It occurred to me today that I’m running out of time.
On March 13th (which was a ‘Friday the 13th’, by the way), my life changed significantly, as did many. As a professional educator, I left my job on that Friday, in a building with my students, and transitioned into a ‘virtual’ environment. During the weeks that followed, I did my best to try to continue to connect with my students, delivering content ‘virtually’ while also trying to foster my growing relationships with them. It was tough, and like most educators I know, I struggled at first. But, I got the hang of it. And along the way, the shake-up in my world
–personally and professionally– allowed me to discover some other things, things that I’ve fallen in love with.
And now, my life is about to change back, at least somewhat.
Teachers are to report back to work next week at my school.
I saw a meme once, and it’s probably only a meme that teachers would understand, but it said something to the effect that “August, for teachers, is just one long Sunday afternoon”. And, as funny as that meme has always been to me, as summers have faded into falls in my life for the last eighteen summers, the message is a little more poignant for me this August. I feel like I have a little more to lose.
* * *
The question is going to be, “Will I have what it takes to desperately cling to the things that I’ve discovered that I really enjoy, the things that have become central to my life, these last five months? Will I find myself strong and emboldened, staring down the same old life that wants to try to have me back, or will I, having tasted something better, decide to rearrange my world differently than it had been before?” I know, that’s more like two, or maybe three, questions.
Because, you see, it’s no big deal to do easy stuff. The big deal is to do hard stuff.
No, that’s not what I’m trying to say.
How about this: it’s no big deal to do hard things when you’ve got the energy and the time to do those hard things. It is, however, significantly harder to do hard things when you are already spread too thin, as it is. Working on my writing, through this blog and through the novels I am drafting, and taking care of my plans to get back into shape, those things have been fairly easy, without much else to get in the way these last five months. They will not be as easy when other things start demanding my attention. I have a life that, right now –at this moment– contains almost everything that I hold dear.
But, here it comes… the other stuff.
* * *
I believe that astrology –the system of beliefs that includes things like planetary positions and astrological signs, etc.– is a bunch of hooey. But, some friend of mine posted on Facebook the other day something about ‘the planets of change are in retrograde in Scorpio’ and I thought to myself, “Hey, I’m a Scorpio, and hey, I’ve got some changes coming.” That probably doesn’t prove the legitimacy of astrology, but it gives me a reason to talk about change.
That change that came at me, at all of us, back in March, didn’t feel like a good one, going into it. But, as it turns out, things went pretty well for me (or at least as well as anyone’s life goes during a pandemic). I know a lot of people who didn’t fare as well, so I am definitely thankful. This change, that’s coming up for me soon, also doesn’t having a great feeling going into it. But, change is change. You have to stay flexible and bend as the winds blow. And, I am pretty happy to say that I made the best of the situation that I was handed this spring. I hope you did, too.
I think that positivity makes a big difference.
* * *
I’ve heard it said that nothing is ever really full. You can take a five-gallon bucket and fill it with bricks. Let’s say you end up getting eight bricks to fit into that bucket.
Is the bucket full of bricks? Yes, because you can’t fit any more bricks in the bucket. But, is the bucket full?
No.
Because, you can then add in golf balls, along with the bricks. Let’s say you end up fitting in seventeen golf balls, in among the bricks. Is the bucket full of bricks and golf balls? Yes. Is the bucket full?
No.
Then you can add marbles. Then you can add sand. Then you can add water.
If you think back to that initial point in time, at the beginning, when we thought the bucket was full of bricks, it wasn’t even close to full.
I saw this metaphor acted out in front of an audience once; I don’t remember where or when. The person who did the demonstration was talking about the importance of prioritizing certain things and making sure that those things end up in the bucket first, because you’ll never be able to fit them in once the bucket has its marbles and sand and water inside. Those big items, that you put in first to make sure that everything else has to work around them, those are the major priorities, like family and faith and the like.
To be honest with you, I’m glad for the pandemic, in some ways. It emptied a lot of useless things out of my bucket. And, truth be told, I’m not necessarily in a hurry to have a full bucket all over again.
Have my bricks changed? Have my golf balls changed? I can pretty safely say that they have, while my life has been strangely different these last five months. Now that it’s time to reconfigure what goes into the bucket along with the ‘major items’, it will be interesting to see how that goes.
* * *
I know that it might just sound like whining, to anyone reading this who has not been afforded the past five months to rearrange their lives. Believe me, I am not whining; on the contrary, I am extremely thankful for the circumstances that have allowed me to reorganize my life. Additionally, a significant part of me has not been whole since I left my students in March. I am, after all, a teacher.
I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the movie (there’s got to be a hundred of them) where the neglected lover escapes their ungrateful significant other to start a better life, only to have that spurned lover show up later, demanding to have things returned to their previous state.
I don’t know if I want to go back to the way things were. I’m healthier. I’m happier.
Let me say this: if you are able to find the best parts of life, if you are able to find ways to make things better for yourself, if you ever get the chance to rearrange things to make them better –> don’t ever give up the great things when you find them.
It occurred to me today that I just don’t know what to think, a lot of the time.
Yesterday, in Maybe (Part 1), I began a monologue on my impressions of how the pandemic is going, specifically related to the American response, and the extent to which we seem to be floundering.
If you ask me, we’ve all gotten pretty soft, here in America, especially when it comes to having to deal with adversity. I guess that’s to be expected when we’re talking about what probably amounts to the richest society to ever have had dominion on the face of the earth. Most Americans, living in their luxury and abundance, have never had to really come to terms with the notion that life can be hard. Of course, this is relative, so before you go off on me, telling me that you’ve lived a hard life, think twice. If you haven’t had to walk ten miles round-trip everyday, for the last ten years, so that you could bring two five-gallon buckets full of dirty water home to your mother and father and fellow siblings so they could have something to drink, I don’t want you to be embarrassed when I point out that the poorest people living in America are among the richest people in the world, from an economic standpoint.
What percentage of Americans would have a mental breakdown if you asked them to walk ten miles in a day, just to collect ten gallons of muddy water?
I think I might.
* * *
Yesterday, I used the analogy of a person hiding from a would-be killer, trying to be as quiet as you can. I think I want to develop that analogy a little bit, if you’ll allow me.
At the beginning of the pandemic, when the media was responding with reassuring messages via the news outlets and the celebrities, I remembered them saying, repeatedly, “We’re all in this together.”
So, imagine being in the closet, hiding from the killer, with five people. Then, not only is it your responsibility to remain quiet, to keep all five of you from dying, but it is the responsibility of the other four people in the closet to do the same. I think of countries like New Zealand and South Korea, that did their best to try to follow this type of an approach –mutual social responsibility– but even those countries are starting to see upticks in case numbers, because sustained effort requires stamina. Stamina, no matter how decent it is, eventually runs out.
Sometimes, when I think about the American approach to the pandemic, I imagine myself in a closet, being quiet, trying to hide from the would-be killer, while the person next to me is watching YouTube videos on their phone at max volume. “We don’t even have a chance”, I’m thinking to myself.
I myself am embarrassed by our nation’s response to this crisis.
The irony here is this: now that we are starting to have to look down the barrel of a prolonged pandemic, because our responsibility and our stamina are not what they could have been, the people who are most uncomfortable with those realities are some of the same people who’ve brought the consequences down on all of us.
If you shoot yourself in the foot, and then discover that you don’t like having to walk on crutches, here’s what you do –> don’t shoot yourself in the foot.
If you drive your car into a tree, and then discover that you don’t like taking public transportation, here’s what you do –> don’t drive your car into a tree.
Choices have consequences, and it’s the worst kind of whining when you complain about the realities that you are having to live through because of the choices that you’ve made.
But, then I come back to New Zealand and South Korea –> even after a successful effort to put an end to their pandemic problems, they’re back at the drawing board. Their populations weren’t able to ‘hold the line’ for very long.
Maybe, it doesn’t really matter what we do in response to the the pandemic.
Maybe, but South Korea and New Zealand have a combined 328 deaths out of a combined population of 56.5 million people. If we’d handled things in America as they handled things in their countries, our death toll right now would be about 1,900 people, rather than 170,000.
* * *
It just occurred to me, as I am working this analogy in my mind, for the second day now, that there are people that I know who want to storm the doors open on the closet where we’ve been hiding, to try to take the would-be killer by force.
It’s a simple philosophical difference, when you stop to think about it. Let’s stop hiding. Let’s start fighting.
Maybe it’s just the negative attitudes, that sometimes come with this approach, that bother me.
I could probably be convinced –sitting in the closet, afraid and as quiet as can be– by my fellows, if they decided that they wanted to stop hiding. Who wants to be the victim? Who wants to sit and wait for the would-be killer to come? We should stand! We should do what we can to overcome!
Remember, yesterday, when I talked about us being determiners?
The problem is, there isn’t a lot of that going around these days, at least not that I’ve been hearing much about, with respect to the pandemic.
Rather, correct me if I’m wrong –please, I want you to– but I’ve mostly been hearing 1) the voices of those who would have us follow the directions of the scientists as we socially distance and as we wear our masks, which all ends up sounding so conservative and cautious, or 2) the amazingly simplistic arguments of people who seems to be very gung-ho about doing what they want, and ignoring the advice they’re being given, and “SCREW YOU, I’M FREE”.
Maybe it’s just that those are the voices that I’ve been tuning in to.
* * *
I think I am suffering from some kind of a problem, here. I just can’t seem to get over all of this. The more I think about it, the more I get wrapped up in it. Then, I start a downward spiral of negative thinking about irresponsible people that gets me to hating my neighbor, which I know I’m not supposed to do.
Just a couple of hours ago, I was in a meeting for an organization that I do some work for, and the leaders of that organization were discussing some of the issues facing the organization, and I was thinking about casting my ‘doom and gloom’ outlook. Instead, I stopped to listen to others and what they had to say.
I was glad to hear that there are other people around me, people that I trust and respect, who think that there are reasons for hope, and reasons for optimism. I guess, MAYBE, I need to tune in to those voices a little bit more in my life.
I take that back; there’s no maybe about that one.
It occurred to me today that I’m using the word ‘maybe’ a lot more lately.
You probably have been, too.
–> My son is almost done logging hours on his learner’s permit. We should be able to get him into the DMV sometime soon to get him a driver’s license, maybe.
–>My church hasn’t had a service, with all of the congregation in the same room, since March. We should be able to do it sometime this fall, maybe.
–>I sent my sister-in-law a get-well card in the mail. It should get to her by the end of the week, maybe.
–>We’re almost out of toilet paper. I should be able to get some at the grocery store, maybe.
There are several problems with us having to use ‘maybe’ more these days.
* * *
The first of these problems is that, as Americans, we have become accustomed to being determiners. We make plans, we chart courses, we are the masters of our own fate. If something lies in our way, we mow it down. If Plan A doesn’t work, we go to Plan B.
When things don’t go our way, we figure out a way to make them go our way.
But, certainly, this pandemic isn’t the only example that we can summon to our minds of situations that exist, beyond our ability to control.
Immediately, weather occurs to me.
But, the thing about that example is that weather, even in its most inconvenient of forms, tends not to last very long. At least, not in comparison to a global pandemic.
This leads me to an interesting side observation –> maybe the real pandemic –that we’ve been suffering from for years– is a lack of patience. Tell me you’ve never seen someone –or you’ve never yourself– lost your patience, after only a moment or two of inconvenience. I know that I have (today, if I’m being honest).
Whether it’s the weather or a global pandemic, we just don’t do well when we’re not in control; we prefer to determine for ourselves how things will go.
Anybody else’s illusion of control laying shattered on the floor right now?
* * *
Additionally, having to use the word ‘maybe’ more often these days makes people uncomfortable. Last year, in August, if you’d asked me if I was going to be teaching in a school in November, the answer would have been, “Yes” –> and I would have looked at you funny. If you were to ask me if I am going to be teaching in a school in November right now, I’d have to say, “Maybe”.
This is emotionally taxing, to say the least. I have a friend, whose identity I will protect, who is in school administration. This friend was telling me the other day, about the uncertainty that all schools are dealing with right now, this friend said to me, “Phil, I’m just exhausted, mentally exhausted. I’m drained from trying to figure all of this out. I’ve never been this tired.”
And this friend of mine, that I speak of, is a work-horse, so tired doesn’t come easily for them.
In fact, I’ve noticed that people are starting to lose their cool more and more lately. I’ve seen on Facebook the same copied post on several Facebook streams in the last few days, a post that talks about “end scenarios” and “getting back to normal”. Six months into a global pandemic and people are losing their minds.
Have you ever seen that scene in the horror movie where the good guy just has to remain perfectly still and quiet for a few seconds until the bad guy decides to go look somewhere else. How does it usually go? The good guy sneezes, or the good guy drops something, or the good guy steps on a squeaky floor board; at that point, it’s all over, the bad guy knows and then chooses to strike.
Inevitably, there’s something about just staying calm for a limited amount of time that seems beyond us.
But look, I get it. It’s hard to stay positive. It’s hard to stay optimistic. And, because we’re not used to having to do it for very long, we lack the stamina to be able to maintain our positivity or our optimism for any significant length of time.
And, if you really want to know what I think about the idea of ‘getting back to normal’, I think it’s a lie that we are telling ourselves to help us to get through the days. I think normal may have left us all back in March.
* * *
I am going to cover this topic some more in my post for tomorrow, so I will dispense with some of those further discussions until then. But, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention how disappointing it is that this has become a political issue for so many people. If you’ve been reading my blog posts for any particular length of time, then you should have a pretty good sense of where I stand, politically. The problem that has recently come to light, in my mind, regarding the pandemic, and the political nature of the fallout from the pandemic, is this: rather than using our heads or even –perish the thought– our hearts, to help us decide how we’re going to navigate the ins and outs of the pandemic, WAY TOO MANY PEOPLE have decided to hand over the keys to their brains and their souls to politicians, to leave it to them to tell us how to handle ourselves during these unprecedented times.
This is dumb. And we should stop doing it. Once the politicians discover that we aren’t going to do any thinking at all, once they discover that we are totally okay with leaving the thinking up to them, then we are all screwed.
Of course, I am okay with you questioning the politicians that I question. I am, interestingly enough, also okay with you questioning the politicians that I have come to respect and trust. What I am ABSOLUTELY NOT OKAY WITH is you not thinking at all when it comes to what it is that you are being told by the leadership, and the reason that I am not okay with this is that I will NEVER stop questioning what it is that I am hearing from politicians.
It occurred to me today that so many people are using social media, but I’m not sure what the point is.
Just over two weeks ago now, I decided to start using a different social media platform for advertising the existence of my blog posts. As a result, I’ve now been spending more time on that social media platform. And it’s got me to thinking about why we use social media in the first place.
What’s the point?
* * *
Part of me wonders about the number of people on social media, just looking for attention. I think that part of what I’m doing on social media falls into this category, at least when it comes to my blog. I wonder how many other people are looking for attention via what they post on-line.
Psychologically speaking, I think that we all seek attention; we all want to be noticed and it’s reaffirming for our egos to have people, on social media or IRL, pay us some regard as fellow people. I don’t know that it’s necessarily a bad thing, but I do think that most things, in excess, are bad, including seeking attention.
This can especially get dangerous when it causes us to foster relationships with other people who might then become more important to us than our loved ones. When those who deserve our attention and affection in the utmost are being starved for that attention, because we are out seeking the attention of people on social media, an imbalance occurs that can wreak havoc on our personal lives.
* * *
Part of me wonders about the number of people on social media just trying to start fights.
I don’t know about you, but it seems like the cool thing to do these days is to say something on Facebook or Twitter that is guaranteed to get people enraged, just so that they’ll comment on your posts. Then, we can have a ‘vargument’ (virtual argument).
Varguments are so much fun, aren’t they?!?! You get to vargue with people, most of which you haven’t spoken to –in real life– in years, because they think that your post is absurd and you think their objection is equally absurd. Then, other people –friends of yours and friends of theirs– can get pulled into the vargument. Before you know it, thirty or forty or ninety people are hurling counterarguments (rarely) and insults (much more common) at each other in a freakin’ free-for-all.
What a good time!!!!!
Do you know how many people’s minds get changed from varguments?
None. No one ever.
If I’m wrong, then show me that I’m wrong. I’ll wait.
So, to combat this, I’ve recently gotten into the habit of pausing before commenting. You might want to try this, especially if you have a tendency to engage other people in varguments on social media. It’s done wonders for keeping me out of varguments. What I do is this: I’ll type out a witty and intelligent comment, sure to get the vargument started, and then I sit and wait for a moment. Then, during that moment, I come to realize that I don’t really want to vargue with anyone.
* * *
Part of me wonder about the number of people on social media who are just bored.
I don’t mean to sound flippant, but social media consumption does not qualify as a hobby, despite what people might currently believe.
I wonder if people would be on social media a little less often if they found something better to do with their time. Now, don’t get me wrong, I know that sometimes, in a down moment or two, social media is the perfect way to waste a few minutes. What is hard for me to understand is how it seems like many people are on their social media accounts pretty much constantly.
Learn to paint, read a book, get outdoors, hit the gym; there have got to be some better ways to spend so much of the time of which people seem to have so much. This, in and of itself, is interesting, if you think about it, because if you’ve ever heard someone complain about not having enough time to do XYZ, but you’ve noticed a significant amount of their time gets spent on social media, then you may have identified the source of the problem.
* * *
Part of me wonders about the number of people on social media, just sticking their nose where it doesn’t belong.
If you are on a social media platform, checking out what it is that other people are doing with their lives, just so that you can later be johnny-on-the-spot when someone asks, “Whatever happened to so-and-so?” Or, if you are using social media to keep up with the neighbors across the street –you know, those neighbors that you wouldn’t bother to cross the street to talk to– you might have a problem.
Of course, this particular exchange is a bit of a two-way street; if you get upset that people stick their noses in your business, step one might be to stop putting all of your crap on the internet for people to peruse. You can’t blame people for knowing everything that there is to know about you when you publish everything that there is to know about you for people to see.
Another caveat along these lines should include the following: getting upset with people when they’ve got something to say to you about what you’ve posted online is a little like getting upset about somebody shooting you with the gun that you gave them and using the ammo that you supplied to them.
At least, if you are going to share yourself with people online, you could do them the courtesy of not getting upset with them when they have something to say.
* * *
I used a gun metaphor in that last section, and when I stop to think about it, that’s kind of fitting, because I think that social media is probably a bit like a loaded gun.
When you think about all of the bad things that can happen with a loaded gun, it hardly seems worth having it. Of course, we all know what the reason is for having a loaded gun, just as we all know how badly that can turn out, WITHOUT CARE. That’s the difference, really –> BEING CAREFUL.
Just as responsible people with guns in their houses understand how important it is to be careful, to educate everyone in the house about the guns, and how to use them, and how to be safe, we need to think about social media along these same lines, I believe. Social media is a loaded gun. It can certainly have legitimate uses, but the danger involved in its misuse requires education and training.
Otherwise, you end up with damage and casualties.
Sound like anything you’ve recently seen on Facebook or Twitter?
It occurred to me today that we need to establish what is worthy and what is not (as it we ever could).
My wife and I got into a slight disagreement the other morning, and the specifics of the argument are none of your business (hee hee).
But, what I can tell you is this: the argument got me to thinking about productivity. The dictionary definition of productivity goes something like this: “the effectiveness of productive effort, especially in industry, as measured in terms of the rate of output per unit of input.”
Wow, that seems a little technical, don’t you think?!?!
So, I guess we have to look at productivity in terms of what is produced. That’s unfortunate, because I’ve spent hundreds of hours at this keyboard this year, and I don’t know if you could make the argument that I’ve produced very much –> and before you go jumping to conclusions, my wife and I were NOT fighting about whether or not my writing is a decent use of my time (she’s one of my biggest fans). Nevertheless, she –or anyone else– could make the argument that I’ve not produced much.
Maybe, I should print it all out. Then, there would be a product.
Maybe, if we are to look at productivity, we can be a little less technical about it and modify our understanding of what a product is.
Look at the factory worker, who is able to, in one hour’s time, put out seventy-five pieces of whatever he is meant to be making. That’s more than one part per minute! Pretty productive, huh?
The guy next to him puts out ninety-eight pieces per hour.
Which of them is more productive?
What if the ‘seventy-five pieces per hour’ guy makes most of his fellow coworkers, during their lunch break, laugh and have a good time and relax, so that the afternoon productivity in the factory goes up because this guy is around, even though his ‘productivity’ on the assembly line isn’t that great. Tangible productivity vs. intangible productivity.
How about this: what if everyone is producing something?
* * *
The problem with this argument –whether some pursuit or another is a worthy pursuit, whether it’s productive– is that it’s subjective. I kind of touched on this topic a little bit when I wrote about gaming in THIS POST. When I was a kid, playing video games was, in my mind, a totally appropriate use of time. My parents were NOT of the same opinion.
Who gets to decide what is productive and what is not?
Society has a lot of influence on this matter, unfortunately, because we tend to look at our endeavors with the eyes of a society that promotes concepts like market value and popularity and conformity; therefore, productivity and products that don’t fit those norms are often not given a second glance.
My daughter recently came up with the idea to start a YouTube channel where she would share her theological thoughts with viewers. My wife and I encouraged her to record a first video, to show to us what she was planning on doing.
Well, her first video was a video where she read a passage of the Bible. When she showed us that video, I told her that there probably weren’t a lot of watchers on YouTube who were going to be interested in hearing her read passages from the Bible. She understood, and I tried to steer her in a different direction, and then she recorded a second video. It was a lot better, and it will be interesting to see where it goes from here.
In that first conversation, where I tried to help her to see that her first concept wasn’t going to be productive, I was careful to try not to extinguish her dream; I am ashamed to say that I have probably –more than once– not been supportive of all of her ideas. I tell myself that I am just being protective, when she comes to me with these crazy ideas, that I don’t want her to be hurt when she doesn’t get the results that she is expecting/wanting.
So rather than have her discover that no one in the world is going to be interested in watching a video of her looking down at her Bible, stumbling and struggling through a reading of a chapter, I break her heart, a little bit. Maybe the right thing to do is to let her try, so that she can discover whether or not her ideas have merit –by succeeding or failing– and then I could just make myself available to catch her if she falls.
The question of being productive, of creating something that people are going to want to have, is a struggle of my own. It would be one thing for me to come to terms with it, if everyone who is reading my daily blog stopped, because I’m an adult and I can use the coping mechanisms that I’ve learned to deal with the emotional fallout. I tell myself that I don’t really care if people read my writing, I tell myself that I am doing it because I enjoy the writing process –which I most certainly do. At the end of the day, though, I watch the numbers (people viewing the post) go up on some posts and I watch them go down on other posts, and I get emotionally attached when a post that I really loved writing does poorly. Just like I think my daughter would be crushed if her YouTube channel didn’t take off.
* * *
The concept of being productive is hard, because we aren’t the ones that make the determination whether or not our efforts are well-spent. When we create, and others evaluate that creation, there is something in us –whatever we ended up investing in the created thing– that is wide-open to attack when people subjectively decide that we’ve wasted our time, that our creations aren’t worthy.
I said, at the end of the first section of this post, that it might be the case that everyone is producing something. Some people have products that are more intangible than others. Let me go even a step further than that: I truly believe that it is the case that even bad things are productive, inasmuch as they could lead –down the road– to good things.
The drunk driver that kills the teenage daughter driving home; when that event draws a family closer together, while it’s certainly not ideal, it could be considered ‘productive’, in a sense. The moronic leader, who awakes the underlings by being so inept as a manager, that ‘boss’ has been productive, in a sense.
I guess that makes us all producers; congratulations on being a producer. Go out and be the kind of producer whose product reflects well on them.
It occurred to me today that I buy a lot of stuff on the internet.
We have four Alexa devices in our home; if you don’t know what an Alexa device is, it is a voice-activated, internet-enabled smart device that you can use to do different things in your home, in connection with Amazon. We are BIG Amazon fans in our house.
The Alexa devices have become a big part of how our home works. The lights in our kitchen, living room, and master bedroom are all controlled by Alexa. We ask her for information about the weather –A LOT– and when we have questions about the definitions of words
–> we are all pretty decent readers in our house, so it’s not uncommon for someone in the house to be coming across a word, in a book, that they don’t know the meaning of.
When it comes time to put a grocery item on our shopping list, everyone in the house knows that we do that through Alexa. When one of the kids notices that we are out of Lucky Charms, they walk up to an Alexa and they say, “Alexa, add Lucky Charms to the shopping list”. Then, when it’s time to go shopping, we check our Alexa app on our phone to get the shopping list taken care of, lickety split.
We even use Alexa to buy items directly from Amazon, which is even more convenient. When I notice that I’ve used the last furnace filter, I walk up to an Alexa and I say, “Alexa, reorder furnace filters”, and she’ll say back, “Based on your order history, I’ve found 3M Filtrete furnace filters. The six-pack of filters is $22.89. I’ve put the order in your Amazon cart for review. To purchase, say, ‘Buy it now’.” At that point, I reply, “Buy it now”, and the order gets placed and it shows up at the house a couple of days later. We do this with candy and laundry detergent and bar soap and dryer sheets and all sort of other stuff.
Like I said, we are big Amazon fans at our house.
And I’ve heard people say that they’d be nervous about 1) having all of those Alexa devices listening to you all of the time, and 2) having Amazon know so much about your purchasing habits. In my experience, people who are nervous about those kinds of things often 1) have something that they’re trying to hide as they protect their privacy rights, and 2) think more highly of themselves than they ought. I’m pretty sure I’m not important enough for Amazon to care much about what my family is saying around the dinner table, and I’m also pretty sure that it’s not a matter of national security that Amazon knows that I order Downy Unstoppables about once a week.
* * *
Up until just recently, I would say that the strangest thing that I’ve ever ordered online was a mattress. That was an interesting experience.
A few years back, my wife and I were in need of a new mattress; I think you know it’s time for a new mattress when it takes mountain climbing experience in order to get out of the divots that you’ve worn in your side of the bed. Anyway, we started thinking about going to stores and trying out mattresses, and the thought of doing that started to overwhelm me. So, instead, I started looking on the internet, to see if I could do some advance research on mattresses, to try to ease the experience that I expected that we were going to end up having in these mattress stores.
What I ended up finding was that you could buy mattresses online.
So, I pitched the idea to my wife, and it wasn’t a hard sell, but it did require a little bit of persuasion. We ended up getting a mattress from Wayfair that arrived in a box that was two-feet by two-feet in diameter, and about as tall as my wife.
When we opened the box, it said inside that we shouldn’t open the box unless we were in our bedroom with the box. So we closed the box.
Then, we took the box, to our bedroom, and opened it (again) and followed the instructions inside. The mattress was shrink-wrapped into a tube-shape inside the box. So, when we cut the mattress’s shrink wrap, it –over the course of several hours– took its appropriate shape on the bedroom floor.
And now, I can say, a few years down the line, that it was a great internet purchase. But, I can’t any longer say that it’s the strangest thing we’ve bought online.
* * *
Moments ago, I just bought the craziest thing that I’ve ever bought on the internet. My wife and I just bought a car from Carvana. Let me tell you about how weird that was.
I’m not an expert when it comes to buying a car, but I’ve done it a few times. Often enough, at least, to start to understand how the whole process works. So, when it came to buying a car online, it’s pretty similar to the experience of buying one in person at a dealership.
I know that the big difference, for me, was not being sure of what I was doing as we were ‘checking out’ with the car that we’d chosen, but then again, I guess I feel like that when I’m in the dealership, as well, filling out all of the paperwork. I will say that I was pretty nervous, making sure that I was clicking on the right things, making sure that I was reading all of the fine print. That final button on the final page of the check-out process, the button that says, “Submit Carvana Order”, I had to nudge myself into clicking that button.
Of course, the problem here is that I feel a little guilty about taking advantage of the dealership that we used to get some test-driving done (sorry, Wendi). The idea of buying a car that we’d never even driven before was a bridge-too-far in our minds, and my wife –it will be her car when it arrives next week– was adamant about getting to drive what we were going to end up buying. And, we most definitely would have bought from the dealership, if they’d had what we were wanting.
That’s one of the most appealing things about buying stuff on the internet, at least in my mind; if I want something specific, and my local grocery store, or local hardware store, or local car dealership, doesn’t have exactly what I’m looking for, I can probably find that specific thing on the internet. My wife wanted some specific things in her next vehicle, and she wanted them at a specific price point, and that wasn’t available from the dealership. Shopping online gives me, as a consumer, a higher level of control over the product that I’m getting.
It occurred to me today that music has been so important to me, as it has to many.
I was recently having a conversation with a friend of mine about the concept of ‘waking up with a song in your head’. I was telling this friend of mine that it is a pretty normal occurrence for me to wake up in the morning with a song in my head and I don’t know where it came from. I asked this friend whether or not the same thing ever happens to him.
I don’t know about you, but waking up with a song in my head happens to me on most mornings. This morning, the song just so happens to be If You Leave by OMD. Now, I don’t know where it came from, I don’t know when I last heard that song, and I can’t even remember any off-handed references to the song, or any of its lyrical lines, in the recent past. Apparently, the song was a feature hit from the movie, Pretty in Pink, which I didn’t know until just a few seconds ago. Can’t remember the last time I saw that movie.
So, who knows how this happens to me, but I can’t say that it’s an altogether unpleasant experience, especially if it’s an enjoyable song. Sometimes, it might end up being an annoying song, so I’ll wash it out of my head by listening to some other music.
Last week, on one particular morning, I woke up with On My Own from Les Miserables stuck in my head. It’s my favorite song of the entire play (the best version, IMO, is the Lea Salonga version –> she’s an epic vocalist). The song is sung by Éponine near the beginning of Act II of the play, as Éponine is lamenting the fact that the man that she is crushing on (Marius) doesn’t love her back. That song, so beautifully tragic, can actually wreck my mood if I leave it in my head for very long.
Just one of the ways that music affects me.
* * *
I also happen to be a vocalist, so music is special to me, not only because I love to listen to it, but because I also love to perform it.
The funny thing about that is that I don’t like to listen to recordings of myself. I don’t like the way my voice sounds ‘outside of my head’, even though I do like the way that I sound inside my head. If you think that sounds strange, please hear me out (Get it? Hear me out? Hee Hee).
I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced this or not, but your voice –whether it’s your singing voice or your speaking voice– does not sound the same to you as it does to other people. That’s because your voice, inside your head, is modified by the sinus cavity in which the sounds reverberate. Those sinus cavities are in close proximity to your ear, so, when you hear your voice, you are only partly hearing what comes out of your mouth and is picked up by your ears from outside of your head. Another part of what you are hearing, when you hear your voice, is the sound of your voice from the inside.
The sound of your voice is one of the only sounds that you will ever hear that sounds different to you than it does to anyone else.
Interestingly enough, I have been singing as a performer for more than thirty years, and I only recently discovered that I don’t like how everyone else hears me.
Nevertheless, singing has provided me with opportunities that I don’t know if I would have gotten from other places. When I was in the church choir as a young teenager, I learned to respect my elder through the relationships that I forged with the other men in the church choir, many of whom were four or five times my age. I learned to love so many of the great, old hymns by working on them -beginning in that church choir– now going on twenty-five plus years ago.
In fact, the other day, I went through my current church hymnal, to see how many of the hymns I was familiar with; sixty-three of those hymns in that hymnal I was able to recall from the annals of my musical memories.
Then, in college, as I joined one of the most prestigious glee clubs in the nation, I got to see the world because of my singing. I learned more about music in those four years than I’d learned previously, or since. I formed friendships with guys in that glee club that will last for the rest of my life. I performed with groups and in places that I never would have been able to perform otherwise. Singing the Ave Maria in the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, performing the Oedipus Rex opera with the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, performing the Carmina Burana with the South Bend Symphony Orchestra, under the direction of Maestro Tsung Yeh, these are all performances and experiences that I will always treasure.
Another of the ways that music affects me.
* * *
Music is an art form, of course, and life is better because of the art –because of the beauty– that we are able to incorporate into our lives. I have enjoyed some art forms to greater degrees, and some to lesser degrees, but I have loved no form of art (not even my love of the art of words) as much as I have loved the art of music.
Also, as I close this out, let me say this. I said earlier that “the sound of your voice is one of the only sounds that you will ever hear that sounds different to you than it does to anyone else”. As I was writing that sentence earlier, it occurred to me that we all have a voice. The fact that it sounds different to others than it sound to us is a great metaphor, I think.
Someone needs to hear your voice, to hear your thoughts, to benefit from the kind, gentle, positive words that you could offer to them. Just because your voice doesn’t seem like much to you, it could be a significantly more beautiful sound in the ear of someone who needs to hear what you have to say.
It occurred to me today that it might be time to stop.
They say that the first thing to do when you’re in a hole is to stop digging, which –I would gather– means that we ought not continue to do the things that make things bad, if we’d like to avoid making things worse.
As intuitive as that advice sounds, you would think that no one, after realizing themselves to be in a hole, would ever continue to dig.
But, they do.
The question is, “Why?!?!”
If you know that what you’ve been doing has been taking you down the wrong path, why would you keep doing it? To answer that, in a general sense, we could probably all look inside of our pasts to see what motivated us to keep digging, in those specific situations where we made that mistake. And, let’s be honest, we’ve probably all been in that position once or twice.
Perhaps, you were so far down the road that you figured that it wouldn’t be any good to try to turn around, so late. That’s how Shakespeare’s Macbeth felt; in Scene 4 of Act 3, Macbeth is lamenting the fact that he has shed so much blood, to attain power and to keep it, that he decides to just keep going. He says, “I am in blood / Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o’er”
Or, perhaps, you didn’t really want to stop doing what you were doing. I think you see this at the end of Disney’s Pinocchio, when Pinocchio realizes that there is something wrong on Pleasure Island, but he’s not necessarily so troubled by it, initially, as to turn away and run.
Some people, for better or for worse, just like to dig holes. They end up in bad situations almost as a secondary result of who they are.
But, if you pan out a little bit, to get a more ‘macro’ view of things, we as a nation have arrived at a point where, IMO, we are significantly stuck down a hole. The problem with this scenario is that, as a nation, we might be stuck down a hole, but only a few of us are aware, at this early stage. Perhaps the most observant among us knew even earlier. But, we are still looking at a length of time, I think, before enough people realize that we are somewhere, as a nation, that we don’t want to be, at which point we can agree to enact some kind of an ‘about face’.
Change in groups is harder to enact than change in individuals, if for no other reason than the group is at the mercy of those group members who are only apt to realize much later that change is necessary.
* * *
If you’re not a Christian music fan, than this might not mean much of anything to you, but there is a popular Christian band named “Casting Crowns” –probably one of my favorite bands of all time– and they sing a song that I want to mention, in connection with the topic of this post. In fact, if you follow the band, and you read the title of this post, then you know which song I’m referencing. Slow Fade is a song about how we often end up in the worst places, not because we are magically transported there, but because we took steps –tiny, seemingly inconsequential steps– that build upon each other to deliver us to the places we would have never thought to tread.
Which is pretty similar to what I often say about frogs –> You can’t boil a live frog by tossing it in a pot of boiling water, because it’ll just jump right back out. But, if you put a frog in a pot of lukewarm water, and you slowly raise the temperature, the frog will just sit there and eventually get cooked.
I wrote about this poor frog all the way back in 2018; that post is HERE, if you are interested. I’m not going to beat that particular horse –or frog– all over again.
But, at about the same time when the song Slow Fade was topping the charts of Christian music, I was lamenting a friend who’d gotten himself into quite the pickle. Through a series of small, seemingly inconsequential steps, each one advancing him further down a road, he ended up cheating on his wife. The thing about ending up in a place like this is, it’s not that hard; all you have to do is take a few baby-steps –IN THE WRONG DIRECTION– and you can accomplish this amazing feat. Seems like I’ve talked about this before, too –> check it out HERE.
If you ever find yourself in a situation like this, where it seems like you’ve arrived somewhere that you never intended to be, the question to ask isn’t “How did I get here?”; the real question is, “How do I get out?”
* * *
One of the things that drives me the craziest about being a teacher is room temperature. When you’re a teacher, and students walk into your room at the start of class, they often say things like, “Mr. Brackett, it’s cold in here!” or “Mr. Brackett, why is it so hot in here?”
The problem with these kinds of statements from students, many of whom really just have a hard time starting a conversation with someone, if not for the ‘opening complaint’ bit, is that our room temperatures in the high school are climate-controlled, which means that they are always, during regular school hours, within a couple of tenths of a degree of the same temperature, all year round.
So, the kid who left home with a t-shirt and jeans on –IN FEBRUARY– comes into a room that is 72.1 degrees and says, “Mr. Brackett, it’s cold in here!”, that same kid will show up on the last day of school in June, wearing the same clothes, and the room will be 72.2 degrees. That kid is going to say, “Mr. Brackett, why is it so hot in here?”
Nothing has changed. The temperature hasn’t changed –not significantly, anyway– and their attire hasn’t changed, but in their mind, it’s a world of difference. The real difference is in their minds.
This is the same issue that further complicates our awareness of the tiny degrees by which our circumstances can change.
* * *
If my students would look at the temperature readout on the thermostat in my room, everyday, they would come to understand what 72 degrees actually feels like. Then, with that understanding, they would be able to tell, truly, if the temperature was too high or too low, because they would understand what 72 feels like.
They would also, hopefully, stop making their silly complaints about their opinion of the room temperature.
Similarly, we need to, as people, develop an understanding that keeps us from becoming frog-legs, which is to say that we should come to understand when things are getting bad, before they get so bad that we are screwed.
I don’t think many of us have been paying attention, in our personal lives, or to the situation in our world. We didn’t get magically teleported here; we got here because none of the steps along the way were so alarming as to cause us to stop our downhill journey.
It occurred to me that, sometimes, the most significant of barriers aren’t even really there.
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post about goal-setting; I won’t bore you with a recap –> if you are interested, it’s a two-parter, available here and here.
It occurred to me after I wrote that post that I was going to need a new goal for my running routine, so I am planning on running a half-marathon before the end of the year.
Which is more than double the length of my PB (personal best).
Which is scary.
But, if you’d told me at the beginning of the year that I was going to run a 10K this year –multiple times, actually– I would have been afraid of what that was going to be like, all the way back then.
Just like I’m afraid, now, of the goal that now lies in front of me.
But I think I’ve discovered something: the barriers that we believe are in our way, a lot of the time, aren’t even really there. We might imagine them being there, but that’s not the same thing as them actually being there.
* * *
Do you know what a Socratic square is? It’s a large square consisting of four smaller squares, of equal size. The diagram can be used to illustrate situations in which two different variables, each with two possible conditional states, can produce multiple outcomes. Let’s apply the Socratic square to the concept of barriers, for a moment.
A barrier can serve two purposes: it can serve to confine and it can serve to protect. In the event that a barrier protects us from what’s outside, we are happy to have it. In the event that a barrier confines us, limiting our freedom, we are usually opposed, inasmuch as we tend to like to be free. However, we can –although it would be abnormal– choose to hate the barrier that protects us, just as we can also, atypically, choose to love the barrier that confines us. Each of these four outcomes –> 1) love to be confined, 2) hate to be confined, 3) love to be protected, and 4) hate to be protected, results from the two conditional states that we can have about a wall, and the two conditional states pertaining to whether the wall is protecting us or protecting others from us.
I saw a recent political ad that juxtaposed our President’s plans to build a wall, at the beginning of his presidency, with the fact that the majority of the free world has restricted travel to their countries from the United States, in light of the current COVID-19 crisis and America’s continuing problems with the pandemic.
Without making any further political statements on the matter, this political ad made me realize that barriers can be viewed in a positive light, or in a negative light, depending on which side of the barrier you find yourself, and depending on whether or not you are okay with being protected or being confined.
It reminds me of a sci-fi book that I read, years ago, by one of my favorite sci-fi authors, Greg Egan. The book was called Quarantine, and it tells the story of Earth, in the future, surrounded by an impenetrable wall that has been placed around us for reasons unknown. The barrier, its source, and its effects on the people of Earth –leading to an interesting mental disease called Bubble Fever– are the subject of the book. As much as I remember it, I enjoyed the book thoroughly.
* * *
I think that the barriers, that hamper me most often, are the excuses that I use.
This blog post concept came to me this morning during a run. It wasn’t a particularly difficult distance to run, but I still struggled because I was telling myself, in my head, that it was okay for me to be stopping to catch my breath because of the humidity, because it was hard to breathe, because the weather was not cooperating. And, you might think, “Sure, those reasons sound like legitimate reasons for having to stop during a run.”
But, the thing is, I’ve run in higher humidity than I faced this morning. I ran in Texas, a few weeks back, when the humidity was 90% and the temperatures were in the low 80s at 7:00 a.m. By comparison, my run this morning was not so tough, as to warrant me stopping six times in four miles. But I did, because I had already legitimized the excuses in my mind.
Maybe the formula is more complicated than I realize.
Maybe it’s not just, “low humidity, run non-stop; high humidity, can’t go straight through.” Who knows how many variables are involved in that eventual decision that I make to stop, for just a few seconds?
When I know, in advance, that I am going to use an excuse to explain my sub-par performances, then it’s pretty much over but the crying afterward (metaphorical crying, not real crying). The funny thing about the quitting that I do, when I am properly armed with just the right excuse, is that I’ve had four or six or ten runs in a row where I never stopped during any of those runs, and then I start to think to myself, “Man, I am glad that I am done with that stupid ‘quitting when it gets tough’ garbage.” But, then, I quit during a subsequent run, maybe just once or twice, and then I’m defeated; sure to follow is a decent string of runs where I can’t seem to do the whole thing straight no matter what I do.
I guess there’s always going to be something in the way, some barrier or some set of circumstances that I decide to use as an excuse. Every time I chose the excuses over the work that I have to do to keep going, I am choosing to believe a lie –> that I can’t do what I know that I can do. It’s during those moments, when I’ve decided that I cannot, that the struggle is over and I’ve lost the battle.
Bottom line: you can’t do what you don’t believe you can do.
Here’s to me, doing a better job at pushing through the barriers in my mind, next time.
It occurred to me today that I’m not exactly sure what love is.
It is, in my defense, a word that gets thrown around a lot.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by the fact that there is some confusion in my mind about the issue –> between what Disney has put in my head about love and what corporate America has put there, between what I know of love from my parents and what I know about love from my wife, between loving God and loving ice cream, there seems to be a bit of ambiguity.
We use the word a lot; to describe differing emotions –emotions that probably aren’t all ‘love’, technically speaking– to the detriment of the core concept of the word. This is evidenced by the fact that the dictionary definition for the word is multiple paragraphs long. It shouldn’t be so complicated, but it is, since we’ve started using the word to describe the way that we feel about all manner of things.
I love Notre Dame football. I love the way that I feel after a decent run. I love my wife and my children. I love craft beer. I love my parents. Are any of these loves the same as any of the others? Probably not.
No wonder I’m confused.
* * *
I also wonder about tough love –> the concept that you can love someone more or better by forcing them to accept the consequences of their actions, rather than by rescuing them out of those very consequences. I wrote a post about it a couple of months back, you can find it HERE if you’re interested.
Enabling bad behavior is never good, but the psychological need that some people have, to be the hero, will compel them to “come to the rescue”, even when they know that it isn’t the right thing to do.
Whether or not you are actually loving someone by saving them from the situations that they get themselves into is a case to be argued.
When I think about love, in its most-pure form, it includes self-sacrifice and humility. I think, at least on a sub-conscious level, people who rescue their loved ones from bad situations aren’t being selfless or humble. They are feeding a need that they have to be the rescuer. Trust me on this; I know this is true because I am an enabler far too often.
* * *
Do you happen to know who the leading lady is with the most Oscars for that category (Academy Award for Best Actress)?
The answer is Katherine Hepburn. She won the Oscar for best actress four times. No other actress has won the Best Actress Oscar even three times. A whole slew of actresses have won the Oscar in that category twice, including Ingrid Bergman, Elizabeth Taylor, Jane Fonda, Sally Field, Jodie Foster (love her), and Meryl Streep.
In any case, Katherine Hepburn is credited with fifty-three different movie roles, according to the IMDB (the Internet Movie Database). The last role that she had on the Silver Screen was a supporting role in the remake of the 1939 classic, Love Affair. When it was remade in 1994 (the year that I graduated from high school), the starring roles were played by Warren Beatty and Annette Bening.
If you are unfamiliar with the basic premise of the movie, two people meet on a fluke and fall in love, but each of them is engaged (unhappily) to someone else. They promise, at the end of their short fling, to reunite after three months’ time, at the top of the Empire State Building. Unfortunately, Terry McKay (played by Annette Bening) is hit by a car while she is at the base of the Empire State Building, trying to make her way to her rendezvous with Mike Gambril (played by Warren Beatty). Since she never arrives, he is left to assume that he has been slighted.
It’s the final scene of this movie that gets me, every. single. time.
—SPOILER ALERT—-
Mike and Terry reconnect, in the final scene of the movie, but Mike doesn’t know that Terry has been incapacitated because of the accident that kept her from the top of the Empire State Building. So, Mike finds Terry, reclined on a couch in her apartment, and he monologues through his feelings about what happened between the two of them, until he finally puts two and two together in his head, and he realizes what ended up happening –and why she has been sitting on the couch the whole time.
I love the end of the movie, but I’m always a little perturbed by the entire concept of the story. Two people meet and fall in love, but then they go their separate ways… for what?!?! While it’s encouraging that Mike and Terry do end up together, I’m not sure that all of the extra drama was necessary. Come to think of it, I can’t think of any Warren Beatty films that I really enjoyed.
It is interesting to note that Warren Beatty and Annette Bening were married at the time that they filmed Love Affair, and are married to this day.
* * *
Jennie and I have been dating for more than twenty-six years. During that time, our understanding of our love for each other has certainly developed through many different phases.
I’ve bought things for her, to try to prove to her that I love her.
I’ve tried to do things for her, to prove to her that I love her.
I’ve repeatedly –probably hundreds of thousands of times– told her how much I love her. I’ve told her with the spoken words, and I’ve told her with the written words.
Whether any of that has been of any use at all, I can certainly say that our love is growing stronger with the passage of time, probably simply because it becomes a more established fact as every day passes.
I know more about my love for my wife than I did ten years ago, just as I hope to know more about my love for my wife in ten years. Since we’ve been married for 7,022 days, you would think that the chances of me having a good sense of how I love her, and why I lover her, would be pretty good.
At this point, though, I think I am most comfortable with saying that I understand more fully how I feel than I used to.
Maybe that’s how it works: a four-year-old really only knows that they love Lucky Charms, while a fourteen-year-old might love their parents or their siblings in a way that they understand.
As time goes by, we come to understand love better, having lived it.
It Occurred To Me Today 