I love summer. I love swimming, I love wearing sandals, and I love the heat. Actually, I don't love the heat itself, but rather the fact that because of the heat so many women wear less around the pool and at the beach than they normally wear under their regular clothes. So, it's not so much the heat I love as the absence of cold. Cold sucks, unless you're a beer. (Sure there's stuff I like about winter, but this blog is about summer, so shut up.)
For me, summer brings with it a fairly drastic upswing in my activity level. This has always been the case, though the delta between my cold-season activity and warm-season activity is far more pronounced than it was when I was younger. Back then I managed to keep fairly active year round. At forty-four, this spring hit me like Deniro in "Awakenings." I stumbled up from the couch, blinking at the increasingly bright days as if struggling to make meaning of my surroundings. And that's pretty close to reality.
After a pretty serious snowboarding injury a couple of years ago I was sidelined for several months. It was physically impossible for me to be active at first. After a couple of months exercise was merely ill-advised from a medical standpoint. Finally, I got to the point where I was cleared to start ramping up my activity level, but somehow my body had lost interest at that point. My metabolism had remained at such a low level for so long that it simply didn't see the point in getting all excited over anything. If there is a physical malady analogous to clinical depression, my body had it for much of 2005 and all of 2006. For all intents and purposes I was hibernating.
Somewhere between our family spring break trip to Orlando and my Y-Princess trip to Camp Sea Gull with my daughter this spring I began to rouse from my coma. These two trips shared key elements that were crucial in waking me. First, they were fun. Secondly, it was physically impossible not to be physically active during the trips. You can't do Disney from the comfort of your couch. Add to that a day snorkeling and swimming with the dolphins at Discovery Cove... well, try dozing under water. As tired as I was by the end of any given day on these kid-focused trips, I realized that if I kept it up they would be the life of me.
So, I'm hell-bent on staying active these days; swimming with the kids and playing Frisbee golf almost daily. I know that over time my heart will thank me for pushing myself, but in the short term I'm only hearing from my knees, shoulders, and lower back; all of whom are steadfastly resolute in their conviction that we should never, ever leave the couch.
Friday, June 22, 2007
Friday, June 15, 2007
Atlanta on $263.78 a Day
Okay, I made that number up, but it's not far off. I'm in town for a training developers' conference. Before you get excited, that's not nearly as glamorous as it sounds. Oh sure, Bob Pike is going to be there, and you could do worse if you're in the market for handfuls of cheap promotional pens, but at the end of the day it's just nine thousand-something nerds wandering around talking about how best to pass along nerd-knowledge in a digital age.
I'm here because my employer thinks there is value in having someone attend these things. Ostensibly the notion is that I'll attend a bunch of sessions where I'll learn tons of stuff about where the training field is going, what's out there on that virtual whiteboard horizon, how to capture the learner's attention and keep it when you know deep down that your subject matter is slightly less interesting than the interior of a toilet paper roll (if you're over five)... you know; nerd stuff.
I may not have mentioned before, but I am a nerd. Not old school or anything; I have no tape on my glasses, no pocket protector, no speech impediment, and I don't drool unless it is appropriate to the setting. I'm what you'd call a neo-nerd (if you were nerdy enough to use words like "neo"). I dress fairly innocuously, have interests outside the conventional nerd-sphere, and can pass for normal in most settings.
"What makes someone a nerd?" you ask. Scientists, philosophers, and podiatrists have been trying to answer that question since... okay, they haven't actually, but I'll give it a go. A nerd is someone who is passionate to the point of obsession about things other people find boring, confusing, or of no real interest. It doesn't really matter if your thing is Star Trek, Star Wars, or painting those tiny civil war replicas; nerd is nerd. (I'll be selling "Nerd is Nerd" t-shirts soon; watch this space!)
Anyhow, this nerd walked into a bar... The nerd was me, and the bar was the Vortex Bar & Grill in Atlanta. Cool. I liked the place even before I walked the two miles distance from my hotel room. I had Googled restaurants in the neighborhood, and hit on the Vortex as the place I'd have dinner because their Website, or more to the point, their attitude hooked me. The Vortex is a place where you can go and have a burger and a beer and have it their way. Don't smoke and don't want to be around smoke? Their Website suggests you go someplace else. Like to complain when things aren't to your liking? Take a hike. They advertise their two locations as being both "whine-" and "idiot-" free zones. They even had an explicit "86" policy, which stated that the lines between places open to the public and public places had been blurred for too long; that the Vortex was privately owned, and the management reserved the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason at any time. Like I said; cool.
Their beer selection was so vast that I suspect they may have actually traveled forward in time, bringing back beers that have no actually been invented yet. (By comparison the selection at most places here in Raleigh is only half-vast.) You could get an "In Heat Wheat" from Flying Dog or a "Peg Leg Stout" from Heavy Seas or a zillion other strange or staid brews from their wall-to-wall coolers. (I had a St. Pauli N.A.. Nerd, remember?) The food menu was actually more substantial than I'd expected, but since they'd won best burger in Atlanta for some number of years I failed to commit to memory, I decided to have a burger. I ordered their "black and spicy," which featured a half-pound patty blackened with Cajun seasonings and topped with jalapeno jack cheese, red onion, lettuce and tomato. The only thing I had to add to it was my teeth. It was hands down one of the best burgers I've ever eaten.
So, that's my brief travelogue of three days and nights in Atlanta. The conference? If you're really, really, really into training and the exciting new technologies for delivering learning on-demand to a global audience, then it would still boor you to tears. Sure, I learned a couple of things; yes, it was time well-spent if you do what I do for a paycheck. But since you probably don't, nothing at all is more than enough to say about that.
I'm here because my employer thinks there is value in having someone attend these things. Ostensibly the notion is that I'll attend a bunch of sessions where I'll learn tons of stuff about where the training field is going, what's out there on that virtual whiteboard horizon, how to capture the learner's attention and keep it when you know deep down that your subject matter is slightly less interesting than the interior of a toilet paper roll (if you're over five)... you know; nerd stuff.
I may not have mentioned before, but I am a nerd. Not old school or anything; I have no tape on my glasses, no pocket protector, no speech impediment, and I don't drool unless it is appropriate to the setting. I'm what you'd call a neo-nerd (if you were nerdy enough to use words like "neo"). I dress fairly innocuously, have interests outside the conventional nerd-sphere, and can pass for normal in most settings.
"What makes someone a nerd?" you ask. Scientists, philosophers, and podiatrists have been trying to answer that question since... okay, they haven't actually, but I'll give it a go. A nerd is someone who is passionate to the point of obsession about things other people find boring, confusing, or of no real interest. It doesn't really matter if your thing is Star Trek, Star Wars, or painting those tiny civil war replicas; nerd is nerd. (I'll be selling "Nerd is Nerd" t-shirts soon; watch this space!)
Anyhow, this nerd walked into a bar... The nerd was me, and the bar was the Vortex Bar & Grill in Atlanta. Cool. I liked the place even before I walked the two miles distance from my hotel room. I had Googled restaurants in the neighborhood, and hit on the Vortex as the place I'd have dinner because their Website, or more to the point, their attitude hooked me. The Vortex is a place where you can go and have a burger and a beer and have it their way. Don't smoke and don't want to be around smoke? Their Website suggests you go someplace else. Like to complain when things aren't to your liking? Take a hike. They advertise their two locations as being both "whine-" and "idiot-" free zones. They even had an explicit "86" policy, which stated that the lines between places open to the public and public places had been blurred for too long; that the Vortex was privately owned, and the management reserved the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason at any time. Like I said; cool.
Their beer selection was so vast that I suspect they may have actually traveled forward in time, bringing back beers that have no actually been invented yet. (By comparison the selection at most places here in Raleigh is only half-vast.) You could get an "In Heat Wheat" from Flying Dog or a "Peg Leg Stout" from Heavy Seas or a zillion other strange or staid brews from their wall-to-wall coolers. (I had a St. Pauli N.A.. Nerd, remember?) The food menu was actually more substantial than I'd expected, but since they'd won best burger in Atlanta for some number of years I failed to commit to memory, I decided to have a burger. I ordered their "black and spicy," which featured a half-pound patty blackened with Cajun seasonings and topped with jalapeno jack cheese, red onion, lettuce and tomato. The only thing I had to add to it was my teeth. It was hands down one of the best burgers I've ever eaten.
So, that's my brief travelogue of three days and nights in Atlanta. The conference? If you're really, really, really into training and the exciting new technologies for delivering learning on-demand to a global audience, then it would still boor you to tears. Sure, I learned a couple of things; yes, it was time well-spent if you do what I do for a paycheck. But since you probably don't, nothing at all is more than enough to say about that.
No, YOU grow up!
I like being a kid. It's one of my favorite things, and I submit that it is one of the best things in the world. It's better than candy, or cartoons, or playing cowboys and Indians. Of course, all of those are very cool, but being a kid is just better. In fact, the only thing better than being a kid, is being a kid with my kids.
My daughter, Loren, and I spent this past weekend at Camp Sea Gull with our Y-Princess tribe (The Crazy Crocodiles) along with hundreds of other daddy/daughter pairs. It was a wonderful, active, fun-filled, magical weekend. We shot arrows from bows and bb's from rifles, we panned for shark's teeth like they were made from solid gold. We ate cafeteria fare in a huge mess hall filled to the rafters with laughter and love and the wonderful noise of memories being made. It was amazing. That place was lousy with kids. Most of them were six or seven, but an awful lot of them were in their thirties and forties too.
Yes; I'm Greg, I'm a kid, and I'm forty-four.
Being a forty-four year old kid can be a mixed bag if you concern yourself with the opinions of others. First, there are the adults. Some of them are going to find your joy at the little things in life a bit strange. Others will find it downright bizarre. A few will quietly decide that it is evidence of some deep-seated emotional or mental problem. Maybe both. Maybe he's a Democrat, they'll think to themselves. And the other kids... there's no ignoring the fact that most of them are still in the single digits when I'm almost eligible for AARP discounts. Kids notice that kind of stuff. In a world where not wearing the right sneakers can land you on the outside looking in, being twice as tall as everyone else and having gray hair definitely puts a question mark after your name.
Years ago—when I was twenty-five, and just a kid compared to the kid I am today—I was playing in the sand at the beach when another kid approached me to check out what I was doing. I'm guessing he was about five. "What are you doing?" he asked, watching me carving a pair of feet out of sand (so it would look like someone was stuck there).
"Playing," I answered.
He puzzled over this for a minute. "Are you a grownup?" he finally asked.
What a cool question, I thought. I answered as best I could at the time; "I don't know."
He puzzled over this for a minute. "How old are you?" my new friend finally asked.
"Twenty-five."
He sighed wistfully, and said, "Yup, you're a grownup." He said it like an oncologist delivering the sad news that I only had seventy years left to live. Seriously, to the five year old, twenty-five puts you on the downward slope to oblivion. It's all over for you. See that tag on your toe, filled out in crayon? Humor aside, at that exact moment I kind of liked the idea that I was grown up. That random child's decree made me stop and think; yes, I suppose I am grown up now. (Of course, it's important to remember that I was playing in the sand at time.)
As time has gone on, I've come to realize that there is a lot inherent in the term grownup that simply doesn't fit me. The great thing, the cool thing, the Saturday-morning-cartoon-happy thing is that you don't have to be grownup at twenty-five or forty-four or fifty-three, etcetera, ad scooby doodum. You can be a kid for as long as you live. (Maybe longer, if certain religious ideas turn out to be true.)
Yes, little Timmy was wrong about me. I wasn't a grownup then, and I'm not one now. Sure, I pay my bills and my taxes, I drive a car, and occasionally wax nostalgic for the way things used to be. Paying your bills no more makes you a grownup than drinking and driving makes you Paris Hilton. Those actions are just functions of managing my life at this stage of my life. I did that when I was three. Of course, at three managing my life mostly meant hiding things; hiding the peas I didn't want to eat, hiding myself in games of hide-and-seek, or hiding the fact that I'd pooped my pants again.
Being a kid transcends the simple trappings of age. The physicist, Richard Feynman, won a Nobel Prize for his work on the atomic bomb. He also worked out mathematical formulas to describe the way a Frisbee flies, figured out how ants tell other ants where you keep your food, and removed doors from their hinges just so he could laugh at the frustration this caused in the grownups around him. He was a brilliant man who did amazing things, not the least of which was remaining childlike until the day he died, despite the weighty times and weightier achievements of his life.
Last summer, when my daughter Loren was six, we two were on our way somewhere in the car. Out of the blue, she said, "Daddy, I don't think I want to grow up. I want to be a kid." From her expression in the rear view mirror I could see that she was serious.
I thought about it for a moment, then I responded, "If I tell you something, will you promise to keep it secret?"
"Yes."
"I'm still a kid." I put it out there like it was a secret; something important that I was sharing only with her. In a way, it was. We talked for a while about the difference (as I see it) between getting older and getting old; which is a lot like the difference between walking and skipping. The great thing was that she already knew what I said was true. She'd seen me being a kid every day of her life. Telling her it was so just allowed me to hammer home the message that being a kid (just like being happy or being sad) was a choice.
At the end of the day, we're handed an age, but we can always choose our outlook, and I'm here to tell you that you could do a lot worse than to choose to view the world through the eyes of a child. Sure you're going to have to endure the occasional comments and glances of the grownups around you who don't understand, don't get it, but you know what they say... "Sticks and stones may break my bones..."
My daughter, Loren, and I spent this past weekend at Camp Sea Gull with our Y-Princess tribe (The Crazy Crocodiles) along with hundreds of other daddy/daughter pairs. It was a wonderful, active, fun-filled, magical weekend. We shot arrows from bows and bb's from rifles, we panned for shark's teeth like they were made from solid gold. We ate cafeteria fare in a huge mess hall filled to the rafters with laughter and love and the wonderful noise of memories being made. It was amazing. That place was lousy with kids. Most of them were six or seven, but an awful lot of them were in their thirties and forties too.
Yes; I'm Greg, I'm a kid, and I'm forty-four.
Being a forty-four year old kid can be a mixed bag if you concern yourself with the opinions of others. First, there are the adults. Some of them are going to find your joy at the little things in life a bit strange. Others will find it downright bizarre. A few will quietly decide that it is evidence of some deep-seated emotional or mental problem. Maybe both. Maybe he's a Democrat, they'll think to themselves. And the other kids... there's no ignoring the fact that most of them are still in the single digits when I'm almost eligible for AARP discounts. Kids notice that kind of stuff. In a world where not wearing the right sneakers can land you on the outside looking in, being twice as tall as everyone else and having gray hair definitely puts a question mark after your name.
Years ago—when I was twenty-five, and just a kid compared to the kid I am today—I was playing in the sand at the beach when another kid approached me to check out what I was doing. I'm guessing he was about five. "What are you doing?" he asked, watching me carving a pair of feet out of sand (so it would look like someone was stuck there).
"Playing," I answered.
He puzzled over this for a minute. "Are you a grownup?" he finally asked.
What a cool question, I thought. I answered as best I could at the time; "I don't know."
He puzzled over this for a minute. "How old are you?" my new friend finally asked.
"Twenty-five."
He sighed wistfully, and said, "Yup, you're a grownup." He said it like an oncologist delivering the sad news that I only had seventy years left to live. Seriously, to the five year old, twenty-five puts you on the downward slope to oblivion. It's all over for you. See that tag on your toe, filled out in crayon? Humor aside, at that exact moment I kind of liked the idea that I was grown up. That random child's decree made me stop and think; yes, I suppose I am grown up now. (Of course, it's important to remember that I was playing in the sand at time.)
As time has gone on, I've come to realize that there is a lot inherent in the term grownup that simply doesn't fit me. The great thing, the cool thing, the Saturday-morning-cartoon-happy thing is that you don't have to be grownup at twenty-five or forty-four or fifty-three, etcetera, ad scooby doodum. You can be a kid for as long as you live. (Maybe longer, if certain religious ideas turn out to be true.)
Yes, little Timmy was wrong about me. I wasn't a grownup then, and I'm not one now. Sure, I pay my bills and my taxes, I drive a car, and occasionally wax nostalgic for the way things used to be. Paying your bills no more makes you a grownup than drinking and driving makes you Paris Hilton. Those actions are just functions of managing my life at this stage of my life. I did that when I was three. Of course, at three managing my life mostly meant hiding things; hiding the peas I didn't want to eat, hiding myself in games of hide-and-seek, or hiding the fact that I'd pooped my pants again.
Being a kid transcends the simple trappings of age. The physicist, Richard Feynman, won a Nobel Prize for his work on the atomic bomb. He also worked out mathematical formulas to describe the way a Frisbee flies, figured out how ants tell other ants where you keep your food, and removed doors from their hinges just so he could laugh at the frustration this caused in the grownups around him. He was a brilliant man who did amazing things, not the least of which was remaining childlike until the day he died, despite the weighty times and weightier achievements of his life.
Last summer, when my daughter Loren was six, we two were on our way somewhere in the car. Out of the blue, she said, "Daddy, I don't think I want to grow up. I want to be a kid." From her expression in the rear view mirror I could see that she was serious.
I thought about it for a moment, then I responded, "If I tell you something, will you promise to keep it secret?"
"Yes."
"I'm still a kid." I put it out there like it was a secret; something important that I was sharing only with her. In a way, it was. We talked for a while about the difference (as I see it) between getting older and getting old; which is a lot like the difference between walking and skipping. The great thing was that she already knew what I said was true. She'd seen me being a kid every day of her life. Telling her it was so just allowed me to hammer home the message that being a kid (just like being happy or being sad) was a choice.
At the end of the day, we're handed an age, but we can always choose our outlook, and I'm here to tell you that you could do a lot worse than to choose to view the world through the eyes of a child. Sure you're going to have to endure the occasional comments and glances of the grownups around you who don't understand, don't get it, but you know what they say... "Sticks and stones may break my bones..."
Thursday, June 14, 2007
My conscience, like my lapel, is clear...
I don't do ribbons. Don't get me wrong; I understand why people wear them, and I'm all for some of the wonderful causes the ribbons are used to represent, but I just don't wear them personally. I don't have a pink ribbon for breast cancer or a red ribbon for AIDS or a really limp little flesh-colored one for erectile dysfunction. It isn't that I couldn't have them if I wanted; my anti-ribbon position is an affirmative stance. I don't wear ribbons because I do not want to wear them.
Why? Because ribbons annoy the pants off me more surely than a phalanx of sweaty soccer moms swooning over Al Gore. ("You know... you really need to watch 'An Inconvenient truth!'" Um, the really inconvenient truth for me today is that you are currently breathing my air.) I abhor empty gestures, and for me, ribbons are the emptiest. (Heck, there isn't even a gesture. The thing just hangs there.)
I remember back during the first gulf war (you remember... the good one) when some students at NC State were staging a "die-in" on campus to protest the war. Literally pairs of kids took time out of their busy schedule of copying off of each other and begging for extensions on papers they didn't really intend to finish, late or otherwise, to lie on the ground and do nothing for an hour or two. I mean, first of all these were college students; lying around doing nothing is hard-wired into their collective consciousness. As gestures go, it certainly wasn't a huge undertaking to drag their lazy asses out of their bong-water stained beanbag chairs and plant them on the sun-warmed bricks of the brickyard for a couple of hours.
If your intention is to show people how strongly you feel about something, shouldn't you do something that takes a little effort? For example, if one guy walked up to one of the protesters and calmly said, "I disagree with you," but another guy ran over and began kicking the patchouli oil out of a couple of them, well... I'm going to be inclined to think that the second guy feels quite a bit more passionately about the issue than the first.
Even more importantly the gesture was empty; it was devoid of value, meaningless, and several other synonyms for "empty." Lying down for a couple of hours does nothing to change the situation about which these people claimed to be so worked up. If you really care about an issue, shouldn't you do something substantive? Maybe write letters to your congressman or your senator, or better yet, Oprah? But hey, they were just college kids, so I should probably cut them a little slack. I mean, how many of them would actually know how to write a letter, anyway.
But this ribbon thing... I see fully grown adults wearing these things, proudly. "Look at my ribbon! See how much I care about {insert cause here}? I care a lot, and you need only look at my ribbon for proof! By the way, I couldn't help noticing that you don't have a {insert color here} ribbon on your person, which shows how much better than you I am, you worthless {insert expletive here}." These people wear ribbons on their lapels, stick them to their bumpers and windshields... they'd probably get them tattooed on their asses if society allowed them to walk around without pants. (Though at least that would be a gesture.)
Years ago I attended an AIDS benefit. (You remember back when people used to care about AIDS, don't you?) The entire evening basically went like this. "Hi, I'm Blaine (or Hunter or Justin or Thad; you know the type...). It's so nice to have you here! Let me give you a ribbon."
"No thanks."
"Really?"
"Yes, really. I'm fine, thanks."
"But, um... everyone else has a ribbon."
"Yes. I can see that. They're lovely, but I'm deathly afraid of pins."
"Oh... well can I scotch-tape one on for you?"
And so on...
Seriously, I spent the entire night trying to avoid having to explain why I didn't want a friggin' ribbon. Here I was at an event that was raising money for a worthy cause. The very act of being there was not only a gesture, but one that resulted in money going to the cause in question, and despite this I was hounded by people who couldn't understand that I didn't need to make an empty gesture to show I cared. If my money or my presence there or my oath never to have unprotected sex with a man didn't prove I was doing my part for AIDS, how was a ribbon going to?
And now, in the aftermath of the horrible, tragic, unimaginable, and did I say tragic events at Virginia Tech, here come the black "VT" ribbons. (Sigh...) I guess I should respect and understand people's need to wear their empathy on their sleeves (or lapels, or blouses, or bumpers...); heck, I guess I do respect it. But it still bugs me. It's bad enough that I have to be reminded that my children are growing up in a world where things like this can happen. (It's always been that kind of a world. It's the reminder I'm lamenting, not the reality that the world is a dangerous, capricious place.) To add insult to injury, I get to know what this sad, pathetic little person looked like; I didn't need a face to go with this evil, but I got one anyway. Of course, if just knowing what he looked like wasn't enough for some of you, NBC provided you front row seats for the "here's why I killed all those people; aren't I just too much?" show when they aired the killer's little home movie. (Shame on NBC for airing it and shame on you if you watched it.)
Almost before the echoes of the final shot fell still, the blamethrowing commenced. This person or that person didn't do enough or did too much or wore the wrong color shirt that day and we need to fire them or censure them or shun them (unshunning them only when we absolutely have to say something to them) and all in an effort to hold someone accountable when the only one accountable had his finger on the trigger when the gun went "bang!" This was a bad guy. Life is hard for a lot of us, but we make our choices and we follow a path that leads us inexorably to who we are and through what we do in this world. Cho was bullied, he didn't fit in, he had an axe to grind, he was considered unstable. It will probably come as no surprise to my readers that all of that was true of me at one time or another in my past, and despite that fact I have never felt the need to kill anyone over it. (And if I ever do, please, please blame me and only me.)
These days the norm is to fall over ourselves searching for answers, wear ourselves out digging for root causes, and above all to rush madly to find someone to punish for any disruption in the fragile facade that life is easy, that our neighborhood is safe, or (as Hunter Thompson so eloquently put it) "that someone, or at least some force, {is} tending the light at the end of the tunnel."
Whatever or whomever that force is, I bet you it is not wearing a ribbon.
Why? Because ribbons annoy the pants off me more surely than a phalanx of sweaty soccer moms swooning over Al Gore. ("You know... you really need to watch 'An Inconvenient truth!'" Um, the really inconvenient truth for me today is that you are currently breathing my air.) I abhor empty gestures, and for me, ribbons are the emptiest. (Heck, there isn't even a gesture. The thing just hangs there.)
I remember back during the first gulf war (you remember... the good one) when some students at NC State were staging a "die-in" on campus to protest the war. Literally pairs of kids took time out of their busy schedule of copying off of each other and begging for extensions on papers they didn't really intend to finish, late or otherwise, to lie on the ground and do nothing for an hour or two. I mean, first of all these were college students; lying around doing nothing is hard-wired into their collective consciousness. As gestures go, it certainly wasn't a huge undertaking to drag their lazy asses out of their bong-water stained beanbag chairs and plant them on the sun-warmed bricks of the brickyard for a couple of hours.
If your intention is to show people how strongly you feel about something, shouldn't you do something that takes a little effort? For example, if one guy walked up to one of the protesters and calmly said, "I disagree with you," but another guy ran over and began kicking the patchouli oil out of a couple of them, well... I'm going to be inclined to think that the second guy feels quite a bit more passionately about the issue than the first.
Even more importantly the gesture was empty; it was devoid of value, meaningless, and several other synonyms for "empty." Lying down for a couple of hours does nothing to change the situation about which these people claimed to be so worked up. If you really care about an issue, shouldn't you do something substantive? Maybe write letters to your congressman or your senator, or better yet, Oprah? But hey, they were just college kids, so I should probably cut them a little slack. I mean, how many of them would actually know how to write a letter, anyway.
But this ribbon thing... I see fully grown adults wearing these things, proudly. "Look at my ribbon! See how much I care about {insert cause here}? I care a lot, and you need only look at my ribbon for proof! By the way, I couldn't help noticing that you don't have a {insert color here} ribbon on your person, which shows how much better than you I am, you worthless {insert expletive here}." These people wear ribbons on their lapels, stick them to their bumpers and windshields... they'd probably get them tattooed on their asses if society allowed them to walk around without pants. (Though at least that would be a gesture.)
Years ago I attended an AIDS benefit. (You remember back when people used to care about AIDS, don't you?) The entire evening basically went like this. "Hi, I'm Blaine (or Hunter or Justin or Thad; you know the type...). It's so nice to have you here! Let me give you a ribbon."
"No thanks."
"Really?"
"Yes, really. I'm fine, thanks."
"But, um... everyone else has a ribbon."
"Yes. I can see that. They're lovely, but I'm deathly afraid of pins."
"Oh... well can I scotch-tape one on for you?"
And so on...
Seriously, I spent the entire night trying to avoid having to explain why I didn't want a friggin' ribbon. Here I was at an event that was raising money for a worthy cause. The very act of being there was not only a gesture, but one that resulted in money going to the cause in question, and despite this I was hounded by people who couldn't understand that I didn't need to make an empty gesture to show I cared. If my money or my presence there or my oath never to have unprotected sex with a man didn't prove I was doing my part for AIDS, how was a ribbon going to?
And now, in the aftermath of the horrible, tragic, unimaginable, and did I say tragic events at Virginia Tech, here come the black "VT" ribbons. (Sigh...) I guess I should respect and understand people's need to wear their empathy on their sleeves (or lapels, or blouses, or bumpers...); heck, I guess I do respect it. But it still bugs me. It's bad enough that I have to be reminded that my children are growing up in a world where things like this can happen. (It's always been that kind of a world. It's the reminder I'm lamenting, not the reality that the world is a dangerous, capricious place.) To add insult to injury, I get to know what this sad, pathetic little person looked like; I didn't need a face to go with this evil, but I got one anyway. Of course, if just knowing what he looked like wasn't enough for some of you, NBC provided you front row seats for the "here's why I killed all those people; aren't I just too much?" show when they aired the killer's little home movie. (Shame on NBC for airing it and shame on you if you watched it.)
Almost before the echoes of the final shot fell still, the blamethrowing commenced. This person or that person didn't do enough or did too much or wore the wrong color shirt that day and we need to fire them or censure them or shun them (unshunning them only when we absolutely have to say something to them) and all in an effort to hold someone accountable when the only one accountable had his finger on the trigger when the gun went "bang!" This was a bad guy. Life is hard for a lot of us, but we make our choices and we follow a path that leads us inexorably to who we are and through what we do in this world. Cho was bullied, he didn't fit in, he had an axe to grind, he was considered unstable. It will probably come as no surprise to my readers that all of that was true of me at one time or another in my past, and despite that fact I have never felt the need to kill anyone over it. (And if I ever do, please, please blame me and only me.)
These days the norm is to fall over ourselves searching for answers, wear ourselves out digging for root causes, and above all to rush madly to find someone to punish for any disruption in the fragile facade that life is easy, that our neighborhood is safe, or (as Hunter Thompson so eloquently put it) "that someone, or at least some force, {is} tending the light at the end of the tunnel."
Whatever or whomever that force is, I bet you it is not wearing a ribbon.
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
Who is this ''Alyssa'' person, and why should I care?
I don't like country music. Period. Please don't take offense if you happen to like it. I don't like shellfish either, and I know plenty of nice folks who seem to genuinely enjoy eating the very same science-fiction-sized insectoid sea-critters that I find so off-putting. My stance on country music isn't a matter of me being "above" that particular musical style, it's just one small facet of who I am.
Besides, I actually like some country songs; it's just country music that makes me want to cut my ears off with a dull pair of pinking sheers. It isn't so much the music itself that I despise as the category. In fact, I probably feel that way about most musical styles. In the end I either like or dislike the song, without regard to what aural box the industry decided to shove it into. As I think about it, it's more the trappings of this or that style that annoy me. Does a country singer lose his voice if he doesn't have a ten gallon hat or sideburns? Does having their pants down around their knees help hip-hop artists when they consult their rhyming dictionaries? But I digress...
A couple of years ago I received a cheap but functional shower radio from a coworker in one of those obligatory and largely joyless corporate gift-swaps. I slapped a couple of double-A's into it and stuck it to the wall of my shower, and from time to time I bother to turn it on and search the dial for one of the three stations that it actually receives. (I assume the transmitter for these is located somewhere in my backyard.) I switched it on yesterday, and after a few minutes of painstakingly twisting the tuning knob by no more than a couple of Angstroms at a time, I managed to tune in a country song.
The song was called, "Alyssa Lies." I knew that within a few seconds because it only took that long for the singer to croon "Alyssa Lies" roughly 74 times. For reasons I can only attribute to a knee-jerk desire to find fault with country music "on spec" combined with the fact that at 44 years of age, there is absolutely nothing I find interesting about my own body, I actually bothered to pay attention to the lyrics. Besides, in 2007 we're pretty much hard-wired by the media to want to know everything about everyone else, so my curiosity was piqued. Who the hell is this Alyssa, and what's she lying about? I figured Alyssa was some woman who'd done the singer wrong... that old staple of country music themes. But I was wrong.
As I listened to this stupid country song playing on my stupid orange shower radio in my stupid preformed fiberglass shower, I started crying like a little girl. I didn't "get misty" or "tear up" or "get verklempt" (as they used to say on SNL's "Coffee Talk"), I bawled like a frigging baby who's been spanked hard while dicing onions in a tear gas factory. I cried so hard that I actually laughed once or twice at how absolutely pathetic it was to be reacting that way to some stupid country song. I put one hand on the wall to steady myself, hunched my shoulders, and sobbed uncontrollably while the words of the song sank in...
"Alyssa lies, in the classroom.
Alyssa lies, everyday in school.
Alyssa lies to the teachers
as she tries to cover every bruise."
I guess the meaning of the song took me by surprise. It was so far removed from what I expected, and simultaneously so completely on-target where what's most important to me in the world is concerned. I don't know whether it's a good song or sucks. I lack the capacity to make a dispassionate, rational critique of it musically. I'm pretty sure it isn't a bad song, but it wasn't the music that hit me so hard. What yanked my heart out through my tear ducts was the thought of any child finding pain and sorrow where every child should find only love and solace.
Being a father is the single most important thing in my life. I realize that statement is something of a cliché, something every parent is supposed to say; but those of you who know me and have known me in the presence of my children have seen for yourselves that it's more than that for me. I am good at many things, but I am a great dad. I don't write that to brag, I write it to express how completely incomprehensible it is for me to know that anyone could do anything but cherish those whom God has placed in their care.
Loving and caring for my children is the one thing in my life that has from day one been effortless and joyful. I spent most of my life waiting for something to happen, feeling somehow unfinished and incomplete. That changed the day my daughter was born. As soon as she was delivered, the nurse took her over to the warming table and gave her a vitamin K shot. My little girl cried for the first time in her life, and when she did, I whispered a promise in her tiny ear that I have kept and will keep for the rest of my life, "Nothing that hurts that doesn't help." That's such a little thing to promise. Seems to me it's the very least every child deserves.
Besides, I actually like some country songs; it's just country music that makes me want to cut my ears off with a dull pair of pinking sheers. It isn't so much the music itself that I despise as the category. In fact, I probably feel that way about most musical styles. In the end I either like or dislike the song, without regard to what aural box the industry decided to shove it into. As I think about it, it's more the trappings of this or that style that annoy me. Does a country singer lose his voice if he doesn't have a ten gallon hat or sideburns? Does having their pants down around their knees help hip-hop artists when they consult their rhyming dictionaries? But I digress...
A couple of years ago I received a cheap but functional shower radio from a coworker in one of those obligatory and largely joyless corporate gift-swaps. I slapped a couple of double-A's into it and stuck it to the wall of my shower, and from time to time I bother to turn it on and search the dial for one of the three stations that it actually receives. (I assume the transmitter for these is located somewhere in my backyard.) I switched it on yesterday, and after a few minutes of painstakingly twisting the tuning knob by no more than a couple of Angstroms at a time, I managed to tune in a country song.
The song was called, "Alyssa Lies." I knew that within a few seconds because it only took that long for the singer to croon "Alyssa Lies" roughly 74 times. For reasons I can only attribute to a knee-jerk desire to find fault with country music "on spec" combined with the fact that at 44 years of age, there is absolutely nothing I find interesting about my own body, I actually bothered to pay attention to the lyrics. Besides, in 2007 we're pretty much hard-wired by the media to want to know everything about everyone else, so my curiosity was piqued. Who the hell is this Alyssa, and what's she lying about? I figured Alyssa was some woman who'd done the singer wrong... that old staple of country music themes. But I was wrong.
As I listened to this stupid country song playing on my stupid orange shower radio in my stupid preformed fiberglass shower, I started crying like a little girl. I didn't "get misty" or "tear up" or "get verklempt" (as they used to say on SNL's "Coffee Talk"), I bawled like a frigging baby who's been spanked hard while dicing onions in a tear gas factory. I cried so hard that I actually laughed once or twice at how absolutely pathetic it was to be reacting that way to some stupid country song. I put one hand on the wall to steady myself, hunched my shoulders, and sobbed uncontrollably while the words of the song sank in...
"Alyssa lies, in the classroom.
Alyssa lies, everyday in school.
Alyssa lies to the teachers
as she tries to cover every bruise."
I guess the meaning of the song took me by surprise. It was so far removed from what I expected, and simultaneously so completely on-target where what's most important to me in the world is concerned. I don't know whether it's a good song or sucks. I lack the capacity to make a dispassionate, rational critique of it musically. I'm pretty sure it isn't a bad song, but it wasn't the music that hit me so hard. What yanked my heart out through my tear ducts was the thought of any child finding pain and sorrow where every child should find only love and solace.
Being a father is the single most important thing in my life. I realize that statement is something of a cliché, something every parent is supposed to say; but those of you who know me and have known me in the presence of my children have seen for yourselves that it's more than that for me. I am good at many things, but I am a great dad. I don't write that to brag, I write it to express how completely incomprehensible it is for me to know that anyone could do anything but cherish those whom God has placed in their care.
Loving and caring for my children is the one thing in my life that has from day one been effortless and joyful. I spent most of my life waiting for something to happen, feeling somehow unfinished and incomplete. That changed the day my daughter was born. As soon as she was delivered, the nurse took her over to the warming table and gave her a vitamin K shot. My little girl cried for the first time in her life, and when she did, I whispered a promise in her tiny ear that I have kept and will keep for the rest of my life, "Nothing that hurts that doesn't help." That's such a little thing to promise. Seems to me it's the very least every child deserves.
Wednesday, February 07, 2007
Of Present and Future Realities (or ''What I Am Going To Do On My Summer Vacation'')
A little bird asked recently where I'd been and why I hadn't blogged lately. The answers to that question are essentially, (a) I've been right here. (b) I've had nothing much to say. Answer "b" does not mean I've had nothing going on; in fact, the opposite is true. I've had so much going on that I have had no time to stop and process any of it and consider what, if anything, any of it means to me.
So lets do now...
Christmas came and went, leaving behind it a few cherished gifts and a pile of bills so daunting, that I've been forced to go on Zoloft while we figure out how to pay them off. We had fun, though the weather conspired to deny us our usual snowboarding/skiing (and sometimes crashing and emergency-rooming) trip while in New York to see my folks, siblings, nieces and nephews. After years of being frustrated at having to "fit" a trip to my father's home into our too-short trip North, I was profoundly saddened that we had no need to "fit" that trip into our plans this year. After having gotten to know the area where he lived fairly well over the years, it seems strange to think that I have no reason ever to go there again. And his home, which was always somehow so familiar to me yet never a very comfortable place to be; the knowledge that it belongs to someone else now, and that I will likely never set foot there again, is tough to get my head around.
That present reality has forced me to face a future reality; one upon which my brain has seized far ahead of actually being ready to think of it. That being the sure knowledge that one day (may it be many, many years hence) my mother and step-father will follow where my father has now gone. That knowledge has led me to think of the time I have left to share with them in a very different way than I did only a year ago.
Between them my mother and step-father share six kids, and have shared them since I was two. With three boys and three girls, we were the "real" Brady bunch. Unlike the TV version, we had more than one bathroom and no live-in maid. Our trials and tribulations were similar to theirs at first blush, though I like to think ours would have made for more entertaining television. While TV's Marcia was nursing a swollen nose, my sister Tracy was throwing one of our cats out a second-floor window to see if it would still land on its feet. (It did, and was fine, though it tended to keep a safe distance from her after that.) When TV's Jan was struggling to find her place while living in her sister's shadow, my brother Mark was shooting one of the neighbor's kids with an arrow. (In Mark's defense, the kid did dare Mark to do it.) During another episode, my step-father came home one day to find one of my sisters being held at sword-point by yet another of the neighbor's children. (In his defense, it can reasonably be said that our family fired the first shot in that particular war.) Yes, we were a lot like the Brady's. (Maybe the Brady's on acid?)
Growing up in Upstate New York, we spent a lot of summers in the Adirondack Mountains (where the phrase "bear with us" is actually a call for help), and we've managed to keep up a tradition of getting together there on or around the Fourth of July each year. For most of the past twenty-odd years we've spent the time "roughing" it on a small island on Fourth Lake. (Alger Island, if you care.) As we've gotten older and more numerous (we kids now have kids) the will to endure the elements just for a chance to rehash old arguments has waned for many of us. Also, as more and more of us reached the legal drinking age it became harder get a good fire started and even harder to keep from falling in it once we had. So it was that in 2006 we eschewed the arms of Mother Nature (and the charms of crapping in an outhouse) and rented a lodge on the channel between Fourth and Fifth lakes in Inlet, NY, thus beginning a new chapter in our shared summer history. (And no doubt a new file in the local sheriff's file cabinet.)
Of course, like every chapter before it, this chapter has its associated problems, hassles, dilemmas, and such. High on the list is the fact that as families go, we are legion, and so it is hard to find any single domicile capable of housing us all comfortably. ("Comfortably" here means with enough room to allow combatants to find neutral corners when someone needs to cool off after a row over whether or not "pantine" is a legitimate word in Scrabble.) Fortunately for us, the place we've found has beds for 22 individuals, which pretty much covers the subset of our tribe most likely to show up for the Annual Fourth of July Family Get Together and Hand-to-Hand Combat Training Extravaganza. Unfortunately, the draconian, anti-business residential codes in and around this particular Adirondack burg mandate that no more than 16 people actually stay there overnight.
That's right! We've got 22 bodies and we're renting a place that has beds for 22 bodies, but only 16 bodies can sleep there. This means that this year, as last year, a couple of people will have to sleep a few doors down at the venerable, "Fish-Smell Motel." (Okay, it's not actually called that, but it should be.) And who decides who stays where? Well, the long answer to that is that we will work out a reasonably equitable solution betwixt the family heads in such a way as to please everyone. The short answer is; I will.
See, everybody wants to stay at "the lodge." Remember the episode of The Brady Bunch where both Greg and Marcia stake a claim to the attic room as their own? Same thing, except the lodge is the attic and we are dealing with roughly 10 Greg's and 12 Marcia's (give or take a couple of each). Nobody wants to be the odd Brady out, but someone has to be. There are simply no other places that could hold all of us to be found in that area. (Certainly not on our collective Brady incomes.)
As in all things familial, the week we spend together is always worth the trouble, but the trouble is always part of the price we share for that week of memories. And that's another problem... with so many families coming together and so many variables to be considered, deciding who pays what at week's end this year will no doubt be a hotly contested issue (as it was in 2006). What variables? Well, for starters, not everyone can come and stay for the entire week. Should those people pay the same as those who stayed longer? Second, my family will take up four "slots" in the lodge (myself, my wife, my one kid, my other kid) while my sister's will take up three (her, her big kid, her smaller kid). Should she pay the same as we do for a week at the lodge for her family, or should she pay for three "slots" while we pay for four? Oh, and her husband will be coming down later in the week, but we don't know how many nights he plans to stay. Since the house will be at capacity at that point, does he get a room down the road away from his wife and kids, or do they all move down the road, or do we hide him in the attic?
However we work out these and other issues this year, I hope we can minimize the number of panties that get tied in a wad over them, because (and here's where we find our way back to my point about future realities) we have no idea how many more years we are going to be able to spend together. My mother and step-father, matriarch and patriarch of the gang that couldn't shout straight, aren't going to be here forever. I get that now. And "getting it," I've come to realize that they are the glue that binds the entire happy/loud/crazy/scattered/contentious lot of us together.
With all the difficulties inherent in gathering any significant number of us (along with a sufficient cache of alcohol, snack foods, and first aid supplies) in any one spot at any one time, I wonder whether we'll find the wherewithal to brave the highways, the vacation housing dilemmas, and the occasional unavoidable hostilities with any frequency in that inevitable future reality. How many years will it be before I'm looking back on my memories of so many summer visits to the Adirondacks and realizing that I have no further reason to go there? I mean, maybe my siblings and I will stay connected and keep committed to our shared traditions. Maybe we'll be making memories together as a group, in one form or another, for the rest of my life and beyond.
There's an emotion I cannot name. It comes in the form of sunlight reflected off ripples on the black water of a deep mountain lake, the bottom of which is layered with memories of raucous laughter and quiet contemplation—the sounds and silences of a family—that have drifted down and settled there to be stirred only by our eventual return or the errant angler's hook. I hope we can go back there forever, or in the alternative, that I never actually know when we've seen it for the last time.
So lets do now...
Christmas came and went, leaving behind it a few cherished gifts and a pile of bills so daunting, that I've been forced to go on Zoloft while we figure out how to pay them off. We had fun, though the weather conspired to deny us our usual snowboarding/skiing (and sometimes crashing and emergency-rooming) trip while in New York to see my folks, siblings, nieces and nephews. After years of being frustrated at having to "fit" a trip to my father's home into our too-short trip North, I was profoundly saddened that we had no need to "fit" that trip into our plans this year. After having gotten to know the area where he lived fairly well over the years, it seems strange to think that I have no reason ever to go there again. And his home, which was always somehow so familiar to me yet never a very comfortable place to be; the knowledge that it belongs to someone else now, and that I will likely never set foot there again, is tough to get my head around.
That present reality has forced me to face a future reality; one upon which my brain has seized far ahead of actually being ready to think of it. That being the sure knowledge that one day (may it be many, many years hence) my mother and step-father will follow where my father has now gone. That knowledge has led me to think of the time I have left to share with them in a very different way than I did only a year ago.
Between them my mother and step-father share six kids, and have shared them since I was two. With three boys and three girls, we were the "real" Brady bunch. Unlike the TV version, we had more than one bathroom and no live-in maid. Our trials and tribulations were similar to theirs at first blush, though I like to think ours would have made for more entertaining television. While TV's Marcia was nursing a swollen nose, my sister Tracy was throwing one of our cats out a second-floor window to see if it would still land on its feet. (It did, and was fine, though it tended to keep a safe distance from her after that.) When TV's Jan was struggling to find her place while living in her sister's shadow, my brother Mark was shooting one of the neighbor's kids with an arrow. (In Mark's defense, the kid did dare Mark to do it.) During another episode, my step-father came home one day to find one of my sisters being held at sword-point by yet another of the neighbor's children. (In his defense, it can reasonably be said that our family fired the first shot in that particular war.) Yes, we were a lot like the Brady's. (Maybe the Brady's on acid?)
Growing up in Upstate New York, we spent a lot of summers in the Adirondack Mountains (where the phrase "bear with us" is actually a call for help), and we've managed to keep up a tradition of getting together there on or around the Fourth of July each year. For most of the past twenty-odd years we've spent the time "roughing" it on a small island on Fourth Lake. (Alger Island, if you care.) As we've gotten older and more numerous (we kids now have kids) the will to endure the elements just for a chance to rehash old arguments has waned for many of us. Also, as more and more of us reached the legal drinking age it became harder get a good fire started and even harder to keep from falling in it once we had. So it was that in 2006 we eschewed the arms of Mother Nature (and the charms of crapping in an outhouse) and rented a lodge on the channel between Fourth and Fifth lakes in Inlet, NY, thus beginning a new chapter in our shared summer history. (And no doubt a new file in the local sheriff's file cabinet.)
Of course, like every chapter before it, this chapter has its associated problems, hassles, dilemmas, and such. High on the list is the fact that as families go, we are legion, and so it is hard to find any single domicile capable of housing us all comfortably. ("Comfortably" here means with enough room to allow combatants to find neutral corners when someone needs to cool off after a row over whether or not "pantine" is a legitimate word in Scrabble.) Fortunately for us, the place we've found has beds for 22 individuals, which pretty much covers the subset of our tribe most likely to show up for the Annual Fourth of July Family Get Together and Hand-to-Hand Combat Training Extravaganza. Unfortunately, the draconian, anti-business residential codes in and around this particular Adirondack burg mandate that no more than 16 people actually stay there overnight.
That's right! We've got 22 bodies and we're renting a place that has beds for 22 bodies, but only 16 bodies can sleep there. This means that this year, as last year, a couple of people will have to sleep a few doors down at the venerable, "Fish-Smell Motel." (Okay, it's not actually called that, but it should be.) And who decides who stays where? Well, the long answer to that is that we will work out a reasonably equitable solution betwixt the family heads in such a way as to please everyone. The short answer is; I will.
See, everybody wants to stay at "the lodge." Remember the episode of The Brady Bunch where both Greg and Marcia stake a claim to the attic room as their own? Same thing, except the lodge is the attic and we are dealing with roughly 10 Greg's and 12 Marcia's (give or take a couple of each). Nobody wants to be the odd Brady out, but someone has to be. There are simply no other places that could hold all of us to be found in that area. (Certainly not on our collective Brady incomes.)
As in all things familial, the week we spend together is always worth the trouble, but the trouble is always part of the price we share for that week of memories. And that's another problem... with so many families coming together and so many variables to be considered, deciding who pays what at week's end this year will no doubt be a hotly contested issue (as it was in 2006). What variables? Well, for starters, not everyone can come and stay for the entire week. Should those people pay the same as those who stayed longer? Second, my family will take up four "slots" in the lodge (myself, my wife, my one kid, my other kid) while my sister's will take up three (her, her big kid, her smaller kid). Should she pay the same as we do for a week at the lodge for her family, or should she pay for three "slots" while we pay for four? Oh, and her husband will be coming down later in the week, but we don't know how many nights he plans to stay. Since the house will be at capacity at that point, does he get a room down the road away from his wife and kids, or do they all move down the road, or do we hide him in the attic?
However we work out these and other issues this year, I hope we can minimize the number of panties that get tied in a wad over them, because (and here's where we find our way back to my point about future realities) we have no idea how many more years we are going to be able to spend together. My mother and step-father, matriarch and patriarch of the gang that couldn't shout straight, aren't going to be here forever. I get that now. And "getting it," I've come to realize that they are the glue that binds the entire happy/loud/crazy/scattered/contentious lot of us together.
With all the difficulties inherent in gathering any significant number of us (along with a sufficient cache of alcohol, snack foods, and first aid supplies) in any one spot at any one time, I wonder whether we'll find the wherewithal to brave the highways, the vacation housing dilemmas, and the occasional unavoidable hostilities with any frequency in that inevitable future reality. How many years will it be before I'm looking back on my memories of so many summer visits to the Adirondacks and realizing that I have no further reason to go there? I mean, maybe my siblings and I will stay connected and keep committed to our shared traditions. Maybe we'll be making memories together as a group, in one form or another, for the rest of my life and beyond.
There's an emotion I cannot name. It comes in the form of sunlight reflected off ripples on the black water of a deep mountain lake, the bottom of which is layered with memories of raucous laughter and quiet contemplation—the sounds and silences of a family—that have drifted down and settled there to be stirred only by our eventual return or the errant angler's hook. I hope we can go back there forever, or in the alternative, that I never actually know when we've seen it for the last time.
Thursday, June 29, 2006
If Balloon Animals Scare You, Skip This Blog...
Originally published February 22, 2006
When I was a child, I spake as a child... only at the time I didn't use words like "spake." My vocabulary, like my life back then, was far simpler than it has become. What few words I knew, I used to tell the world honestly and incessantly who I was and what I thought. I was brutally, even painfully honest in a manner which children share only with parrots and the insane; I told anyone who would listen anything that came to mind and never stopped once to consider what was appropriate to the setting, how they might respond, or whether they cared. It was a lot like having Tourettes, but without the redeeming novelty of randomly blurted obscenities. Yes, just like Tourettes, only boring.
I shared my every waking thought with others because I did not know not to. They say that ignorance is bliss, but the reality is that ignorance is only blissful for a while, because at some point you will bring your ignorance of the reality that fire is hot into the presence of an actual fire, at which point ignorance becomes 2nd and 3rd degree burns. Likewise, your ignorance of the sexual history of your latest one-night stand may only be blissful until a few days later when you notice that it feels like you are urinating pure jalapeno juice. (If you're smart, later the same day you will lose your blissful ignorance of what a really big shot of penicillin feels like.)
And so it was inevitable that one day my belief that ignorance is bliss would run afoul of someone else's belief that silence is golden. I'm not certain which specific beating by which specific classmate at my elementary school alerted me to the possibility that there might be something valuable in keeping one or two thoughts to myself, but since I remember more than a few such beatings, I have to assume that it wasn't the first. Armed with such helpful input as my classmates were willing to offer, I learned over time to filter much of what went through my brain and to exert some control over which thoughts begat utterances. I also made very sure never to use words like "begat."
That doesn't mean I stopped thinking all the things I used to tell people, it just means I kept them to myself. Virtually everyone does this. It's a natural dichotomy of human existence that we simultaneously want people to know who we are while intentionally hiding information from them that is critical to an accurate understanding. (Another is that most people can yodel, but very few people will admit it.) Historically, some people have kept journals in order to record, apparently for themselves alone, the thoughts they've chosen not to share with the rest of us. It's almost as though the urge to reveal ourselves to others is so strong in some people that, having chosen to hide certain things from others, they decide to reveal it instead to themselves.
And then blogging came along and screwed the whole system up. Writing a blog feels exactly the same as writing in a journal. Of course, with a journal you'd have to invite complete strangers into your bedroom in order to share those thoughts with them, but with a blog you just post it and they will come. This means that more and more people are treating their innermost thoughts less and less as would adults and more and more like children. (Or parrots... or the insane...)
Now, I'm not necessarily saying that's a bad thing, but... no... that's exactly what I'm saying. If we stop hiding who we are from each other and start "letting it all hang out," even if only in a blog, the impact on society could be devastating. I mean, what if everyone started sharing their deepest fears, and found out that, yes, strange as it may seem, lots of other people piss themselves when confronted with balloon animals? What if the two lonely Creed fans in the world were to discover each other? What if Letterman were to read Oprah's blog and discover that once you get past the difference in their height, gender, skin color, background, interests, and entire outlook on life they are actually a lot alike?
Recognizing what parts of our psyche to share with others and which bits are best kept to ourselves is an art form humankind has developed and honed for millennia; like music, it has both its sounds and its silences. Blogging is karaoke for the mind, and it's every bit as vile and dangerous as the musical variety. We're meant to keep some of our shit to ourselves, people. God gave us lips so we could zip them, or in the alternative, so that other people could fatten them for us if we didn't.
The rules are simple folks: think what you want, but keep most of it to yourself, or at some point you're going to take a beating. (Trust me. I know of what I spake.)
Wednesday, June 28, 2006
Edible Condoms, Decapitated Saints, and Thee
Originally published Tuesday, February 21, 2006
Valentine's Day has come and gone and no doubt left many an otherwise blissful couple dealing with a heart-shaped assortment of unmet expectations. You bought her flowers and she wanted jewelry. She wore a fire-engine red lace teddy to bed and you had your "heart" set on black latex. You brought edible condoms and forgot she was a diabetic. And why wouldn't things go wrong? We're just arbitrarily demanding on one specific evening out of the entire year that all the men prepare for romance and all the women prepare for sex. How could that go wrong? (Hell, why not just perform a mass cross-gender brain swap?)
February 14th isn't about how much you love your significant other, it's about how well you can exactly meet his or her expectations of what it takes to prove you love him or her sufficiently. And that's a tough nut to crack (no pun intended), because no matter what you may think you know, the reality is that you probably haven't got a clue what he or she really wants.
As far as Valentine's gifts go, more is usually better, but there are exceptions. Love isn't poker*; two dozen roses will usually beat one dozen roses, UNLESS the one dozen roses were delivered in a gold-leaf trimmed box with a red ribbon by some kid wearing a name tag, and the two dozen were hand delivered by you in a plastic grocery bag with the little adhesive paper price sticker still attached.
While there's some debate about who Saint Valentine actually was, it appears he met a pretty gruesome death, being brutally beaten and then decapitated on the orders of the Roman Emperor, Claudius II. As I think about Valentine's Day, I can't help wondering whether the two were dating. I bet St. V. left the tag on the flowers.
*Don't even go there.
Valentine's Day has come and gone and no doubt left many an otherwise blissful couple dealing with a heart-shaped assortment of unmet expectations. You bought her flowers and she wanted jewelry. She wore a fire-engine red lace teddy to bed and you had your "heart" set on black latex. You brought edible condoms and forgot she was a diabetic. And why wouldn't things go wrong? We're just arbitrarily demanding on one specific evening out of the entire year that all the men prepare for romance and all the women prepare for sex. How could that go wrong? (Hell, why not just perform a mass cross-gender brain swap?)
February 14th isn't about how much you love your significant other, it's about how well you can exactly meet his or her expectations of what it takes to prove you love him or her sufficiently. And that's a tough nut to crack (no pun intended), because no matter what you may think you know, the reality is that you probably haven't got a clue what he or she really wants.
As far as Valentine's gifts go, more is usually better, but there are exceptions. Love isn't poker*; two dozen roses will usually beat one dozen roses, UNLESS the one dozen roses were delivered in a gold-leaf trimmed box with a red ribbon by some kid wearing a name tag, and the two dozen were hand delivered by you in a plastic grocery bag with the little adhesive paper price sticker still attached.
While there's some debate about who Saint Valentine actually was, it appears he met a pretty gruesome death, being brutally beaten and then decapitated on the orders of the Roman Emperor, Claudius II. As I think about Valentine's Day, I can't help wondering whether the two were dating. I bet St. V. left the tag on the flowers.
*Don't even go there.
Tuesday, June 27, 2006
You May Prefer Death...
Originally published Friday, May 19, 2006
They say that, to the brain, chocolate feels almost exactly like love. Of course, chocolate is a lot harder to get off your sheets...
I was just reading a friend's blog wherein she lays out, in rather painful detail, a recent dating train wreck. (Dont worry folks; she was thrown clear before the engine jumped the rail.) Her missive got me thinking about my old dating days; that special time in my life when I had no idea what I wanted and no idea how to get it, when "love" was just an alternate spelling for "lust," when "the blues" was more than a musical style; it was also my pet-name for my man-bits.
While I'm sure it's hard to imagine it today, during the heyday of my daring and misspent youth the female equation was for me a mountain too imposing and too high. I spent the better portion of my formative years fumbling for purchase on anything and everything that batted an eyelash within striking distance. (Yes, they batted, and I struck out.) To this day I'm not sure whether the problem was that I was socially inept, or that I was inept socially.
Dont believe what they tell you; it's desperation that's blind, not love. I couldn't tell the difference between a woman who found me entertaining and a woman who was entertaining thoughts of suicide as a humane way of sparing us both further embarrassment at the hands of my unschooled and unskilled advances. Seriously, the only way I knew to be sure a woman was interested in me was to open my eyes while we were kissing to see if she was grimacing or actually enjoying the experience. Self-confidence was for sissies! Dating only means something if it scares the shit out of you, and for me it was a trial by desire.
Yes, the single life was a real blast! Throughout it all, I held tight to the conviction that there must be something more, something better in life if only I could find it. Fast forward a bit and I stumbled headlong into married life, which cured me of that conviction. (It's critical that I mention here that the above refers to my FIRST marriage to she-who-shall-not-be-named; critical both for clarity and because I hope to live past the point where my sweet, wonderful, loving wife of 10 years who happens to know Kung Fu reads this.)
But back to dating... There is nothing wrong with the concept in and of itself; you cast a net around you and see what fails to claw its way clear before you pull the net in. Men like to think they are the ones casting the nets, but thats just because we're genetically wired for hunting and gathering. No, in my experience it is the woman who ensnares the man; and if she likes you well enough she may decide to keep you for a while... usually in a box in her basement or in her walk-in closet if you behave. (Your dating experiences may vary somewhat from mine.)
In the end, dating eventually leads either to marriage or to death. This second (and final) time around, I am quite happy with the marriage alternative. Sure, some will argue that death is preferable, and that's their call, but for me married life has definite advantages that go far beyond simply not decomposing in a box underground. For starters, youre not decomposing in a box underground. Also, there's a certain Zen-ness to embracing the knowledge that you will never, ever, win another argument.
They say that, to the brain, chocolate feels almost exactly like love. Of course, chocolate is a lot harder to get off your sheets...
I was just reading a friend's blog wherein she lays out, in rather painful detail, a recent dating train wreck. (Dont worry folks; she was thrown clear before the engine jumped the rail.) Her missive got me thinking about my old dating days; that special time in my life when I had no idea what I wanted and no idea how to get it, when "love" was just an alternate spelling for "lust," when "the blues" was more than a musical style; it was also my pet-name for my man-bits.
While I'm sure it's hard to imagine it today, during the heyday of my daring and misspent youth the female equation was for me a mountain too imposing and too high. I spent the better portion of my formative years fumbling for purchase on anything and everything that batted an eyelash within striking distance. (Yes, they batted, and I struck out.) To this day I'm not sure whether the problem was that I was socially inept, or that I was inept socially.
Dont believe what they tell you; it's desperation that's blind, not love. I couldn't tell the difference between a woman who found me entertaining and a woman who was entertaining thoughts of suicide as a humane way of sparing us both further embarrassment at the hands of my unschooled and unskilled advances. Seriously, the only way I knew to be sure a woman was interested in me was to open my eyes while we were kissing to see if she was grimacing or actually enjoying the experience. Self-confidence was for sissies! Dating only means something if it scares the shit out of you, and for me it was a trial by desire.
Yes, the single life was a real blast! Throughout it all, I held tight to the conviction that there must be something more, something better in life if only I could find it. Fast forward a bit and I stumbled headlong into married life, which cured me of that conviction. (It's critical that I mention here that the above refers to my FIRST marriage to she-who-shall-not-be-named; critical both for clarity and because I hope to live past the point where my sweet, wonderful, loving wife of 10 years who happens to know Kung Fu reads this.)
But back to dating... There is nothing wrong with the concept in and of itself; you cast a net around you and see what fails to claw its way clear before you pull the net in. Men like to think they are the ones casting the nets, but thats just because we're genetically wired for hunting and gathering. No, in my experience it is the woman who ensnares the man; and if she likes you well enough she may decide to keep you for a while... usually in a box in her basement or in her walk-in closet if you behave. (Your dating experiences may vary somewhat from mine.)
In the end, dating eventually leads either to marriage or to death. This second (and final) time around, I am quite happy with the marriage alternative. Sure, some will argue that death is preferable, and that's their call, but for me married life has definite advantages that go far beyond simply not decomposing in a box underground. For starters, youre not decomposing in a box underground. Also, there's a certain Zen-ness to embracing the knowledge that you will never, ever, win another argument.
There are those who call me "Oil Spot"
Email spammers have somehow learned what specific phrases to employ in the subject line of their emails in order to get me interested; phrases they somehow know will speak to me in a personal and powerful way. Their messages arrive in my inbox bearing subject lines populated with provocative phrases such as "Hi, oil spot," "Shook up accomplish," and "them taken."* (That last one probably reels in a lot of suckers. I know when I read "them taken," I can't help but wonder what was taken, or whom, and where were they taken to, or what was taken from them? The need to unravel mysteries like these is something I suspect we all share.)
Of course, I'm being facetious. These weasels... er, people, seem to have gotten the idea that we can be moved--either to action or towards the formation of an opinion--by simply throwing together strings of random words. (Maybe they've been paying attention to the speeches of the latest crop of politicians.)
I'm hardly a novice where computers are concerned, so I think I have a fairly good idea of how they get their hands on my email address; no mystery there. What puzzles me is how they know I'm having problems getting and maintaining an erection. Personal privacy experts tell me that I should be concerned at such intrusions into my personal information, and I am, though in my case I'm more concerned with the types of information these people are accessing as opposed to the fact that they can access it at all.
You see, the way I figure it is if the spammers actually got their hands on the right information at the appropriate time and emailed us offers we really, truly needed, why we'd have a national holiday in their honor. "Spammers Day" would fall on September 29th every year, because that's my birthday and I'm the one who thought of it. We'd all grill out in the Indian summer heat (sorry, "Native American" summer heat) and we'd cook nothing but tuna steaks. (I know you were expecting me to write "Spam(TM)," but I hate that stuff and it's my holiday.) We'd feast on grilled yellow fin, and sing the praises of those brave men and women who gave up nothing (that I can think of) but who provided us such valuable information, for free, via email, over the previous year.
Of course, it would have to be really useful information to warrant such a hullabaloo, but that's the point I'm getting at (slowly, true, but I'm getting there). Instead of refinancing offers, drug offers, and such; how about emailing us with information on where to get the best price on the Bedazzler(TM) or tips on which sores to worry about. You know... stuff we can all really use.
* Actual email subject lines from actual emails in my actual inbox today. Actually!
Of course, I'm being facetious. These weasels... er, people, seem to have gotten the idea that we can be moved--either to action or towards the formation of an opinion--by simply throwing together strings of random words. (Maybe they've been paying attention to the speeches of the latest crop of politicians.)
I'm hardly a novice where computers are concerned, so I think I have a fairly good idea of how they get their hands on my email address; no mystery there. What puzzles me is how they know I'm having problems getting and maintaining an erection. Personal privacy experts tell me that I should be concerned at such intrusions into my personal information, and I am, though in my case I'm more concerned with the types of information these people are accessing as opposed to the fact that they can access it at all.
You see, the way I figure it is if the spammers actually got their hands on the right information at the appropriate time and emailed us offers we really, truly needed, why we'd have a national holiday in their honor. "Spammers Day" would fall on September 29th every year, because that's my birthday and I'm the one who thought of it. We'd all grill out in the Indian summer heat (sorry, "Native American" summer heat) and we'd cook nothing but tuna steaks. (I know you were expecting me to write "Spam(TM)," but I hate that stuff and it's my holiday.) We'd feast on grilled yellow fin, and sing the praises of those brave men and women who gave up nothing (that I can think of) but who provided us such valuable information, for free, via email, over the previous year.
Of course, it would have to be really useful information to warrant such a hullabaloo, but that's the point I'm getting at (slowly, true, but I'm getting there). Instead of refinancing offers, drug offers, and such; how about emailing us with information on where to get the best price on the Bedazzler(TM) or tips on which sores to worry about. You know... stuff we can all really use.
* Actual email subject lines from actual emails in my actual inbox today. Actually!
Friday, June 16, 2006
La-la-la-la ... I'm not listening...
One of the reasons I don't drink anymore is that, in my experience, alcohol has significantly lower standards than I for a whole slew of things like what stuff is okay to eat, which places are good to lie down and take a little nap, or where to plant my flag. (Now, I don't want to brag, but back in the day I took more than my share of naps!) Another reason I gave up alcohol is that when I drank I used to lose things; things like friends and consciousness.
Once, while at a late night beach party in Western Australia, I got into a confrontation with a guy who seemed pissed off that I wanted to borrow his bottle opener. (In the early eighties, Australia was only just getting around to adopting color TV; technological breakthroughs like the screw-top beer were still years away.) When I pressed Mr. Bottle-opener-guy for an explanation for his open hostility, he informed me that he was still angry about the last fistfight we'd had. This struck me as odd, since I barely knew the guy and certainly had no recollection of mixing it up with him. "When was that?" I slurred. "About an hour ago!" was his reply.
I probably should have taken a moment right then to consider the deeper ramifications of the knowledge that I had been in a fight only an hour earlier and had no memory of it whatsoever. I should have taken a step back and said, "Whoa, I clearly have some stuff to sort out. Sorry to have troubled you." I should have; but, being drunk, I did not. Instead, I responded that he and I probably got into a fight in the first place because he was such a dick about letting people use his fucking bottle opener, at which point we started throwing punches again*.
But that's not what I wanted to share with you all today. I only mention it because when I look back now I can see that my body had been trying to tell me that booze and I simply weren't working out and that I ought to consider letting alcohol see other people. I guess when you're in the middle of something like that, it can be hard to see the vomit on the wall. I bring it up, because my body is trying to get my attention right now. It's been doing so for a while, but I realize that I've been doing my best to ignore it. When I make an effort to tune into it, I can just hear it screaming at the top of its lungs, "YOU'RE IN YOUR FORTIES! SLOW THE FUCK DOWN!"
"But I don't want to slow down!" whines my inner teenager, giving my body the su-fi**, trying to be both defiant and simultaneously hip, and pretty much failing at both.
I realized this at the emergency room the other night, where I received a handful of Percocet, a slew of stitches, and an update from my wife on how many times she's taken me to the emergency room since we met. (I'm averaging a visit every two years, which doesn't seem so bad to me, though I suspect it's a bit above the national average. Besides, one more punch on my card and the next visit is free.)
Yes, at 40-something I realize that my adolescent brain is writing checks my body can't cash, but I just don't care. I can just about guarantee that I'd never see the inside of an emergency room again if I just refused to leave my couch, but then I'd miss a lot more than a few stitches or class 4 shoulder separations. That latter, by the way, is one mountain of gasp-for-breath pain I highly suggest you avoid. In fact, I'd give up just about anything to ensure that I never, ever, hurt like that again. Anything except going out there and attacking things like I'm still fourteen. (Because the thing is, deep down inside--starting about a millimeter beneath the skin--I still am.)
*(What's fascinating to me is that I didn't remember the first fight right after it happened, but that I remember the rest of the evening in such detail almost 20 years hence. Oh the vagaries of the human mind... especially when pickled.)
**(Super-finger. Click here if you don't know what it is, and then stop giving people that lame-ass old-school finger! Give 'em the su-fi!)
Once, while at a late night beach party in Western Australia, I got into a confrontation with a guy who seemed pissed off that I wanted to borrow his bottle opener. (In the early eighties, Australia was only just getting around to adopting color TV; technological breakthroughs like the screw-top beer were still years away.) When I pressed Mr. Bottle-opener-guy for an explanation for his open hostility, he informed me that he was still angry about the last fistfight we'd had. This struck me as odd, since I barely knew the guy and certainly had no recollection of mixing it up with him. "When was that?" I slurred. "About an hour ago!" was his reply.
I probably should have taken a moment right then to consider the deeper ramifications of the knowledge that I had been in a fight only an hour earlier and had no memory of it whatsoever. I should have taken a step back and said, "Whoa, I clearly have some stuff to sort out. Sorry to have troubled you." I should have; but, being drunk, I did not. Instead, I responded that he and I probably got into a fight in the first place because he was such a dick about letting people use his fucking bottle opener, at which point we started throwing punches again*.
But that's not what I wanted to share with you all today. I only mention it because when I look back now I can see that my body had been trying to tell me that booze and I simply weren't working out and that I ought to consider letting alcohol see other people. I guess when you're in the middle of something like that, it can be hard to see the vomit on the wall. I bring it up, because my body is trying to get my attention right now. It's been doing so for a while, but I realize that I've been doing my best to ignore it. When I make an effort to tune into it, I can just hear it screaming at the top of its lungs, "YOU'RE IN YOUR FORTIES! SLOW THE FUCK DOWN!"
"But I don't want to slow down!" whines my inner teenager, giving my body the su-fi**, trying to be both defiant and simultaneously hip, and pretty much failing at both.
I realized this at the emergency room the other night, where I received a handful of Percocet, a slew of stitches, and an update from my wife on how many times she's taken me to the emergency room since we met. (I'm averaging a visit every two years, which doesn't seem so bad to me, though I suspect it's a bit above the national average. Besides, one more punch on my card and the next visit is free.)
Yes, at 40-something I realize that my adolescent brain is writing checks my body can't cash, but I just don't care. I can just about guarantee that I'd never see the inside of an emergency room again if I just refused to leave my couch, but then I'd miss a lot more than a few stitches or class 4 shoulder separations. That latter, by the way, is one mountain of gasp-for-breath pain I highly suggest you avoid. In fact, I'd give up just about anything to ensure that I never, ever, hurt like that again. Anything except going out there and attacking things like I'm still fourteen. (Because the thing is, deep down inside--starting about a millimeter beneath the skin--I still am.)
*(What's fascinating to me is that I didn't remember the first fight right after it happened, but that I remember the rest of the evening in such detail almost 20 years hence. Oh the vagaries of the human mind... especially when pickled.)
**(Super-finger. Click here if you don't know what it is, and then stop giving people that lame-ass old-school finger! Give 'em the su-fi!)
Thursday, June 08, 2006
Short, Retarded Roommates I Love
Originally published Monday, February 20, 2006
I love my kids. There's nothing more immutable or more true in the universe. I'd give up TV for them. (Well, maybe not Battlestar, but everything else for sure.) That written, I've come to realize that for all intents and purposes kids are just roommates who don't care about your stuff. (Or simply "roommates" for short.) That's it... roommates who don't care about societal norms or any of the usual niceties that make living with someone bearable. Oh, and they're retarded.
Seriously! I love my kids more than most people love their Tivo, but along with being wonderful and precious and cuter than a macaroni-art scene of Santa riding a flying unicorn over a field of smiling daisies, they are mental. Pick any ten minute period within the last week and imagine for a moment that your kids aren't kids at all, but are in fact full-grown adult roommates, and replay the scene in your head and you'll see what I mean. Here, let me...
The other day I was working from home, typing away furiously on my laptop, and while I was trying to work, my roommates were taking turns jumping off the couch and screaming "Wheeeeeee!" Then one of my roommates pulled a throw blanket over his head and said "You can't find me" about 37 times until the other roommate pulled the blanket off, at which point the younger roommate collapsed into tears and had to be given a lollypop to get him to calm down. Somewhere during all of this the younger of my two roommates shit his pants, which event he announced proudly by saying, "I have poopy!" with the same entusiasm you'd use to announce you found a 20 on the ground.
See what I mean? At 2 and 6 it all seems perfectly normal, but at 32 and 36 they'd be mental defects. Or celebrities. Yeah, that's actually a much nicer analogy. Having kids is like living with celebrities.
I love my kids. There's nothing more immutable or more true in the universe. I'd give up TV for them. (Well, maybe not Battlestar, but everything else for sure.) That written, I've come to realize that for all intents and purposes kids are just roommates who don't care about your stuff. (Or simply "roommates" for short.) That's it... roommates who don't care about societal norms or any of the usual niceties that make living with someone bearable. Oh, and they're retarded.
Seriously! I love my kids more than most people love their Tivo, but along with being wonderful and precious and cuter than a macaroni-art scene of Santa riding a flying unicorn over a field of smiling daisies, they are mental. Pick any ten minute period within the last week and imagine for a moment that your kids aren't kids at all, but are in fact full-grown adult roommates, and replay the scene in your head and you'll see what I mean. Here, let me...
The other day I was working from home, typing away furiously on my laptop, and while I was trying to work, my roommates were taking turns jumping off the couch and screaming "Wheeeeeee!" Then one of my roommates pulled a throw blanket over his head and said "You can't find me" about 37 times until the other roommate pulled the blanket off, at which point the younger roommate collapsed into tears and had to be given a lollypop to get him to calm down. Somewhere during all of this the younger of my two roommates shit his pants, which event he announced proudly by saying, "I have poopy!" with the same entusiasm you'd use to announce you found a 20 on the ground.
See what I mean? At 2 and 6 it all seems perfectly normal, but at 32 and 36 they'd be mental defects. Or celebrities. Yeah, that's actually a much nicer analogy. Having kids is like living with celebrities.
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