s Life”)

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I had hoped to put off talking about the title of this blog for as long as possible, but it seems I’ve written myself into a corner and provided the perfect segue with the previous entry. And so, against my better judgment, it’s time to talk about what I fully believe is the singular best idea of my life.

In 2005, I saw a nature documentary movie called March of the Penguins with my then-future-wife, Jen. The movie documents the true story of the Antarctic Emperor penguins that need to complete an arduous journey each year in order to breed. While the natural habitat of these penguins is the ocean, the logistics of breeding necessitate that the breeding ground be a specific spot that is solid ice year-round and able to support the weight of the colony. Unfortunately, by the end of the winter in Antarctica, this spot is over 60 miles from the nearest open water.

In order to facilitate the survival of a baby penguin chick, the monogamous (monogamy is the best policy!) penguin parents need to work cooperatively, with one parent walking extreme distances to bring back food while the other keeps the penguin egg (and eventually chick) warm and safe from the intense cold. Even when a chick is successfully born, the penguins still have to survive against hardships such as fierce winter storms and dangerous predators, and the movie documents the deaths of many adult and baby penguins.

I don’t like March of the Penguins!

I like to think that I’m generally a pretty mild-mannered person, but it makes me immensely angry that humans went all the way to Antarctica for months and months to film all the footage for this documentary–and then stood by and watched and did nothing while a multitude of these penguins suffered and died. To me, and taken in light of my previously-stated ideal of “The Hero That Saves Everyone”,  this is unconscionable–if you can save someone that can’t save themself, then you should.

And so! I proposed to Jen the aforementioned greatest idea of my life: The Penguin Dome.

Wherein: Rather than leaving these penguins to their own accord and allowing for uncountable numbers of them to die in the future, instead humans build a humongous dome and create an ideal habitat for the Penguins to safely breed in–a Penguin Dome–with all of the food, resources and medical care necessary to make the Penguins secure and happy. A place to insulate them from the world outside and make sure that they’re safe and can survive without getting extinguished by the reality of the world.

Why should the emperor penguins have to travel 100 kilometers or more to the water to look for fish and potentially get eaten by seals or freeze to death, when humans can just provide them with food?

Why should the penguins have to stand out in extreme temperatures of almost -80 degrees Fahrenheit to keep their eggs warm when we can temperature-control everything so that every egg and penguin survives?

If humans can heal injuries and diseases that used to be fatal; can travel into outer space; can send probes out to explore planets across the galaxy–then why can’t we do something simple like saving the lives of other creatures that aren’t as advanced as us?

Jen. Did not like this idea for reasons I cannot comprehend. I swear that I have tried, but it is beyond my capabilities to comprehend why something like this–maybe not exactly the same, but similar–would be “wrong”. This film continues to haunt me, so I have re-proposed The Penguin Dome again and again–sometimes with slight tweaks, sometimes without–for the last 15+ years.

I propose similar things often. For example, we have a surprisingly robust population of rabbits living outside in our neighborhood right now. I did some research and discovered that outdoor rabbits only live 1/10th as long as indoor rabbits because it’s a dangerous world outside and wild rabbits are heavily predated.  I wanted to lure the rabbits into our house so that we could keep them safe.

I’m pretty sure that the rabbits would be much happier inside with us in an air-conditioned environment and with infinite food and total safety, even if they needed to be tricked into coming into the house to be shown that. But Jen refuses and says I am trying to “Penguin Dome” them.

Is that really such a bad thing? I wonder.