Astronomy (Stars not Horoscopes)

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.

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: 

"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!"

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

Welcome!

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.

Why?

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.

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!

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.

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.

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 The Lord of the Rings. 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.

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.

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.

So I’ve waited, and I have a plan and a vision.

Here’s the plan:

Write something 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.

And here’s the vision:

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.

This blog will be honest.

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.

Welcome and thanks for starting this journey with me.

Name and Titles

I've been thinking about titles and names lately.

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.

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.

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 read 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.

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.

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!"

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).

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.

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.

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." 

The Wall

Here's a fact about me that not everyone knows. I love baseball.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

I also had a stupid grin on my face all night. This is going to be fun.

Are you happy?

A few months ago I found this picture on some random website:

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."

This is a good thing.

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.

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.

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. 

"Most Americans mistake comfort for happiness."

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. 

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. 

I am in a surprising amount of discomfort all the time.

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.

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.

Yes. I'm talking about exercise. I'm talking about food that only on very rare occasions involves bacon and cheeseburgers.

It's time to take the picture I posted above to heart. It's time to change something.

I don't always plan on writing about my own personal physical fitness hell. But for now, it'll do.