Category Archives: language

Waste of time

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A friend of mine used to keep these regular lists. He listed all kinds of things about his life. It was a helpful reflection for him and, often, a source of interest or amusement for those of us who saw them. He gave it up a while ago, but yesterday sent one to a group of us and I have been thinking about for hours. I was doing some especially productive pondering while I was shaving in the shower this morning (side note: I flippin’ love shaving in the shower and I highly recommend that those of you who shave give it a go). This was the list he sent. I take no credit for it and I did edit it a bit for clarity.

List of Things I did to Waste Time While in College, listed In no particular order, and excluding drinking, etc..

  1. Wall Ball, I think was the name, soccer on a squash/racket ball court, with misses leading to being placed against the front wall and shot at from point blank range.
  2. How many plates can you eat, at dinner, times through the line in the dining hall.  Only do-able when you are 20, and playing a serious number of sports.
  3. Some incredibly stupid game when we threw a tennis ball at a semi-enclosed light on the ceiling in the dorm lounge.
  4. Flipping through college’s actual, print and paper, face book, making decisions about who was attractive, pre-Facebook.
  5. Watching Magnum PI reruns after dinner, think every night we did this. Note: there were all of 3 stations on our dorm TV.
  6. Saturday college football, Sunday NFL football.
  7. A handful of incredibly stupid video games, including an early version of Tetris.
  8. Hang out in the “spa,” with an order of nachos, and semi-pretending to study.
  9. Go downtown to either make a late-night run to Dunkin’ Donuts, or to buy CDs.
  10. This one was not my thing, but I had friends who tried to memorize MLB box scores, and then would quiz each other on them.
  11. Play name that tune, which involved going to someone’s room and having the DJ put in random CDs from their collection, play for like 3 seconds, see who could guess the band and the song.
  12. Stay up for days on end, then sleep for extended periods of time.

I admit I participated in some of these things, although not all of them. I did not play Wall Ball as I was not a soccer player and it would have meant simply getting pummeled by a high speed soccer ball. It feels a bit odd to reflect on judging people’s appearance in the paper face book but I did participate in that common practice. I would like to think we all have grown out of such behavior by this point but I can only speak for myself.

What struck me the most about this list, however, is the title. All of these are listed as a waste of time. But are they?

I recently listened to a Radiolab podcast called The Secret to a Long Life. It suggested that novelty can help us stretch time, that by doing new things, or by doing the same things in different ways, we can experience them with an extended sense of time. The extreme extent of this would mean that if you could do novel things constantly your life would seem to last forever. I felt pretty good after listening to this since I am regularly trying to do things differently. I try to take a different route home from the office. I put on my right sock first, instead of my left. I whisk the pudding with my left hand. These are all small things, but they demand that I pay attention more.

If you have ever experienced any kind of accident–car crash, falling off a ladder, getting hit hard in a sports game–you may have experienced time slowing down. Time does not actually slow down, but because we are experiencing something new/exciting/traumatic/dangerous our minds pay attention to more details than they do during other experiences. When you drive the same route every day you may find yourself miles down the road and realize that you hardly noticed the place you have been passing through. But when your car slides off the road or hits another car, your mind registers all the details of the event–you notice more and the time is more full.

The key here (and the lesson of the podcast) is that time will seem slower, our lives will seem longer really, when we experience things where we pay attention, whether that is by our own design or it is thrust upon us. The things that stand out for me in my long life are the things that were new, or different, or unexpected, good and bad. I remember the very first time I kissed my wife, but the hundredth time? I am afraid I do not. I can remember being transported in an ambulance, and standing on top of Black Mountain alone for the sunrise, but what I had for lunch on October 1st? Um, nope.

To me, the things that make life worth living, the things that make life full, the things that teach us the most powerful lessons, the things where we feel the most, the things that make this human life a thing at all, are all of those things we experience in detail, those experiences where we pay attention. We work to make a living so, I hope, we can have a life. Life lies in our attention.

So, the list. Most of the things on this are things that require paying attention. OK, maybe not watching football so much, or sleeping for extended periods, but most of these things are memorable because they were not mundane. They were novel. And having experiences like that is the point. To live a good life, to live a life worth living, requires that we do things like the things on this list.

I am not going to go out and try to get a Wall Ball league started, but I am going to get up early and go for a run in the dark with the wind blowing snow in my face while I sing a song from Lemonade Mouth. I am not going to memorize box scores but maybe I will go see an MLB game in a city I have never visited. And I should try black pepper on vanilla ice cream–I hear that is amazing.

Thank you, my friend, for posting this list. It helped me to remember some of the joys of my earlier days, and it got me mulling over about how to live a joyful life. Heck, all that thinking and even writing this are things I just may remember in future years. After I get some work done (that making a living thing actually matters, people), I need to find me some Tetris to play.

Mail Woes

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IMG_3029 - Version 2

There really was a name and address on here. I just thought it prudent to redact them. I’m like Homeland Security, only smaller.

We often have issues with our mail. Several times each week we receive mail that is not for us. Typically it is for someone in our town who lives at an address that looks similar to ours. 220 Maple Hill Road is similar to 220 Chittenden Road. I guess.

So we put those letters back in the mailbox and flip up the flag. Sometimes I write a note indicating that it was delivered to the wrong address. Just to communicate to whoever might receive it in the end. We have gotten a few pieces of mail with notes on them indicating that they had been delivered to someone else’s address. So it works both ways. I guess.

A few days ago we got our bill from our “plow guy,” the guy who comes to clear our driveway when it snows. At the same time we got a bill from the same plow guy for someone else, but addressed to us. It was not delivered to the wrong address; the wrong address was written for a different customer. So we got it. Simple mistake.

Right away I wrote on the envelope and left it in the mail box. Return to sender. At least that was the idea. But the next day it came back, despite the note. So I wrote on it again and put it back in the mail box. Hopefully it won’t come back to us a second time. If so, I will mail it inside another envelope to the plow guy. He needs to get paid, after all.

I think the U.S. Postal Service is one of the greatest institutions in our nation. I can send something to anyone else and it will get delivered, for a really small price. Eventually. And sometimes with a little encouragement. When tax documents and bills and other important documents get delivered to the wrong address on a regular basis, however, I do begin to wonder about who is handling things at the sorting bin.

My note to return a mis-labeled bill apparently wasn’t clear enough the first time. I guess. Bad weather won’t stop the mail getting through, just bad handwriting.

UPDATE 3/24/2014: This letter got returned yet again yesterday. That is just not right, I tell you, just not right.

Thinking About Integrity

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I continue to spend a bunch of time painting when I can fit it in.  I had the idea that I might paint all the trim on our house this summer, but that is clearly not to be.  There is too much left to do and my flexible time is about over.  One week and I am back into the swing of things with work full time.  So it goes.  I’ve got weekends, right?  I got up early and painted this morning.  I removed the doors from our deck yesterday, took them right off the hinges and set them up in the garage on sawhorses.  I scraped and sanded them and primed them yesterday.  Then they had to dry for a day so we had a night without doors onto the deck.

Of course, we had some intense thunderstorms last night.  Heavy rain and wind and those big flashes of lightning that make everything seem more dramatic in the dark.  I hung a couple of towels at the base of the doors to at least catch the splashing.  That worked out just fine.  This morning I got up early again to paint the doors lying down in the garage.  They were waiting patiently for me.  That is done.  Now I still need to scrape the windows, clean the glass, reattach the clips for the storm glass, rehang the doors, and rehang the storm glass.  Almost done with that task.  All that needs to get done by this afternoon when we have visitors coming.

Anyway, with all this time prepping and painting, I have some time to think.  I spent the other day thinking about my brother and the path his life has taken and the opportunities he has not in front of him.  This morning I thought about morals and integrity.  The book of the summer for me has been John Steinbeck’s The Winter of Our Discontent.  The plot of the story revolves around one man’s struggle with his principles.  Under pressure from his family he winds up making his fortune, but only after making some decisions that are morally questionable.   While I slapped on latex I thought this.  The book was, according to Steinbeck, written in part to address a decline of integrity in American culture.  That decline has not been stopped.

I was thinking about how we prize money in our culture over most anything else.  We don’t think long term.  We don’t look at the big picture.  Have a loss this quarter?  The company must be in trouble.  But what company can grow every quarter.  That seems an impossible thing to ask.  But this pressure to make profits means that companies, meaning the people who run them, think more about dollar profits than they do about costs to the environment, to health, to workers.  The people who run companies often compromise moral principles for short term gain.  That is too bad, since I would prefer to shop from companies that are simply, well, better, not just who offer better products.

OK, I’m generalizing, but can anyone, conservative or liberal or anywhere in the middle, really believe that our moral compass is pointing us in the right direction?  Our cruel and polluting food system is a tragedy, yet food companies work to hide that fact (see Food Inc.) and we seem to truly want to be ignorant of where our food comes from;  otherwise we might have to make a moral choice.  Many of us hardly know our neighbors.  We fill our homes with stuff without regard to how that stuff was made or who made it or what will happen to it when we toss it.  We accept layoffs of a thousand people as just the cost of business.  What gives?

Right now, our health care system is an embarrassment.  What we need is a system where everyone is covered and we don’t spend billions of dollars on advertising for prescription drugs or on overhead to run insurance companies.  I know that many people just don’t want to rock the boat, but come on here people.  Medicare and Medicaid spend far less on overhead that any insurance company, yet we think the insurance system we have now just needs a little tweaking?  Maybe this just makes me sound like what conservatives like to disparagingly call a liberal.  If being a liberal means asking questions and thinking about what makes the most sense for “we the people” (remember them?) then I guess I am one. When I hear people criticizing a bill that would help improve our health care system (at least it would move it in the right direction) by denouncing its support of euthanasia, which isn’t even in the bill, then I have to ask, what is wrong with us?

So I get Steinbeck’s ire at a declining sense of morality, of a loss of principles, and that was 50 years ago.  What would he think today?  What would he write today?  Not that it matters.  he was trying to point it out in 1960 and things haven’t changed a whole lot.  Some would say things have gotten worse.  And this brings me back to thinking about my brother.  He has tried to do the right thing and has made lots of sacrifices for his daughter, who is a teenager.  He has lived in his home town his whole life and did not move, although he wanted to, in large part to do as much as he could for his kid.  And now, despite his desires, she is moving with her mother half way across the continent.  That move isn’t right or wrong;  it is the situation to be had.  My brother has tried all along to do the right thing.  I respect him for that.  It often is not easy to do.

In Spike Lee’s 1989 film, Do the Right Thing, Da Mayor tells Mookie, “Always do the right thing….That’s it.”  That has stuck with me for 20 years.  One can’t really be sure much of time what the right thing is, but that shouldn’t be a barrier to doing it.

Does all this make sense?  Maybe so and maybe not.  It’s what I have to offer from my musings while painting.  I was in the garage, and the circulation was limited, so there may be some fume-addled ideas here.  In any case, it’s what you get, at least for today.

Bouquet

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My daughter really wanted a bouquet for dinner.  She and her brother had pulled the small table from the porch onto the lawn and had spread out a blanket.  She wanted, in fact, a picnic bouquet.  “We’ll set out everything on the little table here and then just take what we want,” she explained.  And she and her brother worked to make it all happen, albeit with a few spills on the way.  Dinner was a fine and fulfilling buffet.

Why Pay Attention

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I remember reading once that the best newspapers are ones that feature people.  They name names.  They contain photographs of those in the community.  The stories are about readers’ neighbors and friends and family.  People buy the paper because it has direct relevance to them.  Recently we have been receiving in the mail, unsolicited, a section of the Burlington Free Press that is about people in the community.  It contains stories about everyday people and it contains lots of photos.  Normally, I pitch those free papers, but I flip through this one every time.

I check it out because I may see someone I know in those photos.  I have seen people I know in its pages.  I was in it once, as were my children.  USA Today won’t contain pictures of anyone I know personally.  This little paper likely will.  So I open it up each time and peruse it before adding it to the pile of fire-starting material.

I thought of this little newspaper today.  This past weekend I spent some time with David Grant, who is president of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation.  He just announced he is leaving his position.  He wrote about this on the foundation’s blog.  I subscribe to the blog through a reader.  The foundation hosts a huge poetry festival every couple of years.  It is of interest to me.  I had not made the connection, however, between David’s association with the foundation, and my own interest in it.

I find that I sometimes do this somewhat dramatically, at least in my own head–I connect two things together in one arena and then connect one of those things with something else in another arena;  and then one day a light bulb goes off that all those things are related.  I have a Eureka moment–“Hey that is related to that, and that is related that and whoa, everything is connected!”  The reason this seems so dramatic to me is that I spend a lot of my mental energy on looking for and finding connections.  Discovering how things intertwine brings me real joy. So when I find that I have missed something that, in hindsight, seems so obvious, I stumble a bit.

I had one of those moments this weekend.  “Oh, David directs that Dodge Foundation–Duh!” I thought to myself.  Today I went back and looked at the foundation’s blog and found the articles that David had written that I had previously just skimmed over.  I hadn’t noticed who had written them and so had not made a personal connection to them.  This time I read them more thoroughly.  They were interesting to me the first time, but they were more interesting to me with another read.  I had some context the second time around.  I could picture who was doing the writing and I had at least some idea of how he thinks, of what he has experienced in the world.  It made the articles more relevant.  I had a picture.

The point is, I paid more attention because I knew the author of the article.  I suppose, while the writing is of a very different type, I might compare it to a favorite poet or author.  If I have enjoyed a poet or author I am likely to pay attention if he or she comes out with a new book.  I have some context, some personal history, so I have a link to the new book.  That is what happened with David’s blog posts.  That is what happens with the local newspaper that comes in the mail.  Once I feel that I have a connection, or that I might have a connection, I pay more attention.

I think most of us do this.  The captain of the U.S. ship that was recently hijacked by pirates and then released, was from Vermont.  Vermonters paid attention.  My guess is they paid a lot more attention than Oregonians or Floridians.  They had a connection, even if it was not directly personal.  It was still personal.  We pay more attention when a neighbor is in trouble than when a stranger is.

This is why it is important for me to look closely.  When I look closely I notice more, and the more I notice the more I am likely to see connections.  Then I pay more attention.  Attention feeds attention in a positive feedback loop.  The more I pay attention, the more connections I see, and so the more I pay attention.  If all of us could stop to look closely, to ask questions, to challenge our assumptions, to simply wonder, we would see that many things are not so strange after all.  We would see that we are connected to our world.  And we would notice what we do.  And we would see how we affect those around us.  And we would better understand that all we do has consequences, good and bad.  And we would, perhaps, make more conscious and better choices.

Maybe not, but I’ve been doing my best to pay attention to what I see in the people I encounter everywhere I happen to be.  I believe if we could slow down and refect a little more, we might just take care of ourselves and our neighbors and our world better.  And that would certainly be something to which we all could pay attention.

Luck? Or Hard Work?

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I was chatting with a coworker today and she noted that I must be looking forward to having some time off this summer.  My job allows me a couple of mostly-free-of-work months over those warm days.  She said at first that I was lucky, then said, “No you’re not lucky. You made it happen.”  That got me thinking.

I think we tend to attribute far too little of our success or fortune to luck.  I think back on the key moments in my life and there were some lucky moments.  If I didn’t have a particular teacher or supervisor or friend I might have taken the path I took.  I had not seen the newspaper on the right day or if a housemate hadn’t taken a class on the right date, I might not have found this way in life.  Luck had a lot to do with it.

Sure, hard work matters.  In fact, it is what one does with the lucky moments that makes the difference.  Get lucky and land a good job?  That matters a lot less if you are a slacker, or if the people with whom you work hate you.  You need to make it happen, as my coworker said.  To clarify, hard work matters a lot, but luck matters too.

Think of the big ones.  How about where you were born?  That kind of makes a difference in the opportunities one has.  How about other members of your family?  Whether one has abusive parents or the most loving on the block makes a difference, and that has nothing to do with hard work.  Yes, with some struggle one can overcome these tricks of fortune, but that is my point.  It takes more work for one born into more challenging circumstances.  

One can be successful if one is mostly lucky and one can be successful if one works terribly hard.  I believe it is when one takes full advantage of the circumstances that simply happen to him or her that one can be most successful.  Sure, chalk it up to hard work.  I just don’t buy it.  Everybody gets lucky, whether he or she acknowledges it or not.  

Here’s Thomas Jefferson:  I’m a great believer in luck, and I find that the harder I work, the more I have of it.

I’m with that.

Bazillion Versus Gajillion

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So which is bigger, a bazillion or a gajillion?  I vote for a bazillion but what do I look like?  A mathematician?  I feel like we use superlatives so often that they often have no meaning.  So really, what the hell difference does it make?

One of my least favorite superlatives is “extreme.”  While it isn’t as popular as it used to be, there are approximately a gajillion things out there labeled “extreme.”  There are fast food meals, frozen pizzas, video games, even underwear (“extreme comfort”).  I think it is a little ridiculous.  Hey, some marketer says, let’s hop on the extreme bandwagon.  Extreme sells.

I finally had my fill of extreme when I saw an advertisement (on a restroom wall poster of all places) for “Extreme” truck bed liners.  These were spray on liners for the beds of pickup trucks.  Extreme?  I mean, I can see how a climb up a remote rugged peak can be extreme.  I can see how an athletic event can be extreme (run across the Sahara anyone?).  I can even see how a hot pepper can be labeled extreme.  But a spray on truck bed liner?  That went too far.

So I am in pursuit of some answers.  Maybe you can help me out.  Which is bigger?  I really want to know what you think.  Let’s give some meaning to these terms.   I don’t need a number.  I know they aren’t real numbers.  I just need an answer:  Which do you think is bigger and why?

If I get at least 100 answers in the comments I will send a rubberized foam velociraptor to the best answer.  An extreme toy, if you will.  I look forward to hearing what you think.