I just found an old note that came with an arrangement of flowers at the hospital:

Here’s To A Speedy Recovery!
We Love You Very Much,
Mom & Dad, Patty, Tom & The
Girls, And Sandy, Mike & The
Boys

Death has always been extremely difficult for me. But I have never felt it as close to home as I have with my own father. I ache for those who experience death on a daily basis. I ache for the Africans slaughtered by genocide, the six-year-olds dying from diarrhea, the Middle Easterners killed by terrorist insurgents, the millions dying from cancer, and the families still reeling from 9/11. We see the preciousness of humanity every single day in the news. But we feel the preciousness of humanity when we lose one human we love.

This tragedy is one of my greatest gifts. My family and I are still receiving letters and meals from friends and family and people we don’t even know. I am backlogged with e-mail but plan to reply to every message.

We received three five more cards today. Some of the cards are handmade, some are filled with signatures, some contain special trinkets… feathers, prayer cards, dried flowers. When I was little, I would rush to find the money in a greeting card. Now I can’t wait to read the handwritten message. I have begun exchanging letters with old friends and started new relationships. This is the work of my father, leaving us peacefully and sprinkling in happy moments to show us we’re safe in his arms.

Thank you so much for the support.

Orgies are the way to ease social tensions, claims US judge

He is the conservative bastion of the US supreme court, a favourite of President Bush, and a hunting partner of the vice-president. He has argued vociferously against abortion rights, and in favour of anti-sodomy laws.

But it turns out that there is another side to Justice Antonin Scalia: he thinks Americans ought to be having more orgies.

Challenged about his views on sexual morality, Justice Scalia surprised his audience at Harvard University, telling them: “I even take the position that sexual orgies eliminate social tensions and ought to be encouraged.”

[Via El Oso]

The British media eat this stuff up.

1. When passing back and forth a note, the woman will always keep it.
2. Women are not very good at hiding affection — if you know how to read it.

That is all.

Tell us about a talent, experience, contribution or personal quality you will bring to the University of California.

And I have to do it in either 200 or 600 words. Any suggestions?

It’s when you learn just how to drive it that you have to trade it away.

It’s when you know just how to make the layout right that it’s time to call it a day.

It’s when you finally have the words in your mouth that you can’t think of anything to say.

It’s when you finally begin to understand someone that you have to give her away.

This has infinitely more meaning to me today. I have always been fascinated with the one-year-ago thing, because we all live our lives in seasons. Our wisdom is judged by the number of seasons we have seen. And with the shift of temperatures comes a shift of understanding.

My beloved, yellow, Lance Armstrong wristband fell off yesterday. It expired. I first put it on many weeks ago, the moment I found it lying on my computer keyboard, packaged in plastic… the day after my father called a family meeting to tell us he had deadly cancer.

My parents bought four as gifts for all of us, before I knew what they were and long before they became a national craze. I never took the band off, not once. Not when I sat beside my sedated father in the hospital bed, or after he departed forever. To me, the band embodied two great athletes I greatly admire, two men who were to live long lives despite cancer.

Now I idly fuss with my sleeves and feel for the wristband that isn’t there anymore.

But change is, of course, good. Yesterday, as a concious step in this transition, I made a bold choice that will probably surprise most of you — I ate at an Asian-food restaurant. I forwent my aversion to the cuisine and shed a part of my identity. I went to Kitima, a Thai restaurant in Hillcrest. I ate Sidewalk Noodles with an “abundance” of chicken. It tasted very foreign. But appealing. I was in the company of great friends. We conversed for hours.

Oh, and I have decided to accept the pleas of dozens of you and try sushi for the first time. Who’s going to be first to expose me?

He stared into the taillights of the Lexus in front of him. They were bold and red but not uninviting. It was a comforting hue.

He glanced in the mirror at the headlights behind him. Square and pale, with gentle fog lights. An old Toyota, content at its cruising speed and anonymous.

The speed of the Lexus did not change, and neither did his speed. He felt strangely safe in the middle of the two vehicles, barreling down the freeway at 62 miles per hour.

He returned his gaze to the taillights in front of him and let his mind meander. He thought of nothing in particular, if anything at all. Occasionally he returned to the strange reality of supreme comfort in the little cockpit, never changing speed, never even thinking about the pressure on the gas pedal. He forgot he had been driving.

As he moved through space, other cars whirled past him. He had been accustomed to this. His thoughts faded to calmness, and then back to reality again.

Why were all the cars moving so fast? He knew they drove very fast in San Diego, but not this fast.

Eager to get to their destinations.

Why not the Lexus or the Toyota? He shifted in his seat. He realized it was odd to have remained in the same place for so many miles. As he pondered it with a renewed alertness, he shifted again. How long had he been behind this car? Suddenly a few miles felt somehow miscalculated. Had it been hours?

The landscape had not changed. He was intensely aware now. The cars still whirled by, and yet he did not consider what they looked like or who occupied them.

How long has this been going on?

He remembered driving long distances through the Simi Valley. He knew the tricks of weariness could not be beaten by its hostage.

But he was not weary. He glanced at the speedometer. The needle hovered just past the 60 MPH mark.

He rubbed his eyes and shook his head. But he was not weary! This was not like the long drives he had experienced before. He realized he was stuck there, somehow prevented from looking around or changing the speed of his vehicle. He had recalled a similar sensation in dreams, where alternatives were available but strangely forbidden. But he was moving through this conciousness.

As he moved through space, the taillights in front of him provided comfort. He gazed deeply into them again. Soon he was at ease about the sensation.

The perplexion suddenly did not faze him, as if that were now a former and trivial pursuit. Although he did not understand what was happening, he was at peace with it.

His mind moved to other questions, but as soon as he pondered them they were solved. He began understanding at a rate so fast that the answers came before the questions. With each answer he pitied his former self and felt ever more omniscient.

He watched himself move through space, his small car still behind the white Lexus and still followed by the old Toyota. He felt two existences, both sitting in the car and observing from afar. He felt more connected to the self that was far away, and he watched himself in contemplative amusement.

The cars no longer mattered, and he could only feel the motion. He could feel a great transition, rapidly materializing in the middle of space. He could feel instants of time expanding into centuries of stillness. He could feel a perfect balance of sorrow and joy, so sharp it was foreign, but not unsettling. So sharp and yet so incredibly dull.

He realized he had died.

He knew not what to make of this place in time, and it did not trouble him.

He was dead, but still there. Somewhere.

Friend: who won round one?
Me: tie
Friend: k,
Friend: is it still on? my friend is making me watch friends instead
Me: jesus
Me: that’s sad
Me: no it ended
Friend: do you pity me?
Me: I pity your friend
Me: who has her priorities mixed up
Friend: amen to that, but she isnt political
Me: still

Sigh.

The Stylistic Concerns of the Internet (WMA)

There’s a difference between saying something is a space and saying it’s a particular place. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t think of the Internet as one of those ubiquitous presences like the atmosphere or the cosmos — none of them phrases we’re tempted to put into capital letters.

Putting a capital I on Internet implies something more than that. It turns the Internet into a specific location, a city of bits, where a single community is taking shape.

…

The Internet is no more a coherent community than the collection of travelers who happen to find themselves at Kennedy airport on a given Monday afternoon — on their way to or from Stuttgart, San Juan, or St. Louis.

I highly suggest you give the five-and-a-half-minute piece a listen.

This issue is particularly interesting for me, as someone who works in both the computer and journalism industries. And I care a lot about language. I still insist on the capitalization of Internet and Web.

Nunberg cleverly argues that Americans used to capitalize The Radio and The Television, until those technologies eventually fell into the background. In some ways, I suppose there are parallels between the Internet and the vast, loosely connected “network” of television programming that materializes through a single television set

However, the World Wide Web and its parent, the Internet, are very different from anything we have understood before. In English, we don’t only assign capital letters to places but to proper names. “The Web” explicitly refers to the billions of pages of hypertext and media that exist on the Internet and are accessible with a computer and a modem. The early pioneers of the Internet used a common word to describe the Web — web. “The web” can have several other meanings, like a spider’s web, or a web of friends. Seeing “the web” in lowercase can be unclear.

Moreover, I always capitalize the Media (or The Media, another discussion altogether) and use it as a singular noun. I do so because the Media collectively refers to a large body of organizations — literally affiliated or not — that takes on common characteristics and serves as the victim of generalizations. When I say, “The Media is dominated by financial interests,” it’s clear to you that I’m referring to the many news media outlets that comprise the mainstream system that delivers information to the public.

But in many cases, my concerns about capitalization, spelling, et cetera relate to the arbitrary, which is what grammarians care about — as opposed to semantics, which Nunberg cares about. If you’re still reading this, you might wonder why there’s such a big discussion over some capital letters.

Nunberg says we attach great meaning to arbitrary things, and the capitalization of Internet and Web can shape our views of what those “places” or mere “spaces” really are. I may not be convinced to start lowercasing, but I have been forced to contemplate the meaning of the digital world.

Plus: Vivian Cook discusses the elasticity of language and asks us not to get in a strop about spelling.

The grief usually comes unexpectedly, sneaking up from behind and wrapping its arms around my body. There is no choice but to cope with it and recall the images in my mind’s eye. This experience is still surreal and will be for a long time. Maybe forever.

When I got home, I talked to my mother about how I felt. As we talked, I casually clicked the link on my sidebar that takes me back to this day in 2003. I was upset-slash-amused.

And: richphelps.com is fixed and links to the special commemorative archive on my weblog entitled “Remembering Dad”.

TINP, anyone?

I’m sitting before a blank canvas. Well, it’s not blank anymore. What to write? What to say? How to say it? A ramble.

I formally returned to life today. I talked to an instructor who lost a friend to suicide just a week before I lost my father. I talked to a barista who lost her father to illness almost a year ago, and subsequently lost her mother to chronic heartbreak three months later. I talked to a lot of people today, sometimes simultaneously. My universe is buzzing.

My life is a novel. This is not me talking; too many have told me so — those close to me and those not as close. One person repeated it tonight and then flattered me with his choice of yours truly as a character to develop in a writing class.

I will write the novel someday.

As always I am obsessing about my weblog and the direction to take it. I sense it will become more artistic. I want to do more writing. Someone suggested an ongoing novel or series of random shorts. I asked him for a word to get me started. Carbonated. I’ll see what I can do with it.

What do you think? Would this sort of thing interest you? Please contribute.

I admit I am not looking forward to cleaning up two weeks of mess. No loss ever comes at a good time, and this one was no exception. But I’ll make it.

Letters and flowers from the farthest reaches of our social network are still filtering in. But the immediate rush of support has faded. It is very interesting to learn about myself as I grieve. I had wondered how I would be feeling at this time, and I wonder now how I will feel in two weeks. I am still intensely sad. It is hardest late at night. I have begun doing some normal things, though. When I talked to Sam on the phone today, I experienced precisely the same, semi-guilt of a happy conversation that I did with him after 9/11. Was I allowed to do this?

My trip to Santa Barbara was extremely restful, as usual. Minus the traffic. I discovered the county’s two public radio stations, and I listened with amusement to how they differ from San Diego’s one and only.

My dad will undoubtedly come up a lot, both in my thoughts and words. Some days will be harder than others for working. I hope you all can be somewhat sensitive to this. I hope that the hundreds of you who discovered my Web site will keep reading even after I stop writing about my dad.

Back to normal? Not quite. But I march onward.

PS: I still have to write the story about all this. Coming soon.

My brother was a gentle man. Many of you knew him as “Rich”, but to his family he was “Dickie”. Try as he did to get us to call him Rich, it just never happened. Too many years had passed.

He loved his family very much. He loved so many things that it will be hard to go anywhere and not think of him. If you drive by the beach at Carlsbad or Coronado, we will think of him. If we are skiing in the mountains of Utah, we will think of him. If we are running or biking, we will think of him. When we eat any kind of delicious Italian food, we will think of him. He could never get enough of good food. He loved to work in the yard and make his flower beds look beautiful. He felt this was the legacy my grandfather left him. He loved the desert and spent many weekends there hiking with Nonie or with his friends.

The biggest part of my brother that I will never forget was his humor. Many times the humor was at his expense, but it never failed to bring everyone to tears with laughter. Christmas was always special in that we knew he would come up with something that would make us shake our heads and laugh. He would come up with comments out of left field and we would all build on the comment with more and more kidding. Our family is famous for practical jokes, and he was always ready, willing, and able to assist.

He loved his workouts. I don’t remember him going without them for any length of time until the end. He always kidded about the girls looking at him. He was so young at heart he had a hard time not hanging around with David and Andrew and their friends.

I don’t think he ever left a phone message for me in his normal voice. His last message was on my birthday in August where he pretended to be the owner of a seniors-only mobile home park in Sun City. He was informing me that I now could apply to live there at a reduced cost because of my age. The messages were always believable to others, but I knew who it was, whether he had a New York accent, Italian accent, or Spanish accent. He figured he would fool me one day, but it never happened. I will miss those phone messages because they always made my day a little lighter — I can’t imagine not getting them again.

He was incredibly proud of his family. He passed his love of running on to his son David. Together they spent many hours training and traveling to meets. He spent hours coaching and mentoring other young boys with an incredible enthusiasm for the sport.

Andrew always amazed him with his various talents and achievements. Dickie/Rich couldn’t say enough about Andrew’s computer savvy or his success at pretty much anything he attempted.

He had been married to Nonie for 25 years. That is quite an achievement these days. They managed to raise two incredible young men in such a way that they are caring and sensitive people. They will surely take care of their mother in the days ahead.

He had a special and close relationship with both my mother and my father.

He loved them more than life itself and was so happy they returned to Italy to spend their 50th anniversary in the town where they were married.

I would now like to read a poem in tribute to my brother [by Carmela Cornejo as seen on andrewphelps.com].

God saw he was tired,
And the cure was not to be,
So He put his arms around him
And whispered,
“Rich come to Me.”

With tearful eyes God watched,
As you
Saw him pass away.
Although you loved him dearly,
God could not let him stay.

A golden heart stopped beating,
Hard-working hands at rest.
God broke your hearts to prove
To you,
He only takes the best.

Our family has suffered a tremendous loss. The love and support of family and friends has been so sustaining these past several days. Words cannot express our gratitude.

If you missed it: Read Brad Swecker’s eulogy or my eulogy.

PS: I still have to write the story about all this. Coming soon.

My newest cousin, Hailey Rose Shields, was born today. She came into the world two weeks early, at noon. She weighs a healthy eight pounds.

During the most difficult time my family has ever faced, this miracle is an incredible blessing. Hailey Rose, whose initials match those of my father, simply could not wait to cheer us up.

Hailey was born to my father’s sister, Sandra, and her husband, Michael.

My Aunt Sandra’s pregnancy was high-risk, and this birth was fraught with challenges. My father always told us he would give his own life so that Sandra could have a healthy baby. He would beam with pride to see Hailey now.

I will be in Santa Barbara for the weekend.

Jeff put together this piece in about a day with very little notice. And he didn’t just throw something together — he created a small masterpiece that I could watch again and again. We owe him our gratitude. Thank you, Jeff.

Download “In Loving Memory” now.

The video is in Windows Media 9 format. Running time is 5:40. Please note the file is fairly large (11.1 MB) and may choke a low-speed connection. However, the video is optimized so you can stream it off my Web site within Windows Media Player. (Just click the link and choose Open in Internet Explorer or choose File | Open URL... in the media player.)

The online version isn’t as smooth as the original, of course, but I think it does a good enough job. If you’re having trouble getting it to work, or if you get no video or no sound, try this one instead. If you’re still having trouble, please contact me.

One more thing. I’m sure there’s some confusion with Harold and Rich and Dickie being thrown around. To my family and some close friends, my dad is Dickie. To others, he is Rich.

PS: I encourage you to share this link with friends. I have repaired the e-mail feature so you can forward away.