U I I E T A

Those of my avid readers* will remember that in a posting not long ago I referred to myself as being a contrarian by nature. However, for the purposes of full disclosure, along with giving me a topic to write about, I have to say that I have recently fallen in with a fad. (Luckily, it’s not planking.)

Now, before I get into the fad, I have to defend my apparent hypocriticalness. I still consider myself a contrarian, despite what I have just admitted. The reason for this is because by falling in with a fad, I’ve done something contrary to my own human nature, which is to be a contrarian. Thus, I’m still a contrarian, because I've contradicted myself. (If you need to work that out on a whiteboard, I totally understand. My head is still spinning.)

Alright, back to business. The fad I’m talking about is the game Words With Friends, which is essentially Scrabble over smart phones. It’s fun because you can play with anybody, no matter where they’re physically located. The games tend to take a while, as a player may not always be monitoring, but that adds to the drama, as you don’t want to lose a game that’s lasted for six days.

I’ve been playing for several weeks now, and so far I’ve found only one downside. You see, the game allows you to arrange your letters and then submit them as a move. If what you've attempted to play wasn’t a valid move, you can just try again. This means that you can guess at letter arrangements that look like words. This leads to a lot of weird words being played, especially when the triple-word scores are at stake. This does kind of build your vocabulary, as you see lots of new words, but you don’t really know the meaning of any of them unless you look them up.

Here is a partial list of words that have been played that I didn’t know were actual words:

bora
zona
fie
ute
eh
hao
la
houri
tipcat
zori
fe
bander
fice
aurora
gox
zoeal

(I’m sure that I played several of these words myself. Guess and Check is a temptation that is very hard to resist.)

Other than this one small detail, however, it’s a very fun game, which mixes both strategy and luck. Because of this, I’m fine with playing, even though it's a fad. Just as long as it doesn’t become an obsession that keeps me from my other priorities.

On a totally unrelated note, I’m not sure why I haven’t posted for several weeks. I must have been busy. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to figure out what words I can build using the following letters: u i i e t a. Also, it needs to get me sixty points.

* Let me live in my fantasy world.

The Fight Against Change (Offline For 8 Days)

I’m pretty certain that I’m going to eventually turn into the quintessential grumpy old man. I picture myself rocking on the front porch of my home, a perpetual scowl attached to my weathered face. I’ll shake my fist as teenagers drive by at a rate which I judge to be too fast (15 miles per hour), and I’ll complain about how things were a whole lot better back before matter transporters and Meal-In-A-Capsule pills came along. Above all, I’ll be stubborn and refuse to accept any sort of change.

I know this is going to happen because I’m already showing signs of it today. For example, just recently at work everybody got an instant messenger program installed on their computers. The goal is to make it easier to facilitate communication and thus boost productivity. However, as soon as I saw it I decided that I didn’t like it. My basic reasoning boiled down to this:

1)      Instant messaging means that people would have another line of communication with me.    

2)      People are annoying.

3)      Thus, I don’t want to communicate with people any more than I have to already.

4)      Bah! Humbug!

Today I was at a co-workers desk and he had his instant messenger up. The program showed a list of employees, including me, along with their ‘online’ status. Most were online. A few were off-line, but they had not been gone for long, and they had left a message saying when they would be back, usually within 10 to 15 minutes. My icon, however, told a different a story. After my name it said: Offline for 8 days.

I smiled and felt intensely proud of myself. You can give me the tools for change, but I sure don’t have to use them! That’ll teach the company for being so bold as to try and make me more productive! Humbug!

Now, how will I not become a grumpy old man if I’m already acting like this? There’s absolutely no way it won’t happen! This means that someday I'll just give up completely on changing with everybody else, and from that point on I’ll dig in my heels and watch the world pass me by, all while being as grouchy as can be. The thing about it is, however, that I’ll love it, because I’m a contrarian by nature, and what’s more contrary than rejecting everything new, whether it’s good or bad?

Sure, I won’t be much fun to be around. Hopefully I’ll have one or two close friends in my life who’ll accept me for who I am, but if that fails I’m sure there’ll be other contrarians like me out there, and we can sit around at a barber shop and complain about things such as how football used to be so much better back when they actually allowed the players to hit each other.

I’m not there yet. For example, I’ve recently embraced having a smart phone. However, I think that electronic devices to read books on are stupid, so it’s just a matter of time before the scale tips completely in favor of me thinking that basically everything new is stupid.

And I can’t wait for that day to come. Humbug!

Bumps, Bruises, and Why They Make Me Happy

“Wow, look at the grass stains on my skin. I say, if you knees aren’t green by the end of the day, you ought to seriously re-examine your life.”
- Calvin and Hobbes

It was about a year ago when I moved to Minnesota, in an attempt to seriously re-examine my life. Now, upon reflecting on the past twelve months, I’m quite certain that it’s been successful. I don’t know if I’ve actually gotten grass stains on my skin, but I have accumulated an impressive amount of the adult alternative: injuries.

I didn’t get injured much in Wisconsin, beyond a few jammed fingers playing basketball, and I attribute that directly to me not having nearly enough fun. I mean, the chances of getting injured while watching TV or reading a book are pretty low, besides the odd paper-cut, and those two activities constituted an embarrassingly high percentage of my free time there.

Now, however, things are different. I routinely wake up in the morning stiff, sore, or aching. Despite the fact that I sometimes limp around like I’m seventy, this makes me happy, because it means that I was out doing stuff, and doing stuff, in my book, is always better than not doing stuff. (I hope that didn’t get too technical.)

For example, last winter I was playing boot hockey and I took an elbow to the face. This resulted in the best black-eye I’ve ever had the privilege of sporting. I was ecstatic for the next several days as I watched the bruising deepen and spread. It was proof for the whole world to see, and cringe at, that I had been doing stuff!

Just recently, I was playing volleyball and I hurled myself off of the court in an attempt to bring back an errant shot. (For the record, I did manage to bring it back.) After I peeled myself off of the grass and got back on the sand, I noticed that my right leg had begun to swell up. I’m still not sure what I hit it on, but it must have been an epic collision. The swelling was a little concerning, but since I’m a guy, and my leg was still attached to the rest of my body, I just ignored it. This resulted in the best bruise of my entire life. It started just below the right side of my right knee and went all the way down to the bottom of my ankle, probably 10-11 inches long and 3 inches across at its widest. It managed to keep its awesomeness even as it started to heal, because, for some reason, a portion of the bruising decided to move to the back of my leg. (Seriously!) While confusing, this was still a welcome development. A migrating bruise! How often does that happen? Plus, it meant that I was doing stuff!

I’ve suffered various other injuries over the last year, but I won’t get into any more details. However, I will say that I’ve gotten more banged up than in the infamous Year Of Multiple Sprained Ankles, back when I was a young lad in high school, and that makes me fiercely proud.

Now, there may be those of you out there who are thinking that I’m a little bit off for equating fun with injuries. Perhaps you think that I’m trying to somehow justify the fact that I’m clumsy and injury-prone. If you are one of those people, here is my response: While I cannot say with certitude* that you’re wrong, I can say that I’d much rather be injured and having fun than healthy and lying on the couch. **

* Bonus points for current events humor!

** I will admit that you can get injured on the couch if you reach too quickly for your bag of chips without stretching beforehand.

*** There isn’t a third footnote.

The Original DQ

I sort of like it when new things are made to look old. Retro, would be the term for that, I believe. However, sometimes you just can’t beat when something is just really old.

For example, this weekend while driving through southern Minnesota I wound up at a small-town Dairy Queen. As I stepped in, my first thought was this: “Wow, this very well could be the original Dairy Queen!”

While probably not true, it was no modern restaurant, that was for sure. Everything seemed to be tinted a drab yellow. The equipment looked like it was made during the Industrial Revolution. For example, cups were kept in giant, yellowed rectangular storage bins that were slapped up on the wall, making it look like one of their main uses was to inflict head wounds on any unwary workers walking by.

The non-digital menu on the wall consisted of five sections, each individually lit. I know this because the second section from the left kept flickering on and off, making it nearly impossible to read and also causing me to wonder if I would be the first person ever to have a seizure trying to determine how much a burger cost.

Orders were not punched into the cash register. Instead, the cashier used a standardized Dairy Queen pad that was probably designed in the 1950’s. Each sheet consisted of a list of items on the menu which the cashier circled and added notes to in order to record each order. For example, on mine the word ‘cheeseburger’ was circled, and the letter ‘K’ was scrawled next to it to denote that I wanted ketchup. Once you had ordered, you were given an order number, which was pre-printed on a small section of the order form that was removed and given to you.

You then sat at what had to be some of the smallest restaurant tables ever and waited for your number to be called. While you waited, you could amuse yourself by listening to the drive-through orders as they came in. This was because the speaker crackled loudly throughout the entire building, meaning that you could easily hear the person in the car outside ordering a burger and fries from anywhere in the restaurant, including, in all probability, the bathroom.

Speaking of the drive-through, it is strategically located right next to the entrance, creating a flow of traffic through which anybody attempting to enter must navigate. This set-up enhances the process of natural selection by assuring that only the shrewd customers with quick reflexes who don’t get crushed by distracted texting teenagers or old men who believe they have to right to drive and park anywhere they want will have the opportunity to return for another meal.

With all of this being said, this Daily Queen is one of my favorite restaurants of all time. There’s no flash to it, and it may collapse from age at any moment, but it has character, which most places these days can’t claim. I forget which town it was located in, which annoys me because I’d think about making an occasional Saturday road trip there just to go for lunch and to see if I could make it through the drive-through gauntlet with sustaining only minor bruising. I guess to me it seems to represent a simpler, more innocent time, a time when giant automobiles with outrageously large fins would drive by sporting “I Like Ike” bumper stickers while newsboys on the street corner yelled, “Extra! Extra! Read all about!” Sometimes you just need to get away in today’s hectic, run-run-run society, and that’s what this Dairy Queen is all about.

Also, the food is pretty good and the prices are retro, so how can you go wrong?

Whiteboard Deficient

We all have weaknesses that hold us back in our chosen professions. For example, Superman has kryptonite, and Batman, at least in the new movies, has a costume that is too tight in the neck area, which is why it always sounds like he’s just swallowed a handful of gravel. (On the other hand, Joe Biden’s weakness is that he is fully capable of talking at all times.)

I must admit that I have a weakness. It pains me to say it, but in the interest of full disclosure, here it is: I cannot write on a whiteboard.

Believe me, I’ve tried and failed many times. I’ll attempt to diagram something or create a neat bullet-point list, and when I’m done the whiteboard looks pretty much like somebody dipped ants in paint and let them walk around on it for twenty minutes. (The only difference, of course, is that ants spell better than I do.)

Some of my problem can be attributed to the fact that I’m left-handed, which means I can’t wrist-write, because my hand is trailing the marker and will instantly smudge out whatever I’ve just written. (Curse the dominant right-handed class and their left-to-right writing methodology!) That leaves me with no option but to write with only the tip of the marker touching the board, which always turns out to be an instant disaster, as whatever muscle it is that should control this shirks its responsibility, leaving me with absolutely no control of what I’m doing.

You may think that this really isn’t that big of a deal, but it is. It has placed a glass ceiling above me, which will keep me from moving of the corporate ladder. Have you ever seen somebody with ‘senior’ in their title stand up in a meeting and scribble illegibly on the whiteboard for ten minutes and still have the respect of their peers the next day? I think not. Sadly, it means that I may have no other option but to aim for management {shudder!}, where incomprehensible diagrams are assumed to be a result of you thinking faster than your body can react, and is considered a good thing.

I’m left with few options. I could hire a personal assistant to do all of my whiteboard writing for me, but that would be costly. I could learn to write right-handed, but that would be time-consuming. I could suck it up and quit whining, but that wouldn’t be any fun.

So I guess for now I just plug along, accepting my major deficiency and doing my best to not let it hinder me. I mean, things could be a lot worse, couldn’t they?

Plus, I can still smell the markers.

Recommended Reading

Before watching the HBO miniseries The Pacific, I had little to no knowledge of the war in the Pacific during WWII. This 10-part series was done pretty well, and it opened my eyes to a lot of what occurred during that time.

After finishing the miniseries, I moved on to the book With The Old Breed, which was written by E.B. Sledge, who was one of the main characters portrayed in The Pacific. His book is a first-person account of the two campaigns that he fought in, Peleliu and Okinawa. It goes into much greater detail than The Pacific had time for, and it gave me a much better understanding of what the fighting on the Pacific islands was like.

I won't try to give any sort of summary or specific details on the book. All that I’ll say is that it is one of the best books I’ve ever read, and I highly recommend it to anybody. In fact, I can say that, to me, the best part of The Pacific is that it led me to read With The Old Breed.

I Signed Up For What?

I’m getting kind of nervous.

This is because a few months ago I did something incredibly rash, without putting much thought whatsoever into just what I was committing to.

I blame it all on Christmas, or, more specifically, Christmas cookies. You know how it is: You swear to yourself that during the upcoming holiday season things will be different, and you’ll control the amount of junk food you eat. However, despite your good intentions, your resolve immediately disintegrates and you end up eating just as terribly as you always do, or maybe even worse. (The closest thing to a vegetable you consume in the second half of December is a cookie that has green frosting and/or sprinkles.) This leaves you a bloated mess when January rolls around, which is the perfect time to ignore your New Year’s resolution to get into shape and instead focus on seeing how long you can stay inert on the couch.

That’s what happened to me last Christmas, which is not unusual. What is unusual is that in February I usually get serious about getting back into some semblance of shape, but this year, for some reason, I didn’t. Soon it was mid-March, and I realized that I had to do something quick, or else I’d have to update my wardrobe to include pants the size of two-man tents

 So I signed up for a half-marathon. The day was March 19th, and at the time the snow was still piled up everywhere. May 14th, the day of the race, seemed like a long, long way away.

But now it’s almost here, and I’m getting nervous.

It’s not because I haven’t trained, mind you, because I have. In fact, signing up turned out to be a great idea, as it busted me out of my lethargy, which was causing me to rival Garfield himself in terms of food consumption, and motivated me to exercise enough so that I no longer have to worry about the button on my pants popping off due to increased belly-pressure and taking out somebody’s eye.

Yet now I have to run the actual race, and I’m no runner.

I envision the race to consist of a bunch of hard-core fanatics with subscriptions to Runner’s World, all smiling smugly and using running terminology such as “splits”, “gentle pickups”, and “speed-work”. They will all have high-tech running shoes and space-age clothing and know all about the benefits of proper stretching. They will be hoping to improve on their previous half-marathon times or warming themselves up for a full marathon. (I reallize that this is a vague, possibly demeaning, generalization of runners. However, I'm sort of intimidated at the moment by them, and this is what I can't help but picture.)

Then there’s me. I don’t use running terminology, unless “my dogs are barking” counts, and my only goal of the race is to not throw up.

So it’s going to be interesting. How will I handle being put into a situation that's like nothing I have ever encountered? Will I wilt before the pressure, or will I rise to the occasion? The day will be memorable, but what kind of memories will be made? Will they be memories that I’ll be happy to have, or memories that I’ll wish I could forget? The tension is nothing if not thick.

So, if you’re in the Maple Grove area on Saturday, feel free to stop on by to cheer or heckle. I’ll be the guy who’s wheezing a lot and cursing the March 19th version of himself for getting me into this situation in the first place. I’ll try not to throw up on you, but I can’t promise anything.