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I've Been Kicked Out of a Band, Again

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  I love music . I love listening to it, writing it, playing it, performing it, noodling around on any instrument I can make sound interesting, and pretty much any other means of experiencing it. The problem with performing it is finding a group of friends or peers with similar tastes and available time to rehearse. At the moment, my problem is the latter. Full transparency, I wasn't literally kicked out of a band. Last September, I jammed with some old friends with the intent of making it a regular thing. Problem is I don't have time to make weekly band rehearsal a regular thing. I have two young kids and my intention is to be as active in their lives as their mother. So, while feeling guilty for the last 9 months that I never returned to jam, the day finally came where my absence was rightfully filled. Maybe I should have quit but the allure of being in a band is the healthiest drug I can imagine. Waffle Mouse (one of the many names the guys are considering, but haven't ...
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My Favorite Creative

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As I type this two drastically different things are happening; I'm in California for a film festival and my mother, Linda Boberg, is lying in a Des Moines hospice bed. In fact she started hospice care the day I flew out here. As you can imagine, I'm experiencing quite the emotional tug of war. When you have a kid you commonly examine where they get certain traits. I've always been able to parse that I get my emotional, empathetic tendencies from my mother and my pragmatic, compartmentalizing skills from my Dad (another raging tug of war at the moment). This list could go on forever, but one thing I've never fully understood is where my creative drive came from. Now with the writing on the wall, it's obvious my mom flipped the creativity switch. It wasn't until my Mom self-published a novel at 65 years old that I understood how creative she is. In the last three years she's self published half a dozen books and written many more. Her first bout of cancer in 2...
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Positivity

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  I am a positive person. I take people at their word, don't require anyone to earn my respect, and hope for the best. Living in the covid era has been an exhausting trial for many people, but I've always tried to ride the wave of no matter the situation, turbulence is to be expected and can be weathered. When our washing machine was overloaded and flooded our laundry room, I didn't freak out and get angry, I just started cleaning up. When our daughter was born and I had to juggle the new fog of parenting, I just put one hand in front of the other to change diapers, walk my daughter to sleep, and try to relish the fact that today's lows are tomorrows funny memories. Today, when I opened the fridge with a little too much gusto and a take home container of ranch went flying and exploded on the near by carpet I just ran, got some paper towels, and hopped too. Keeping cool and positive is state I try to maintain, even when life throws a deadly virus into your orbit. Skippin...
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Bluey, the Unreliable Narrator?

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  Currently there is no bigger thing in our house than a fun little cartoon out of Australia called "Bluey." Emmalyn (my nearly four-year-old) loves it. Marieta and I laugh and cry at it frequently. Even Elliana (our five-month-old) loves the music and steals a glance every now and then. Beyond being a lot of fun, it is incredibly heartfelt and emotionally spot on. Currently all 50+, seven-minute episodes are available on Disney Plus and needless to say we have watched them all, multiple times. Marieta identified immediately how much the show's ethos lines up with our style of playful and attachment parenting. Bluey is the six-year-old playfully curious first born kiddo, Bingo is the four-year-old Bluey doppelgänger with a very big heart, Chilli is the too-smart-for–her–own–good, cautious, free spirit Mom and finally, the father dog "Bandit" is very much a variation of me; fun-loving, down for all kinds of silly games and adventures, and maybe cutting a corner h...
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My laugh & scream are having a moment

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  People are desperate to get out and live their lives. How do I know? The Boberg Family Youtube channel , which I use to share family vacation and holiday videos and random fun things, is seeing some serious traffic. I'm not talking new Taylor Swift music traffic, more like modest, viral niche video traffic. This is a screenshot of our subscriber count jump as of April 15 and the view count is currently at 445k. I've produced a TON of content before. Professionally I've produced these numbers, but those were generally crafted for an audience. The Crazy Mouse at the Iowa State Fair video that is generating all this imaginary internet cache is a single shot, where I laugh and scream like an eight-year-old boy. So silly and surprising. From the comments I can divine that people are loving my silly yelling and laughing. That is fine with me, I can take a joke and deserve to be joked about. It seems the views come from earnest love for rollercoasters and people looking for a g...
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This book should not exist

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It's late on a mid-October 2015 night and I am struggling with whether I should buy a $1,200 last-minute ticket to California to be with my family for my mother's emergency brain surgery. A week prior everyone was together in my house for an adventurous weekend climbing a wind turbine and celebrating my grandmother's 90th birthday, now we are on the eve of my mom going under the gamma knife for emergency brain surgery. Turns out she has a size-able tumor growing on the surface of her brain.   It's a bit of miracle that the tumor was discovered in the first place as my mom's routine cancer screenings didn't usually include brain scans; however, she had been complaining of blurry vision and balance issues, plus she had become quite irritable having been pushed to take FMLA from work to deal with what she thought was post-cancer "brain fog." Thankfully her doctor had the good sense to add it all up and include her brain in her next cancer scan. Sure enou...
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Location: Iowa, USA
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Finding "Clarity" in 1999

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I distinctly remember Tuesday, February 23, 1999. I was still living in Iowa and immediately after school let out I road with a friend to Best Buy so he could pick up Eminem's freshly released second album. Always down for a hang, I road along as there was one album I had read about and wanted to see if it was in stores. That album was Jimmy Eat World's Clarity . On the ride home I didn't bother asking to put in my purchase as my friend was not a rock fan. So for the next hour or so of cruising we blasted Slim Shady at painful volumes. For those uninitiated, this was the "Hi! My name is (ticka ticka) Slim Shady" album. I was indifferent to rap so it got a little long and tiresome by roughly the third time through the album. When I finally listened to Clarity it underwhelmed. Nothing on the album is lyrically hook centered on kinetically riff focused like later Jimmy Eat World releases. For a 16 year-old ska and pop punk super fan, Clarity go...
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