Larger than Life (tissue warning)

I recently attended my Uncle Matthias's funeral.

Due to the fact that my father had about 17 brothers and sisters, there are many of my aunts and uncles that I don't really know all that well, and Uncle Matthias was one of those people. All I really remember was that at the baby shower/Wedding reception we had a few years ago, he and his wife Jane brought us a tree to plant for Lilas. According to his Obit, He was a man who loved life and those that were alive.

Let me explain a little bit further. He had a lot of cats. 11 cats, mostly walk in strays that he took care of. He also tended to his garden a lot. This seems kind of like typical things a 63 year old fellow would partake in, but it is a little deeper than that in my family. We are, from my observations, the stewards, caretakers, and the ones most attuned with life and lives.

See, my father enjoys it when the lake water runs over the bank in the stream. I always assumed it made for good fishing, but one day my dad related this to me that made him tear up a little. "Ryan, when I was younger, there was so much bad around me, so much death, then I would see the water rise over the bank. The water was just so full of life, I could forget how tough things were and revel in the living. There was just so much life..."

I think that we as Riojas's are quite attuned to life. We are sensitive to the little behaviors that are exhibited by living things and life in general. That's why we got a tree. I mean, Karen and I were registered at Target for gifts, and we had no place to plant a tree where we were living, other than at my parent's house. It was not a practical gift at all if one looks as it in a useful way. But this one gesture of good wishing seemed more a representation of Life than something that could be used for any useful purpose. My uncle was saying, whether he meant to or not, "Here is life! I'll give you life for your new life starting."

My father also is a man who is preoccupied by the essence of life. He is a hunter and a fisherman, as well as a 4wheeler officionatto, and spends his day at work providing heat to people who are cold. I myself find myself getting choked up about silly things like when people are offered jobs to be able to continue providing for a family. My dad is also an empathetic man, which I inherited from him in spades. We both have a desire to fix bad emotions in other people, to experiment with human reaction, and to make people laugh. By the same token, I guess I share the same sort of anchor to the well being of life to enrich my own.

The format of the funeral was to collect the family and have people share fond memories of my uncle. My dad took a turn.

"I remember that Matthias had a pretty blue car. He would give me and Danny each $2.50 a piece for our allowance and get into his car. Then he would say... 'Hey, each of you gimme a dollar back.' We would give him a dollar and he would peel out in front of the house. We would cheer and yell and have a grand old time. My brother Matthias was someone who was Larger Than life itself..."

I'm kinda choking up right now as I draw conclusions and parallels with my own life. I am seeing with each day that I grow older and older why my dad was the way he is; why he would ask me where I was going before I would hang out with my friends, and why he would give me 5 or 6 bucks to enjoy the outing without thinking about it. That's what my dad was shown about how to take care of someone younger than himself. To be larger than life is what it means to be a Riojas, to be a part of this family, to be a person so tied to the ebb and flow of life.

I now look at my dad with the eyes of a father. I see things that he is too humble to admit. My father has a million people that would take a bullet for him. The conversations I have with people I meet on campus is "your Tino's kid aren't you" that is followed by "Your dad is a great guy!" There are children being born in the family that people, on purpose, are naming after my dad. As sad as it is to lose a brother, an uncle, a father, a friend, a soldier, a caretaker, and a gardener, I believe it is Valentino Riojas's turn to be what Uncle Matthias was to him. It's my father's turn to be larger than life.

This post in particular made, and makes, people in my family cry.

All your love is missing is hate

I was hanging with my friend a while ago at his place eating grilled cheese and tomato soup. Most people would associate the food with childhood, but for me, I never had a point in my childhood where I had such a combo. My grilled cheese was always served with pear halves and I never had tomato soup until I was twenty.

Anyway, my friend has an amazing impediment. He cannot make grilled cheese. It's an ailment likened unto Derik Zoolander's left turn disorder. Try as he might, he just cannot do it. His girlfriend had to boot him out of the kitchenette and save the would be Dorito flavored charcoal bits, earning him beration and harassment of the culinary sort. The cute chattiness and whimsical insults made the scene endearing as she scraped the leftover cheese flakes from the pan into the garbage and handed me a plate with a delectable trinkets of flavor. During the serving, my friend looks at me and says "Don't we act like a married couple?"

I thought about it. I looked at it. I compared my marriage to the cute little exchange I just saw, and felt as tough there was something missing. there was a piece that Karen and I have that seems to make us, for a lack of a better term, less whimsical, yet stronger...

"I don't see enough hate," I said. This brought a strange look from the two of them to me. I could see the narrative "Hate... Is he telling us a joke? Isn't hate the opposite of love? Huh? Did we spike the tomato soup? He might not be used to all the Lycopene. We've been brought up with this stuff, he's been eating tomato soup for only 4 years now, he might be getting drunk.

"I'm serious" I said, "you need more hate I think." An uncomfortable chuckle emerged from the two of them.

HATE! yes hate. A marriage is strengthened by hate! Now let me explain: If everyday, day in day out, a couple is constantly enthralled in constant bliss, that means only one thing... They are lining to each other. even entropy dictates that nothing is truly constant, thus flux is always occurring in everything in the fractal of life. Therefore, to be happy all the time, is impossible. As Dennis Leary once said, "Happiness comes in small doses, it's a chocolate chip cookie, a cigarette, or a 5 second orgasm: you cum, you smoke, you eat the F*****g cookie and shut the F*** up!" Being constantly happy would in essence be an IV drip of those small doses, and more work that it would be worth. Bottom line: Bad days happen! Bad days happen more than good! Bad days are a constant! And given the chance of there being one day a week that is good... a generous assumption to be sure, that is one day a week for two people that is good. Odds are 1 in 7 that a married couple will have the same good day (86% chance of failure) and thus the good day will be destroyed by the bad day, and lets not forget the 6 bad days that overlap, giving two bad days for the price of one most days. Those are grounds to snap. explode, scream, swear, throw things, spit, splash, tear, dismantle, set up sleeping bags, make hotel arrangements, wash the blood from your gashed, vacuum dented forehead, rinse and repeat at least 6 times a week. This is only the natural progression of the entropic world. Anyone who pretends that a world like that is happy all the time is being dishonest.

By hate, I'm not talking about disdain, or angst, or disgust... all of which are reasons not to get married. I'm instead talking about hate in terms of honesty. Many would argue that honesty is what a marriage should be based on. I would take a stronger stance on that and say that pure honesty is a most powerful force in the human social world and that it must be tamed and used in order to be able to even consider marriage. To be honest with ones self is most vital. To know ones own weakness, to know the limits of ones strengths, to understand that despite the fact you might be right in the argument, the fight will continue until you are not, and to know that being wrong is not necessarily incorrect, though your weakness is exposed, is but scratching that surface of honesty's submission.

One must be comfortable with ones honest self to then be able to be honest with a partner. Once you do get married, You find that honesty with money and time becomes the next big hurdle that must be jumped. Many people would say that after you get married, it becomes about money. I say that it becomes about time and money. Money, by my own definition, is an object that has no worth unless it is exchanged for something else. Money is also an arbitrary value placed on a man's time and effort. T$=Money(rnd(infinity)). There is a relationship of time and money that is expressed in, more or less, the fact that one sacrifices time to make money. the honesty comes with what we sacrifice our money on. Video Games, Movies, Accent Clothes, Restaurant Food, these things that bring single people pleasure, now brings strife to the couple and to be honest that these things are a waste would clear up a lot of pain. But to change is to acknowledge in some way that the old way we were was wrong, and that attacks pride. Pride can be one of the biggest nails in the coffin of honesty, and as a result, the level of anger and hate gets pushed to the bottom of the pile serves as an agitator, churning other things into the top of the slurry, and making truly ugly reactions occur, like abuse and passive aggression. The explosion is what ultimately makes a marriage unhealthy.

One must always be honest. One must always be comfortable with their honesty. One must be able to sit down and have a brutal reaction with a bad day. Those who convert time into money see to it many times that one will have a bad day, and a marriage that is honest will allow for someone to sit on their couch, rant and rave, yell at each other over bills and housekeeping, and in the end have that hatred going for them.

"I think that for a marriage to work, someone has to take into an account the person he or she loves. If that person is someone you honestly cannot be without, even if you hate that person with every fiber of your being, and that sentiment is shared, that couple is ready to work at that marriage, and it might not be the easiest thing, but at least both people will have the drive to keep the marriage alive; The couple must be attractive to each other especially when they repulse one another." That was the only reply I could muster, then I finished my sandwich. It was a sandwich type I was not used to eating with tomato. and while the notion of fruit soup and buttery sandwich seems repulsive, they have been a loving marriage for generations.