My wife, Jennie, turned twenty-one on March 31st, 1999. It was also the night that I asked her to marry me. Combining the two into something big was a challenge.
Of course, the twenty-first birthday in America is one of the most anticipated ones, since it’s the final birthday for which something becomes permitted, that was previously denied, because of someone being “underage”. While Jennie’s never been much of a drinker, she was looking forward to that birthday, and spending it with her college roommates and friends, as much as any other twenty year old.
So, imagine her disgust with the idea that I wanted to take her back home, away from her college friends, for her twenty-first birthday. Let’s just that, when I first floated the idea to her, she wasn’t particularly fond of the notion.
To get her to agree with the concept, I told her that I’d gotten reservations at one of the most prestigious restaurants back home, through a friend who knew someone with the proper connections. Jennie agreed to the idea, primarily because I promised that it was going to be a night to remember.
Boy, was it.
At this point, I was a newly minted alumnus from the University of Notre Dame, with some still pretty significant ties to the Notre Dame Glee Club where I’d sang as a club member for four years. I reached out to some of my closest friends who were still in the club, to assist me in proposing to my girlfriend. I told them to meet me at Applebee’s.
Now, as everyone knows, Applebee’s is not an exclusive restaurant. But, it was our favorite restaurant, Jennie and I, and it seemed like the perfect place to make all of this happen. I coordinated with the manager of the Applebee’s that we frequented back home to get things set up for that evening. More on that in a minute.
I got Jennie to agree to this whole thing on a stipulation that we would leave campus, come home to have dinner, and be back to campus as soon as possible. So, we left campus, drove home, and stopped at my parents’ house for a moment or two while I confirmed our reservations for dinner.
But of course, there weren’t any reservations.
When I got done using the phone, I hung it up and turned to tell Jennie, while wearing my best fake disappointed look, that there was a mix-up at the restaurant and that we weren’t going to be having dinner at the fancy and exclusive destination for which we’d left our college campus and traveled many miles to come home to visit.
You could see the dismay on Jennie’s face.
So, I scrambled to try to come up with a Plan B (wink, wink). I suggested that we should go to our favorite Applebee’s to try to make the best of things. It wasn’t what Jennie had in mind, and it was a very distant second choice for a girl who didn’t have any idea what was coming next.
So, we left my parents’ house and we headed off to dinner. Meanwhile, Jennie’s family was already on their way to the same restaurant.
During the trip to dinner, Jennie was despondent. She complained that she wasn’t going to get to be with her friends on her twenty-first birthday because I’d dragged her away from campus. She complained about the reservations that had fallen through and that she wasn’t even going to have that to enjoy. She couldn’t be consoled.
I, meanwhile, had a hard time keeping a straight face. I knew what was coming. I was, after all, driving a car with a dozen red roses and an engagement ring in the trunk.
The Applebee’s, when we arrived, seated us immediately at a corner table, and we ordered our meals and drinks –Jennie legally ordered her first drink in a restaurant and enjoyed getting to do that, at least. It was at that point that I remembered that I’d forgotten my wallet in my car.
Which, of course, I hadn’t.
But, it gave me the opportunity to run back out to my car, which I’d parked far enough away to be unnoticed, and pop the trunk, so that the several members of the Notre Dame Glee Club would be able to get inside to get the roses and the ring. Those members of the glee club, two first tenors, two second tenors, two baritones, and two basses
–an octet– got the roses and the ring and congregated in the kitchen with the restaurant manager to organize the reveal.
Then, I made my way back inside –wallet in tow– to be with Jennie while the plan unfolded.
She didn’t immediately understand why our food was delivered to the table by men in tuxedos. She didn’t immediately understand why one of them handed her a dozen red roses. But, when they arranged themselves around the table and began singing Let Me Call You Sweetheart in barbershop harmony, and I got down on my knee next to her seat, with the box that they’d given me, to show her the engagement ring, things became pretty clear.
And Jennie’s family, who’d been seated on the other side of the restaurant during the whole thing, came over to take pictures and bear witness to the event.
The glee club octet was so loud that I didn’t hear Jennie answer the question that I’d asked, so I repeated the question to her a second time. She confirmed, more loudly, her reply, and we listened to them finish the song. It was all so exciting that neither of us even finished the food that we’d ordered. Jennie didn’t even finish her drink. The glee club guys congratulated us and went on their way. The other people in the restaurant at the time were also warm and approving.
And then, we headed back to our college campus, arriving late in the evening, to Jennie’s friends and roommates who were excited about what had taken place and excited about Jennie’s birthday.
The whole story even ended up getting published in the newspaper when Jennie submitted it to the Wedding Announcements section of the paper. That was pretty cool, too.
I don’t know if I have ever done a worse job of meeting Jennie’s expectations for any of her birthdays, or if I have ever exceeded her expectations to a greater extent.
It occurred to me today that humor is something that we learn.
My son just told me a joke that wasn’t funny. And, as I often do when he tells me a joke that’s not funny, I rolled my eyes and I thought to myself about his sense of humor.
I suppose it likes most things: the more you work at it, the better you get. So, if your average day or week or month of human experience is going to have in it an average number of attempts by people at being funny/telling jokes/getting others to laugh, then as time goes by, forty year olds are going to be funnier, on average, than six year olds, and neither of those groups of people are going to be as funny as your average senior citizen.
And, as with most things, there are going to be people who work at improving harder than others. Michael Jordan was, when he retired for the last time in 2003, one of the greatest players to ever play the game. He was about forty at the time. I’m forty-four, four years older than Michael was back then, and I’m not nearly as good. I think I have played in three actual basketball games in my entire life –> that might have something to do with it.
So, the passage of time improves us, just as water wears at the edges of a stone, gradually and with a patience that puts most people to shame. But, concerted effort also improves us, for those who don’t have the time or the patience to wait. You could wait for the water to smooth the stone, or you could take a file or some sandpaper to that stone, or a hammer and a chisel.
Back to the question of humor, comedians are the professionals in the ‘sport’, and their concerted effort makes them funnier than the average person. They try jokes in front of people and those jokes succeed or fail, and the comedian is paying attention to that data, to be able to tailor a set of jokes that really has them rollin’ in the aisles. As they do this work, they come to understand things about delivery and timing and knowing your audience. Because comedians know things about being funny that your average human doesn’t understand, they’d have a greater chance at being really funny, I would think, than those who just don’t fully understand.
Jokes about social media are going to flop in a nursing home, and jokes about retirement planning are going to backfire in a TikTok video.
However, aside from the people who work really hard at designing a comedy routine, there are some people who are funnier than others, even when you account for things like learning or planning. Could it be that there’s a talent involved here, like there is with so many things where learning is involved?
Maybe, like so many things, our children pick up from us –their parents– some abilities because they observe us doing certain things. I have a cousin who is good with cars, and when we were kids, he was always next to his father, my uncle, working on and paying attention to cars. My children have watched my wife and me as we exercise our musical skills, and they have, each of them in their own way, excelled in music to different extents.
* * *
Not to stray from the subject for very long, but I’ve often wondered about this question of talent vs. training and the combination of these two things that you find in the most capable of people in whatever field or discipline you might chose to focus on. Is the greatest brain surgeon the one with eight thousand hours of brain surgery experience or the one with the rock solid hands that don’t ever more a millimeter with his consent? Can you teach steady hands? Can you have enough skill to make training unnecessary?
In psychology class, my students would understand this as the question of nature vs. nurture. We have certain things that are naturally handed to us, in our genetics, while we have other things that we receive from exposure to certain environments in our lives. The son of the NBA superstar might get his father’s genes, resulting in him growing to an adult height of 6’9″, but he will probably also pick up on some things as he sits in the bleachers watching his dad in his practice sessions.
Along these same lines, I wonder if talent is actually a myth. I wonder whether or not it’s actually an illusion that anyone has ever been successful doing something really well that they didn’t work really hard to succeed at doing. Have we ever documented someone who is totally capable of something that everyone else has had to work at, and that person has exactly zero hours of experience or practice?
Bob Ross, talented artist, once said, “Talent is pursued interest. Anything that you are willing to practice, you can do.”
* * *
I expect that my son will eventually get better at being funny. If he doesn’t have an innate talent –which would seem unlikely at this point–he’ll at least get better through the process of practice and learning. It’s important to note that this process –> the process by which all of us tend to get better at things over time when we continue to work at improvement –> this process is called progress.
I’ve written several blog posts over the past few months about getting better at things, about making improvements, about being about the business of advancement. It’s unfortunately the case that I, only recently, have discovered that, for many years, I squandered my time, not really doing my best to move forward in being the best person that I can be.
It occurred to me today that safety shouldn’t be hard to find.
One of my family’s favorite vacations was the trip that we took to Disney in 2016. We talk about it often, when we are in the mood to recollect some of our favorite memories (it’s a game we play, see HERE for the details). One of the smartest things that we did on that vacation was to pay for the Disney PhotoPass; this service allows for a collection of photos to be built during your Disney adventures, as all of the photographers in all of the Disney parks end up linking the pictures that they take of you to an on-line account that becomes a digital photo album. I don’t remember what we paid for it, but it was worth it, whatever the cost.
As I ponder the topic of fear for this post, I am reminded of the photo that was taken of our family at the very top of the Tower of Terror in the Hollywood Studios park at Disney World. That photo, like so many others that were added to our PhotoPass album, is now forever a part of our memories from the trip. My son was twelve at the time, and my twin daughters would have been nine.
If you’ve ever heard the phrase “when the bottom drops out”, it’s meant to describe a situation that goes badly very quickly. We assume that what’s under us is going to be there, and continue to be there, because we operate under the assumption that it’s normally the case that we have something under us. And it’s because we are largely unaccustomed to the feeling of having things beneath us suddenly disappear, that the feeling of it, when it happens, is particularly frightening.
I just so happen to have a picture of what that fear looks like on the faces of all of the members of my family –> how cool is that?!?!
In the instant of fear, we seek safety as part of a natural fight-or-flight response that is built into our nervous systems. That photo, from the top of the Tower of Terror, shows my son, next to me, wrapped around my arm and clinging tightly, in the moment of his deepest fright.
It’s not that I did anything to make this all go away for him. To be completely honest, I was significantly terrified, as well. But, I am strong (sometimes) and my son came to me because he knew my strength. For him, there was a bit of safety in that strength.
It might be a little sick and twisted of me, but I will always have a strange affection for that photo. I don’t like it because of the fear that it captured on the faces of all of my closest loved ones; rather, I love that photo because it showed my son seeking strength and safety from me in his moment of need.
* * *
In the late fall of 2008, my only brother died unexpectedly in a freak accident. That time, those hours and days and weeks, were mostly a blur and I don’t remember a lot of what happened. I do remember very heavily leaning on my wife. My wife, and her strength during that time when I needed someone to lean on so much, was invaluable to me. I can’t imagine how badly that period of my life could have ended up
–where I might have ended up, resulting from that darkness– had it not been for the support that Jennie gave me.
The shock of my brother’s death was the worst part; death is always horrible but I think it might be slightly less so when the death is expected and you have a chance to come to terms with what’s about to happen. We never had that chance –> we literally were caught entirely off-guard.
But, Jennie was there for my mother and father, and even my brother’s widow as well, as she recognized that the four of us desperately needed to have someone to be strong for us. In fact, she sacrificed how she was feeling and the grief that she was dealing with, in exchange for being the person that each of us was turning to during those dark times.
When a ship is on the ocean and the storms threaten it, the ship would reasonably seek a harbor.
Jennie was our harbor.
* * *
For me, and others like me, we have an even stronger place to go when we feel like the world is crashing in, when we feel like all other hope is lost. Seeking God, and knowing that He is always in control of what is going on in our world, is a great solace.
For example, take this year, thus far.
This year has been unlike any other year before it, for sure, but as upside-down and crazy as this has all seemed, none of it has surprised God. He has remained in control throughout. For those who might wonder about a god who would allow the insanity of 2020 to have taken place, I certainly trust in His plans. He is God and I am not. This doesn’t mean that I’m not afraid of what’s going on; it just means that I’ve got an ultimate place to go to find refuge from my fear.
God can accomplish His purposes through whatever circumstances He sees fit to use, in my life personally, and in the larger scope of my community and the entire world. I can still rest comfortably in His arms, knowing that He is the ultimate place to go for the strength that I seek when I fear or grieve. As nice as it is to have people around us to help us with our fears and our sadness, they will sometimes fail us.
It occurred to me today that our expectations might be a little messed up.
A friend and I were listening to music earlier today and we heard the song, I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles) by The Proclaimers.
It was a one-hit wonder song from a one-hit wonder band, to my recollection, and while the song was playing, we commented on the fact that the song was basically a list of several unrealistic promises that the balladeer was making to the target of the love song.
My friend, who is always very astute and observant, made a note that you just don’t hear love songs where the singer promises to do the things that often upset spouses when they go undone.
When he said this, I laughed and thought to myself, “How little we understand about what to expect when we are first starting things out?”
How about this for the first line of a love song: “I will show you my love by picking up my dirty socks.”
Love songs like these, while they would certainly be more honest with respect to what marriage and the marital experience end up being like, they wouldn’t be very “romantic”. They wouldn’t end up at the top of the charts, I don’t think.
The funny thing about the word “romantic” is that it has two definitions –> the definition that is not “an expression of feelings of love” is rather “related to an idealized view of reality”.
Talk about ironic –> romantic means delusional.
And, if you stop to think about it, romantic notions about marriage are idealized views of reality. The woman who marries the husband, thinking that her new husband is going to be the ideal Prince Charming, is being a romantic –> in both senses of the word, perhaps. The man who marries the wife, thinking that her new wife is going to be the ideal, is being romantic.
The truth of the matter is that these expectations are unrealistic, because people are humans. Humans are imperfect and incapable and disappointing.
What you end up discovering is that your wife can’t cook, or your husband can’t remember to put the seat down when he’s done, or your wife doesn’t understand the basics of washing laundry, or your husband is more likely to injure himself with a power tool than to be productive with one.
The major issue here is expectations.
* * *
I partially blame Disney, at least when it comes to all of this ‘unrealistic romantic expectations’ non-sense. While, more often than, it’s quite harmless how young children are affected by any individual piece of programming that they watch early on, the overall effect of all of that programming, piled piece on top of piece on top of piece, is that it starts to lead to an entire set of unrealistic –dare I say, romantic– expectations that we carry into our relationships with other people.
As guilty as Disney might be in peddling unrealistic expectations, specifically when it comes to romance, Hollywood is –in general– another place where we tend to get our unrealistic expectations of the world. When was the last time that you saw a movie where the main character popped a zit? Or lanced a blister to let the puss out? When was the last time that you saw a romantic film where the husband had to help his wife put her anti-fungal cream on her toenails?
We end up with unrealistic expectations when we think that the real world will operate the way that it does in the videos we watch.
It just doesn’t.
* * *
There are certainly many areas of life where unrealistic expectations set us up for disappointment and hurt feelings down the line. You’ve probably heard it said that, “If you don’t expect too much, it’s harder to be let down.”
While this is a cynical way of looking at life, it does work, and I can speak from experience on this. As often as I have been disappointed in the way that things sometimes turn out in life, I have tried to make it my practice to –at the very moment when I realize that I am feeling disappointed– to ask myself to review my expectations, to see whether or not I was being unrealistic or idealistic.
Just earlier this evening, a couple of hours ago, I was significantly disappointed to discover that I wasn’t going to be getting something that I had been looking forward to all day long, something that I was led to believe that I would be getting. At that point, as the disappointment set in, I realized that I wasn’t at all reasonable to have expected the thing in the first place, in light of the circumstances.
When things don’t turn out as I would like them to turn out, it is true
–almost every time– that I was expecting too much or that I was being unrealistic in the first place.
* * *
If Bruno Mars could release his next hit single and the lyrics could go something like, “Baby, I will show you how deeply I love you by taking care of the cat litter every time it should be done”, that would get the world a little bit closer to a realistic understanding of what it really means to be devoted to someone. Or, if Disney’s next Prince Charming could avoid slaying dragons, conquering enemy armies, and traveling hundreds of miles to save the Princess, so that he could instead devote his full energy and whole-hearted enthusiasm to learning how to keep a bathroom clean, then the Princess might be even more impressed by his level of commitment.
What I’m really saying is that we need to be careful when it comes to what we are expecting of each other.
It occurred to me today that I prefer things to be stable.
When I was a kid, I remember loving roller coasters…
…once they were underway.
But, before that, there was the worst part of the roller coaster experience: the build-up to the actual start. When I was a kid, you got in the car, and the car took off from the start/finish area (where you got on the ride and then, two minutes later, you got off), only to almost immediately head into the long climb.
This part of the roller coaster experience was just a long, slow climb into the air, up to the top of the tallest part of the roller coaster, the part that led to the first drop that ended up being enough momentum that it would carry you throughout the rest of the entire ride.
I remember being terrified, on numerous occasions, by the click-click-click-click of the cars in the roller coaster as they were pulled, by the cable under the roller coaster, to the top of this enormous hill. I remember looking out either side of the roller coaster and seeing the familiar surroundings fall away as the height got to be higher and higher, until it was only treetops and distant horizons in all directions.
Knowing that the top was coming. Knowing that the fall was coming. Knowing that the excitement was coming, but not until the agonizingly slow climb to the top was completed. I remember the click-click-click-click of the climb turning into a click—-click——–click————click—————-click that signaled that the climb was almost over and that the drop was just a second or two away.
And then –> the drop, and the twisting and turning, and flying and flipping, and the fun of the roller coaster probably lasted half-as-long as the climb to the top of that biggest drop.
* * *
I am a little old these days to be riding on roller coasters, but I still get that same feeling, sometimes.
My family is leaving on vacation tomorrow. We will be gone, to parts unknown by our family, for two weeks. It will include a lot of fun memories and many enjoyable experiences.
But I won’t be happy until we are there.
Which means, between now and Saturday afternoon, when all of the highway driving and all of the significant mileage is complete, I will feel just like I am being towed by a cable, pulling me in my little two-seat cart, to the top of the tallest drop of the roller coaster.
My wife asked me a few minutes ago what was wrong. She could tell that something was up with me. She and I have known each other for so long that we understand when the other one is even just a little bit off. I told her that I was feeling unsettled. When I know that something big is coming, I just want to be on the other side of it. I know that the next forty-eight hours is going to be a transition from where I am used to being, to where I am going to be heading.
Once we get there, and we can get settled and things can return to something that looks more like what my life would normally be like, everything will be fun and fine.
I don’t know why I’m this way, and I don’t know if other people operate in this same manner. I suspect that there are people who can enjoy that long and arduous trip to the top of the first drop of the roller coaster, but those kind of people don’t make sense to me. What is it that they are enjoying? You’ve certainly heard it said –including by me (hypocritically as it turns out) once or twice on this blog– that one should enjoy the journey. But, at this moment, as I am sitting in limbo between where I am about to leave and where I am yet to arrive, it would seem that I am unable to “enjoy the journey”.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise to me that I am goal-oriented. I’ll blame my parents for that one (sorry, Mom, but I think that this is probably well-placed), since my Dad and I had plenty of exchanges while I was growing up that were, shall we say, “goal-focused”. Because of this, I don’t know if I am going to ever be able to just, spontaneously, “journey” or “wander” without a particular destination as the end-goal.
My brother, who died in 2008, was the same way –> there were many famous stories about how my brother would start a home improvement project or a home repair, and he wouldn’t stop until he was done, sometimes going right through the evening and into the night. He once hung a chandelier in his starter home and worked on it until the wee hours of the next morning because he was determined to get it figured out, determined to reach the goal.
I have a goal in front of me, and since we aren’t yet all packed and ready to go, we can’t leave yet. Thus, I am hampered in doing what I have always been trained to do –> attain the goal.
* * *
I think about the adjective, “settled”, and the adjective, “unsettled”, and I am interested in the differences. When I think about settling, I think about settlers. People who were moving from one place to another, in order to “settle” there. Conversely, I guess that someone who is unsettled is not in a place where they feel like they are comfortable or where they feel that they are able to be at peace with their set of circumstances.
It’s during times like these that I feel unsettled.
I’ve had problems in the past with my temper, but through some anger management practices that I’ve incorporated into my life, I’ve been able to control my temper issues much better in recent years.
This post has nothing to do with any of that.
Rather, it has to do with gasoline.
My wife and I bought our first house about eighteen months after we got married, having lived in an apartment during that first year-and-a-half, saving money for the eventual starter home.
It was small and it was never going to be forever, but it worked well for about seven years. It had a lot of things going for it as a starter home, but the clock was ticking all along, and we were going to end up leaving that place. Nevertheless, we made improvements to the place, here and there. We made one of the bedrooms into a nursery where all three of our children spent some of their youngest nights. We planted a side garden one spring that yielded more zucchinis than you would have imagined could come from so few plants.
One of the issues that we tried to address with the house, an issue that we tried to fix but never completely tackled, was a significant stump in the middle of the backyard. One time, we gingerly wiggled my pickup truck in between the side of our garage and our neighbor’s nearby fence so we could get the pickup into the backyard, where I proceeded to hook the truck up to the stump with a tow cable. The truck tires dug some pretty impressive trenches in the dirt of the backyard, while the stump held the truck solidly in place.
And then, there was the time that I thought that the best way to deal with the stump was to go at it with an axe. Not at any particularly decent level of upper-body fitness at the time, my physical strength gave out long before the stump took very much damage at all. As a matter of fact, if I remember correctly, the axe head ended up coming loose from my axe handle at one point; I don’t know if you’ve ever seen how far an axe head can fly when it leaves the handle to which it was once attached, but those suckers can go quite the distance.
And then, there was the last battle with the stump. Which isn’t to say that we beat the stump. Rather, we quit the battlefield.
I’d read something on the internet somewhere that said that you could soak a stump in gasoline (remember, back at the start of this post, when I said it was about gasoline) and that doing so would cause it to slowly burn the stump out when you set fire to it.
Now, before you start to SMH, understand that I am not what you would call a dumb person –> I am in the top thirteen percent of educated people in the United States, according to recent information from the Census Bureau. However, I never registered for the class in college on starting fires with gasoline.
So, I soaked the stump with gasoline. I put a decent amount on there, and I let it soak for hours –> it may have even been overnight. And then, very cautiously, I approached the gasoline-soaked stump with a lighter, and I lit the stump, and…
…nothing.
Well, not exactly nothing.
It burned. The gasoline, not the stump.
Several minutes later, all I had was a stump that appeared unscathed by having been on fire for several minutes. And the smell of burnt gasoline tinging the air. And the smell of my defeat, also tinging the air.
So, I went and got some more gasoline. As smart as I am, of course I didn’t have the gasoline anywhere near the stump as it was burning; I mean, what kind of a fool do you take me for?
And, of course, because I am significantly intelligent, I put the gasoline in an open container, because only an idiot would put it in a closed container, thereby making an explosion much more likely.
So, with my one-gallon ice cream bucket filled about half way with gasoline, I approached the stump once again.
As many times as I’ve looked back on that moment, leading up to what happens next, I can’t remember having thought to myself at all about the fact that the stump was just recently on fire and that the stump might still be hot enough to cause the gasoline to catch fire upon contact. That thought never entered my mind, at least not as far as I can remember.
Of course, the stump was hot enough still to catch the gasoline on fire on contact, so when I poured the gasoline on the stump, the gas caught fire. Then, the fire climbed the stream of pouring gasoline, back up and into the bucket, to the extent that I was, two seconds later, holding a ice cream bucket with burning gas in it.
This caused a total freak-out.
I threw the ice cream bucket, with burning gasoline in it, up in the air, in a panic, and burning gasoline left the bucket, mid-air, and rained down on my head.
In retrospect, it probably would have been more intelligent to just calmly set the bucket down and step away, but that’s not what I did.
Did you know, by the way, that the old trick that they taught all of us when we were in elementary school –stop, drop, and roll– doesn’t work in the slightest if what is burning is a liquid on your very skin? You can roll around till the cows come home and it’s not going to put out the burning liquid on your skin.
It’s about here in the story where I should bring in the hero, the person who saves the day.
While I was doing all of these ridiculous things in the backyard, my wife was mowing the lawn in the same general vicinity. She ended up seeing me and putting out the fire on me with the nearby garden hose. Even after the fire was out, I told her to keep spraying me because the gasoline on my skin felt so hot that I was concerned that I would start burning again.
After my wife was done with the garden hose, I ended up taking a cold shower to wash gasoline off of me (and because I had been rolling around on the ground, trying to put myself out). After the shower, it became pretty clear that the skin on the side of my head and on one of my ears was very badly burnt. I almost ended up having to have my ear reconstructed.
So, if you are looking for some lessons to take away from this story, here’s a couple:
**No matter how intelligent you believe yourself to be, there are things that you don’t know anything about; it’s dangerous to pretend that you do.
**Any husband who is preparing to do something stupid would be best served in having his wife nearby to “catch him when he falls”.
**Don’t believe everything that you read on the internet.
**The one sure way to make a bad situation worse is by panicking.
When we sold the house in the summer of 2009, that stump was still there. I wonder if it still is.
It occurred to me today that there are a lot of situations that could be described by the concept of diamonds in horse manure.
Let’s say, for example, that I took $500,000 worth of diamonds and I evenly distributed those in one ton of horse manure? Would you go looking for them?
Maybe your answer is a quick yes, but what if I said that it was only $200,000 worth of diamonds, or what if I told you that you had to look through two tons of manure. Is there a balance, or a ratio, beyond which you’d be opposed to this endeavor? Would you search for $10,000 worth of diamonds in five tons of horse manure?
The basic question is this: how much bad stuff are you willing to put up with to get some good stuff?
* * *
I have been thinking about trying to become a freelance writer, lately.
And so, I’ve signed up as a freelance writer on a couple of different freelancer sites, and I am sure that there are thousands upon thousands of users just like me on those sites, and the people who are looking to hire someone to write something for them aren’t going to wade through the thousands upon thousands of available writers that are available to find me, waiting and available. It’s too much work for them to do.
Or, if you look at it from the other side of the coin…
On one of these particular sites that I signed up for, I have been “hired” for jobs a half-dozen times over the last couple of weeks, and each time the employer ends up being some “businessman” from a foreign country (India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, to name a few) who wants me to partner with them as they tackle the U.S. job market.
Basically, these “businessmen” want me to work for them in some pyramid scheme were I employ my American friends under me and we all work for this man overseas, doing things that they won’t even mention until I’ve gone so far as to commit to being a part of one of these ventures.
How much of that particular horse manure am I willing to sort through to get to that one person who is looking for someone just like me to write something for them that I would totally knock out of the park?
* * *
I had a computer repair job come in the other day. A friend of a friend of a cousin of mine asked me to fix a laptop that was having problems booting up. When you turned the laptop on, it never made it all the way to the login screen. When I took the job, I told the guy that it would probably be a pretty easy fix and that there are only a few problems that tend to cause these kinds of issues.
And, a couple of hours later, I was looking for answers on the internet…
The way that things seem to go for me when I end up looking on the internet for assistance with a computer problem is that there is so much crap that it’s hardly worth wading through all of it. You find websites that only have the suggestions that you’ve already tried, or you find other websites that claim to have the answer, but they’re not even close. I searched and searched for the right answer, and I was ready to give up, but then…
…I found the website that had the advice that ended up working for me.
So, in light of the difficulty that I had during this particular job fixing this boot up issue, I created a document that I will keep that had the set of instructions that I looked very hard to find.
I mean, can you imagine going through the horse manure to find the diamonds, only to through the diamonds back into the horse manure –to prolong your own agony?!?!
* * *
I was at a community gathering the other night, hosted by the police department in my town. During the meeting, the police chief was talking about big city policing and how excited small town police departments have often been, in the past, to discover that they’ve been following the same protocols and procedures as the big city departments do.
The police chief said at this meeting the other night that he thinks that it’s time for big city police departments to start looking at small town departments, who are policing their municipalities with peace and service, rather than with brutality and domination, and it got me to thinking and my metaphor, here.
Who’s to say that the big city police departments are doing it right? Ask Breonna Taylor’s family or George Floyd’s family, and they would probably tell you that there is something wrong with their local police force and the way that they are handling things. Perhaps, small towns have more than a thing or two to teach to the big towns.
But, if you are a big city kind of a person, small towns are not your thing, just as the small town person is not interested in the big city. It’s not that either of these approaches are inherently correct or incorrect, but people have different preferences.
If you asked a gardener to dig around in a ton of manure to look for the half-million dollars in diamonds, they might just be more interested in the fertilizer. You can’t make the geraniums grow by sprinkling diamonds over their root structure.
* * *
The post is titled, “Diamonds in Horse Manure”, and while some would, in a mixture of one ton of horse manure and a couple of handfuls of diamonds, find more value in the manure than in the gems, others would go straight for the “girl’s best friend”. It’s certainly a matter of perspective, I suppose.
So, if this is true, and so much of how we look at life and what we are having to deal with is just a matter of perspective, then we ought to –in order to keep ourselves from being tossed around by the fickle and ever-changing circumstances of life– become highly skilled at looking at things at different perspectives.
So, why aren’t we?!?!
Why does it seem to be the case that so many people are just stuck looking at things from only one vantage point, incapable of the mental flexibility that it takes to consider things differently? If I were offered the opportunity to search in a ton of horse manure for a half-million dollars in diamonds, the very first thing I would do, I’d think, would be to start looking at horse manure from whatever other perspective would make me capable of digging around in equine feces.
The next time you’re in a spot or a jam, and you are frustrated by what you are having to endure in order to make it through, perhaps it would really be much simpler to look at the bad stuff as “not-so-bad-stuff”.
It occurred to me today that there is a lot of lip service going on these days.
If you don’t know what lip service is, it’s a claim that something is important that isn’t supported by a person’s actions. For example, if someone tells you that their physical fitness is important to them, but they don’t exercise, then it’s lip service. Or, if a politician tells you that public safety is important to them, but they don’t set a safe example, then it’s lip service.
Don’t tell me something’s a priority with your words and then show me that it’s not with your actions. That leads me to believe that what you say and what you truly believe are not the same thing. If I have a reason to believe that you say things that you don’t believe, then I stop trusting you –or at least I stop trusting what you say.
* * *
It’s a matter of integrity, really. And, when I think about the word “integrity” I always think about the starship Enterprise.
If you’ve been playing along on the at-home version of this blog, then you know that I’m a Star Trek fan (proof lies HERE and HERE). When the word “integrity” is used on the Star Trek television episodes or in the Star Trek movies, it’s usually a reference to the ship being under attack, and the thickness of the ship’s shields, or even the hull of the ship itself, is giving way. The problem with being in a space vessel is that the hull is what separates you from the vacuum of space. Zero hull integrity in space means bad things if you –for example– breathe oxygen,
Or, think about a submarine. The hull of a submarine is several inches thick and is usually made out of steel. The generally-agreed-upon safe depth for a submarine is not to exceed 800 feet deep in the water, because the pressure of the outside water on the hull of the submarine at greater depths is more than the steel hull can withstand. At 800 feet deep in the water, the sub is under a pressure that is 2400 times as intense as the pressure of the atmosphere on us as we normally walk around on the earth. During your average day on the planet, you are under pressure from the atmosphere around you that equals about 14.6 pounds per square inch of your skin. Because your skin and your skeletal structure is strong enough to handle that pressure, you aren’t squished like a grape by the pressure of the atmosphere around you.
A submarine at 800 feet deep in the water is under a pressure that equals approximately 35,000 pounds per square inch. While that seems like a lot of pressure, a hull that is thick enough –that has enough integrity– can withstand that amount of force. You can imagine what would happen if a submarine had a single square inch of its hull, where the hull thickness was only four inches instead of seven, and the sub was 800 feet deep in the water. That single square inch is going to be the point where 35,000 pounds of ocean is going to come in to the submarine.
In short, a hull needs to be able to stand up to pressure.
So, maybe part of the problem with integrity –> saying what we mean and meaning what we say, is that we are under pressure that causes us to fail to live up to the words that we utter, when it comes to taking the actions that we suggested that we would take. I can talk about how important my fitness is to me, but tomorrow morning, will I mount up and go for a run or will I avoid my responsibility and take the easier path? Or, when I say how much my fitness means to me, but that container of Oreos in my pantry is looking pretty awesome, can I stand up against that pressure?
* * *
In my house, we have a system of chores that seems to work pretty well –if you ask me– and the kids are able to gain access to “screens” (cellphone, TV, XBox, basically anything that has a screen that you might stare at) when the system of chores is completed.
The problem with the system, often times, is that the children don’t do their chores, and then they don’t get screen time. Cue wailing and gnashing of teeth –> it’s awful. Another problem with the system is procrastination –> when my kids spend all day not doing much of anything, but then, they get to the end of the day and it’s a mad dash to try to get stuff done, so the system is completed and they can have screen time.
To which, I will often say, “You had plenty of time earlier today to do this stuff, but you didn’t. If it wasn’t important to you then, how can it be that important to you now?”
They hate it when I say that. But it’s true, and it makes me think about the three Ts –> time, talent, and treasure. What we spend our time on, what we use our talents for, and what we spend our money on (treasure) will pretty much tell the tale of what’s important to us.
What we say means almost nothing.
If I spend my money on scratch-off tickets at the local gas station, but I tell you how concerned I am about having enough money to retire someday, what are you going to believe?
If I spend forty-five minutes scrolling Facebook, but then I complain about how I didn’t have enough time to complete that certain project that you asked me to complete, what are you going to believe?
If I don’t have enough time to work out, but I definitely have enough time to play Candy Crush on my phone for two hours, what are you going to believe?
If I don’t have enough money in my budget to allow me to give to charities that support orphans in Africa, but I can eat out seven or eight times a month, what are you going to believe?
I guess, to a certain extent, many of us have a problem doing this –> saying one thing but then doing something else. It seems to be pretty central to the hypocrisy which is fundamental to the human experience, but I would suggest this, if you can’t help but say things that you are later going to have a hard time living up to:
Don’t talk. Just act. Don’t say. Just show. Don’t promise. Just prove.
In our efforts to express ourselves, we rush into statements that end up being our undoing. In a world of increasing levels of noise, the way to defeat the problem of lip service is to speak as little as possible.
It occurred to me today that an honest, humble patriotism would be preferable to what we have now.
I’ve written about my concerns for America in posts before, but I’ve recently had some pretty significant discussions with some close friends of mine, and I think that maybe one of our greatest problems is our patriotism.
Before you start screaming, “Hey, what’s wrong with patriotism?!?!”, let me explain.
Unfortunately, I think that the patriotism that is pretty prominent in America today is actually nationalism, in a philosophical sense. The philosophical term, ‘nationalism’, could be described as, “a belief in the supremacy of one nation –its culture, society, interests, etc.– above all other nations, and the promotion of that nation to the detriment of others.”
Patriotism is something else entirely. Patriotism doesn’t force itself on anyone, and patriotism is also not elitist. While patriotism may include a pride in one’s country and its way of life, it doesn’t pretend a supremacy over other countries or other ways of life. While patriotism is, by and large, defensive and unassuming, nationalism is predatory and antagonistic.
When I hear people talking about “America” and “patriotism” and “the land of the free”, and so on, they do it so aggressively these days that I can’t help but think that they aren’t being patriotic –> they’re being nationalistic. Before you start to wonder whether or not there’s really such a big difference, let me illuminate an example.
* * *
There’s a sub-movement going on right now, in light of the recently heightened national awareness of racial injustices, to get Colin Kaepernick reinstated to the NFL and signed by an NFL team. For those of you who are unaware, Colin Kaepernick was a starting quarterback who protested police brutality and racial inequality during the 2016 NFL football season by sitting and/or kneeling during the National Anthem. Not long afterward, he found it hard to get a job because of the widespread disapproval of his actions.
If you want to start a fight among your family and friends, bring up Colin Kaepernick and kneeling during the national anthem and disrespecting the flag; that should do it. If I had a dollar for every person that I knew who, back in 2016, thought that Kaepernick was a jerk and/or an idiot and/or a traitor, I’d be taking us all out to dinner at a fancy restaurant.
I remember in 2016, when this was happening, I had black students in my classes that wouldn’t stand for the Pledge of Allegiance when we did it at the beginning of the school day, every day, either. They were not alone. Our school district, that serves a significant population of black students, drafted a policy to allow for them to “not pledge allegiance”.
But, I can’t say I blame Kaepernick, or those students of mine. Not one bit.
I think our nation, and its failures, deserve close scrutiny. I believe that any nationalism, that clouds the minds of the people so that they can’t see that we’ve got some serious problems to fix, is pretty dangerous. Any rabid love for the United States that would go so far as to deny our brokenness, both historically and currently, should have a light shone on it. I applaud Colin for saying, publicly, that he was not comfortable paying homage to a nation who treats its citizens —ANY of its citizens– poorly, as part of any systematic approach.
Anyone who loves this country must want it to be better than what it is, and right now, as Kaepernick tried to tell us, racism is still a problem. If you find anyone who says that they love this country, but they aren’t opposed to the racism that has been a part of this country’s history FOR WAY TOO LONG, then they don’t really love this country. True patriotism should include in it a desire for us to be better tomorrow than we were yesterday.
* * *
When we understand that patriotism is modest and that nationalism is arrogant, you really only need to ask yourself this question, if you want to find out which mode our country has been stuck in lately: “Has our country, recently, been honestly looking at where we’re at, as a nation, to try to determine how we might make improvements?”
I don’t know about you, but I’m not interested in making sure that we keep the American experiment going, if that just means that we are going to try to postpone, for as long as possible, the horrible death of our democracy. We should be making progress, we should be advancing, we should be looking for new paths to continue to ensure that our nation has an identity and a way of life worth believing in. If America, and the people of America, aren’t going to take it upon themselves, as a nation, to improve our society, then we are just putting off the inevitable point in the future where we are finished.
But, here’s the kicker –> any process for making progress has to start with identifying our weaknesses, our failures, and our inadequacies. One of the most dangerous problems with nationalism is that it is so closely linked with pride and arrogance and conceit to be able to easily look itself in the mirror and say, “We’ve got a long way to go, still.”
I’ve always believed that there’s a cycle of unrest for our country, and it tends to happen every fifty or sixty years, if you look throughout our history; the people of this nation look around and are saddened/disgusted/outraged that no progress is happening. So, they instigate change and, for a while, things improve and progress occurs. But then, it’s almost as if we spend a certain amount of time making progress and then we get tired or bored or sick of it –so we stop. Then, the progress stops. And it only takes a certain amount of time after that for the new generation to look around and be saddened/disgusted/outraged that no progress is happening.
It also occurs to me that, maybe, there are events that coincide with these periods of progress, goads that lead to the outrage that lights the fire of progress. With the pandemic happening right now, and the national spotlight on police brutality and racism, you wonder if it just takes a little bit to shake people awake enough so that they look around and say, “Hey, things shouldn’t be this way.” Maybe the civil rights movement and the war in Vietnam, in the sixties and seventies, shook people awake back then, as well.
I just wonder whether or not the overwhelming pride that you get these days from our current variant of patriotism is appropriate. Are we really the example that the world should follow? Have we really done such a great job handling our national responsibilities that we ought to think highly of ourselves? I don’t know about you, but I’m just as broken as the next guy/gal; I’m trying to handle my failings in my own agenda of progress.
It occurred to me today that I have been deeply impacted by The Incredibles.
Now, before I get terribly involved in a discussion of why I think it is that Elastigirl ended up with the wrong guy in the movie, and I why I think she should be with me, instead, allow me to get serious for a few paragraphs.
For me, a significant part of the story is the story of Buddy Pine, the young boy tossed aside by Mr. Incredible as a crazed fan when Buddy tries to reach out to him, to ask if he might be Mr. Incredible’s sidekick. Buddy ends up using the negative energy of that rejection to become Syndrome, a powerful nemesis that Mr. Incredible, with his wife, Elastigirl, and their family, ends up fighting at the end of the movie, for “all the marbles”.
In fact, if you were to plot the progress of Mr. Incredible’s character as he makes his way through the movie and visualize that alongside the progress that Buddy makes –albeit the wrong kind of progress– it’s arguable that Buddy is a more progressive character than Bob Parr (Mr. Incredible’s alter-ego). Not long after Mr. Incredible casts Buddy aside, he and his fellow superheroes, world-wide, are forced into the underground because of society’s growing discontent with having to deal with the fallout from their shenanigans. Bob Parr does not take this very well, and spends a good part of the movie pouting. Meanwhile, since he couldn’t be Mr. Incredible’s sidekick, Buddy (either consciously or sub-consciously) seeks to become the focus of Mr. Incredible’s attention as his nemesis, instead.
And even though Syndrome loses in the end –for he must, of course– I can’t help but admire the degree to which he is able to take the lemons that life hands him, to make the best lemonade that he can. The rejection that powers his ambition for most of the movie, even though it’s quite a dark brand of motivation, is a productive path; in fact, Syndrome, over the course of the movie, is a much more productive individual than Bob Parr, who is only really able to pick himself up by the bootstraps when he is engaged (secretly) by Syndrome in doing the antagonist’s bidding.
* * *
A different sub-plot of the story, which happens to also be the sub-plot of a story about two of the greatest superheroes of all time and their animosity with each other, comes out in a scene about two-thirds of the way through the story, when Syndrome reveals that he, an inventor without any particular super-powers to speak of, intends to one day sell his inventions to allow for everyone –with the money– to become empowered.
And this is the line that sticks with me, wherever I go:
“And when everyone’s super, no one will be.”
And I’ve often thought of that line, from time to time, because it is much more of a general statement on society than, perhaps, the writers were ever intending. What Syndrome means, most certainly, is that he intends to destroy the entire superhero class by making it so that there is no difference between those who have super powers and those who could buy the tools that would make them super powerful.
This desire to destroy what the Parrs –Bob, Helen, Violet, Dash, and Jack-Jack– have is vengeful angst resulting from Buddy’s rejection by Mr. Incredible. Syndrome intends to make Mr. Incredible pay for that rejection by rendering all of humanity “super” so that the thing that makes the Parr family special would cease to be that rare.
But, if we pan back a little bit from this specific statement, we can see that there is a lot of truth to these words on a larger scale.
The things that make some people ordinary and others extraordinary are often the abilities that we have. The doctor who is able to perform the most delicate of surgeries is extraordinary. The basketball player who can fly above his opponents to dunk the ball in the hoop is extraordinary. The author who writes the stories that people just can’t wait to read from cover to cover is extraordinary.
Our admiration of those people, who have abilities that we would wish for, is an admiration that wouldn’t exist if everyone was capable of those same feats. Who would we admire if we were all able to do the things that our “heroes” do?
Additionally, this is another approach to looking at the age-old question: “Which is better? Talent or hard-work?” I think that, as a society, when we look at those people who we might identify as extraordinary or super, we tend to assume that they have some skill that we don’t have and couldn’t obtain, which makes them as unique as they are, when in fact, it might more often be the case that the unique and super individuals among us are just those people who have worked hard enough to become so excellent at something that they rise above the level of everyday ability. We don’t want to look hard-work in the face anymore; our easy society doesn’t want us to have to work hard for anything.
Of course, the other side of that argument is that there have been plenty of individuals who have worked very hard and have never arrived at the level of ability that others seem to just naturally possess.
* * *
And of course, the other two superheroes who face off against each other on opposite sides of this “superpower vs. supertools” debate are Batman and Superman. Batman has no superpowers, but it doesn’t keep him from being able to be a super hero, because he has the tools that make him super powerful. Superman, on the other hand, is a super hero because of his super powers. Truth be told, Superman is an alien, and Batman sees Superman –and the power that he has– as a threat to Earth. Batman takes it upon himself, in the Batman v. Superman story line, to attack Superman in defense of the planet.
This story compares pretty similarly to the Bob Parr/Buddy Pine story in The Incredibles. If it weren’t for the fact that Syndrome is so obviously the antagonist in the movie, you might be hard-pressed to try to identify which of those characters –Syndrome or Mr. Incredible– is more worthy of the “hero” moniker. Certainly, from what we see in the movie, Sydrome is the harder worker. He has to strive and struggle for every advancement that he is able to make toward being somebody worthy of Mr. Incredible’s attention, while Mr. Incredible just seems to take his super power for granted.
They say that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. I think both of these characters are made to realize, through different circumstances in the film, that wanting something and not having it can be powerfully motivational. Through hard work and/or natural talent, I happen to believe that everyone can be super.
It Occurred To Me Today 