This is my family. I found it, all on my own. Is little, and broken, but still good. Yeah, still good. — Lilo and Stitch

When Irish Woman and I went to get married, it took almost an hour for both of us to describe the twists and turns of our family backgrounds. Between marriages, divorces, deaths, parents, guardians, and everything else, the pastor was scrubbing his face with his hands as he tried to understand it all. He then pronounced our family as “biblical”. His reasoning was that nobody in the Bible had a nuclear family. Someone always was widowed, or had two wives, or was being raised by an uncle or grandparents. That was a great way of saying what I’ve come to feel: Family is not genetics. I love my blood relatives, but I love the family I’ve gathered over years of travel and heartache just as much.

Scotty: Computer! Computer?
[He’s handed a mouse, and he speaks into it]
Scotty: Hello, computer.
Dr. Nichols: Just use the keyboard.
Scotty: Keyboard. How quaint.

— Star Trek IV – The Voyage Home

One of the hardest things I do in IT is to continually learn about new technologies. But the  hardest thing I do is to teach others about old technology. You hang out in any big operation, and you will find the antiques. They’re old, and they’re slow, and they keep the lights on, so no-one messes with them. A huge percentage of the world’s business is still done on mainframe, and the Cobol programmers aren’t getting any younger. Convincing a 22 year old that they need to learn how to maintain and improve that code is almost as challenging as wholesale replacement would be.

Colonel Mustard:  Why is J. Edgar Hoover on your phone?
Wadsworth:  I don’t know, he’s on everybody else’s, why shouldn’t he be on mine?

— Clue

My biggest fear with this whole NSA scandal is that it will blow over. People are already getting used to the idea that someone, be it government or private companies, is watching and tracking them, and that worries me. Normalization of the surveillance state leads to its acceptance. There are just too many places where it can be abused, and those who do the watching have no watchers of their own, and they are far from angels.

You gotta be ready to listen to your children, even if they have nothing to say. — Chicken Little

There have been many a morning where the drive to school is filled with conversations about Boo’s imaginary friend and his dog. Girlie Bear chats with me about the goings on at her school and among her group of friends. Little Bear and I have some excellent conversations about nothing at all. I may not always understand everything they say, but the fact that they want to talk and the tone they use tells me a lot about what’s going on in their lives.

Gallaxhar: [enters on a personal hovercraft] You must be terrified. Waking up in a strange place, wearing strange clothes, imprisoned by a strange being floating on a strange hovering device. Strange, isn’t it?
Susan Murphy: Hardly. It’s not the first time.
Gallaxhar: [pause, deflated] Wow, you really get around.

— Monsters Vs. Aliens

The more you think about a  situation and get used to the idea, the easier it is to deal with it. The more exposure you get to things that push your limits, the more those limits will expand. I’m not saying that training, practice, and even competing with a gun will fully prepare you for actually using it under stress, but it will at least get you thinking and hopefully ingrain good habits that will help. Normalization of the abnormal frees up your mind and body to do what needs doing instead of freezing at the sight of the unfamiliar.