The Fall Of 'Epic'

It seems that we’re losing the word ‘epic’ the same as we lost ‘unbelievable’.

I really don’t know when we lost ‘unbelievable’, but I'm quite certain that it had to do with broadcasters overusing it during sporting events. Sometime along the way, any play slightly above average began being referred to as ‘unbelievable’, to the point where the word has now lost all of its meaning:

“A routine ground ball to second base! Unbelievable!”

“He’s got a clear path to the basket and gently lays it in! Unbelievable!”

“He runs a slant and gains five yards! Unbelievable!”

If anything, the overuse of the word ‘unbelievable’ makes the players seem horribly incompetent, like it’s miracle they can even execute an average play as opposed to just falling over and mumbling incoherently.

And now the same thing is happening to ‘epic’, whose dictionary definition is as follows:

1. noting or pertaining to a long poetic composition, usually centered upon a hero, in which a series of great achievements or events is narrated in elevated style
2. heroic; majestic; impressively great
3. of unusually great size or extent

So, based on these definitions, your meal was not ‘epic’, no matter how many times you posted pictures of it on Facebook. For a meal to be epic, it would have to last for several days and consist of multiple courses that included various hot peppers that would kill a normal person.

A baseball game that goes ten innings is not ‘epic’. Get back to me when you get over twenty-five.

The concert you went to was not ‘epic’. Maybe it would be in the running if it lasted for a full day and consisted of a dozen headlining acts, none of whom got arrested or had a temper tantrum and stomped off of the stage so they could then complain viaTwitter about how they don't get any respect.

‘Epic’ should be used sparingly, only in cases when it’s clearly deserved.

The move Braveheart is epic.
The 1980 Olympic U.S. hockey team win over the Soviet Union was epic.
Man landing on the moon was epic.

Think of it this way, what word do we have that’s grander than ‘epic’? What word is the next step up from it? What are we going to say when something truly epic happens? We’ll no longer be able to use ‘epic’ to describe it, because it's been so diluted that it won’t truly capture the magnitude of the event. What does that leave us with? ‘Super-epic’? ‘Epic Squared’? ‘Epic Cubed’? Ugh.

Unfortunately, I think that we’re already past the point of being able to save ‘epic’. Our only hope is to come up with a brand new word to take its rightful place, one that isn’t terrible, like my above suggestions.

Any ideas?

Trotting With Turkeys

I signed up for the first ever Copper Country Turkey Trot on Thanksgiving Day for several reasons:

1)      It was free.

2)      I figured that I’d feel less guilty about consuming an utterly ridiculous amount of food later on if I ran enough to burn off a quarter of a piece of pumpkin pie first.

3)      It was free.

4)      I kind of hoped there would be a classic U.P. blizzard, which would leave us all running in two feet of snow with almost zero visibility, not sure if we were passing snowmen or men covered in snow. (I’m not sure why I was hoping for this, mind you. Perhaps because it would make a fun story to tell afterwards.)

5)      It was free.

6)      This was my first turkey trot, and I was harboring hope that there would actually be turkeys trotting about with us. I mean, why else would it be named that? They wouldn’t get ones hopes up with promises of turkeys just to crush them, would they?

7)      It was free.

My training consisted entirely of trying to remember to bring my running shoes with me from Minnesota, which I managed to accomplish while only having to turn back once. It was a good plan, and I may incorporate it into future training.

On the morning of Thanksgiving, I rolled out of bed, almost tasting the upcoming feast of turkey, stuffing, and pie. An almost overwhelming urge to not exercise any more than raising a fork up to my mouth almost derailed me, but I was able to fight it off, mainly by thinking of trotting around with turkeys.

When I arrived at the sight of the race, at around 8:40 in the morning, I quickly realized that the demographic of the event was broken down as follows:

Wives of husbands who were out hunting: 98%
Other: 2%

Now I’ll admit that this isn’t hard data, just my own primitive reckoning, but judging by the amount of complaining about toilet seats being left up, I think that it’s pretty darn accurate.

It was a perfect day for a run. The weather was very mild, with no hint of a blizzard in sight.

A little disappointed that I wasn’t seeing any turkeys, much less turkeys trotting about, the event kicked off, and I was on my way.

No times were being kept, as it was all for fun, so the “race” quickly turned into a social event more than anything else, with people catching up to each other, chatting, then going on their separate ways. I tried to fit in with the demographic by trying to swap recipes and discussing shoes, but it didn’t really work out to well, since everybody already knew how to make toast.

Somewhere during the last mile, I gave up on the hope of there being any turkeys present. Talk about false advertising! Already discouraged by this stunning turn of events, I then encountered a hill with a roughly forty-five percent incline that stretched on for about eighteen miles, which is a little weird considering the fact that the course was only 3.2 miles, but physics has never been my forte, so I just tried to power on through it.

On this hill, the friendly chatting pretty much stopped, and all of the runners who were expecting a fun, casual jog, including myself, were now sucking wind and giving thanks for escalators and elevators as means to conquer various ascents in other facets of their lives.

Eventually, I made it up the hill and finished the run, driven on mainly by the realization that if I collapsed, my mother probably wouldn’t be too excited to bring me a plate of turkey dinner to wherever I was still lying, gasping for breath.

After that, there's not much more to tell, and I was soon on my way back home, making a beeline towards more caloric intake than a dozen turkey trots could ever hope to overcome.

Overall, it was a worthwhile and fun experience, one that I’d consider doing again, especially since I’d know what to expect, which definitely wouldn't include real turkeys. But hey, as long as it’s still free, right? Plus, maybe next year it’ll be a good blizzard. Then I’d have a lot to write about.

The Rigors Of Small Business Ownership

I’ve just learned several lessons that I’d now like to share with you, so as to keep you from making the same mistakes that I did. If you later feel the need to thank me, your gratitude can be expressed in a monetary fashion, or with baked goods.

I’d just picked up my mail, and I noticed that I'd received something from a local Dodge/Jeep/Ram dealership. Usually, I never read mail like this, but on a whim I tore the letter open. The first line read as follows: “From one small business owner to another, I am contacting you today about the…”

That’s as far as I got before my head exploded.

Wait, I’m a small business owner? When did this happen? Was it on that one Saturday night I still don’t remember very well? Or did somebody drop their small business on the sidewalk and it got stuck to my shoe when I later passed by?

What is my small business? What do I produce? I hope it’s not golf clubs, because I don’t know a thing about producing golf clubs! Or pacemakers, or industrial fans, or greeting cards! Oh boy, unless my small business makes semi-edible toast, I’m in big trouble here!

Does my small business have a cool name? If not, how hard is it to change a business name? I’ll bet it’s a lot of paperwork. I hate paperwork!

Do I have any employees? If so, how many? Will I be able to walk that fine line of being a no-nonsense executive while still being able to connect to my workers on a human level?

Does my small business have a vision? If so, can I change it? If so, how could my small business possibly succeed when its new vision would most likely focus exclusively on taking vacations and napping?

Do I have a corporate headquarters? Do I have my own office? Is it a corner office, with a beautiful view of some city skyline? Do I have a huge desk? Can I put my feet up on that desk all day and smoke cigars?

Wait, do I need to wear suits all of the time? I only own one suit, and it’s too big! Where can I get more suits? Or can I just change the dress code? What would that dress code be? Could it include tank tops and not be considered tacky?

As you can see, this was a quite stressful several seconds of my life. Then I read a little further down in the letter, where it stated this: “If you are a small business owner, you qualify to receive the enclosed…”

If I'm a small business owner?

My head unexploded, and my stress levels immediately fell to their prior levels. What a relief! I didn't own a small business after all!

After I swore at the misleading letter for several minutes, life went back to normal, and the strain of leading a small business through today's murky economic waters ended.

This leads me to the lessons that I learned. They are as follows:
1.)    Never open junk mail from Dodge/Jeep/Ram dealerships.
2.)    If you do, read them all the way through before freaking out.

These two lessons should definitely be directly applicable to you at some point in your future, and it’s my pleasure to have lent you a helping hand. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go stare out of a window wistfully. I miss my office with the city skyline and the desk that I used to put my feet up onto while I smoked cigars. It made me feel special.

Genetics And My Radio

Many years ago, back when my current car first came into my possession, one of my initial thoughts was to take out the factory radio and put in something else, something much cooler. (Like I said, this was many years ago, back when I was worried about being cool.)

The problem was that I was fighting my genes, which are always telling me to be frugal, especially in the case of when I have a perfectly good working radio in my car already. So, due to the burden of genetics, and perhaps a little bit to my own laziness, the factory radio stayed in. Still, I was for the most part content. Sure, it would have been nice to have an auxiliary input for road trip iPod use, but it wasn’t that big of a deal. (It would keep me from doing Radio Scan, anyway.)

Just recently, however, my situation changed. What happened was, and I’m going to be using technical terms here, so please bear with me, the factory radio crapped out. Or it almost did. Basically, it would sometimes work and sometimes not, kind of like a(n) {insert your own stereotypical employment based joke here}. There wasn’t much I could do about it. Whenever it felt like stopping, it would stop, and whenever it felt like working, it would work. There wasn’t much consistency to it that I could ever determine.

For a while it was almost like a game. A good song would come on, and I’d grit my teeth, hoping that the radio wouldn’t shut down before the song ended. If I made it through the song, I’d yell out “Woo-Hoo!” If the radio died before the song was over, I’d yell out “D’oh!” Eventually, as hard as this may be to imagine, even this seemingly nonstop form of amusement began to get old, and I finally decided to defy my genes and get a new radio.

And that’s where I’m at today. My new radio has an auxiliary input and it plays mp3 discs. It’s the mp3 capability that really intrigues me. Previously, I was limited to perhaps 20 songs on any given burned CD. Now I can get well over that. For example, I made a 64 song Don Williams CD. Now, this may seem all well and good, but who on earth has the time to sit in their car and listen to 64 songs?

Now, if you’d have asked me this question a few years ago, back in my younger “heck-raising” days, I’d have enthusiastically raised my hand, since driving around aimlessly for hours on end is basically your job at that stage in your life, along with ignoring everything that your parents tell you. However, times have changed since then, and now, even when I’m in my car, there’s just as much a chance of me listening to talk radio than there is music.

So basically, while the concept of CDs with an obscene amount of songs on it is wonderful in theory, I’m probably not going to be taking much advantage of it. It almost makes me feel like I should go on a road trip, from one coast to the other, just so I can listen to various incredibly long CDs.

You know, it would be fun to see how my genes would react to that. I’d be getting full use out of my purchase, which should make them happy, but I’d also be frivolously wasting money on gas. Hmmmm…it’d almost be worth it.

Awaiting Inspiration

So it’s been pretty quiet around here.

I’m referring to, of course, my brain, which has recently abandoned me in terms of generating anything interesting to write about. I could, of course, try to write without it, but I’d hate to think what it would mean if there was no drop-off in quality. I don’t think I want to risk it. I think I’m better off not knowing.

So instead I wait for inspiration, which is kind of like waiting for a package to arrive in the mail, except for with writing there’s a much greater chance of it being lost or severely damaged in transit.

That’s not to say, however, that I’ve not been trying. In fact, I’ve tried to jumpstart my brain by feeding it a few ideas here and there, but that’s been pretty much a disaster. To prove it, here’s a rundown of the topics I’ve come up with so far:

The election – It goes without saying that this would be a terrible idea. No matter who you were rooting for, I’m pretty sure that you're sick to death of it. If you’re not, then I seriously worry for you.

A summary of the value I add to my company at my place of employment – That would be much too short.

A poem about the upcoming onset of winter – This might work, but I can’t figure out what rhymes with “hypothermia”.

A recap of that one time I had to save the universe – Ah, who am I kidding? That’d just be the plot of Star Wars, except it’d be lacking the special effects. The dialog, however, might be a tad better.

Another post about how I can’t think of anything to write about – That would be cheesy. Nobody would want to read that