This weekend, I

watched Ong-bak. I remember seeing the trailers for this movie a few years back and finally got to see it over the weekend. It's a martial arts film with a basic plot (a young man travels to the big city to retrieve the head of a statue stolen from his village), but some great action sequences.

saw the finale of Grease: You're the One that I Want. I'm stoked Max and Laura won. I like to believe that it was my five votes each week that kept Max safe from elimination and nudged him ahead of Austin this past week to get the leading role in the latest Broadway incarnation of the musical.

attended a party thrown by friends for their one-year-old daughter. It's hard to believe it has been a year since she was born. It didn't seem so long ago that we were visiting L & T in the hospital and Z was but a blanketed bundle. Now she's walking. Admittedly, it's a wobbly, halted, drunken style of walking that requires a certain Jackie Chan level of mastery to imitate, but it's still walking (and that wasn't something she was capable of doing the last time I saw her).

The cynic might ask why anybody would throw a party for a one-year-old and I would have asked the same question a few years back, but I think I get it now. The party is less about celebrating a birthday than it is about celebrating the parents' survival. It's a way to for mom and dad to show friends and family that they're still alive and doing well (exhausted, but well). I hold L & T in high esteem and if I can do half as well as T when I'm a dad some day, I'll be ecstatic.

I think the quote that will stay with me the longest came from L while she was opening gifts. She said to her daughter in a genuinely excited tone, "Oh, Z, the things we'll do, the fun we'll have!"

It was such a refreshing sentiment. I've heard enough people talk about their children as burdens, advising parents-to-be or younger, childless couples to have their fun while they can. When they talk like that, I assume they're joking, but I also sense the mean it to a degree, which is disheartening. Every now and then, it's nice to hear somebody express what I hope and believe: that a child (beyond being hard work and expensive to raise) is a chance for fun and an opportunity for adventure. True, it might not be the same fun one would have if one weren't "burdened" with a child; it might actually be different and better fun.