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Never Trust a Person who Doesn't Like Vacation

I’m just back from enjoying a few days away with my family. During our little sojourn away from the confines of our home, some things occurred to me. My apologies for the randomness of the following thoughts, but if you’re looking for something to tie them all together, then we can say that they all came to me while on vacation.

--We began our trip with a night of camping at a state park. It’s the first night that all six people in our family camped together, and overall I think we had a good time. It’s only the second time in almost twelve years that I’ve been camping, and it’s the first time that I noticed how much RVs have taken over campgrounds. Ever since my first camping experience with my dad at a Cub Scout camp when I was nine years old, I’ve always thought of camping as sleeping in a tent. But at some point that changed. There were about 290 campsites at the state park where we stayed, and since it was a Wednesday night, only about half were taken. But out of those 145 campsites, at least half had no tents, but rather RVs or campers of some sort! My first inclination was to vilify those who claim to be camping while bringing along comforts of home such as a soft bed, a kitchen, a bathroom, and even satellite television! I noticed a significant lack of socializing. Camping reminds me of people staying in tents, and being surrounded by other people in tents, and since everyone has a tent, everyone’s outside and strangers end up talking to each other, exchanging Where-are-you-froms and just enjoying a communal experience. A good deal of that is lost when people hole up in their RV. However, I’ll try not to scorn the RVers too much. At least they’re out enjoying nature. Maybe they like canoeing, fishing, bicycling, hiking and all things outdoors, but just don’t like sleeping in a tent. Better to sleep in an RV than to never leave your home in the first place, right?

--After camping we went to a town on the shore of Lake Michigan. My wife’s family owns a house right on the beach, and we reserved it for a few days. It’s a very nice place that’s old, but that is being gorgeously refurbished over the past few years, and the view and location are priceless. But it’s dwarfed by the other many-thousand square foot, and multi-million dollars houses that surround it. We spent three or four days and nights on the beach, enjoying the sun, sand and surf. And although there are dozens of houses along the same stretch of beach, there were rarely other people on the beach. What’s the point of having a house on the beach if you never go down to the beach? They might as well have built their mega-mansions in front of a large mural.

--It’s nice being in the western most part of the time zone to your east. I’m used to the sun setting around eight-thirty in the summer, and dusk lasting until almost nine. However, the eastern shore of Lake Michigan is in a different time zone. Daylight lasting until ten o’clock is fantastic!  

--Sunscreen is one of those products whose benefits are best understood when it’s not used. We don’t appreciate skin that isn’t sunburned until we have skin that is.

--Fishing is considered a hobby. Someone who’s sitting around doing nothing is said to be wasting time. Often there’s no difference between the two.

--Satellite radio is a fun service. I like being able to listen to all sorts of music and interesting news and talk shows. It’s also convenient for long trips because there’s no limit to the signal’s range like there is with radio. Satellite radio works when ground stations send a signal up to satellites orbiting 22,000 miles above the earth, which then send scrambled signals back down to the car radio, which then unscrambles the signals and plays sound. It’s awesomely impressive technology. Still it boggles my mind how I can receive a signal in the middle of nowhere, dozens of miles from the nearest town, yet the signal can’t overcome the roof overhang on a McDonald’s drive-thru. Yep, only static while waiting for my large Diet Coke. 

Summer Time

The theme song to a popular Disney Channel show claims “there’s a hundred and four days of summer vacation ‘til school comes along just to end it.” Lyrics then describe the various ways that an adventurous pair of boys spend their summer.

Oh, if only it were true.

We’re being sung a lie! There aren’t a hundred and four days of summer vacation, and I don’t know what kind of calculation these people performed to arrive at that number. Maybe they go to some sort of special shortened-calendar school. If that’s the case, then good for them. I’m jealous. So are my kids.

Or maybe they chose 104 for rhythmic reasons of song writing. They wrote a catchy tune, so at least they have that going for them, since their math skills are atrocious. Although their math skills probably improve every time they deposit one of those fat royalty checks from Uncle Walt.

But I’m still not letting them off the hook. Summer vacation isn’t 104 days long. In fact, thanks to that wicked waste of a season we call winter, and the accompanying cold/snow days, my kids will enjoy a summer vacation five days shorter than last summer. There are seventy-five days of summer vacation this year.

My kids and I have been counting down until the last day of school and it’s been difficult to avoid stealing their excitement. Although I graduated high school eighteen years ago, I still remember that euphoric feeling when the entire summer lay ahead. It seemed anything was possible, even if most days consisted of little more than waking up, watching television, running around the neighborhood, eating sugary snacks, staying up way too late and watching more bad television, and then falling asleep before doing the same thing all over again the following day.

I’m an adult now and I don’t get summer vacation. I have vacation time, but only a few weeks per year, and I’m quite sure that my boss would have a few choice words for me if I tried to take all of my vacation time at once. Since I won’t get a summer vacation, I’m forced to live through my kids, hence the excitement about their last day of school.

(To show how ridiculously in love I am with summer vacation, you should know that I made a paper chain in August to count down the days until the last day of school. The chain had 175 links when I made it. Just five days into the school year I don’t think the kids were even thinking about the last day of school, but I was!)

Even though it’s not my summer vacation, it seems entirely too short. Seventy-five days is nothing! It takes more time than that to grow a decent tomato. That’s less than half the baseball season, and not even three full moons (depending on the cycle, of course). When did summer vacation become so short?

Actually, I don’t think the vacations have gotten any shorter. Summer vacation is about as long for my kids as it was for me. The only thing that has changed is me. I’ve gotten older.

And maybe that’s the real reason for the exaggerated summer vacation length in the Disney song. For those of us who have to look into the past to see our childhood, time continues to have its way with us. Those seventy-something days of summer vacation when we were kids might have been the equivalent of 104 days at our current age. I don’t know if it’s a scientifically proven fact that time passes more quickly as we get older, but it should be. We’re adults now, and looking back at those long, hot days we imagine that our vacations must have been longer.

Luckily I don’t think my kids have inherited the affliction that causes me to constantly think about time. They won’t have a secret hatred for the 4^th of July just because it’s a sign that summer’s close to half over. They’ll be too busy enjoying the summer, and doing things kids should be doing: playing in the backyard, walking to the park, staying up late, and maybe even locating Frankenstein’s brain.

Not Doing Anything Cool Now? Just Wait.

This week marks twenty years since I started keeping a journal. You can call it a diary if you want, I don’t care. It won’t make me feel any less manly. I was sixteen years old when I started the journal, and back then I’m pretty sure I called it a journal instead of a diary because I didn’t want to be girly, but now I don’t care.

That’s just one thing that has changed in twenty years.

I can’t remember why I started keeping a journal. Robert Parker, my eleventh grade American History teacher, brought his journals into class one time. He had something like thirty years worth of journals, and I remember thinking how awesome that was. Simple math tells me that I was in tenth grade twenty years ago though, so I had already been keeping my journal for a year by the time Mr. Parker talked to the class about his journals.

I’ve read that initial entry numerous times. The first few pages of that first notebook have torn away from the spiral binding, and the cover is gone. The print has faded or dirtied from years of being stuffed beneath my bed, but it’s still there. I can look at that notebook and read about the important things in sixteen-year-old Brett’s life.

Thankfully, thirty-six-year-old Brett is a lot different from the kid who began that journal.

For the most part, there’s nothing Earth shattering in my journals. Anyone who didn’t know me might not find them too interesting, and I’m probably flattering myself to think that anyone who does know me would like them much better.

But that leads me to the interesting thing about journals. They’re like fine wine: they get better with age.

You can write a journal entry today, and re-read it and wonder, “Why did I bother wasting my time writing that? It’s banal, mundane, boring. Who cares that I got the oil changed, and then went out for pizza and then came home and watched The Americans?”

And if you’re thinking those things, you’re right. No one presently cares about what you write in your journal.

They’ll care later though!

Twenty years from now you’ll read that same entry and marvel at how much you paid for an oil change, or long for pizza from that place that closed, or wonder if The Americans is as good as you remember it. The entries you write today are going to be different tomorrow, and they’ll change a little bit every single day because you change a little bit every single day. You change, people around you change, technology changes, your perceptions change, your opinions change, your memories change.

Even the way you keep your journal might change. When I first started I wrote in a notebook and recorded the time I began and ended each entry. Someday I plan to add up all those minutes to see how many days of my life I devoted to writing like that. (Exciting, huh?) I deserted the hand-written journal in favor of writing on a computer a few years back though. I had too much to write and not enough time to write it by hand, so the richness of hand-written words had to succumb to the realities of time and events.

And the more things change, the more valuable it is to have a record of how things used to be. You might not know of any good reason why you’d want to know what you did on some random Sunday fifteen years ago, but you also never know when a journal will come in handy. Maybe you won’t solve any of the world’s problems with your journal, but the next time you try to remember whether Uncle Claude spilled the bottle of red wine on the new carpet at Thanksgiving in 1996 or 1997, you’d be able to look it up if you had a journal.

So if you don’t keep a journal, you should start. Even if it’s just a few sentences per day, it’s better than nothing. And even if you don’t feel like doing it, you should. Someone—maybe even you—will be thankful someday that you did. And if you think that nothing you say or do is worth writing about, write about it anyway. Because eighty years from now someone might find your journal, and they might think that your boring, uneventful day was awesome.

Imagine what it’d be like to read what your grandmother did on May 17, 1934. If she kept a journal you wouldn’t have to imagine it. You could read it. And it’d be much more interesting than she thought!

Thought for Food

As a teenager, and again right after college, I worked in a grocery store. The two stints totaled about six years, and I did just about every job you could imagine, except meat cutter.

(Meat cutting is a skill that has to be developed. Keeping track of all of those different cuts and varieties of meat isn’t something learned quickly. Although I do think it stops well short of making a meat cutter capable of performing surgery on a human body, a claim made by a veteran meat cutter for one of the companies where I worked.)

Working in a grocery store imparts a certain amount of wisdom upon those who pay attention. Since everyone shops at a grocery store—rich, poor, young, old, black, white, brown, yellow, red—we get to know people from a wide swath of the community. And as any grocery worker will tell you, there’s no difference among people when they enter a grocery store. They’re all equal in their moronocity, which is a word I might have just invented. It describes the moronic level of a person.

People of great intellect outside of grocery stores are reduced to bumbling primates. Normally courteous people leave a trail of germs for other customers. Mathematicians forget how to count.

I’m not saying these things to be mean. I’m saying them so we can recognize there are problems. If you haven’t worked in a grocery store, you might not even know the problems exist. Perhaps you’re familiar with other manifestations of these problems if you work with the public in other fields, but some of them are distinctly grocery in nature.

So, as a public service to you, I have a few tips to keep in mind the next time you’re in a grocery store. The grocery employees will appreciate your new wisdom, as will your fellow shopper, although they might not even realize they’re benefitting from it.

Without further ado…

--Unless you have difficulty walking, you’re going to get into the store much quicker if you take that empty fifteenth space in the row than if you wait for the woman backing out of the second space in the row.

--The display of grapes in the produce department is not a free buffet. You know what grapes taste like. True, there is some variance in taste and firmness, so if you must try one grape, go ahead. Better still to squeeze a lone grape through the bag. Whatever you do, there’s no need to take an entire handful of grapes to chomp on as you walk through the store.

--There are other people in the store besides you, so try not to park your cart in the middle of the aisle.

--If something is empty on the shelf, then in all likelihood there is none “in the back.” And if you find someone to go check “in the back,” there’s a high likelihood that that person is going “in the back,” sitting on a stack of boxes for a minute, and then coming out and telling you there is no more.

--If you drop something and it breaks, please tell us so we can clean it up before every other customer drives their cart through it and drags it around the store. We won’t yell at you or even charge you for whatever your broke. Probably.

--If you can’t operate the self-check lanes, don’t use the self-check lanes.

--Express lanes. You see the sign. You know how to count. Don’t be a jerk.

--If an item doesn’t scan the first time, it’s not free. And believe it or not, you’re not the first person to come up with that idea.

--If an item doesn’t ring up with the right price, it’s more likely than not that you looked at the wrong tag.

--Most places will adjust the price of something that is “ringing up wrong.” They do this not because they know they made a mistake, but because it’s just easier than proving to you that the customer is not always right.

--At the end of your visit you’re going to have to pay for the things you buy. Best if you have your payment method ready. If you wait to dig into your wallet until the cashier tells you your total you’ve waited too long and you’re making things slower for everyone.

There you have it. My tips to you. There are plenty more where these came from. And if you think they don’t apply to you, please re-read them, because they do. The only way to make sure they never apply to you is to go work in a grocery store for a number of years.

I dare you.

Mad World

It’s NCAA tournament time. Or March Madness as it’s called. I think that name came from the seemingly unpredictable nature of men’s college basketball during the month. It might just as easily have come from the feeling we get when we discover that those tournament brackets that we filled out oh-so-carefully have become worthless.

I don’t follow college basketball as much as I used to. I can probably name more players in the Big Ten from the 1993-94 season than the 2013-14 season. I still pay attention every March though, and after Selection Sunday I still fill out a bracket, just like every other person with even a passing interest in sports.

And inevitably, usually by the following Friday, when the tournament is actually half over, my bracket is a mishmash of circles and lines—mostly lines—indicating which of my choices won and which lost. Then I beat myself up for not having foreseen that number thirteen seed upsetting the four seed. “It’s so obvious! How could I have missed it?” Psychological researchers have a term for this: Hindsight bias. We know all the answers after the fact!

That’s so annoying.

Maybe the only thing more annoying is seeing the brackets chosen by “experts” in college basketball. The “experts” inevitably choose mostly number one seeds to make it to the Final Four. Gee whiz, picking the best teams to win really takes a lot of expertise. Never mind that in the long history of the tournament all four number one seeds have made the Final Four only once. Experts continue to have foresight ignorance (I just coined that term) and pick the favorites to win. Is it bad that I gain a fairly large amount of joy from seeing experts look foolish?

The big story this year though is about the $1 billion challenge that some company is offering. If you correctly choose the winner of the 63 tournament games (after the play-in games) you’ll win $1 billion. Don’t go buying yourself a new house yet though. The chances of a choosing a perfect bracket are 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 to 1. That’s 9.2 quintillion. To one.

Let’s think of that another way. Every single person on the planet would have to complete 1.3 billion brackets each to ensure that someone would complete a perfect bracket. I’ve only done one bracket so far, so I guess it’s probably not going to happen.

I saw a story earlier today where some outplacement firm (what the heck is an outplacement firm?) estimated that March Madness costs the U.S. economy $1.2 billion in lost productivity. That sounds like one of the 64% of statistics that are made up on the spot! No doubt this is the work of some manager who can’t stand to see his employees having a little fun.

Maybe we’ll see those two stories come together. If someone chooses a perfect bracket maybe they can donate their $1 billion to the U.S. economy, so it only loses $200 million. Then, when you throw in the $1 bracket pools that take place in offices across the country, there’s probably no loss at all!

It’s no small coincidence that the NCAA Tournament championship game takes place in April. Most of the madness occurs in the early rounds in March. Unless there’s some underdog team playing, many people have lost interest by the time the championship game is on. All of our brackets are in the recycling bin by then, and when a team cuts down the nets we try to think back to three weeks earlier and figure out how we couldn’t have seen it coming.

Two weeks later no one even remembers who played in the championship game.

So I’ll monitor scores over the next few days and hope that my bracket doesn’t end up in the garbage before the work week is over. I know how it’ll turn out though. It’ll turn out the same way it always turns out: I’ll yell a few choice words about the bracket itself and become consumed with an irrational hatred for some small school that didn’t beat the powerhouse school like I predicted. Only this year I’ll have the added disappointment of not winning the billion dollars!

Madness indeed.

Schoolhouse Clock!

I read an article about a movement to push back the start time for high school students. Proponents of the movement claim that scientific research shows that the natural body clock of teenagers causes them to become tired later at night, which makes waking early for school difficult. They’re tired in class, and don’t learn as much as they would if they were well-rested. So the answer to this is to begin school later in the day to give the kids more time to sleep.

Are you kidding me?

Not to sound like an old fogey, but when I was in high school class started at 7:35 and the day ended at 2:35. We might have fantasized about the school district changing the start time to accommodate our lack of sleep, but I wouldn’t have expected them to actually do so.

Girl’97 is a junior in high school. Honestly, I don’t know what time she goes to bed, other than she’s asleep most nights by 10:30. Her school day begins at 7:45. This semester she’s taking a swimming class, which just happens to be first hour. So she’s in the pool and doing laps no later than 8:00. Yesterday she swam just under a mile in class, meaning she’d done more by 9:00 a.m. than most people did all day. Luckily, Girl’97 doesn’t seem to have much of a problem managing the 7:45 start time. Sure, sometimes she’s a bit surly in the morning, but mostly she’s just fine.

Similarly, I’m quite sure that many high school students have contended with early start times for the past century or so. You know, probably since labor laws were implemented and they began going to high school instead of waking at 5:30 to go work at a job.

I don’t mean to sound unsympathetic to the tired teenager’s plight, but I’m unsympathetic to the tired teenager’s plight. And if I were sympathetic, moving the beginning of the school day back doesn’t seem like the best solution.

Districts allow students to begin later because they know that students can’t get themselves to bed early enough to get eight hours of sleep. Yet they believe that these same students will have the self-discipline not to stay up an hour later since they know they don’t have to wake up as early?

The article mentions scientific studies that show that teenagers have a later release of the hormone melatonin, causing them to frequently not feel tired until 11:00 p.m. The glow of electronic devices can further delay the tired feeling, which is problematic since according to one study 88 percent of teenagers keep a cellphone in their room.

The implication that teenagers should begin school later because their biology tells them to stay up later ignores one simple fact: teenagers don’t go to sleep when they’re tired; they go to sleep when they want to!

There are two great points of irony in the article. In one instance a school district pushed back the start of their day from 7:55 to 8:55, which means the day ended at 4:05. Now student athletes frequently skip their last class so they can make away games on time. Sleeping through first hour: unacceptable. Skipping last hour for extracurricular activity: fine.

Right?

In that school district, one girl pushed for the later start time. She was frequently late for class when school started at 7:55. Now that the school district changed the start time and the day doesn’t begin until 8:55…she’s still late for class.

It’s safe to say that tired teenagers will be a problem for as long as society demands that teenagers do anything they don’t want to do. Is that a problem? Maybe. But it’s a problem that millions of teenagers have somehow overcome for decades. They might face a bigger problem when they leave high school and discover that the rest of the world isn’t going to change the hours of operation simply because they can’t get themselves to bed.  

Teenagers are unique. They’re not little children, they’re not mature adults. They’re learning how the world works, while already thinking they know how the world works. Instead of pushing back the beginning of the day, maybe we’d be better of with a simple three word set of instructions that apply to many different situations including when to go to bed and when to get to school: Be on time.

Damn you Winter!

Around five-thirty this morning, I looked out the window and saw white. Just as the trusty television weather folks had predicted, a winter storm rolled through overnight. It dropped some inches of snow, although about ten fewer inches than one sensationalist weatherman suggested might be possible a couple of nights ago.

It was a messy snow, the kind accompanied by fierce winds whose currents deposit drifts in a seemingly random pattern. Six inches here. Two feet there. Bare pavement over there. Some of that snow ends up stuck in the window screen and makes things look much worse than they actually are, but I could still tell it sucked.

But I did my duty and bundled up and went outside to shovel. (Yes, shovel. No snowblower here.) As soon as I started shoveling I realized that this was wet, heavy snow, unlike most of the powdery stuff we’ve had this winter. (Close to eighty inches of it, by the way!) And this wet, heavy snow, although nice for snowmen and snowballs, is a pain to shovel. Perhaps the only good thing about it is that it scrapes up from the sidewalk cleanly.

That’s what winter does to us. It forces us to look at the bright side of shoveling heavy, wet snow on a day that could have just as easily been seventy degrees and sunny.

The other thing that winter does is make us thankful.

There have been many cold days over the past few months when I’ve been outside with three layers of clothes, a frosty beard, and partially numb fingertips, trying to find a place to throw the latest inches of snow. The flakes came so fast and so often in weather so cold that I began to run out of room to put it. Piles at the end of my driveway grew taller than me, and a four-feet-high, twenty-feet-long snow wall separated my driveway from my neighbor’s. I watched the games in Sochi confident that if shoveling were an Olympic event I’d practiced enough to medal this year. 

Sometimes the only thing that kept me from becoming a less-crazy version of Jack Torrance (“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”) and stabbing at the mountainous piles of snow with my shovel while screaming obscenities was the thought that spring had to arrive sometime. And when it did, I’d enjoy it even more than in previous years thanks to the lousiness of this winter.

I think there’s something to that. Those of us who live in cold weather climates and have to suffer through months of weather forecasts that elicit such pitiful responses as “At least it’s only a few inches,” or “At least it’s above zero” enjoy the warmth much more than those who are in it year round.

Those jerks in warm weather locales don’t even appreciate what they have. “I’ve never seen snow,” they say, as though snow was a leprechaun and they had to see it to believe it. Well come on up, you warm weather wimps, and take a look at what we have here. Drive in it, shovel it, cancel plans because of it. Then maybe you’ll keep your mouth shut!

Winter is exercise. It’s what we have to do so we can enjoy summer, which is pizza and cheesecake. And we’re tougher because of it. We’re strong and lean and our pizza and cheesecake tastes better than theirs. They’re soft and lazy because they do nothing but eat pizza cheesecake. They do no exercise.

Figuratively speaking of course.   

It could be that I’m just jealous of warm weather places, but I don’t think so. I can complain about winter (hey, you do it to!), but even as I shiver in my car as I drive to get a gallon of milk at nine o’clock at night, I know that spring will be so much better because of it. Someday I’ll have the windows down and my arm hanging out as I drive to get that milk. The snow will be a distant memory. The reassuring scent of a distant skunk (an animal that has enough sense to spend the winter in a den and wait for spring) will permeate the air. The sound of cicadas and crickets will mesmerize me.

And maybe then I won’t be so angry at the warm weather people.

Until next winter.

Invented Problems for New Solutions

I read recently that Netflix agreed to a deal with Comcast to ensure faster access to their content. Details of the deal haven’t been announced, but it’s safe to say that Netflix will pay a large chunk of change to Comcast, and in return, Comcast will allow Netflix’s content to stream quickly over its lines. This will help alleviate some complaints that Netflix has received regarding loading and buffering delays of its content.

A couple of things about this really amaze me. One, it’s legal for a company providing internet access to accept money from a company providing content in exchange for faster access to that content. Good luck to anyone who wants to compete with Netflix. Two, we’ve reached the point where waiting for a movie to load or buffer is enough of an inconvenience that people will actually complain about it!

Thousands of films and television shows can be delivered directly to our living rooms. This is done instantly. Through wires we can’t even see. Or maybe not even through wires at all. And yet some of us still complain about a minutes-long delay in these programs loading. Imagine if we had to revert back to an earlier day in which the only opportunity to watch an old film or television show was to wait for it to appear on some local channel late at night.

Oh the humanity!

Technological developments of recent years are fascinating. But perhaps the most incredible invention of all is the invention of the continuous need for these things. Technology is cool, and it solves problems, but it also invents them. How else do we explain a company that’s willing to pay millions of dollars to eliminate a minutes or sometimes seconds-long delay in the operation of their product? A product, by the way, that only six years ago we were amazed even existed.

So instead of coming up with solutions for problems we didn’t even know we had, (“My, that picture on my television just looks incredibly fuzzy. If only I could purchase an expensive new television with a clearer picture,” said no one ever in the years immediately preceding the marketing of HDTVs), I propose a national effort to solve real problems. The sort of problems that drive us all crazy, but we probably rarely think about.

Now, you might think that some of these things aren’t really problems, or that they already have solutions. But if we accepted that answer, then most of the consumer electronics industry wouldn’t exist.

So my call to do better:

When the light turns green, why does it take half a minute before the fifteen cars ahead of me begin to accelerate? We all know it’s green. Why aren’t we all going at the same time, or at least a little sooner than we are now?

By now shouldn’t someone have invented a more effective way to remove snow from streets than a snowplow?

How about a door that prevents people wearing too much cologne or perfume from entering a building?

Why must pop (or soda or coke, depending on where you are) taste so much better from a fountain than a can? Let’s fix that.

Bar soap works great for ninety percent of its life. Then it gets down to a little nub and becomes practically worthless. It falls to the shower floor and slowly washes away. It’s like a soap tithe to the shower. How can we get around that?  

Pencils and crayons, too. Why do we just accept the waste that goes along with throwing away usable portions of these items?

Surely we can invent a better toothpaste tube, can’t we? At least it seems like people are trying to do something about this. The stand-up tubes with the pull-back dispenser at the top is marginally more effective, but also messier.

How about a razor that works, won’t end up in a landfill, doesn’t cost an arm and a leg, and isn’t something that I might accidentally kill myself with while using it?

Public restrooms. Enough said, isn’t it?

And for the love of God, would someone please figure out a way to take the calories out of cheesecake?

Is that too much to ask?

If Only I Could...

One of the disadvantages of becoming an adult is that we stop thinking about some of the things that occupy our minds as children. Okay, so maybe it’s not always a disadvantage. I mean, I’m happy that I no longer have to worry about some of the things that come with being a kid, like being cool or popular. (That ship sailed long ago!) But there are many thoughts we have as kids that seemingly never occupy our minds after a certain age.

Foremost on this list are superpowers. Sure, every busy adult at one time or another has probably wished for a duplicate version of themselves. That’s not really wishing for a superpower though. That’s more of a complaint about the busyness and chaos of adulthood. The same with wishing there were more hours in a day. Most adults who wish for such a thing do so because twenty-four hours isn’t enough for them to complete their everyday responsibilities, not because they want special time-bending powers to do something awesome.

But kids think about superpowers all the time. Once when Boy’04 was little, probably three years old, we were playing and he told me that he wanted to fly. I picked him up and carried him around the room as we always did, and he started yelling.

“Not like that. I don’t want you to make me fly. I want to fly for real! When can I learn to fly?”

It seemed perfectly reasonable to him that he’d learn to fly just as he had learned to talk or walk. If Buzz Lightyear could do it, then why not him? Unfortunately, I had to explain to him that he’d never be able to fly on his own. 

Complete disappointment.

I think our desire for particular superpowers changes as we get older, too. When I was ten or eleven years old I remember watching wrestling and wishing that I had super strength that would allow me to get in the wrestling ring and defeat Ric Flair. It’s a safe bet that I would have sold my soul to the devil for such a power back then. But it would have been a reasonable trade since Flair always came so close to getting beat, and there’s no way he could have remained champion if I’d had super strength. And if I wasn’t ten years old.

I’m ashamed to say that four or five years later I remember having a discussion about superpowers with a few of my friends. I can’t remember the powers they wanted, but I had the ingenious idea that if only I could be invisible I’d walk into the girls’ locker room at school and have a look around! (What a delinquent.) Now that I mention it, I think I might have seen that in a movie, but I’m not sure. No doubt there are boys around the world right now who would accept such a power.

These days I’ve reverted back to a more wholesome superpower desire. I’d choose flying if I could. Just like three-year-old Boy’04. Of course, that’s stipulating that the power to heal disease or world hunger or protect my loved ones was off the table. We’re talking pure selfishness here.

But even if I think about superpowers, I can’t pretend I have them. If a seven-year-old boy is outside playing and pretending he’s flying around the yard, people will think it’s cute. If I pretended to do the same thing people would think I was having a breakdown.

Like everything else with growing up, I suppose our desire for superpowers changes. Girl’97 wishes she could read people’s minds. She’s right on the cusp between childhood and adulthood, and her superpower choice falls perfectly in between. It would never even occur to an elementary school kid to want to read someone’s mind. I’d probably reject that superpower if it were offered to me. But for a teenager it could be invaluable.

Thinking about these changes as we get older makes me wonder if the most universal desire is for the ability to control time. When we’re younger we want it to go faster, but as we get older we want it to slow down. And since we’re often happiest when we’re simply enjoying the moment and not thinking about the past or the future, perhaps it’s a good thing that none of these powers exist outside of our own minds.  

Donna Day

I’ve not written for a few days (hey, I’ve been busy, give me a break), and in thinking about today’s column a couple of different ideas danced around in my head. One is about super powers, and how our desire for them changes as we grow, and the other is about problems, those we invent and those we don’t even try to solve. Both amused me as I thought about them, and maybe they’d amuse you if I wrote about them.

Then I went on Facebook and this column wrote itself.

Today is Donna Day. Don’t know what Donna Day is? Well, lucky for you there’s an internet and there we can find all sorts of information. Even information about Donna Day. Or Donna’s Story.

But if you’re one of those people who aren’t going to go clicking on links all willy-nilly, then let me explain. Donna was a girl. Born in 2005. Diagnosed with cancer in 2007. She died in 2009, just over four years old. I didn’t know her and I don’t know her parents. But her mom writes some pretty incredible stuff, both about Donna’s story and her own story as a parent of a child with cancer.

Donna Day is the day where bloggers get together and ask their readers to donate some money to try and cure pediatric cancer.

So, dear reader, here’s the plan: We’re going to donate to St. Baldrick’s Foundation, which is the foremost pediatric cancer research fundraising organization. Those of you who know me will remember that Boy’04 and Boy’06 participated with me in St. Baldrick’s fundraisers in the past. In the four or five years that we participated, we raised over $2,000, thanks to generous family and friends. I’m proud of that.

This year we’re not going to shave. But you can still donate. Give to St. Baldrick’s in Donna’s Name, and the organization her parents started after her death, Donna’s Good Things.

I can’t think of anything more difficult to think about, but more necessary to act against, than childhood cancer.

It’s easy to ignore. No one wants to read a sad story that frequently ends in a child’s death. It’s much easier to just scroll on past the link and watch some cutesy video or chuckle at the latest meme. But cancer cannot be ignored. If it’s ignored, it prospers. The only way to eliminate it is to focus on it. Think about it. Do something about it. Act.

Cancer will affect about 1 in 300 kids before they turn twenty years old. Do you know how many kids that is? Think about your child’s elementary school. The statistics say that one kid in that school is going to get cancer before they turn twenty. So although you don’t know a kid with cancer now, there’s a good chance that you will in the future.

And if you’re lucky, all you’ll have to do is explain to your child why their friend is no longer in school. Or why their friend is now bald. Or why their friend can’t go outside for recess. Or why every car suddenly has a ribbon on it. And eventually, if things turn out how they often do for kids with cancer, why so many adults have tears in their eyes, or why the school had a moment of silence to start the day.

Those are difficult conversations to have. Your kids might not understand. They might cry. They might get upset. They might miss their friend.

But you’re lucky, because your child is still there.

It boggles my mind that this is still even a problem. It shouldn’t be a problem. It should be a thing. Kids should be confused by it. Sort of like when we mention a time before the internet. Imagine a world where kids learn about cancer in history books instead of doctor’s offices.

Donna’s mom isn’t raising awareness and raising funds to prevent cancer in Donna. It’s too late for her. She’s trying to prevent cancer in someone else’s child. She’s doing something. She’s taking action. And no matter how difficult it is, we can’t ignore it. We all need to think, to act, to give.

And it just occurred to me that even though I didn’t write the blog I planned to write, I still ended up writing about super powers and solving problems.  

Self-trophying

I sometimes hear people complain that in today’s society, “everyone gets a trophy.” This is usually in reference to the common practice in youth sports leagues of giving trophies to all players simply for participating. “If everyone gets a trophy, then the trophy doesn’t mean anything,” they say. Or, “In real life you don’t get a trophy all the time.”

Those things might be true. Life is tough and there are winners and losers. We all learn that lesson someday though, and whether or not everyone getting a trophy prevents kids from learning that lesson in a timely fashion is not a question I’m prepared to answer. I will say, however, that in real life (by which I assume people mean “adult” life), no one cares how well you can hit, kick or catch a ball either, but that doesn’t stop us from acting like it’s important.

But the real reason that I’m not prepared to comment on the rightness or wrongness of everybody getting a trophy is because I give myself trophies all the time, and rarely do I do anything to deserve them.

(Just so we’re clear here, I don’t give myself actual trophies. That would be weird. I’m talking virtual trophies here. Anyone who has ever had a real trophy knows that those things fall apart after a year or two, and anyway, who needs the clutter?)

For instance, the parking situation at my place of employment is pretty lousy. There are hundreds of street parking spaces, but they’re usually filled by the time I get to work. But if by chance I get to work and there’s an empty space right in front of my building, I’ll park there. And then, as I walk into work, there’s an extra spring in my step as though I did something special. I feel a sense of accomplishment. I’ll tell my co-workers where I parked.

 But what did I do? I pushed a pedal and steered a wheel to a certain place and happened to get there at the exact time a space big enough for my car opened up.

In other words, I did nothing.

And it’s not just parking.

On more than one occasion I’ve cracked open an egg while cooking and come across a double yolk! Great Caesar’s Ghost you’d think I’d just split the atom or something. I’ll show my wife and kids and they’ll look at the two yolks and say, “That’s awesome!” or something equivalent, and then go about their day.

I’ll get so excited that I consider taking a picture of the two yolks and posting it on Facebook.

Or write a blog post about it.

It’s like I personally put those two yolks in that egg. But I didn’t. Obviously. I didn’t even purposely choose that egg. The two yolks showed up by mere chance. That doesn’t stop me from giving myself a Best Double Yolk Finder trophy.

Maybe we just have to enjoy the small things in life. I mean what’s more exciting than flipping open a big, thick book with hundreds of pages and landing on the exact page you intended? Nothing, that’s what!

Pure chance or a skill honed by years of practice? I think my Expert Book Opener trophy answers that question.

 But perhaps the most ridiculous self-trophying that I do involves my television. We have a DVR and at the moment that DVR is approximately 55% full. That’s dozens of hours of television shows, movies and cartoons. One movie has been on there since 2011, I think.

If I had nothing to do this weekend, and sat down and watched twenty hours of television and got that DVR down to only 37% full, I’d feel like I really accomplished something. I’d think the weekend was productive. Yet what did I do? I sat on my butt and looked at something. That’s about as close as you can get to doing nothing without actually doing nothing!

Does it deserve a Champion DVR Clearer trophy?

Absolutely.

So does everyone deserve a trophy? I don’t know. Maybe kids in youth sports deserve trophies simply for putting up with adults for the entire season. That’s an accomplishment to be proud of!

Lies When the Truth Doesn't Matter

I recently read an old article about Ty Cobb written in 1961. In case you don’t know, Cobb was a baseball player about a hundred years ago. He was great. When he retired he had more hits than anyone who had ever played the game, and even today only Pete Rose has more.

The man who wrote the article, Al Stump, spent time with Cobb near the end of his life. He portrayed a Cobb so angry, bitter and mean that people could barely stand to be around him. The seventy-five-year-old Cobb confessed to Stump that he killed a man in 1912 on the streets of Detroit when the man tried to mug him. Cobb suffered a knife wound to the back, but he went out the next day and collected two hits in three at-bats. Then he went to the hospital to be treated for the wound.

I always take these stories with a grain of salt. Especially in baseball. I once read a fantastic book about the 1964 World Series by David Halberstam. He interviewed dozens of baseball players for the book, and had some great stories. As I read the book I’d use various baseball and news records of the day to check the veracity of each story. Inevitably I’d discover that the truth behind the story was different from how the ballplayer remembered it. Something similar to his story happened, but it wasn’t exactly his story.

I’ve seen this too many times to count. I don’t think the players or the writers are trying to fool us. I think that everyone who repeats the story honestly thinks it’s the truth. When they look back at their careers, these are the things they remember. It has shaped them into who they are. Whether they’re true or not almost doesn’t matter, because it’s what they’ve accepted as truth.

I have a small example of this from my own life, and it’s been completely unintentional.

When I was a kid, my grandpa used to sing songs whenever my two sisters or I were in the car with him. I think he enjoyed singing the songs, but I think he knew that we enjoyed them also. The lyrics were bizarre, the melodies catchy, and one song in particular has remained with me to this day. I’ve taught it to my own kids. As I’ve taught it to my kids I tell them it’s a song that my grandpa made up, and it’s so silly that anyone would believe that a grandpa would make it up. If you knew my grandpa you’d have no doubt about it.

I learned the song long before I’d ever heard of the internet, and from time-to-time I think about doing a search for the lyrics of my grandpa’s song to see what comes up.

Then I decide not to.

For almost thirty years I’ve thought that my grandpa created this song. I’ve sung the lyrics for other people and no one has ever recognized it. So it’s entirely possible that he did create it. However, if I’ve remembered the lyrics for thirty years, it’s also possible that he remembered them for thirty, or fifty or sixty years and the song isn’t something he created, but something he learned in school, or on the playground, or maybe even from his grandpa.

Whatever the truth is, I don’t know want to know it. This song has become part of my memory of my grandpa, and I see no reason to tamper with that memory. There’s nothing to be gained by anyone in finding out the truth.

And the truth about Ty Cobb getting knifed, killing the man, and then getting two hits the next day? Al Stump checked on it, and he said “Records verified this.”

The only problem is that Al Stump’s story of Ty Cobb killing a man is told in two different works, Cobb’s autobiography (which Stump helped him write) and the article I read. In the book the encounter took place in Syracuse. In the article, it took place in Detroit. In one the man died, in the other he was just injured.

Who got the story wrong? Cobb or Stump? What do we make of the fact that Stump tried selling a forged Cobb diary twenty years after Cobb’s death?

The image of Ty Cobb as a sonofabitch has been around for more than a hundred years. It would be interesting to find out the truth about what actually happened between Cobb and the mugger, but it wouldn’t change anyone’s opinion of him.

The truth might be out there, but sometimes it just doesn’t matter.