Note – “Murray” was my grandmother and Aunts’ maiden name.

I went to my Aunt Patty’s wake earlier tonight. I went through the receiving line, which included her husband, daughters, their significant others, and her sister, Eileen.

Seeing my Aunt Eileen gave me pause. It was only when I sat down with my sisters and started talking to them that the full realization of Aunt Eileen’s situation hit me: she’s the only remaining sibling in her family. No parents, no sisters, not brothers. Just her.

Granted, she still has her husband and her children, and family members pass as the years go on. However, as selfish and/or morbid as it may seem, I couldn’t help but think about what it would be like if I were the only sibling left.

My immediate family – particularly my siblings – are everything to me. I’m not in a relationship, and I have my own doubts as to whether I’m the marrying kind or will ever have children of my own. Even if I did, the support structure that I already have in place is unique and irreplaceable.

My Aunts had a similar relationship. At times it may have seemed tumultuous, particularly since they’re all unique characters in their own right. I could probably write a book on my grandmother (their sister), whose void in my life is felt on at least a weekly basis. But when all was said and done and particularly when it mattered, they had their own bond and way of using each other for support.

My siblings and I have the same relationship. And I have to be honest, I don’t know how I would react to being the only one left.  This, to me, is a much more worrying prospect than my own mortality.

As if my Aunt Patty didn’t give me enough through her life, attitude, and brave battle with cancer, she’s also provided me with a greater appreciation of my siblings and the crucial role they play in my life. So to Jack, Davelyn, Bridget, and Megan – I thank you for everything, and I will continue to thank and appreciate you throughout our short time in this world. And I thank my Aunt Patty and her sisters (including my Nanny) for being the example.

Tomorrow’s the funeral. Keep Patty’s husband, daughters, and grandchilren in your thoughts and/or prayers tonight. It’s going to be a long day for them.

You miss exchanges like this:

KevinMarshall @millej I thought you were making a SeaLab reference.

millej @KevinMarshall Ohhhhh…. “Stop that, you’re scaring mommy!” No, I was referring to a children’s book.

KevinMarshall @millej A BOOK?! Referencing a BOOK on the internet? What’re you, writing for Salon.com now?!

millej @KevinMarshall It’s mostly bright, colorful drawings. I think that puts me beyond the scope of Salon.com.

KevinMarshall @millej But it does qualify you for The Huffington Post.

OHHHHHHHH SNAP

The answer: me.

When I was a child, at an age far too young for me to recall, my grandmother would watch me.  Once in awhile a commercial would come on for a collection of polka songs, and when that accordion struck up, I would jump up and start dancing with a huge grin on my face. The song went something like “Stashu Pandowski was the polka king,” and so my grandmother and her sister, my Aunt Patty, took to calling me Stashu Pandowski (or “Stash” for short). It spread to the rest of my family, but went away once I hit puberty.

With one major exception – my Aunt Patty. Even when I became an adult, I’d still be greeted with “Hello, Stash!” I know that a lot of people don’t care for nicknames they attain in childhood, particularly from family members. That wasn’t the case here. If anything, I always looked forward to hearing it. It was like a sign of refuge, a harbinger of good times to come that would make me forget about my trials and tribulations during her visit. She was never anything but wonderful to us throughout our childhood and beyond, and was there for us more than any other member of either side of my extended family.

I don’t have a single memory of her that doesn’t bring a smile to my face. There was never a curt word towards or about us. She was a woman who genuinely loved life, and that attitude was contagious. It would infect everyone in the room with a boisterous reverence for anything and everything that came up in conversation.

In particular, Patty loved her family. She would light up when she spoke of her daughters and their accomplishments. Some parents will do it to boast, but my Aunt Patty was genuine in the love and pride she had for her daughters. Talk of them would include reactions that were every bit as if she were hearing it all herself for the first time. If I ever have kids, I know that if I love them even half as much and hold them in as much esteem as Patty did her children, I’ll have done alright.

We lost Patty earlier tonight after a long, brave, and tenacious battle with cancer. In the true Murray tradition, she was a fighter until the very end. Please include her, her husband, her daughters, and her grandchildren in your thoughts and/or prayers tonight.

“Oh, yes, this is nice. Know what’s also nice? This sweater. It will break you.”

Fedor and his fabulous lucky sweater.

Live, this coming Saturday night on CBS, it’s the American television debut of legendary MMA fighter and consensus #1 Heavyweight in the World, Fedor Emelianenko, facing off against former Kimbo tormentor Brett “Grimm” Rogers.

Also on the card:
Jake Shields vs. Jason “Mayhem” Miller – Strikeforce Middleweight Title Fight
Gegard Mousasi vs. Remy “Sukudjou” Thierry
Febricio Werdum vs. Antonio “Junior” Silva

It should be an interesting night, and the Miller/Shields fight is one of the more competitive (on paper) that you’ll see in MMA.

More importantly, as you all know, Fedor has been rocking this amazing sweater in preparation for his fight against Rogers. It’s his lucky sweater. The last time he wore it in preparation for a fight, he hit Andrei Arlovski so hard that the man was literally launched into the air vertically and landed unconscious.

I have purchased my own Fedor sweater, as you can see in the pictures below. As such, I have decided that I am not only going to invite my friends over to watch this fight, I am going to make it a FEDOR SWEATER PARTY. Though it is not required, attendees are STRONGLY ENCOURAGED to bring and wear their own Fedor Sweater to this event.

We are also considering ice cream, another staple of Fedor’s regiment (again, see the pics for more).

Me in my very own Fedor sweater. This is what I will rock on Saturday.

It’s going to be awesome.

When it comes to film, I have two almost shamefully pathetic fandoms: one for anything made by Stanley Kubrick, and the other for anything done by The Coen Brothers. I don’t claim to be an expert on either, and I certainly am not one of those that could spout obscure factoids about every nuance of their films. I do, however, seem to be completely unable to dislike or criticize anything done by Kubrick or the Coens, and I’ve enjoyed all their films tremendously and without exception.

As someone averse to such a fundamentalist approach to pop culture, I should be a bit more ashamed to admit it. I should also be ashamed to admit that I not only enjoyed “The Man Who Wasn’t There,” which has become largely forgotten and dismissed, but that I also get really peeved when people criticize it even though I can’t really defend the criticisms levied against it.

Thankfully I won’t have to do that with “A Serious Man,” which seems to be hailed as brilliant by more or less everyone I know who has seen it. If you do go to see it, I suggest you bring someone with you. I myself didn’t fully appreciate it until I was discussing it with my friend Ryan and, in the process, realized what the film was all about. Once I got home and had the opportunity to ruminate on its theme and how it reflects my own personal experiences and difficulties over the last several months, I transcended enjoying the film and began to feel a deep sense of appreciation for its existence.

Of course, it’s possible too that I read far too much into what was happening and it was more along the lines of a David Lynch film like “Mulholland Drive;” a series of non-sequiturs that exude a greater meaning but lack any real intent on the part of the auteur. In which case, you should still be able to enjoy it as a beautifully made film chock full of awkward Coenesque black humor.

It was also my first exposure to actor Michael Stuhlbarg, who was simply amazing in this film. I sincerely hope to see more of him in the future.

The only complaint I had was the audience at The Spectrum. My God, these people. They guffaw at the littlest things even if they aren’t meant to be “laugh out loud” funny. It’s obnoxious, and it was people like them that made me hate Steve Martin’s play “Picasso at the Lapin Agile.” Is it really necessary to broadcast to the other people around you that you’re smart enough to get the joke? It’s a theater. It’s dark. There’s a ton of people there. I can’t tell who you are anyway, and I’m sure as Hell not going to take a head count of who got the vague literary reference and who didn’t.

Also, true story, someone led a blind man into the theater as we were going in. Yes, I know, they can still hear the film, but it still seems a bit weird. It almost seems like cruel teasing, to lead someone into a theater who can’t take full advantage of the medium.

Perhaps more notable than the blind man being led into a movie theater was the uber-dork moment I had that made me a little ashamed of myself. As my friend Ryan quipped that perhaps the blind man was Matt Murdock (Daredevil) and really could see the film after all, I had to pipe in and note that since it’s light being projected onto a flat screen, his powers still would not allow him to see the film. This on the same day Cute~Ella posted a picture of herself and her little brother in a Star Trek uniform, and me piping in to note that the three dots on his collar that she pointed out meant he held the rank of Commander. If this had been real life, I would have shrunk a little in my seat a little and pretended I’d never said anything, lest I be pantsed and the money for my lunch at school be separated from my person.

So anyway, yeah. Go see “A Serious Man.”

I love Beethoven because of the dual nature found within his music. Just listen to his 9th Symphony and then Piano Sonata No. 8. They don’t even sound like the could be penned by the same man. One is bombastic and blustery, while the other is this beautiful rumination.

Which reminds me, I have a list of things I really need to do:
1. Focus more on my shoulders at the gym.
2. Give up coffee.
3. Educate myself on and listen to more classical music.
4. Devote a little time every night to leisure reading.
5. WRITE GOD DAMNIT

That second one’s going to be a toughie. I might transition to tea first before I try to remove caffeine from my daily routine entirely. It’s the only chemical vice I have left. And then, I’ll be accidentally straight edge. Who woulda thunk it?

I have nothing more to add to this entry. I just wanted to put this out there so that I can hold myself accountable for following through on those things I’ve mentioned, and to let the internet know I’m still here and still kickin’.

I’ve changed up the look of the site, which most of you probably won’t even notice since you’re viewing this through an RSS reader. But if you’re so inclined, you can look at the layout that those Neanderthals that still type out URLs or -gasp- use bookmarks see by clicking here.

I’ve also updated and expanded the site’s blogroll. If you’d like to be added, just shoot me a line through Twitter or Facebook.

Whenever I get a chance to see “Where the Wild Things Are” I’ll be sharing my own thoughts. In the meantime, my favorite blogger – the perpetually insightful Todd Alcott – shares his thoughts on the critical reaction and response to the film HERE.

I have to say that even without having seen the film, I’ve found most of the complaints directed towards the film by critics to be a bit more than ludicrous. To extrapolate, I’m finding more and more as of late that the pervasiveness of unnecessary snark and defeatism that has come as an extension of the overwhelming influence of “the blogosphere” is ruining the genre of critical writing. Or I should say what people perceive to be critical writing.

Being a critic means dissecting something in a meaningful and thought-provoking way, not tearing something apart because you think it’d make for a sexier read or because you’re looking for something to be wrong with the film. That’s the difference between an online critic and somebody like Roger Ebert; if Ebert completely lambastes a film, it’s because it doesn’t succeed in certain critical areas pertinent to film-making, not because he goes into a film chomping at the bit and ready to write the most scathing review possible before having even seen it.

Well, okay, maybe he did with “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,” but who can blame him?

My point is that as much as traditional print media missed the boat in adapting their business model to suit the needs of an ever-changing world brought on by the blogosphere, I’m deathly afraid that we are sitting idly by and allowing the uneducated and untrained to continue their hostile takeover of media. Whether it’s online bloggers whose general tone can be summarized with “Pffffft” or the over-use of “FAIL” as a descriptor (I personally think we need to abolish it immediately though that’s a rant for another time), I can feel the general tone of critical response in all mediums becoming more confrontational and far less constructive. It’s anti-intellectualism that doesn’t realize it’s anti-intellectualism, which makes it even more counter-productive to critical thinking.

On the other hand, I’m a 27-year-old crank myself, so who am I to judge?

Long story short, put Todd Alcott’s blog in your RSS readers and stop using the word “FAIL.”

Last Sunday, “The Simpsons” aired a new episode centered on Mixed Martial Arts. It wasn’t a good episode by any stretch, which is par for the course the last several years of the series. In the episode, Marge organized a protest against MMA events held in Springfield and as a result is challenged to a fight by the promoter, who promises to stop putting on shows if she wins.

The show was littered with inaccuracies about the sport, portraying it as a bloodsport with little to no rules (and no referee). Fans of the sport were portrayed as dumb, largely uneducated, and literally screaming for blood. All in good fun, right?

Well, not quite. As noted in USA Today, UFC president Dana White has a bone to pick with the writing room of one of the longest-running shows in television history:

“I was disappointed,” White says. “I think it was typical of people that don’t know anything about the sport. I know it’s for fun, but the second half of it really wasn’t even funny. …We like fighting.  But to make it sound like the UFC crowd is this bloodthirsty crowd that shows up and just want to see people get their (butts) kicked — that’s not true. That’s the stigma that the mainstream has of us. … The Simpsons program will show you how mainstream we’re not.”

I shouldn’t even comment on this because I know it’ll result in a flame war, but I am absolutely, 100% with Dana White on this one.

In their post about White’s comments, the guys over at Cage Potato argued that White shouldn’t have expected much else. After all, the show is known for its over-the-top satire with (intentionally) gross inaccuracies, particularly when it comes to sports (they provide their portrayals of the worlds of boxing and baseball as prime examples).

I understand the argument, and think that it’s only fair that we put it on the context of the series as a whole. But if we’re going to talk context, I think we should extend the same courtesy to Dana’s (and my) concerns over how the sport was portrayed. After all, baseball and boxing aren’t thriving for mainstream acceptance, illegal in ten states, or have a history of being misrepresented and attacked by politicians, lobbyists, and hacky sports journalists.

As a fan of MMA, I’m constantly striving for people to if not embrace then at least accept the sport, and it’s frustrating when something as high-profile as “The Simpsons” reinforces all the stereotypes and misconceptions that the sport and its fans have been trying for years to discredit. I’m particularly touchy about it since there’s a battle in my state to legalize MMA and we keep getting blocked by empty-headed rhetoric coupled with downright lies from the likes of State Assemblyman Bob Reilly.

I’m sure most of you reading this will dismiss me as taking it too seriously and/or not having a sense of humor. It’d be different if the sport were accepted and legal and not under attack from groups that use misinformation and downright lies to further their own agenda (whatever that is). As it stands, until we as MMA fans don’t have to fight the sort of idiocy that we face from legislators and stubborn athletic commissions, I’m not laughing.