A Word About our Title

I’m pretty sure I addressed this in the first iteration of DFTC (yes, I just abbreviated my own blog - can you stand the pretension? Can you?) but sharing with you the origin of our blog title is good filler, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with babies, pregnancy, or parenting, thus fulfilling a goal I set for myself when returning to blogging - to give a sh** about something other than my own tiny universe. Yes, I’m psyched about the baby, especially now that she's finally here. Yes, parenting is a big deal. Yes, nearly everyone we know is in this boat with us. But not everyone, and we at DFTC (there it is again!) care about all our Constant Readers, not just the ones that care about us back. Moreover, filler is good, as our readers will note with dismay (or apathy) that posts on this blog have fallen off of late, in rough correspondence to the weeks since Olivia has graced us with her presence. I'm sure there's no connection.

Anyhoo, as the picture in the header indicates, I stole this title from graffiti - specifically, graffiti in the garage outside my freshman dormitory.




… Did you expect more?

I could leave it there, but that would make for a pretty crappy post.

The phrase was probably scrawled by a drunken frat-guy who considered the thought deeply philosophical, but I thought it was a fairly decent motto for that year of my life. College was good to me. I had come from a high school experience that was less than ideal to the “big city” of Columbia and was busy coming into my own. Far from feeling like an outsider, as in high school, I immediately found a circle (several circles, really) of like-minded geeks. I lived with a roommate who never slept, in a room with fake vulture and a light-up reindeer named Lupus. (If you immediately heard Hugh Laurie’s voice saying “It’s never lupus,” you are in the right place my friend)

Classes were challenging, but not ridiculously so (I assiduously avoided science and engineering in favor of business classes - hence my less than taxing course load), and as a result I enjoyed a high degree of free time for wrecking the toy aisles at Wal-mart at one a.m., LAN battles on Unreal Tournament, rolling twelve sided dice (yeah, that’s right), and consuming an unreasonable amount of Waffle House. It was a chaotic time, but in the best sense of the word - unpredictable, exciting, spontaneous. I certainly can’t say it was the best time of my life - I’ve been blessed way above my pay-grade in the years since then - but it was a good year, and the writing on the wall summed it all up pretty well.

But subsequent years have also been well summed up with this phrase, in good ways and bad. (This is me getting deep, so try not to get your ankles wet.) Life is not orderly, nor is it meant to be. We forget the chaos at our own peril, since the chaos is life happening.

Or it’s just a piece of graffiti that struck my fancy. Whatever.