tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-65913462024-02-20T05:14:48.066-05:00Good Mike / Bad MikeMikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08459329833381496473noreply@blogger.comBlogger24125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6591346.post-80110949697672445282013-07-17T19:41:00.002-04:002013-07-17T20:08:10.068-04:00People Who Annoy Me -- Part 1<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Sooner or later it was coming. Anybody who knows me at all has heard me complain at length about one group of people or another. It's a big list. So we'll call this Part 1 of an occasional feature.<br /><br />Without further ado...<br /><br /><b>1. People who spit</b><br /><br />Seriously? Aside from the occasional respiratory ailment, I can't think of a single time in my life when I've sat around thinking, <br /><br />"You know? I think I'm in the mood to spit."<br /><br />I'm not talking about people who use chewing tobacco or its variants. I don't understand why people use chewing tobacco, but that's not the focus for this post. And I'm not talking about people who do it as an insult. I get that, even though it seems a little too dramatic and cliched. I'm talking about people without anything else in their mouths who have nothing better to do at the moment than spit. <br /><br />You know what the pavement beneath my feet needs RIGHT NOW? Spit.<br /><br />I don't want to hear about overproduction of saliva. I don't really care what you say, what stories you've heard, what some underqualified TV doctor says, nothing -- this is not a thing now. Ok? I'm a pretty charitable person when it comes to people's medical concerns. Peanut allergies, gluten intolerance, soy sensitivity, lactose intolerance. I feel for you. But overproduction of saliva is NOT a thing. It's called being hungry or anticipating a meal. End of story. Our mouths are one of the dirtiest places on our body, so when you spit, you're just spreading disease. Stop being disgusting. Stop leaving little puddles of your germ-infested fluids all over the sidewalk.<br /><br /><b>2. People who talk on the phone in the bathroom</b><br /><br />Let me give you a situation. You have a dinner party. You've had a wonderful meal, and you've moved the conversation into the living room. You and a few friends are sitting on couches catching up on the last few weeks, telling jokes -- you get the gist. All the water you drank during dinner starts to do its work, and you begin to hear nature's call. It's only natural at this point to say, "Hey, John, listen. I gotta go to the bathroom. Why don't you come with me and talk to me while I take out my penis and urinate. This conversation is too good to put on hold for even a second."<br /><br />Nope. In almost 37 years of life, I've never proposed or had this proposed to me.<br /><br />Even so, a few times a week, I'm in the bathroom in a store or a restaurant or at work and hear guys talking on the phone while they pee or while they sit on the toilet. You wouldn't ask someone to watch you do that, so why do you take someone in with you on the phone? Why don't you make a decision? Which is more important to you right now: finishing your phone conversation or emptying your bowels? If your bathroom situation is so urgent, is it so difficult to say, "Hey, listen, can I call you back in a few minutes? I'm not in a good place to talk right now." And I can't say I've ever heard an interesting phone conversation in the </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"><br /><br />"Ok, Jim, let's go ahead and put together an action plan on that one."<br /><br />"Shut up! Are you serious? He said what?"<br /><br />"I dunno. I'm thinking about seeing that new Superman movie this weekend."<br /><br />These conversations can wait.<br /><br />Oh, and one more thing. It's extremely difficult to wash properly while holding a phone to your ear. Soap, warm water, 15 seconds of handwashing. Otherwise you shouldn't even bother. It's rare enough to see a man do more than splash water on his hands (I call the average male handwashing maneuver "The Wicked Witch of the West" -- wouldn't want to melt from too much contact with water), and I NEVER see a dude on the phone wash his hands. Hey, your boyfriend just wiped his ass with one hand and held the phone to talk to you with the other. And he still has particles of crap on his hand. Remember that when he helps you cook dinner.<br /><br /><b>3. People who order at the drive through, when they should've gone inside</b><br /><br />I think every drive through interaction should focus on convenience. A good drive through order is simple, to the point, difficult to screw up. Because you're going to give your order to some person making $7.25 an hour to do a job they hate. You may think they should do their best regardless of the job, regardless of the pay. Funny thing, though, your expectations don’t translate to their actions. Go ahead, set your expectations. Get too loud about it, though, and you're likely to get their expectorations. <br /><br />You want a number 3 combo, but with extra pickles, no tomatoes, hold the mayo, oh, and add cheese on the side and some ranch sauce, and on your second order you want a number 4 combo, no pickles, extra tomato, extra mayo, and no ice in your drink -- half regular, half diet, of course. And on a third separate order you want...<br /><br />You get the point. You know what you're not getting? What you want.<br /><br />And that guy in the car behind you, the one with 30 minutes for lunch, just trying to grab a quick hamburger? Yeah, he gets to listen to you go back and forth over the tin can speaker at the menu board, gets to wait while you fish through all your bags and argue with the poor sap at the window who's going to spit on your replacement order, gets to inhale his burger before heading back to work.<br /><br />You didn't get what you want -- an inconvenient situation for you, but one you should have anticipated. The guy behind you is late to work. To be fair, his schedule isn't your responsibility, but I'm just illustrating the chain of events. The manager of the restaurant probably gets to hear you complain about the service at the drive through, something he can’t really fix. The people who would give good service at a drive through don't work at drive throughs. They make more money doing something else, and if you pay fast food workers more money, your extra value menu becomes decidedly more expensive.<br /><br />Do everyone a favor. If you have a tenuous grasp of English, if you have complicated special requests, if you plan on spending more than, say, $30 -- just go inside.<br /><br />________<br /><br />Since I've spent roughly a thousand words belittling the very people who may now be reading this blog, now is probably the wrong time to express this, but please -- don't get me wrong.<br /><br />I have friends and/or family who do all of these things, and I don't love them any less. As it turns out, I'm good at separating people's good behavior from their bad behavior. At the risk of sounding incorrigibly rude, if you and I speak on a semi-regular basis, then even if you do the stuff I've listed or the things that will come up in future installments, I obviously think your good qualities outweigh your bad. I'd say I don't want to know the terrible things people think about me, but maybe I need to hear some of them (though this isn't necessarily an invitation). I think recognizing and changing the bad stuff makes us better people tomorrow than we are today.<br /><br />So, buck up! I might hate most of the things people do, but I still like a few people. Just don't call me from the bathroom.<br /><br />In future installments:<br /><br />--People who get "offended"<br />--People who never left high school<br />--People who can recite the complete lineups of every NFL team or sing the lyrics to dozens of songs they love or keep track of all the characters and plot lines on their favorite TV show, but can't sort out the difference between "your" and "you're"<br />--Religious people who won’t take “no” for an answer<br />--Anime/JRPG Fans (closely related to the religious people listed above)<br />--Sports fans who keep talking to me about sports even though they already know I don't follow sports<br />--Geeks who criticize every movie, game, or book they encounter<br />--People who make lists of stuff that annoys them</span>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08459329833381496473noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6591346.post-50056735541224960022013-07-09T20:57:00.002-04:002013-07-09T21:06:35.918-04:00Do I Know You?<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I feel conflicted about people. On one hand, I have a terrific circle of family and friends. We support each other and help keep each other (relatively) sane, and I don't know what I'd do without them. On the other hand, the thought of speaking to people I don't already know fills me with dread, fear, and disgust. <br /><br />I try to get to work about 20 minutes early. Just in case I get stuck behind an accident or hit the traffic lights in the wrong rhythm, I like to have a time buffer to make sure I'm not late. With my few extra minutes, I'll generally sit in the car and read a book.<br /><br />On a recent day, I sat reading my book and got a tap on the window from a total stranger. First, I nearly soiled myself. I mean would it have killed the guy to stand in front of the car first and maybe wave to get my attention? Do I need to keep underwear in the glove compartment now, in case of random window knockers? Second, do I look like I'm asking for a conversation? My windows are up. I'm focused on a book. The book should be a clue, but I've learned over the years that people think reading is a last resort. They assume if you're reading, it must be because you can't find someone to talk to, so it should be okay to interrupt you for a conversation about nothing at all. <br /><br />"Hey, can you tell me where Suite 400 is?"<br /><br />"Sorry, man, I don't know. I just work in this building behind me in the sales department. I don't really know all the addresses around here."<br /><br />"But I'm looking for Suite 400. Do you know where Suite 400 is? I'm driving a truck."<br /><br />"No, I -- I really don't. I just work in this building. I don't know the addresses of the other buildings around here. I'm sorry."<br /><br />"I'm looking for Suite 400, though. Do you know where Suite 400 is?"<br /><br />"Look, dude, I can't help you. I don't know where you're going, and I don't know the addresses arou--"<br /><br />"Fine," he said, as he stuck his hand, palm out, in my face. "Whatever. Have a good day, SIR. Thanks for nothing."<br /><br />Wait, why am I the asshole?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I didn't walk up and start banging on some random stranger's window. I didn't assume he knows all the addresses and business names of the buildings in the area. I didn't ask him the same question over and over, even after he told me he didn't know the answer. I didn't interrupt him, stick my hand in his face, and treat him like he'd just ruined my day. I was polite. I used an apologetic tone to answer his question and told him I didn't know the answer. As far as I understand it, I followed social protocol, but I'm the jerk. <br /><br />And this is why people suck. Even when you follow social protocols and pretend to care about whatever crap they're talking about, they act like you owe them something. I mean, am I supposed to get out of the car and walk around with you, helping you search for a building? You're getting paid to find the building -- all I'm doing is missing out on my book. If I'd known where the guy was trying to go, I would have told him. But I'm not going to tell him to hop in the car and drive around with me until we find his place. I may be antisocial, but I don't make people's lives harder just for the fun of it. Well, not unless they deserve it.<br /><br />Even when people are polite, I don't like talking for the sake of talking. Walking down the hall at work, I see people who work in other departments all the time. I don't know their names; I don't know anything about how they spend their days. I'd rather just look the other way, but instead there's this social pressure to nod and say hi, or even worse, converse about their weekend or whatever the relevant small talk for the day might be. I hate those interactions.<br /><br />Look, I don't know you, and you don't know me, and we've lived our entire lives pretty content with this state of affairs. So why don't we just stick with the status quo? I've overheard your conversations with other people. You talk about sports and cars and fishing. I hate sports and cars and haven't fished since I was 10, so unless you read Neil Gaiman or J.R.R. Tolkien, or unless you play World of Warcraft or watch Star Trek, I don't think you and I are going to have enough in common to maintain any kind of friendship. Why don't we skip the nod and the smile? Why don't we skip the hello and the small talk? Why don't we just go about our business as though we don't know each other? I've got things I like to think about and work on in my head. When I have to stop and waste time with people I don't know, I lose track of those things. So keep your distance from me.<br /><br />I've learned over the last few years how little time we get on this planet. I, my friends, and my family are all reaching a point where we really don't know on January 1st each year who won't be with us when the day rolls around again. There's so much I want to do. I want to learn blacksmithy. I want to read all the books on my growing reading list. I want to learn to brew alcohol and distill liquor. I want to watch my kids grow up to become (hopefully) happy, well-adjusted adults. I want to eat better and get back in shape. I want to spend time laughing and drinking singing bad karaoke with the people closest to me. I have so little time.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />I need to learn rudeness. Instead of sneering and saying, "Do I know you? No? Go away," I tend to try and help the guy who needs directions or pretend to care about someone's fishing trip or find something nice to say about whatever sports team someone likes. Like I said a couple weeks ago, I'm a liar. I'll even pretend to like you.</span><br />
<br />Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08459329833381496473noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6591346.post-47444207275368973542013-06-26T22:19:00.000-04:002013-06-26T22:29:29.865-04:00[spoiler alert]<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Not really. Well, possible spoiler about the name of one character in one recent movie. Other than that, I won't spoil anything today. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Hopefully.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Fair warning though, if a single character name from the new Star Trek movie is too "spoilery" for you, save reading this post until after you see the movie, since you won't get through the post without finding out.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A Facebook exchange took place after Jessika and I saw Star Trek Into Darkness, and it got me thinking. Jessika mentioned on her wall that Benedict Cumberbatch had done a great job as Khan and sparked a discussion among her friends about how much they've liked him in other roles. The following day, though, she got a comment from a friend who seemed to consider the name "Khan" a spoiler.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Two things.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">1) It isn't.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">2) Ok, maybe it is, but the concept of spoilers is whiny and narcissistic, so I don't care.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">First, I should be clear. I'm not actually directing this post at any specific person. Though a single discussion sparked my thought process, I've been bothered by pedantic spoiler freaks for years. Despite the stacks of DVDs on shelves in their living rooms, movies they've seen multiple times, certain people will tell you that a movie is ruined by knowing the ending. I don't buy the logic, nor do I believe there's a perfect first experience for every movie that's somehow superior to all the repeated viewings -- you know, the viewings where you start to pick up on all the things you didn't notice the first time you saw it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So I'm going to try (and fail) to be reasonable. I understand there was some secrecy on and around the set about the identity of Cumberbatch's character. J.J. Abrams even made an appeal via some outlets for reviewers not to spoil any surprises, but based on the previews and the names of other characters that were not secret, any rational individual should have seen it coming. The same articles I read, speculating about Cumberbatch's character, also revealed that Alice Eve would play Carol Marcus. One of the officially released previews gave a glimpse of a hand pressed against a pane of glass in a Vulcan salute. Do we have to spell it all out in excruciating detail? Anyone who has any knowledge of Khan, any suspicion he might be in the movie, would have to be brain dead to be surprised at this point. Abrams may have used words to ask for secrecy, but his approach to casting and marketing the movie was the equivalent of shouting to the poker table that he had pocket aces and was going all in.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">If the character had been a nobody, another Nero or Sybok or Ru'afo or Soran, nobody would have requested secrecy. The act of working in secrecy means there is something bigger happening than the usual. So now we're left with a villain with a generic name, characters and situations closely related to Khan, and a request for secrecy. Do the math and stop complaining. Any possible surprise was spoiled by the very revelation that there might be a surprise.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">That's my opinion, though, worked out all inside my own little head, and I realize the spoiler freaks will disagree. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Which brings me to point number two, and this is extremely important to the discussion -- I don't care. The more you whine about spoilers, the more I want to spoil it just to piss you off. I already went to the movie and enjoyed it. I don't give a crap if you see it or enjoy it or are even aware of its existence. That's your deal. Don't bring me into it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Don't get me wrong. I don't make special efforts to spoil movies or TV shows for people. I'm not the kind of guy to walk out of the first ever screening of The Sixth Sense, look at the line of people getting ready to walk in and say, "Bruce Willis is dead all along!" I'm not the kind of guy to walk into the midnight release for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and say, "Dumbledore dies at the end!" I don't shout plot points to the world just to spite the people who haven't caught up to my reading or movie-watching.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But I'm also not going to waste my time parsing every possible definition of the word "spoiler", just to avoid offending somebody's delicate sensibilities. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Maybe you want to enter every movie experience in a state of complete ignorance. Good for you. You should do what makes you happy, as long as you don't narcissistically stand back and tell me how I'm supposed to behave to help you make those things happen, because I'm unlikely to help you. I have no interest in pussyfooting around your idiosyncrasies. Your enjoyment is up to you, and it's your job to make it a reality. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So I'm not going to propose any middle ground. There's no statute of limitations like a week or a month or six months. I won't go out of my way to discuss the entire plot of a movie, but I will say what comes to mind, regardless of your emotional baggage. If that bothers you, you either need to re-evaluate your relationship with me, or you need to seek professional help. Those are your decisions, though, not mine. If your involvement with me in social media makes your goals harder to reach, stop bitching like a child, and mute my feed or unfriend me or unfollow me. Unless you enjoy bitching like a child, in which case, I'll give you fair warning -- I've probably already muted your feed. I don't publicize my decisions to ignore people. I just ignore them. There are fun debates and conversations to be had on any number of topics, but listening to people who whine but who never take action gives me no pleasure.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Stop putting your happiness in my hands, because I promise you, the more you piss and moan, the more I want to take advantage of my power and make you sad.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So [spoiler alert] don't get too attached to any characters created by George R.R. Martin. Keep whining, though, and I'll start spilling names.</span><br />
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Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08459329833381496473noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6591346.post-15854512317440812172013-06-06T21:09:00.000-04:002013-06-06T21:09:36.728-04:00Good Mike / Bad Mike<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I'm a bit of a liar.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I sometimes recall a moment, at 7 or 8 years old, when I put a piece of tape on the wall, wondering if it would really be invisible. Some time later, one of my parents (I don't even remember which one anymore) came along and asked if I had put tape on the wall. I said no. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I'm a parent now, so I can picture the scene in my head. Parent walks down a hallway and sees a piece of tape in the middle of the wall. Three feet away sits young son, looking in another direction, hiding a roll of tape.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"Did you put this tape on the wall?"</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"No."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"Did you put this tape on the wall?"</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"No."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"Are you sure you didn't put this tape on the wall? You're not in trouble. I just want to know."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>Hmm. This seems like a trick. I thought I would be in trouble for putting the tape on the wall, so I lied about it. Now if I admit putting the tape on the wall, I have to admit I lied about it. Then I WILL be in trouble for lying. Better stick to the plan.</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"I didn't do it."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"Ok, you wouldn't be in trouble for putting tape on the wall, but you're about to be in trouble for lying to me,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>I knew it was a trick!</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">so I'm going to give you one last chance to tell me the truth."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As a parent, I'm still not sure what comes next. On the one hand, if young son finally comes clean and admits doing the deed, he's finally owned up and told the truth. But he's also admitting to lying about it when you first asked him. I'm thinking the least trouble would be admitting it in the first place, followed by owning up to the truth after lying about it, then finally, continuing to lie, even after being called out for lying. But how do you differentiate the punishments? You have to punish him for lying, but do you punish him less for admitting he lied? If you do, will he start lying about things, then admitting it at the last second, knowing it'll lead to a reduction in punishment?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">All I had to say was, </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"Yes, the package says 'invisible', and I was wondering if it would really be invisible." </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Without trying to ennoble my actions too much, I was engaging in skepticism, in science, testing claims. I don't know how my parents might have reacted, but I know how I'd react now. I'd be glad my kid didn't believe everything people told him. Invisible tape is minor, but everyone has to come to terms with misleading advertising sooner or later, and the process has to start somewhere. Once you discover they've been pulling the wool over your eyes about invisible tape, you might be less likely to believe wearing a magnetic bracelet will improve your health or that the Easy Bake oven will be easy or allow you to bake.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I never learned not to lie -- I just learned to be ashamed of myself when I did. And that's not my parents' fault. They disciplined me when I lied. Common sense (I have more to say about the concept of common sense some other time) would dictate if you punish a child for lying, sooner or later, to avoid punishment, they'll stop lying. But I didn't. I just tried harder to tell better, more bulletproof lies. Ultimately, I just started hiding the things about me that I didn’t want to have to lie about.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I don’t know about other people, but I feel like I have two people inside my head. I have Good Mike. He’s positive, cares about justice and decency, loves his family, and wants to find the good in everything. Good Mike really exists, and he’s the guy who usually writes this blog. He’s the angel on my shoulder who shows up to remind me about the things I’ve learned from all my past experiences. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But there’s also Bad Mike. He’s bitter, angry, cynical, pessimistic, and doesn’t listen to reason. He’s the misanthrope on my shoulder who tells people the world needs an asteroid to wipe out the human race. He makes fun of everyone’s music. He rages at drivers who don’t understand the function of turn signals. Bad Mike really exists, too, and I can't reconcile Good Mike with Bad Mike.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Because I know myself and my tendencies, I've pushed myself while writing my posts never to say anything untrue. But while my posts have been honest, they don't represent all of my conflicted and strange split personality. I've committed a sin of omission, so to speak, in bottling up Bad Mike. I set out to write every day, to try to connect with people, to learn from my audience and, though it feels a little narcissistic to say so, I was hoping to teach my audience something about themselves and about me. I don't write every day, though. I only write when Good Mike has something to say.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Bad Mike needs to breathe. As it turns out, I think my conflicting sides inform one another. The good little voice in my head only exists in counterpoint to the rude little voice in my head. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So over the next few weeks, this blog is going to change in format. Bad Mike has some things to say, and this blog, accordingly will change names and formats. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Bad Mike isn’t always nice, and he's frequently illogical and unreasonable, but I’ll try to make him entertaining. Bear with him, though. I didn't know Good Mike was funny until people told me, so I definitely don't know how interesting Bad Mike is going to be. I'm hoping that when Bad Mike and Good Mike speak to each other, I get closer to my own truths and my own feelings. Time will tell.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">There's scotch tape on the wall, and I put it there, dammit.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Get ready for Good Mike / Bad Mike.</span>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08459329833381496473noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6591346.post-27116722511542815372013-04-17T20:04:00.001-04:002013-06-06T21:05:33.396-04:00Plenty<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Jessika finds constant amusement in my need for numbers and specificity. Even for so simple a task as making boxed macaroni and cheese, I follow the directions. But directions aren't enough. Because of whatever strange things happen inside my head, I go a step further. See, the side of the box calls for 4 tablespoons of butter or margarine and a quarter cup of milk. When the kids eat mac and cheese, I always take a fresh stick of butter out of the fridge, so I can measure it more easily (I sometimes even look for the stick where the measurement lines aren't crooked), and I pour milk into a measuring cup. I set the butter and the milk on the counter, along with the torn-open package of cheese. Once the pasta finishes cooking, all I have to do is add my pre-measured milk, butter, and cheese packet. Then I stir. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Jessika eyeballs her quantities. She puts some butter into the pot, puts some milk into the pot, and she never measures it. I can't live like that. I can't just put "some" of anything into a recipe. I will happily eat food that others cook, regardless of their methods, but I personally have difficulty with the concept of "some of this, some of that" cooking.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So the food I cook often has complicated mise en place, leading me to dirty large numbers of tiny dishes to make simple recipes. You know those cooking shows where professional chefs use countless ramekins to show the TV audience what all the ingredients look like before they go into a dish? I would manage my cooking life like that, if I could. I like to think, though, that the food I cook maintains consistency from one preparation to the next. If you've eaten my baked mac and cheese once, the dish will taste the same each time (unless I don't have a properly-shaped dish or try making it with gluten-free pasta). You know what you're getting. I find comfort in knowing what I'm getting.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So, I've probably front-loaded the punchline for this entire post here, but bearing in mind my need for numbers and my need for mise en place, when Jessika and I took the kids to the beach last week, we had friends and family telling us over and over again to use plenty of sunscreen. For most people, this is pretty good advice, but for the four of us, it was a recipe for fiery pain and copious amounts of aloe.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtKKiYszSzpJGV9_tDQYPcb30jXTzjh5w0nwA1EOgWzP5eW89VyXIiscGr89LS_Xa5B2jCRZ3XjIHNEinlcdhtf8rLSRka_LnwsNNgZ5V2K-dPwDoHnxiuW82N1OrbMCOS9RVbAg/s1600/3413926-close-up-of-a-cooked-lobster-s-claws.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtKKiYszSzpJGV9_tDQYPcb30jXTzjh5w0nwA1EOgWzP5eW89VyXIiscGr89LS_Xa5B2jCRZ3XjIHNEinlcdhtf8rLSRka_LnwsNNgZ5V2K-dPwDoHnxiuW82N1OrbMCOS9RVbAg/s320/3413926-close-up-of-a-cooked-lobster-s-claws.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">This is a picture of me from last week. No, look again. The sun temporarily burned away my smug arrogance.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Jessika and the kids had never gone to the beach. They don't know about the sunlight reflecting off the sand or the danger of an overcast and windy day. So they didn't have a frame of reference for how quickly they would burn or how much sunscreen to use. I have a frame of reference, but I have an entirely different set of challenges, which I managed to inflict upon my wife and kids. I don't have any idea how to quantify "plenty". By my reckoning, if I made $60,000 a year in my job, I'd have plenty of money. By somebody else's reckoning, $60,000 a year would barely pay the bills. "Plenty" is a matter of perspective. An NFL quarterback with 4 or 5 seconds to think about where to throw the ball has plenty of time. Give me the same amount of time to throw a football, and I'm still trying to figure out how to hold the stupid thing.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">You know what would have helped me? A measurement. Something like, "Apply .25 ounces of sunscreen per 50 square inches of skin." Then the package could give me a helpful infographic detailing how to determine my overall skin area, based on my height and weight. A skin pigmentation graph wouldn't hurt either, just in case there are greater or lesser amounts of sunscreen recommended, depending on skin type. I also wouldn't mind having a couple of pictures of what my skin should look like after applying sunscreen. Should there be a slight sheen to my skin? Should it look normal? Should there still be white streaks from where not all the sunscreen absorbed into my skin? These are pressing questions from someone who dragged three innocents into the world of beach-induced, head-to-toe sunburn last week.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Finally, I need a timeline for reapplication. Based on time of day, cloud cover, temperature, latitude, whatever other relevant factors come into play -- how often should I reapply sunscreen? Again, a handy infographic would help me.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">With enough time on my hands, I could even pre-portion sunscreen, creating my own preventative mise en place for the entire family, saying, "Ok, now it's time to put on sunscreen. This is exactly how much you need, in this little squeeze tube. We'll meet back here in 53 minutes and 21 seconds to reapply, unless the sun comes out. Then we'll meet in 41 minutes and 43 seconds."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Then again, Jessika has now completed her first trial run at the beach. And her macaroni and cheese comes out just as well as mine does. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I probably don't need to pre-portion, after all.</span>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08459329833381496473noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6591346.post-3051885404570726102013-03-05T19:34:00.002-05:002013-06-06T21:05:48.899-04:00You Don't Have to Turn on the Blue Light!<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I'm afraid of the police. I shouldn't be afraid, since I stick pretty close to the speed limit these days. I keep my tags current and my various lights working. I always come to a complete stop at stop signs, and I don't run red lights. In fact, in 20 years of driving, I've only been involved in one accident where I was at fault, and in that one, I was traveling approximately 5 miles per hour and the car in front of me had nothing more than scratches on the bumper. So I'm a pretty safe driver, and my adherence to other laws these days is generally as precise as my adherence to traffic laws.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Driving down the road, though, noticing a police car behind me, I always worry about what might happen. Do my brake lights work? Do my running lights work? Is this guy going to worry about 1 mph over the speed limit? My hands start to shake a little, and I can't stop looking at my speedometer and my rearview mirror. A cop pulled me over once for having an expired tag. The sticker had come loose and fallen off, or someone had physically removed it from my plate. Either way, he pulled me over. I didn't get a ticket, but I had to sit on the side of the road with blue lights flashing behind me. The county police pulled me over twice in one night once for a dead headlight. The light must have just gone out, since I hadn't noticed it yet. Two different police officers in one county for one headlight! Seriously? There are no murders happening that need investigating?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Even if I know I'm obeying all the relevant traffic laws at that moment, I worry that the officer behind me might turn on the blue lights anyway. See, I've had a run-in with the police that never should have happened. I haven't always worried about the speed limit as much as I do now. In fact, I used to have a heavy foot. I got a ticket once from a motorcycle cop who'd set up a speed trap. I wasn't exactly flying, but I was over the speed limit, so I can't reasonably complain. I went to the courthouse to pay my ticket. Shortly after walking up to the payment window and presenting my copy of the ticket, a sherriff's deputy approached me. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"Are you Robert Michael Coon?" </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"Yes."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">He also confirmed my social security number. Yep, that's me. I started to feel a little nervous. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"Did I park in the wrong parking lot or something?"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"No. We have a warrant for your arrest."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Now, I'd obviously sat on the side of the road before with flashing blue lights behind me. I had even testified in court against a guy driving a dump truck who had clipped the back of my car. I had no frame of reference for this. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"So what do I need to do to clear this up?"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"Well, first I'm going to arrest you."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">You know the stereotypical (probably archetypal) movie scene where one white guy walks into a bar full of black guys and says something offensive? You know, there's the record-scratching sound, and everyone just freezes in stunned silence for a minute? Yeah, I felt something like that.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">He was nice enough to let me use my cell phone to call Jessika. I told her I was under arrest, and I didn't know why. I told her they were taking me to the county jail. I didn't know what else to say. The officer put me in handcuffs and leg cuffs and led me out to a police van. I got into it, along with some other people, and we drove to the county jail. They booked me, took my photo and fingerprints, all that jazz, and I sat in a holding cell for the next few hours while I waited for an officer from Oconee County, Georgia to come pick me up for transport to their county jail. I don't think I felt anything. I just sat listening to people tell each other their stories, why they were here. People really ask each other that question: "What're you in for?" I figured it was just a movie thing.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Behind the scenes, Jessika had jumped into action. When she called my friend David, he didn't believe her. I'm not the only Mike we know. She said "Mike's in jail," and he thought she was talking about a different friend named Mike. Nobody believed I could do anything to land me in jail. It had to be another Mike. She called my sister and my parents, and they found an attorney who managed to get me out that afternoon. I'm glad he was so capable, because I walked out of that jail at 5:00pm on a Friday. At any point, if anyone involved had moved just a little more slowly, I could have spent the weekend in jail. But everybody came through, and I walked out of the jail to see my parents and my sister and my wife waiting for me outside. I kissed Jessika, and at 32 years old, I walked to my father, hugged him, holding on for dear life, and I cried.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In 2001, while living in Athens, GA, Jessika and I had our radios stolen from our cars. The thief also took my backpack with my college textbooks and notebooks. I can only assume that something in that backpack had my name on it, because a few years later, a man who called himself Robert Coon committed felony credit card fraud in Oconee County, Georgia, near Athens and the University of Georgia. I lived in Athens while I attended UGA, so when an enterprising deputy looked up rental records in Oconee County, he found my name and my social security number. Without making any attempt to contact me or verify my identity, he had a warrant sworn out for my arrest. Fortunately, by the time the crime took place, I lived an hour away and worked for Barnes and Noble. I also bear no physical resemblance to the person who committed the crime, so my attorney was able to get the case dismissed before I was formally arraigned.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So now I can't see a cop without a moment of terror. Every single time I see a police car on the road, I think about the power that they have to change a person's life. I didn't commit the crime in question, but because a sworn officer of the law said that I did, I spent a day in jail. What if I had still lived in Athens when the crime occurred? What if the perpetrator had more closely matched my physical description? What if the defrauded individual in the intervening years between the crime and my arrest had forgotten enough of his features that, looking at me, she had become convinced I was the person who stole her money? I could have gone to real prison, not just a county jail, simply because a deputy said I did something, and I couldn't prove otherwise. We hear the phrase "innocent until proven guilty", but at no point in the process of getting handcuffed, taken to jail, and left in a holding cell for a warrant that never should have been issued did I EVER feel innocent.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Despite our illusions to the contrary, our lives are not always under our control, at least not in the sense we can actively predict. Sure, if we had chosen to live in another apartment way back in 2001, we wouldn't have had our radios stolen, and I would not have been impersonated by a criminal. But what else might have happened instead? We can't see around every corner, predict every outcome.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I just keep an eye out behind me.</span><br />
<br />Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08459329833381496473noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6591346.post-6900385354635661802013-02-25T21:19:00.000-05:002013-06-06T21:06:06.608-04:00Bloody Legs and Broken Printers<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As the parent of an 8th grader, I'm beginning to learn about the occasionally incurable sullenness of teenagers, about the difficulty of finding out anything useful about a teenager's life, and about the pain of watching a child seemingly procrastinate his future away.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I get it. The sullenness comes with the age, not from some grudge he bears against us. I expect, like most of us, he'll grow out of it sooner or later. I think the need for privacy has something to do with a desire to have control over his own life, even if he only controls our access to information. And his procrastination probably won't end the world. Most people procrastinate at some point in their lives, and the world still has plenty of doctors and engineers.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Don't get me wrong, though. Procrastination can cause bodily injury.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In my freshman year of college, I had two roommates in an apartment off campus. During that year I got sick -- not just a sniffle, but full on body-shivering, fevered-delerium, can't-get-out-of-bed sick. I had a roommate to help out, and though he'd never publicly admit it, he's actually a nice guy. He went to the store and got supplies for me, and though he didn't minister to me in the way a nurse or a mom would, he really helped me make it through. And seriously, as a couple of teenagers, it would have been more than a little awkward for him to stand over me taking my temperature or rubbing Vick's Vapo-Rub on my chest. Though the realities of dealing with other people's hygiene habits, sleep patterns, and music volumes can rankle, having other people living with you can provide a safety net you don't get when you live alone. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I found this out during my sophomore year, when I waited until around 1am one night to finish and print a paper due at 8am the following morning. I had decided, after having a year with two roommates my age, to try living alone. Aside from the inconvenience of moving, nobody was really mad about it. I'm still close with one of them, and I'm pretty cordial Facebook friends with the other (despite the probably unclosable political gap between us). I was young and still figuring things out for myself, so I wanted to try something new. I found myself sitting alone in my apartment, at my computer, a mere seven hours before I would hand in my paper. I clicked "Print" and found out, to my horror, that my printer had stopped working. I don't know what happened. The printer quit working, and the campus computer lab had already closed.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfEOC1I9cK2zuXZpt7n9UHbe-EX0BsnS8X_LpNCAGBftQ-cTwYsIEb7taHSsMV9AcJZ-UycAOp4tvzcCPxgOBNbL4YuK4icxo9CM546TfovRN5JIS9TfHbOXDYBoOjVYwm-Z3AdQ/s1600/office+space.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfEOC1I9cK2zuXZpt7n9UHbe-EX0BsnS8X_LpNCAGBftQ-cTwYsIEb7taHSsMV9AcJZ-UycAOp4tvzcCPxgOBNbL4YuK4icxo9CM546TfovRN5JIS9TfHbOXDYBoOjVYwm-Z3AdQ/s320/office+space.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Has ANYBODY ever had a printer you could trust?</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I called my old roommate, David. Problem solved. I could print the paper at his apartment. So I saved it to a floppy disk, put on a coat, and walked out to the car. Though the date escapes me now, I assume this must have been early to mid-December, since the temperature was below freezing, and the paper was an end-of-term paper. Of course, because this is how these situations work, the car wouldn't crank. Wouldn't even turn over, in fact. I walked back into the apartment, got my bicycle, wheeled it down to the street, and started pedaling. David didn't own a car, so I still helped him out with transportation, and he also did a lot of walking and riding city buses, so he couldn't pick me up. I had about a mile of uphill bicycle travel in front of me.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I'm not a strong bicycler, and as I started up a hill, I needed to downshift to have any hope of making it to the top. My bike hesitated and threw its chain (probably because the bicycle's wheels weren't moving). I fell off the bike and into the middle of the roadway. Thankfully, at 1:30 am, the road was quiet. I fell on top of the bike, and the handlebars bent under my weight. Even through my jeans, I skinned my leg badly, to the point where I could feel a small trickle of blood. Just to recap, I'm now standing in the middle of the road, blood trickling down my leg, holding a ruined bike in sub-freezing temperatures, now with half a mile to walk to get to a place where I can print a paper. Of course, I'll then have to walk home, since David doesn't have a car in which to drive me home.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">By the time I reached David's apartment, I was a shivering, stressed-out mess, but I got the paper printed. I think he gave me a hot drink. I walked home. To my credit, I never even considered asking for an extension on the paper. I HAD to get the paper printed and turned in on time. I would not have even TRIED to make excuses to the professor about my tough night. Even as a sullen teenager, I knew I'd had plenty of opportunities before 1:00am to finish and print my paper, which would have avoided all of my trouble. Sure, I would still have needed to deal with the printer and the car, but not in the middle of the night, bleeding into my jeans.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So when I see my son putting off assignments until the night they're due, I'm not just worried about what will happen if I have to drive to Walmart at midnight to replace a printer. I'm worried about the habits he's building, because I don't want to think about him walking a freezing mile through a rough part of town in the middle of the night, dragging a useless bicycle behind him. But if you asked my parents, I'm sure they'd tell you they wanted the same for me. I still haven't completely learned the procrastination lesson, but because of events like this one or my recent issue with a flash drive, I've learned more about the role of planning and anticipation in our lives. We can't prevent the really big, bad stuff from happening someday, but we can avoid the small stuff. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I don't expect him to learn the lesson any better than I did until he has to endure his own defeats. I think I might learn a little from him, though.</span><br />
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Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08459329833381496473noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6591346.post-21084734664883569172013-02-20T20:40:00.000-05:002013-06-26T22:08:44.207-04:00You Forgot Your Flash Drive<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I love The Big Bang Theory. Despite the show's cavalier treatment of geek culture, sometimes getting crucial details wrong and showing the writers of the show are probably more chic than geek, the characters have enough similarity to myself and to the geeks I've known in my life that I can forgive their mistakes (I'm not going to dig into their inaccuracies here, but I'll note -- there are no playable races in World of Warcraft with prehensile tails). I'm thrilled that the top-rated sitcom in America can reference comic books, fan conventions, video games, and string theory without even a whiff of mainstream disdain and still remain the top-rated sitcom in America. Around my house we don't even name the show anymore. On Thursday night, we get my daughter in bed and sit down to watch The Boys. Yes, the girls on the show have taken a larger and larger role over the years, but for us, it's still The Boys.</span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"There is no more Sheldon! I am the sword master!"</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">One of my favorite episodes has the boys on a trip to Northern California to attend a physics conference where real-world physicist George Smoot will present a paper. Sheldon has a research paper of his own on a flash drive to give to Dr. Smoot. He expects the professor will love it "because it's brilliant." To his dismay, in the middle of their train ride through California, he discovers he left his flash drive at home, and to his mind, the rhythmic sound of the train's wheels mock him, chanting "you-forgot-your-flash-drive, you-forgot-your-flash-drive, you-forgot-your-flash-drive."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I have read voraciously throughout most of my life, and I studied fiction in college, and in fiction, I believe we find mirrors for ourselves. We find new ways of describing our lives and coming to terms with our successes and failures. By experiencing part of another person's life, we gain perspective on our own. So instead of putting up a new blog post last week, I have spent the past few days repeating to myself -- </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b><i>you-forgot-your-flash-drive, you-forgot-your-flash-drive, you-forgot-your-flash-drive</i></b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Yeah, I lost my post.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">You see, I find opportunities to write at different times during the day. Sometimes, after getting out of the shower and before waking up my daughter for the school day, I will find a few minutes to get some thoughts into digital form. Throughout the day at work I find myself jotting down notes on a legal pad I keep at my desk, and instead of leaving the building or taking a walk on my 15-minute breaks, I will often stay at my desk and get those thoughts into a text file on my work computer's Notepad program. I save those thoughts to a usb flash drive. I do most of my composing in Notepad, actually, because I can edit a plain text file on practically any computer I happen to be near. So I've taken to keeping all of my posts on my flash drive, and when they're ready to publish, I copy/paste them onto Blogger, do a quick final edit to make sure the formatting looks right, add whatever pictures I plan on using, and click "Publish".</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So last week, after pecking at it off and on for a couple of weeks, I felt ready to publish. I had done some editing during breaks at work and had the entire post saved to my flash drive. I came home and unloaded my pockets. Then I got sick. Unlike my friend Terese, <a href="http://tml-youllbefine.blogspot.com/2013/01/i-am-wolverine.html" target="_blank">I didn't become Wolverine</a>, but I was in bad shape. I spent the weekend in a Day/Nyquil-induced haze, and by Monday I had forgotten where I put my flash drive. I can't find it. I've looked in all the places such things end up, even checking the laundry room, on the off chance I forgot to take it out of my pocket (it's happened before -- the thing is pretty durable, as it turns out). I don't think I can recreate it, either. I got it out of my head looking the way I wanted to, and I'm not sure I can get it back in there and back out again. So barring a miracle, my post is gone. Sheldon keeps chanting in my head, over and over and over again.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Jessika occasionally points out my concern, bordering on paranoia, for my way of doing things. I wouldn't say that I suffer from OCD, though. I have had experiences during my life that I would not like to repeat. Ever have a credit or debit card declined in a grocery store with a cart full of groceries? Such an experience might make you more likely to check your bank balance before heading out to the store, or check it on your phone while you're shopping. Either way, you'll verify that you have funds before piling a bunch of stuff on the belt. I've written before about <a href="http://mikecoon.blogspot.com/2012/10/whats-weather.html" target="_blank">pushing a car up an icy hill</a> because I couldn't be bothered to keep track of weather. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So I create habits for myself that help me avoid situations I don't want to repeat. Some might call them rituals. I don't care. Call it paranoia. Call it what you want, as long as I don't repeat past mistakes. At work I have a complicated highlighter usage system for keeping track of orders that I take. I made mistakes very early on, and I don't want to repeat them, so my highlighters have helped me create habits that help me avoid mistakes. In public places, I have a habit every few minutes of touching my back right pants pocket. I keep my wallet there. One of these days, if I ever lose my wallet (which is hard to do when you're constantly verifying its presence), I'll have a pretty good idea of the time frame when it went missing.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I have a feeling that my new flash drive, when I buy it, will have a designated location at work, and a designated location at home. I have a feeling I'll become borderline obsessive about checking those locations to verify the flash drive hasn't disappeared. I don't want to lose another post. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Call me paranoid. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But my paranoia has a purpose.</span>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08459329833381496473noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6591346.post-80465502102977291642013-01-31T07:42:00.000-05:002013-06-26T22:09:02.663-04:00I Am NOT a Sith Lord<br />
A number of years ago, frustrated by my schedule and pay scale as a retail manager, convinced that my natural intelligence should allow me to do nearly any job that I had a mind to do, and motivated by no small amount of shame that one of the "smart" kids from high school dropped out of college and worked as a retail manager, I did something bad. With the help of a friend, I fabricated a job history, taught myself just enough Java to sound like a moron to people who actually know Java, and began applying for positions as a programmer. My friend had successfully pursued the same kind of strategy a few years before and was confident I could do it. He told me repeatedly that HR managers really don't know anything about the jobs they fill, and that confidence and even a degree of arrogance would enable me to walk into a mid-level job. After that, my small amount of knowledge, combined with easily-Googled boilerplate code and a decent mentor reachable on instant messenger would have me up to speed within months. I went for it.<br />
<br />
Even then, I knew that I was doing something wrong, and I suck at doing bad things.<br />
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I can't even do bad things in a video game without feeling horrible about it. In <i>Fallout 3</i>, when you find the town of Megaton, the one with the unexploded nuclear bomb in the middle of it, you have a choice. You can embark upon a quest chain that leads to defusing the bomb, securing the town against that threat. Or you can complete the quest chain from a rich landowner living in a tower near the town. He thinks the town is an eyesore and wants it destroyed. Through his quest chain you can detonate the bomb and destroy Megaton. It's just a game, and the innocent people in the town don't exist. So in the interest of completing the game in every way possible, I destroyed the town on my second playthrough of the game. I felt bad for three days, then deleted the save file. I simply couldn't deal with the knowledge that I had killed non-existent innocents for no reason other than receiving a virtual trophy. There are Xbox Achievements in that game that I will never get.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">I felt a great disturbance in the force, as if millions of voices had suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.</td></tr>
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In <i>Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic</i>, the player can choose to play a good or an evil character, a Jedi Master or a Sith Lord. The game keeps track of what dialogue choices a player makes, assigning light side or dark side points for speaking politely or rudely. The player's actions lead to the accumulation of dark and light side points, as well. In one event, some thieves are shaking down a man for money. The player gets light side points for saving the man from the thieves and even more light side points for refusing his offer of a reward afterwards. Or you can kill all of them and take everybody's money. Or you can save him from the thieves and then bully him into giving you the money. In the game, I always speak respectfully, try to stay on everyone's good side, and save as many people as I can. There are other games where the player makes good vs. evil choices, but no matter how hard I try, I'm not happy being the bad guy in a game.<br />
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I think it's relevant here to bring up the choice between Jedi Master and Sith Lord in <i>Knights of the Old Republic</i>. According to the various additional materials available on the Star Wars Universe, the Sith don't necessarily see themselves as evil. I'll admit that some, like Darth Maul, seem like mindless killing machines (and are less interesting for it), but others see themselves as realists. The truly strong do not need such concepts as morality or right and wrong. They pursue their own self interest and think that others should do the same. The strong will prevail, and the weak will fall. My software interview was my attempt to become the Sith Lord of my own life. I should pursue whatever opportunities arose, through whatever means necessary.<br />
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After interviewing with an oblivious HR manager (my friend was right about their grasp of technology), I had a second interview with a company. I remember meeting my potential boss and making some polite small talk. It was a panel interview and started out well. What kind of work have you done? I had a great answer for that one. Every faked job history had a detailed backstory. Then I started getting the real questions, specific questions that only a true professional would be able to answer. What were the questions? I don't know. I don't think I understood the questions then, let alone now. I was in over my head, crashing and burning. I could see the interviewers glancing at one another. I was caught. Oddly, they never called my bluff. At some point, I begged off with an excuse about getting nervous in job interviews and being unused to not having my reference materials nearby. I even said that I think memorizing details of procedures was unnecessary with the sheer volume of reference at our fingertips online. Why store information both in my head and online? When you're bombing an interview, why not start spewing arrogant generalizations, too? They thanked me for coming in, and I thanked them for their time. We all knew what had just happened.<br />
<br />
Just like on my Xbox, there are some real life achievements I will never get. I'm okay with that.<br />
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<br />Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08459329833381496473noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6591346.post-86008555428594536862013-01-22T19:20:00.000-05:002013-01-22T19:20:24.631-05:00Wanna Go To the Beach?<br />
Ready for a surprise? I don't like the beach.<br />
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In late Summer of 1994, my family took a trip to Jekyll Island, GA. I had taken vacations to the beach before, but this time I ended up at a church event for teenagers. Now, I was a squeamish kid. I didn't like swimming in lakes, because I didn't like my bare feet on the squishy, muddy bottom or getting tangled in seaweed, or whatever you call the stuff that grows out of a lakebed. Also, snapping turtles. And dirty water. And fish poop. If you're swimming near a dock, there are strange plants or fungi that grow on the sides of docks and make everything slippery and gross, too. Despite Hollywood's best efforts, always showing attractive naked people swimming near waterfalls, there's really nothing attractive to me about swimming in a lake. Take away the snapping turtles, and add sharks, stingrays, jellyfish, and getting sucked out to sea by undertow, and you can guess at my feelings about swimming in the ocean.<br />
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What about staying out of the water, you know, enjoying the sun and sand? I've gone to various beaches on the Atlantic coast and the Gulf coast, maybe a dozen separate trips over the course of my life. I always seem to end up on the beaches with jellyfish washing up all over the shore, or cars driving on the beach (looking at you, Daytona), or sand that consists primarily of broken shells that cut into your feet. On really hot days, walking on the beach is like walking on hot asphalt. Then there's the never ending parade of people. I mean, I probably like my friends and family even more than the average person does, but I like the general public even less than the average person. I could list the things that I don't like about the public, except that I'd just come off as a crotchety old man, so I'll just fall back on my social anxiety, my complete discomfort at being around large numbers of people I don't know and with whom I probably have nothing in common. Being at the beach isn't like being at Dragoncon. At Con, I can tell by a costume whether or not I have something in common with a person, and standing in line for a panel next to someone generally leads to easy conversations. I can't start a conversation so easily on the beach. "Gee, that's a nice bikini line you have there. Do you wax or do you shave?"<br />
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In this case, though, I was a teenaged boy, getting a chance to spend time around teenaged girls in bathing suits. Even if I could never work up the nerve to speak to any of them, why miss the chance to look at them?<br />
<br />
Wow, that's not creepy at all.<br />
<br />
And one thing leads to another, you know. I started horsing around in the water with some friends. Before I could blink, I was underwater, upside down, rolling along the sand. I could hear the waves around me as water rushed into my mouth and my nose, and I was blind. I don't know what happened. I don't know if I was ever in any real danger, or if I was just carrying on like a Mel Brooks Merry Man. Whatever the case, I found my feet and managed to get out of the water, choking and spluttering and making a fool of myself.<br />
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I spent the next couple of days swimming in the hotel pool. At least I can't get wrapped up in seaweed or sucked out to sea. Sure, kids pee in pools, but there's enough chlorine that nothing can live in those places. Well, that's what I thought then, anyway. Since having kids I've learned all about the funky bacteria and viruses that live in public pools. But nasty bugs haven't kept me out of pools for the last decade and a half. I've mostly stayed out of public pools because of my Jekyll Island trip.<br />
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Just a couple of days after nearly drowning on the beach, I found myself at the hotel pool diving for quarters with some friends. If you've never dived for quarters before, it goes something like this. Throw change in a pool, and dive to the bottom to pick it up. This passes for entertainment in a swimming pool. One of my quarters landed right down at the bottom of the deep end, 15 feet down, and I jumped right in. As I dove deeper, the pressure of all that water on top of me became stronger and stronger, and I didn't know that I should do something to equalize the pressure in my ears, and as I put my fingers on the quarter, I felt a POP! and a whoosh in my left ear, then pain, horrible pain. After a drive into Brunswick, GA to find a hospital and hours spent in an emergency room, I found out that I had ruptured an ear drum.<br />
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I'm about to sound like a paranoid agoraphobe for a minute, but bear with me. Other than a family trip to Daytona a couple of years after that, where I stayed in hotel room and ventured out for meals and for a day trip to Disneyworld, I haven't returned to the beach since then. I've also stayed away from swimming pools. I took the kids to the neighborhood pool a few times, but I avoid putting my head underwater. I no longer have any interest. Don't give my experiences too much credit, though, for keeping me away from the ocean. Mostly I haven't gone back because I don't take very many vacations anymore, not like we did when I was a teenager. We had religious reasons for taking trips every year for big church conventions, and often those conventions were in cities like Pensacola, Daytona, Jekyll Island, or Virginia Beach. I don't do those things anymore. I used the Bill Hicks defense for years. He once remarked that the beach "is where dirt meets water. End of fascination." Not going to the beach became a way to differentiate myself from the drooling masses. See? I'm too intelligent and awesome. I would never lower myself enough to go to a beach.<br />
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I do like a couple of things about beaches. I love sunrises and sunsets on the beach, especially sunset, because if the beach is quiet and deserted enough, if the lights of the closest city lie far enough away, I can watch the sky darken ever so slowly and watch the stars fade into view. I've written before about my love of the stars, and only in the mountains do I find more peace and joy looking at the stars than I do at the beach. Sitting quietly on the beach, listening to the waves crashing, watching the stars begin to twinkle, I feel tiny up against the vast cosmos, and I come closer to the spiritual than I ever have (or probably ever will) in a building made by humans.<br />
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Jessika has never been to the beach, nor have my children, and we're starting to talk about taking a vacation this year, getting away for a few days and staying in a hotel, maybe at the beach. In fact, I'm the one who suggested the beach, even though Jessika responded by protesting that I hate the beach. I don't think I do. I think I had a bad week and some easy excuses to stay away. I think I'd like it, especially with Jess and the kids along.<br />
<br />
But I'm still grossed out by jellyfish.<br />
<br />
Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08459329833381496473noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6591346.post-22163029715646632532013-01-02T22:08:00.000-05:002013-01-02T22:32:22.979-05:00Present Perfect<br />
<pre style="word-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">We've arrived at resolution season again!
Historically, I'm a goal setter. I'm also a goal breaker. I think that most of us set unrealistic goals during childhood. I'm going to be a professional baseball player or an astronaut or a rock star. Supposedly, though, we eventually learn to set realistic goals and make realistic plans for reaching those goals. So we decide to become an accountant and go to business school for an accounting degree. Or we decide to become an engineer and go to school for an engineering degree. We might decide to learn a trade, so we work up from apprentice to journeyman to (hopefully) master in our chosen trade. Point is, by 36 years old, I'm supposed to be able to look into the future, see something that I want to do or own or be, make a plan for getting there, and then execute that plan.</span></span></pre>
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<pre style="word-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">I have learned over the years that I never truly understand a goal until I reach it. To me, long-term goals are a bit like a romantic comedy. In a romantic comedy, usually the male protagonist has to work to convince some girl that he's the one. When we make a long-term goal, we're doing a similar thing. We go through all kinds of awful things to achieve the goal of buying that Mercedes or that huge house in the suburbs. Romantic comedies always end too soon, though. What happens after the wedding? There's a reality to living with one person day in and day out, that you're not ready for until you do it. Then you find out if you can keep doing it. Livable or not, though, there's a world of difference between the beautiful white dress and the socks on the floor. That Mercedes is eventually going to need maintenance, repairs, body work, and replacement. When the goal is to achieve something, we forget about what might happen after we reach the goal.</span></span></pre>
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<pre style="word-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">My goal this year is to stop setting goals.
Kind of.
Don't misunderstand me (or DO misunderstand me -- it's up to you). I don't mean that I'm no longer planning for the future or that I'm actively trying to sabotage myself. I actually see this as a step toward reaching the kinds of things that I used to set goals for. We set goals because we want to be happy, but reaching a goal only provides temporary happiness, until it's time to set and reach a new goal.
Here's the thing. I can set a goal to be 175 pounds by this time next year. But I don't want to reach 175 pounds so much as I want <b>to have reached</b> that target weight. I don't want to get rich; I want to <b>have gotten</b> rich. I don't want to exercise every day; I want <b>to have</b> exercised every day. In other words, I'm less interested in the future tense and more interested in present perfect tense. I don't think I'm alone in this, either, otherwise I wouldn't spend my time writing about it. I think that I'm not the only person who would rather have the results of hard work than the actual hard work. Even people, like myself, who really do value hard work, if given the choice between doing something they don't really want to do or just having the benefits of having done that thing, would probably take the benefits (up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B,A, start -- am I right?). I may value hard work, but I'd rather kick back and have a beer with friends, all things considered.
So at the risk of being far too clever, I've realized that my desire for a present perfect life hampers my chances of creating a perfect present. By placing emphasis upon some future accomplishment, all of the present moments in between here and there become the means to an end. We've heard people talk like this before. </span></span></pre>
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<pre style="word-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">"The next two years are going to be nearly unbearable, but it'll be worth it in the end."</span></span></pre>
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<pre style="word-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">So at the beginning of a new year, instead of taking stock of what I want or where I want to be -- the implicit assumption in both of those cases is that I don't have what I want or I haven't reached where I want to be -- I'm going to pay attention to what I love about what I already have and where I already am. I am already living in a present perfect reality. I have <b>already</b> reached somewhere. I have a wonderful wife, great kids, fantastic family and friends, and a range of interests that never leave me bored. Instead of focusing on where I might go from here, I'm going to focus, every day, on where I am. </span></span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; white-space: pre-wrap;">Instead of looking toward some halcyon future, where my work has paid off, and I've become a successful whatever-it-is-that-I-can-be, I'm going to focus on the present. As new opportunities arise, do I take them? Sure. New positions come up all the time at my company, and if a good one pops up, I need to think about where that takes me. Understanding that the future is coming and planning for some of the possibilities it brings is not the same as placing more importance upon a future goal than on present realities. Additionally, there are certain practical realities that I won't ignore -- how much should we spend on groceries this week, what's the price of gas doing to our budget, how close are we to our yearly family medical deductible, those kinds of things.</span></pre>
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<pre style="word-wrap: break-word;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; white-space: pre-wrap;">I'm headed in a direction, and I'd love to think that it's a good one, but I won't find out until I take the ride. And I'm going to enjoy it.</span></pre>
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Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08459329833381496473noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6591346.post-20467784288812445912012-12-20T20:55:00.000-05:002012-12-20T20:55:23.375-05:00Getting Serious<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So far, I have maintained a generally humorous and light presence on this blog. I do think, though, that my blog should reflect me, should reflect how I look at and interact with the world. I mostly interact with my world through sarcasm, silly jokes, and, while cooking, silly dances. Life is too short to spend the whole time moping about, and I have to agree with Dave Matthews when he says that he "can't believe that we would lie in our graves, wondering if we had spent our living days well".</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But I do get serious from time to time, and I think my blog should reflect that. As much as I hope to make you laugh at me or at the parts of yourself that you see in my little stories, I also hope to influence you in some small way when I do become serious. I hope that I can push you occasionally to think about things from a perspective that you may not have considered.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">With that goal mind, I need to say something about Sandy Hook Elementary School. I'm not the first to blog about it, and I won't be the last, but I do hope to say something that doesn't consist of trite or opportunistic assertions about the role of religion in schools, violent media in children's lives, or gun control. My friend Terese <a href="http://tml-youllbefine.blogspot.com/2012/12/fear-guilt-and-carrying-on-one-moms.html" target="_blank">wrote beautifully</a> about her reaction as a parent. She echoed my feelings, and judging by the comments she's received, I'm not alone in my agreement with her. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We've had a remarkable outpouring of support for the victims' families. We have seen disgust, horror, and revulsion over the actions of the shooter. These responses have been nearly universal. I understand that in a nation of over 300 million people, there will be fringe groups like Westboro Baptist who either do not feel the horror that most feel, or who, despite the horror, choose to use the massacre to further their own agendas. There are also those who are considering enacting the same kind of mass killings that took place last week. We don't like to think about those people, but we know that this can happen again. In fact, our knowledge that this can happen again drives the fear that Terese wrote about in her blog and the determination she expressed not to allow that fear to rule her.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Our reaction to groups like Westboro Baptist or to the idea that some individual out there may already have plans to perpetrate their own crimes reaches nearly universal agreement, as well. At a deep and instinctive level, we recognize the fundamental evil not only of a person who could commit such a crime, but also of the people who would take advantage of that crime to make cheap political or religious points. Granted, the shooting will become another example that must come into our national discussions about the availability of guns to people of compromised mental states, about the state of mental health in the country, about the supposed role of violent media in desensitizing children to violence, about the role of religion in schools. These points have already come up in response to the tragedy, and I have my own strong opinions on all of them, but the tragedy should not serve as a tool to use in making broad and unsupported assertions.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I've paid special attention to the public reaction to the shooting because I want to make clear that the public reaction to it has been as nearly universal as is possible in a country with such a large and diverse population. Aside from the already mentioned fringe groups or individuals, nobody stopped last Friday and said, "Wait, I need to think about this. My political and religious background is not clear on the subject of school shootings." We didn't NEED to take time or debate anything. Whether because of our natures or because of our upbringing (encompassing a wide range of religious, political, and educational traditions), or in my opinion, through a combination of our nature and our upbringing, we automatically and instinctively understand the WRONGNESS of what happened last week in Newtown. Whether we believe that religion belongs in schools or not, whether we believe that violent media has an impact on our likeliness to commit violent crimes or not, whether we think that guns should be easier to get or harder to get, we all stand unified in our shock and outrage.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This public reaction gives me hope. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Despite our disagreements over specifics and over the politics of our choices, our myriad traditions have taught the VAST MAJORITY of us the difference between right and wrong. I find comfort in this knowledge. It means that morally and educationally, we are doing something right. Society is not broken. Some individuals in our society are broken. But this is frightening to some, because it might mean that no single group has an absolute monopoly on truth or goodness, and some groups and public figures are now twisting facts, twisting statistics, and twisting decency to convince the public that their group needs to dictate behavior for all of us. Attacking my lifestyle or beliefs, telling me that my lack of active religious faith makes me in some way complicit in a crime like this is wrong. I've seen versions of this idea pushed by some very public figures over the last few days, and this is not the way forward.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">To get through this event, others like it, and others to come, to find a way to prevent tragedies like this in the future, we have to recognize our fundamental unity, not our fundamental differences. I don't know what that means on a large scale. I don't know how that will work, but I DO know that as an individual, I can choose to avoid hostility toward those who disagree with my positions, and I can ask others to do the same. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We're more alike than we sometimes realize.</span>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08459329833381496473noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6591346.post-36047333048079708092012-12-19T20:50:00.001-05:002012-12-19T20:50:05.953-05:00My Dad's Like That Too<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A few weeks ago, shortly before I left work for the day, Jessika sent me a text. She knows that I pass a grocery store on the way home, so occasionally she'll ask me to stop and pick up a few things. I'm happy to do it.</span><div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This particular time, I walked in, grabbed a cart and started working on the list. Before long, I'd picked up what we needed and hopped into the express line. No worries, I had fewer than twelve items. The cashier was a teenaged girl, maybe seventeen or eighteen years old. You have to understand, once I passed thirty, I lost the ability to distinguish ages below about twenty-two or twenty-three, so my estimate could be off by a few years in either direction. She was friendly. She rang out my purchase, and I left. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Of course, halfway to the car, I realized that I had forgotten to buy toilet paper. There are two important points here:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">1) I was on my way home from a full day at work. In other words, once I get home, I don't plan on leaving again. I'll restate this for friends who, in the past, may or may not have been offended that I've turned them down for weeknight activities. Without significant notice (say, at least a few days), I don't do anything outside the house after I get home from work. Even with notice, I'm likely to turn you down. Unless you have tickets to a Dave Matthews Band show, or there's a midnight showing for something hobbity, I'm not interested in late night activities when all I can think about is the alarm that will go off in just a few hours. Nothing against you. I'm just done.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">2) Nobody wants to live in a house with no toilet paper.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Fortunately, I remembered the toilet paper before I had gotten into the car and driven home, so I put the groceries in the trunk and walked back into the store, seeking toilet paper.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As luck would have it, the only checkout lane without a long line was the line I had just used. I stepped up to the register, put the toilet paper on the belt, and the girl said, "Hey, weren't you just in here?" I explained, that, yes, I had just gone through her line a few minutes before, but I forgot one of my items. I also briefly mentioned that I was on my way home from work, and I was glad that I had remembered the toilet paper before I drove home, because once I get home from work, I don't like leaving the house again.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">She said, "Yeah, my dad's just like that."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I want to clarify something here. I did not have any desire or need for this girl to see me as a sexual or romantic option. If she's </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">seventeen or eighteen</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> years old, she's young enough to be my daughter. But I had never, up to that point, interacted with an adult (or near adult) who was really young enough to be my child. Sure, considering the age at which a male is sexually mature enough to reproduce, I could technically have a child in his or her 20's at this point, but I'm talking about an adult who I could conceivably have helped to create AFTER I became an adult. So this story is really more about the slow (but shockingly fast) march of time and not at all about how it's gotten harder over the years to score with eighteen-year-olds.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The tale doesn't really end here, though. Just this week, as I was telling my grocery story to someone at work, a coworker from a different department happened to be listening in. Now, as a thirty-six-year-old, I comprehend that I am in my mid-thirties. On some level, I realize that I'm approaching forty, and this is supposed to be a big deal. So as I tell the story about how this girl at the store thought that I was old enough to be her father, a coworker from another department leaned in. I suppose I could also be this coworker's father, but I'd have to have been a high-school dad for her to be my daughter. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">She says, "No way, man! You'd have to be pushing FORTY to be that girl's dad!"</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">On the one hand, my coworker told me that she thought I was probably in my late twenties to early thirties, so I'm apparently younger looking to some people than my actual age would suggest. On the other hand, I'm apparently one or two years away from forty (which is, by her tone of shock, only a couple of years away from adult diapers and a dirt nap).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Before you get too worried about my self image or my feelings about my slowly advancing age, I need to reiterate that I feel good. I don't feel old (and I shouldn't, since I'm not old), and I don't have any desire to return to my teens or twenties. I'm going to say that again, for good measure. I don't have ANY desire to return to my teens or twenties. I'm simply interested in how it felt to get absolute confirmation that I've apparently moved into a new phase of my life, a phase where the twenty-somethings with whom I've long identified myself start to see me as "older".</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I saw a post on Facebook by a friend who has a few years on me. By the way, "few years" is not code for pushing sixty. He's got a few years on me. He recently started a new job and commented on his first Christmas party at the new job. He noticed that he spent his time with the senior management and executives instead of the twenty-somethings downstairs who invariably end up drunk and spreading all kinds of workplace gossip. Rightly, he enjoyed his new position. We all like to have a few drinks, and getting a little soused from time to time doesn't mean you're immature or that you have a drinking problem. But it's nice to feel like you're making some progress.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So, yes, my beard has some grey. My temples are starting to pick up a few grey hairs, too. But I feel like I'm exactly where I need to be. I graduated from college a couple years back. They like me at work. There are opportunities in front of me. I've got great kids and a wonderful wife who listens patiently to all my stories, even the ones she's heard before. It's pretty good to be me right now.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And in fifteen years or so, I'll get to be mistaken for someone's grandfather.</span></div>
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Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08459329833381496473noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6591346.post-71904747309370662292012-11-14T21:26:00.000-05:002012-11-15T06:48:16.907-05:00Situational Awareness<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Remember the part in Peter Jackson's adaptation of The Return of the King when Frodo is a prisoner in the Tower of Cirith Ungol? Even if you don't know the name, you remember the part. He wakes up, realizes the ring is missing, and an orc pops up through a trap door in the floor. As Shagrat gloats over his opportunity to despoil and kill Frodo (or deliver him to the Eye), he gasps and we see the point of an Elvish blade come out through his chest. Sam has come up behind him and impaled him on Sting.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">That orc? Yeah, that's me.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Not literally, of course. I didn't play the role, but Jessika has used the term "oblivious" to describe me more times than I can remember (though probably fewer than I deserve).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This morning I went through my usual routine of snoozing the alarm, showering, starting the coffee, and sitting at my computer at the kitchen table until Zoe's wakeup time. I helped get her ready for school (clothing, breakfast, drink), and finshed my process of getting ready. I also watched Jessika as she poured a giant travel mug of coffee, mixed chocolate and milk into it to make a homemade mocha, and set it on the counter to take to school with her. Halfway to school, she looks over at me and says, "I forgot my freakin' coffee." Now, I watched all of her preparation take place, and at no point during our process of walking out the door, did I ever see her coffee on the counter. In fact, my last recognition that it even existed was when she was making it. My tunnel vision is so complete that I was no help at all in remembering the coffee. Generally, I feel good if I remember my lunch and my security badge for work.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">To be fair, she pointed out that it's not my responsibility to help her remember her own things. Jessika is pretty cool this way. She takes responsibility for herself, and she expects others to do the same for themselves. But I'm pretty sure that she could've set $500 on the counter instead of her coffee mug, and I still wouldn't have noticed it. Zoe could have been wearing mismatched shoes and socks, and I wouldn't have noticed. I try to remind myself to pay attention to life going by around me, but the only way I remember is to write it down. Most of the time, though, I don't remember to look at things I've written down. I'm a mess.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">When I was a kid, we had a giant mutt of a dog named Chewy. We didn't have a fenced-in yard (I didn't understand at the time, but I think we didn't have the money for it.), so my dad hooked up a long wire runner between two trees in the backyard. We could attach Chewy's leash to the runner, and he could dash madly back and forth across the yard. As often as I had to duck to get under it, one would think that I'd gain some kind of awareness of the runner as a constant in the back yard. Not true, though. Unless I saw it, I couldn't remember to duck. One particularly bad incident left me with a grease mark across my eyes and no glasses. We never found those glasses, in fact. They flew into the woods when I ran into the wire, and we never saw them again. I'm sure it was amusing on some level to watch my sprinting form go horizontal before landing roughly on my back, though. Amusing because there was no serious injury, and slapstick is just funny.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Basically, I'm the kind of guy who could get flattened by a bus while texting and walking across the street.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">To compensate for my lack of awareness, I've learned to become a creature of habit and paranoia. I suspect that my paranoia keeps me alive and relatively uninjured. When I lose that paranoia or stray from my habits, I invite disaster.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I once came literally inches from serious injury (possibly death, to be totally frank) when I was working in construction. As I worked on a deck that stood about 20 feet above the ground, I found myself in a situation where I needed to use a circular saw to cut off the top of a 6 x 6 post at the corner of the deck. If you know anything about circular saws, you'll know that the blade does not extend deep enough to cut through a post that big in one pass. The only way to make that cut with a circular saw is to cut each of the four sides. Your off cut will still be attached by a small amount of wood in the middle that the blade could not reach. Grab a hammer, and hit the off cut. Voila. Not pretty, but we were using the posts as a core for a cedar facade, so the post didn't need to be pretty.</span><br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTmoC1eLtO6z0HU9YKXOQH5tqTHwk-fSJdELpw_ZxN0YDc7Yn46zc8cA6G5Lhpy_6b9kA7c7GbfEq_FbFY1FYuN1O6CqMre8t_HFfpsg9TV-qX61xgvHNcOAZDtHIuv5kCvkPNXQ/s1600/1930_49008756711_6427_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Not a good day." border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTmoC1eLtO6z0HU9YKXOQH5tqTHwk-fSJdELpw_ZxN0YDc7Yn46zc8cA6G5Lhpy_6b9kA7c7GbfEq_FbFY1FYuN1O6CqMre8t_HFfpsg9TV-qX61xgvHNcOAZDtHIuv5kCvkPNXQ/s320/1930_49008756711_6427_n.jpg" title="" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">That post in the center of the picture? That's the spot.</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I probably could have used a reciprocating saw to achieve similar results. I could have gotten an extension ladder to reach the outside of the post. There are probably other solutions. My solution was to lean out over the edge of the deck with the circular saw to make the outer cut. To be fair, I was encouraged by my boss to do it this way, and I have an incessant need to please my bosses, but I still made a conscious decision to follow those instructions. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">While making the cut, my fleece sweater got too close to the blade. And by too close, I mean touched. My sweater was pulled in. I don't really know how close I came to falling off the deck, or how close the blade got to cutting me open. My sweater was destroyed, cut open across the belly, and it happened because of my tunnel vision. I was more concerned with the objective than I was with how I would get there. I had poor situational awareness of my own body and clothing, I could potentially have paid the ultimate price. Getting to an emergency room would have meant a 30 minute drive in the back of a pickup truck, so it would definitely have been the worst day of my life, one way or another.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I like to think that I would stand up to my boss if I were in the same situation again. But here's the frustrating thing. I'm probably the only person from the job site that day who would have had that accident. I could have handed the saw to my boss, and he would have made the cuts and then poked fun at me for being afraid to do it. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But all these experiences have built my paranoia to the point where it's like an impregnable shield of fear and insecurity. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The upside? I don't stub my toes when I walk around dark rooms.</span>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08459329833381496473noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6591346.post-45992292388581969092012-10-29T22:30:00.000-04:002012-10-29T22:30:12.254-04:00A Few of My Favorite Things<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So it's now been nearly three weeks since my last post. I never thought about this when I first started writing, but the election cycle has really taken a toll on my ability to write about anything interesting. I've written three fully formed and edited posts, complete with clever little memes that I created myself. Despite my personal injunction against taking sides in social media forums, I still managed to write three incredibly bitter and angry screeds about politics. I didn't take sides, though, so instead of alienating half of my (admittedly small) audience, I probably would have angered both sides. None of them were terribly different from one another; they simply reflected three attempts to write the same thing without resorting to anger and bitterness. The TL;DR version of those posts is this:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I'm tired of people pretending like they don't care and that they hate everyone involved in politics. Even people who claim not to care have hot button issues, and broadly claiming that both major candidates are terrible is cowardly and dishonest, or at the least, completely unproductive. So figure out what you believe. Once you figure it out, make a decision either to talk about it or not to talk about it, and for the love of Pete, stick to that decision. Seriously, if you think they're both terrible, stop telling me about it, and go back to telling me about Ron Paul or something. At least you had some passion then.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">There was more to the posts, digging into third party candidates, insulting Herman Cain (not for being a Republican, but for being an idiot), and generally spreading vitriol around. It's really not an interesting argument to make, certainly not interesting enough to take up a whole post. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So instead of complaining about the lazy nihilism that oozes out of half the posts I see on Facebook, instead of lamenting all the hate I see at this time of year, I've compiled a small list (obviously not comprehensive) of some things I love. I think that the things we love define us more completely and more earnestly than the things we hate. In the spirit of fighting the negativity of election season with some positivity, here are a few of my favorite things.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>1. <i>The Lord of the Rings</i></b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This is fanboy love of the worst kind, really. I've read the book a couple dozen times (literally, you have no idea how obsessed I am), and I consume Tolkien's other works about Middle-Earth the way Apple fanboys consume iPhones (and with the same haughty disregard for any perceived failings). I once quoted the Merry Old Inn song at a Halloween party to <a href="http://tml-youllbefine.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">someone I barely knew</a> at the time (interestingly, she wrote about a different Halloween party in her latest post). In my defense, though, there was alcohol involved in that particular event, so it seemed like a neat little party trick to my addled brain. I even subscribe to the <a href="http://www.twitter.com/ShireReckoningW" target="_blank">@ShireReckoningW</a> Twitter feed so I can stay up to date on what's happening each day in the novel. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I've found so much in the novel that I'm always wanting to share. There is joy and suffering, heroism and betrayal, peace and war. Most importantly, I find a concern with the value of friendship and courage. I think Tolkien desperately believed that despair is one of our worst mistakes. In discussing the book with friends, I'm always trying to create the impression that the book is more than just a story about hobbits, that it has something vital to say about the importance of our friendships.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>2. Video Games</b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Man, I love to shoot stuff. I also like to hit stuff with a sword or command large numbers of troops in fake battles. In fact, I find other forms of electronic entertainment inferior, almost boring by comparison. When I sit and watch TV or a movie now, I almost always have a game on my laptop or my phone. I multitask my electronics. Now, based on my love for <i>The Lord of the Rings</i>, you would think I'd love the MMORPG based on the novel (if you're even aware of its existence, that is). Even though I can play the game for free, I just can't get into it. I've tried a couple of times, but the game reminds me of early attempts at computer animation. Long on detail, short on heart. Couple an uninspiring adaptation of my favorite fictional work with the recognition of my sometimes addictive relationship with MMOs, and it's easy for me to skip that one.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Some of my best friends, though, the ones who truly approach the level of adopted family, come from my days playing <i>World of Warcraft</i>. My friends all have lives and names, but in some ways they really are Mercade, Muskulls, Muskullswife, Invysillama, Myca, Mahroo, Moonders, Deadstick, Asakawa, and others, and innumerable alts. We worked together in aid of something larger (getting to the end of the freakin' Shadow Labyrinth) before we ever knew each others' religion or politics.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>3. Making Stuff</b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I can't just say that I like to cook good food, or build things out of wood, or that I'm fascinated by my desire to learn blacksmithy. These things are all of a piece. I love the feeling of standing back from a project, taking a good look at it, nodding my head, and saying, "Yep. I made that. I did a good job, too." If you've ever gotten a slideshow presentation from me before, you'll also know that I love to show off my work. I take pride in creation. I still reminisce with old coworkers about the houses we built and the work we put in. I also reminisce about sitting on a scaffolding 15 feet off the ground, in 95 degree heat, punchy from exhaustion, nearly laughing myself into thin air as my vulgar English boss spoofed Fleetwood Mac songs. For the record, he and I probably couldn't be more politically different. Doesn't matter.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />In fact, in nearly every aspect of life that I enjoy, my enjoyment goes hand in hand with the presence of friends and family, despite our tendency so often to be at odds with one another, politically or religiously. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But we don't cut each other checks to keep the lights on during the hard times because of politics. We don't celebrate new jobs or births because of politics. We don't go to each others' birthday parties, bonfires, or graduations because of politics. And when as we suffer our worst moments and worst losses, we don't mourn together because of our politics.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We celebrate, cry, laugh, sing, dance, argue, criticize, and support -- because we love each </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">other.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">At the risk of mawkishness, I'll say that my people are more important to me than my politics.</span>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08459329833381496473noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6591346.post-20183210104566069942012-10-10T21:27:00.000-04:002012-10-10T21:27:12.179-04:00Lessons from Jessika<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">While talking with my wife the other day, the topic turned to why I blog. Despite my desire to write and share, and despite close relationships with others who write and share, I can't shake the notion that writing is an egomaniacal pursuit. I told Jessika this, and as usual, she defended my own intentions to me. She has a way of cutting through my moments of self doubt with surprising clarity. I write because I like to think that my stories and musings might entertain people, make them chuckle or smile in some small way. I've also heard from coworkers and friends over the years that I have an interesting way of looking at life (although this could, on reflection, be similar to the supposed old Chinese curse about living in interesting times). Now I'm pretty happy with my life, due largely to my particular outlook on life, so I write because I hope that my perspective might enlighten my readers in some way, intellectually or emotionally.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As usual, I learned something about myself and about my motivations from talking to her, and in that spirit, I'm writing today about the impact Jessika has had on my life, my outlook, and my happiness. And I think others may agree. So here are a few things I'll call Lessons from Jessika.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>1. Sugarcoating is for candy</b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A very good friend once told me that when he wants a balanced opinion, when he wants someone who will look at a situation from every angle, sympathize with all positions, and ultimately recommend no useful course of action whatsoever, he asks me for advice. If you don't understand why this doesn't offend me, you need to re-read the last sentence. But if he wants someone who will smack him in the face with brutal truth, he talks to Jessika. For awhile her personal quote on Facebook was, "I refuse to sugarcoat it for you." </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In situations dealing with serious life decisions, a painful truth is always preferable to a comforting or convenient lie. The potential for long term pain or unhappiness is simply too great to risk saying what's easy in place of what's honest. Yes, sometimes truth seems subjective to the person asking the questions, but that's no excuse for pussy-footing around. If someone asks your opinion, they want YOUR opinion. If they come back later and try to lay any blame on you, "Hey, you asked MY opinion. What would I do? You don't HAVE to live like I do, but I won't lie to you about how I choose to live. Don't like my advice? Here's a lesson for you, then. Don't ask me." </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Understand, though, this predilection for painful honesty applies to relations with friends for loved ones -- people you actually care about. When dealing with strangers or mere acquaintances, truth or lies are irrelevant. In those cases, say whatever you must to shorten the interaction.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>2. I don't wanna hear it, none of your bullshit!</b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I don't think I had any experience with Punk or Hardcore before I met Jessika. Sure, I grew up in the 90's, so I'd listened to Grunge and some Industrial, so I wasn't <u>completely</u> wet behind the ears, but I couldn't have told you anything about punk. Let's get something straight: I still can't tell you much. But I've learned a little about the kind of in-your-face, not-listening-to-your-crap attitude that oozes from every pore of most punks. Punk rockers don't have a reputation for making good life decisions (although I <u>do</u> realize that I've quoted a band above known for its influence in straightedge), but I think we can still learn something from the mindset, and Jessika speaks to it all the time.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Life is too short to deal with people who only bring drama to your day or your life. Some of it is unavoidable -- you can't quit every job or drop every class just because of drama. But you can pick your social encounters, for sure. And you can organize your day around the people and the activities that energize you the most. Jessika's most common reaction to bullshit walk the other way, but if she can't walk away, she'll tell you what she thinks. Hell, even if she <u>can</u> walk away, she might, for good measure, tell you what she thinks. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I've learned that we don't have to put up with the crap that people spew in our direction, and it's okay to scream that at them if it might make them shut up.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>3. Everyone wants to be like me!</b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Maybe. Who knows. It doesn't really matter, though. Live your life as though everyone wants to be like you. Why? Because it means that you're at peace with your decisions. You're at peace with your particular set of idiosyncrasies, and you see them as strengths. So even if you can't prove that everyone wants to be like you, live like you know it for truth.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I've learned that so much unhappiness stems from trying to live up to other people's expectations or hopes for us. If those people know so well what you should do with your life, why do they spend so much of their own lives angry, sad, confused, and unhappy? They don't know crap about how to be happy! Stop letting other people run your life for you. Figure out who you are and what you want out of life, and go work on it!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>4. Get over it or die mad.</b></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This is one of my favorite lessons. We're always going to run across people who are just frightfully bothered by us. They don't like what we say. They don't like our work performance, our school performance. They don't approve of the way we speak, the way we vote, the way we worship (or don't).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The best thing those people can do is to GET OVER IT. I live my life in the way that seems best to me and to my family, and I'm not about to change it just because someone else doesn't like it. So get over it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The other choice, of course, is to die mad. Seriously, if you never move on from your moralizing and judging, you will literally do it until the day you die, raving at everything wrong with the world. And that's really no way to live. Your brain obviously has the ability to move on from bad experiences (hopefully you're not still bitter about every disappointment you've ever experienced). Engage that ability to move on, and accept that I don't plan on changing myself to suit your politics or your religion or your sense of decency. Your life will be better, more full of opportunities for joy. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Besides, I don't wanna hear it...</span>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08459329833381496473noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6591346.post-1476013533978407552012-10-01T21:05:00.002-04:002012-10-01T21:05:35.605-04:00What's the Weather?<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I have a new phone that I love. I know that I've mentioned this in other posts, but I'm still just floored by the sheer amount of data at my fingertips at all times of day. For example, I can check the weather in my exact location any time I want to. My phone has GPS, too, so I don't even have to input a city or ZIP code or anything. I just press the weather button, and I find out that it's currently 72 degrees Fahrenheit and mostly cloudy. I find myself checking the weather all day long now. I'll be sitting at my desk at work, and I absolutely must know the temperature and cloud cover at that moment.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I haven't always had such easy access to the weather.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">During high school, I was a backpacker. I saved up and bought hundreds of dollars of hiking and camping supplies. I had a backpack, cooking kit, portable stove, tent, sleeping bag, hiking shoes, special socks, first aid kit, compass -- you name a piece of hiking gear, I probably had it or had plans for how much a good one was going to cost me.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I and my two best friends, Scott and Jeremy, liked to go on overnight hiking trips. We would pack up the gear, hop in Jeremy's beat up Chevy Nova (the 4-cylinder compact version from the late 80's), and drive up to North Georgia to walk all day, sit around a campfire half the night, and sleep on the ground in a tent. I've learned in the intervening years that not everyone understands the fun in this. Actually, I don't even understand why this is fun. It just is.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">If I remember correctly, we planned a trip in early March one year to the Cohutta Wilderness in extreme North Georgia. We checked topographical maps and National Park Service maps of the area. We decided on a trailhead and parking area, planned our route, and decided to avoid river and stream crossings. Although the winter had been mild, we didn't want to deal with mountain streams so early in the year, even in Georgia. We planned our meals, loaded our packs, and tested Jeremy's new pump-operated water filter. Water gets heavy when you have to carry a couple of day's worth at a time, so he had researched filters and decided on a mid-priced filter that had gotten some good reviews in Backpacker Magazine.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Even in the days before the internet became central to our lives, research and planning were easy tasks. Apparently, though, despite all our planning, turning on the TV and planning for weather was a task beyond the likes of us.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Although the weather was nice at home -- in the 70's, I think -- we discovered upon reaching the mountains that winter had not exactly loosened its grip. It was cold up there! No worries, though, we had sleeping bags and a tent and fire-making supplies. Our elevation increased, and I could have sworn that I saw a little ice on the road. Yeah, that was ice. Probably just a little bit of leftover stuff from earlier in the season, though -- nothing to worry about. We kept listening to Frank Sinatra or Take 6 or Manhattan Transfer, or whatever it was we were trying to sing with that week.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The point of no return came when we were within just a couple of miles of our destination. As we rounded an especially icy bend in the road and headed up an icy hill, with an approximately 25 to 30 foot drop at the bend in the road behind us, we hit the real stuff. Not just a little ice, the kind that causes a little bit of tire spinning. We hit ICE. The car's front wheels started spinning in place and we started to slide backwards. Jeremy turned the wheel and stopped our backwards slide by sticking one of the back wheels in a small ditch. Now what? A car came around the corner behind us and got similarly stuck, and a truck and another car started to approach from the top of the hill and soon joined us. Scott, who at the time fancied himself a bit of a ninja, turned out to have foot spikes in his pack. (Honestly? I don't know. Perhaps he could shed some light, but I've never asked.) He and I got behind the car, each took a foot spike for digging into the icy sheet covering the road and tried to push as Jeremy fruitlessly spun the wheels of the car. Ultimately, the four vehicles' owners all got together, sat on hoods, pushed from behind, and slowly, ever so slowly extricated the four vehicles from their predicaments. We had made a few friends, the temporary kind who come together, despite their differences, because of shared hardship, and we went on our way, still intent upon hiking.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We got onto the trail a couple of hours after we had planned. This left us two fewer hours until dusk, when we would need to have camp set up, water filtered, fire built. We walked, but really spent our time looking for a combination camp site and water source. As it turns out, finding a clear spot to set up camp and finding a stream near camp when you've planned your route to avoid water presents a daunting challenge. By the time we found a spot, it was already fully dark. Scott struggled to collect wood and build a fire in the dark, while I wrestled with the tent, and Jeremy risked frostbitten fingers to filter enough water for tea and ramen. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We ate. Sat around the fire. Retired to the tent and our sleeping bags. We had good bags, but we still shivered. Upon waking in the morning, the extra gallon of water that Jeremy had filtered was a solid block of ice. Not a cold gallon of water with a sheen of ice over the top. A solid block of ice. We had spent the night in 25 degree-rated sleeping bags, and the temperature had dropped to 17 degrees. We shivered through building a morning fire, packing up camp, and eventually heading back to the car. Were our lives ever in danger? No, we had pretty good gear, and we were never far from a fire or the car. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We camped again, but the three of us never hiked again.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Some lessons? Bring water, even if you plan on filtering refills for your bottles. Don't avoid water when you know you'll need it. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Most importantly, you can never check the weather often enough. </span><br />
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<br />Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08459329833381496473noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6591346.post-1048528113919773072012-09-24T20:57:00.002-04:002012-09-24T21:37:58.985-04:00Don't I Know You From Somewhere?<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I like to think that I'm a reasonably intelligent guy, who has a (probably) better than average grasp on basic statistics. Because of this, I'm under no illusion that I'm the only Mike Coon out and about these days.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">One of my uncles has managed to trace our family tree back to a John MacCoone, who apparently came to America sometime during the 18th century. He traced various ancestors throughout New England, found a story about the rescue of some family members from Mohicans, and followed the family to Ohio, where my most immediate ancestors lived.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Based on the geographical movements of my family, and the knowledge that we've been here for going on 300 years, I can only imagine how many Coons are floating around the US. I know that Gene Coon was a producer on <i>Star Trek</i>, and he's not even a part of the genealogical research my uncle has done. He may have been a distant relation, but we don't really know. There's also Brad Coon, who when I last checked, was playing AAA baseball in the Angels farm system. Again, as far as I know, he doesn't pop up in my immediate family, but he's from Ohio, so he's probably connected somehow. Point is, we might not be as numerous as Smiths, but there are lots of us.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And we probably don't even have to discuss the name Michael. It's out there. A lot. I read somewhere once that Michael was the most popular name for boys in America during multiple years in the late 1970's and early 1980's, and I can't imagine that its popularity has waned very much. Most of my classrooms and jobs over the years have included at least one Mike or Michael besides me, so the general likelihood of putting together say, 500 men with the surname Coon and finding a few Michaels is probably pretty high.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">All this speculation is leading somewhere very personal -- bear with me.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A few years ago I discovered a Mike Coon club on Facebook. It was a public group (apparently gone now, because a quick search doesn't turn it up), and all of its members were named Mike Coon. I seem to remember seeing 14 members, and neither I nor my uncle Mike were members, so now we're up to 16 of us. I'm sure there are others out there who simply never found the Facebook group or who don't even use the internet. I know from the experience of creating usernames for websites over the years that I won't always get the username "mikecoon". Obviously others find that username relevant.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I have been receiving email for some time from Redbox, verifying rentals and returns, and giving me advice about new releases. I don't rent from Redbox using my email address. We've always used Jessika's email address anytime we've rented from Redbox. So I did a little research, and these Redbox rentals are happening in Colorado Springs, CO. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This is when I go to Google.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Sure enough -- there's a real estate agent named Mike Coon living in Colorado Springs, CO. Now, his email address is probably very similar to mine, since people tend to use variations on their names for email addresses. I do wonder if he's ever questioned why he doesn't get confirmations from Redbox, though. </span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">All of these experiences are relatively innocuous, and no different than what every John Smith in the world probably endures all the time.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Now I've recently bought my first real smartphone, and I have this unlimited data plan from my provider, so I've been playing with apps like crazy. This weekend I decided to join the Instagram crowd. I take pictures of my kids and of funny things, and it seems like an cool way to automatically link to Facebook. So I go to set up my account, and the website tells me that there's already an account linked to that email address. Now, I've had the same email address since Gmail was in closed beta, so I know I haven't typed anything wrong, but I start thinking that maybe I started an Instagram account at some point and just forgot about it. So, of course, I click on "Forgot Password". I get an email with a link to reset my password, follow the link, change my password -- bingbangboom -- I'm in.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Holy shit.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In front of me on my phone is a chronicle of somebody else's life. Mike Coon eating pho. Mike Coon at some kind of Glen Beck event (definitely someone else). Mike Coon's newborn baby. And the Mike Coon in the pictures is not me. Except that based on the email address of record, if somebody wants to know about the man with that email address, they get -- him. Why would someone use an email address they don't own to create web accounts? Does he want my email address? Mine is simple. I got my favorite username because I was an early adopter on Gmail. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I felt violated. I felt compromised. My wife was NOT attracted to this other Mike Coon. And worst of all, I don't want people to think that I watch Glen Beck. I can accept that other Mike Coons are out there going about their Mike Coon-y business, but when they're using my email address to record their lives on Instagram, that just -- weirds me out.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">My first instinct was to delete the account and move on, creating a new one with my email address, but when I went to delete the account, the website told me that the user name associated with that email address could not be reused if I deleted the account. What if this other Mike Coon is really attached to that user name? I can't just delete it on a whim. As it turns out, I'm a nicer person than I give myself credit for. I started searching Facebook for a Mike Coon who looked like the Mike Coon in the pictures. No luck. So I searched Facebook for his Instagram friends. No luck there either. I sort of surprised myself and made an honest attempt to find this guy and say, "Hey, you used the wrong email address. Send me your real one, and I'll change it on the account." </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">No dice.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So I deleted him.</span>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08459329833381496473noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6591346.post-48578395575801138692012-09-09T20:23:00.000-04:002012-09-09T21:02:20.509-04:00Lessons from a 5th Grade Book Report<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">When I was in 5th grade, I had a book report. I don't remember all of the details, but we received an assignment, and I'm sure the teacher gave us plenty of time to complete it. At this point, I've watched my son go through 5th grade. I have a general idea what kind of assignment the teacher handed out. 5th grade assignments are easy. I mean, for a kid with a reasonable degree of intelligence, 5th grade book reports are like asking Stephen Hawking to do basic arithmetic.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Here's the thing: I don't know what I did with my time -- I've always been a big reader -- but I didn't read anything in time to report on it. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">There are very few moments from my childhood that I remember with perfect clarity.The time I drove my car down the front steps of the house at 4 years old? That's still stuck up there in my brain. The time I got my pants pulled down in front of the whole gym in 6th grade? Who can forget that kind of horror? Trying to attack my next door neighbor with a stick, only to find myself on the ground, his hands around my neck? Yep, still there. (And on a related note, bygones are bygones. We drove to school together all through high school, and we're still in contact on Facebook.) I still remember the night before the report, tearing my closet apart, looking for something to report on, finally settling on Edith Hamilton's <i>Mythology.</i> Now, I hadn't (and still haven't) read the book, but I seem to remember thinking that I could talk about Zeus and Athena and fake my way through. With 25 years worth of accumulated life experience, I've learned a couple of things about myself.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">First of all, I'm terrible at faking my way through anything, as it turns out. I don't remember what my teacher asked me or how I responded, but I can remember the shame and fear coursing through me as I realized, standing in front of the entire class, that I couldn't answer her questions. My friends know that I have occasionally tried to fake my way, with embarrassing results. In fact, I vividly remember sitting in a conference room about 6 years ago at the CDC, desperately trying to extricate myself from a job interview that had turned into a massive crash and burn. As it turns out, I really only know enough Java to write a "Hello World" program, despite the fact that I had convinced myself and others around me that I was just weeks away from a big job and big money. That interview was the final straw. I think.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Another thing I see? I make awful decisions under stress. By 5th grade, I had read all of C.S. Lewis's Narnia books, <i>The Hobbit</i>, various books in the Hardy Boys and Three Investigators series, books by Beverly Cleary, Judy Blume, and Louis Sachar, and others that I no longer remember. You know what I hadn't read? The one book that I chose to report on! To this day I can't understand what fit of stupidity descended upon me to ignore the dozens of books I had already read and could have discussed at length and made me instead choose a book that, even with my higher than average intelligence at that time, no teacher would believe I had actually read. Granted, a classmate did his report on <i>The Stand</i>, but he had obviously read the book, and he later went on to Harvard, then Princeton, then to positions at universities as an English professor. I, on the other hand, spent 16 years on a Bachelor's degree and don't currently teach at any colleges. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Apparently 5th grade book reports are bellwethers for future academic and professional success.</span></div>
Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08459329833381496473noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6591346.post-42954380565364055692012-08-13T21:01:00.002-04:002012-08-13T21:01:59.280-04:00Astronomy (Stars not Horoscopes)<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">When I was in seventh grade I decided to perform a great social experiment. I decided to put on a label for all the school to see, that I liked astronomy. For the first time that year, I remember finding three-ring binders that had clear plastic on the front and back, and I tore photographs out of my Astronomy magazines of nebulae, globular clusters, and solar prominences and slid them into the front and back of my binder. In fact, every single month, when the new issue came out, I would go straight to my room, turn to the back of the magazine, and start planning which photographs would go into my binder that month.</span><div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I didn't realize at the time, but I think my parents were desperately hoping that their thoughtful and intelligent seventh-grader would start showing an interest in something that might lead to a career, or at least a college major. Now that I'm the parent of an eighth-grader, I've become aware of the crippling fear that starts to creep up on some parents around the middle school years. It goes something like this: </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"My kid is really smart and has so much potential, but I'm afraid that he's just going to flit around from interest to interest for the rest of his life and end up not graduating from college until he's 33, even then getting a degree in English, not in something useful, and he's going to struggle and barely pay bills and worry about money every single moment, and life doesn't have to be that way!"</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So you start thinking about ways to take the things that your kid is interested in and push those interests a little bit further, give your kid opportunities to explore those interests, in hopes that you might spark a life-long passion that will lead to a sense of purpose and resolve. I'm no longer worried about my eighth-grader, or at least, not worried in the same way that I was a year ago. For his birthday, he and I went to the local computer store, bought components and built his first computer. So many of his interests revolve around gaming, creation, and the internet, and at 13 years old, we decided that the time had come for him to have his very own screaming machine. Whatever he does, he'll be fine. I'm fine, and he'll be fine.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">When I was in seventh grade, my passion was astronomy. Mom and dad gave me a subscription to astronomy magazine, and I became completely fascinated by astrophotography. If you're not familiar with it, astrophotography is not just pointing a camera at the sky and snapping a picture. First you need a good telescope. When I say good, I don't mean one of those little $100 jobs that you find in your local department store. I'm talking about something put out by companies like Meade or Celestron and, depending on your ambition, costing upwards of $10,000. Now, you can get a good-enough scope for something closer to $1000, still not chump change, but that'll get you started. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">When you buy the scope, though, you need to think about the tripod. Not just any tripod and mount will do. There are specific kinds of mounts that will allow a person to turn a knob ever so slowly and move the telescope in conjunction with the earth's rotation, allowing a camera attached to the lens to take extremely long-exposure photographs without the star field blurring from the apparent motion of the stars across the sky over the course of the night. These days you can even get powered mounts that will do all the work for you, assuming, of course that you've set up your tripod and scope properly.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Yep. You can't just put the telescope in your yard and point it somewhere. Not only do you have to locate north, and you have to know your latitude and longitude as precisely as possible. First of all, finding north and pointing there are no mean feat. We generally know Polaris, at the tip of the Little Dipper, as the north star, but point a telescope there, and you still haven't found north. True magnetic north is somewhat off from Polaris. You didn't think we'd be so lucky as to have a star in just the right place, did you? Second, you have to adjust the position of your telescope to allow for the earth's rotation at your specific latitude and longitude. This is not terribly difficult, but I will give you fair warning. If you happen to be dating someone, a person that you potentially might end up marrying, and you tell that person that you know the specific latitude and longitude of your house, you may, possibly, be in for at least 11 years worth of good-natured ribbing over how nerdy you are. I won't reveal my sources, but I can say with absolute certainty that this can happen.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As it turns out, by the time you upgrade to the really stable tripod with the motorized mount and buy a camera and an adapter to hook it up to your telescope, and buy the various filters you'll need, you're looking at close to $2000 worth of expense, and I've just never made it up to that kind of money. I have a 3.5" Newtonian reflector collecting dust in my closet, that has come with me to every home I've lived in for the last 12 years, and one of these days I'll pull it out and hopefully impress the kids with the little bit of knowledge I've acquired over the years. One more way for daddy to prove that he knows a little something about nearly everything.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">My parents couldn't get me the big telescope rig, but they got me a trip to Georgia Tech during the summer after my seventh-grade year for a science summer camp. I spent two weeks learning about hovercraft, and bottle rockets, and flatworms. I'm not a scientist, but a valuable bit of knowledge started to worm its way into my brain.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I found out that when I let my geek flag fly, people liked me better than when I was trying to remain unnoticed. My parents helped create the geek monster you know today by buying me a magazine subscription and encouraging my early interest in science. I'd love to say that I learned to be myself, no matter what, but years of high school and attempting to impress all the wrong girls were still ahead of me. Lessons don't really sink in that quickly in real life. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The telescope might be in the closet, but I've never sold it or given it away. My friends are the best kinds of geeks I can possibly imagine, and the skies still call to me.</span></div>
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Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08459329833381496473noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6591346.post-56162759194794485852012-08-04T11:25:00.000-04:002012-08-04T12:01:17.811-04:00Welcome!<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">I’m so glad
you stopped by to read a few of my words. You may be puzzled to see a welcome
message as the fourth entry posted on a blog, but I wanted to get a few entries
in before I started inviting people to visit and read.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">Why?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">In college, I
had six different majors, and I spent 16 years obtaining a Bachelor’s Degree.
My friends can assert that I have a history of starting schools, jobs,
projects, and hobbies that I later abandon due to lack of interest.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">But two
activities keep coming back to me: carpentry and writing. I can remember when I
was a kid I the early 80’s, sitting in the living room on weekends when my dad
was watching “This Old House”, “New Yankee Workshop”, and “The Woodwright’s
Shop”. These guys had power tools, and that was pretty awesome (Well, the first
two did. The guy on the third show works entirely without power tools, which is
its own kind of completely freakin’ awesome), but even more awesome, they built
stuff!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">Norm Abram is
the host of “New Yankee Workshop” and a bit of a personal hero. He’s a solid
carpenter, aided, I’m sure, by the magic of television to allow him to fix
mistakes and cover imperfections without the audience ever having to know about
them. He loves going into antique stores, finding great old pieces of
furniture, and showing his audience how to adapt those old pieces to modern
tools, modern materials, and modern techniques. The most respected and
expensive carpenters would replicate materials and techniques, but Norm isn’t
trying to preserve old techniques as much as he’s trying to teach the joy of
creating something for yourself. He’s a great teacher, and he calls drawers
“drawhs”, and I gained an early fascination with carpentry from him. I always
suspected that if I got a chance, I would love and have a talent for
woodworking.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">I got my
chance during 2007 and 2008 to test out my suspicions when I left retail and
started working as an apprentice carpenter. Although the company closed in
2008, and I went back to retail, I’ve never abandoned carpentry. I don’t get to
do it much, because tools and space are either expensive or at other peoples’
houses, but the work I do is satisfying.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">I’ve also had
a fascination with writing down words for other people to read. I remember
Christmas in third grade, to this day still my favorite Christmas, when I
opened my presents to find a boxed set of <i>The
Lord of the Rings</i>. Tolkien hooked me on the idea of world-building. I
started trying to write sequels to his works, and nothing thrilled me more than
seeing Middle-Earth realized on film. I was, and still am, less concerned with
Peter Jackson faithfulness to Tolkien’s story than with his faithfulness to the
vision and world of Middle-Earth. My desire to write and to share grew out of
my fascination with world-building.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">I would never
have imagined it, but I fear that I have become “that guy” among my group of
family and friends who flits from master plan to master plan, unfortunately
doing more planning than mastering. I play golf with around a 40 handicap, know
about two or three guitar chords, and I have a nice 3.5” Newtonian reflector
telescope languishing in my closet. My hard drive is littered with the remnants
of computer programming projects that never resulted in any practical
programming knowledge. I even know 10 or 12 words in Japanese.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">As I begin a
new project, fully realizing that the weight of my own history argues strongly
for failure, I simply haven’t yet had the nerve to announce a blog that I would
update once and then forget. This concept, this project of writing is too
important to me to allow it to become another abandoned pursuit. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">So I’ve
waited, and I have a plan and a vision.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">Here’s the
plan:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">Write <b>something</b> every single day. Most days I
expect that I’ll work on this blog. I plan to write many more entries than I
actually publish, because not every entry will be a good one. If one out of
three is actually any good, then I still get a couple of posts per week, at
that rate. My plan will actually require a great deal more time management than
you may think. I have a job, a wife, two kids, and an addiction to wasting
time. I can spend an hour and a half looking at stupid pictures and gifs on
reddit, and, like many of my generation, video games are a tempting
distraction. There’s nothing wrong with entertainment, but I won’t neglect my
commitments to my family, my fitness, or my job, so I need to reduce my
entertainment commitment if I’m going to find time to write.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">And here’s
the vision:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">This blog
should be a vehicle for people who already know me to get to know me better and
a place where people who don’t know me can meet me. Sometimes that will mean
confessional posts, and sometimes I might just rant about something that I just
can’t ignore.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">This blog
will be honest.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">Finally, this
blog will a mental workout for me. If you’ve ready my earlier posts, you know
that I’m physically out of shape and trying to get back on track. Ditto on the
brain. If I’m going to make a go at a childhood dream, I need to get my brain
and my fingers going again.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";">Welcome and
thanks for starting this journey with me.<o:p></o:p></span></div>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08459329833381496473noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6591346.post-75825939370275772692012-07-30T20:26:00.000-04:002012-09-30T20:49:26.680-04:00Name and Titles<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I've been thinking about titles and names lately.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Part of starting a new blog is creating a name for it. I don't know about other people, but I have a hard time coming up with good names. Blogs, school essays, video game characters, you name it, I have a hard time naming it. And I actually do think I know something about other people's naming habits, but more on that later.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As I was titling my blog, I had a few things going through my mind. I though about a descriptive/self-deprecating name. "Adventures of a Dilettante" or something like that. That'll tell people that I write about a wide range of subjects and that I don't take myself to seriously. Who am I kidding? I DO take myself too seriously. Okay, scratch that name, I certainly can't have a title like "The Best Blog" or "I'm Pretty Awesome" or "Please Read Me". I don't want a vague name like "Thoughts" or "My Feelings About Some Things". So I setting for "Do I Have To?" It seems to encapsulate my state of mind on any given day, so maybe it'll grow on me as a name. Or maybe I'll grow out of it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">My good friend Terese has a great name for her blog: "You'll Be Fine, I Promise". She even has a great story behind why she chose that name. I won't spoil the story; she tells it better than I could, anyway. You should <a href="http://tml-youllbefine.blogspot.com/p/who-is-this-fine-mom.html" target="_blank">read</a> it for yourself, and while you're at it, read the rest of her blog too. She's been tremendously supportive of my fledgling efforts here, and she tells a good story. I'm hoping that sticking at this long enough will result in a great story that can turn into a great name.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The issue of names came up again last week when I joined the office softball team. We had to choose a name for the public park league we joined. Our organizer put out a call for team name ideas, and the names started rolling in. No Homers. Showing Signs of Fatigue. Old and Flabby. Lowered Expectations. Out of Breath. There's obviously a theme here. We settled on Scared Hitless.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">One of our office managers quite unintentionally explained the real trouble with titles and names when he heard our team name. He said, "Scared Hitless! I love it! Underpromise and overdeliver. That's the way to go!" I want to avoid broad generalizations, so I'll mainly speak for our little softball team, but I think we might be able to extrapolate outward a bit to portions of my generation without ruffling too many feathers -- The lower you set the bar for achievement, the more pride you can take in failure. "Sure, we didn't win a single game, but look at us! We're Scared Hitless, and we actually got a few hits! We're winners!"</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Maybe underpromising and overdelivering is a useful strategy for managing expectations (It certainly worked for Scotty on the U.S.S. Enterprise), but our name feels a bit like the softball equivalent of a straw man argument. I don't mean to say that I'm part of a generation of losers trying to convince everyone that losing is okay. I just see a lot of cynics around me (and in the mirror).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">There's no grand realization or plan here. Based on some of the name choices I see, I and many of the people I interact with would rather succeed cynically than fail earnestly. Earnest people get ridiculed for being naive or old-fashioned or just uncool. Cynics are presumably intelligent enough not to be earnest.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Maybe we've bought in too much to the concepts of success and failure. Or maybe our cynical attitudes are merely a manifestation of our rejection of the success/failure dichotomy.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Sometimes I read too much into things. Maybe it's just funny for out of shape geeks to drag their pregnancy bellies around a softball field. As Freud probably didn't actually say, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar." </span>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08459329833381496473noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6591346.post-81388407871309889212012-07-26T18:14:00.000-04:002012-09-30T20:12:39.331-04:00The Wall<br />
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<span style="color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I remember the Atlanta Braves in the 80's. My earliest baseball memory is a hazy image in my head of the Braves playing the Cardinals in the 1982 NLCS. Without the aid of Wikipedia I can name so many of the major Braves players of the mid-eighties. They had players like Dale Murphy, Bruce Benedict, Chris Chambliss, Glen Hubbard, Rafael Ramirez, Bob Horner, Albert Hall, Claudell Washington, Phil Neikro, Gene Garber, Steve Bedrosian, and so on and so on. I could name more. Seriously, I could.</span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The eighties were a rough time to be a Braves fan, because the were always so bad, but they were all still superheroes to me. I wanted to be a baseball player. I still do.</span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So I jumped at the chance to join the office softball team. I'm trying to get my body back into shape. I started running again (ok, fine, I alternate between walking and jogging) a couple of weeks ago. And now, not only do I get to stand on a baseball field, swing a bat, run the bases, and play a position, but it's also some badly-needed exercise. Am I taking a casual public park softball league a little too seriously? Probably. But I love the diamond.</span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We had our first of two practices before the season starts last night, and playing softball is not as easy as I remember. I used to think softball and baseball were relatively low-effort activities. Maybe when I was more physically acive they were, but with somewhere in the neighborhood of 17 years of nearly complete inactivity behind me, I found myself wondering:</span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">How do you tell the difference between a mental wall and a physical wall? You hear about "the wall", that moment you reach mentally where you want to quit, think you can't go on any longer, but you push through and succeed. But you also hear about people passing out from physical exertion. Not pretty. But those people probably thought they were just pushing through "the wall". How does a couch potato who hasn't exercised seriously since high school tell the difference?</span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As I stood in the outfield (baseball fans: I deliberately chose to cover right field when I realized how winded and tired I was getting) desperately sucking as much air as I could, sweat pouring down my face, legs aching from the running, arm turning to jelly from all the throwing, I considered whether I would look back in two hours with relief or with regret.</span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I wanted to stop and tell everyone that I needed to sit and rest, but did I want that because I was about to faint or because I'm essentially weak-willed and give up too easily when faced with physical difficulty. There is some precedent for the latter.</span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Two things happened. First, my pride and my desire to impress my new coworkers and teammates made all of my questioning irrelevant. I've been at my job for less than two months, and beyond my desire to get out on the diamond and do something I love, I also want to build camraderie and relationships, especially since my boss and my boss's boss are both playing with me. I refused to show weakness.</span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Second, I stayed upright and even managed to get in a few more at-bats before the practice was over. I hung in there. I may have learned something more valuable if I had passed out, something about not being driven by pride and fear, but I lucked out and saved that lesson for another day.</span></div>
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<span style="color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I also had a stupid grin on my face all night. This is going to be fun.</span></div>
Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08459329833381496473noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6591346.post-1484549689627830402012-07-17T22:17:00.002-04:002012-08-04T11:37:47.815-04:00Are you happy?<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A few months ago I found this picture on some random website:</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIB7IOZWAa_e85N8KVgpDzSNZwJJ8WlrUDoyHvblgYLp4czpT8wuLuPCsgkSb2lUS-3kWpAHgOXnldz7DFWE61zWNZO4J3LzjQEOKguDunHOx_sxUhlkqieZaWmpyzd-qoD8fmuw/s1600/areyouhappy_a2_web_1024.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIB7IOZWAa_e85N8KVgpDzSNZwJJ8WlrUDoyHvblgYLp4czpT8wuLuPCsgkSb2lUS-3kWpAHgOXnldz7DFWE61zWNZO4J3LzjQEOKguDunHOx_sxUhlkqieZaWmpyzd-qoD8fmuw/s320/areyouhappy_a2_web_1024.jpg" width="226" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And I'd gotten to this point in my life, where I could really say that, if you were to add everything together, the answer would be, "Yes, I'm happy. Probably happier than I ever thought I could be."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This is a good thing.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Not everything in our lives will always be perfect, and I get that. For example, I wasn't happy in my job. I spent a year and a half going back to school, finally getting the college degree that I quit working on so many years ago. Then I ended up right back in retail. I went back to school to get out of retail, and there I was again, just as miserable at work as I'd ever been. But I found a new job, and I'm much happier, less of the whole overworked-and-underpaid thing going on, and things are pretty good.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">If you're unhappy, you should really analyze why you're unhappy. Dig deep. Don't settle for easy excuses. I was unhappy at work because I will never really enjoy retail, plain and simple. No matter how good the company is or isn't, retail isn't my game. Long term? I'd like to teach or to train, or to work on creating programs to educate or train people. I'd like to think that if I practice enough, I might eventually make a few dollars putting words down on paper. Retail doesn't really come into any of those plans, though. So I found a way to change something.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And then the other day I read this article online talking about the 10 things that Americans don't know about America. I always click on these stupid "Top 10 Things" lists despite the fact that most of them aren't all that good. This one, though, buried somewhere in the list, had this perfect little gem. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"Most Americans mistake comfort for happiness."</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Now, I'm a 35 year old male. I spend my days sitting at a desk, and my nights sitting on a couch or staring at my laptop at the kitchen table. I am, at the risk of repeating myself, hopelessly out of shape. My back hurts from the weight of my belly. I couldn't do a pushup if you promised me a bacon cheeseburger, and I get winded just starting the lawnmower. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">My clothes don't fit like they used to. I swore I would never buy 36-inch-waist pants, and those 36-inch pants that I bought anyway are now starting to feel tight. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I am in a surprising amount of discomfort all the time.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Somewhere in between my teen years -- when I played basketball every day, hiked whenever I got a chance, played baseball with the neighbors, and ran a respectable mile -- and now, I've become a slob, and I don't even know how it happened. One day, I was pretty proud of my jump shot and my lung capacity, and the next day I found myself going back for thirds of that weird chicken-and-rice-and-gooey-cheddar-cheese dish.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">At the risk of improperly tying together the concepts of comfort and happiness, I'm going to say that I'd be happier if the discomfort I'm bound to feel every day left me with some sense of accomplishment and well-being.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Yes. I'm talking about exercise. I'm talking about food that only on very rare occasions involves bacon and cheeseburgers.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It's time to take the picture I posted above to heart. It's time to change something.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I don't always plan on writing about my own personal physical fitness hell. But for now, it'll do.</span></div>
<br />Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08459329833381496473noreply@blogger.com