Third person nightmare

I’ve started to refer to myself as Daddy in the third person.  Even when my daughter is not around. 

Me:  Daddy’s going to bring to garbage out.

Mother-in-law:  Isn’t Clara upstairs already?

Me:  Um…yes. 

Mother-in-law:  Then who are you talking to?

Me:  Kill me now.  Please.

I’ve actually given my wife permission to administer electro-shock therapy if necessary.  Anything it takes to prevent me from speaking like this ever again. 

If you catch me doing this, I give you permission to backhand me with a shovel.

My book has been hijacked by a couple of no-nothings.

I have been betrayed by my book. 

As I come closer and closer to completing the manuscript to CHIKCEN SHACK, the story continues to veer off in unintended directions.  When I began writing  a year ago, I thought I’d be telling the story of two rival brothers and how their familial relationship did not preclude them from being ruthless and cruel to one another.  I wanted to demonstrate how friends can sometimes be more loyal and loving than family and that genetic similarity is not always a good reason to remain close to a person. 

Then the brothers in my story began growing closer, even as I tried like hell to force them apart.  It’s instead becoming a story about reconciliation, forgiveness and acceptance, at least in terms of these two brothers, and as much as I like the story and feel that this is the correct direction, I don’t like it. 

It’s not what I had planned.

I wanted the book to reflect my feelings on the issue of friends and family, but instead, the characters took a life of their own and stopped listening to me.

I know that sounds ridiculous, but it’s true, and it annoys me.   

In the past, I’ve taken some criticism for the value that I place upon friends. Having come from a family that is not terribly close-knit, I have relied upon my friends for much throughout my life and have never been let down. In fact, during every crisis and time of need in my life, I can point to a friend or friends who played a crucial role in helping me get through. For reasons that I don’t entirely understand, this has prompted some to take offense to the elevated status of friends in my life, presuming that I undervalue family as a result.

While I have assured these people that this is not the case, perhaps it should be.

Research reported on in the New York Times seems to indicate that friends are significantly more beneficial to a long and happy life than family, and that close ties to family can actually reduce lifespan and overall wellness.

“In general, the role of friendship in our lives isn’t terribly well appreciated,” said Rebecca G. Adams, a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. “There is just scads of stuff on families and marriage, but very little on friendship. It baffles me. Friendship has a bigger impact on our psychological well-being than family relationships.”

Research, for example, has demonstrated that people with friends are less likely to catch colds and are more likely to enjoy reduced stress levels, lower blood pressure and greater measures of happiness. A Swedish study found that only smoking has a greater impact on the likelihood for a man to suffer from coronary disease that friendship. And all the research demonstrates that people with friends live longer lives.

Conversely, research has also found people with close ties to family often suffer from higher blood pressure, increased stress levels, and shorter life spans.

In short, your family will someday be the death of you.

This makes sense. Right?  Everyone knows how crazy your family, or certain family members, can make you. And while you may have friends who do the same, most people are eventually able to cut those poisonous friends out of their lives, while those rotten, good-for-nothing family members linger on like a festering sore. In fact, I might argue that the meanest, most despicable comments and actions that I have ever seen or heard have taken place between members of a family and not between any friends who I know.

Does this mean that I undervalue family? Of course not, but I have actively eliminated ties with family members who I would not otherwise befriend, and I will continue to do so. Family is an opportunity to establish meaningful relationships with people, but it is not a requirement. While there are members of my family who I cherish, I do not find the genetic or societal links to family strong enough to allow rotten people into my life. So I simply treat my family as I do my friends: If I like you, you’re in. If I don’t like you, I don’t waste my time on you.

And based upon the research, it turns out that I may live a longer, happier life as a result of this philosophy.

Unfortunately, the brothers in my book seem to be unaware of this research, so despite their obvious differences, they are struggling to make their relationship work, and no matter what I do, I can’t seem to stop them.  Ironically, my agent and a couple of my friends saw this as a story about two brothers coming together long before I ever did.

I suspect that it was my inability to see the forest through the trees that caused me to misread the direction of the story, but I’m still annoyed nonetheless. 

It’s my story.  Not theirs.   

Vegans. The annoying kind.

I don’t mind vegetarians, vegans, and the rest of their ilk. In fact, I admire them and am envious of their ability to eat and enjoy vegetables and fruits to the exclusion of other foods.  Some of my closest friends are vegetarians. 

But when militant vegans attempt to disturb my own meal with their nutrition-turned-religion, then I become annoyed. I may annoy many people, and I may be callous and inconsiderate when doing so, but I don’t ever make it a point of ruining someone’s dinner with talk of slaughtered cows, rotting meat and families of chickens torn apart, killed and fried for my benefit.

It is my sincere hope is that one day, we will discover that plants are sentient beings, capable of the same thought, communication and feeling as human beings, and all the self-righteous vegans of the world will finally shut the hell up as they writhe in a stew of unbearable guilt and shame.

And considering the number of times that human beings have been ignorant and flat-out wrong about the world around them, who is to say that this might not one day happen?

Dreams can come true.

Enough with the ten minutes

I spent the afternoon writing at Panera, which is always a delightful spot to work. Good food, caffeine-free soda, free Wi-Fi, and comfortable surroundings.

I have just one complaint.

I typically order one of two sandwiches.  The first is made with an ale mustard.  The second is made with chipotle mayonnaise.

I’m allergic of mustard and I despise mayonnaise, so I always ask that my sandwiches be made without these condiments. And every time I ask, regardless of who is taking my order or where I am, I am told that it will take ten minutes to prepare my “special order.”  This is always said to me with great regret, and this evening, it was said in such a way that the server was clearly hoping that I might change my mind.

I wish these ten minute warnings would stop, for a few reasons:

First, it never takes ten minutes.

Second, every meal, regardless of what you have ordered, takes at least five minutes to prepare, so ten minutes is hardly a problem.  Think about it:  If you’re going to take my name after I order and hand me a buzzer to alert me when my food is ready, you’re probably not going to be handing it to me in a minute or two.  Right?  So what’s ten minutes?  

Third, ten minutes to wait for a palatable sandwich that I can eat without it killing me is not a bother.

Last, ten minutes for a fresh sandwich sounds like a good deal to me.  It’s not as if I’m sitting in the McDonald’s drive-thru, running late to an important meeting.  It’s Panera.  Not fine dining but not fast food either.  And if I have to wait ten minutes to enjoy a sandwich that is not prepared ahead of time, I’ll do so happily.

The demanded apology: A pathetic, passive aggressive attempt to make someone say words that the don't want to say

From yesterday’s Washington Post:

“The mother of a 13-year-old Montgomery County middle school student is demanding an apology from a teacher who had school police escort the youngster from a classroom for refusing to say the Pledge of Allegiance.”

You can read the full article here.

First, I’m completely in favor of a student’s right to refuse to recite the pledge of allegiance. I believe that pledging allegiance to anything is a student’s prerogative, and to force a student to comply amounts to senseless and meaningless indoctrination.

Even I have flirted with the idea of refusing to pledge because of the 1954 addition of the word God to the pledge, coupled with my firm belief in the separation of church and state. Since the word God was added to pledge long after its inception and at the behest of Daughters of the American Revolution, I simply omit the word when pledging.

I love my country. I just don’t think that God has a role in my decision to pledge allegiance or not.

But if I student does not want to recite the pledge at all, that is his or her right, according to the Supreme Court and (more important) common sense.

Second, if the facts of this case are correct, then the teacher was most assuredly at fault and should be reprimanded in some way. Again, common sense.

But regardless of the facts, I fail to understand the obsession that people have with the need for apologies and their propensity to demand them.

The purpose of an apology is to express regret over something that has been said or done. It is something that I do frequently considering the number of mistakes that I make on a regular basis. There is nothing wrong with expressing an apology for something you have done that you regret.

However, to demand an apology is entirely different. When you demand an apology, you are asking to person you have offended you to utter a set of words that may express regret but with no guarantee of sincerity. There is no way of knowing whether or not the apology was heart-felt, since you never allowed the offender the opportunity to apologize without prompting.

In fact, by demanding the apology, you’re almost guaranteeing a lack of sincerity on the offender’s behalf. In general, demanding an apology just makes a person angry and spiteful.

And besides, what is the value of a demanded apology? Does an expression of forced regret make a person feel better?

I hope not. You’re pretty pathetic if that’s the case.

A demanded apology is nothing more than an adult version of “Take it back!”  It’s a form of passive-aggressive punishment that typically results in the petty, meaningless satisfaction in knowing that you made someone state a set of words that they would rather not have said. Possibly. Depending on if you ever gave the person a chance to apologize, which apology-demanders rarely do.

So in the case of the student who refused to pledge and his mother, what will they get when this teacher apologies, which she probably would have done anyway if just given the chance?

Revenge?

Will they drive away from school able to say, “Yeah, we sure showed them.  Didn’t we?”

Will little Johnny learn a valuable lesson about the importance of an apology when one is demanded and the story about the apology hits the pages of The Washington Post?

Probably all three. Unfortunately.

Brilliant

Poisoned before my second birthday

When I was about sixteen months old, my stomach was pumped after having swallowed an entire bottle of paregoric. Oddly enough, I never looked into what paregoric was until just recently. It was just one of those family stories that was retold from time to time, without much thought.

After some research, I learned that paregoric is a medication known for its “antidiarrheal, antitussive, and analgesic properties.” When I swallowed the bottle in 1972, it was a Schedule V drug, available over the counter, but two years later, it would be reclassified as a Schedule II drug, available by prescription only. Why this bottle was left out for me to swallow is beyond imagination, but my wife had a guess.

It turns out that paregoric was also used as a household remedy in the 18th and 19th centuries to calm fretful and misbehaving children, often resulting in their death. It was rubbed on the gums of babies who were teething to ease the pain, but in some cases, babies were given the medication orally, even though it was not recommended. When I read this to Elysha, her response was immediate. “Your mother was totally trying to chill you out, and things just got out of hand, or you made her so crazy that she accidentally left the bottle out in the open.”

I was a difficult baby.

It turns out that she was right. I recently re-connected with my father after almost two decades of estrangement (oddly mirroring the experience of Martin in SOMETHING MISSING), and one of my first questions for him was about the paregoric. He confirmed my wife’s suspicion, telling me that he and my mother would administer it to me by the spoonful in order to calm me down.

He reiterated that I was a difficult baby and added that I did not get any easier as I got older.

Fine is not good enough

My wife and I are attempting to keep our daughter away from television until the age of two, as recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics and based upon a great body of research that seems to indicate that television before this age can negatively impact cognitive development.

And I don’t think we’re overly cautious or overprotective parents. We allow Clara to cry herself to sleep each night, have left her with babysitters, and rarely call the doctor with concerns.

But too much research indicates that television before the age of two is bad, and we’ve decided to buy into it.

And according to both of our babysitters, Clara loves books and is more attentive to them than any other baby they know. Perhaps the absence of television in her life has contributed to this.

Or maybe she’s just a genius.

Either way, Clara is just over a year old and is already is fascinated by television (and screens in general). She loves to sit on my lap and watch me write, and if a television is on in another room or in a restaurant, she will crane her head to catch a glimpse of it. Thankfully, my wife and I don’t watch a lot of TV, so keeping her away from it is relatively simple. 

Yesterday morning my wife was watching the news and I was playing with Clara on the bed, using my body to block her view of the screen. After a moment, I noticed that she was staring out the window. “How sweet,” I thought. “She must be looking at the birds.”

Then I noticed the reflection of the TV screen in the window and realized what was going on.

Clever girl.

Of course, television viewing before the age of two was exceptionally common when I grew up, and dare I say that it is still quite common today. As a result, many people say things like, “I watched television when I was a kid and I turned out fine” or “My son started watching Sesame Street when he was nine months old and he’s at the top of his class.”

While all this might be true, I find these arguments ridiculous because there is no way to measure lost potential.

I grew up in a home without many books, and I have no recollection of my mother or father ever reading to me or encouraging me to read. We owned half a set of Funk and Wagnall’s encyclopedias, and by the time I was about eight years old, I had begun to read them, desperate for any kind of book at all. We had a television in our bedroom and a healthy supply of video games, and my fondest memories of my mother are the times when we would sit down and play the Atari 5200 together. My childhood was spent with video games, TV and the outdoors.  Books never even played a significant role in my life until I was about twelve years old and found the public library on my own.

Not once in my entire life did my parents help or even ask about my homework.

Yet today I am a successful teacher, small business owner, and published novelist with a second book on the way and a third in the works. I hold four degrees from four different colleges including a Master’s in educational technology, and I graduated at the top of my class each time. I might be in the position to argue that all this talk about the importance of reading to your child and avoiding television and video games is nonsense, and that despite my questionable childhood, I turned out just fine.

Sure, but what could I have been?

How much potential did I actually possess as a child, and how much of that was lost because of the way in which my parents chose to raise me?

Probably a lot if the research is correct.

Yet our decision to keep Clara away from the television until she is two in no way casts judgment upon those parents who do not.  The research is certainly not conclusive and parents are entitled to make their own decisions. 

In fact, if it’s true that television viewing before the age of two retards cognitive development, then it’s fine by me if everyone sits their infants in front of the boob tube. Less competition for Clara in the future.

But too often, people assume that our decision somehow impugns their own parenting choices, and so they leap to their own defense, unnecessarily, by telling my how they turned out fine and how their other kids are doing great even though they watched plenty of TV as infants and toddlers.

And that is when I do pass judgment on them, not for their parenting decisions, but for their inability to understand lost potential, no matter how fine they turned out. 

Fine is not always good enough.

A mixed bag

I received an email from a reader of this blog today that was interesting. 

She wrote:

I find you both acerbic and dorky.  One minute you remind me of fuzzy little bunny and another minute you’re more like an angry rattlesnake.  It’s strange.  I don’t know if I that or not.  But I loved your book.

Say what she wants, as long as she likes my book, I’m good. 

Either way, I rule.

Whenever I am asked how I find the time to teach, write novels and run a small business, I reply that I don’t sleep as much as most people, therefore I have more hours in the day to be productive.

I also contend that I am an efficient sleeper, using my ability to fall asleep in seconds to make the best use of my time in bed.

My friend, Kim, finds this claim to be amusing at best, but I think it’s true. 

I contend that although I only sleep about five hours a night, I use every minute for sleep rather than tossing and turning like so many.  This is how I manage to remain alert and productive despite my lack of sleep in comparison to others.

But it turns out that rather than being efficient, I may just be genetically superior.

Dream come true times two

UNEXPECTEDLY, MILO will be available in bookstores on August 3 of this year, which feels like a million years from now.  We are currently in the process of preparing for the book’s publicity and marketing.  Galleys have been sent to a variety of media outlets and plans are in the works to publicize and promote the book. 

We have a couple original ideas in this regard that I look forward to sharing with you in the near future. 

Bookstores are also beginning to place their orders.    

In the wake of this preparation, I was recently asked by a bookseller if the publishing of my second novel has now become “old hat.”

I laughed.  Even though this is my second trip through the publishing process in just over a year, the process is just as fresh and exciting as it’s ever been.

“On the contrary,” I explained.  “Publishing my second novel is like have my dreams come true for a second time.”

I sort of hope that I always feel this way, no matter how many books I publish in the future.

My wife, the radical noncomformist

I often credit my wife for being the most tolerant woman alive, willing to put up with my alternative views on the world, my utter lack of conformity and my unwillingness to submit to cultural and social graces that I do not find logical or applicable. I am stunned with her unquestioning acceptance of someone as potentially annoying as me. Then I realized, just the other day, that she is just as much of a nonconformist as me.

It’s true. Though her friends and family obviously love her, Elysha is unlike  them in a variety of ways:

She’s one of the only members of the family to not marry a fellow Jew, and she almost exclusively dated non-Jewish men throughout her lifetime.

She was known for having the most eclectic group of friends in high school, including a guy who went by the name Chainsaw. Her father has told me on more than one occasion that she would bring home the oddest collection of human beings that he’d ever seen.  She was friendly with theater geeks, musicians, jocks and everyone in between.

She once wore tinfoil in her hair for a day in middle school, thinking it looked good.

She despises the phone with a hatred normally reserved for hermits.

She does not enjoy shopping and often feels guilty about spending money.

Her musical taste ranges from Led Zeppelin to Lyle Lovett to the Buffy the Vampire Slayer soundtrack.

She may like Battlestar Galactica more than me.

She does not read the tabloids, prefers her laptop to the television, does not watch American Idol or any other reality program, and refuses to read any baby book that denotes recommended milestones (and most baby books in general).

I could go on and on, but suffice it to say that she is a nonconformist. She is unlike any other woman I have ever known.

And to think it took me this long to figure this out.

Imponderables

I recently asked the following questions, to which I have yet to receive an answer: 1. Under the category of useless features, why do air conditioners have remote controls? How many changes to the temperature are made in a single day?

2. Why do the batteries on smoke detectors only die at night?

3. Why is it that I've never heard a man complain about dry skin yet I hear women complain about it constantly? Are men genetically superior in this regard?

Audio books: The good, the bad and the silly

When I was twenty years old, my best friend, Bengi, suggested that I begin listening to audio books during my one hour drive from Attleboro, MA to my job on Cape Cod.  Feeling that I was a serious reader and future scholar, I considered audio books a tool of the illiterate masses and rejected them with all of the snobbery that an uneducated, twenty year old McDonald’s manager could muster.

I often think of this as one of the most foolish positions that I have ever assumed in my life.

Three years later, I found myself working for a marketing firm that kept me on the road all day long, Tired of commercial radio, I finally decided to give audio books a chance, jamming a cassette tape into my Sony Walkman and hitting play.

I have never turned back.

Though I still read vociferously, audio books have become the primary way that I consume books.  I read about twenty books a year but listen to at least twice that many.  Driving, doing chores, exercising, eating breakfast, walking the dog, and almost any other time that I am alone, I am listening to an audio book or a podcast.  My headphones are a permanent fixture upon my head, even when I am not listening.  In fact, I sometimes worry that my one-year-old daughter thinks that my headphones are akin to ears or a nose, just another part of Daddy’s anatomy. 

They are on my head that much.

Thankfully, I am a remarkably strong auditory learner, meaning I can focus on and remember what I hear with ease, allowing me to do many other things while listening.  Other's, including my wife, are not as fortunate.

Conversely, I have no visual skills with which to speak.  I cannot remember a person’s face even if I just saw the person an hour ago and I have no idea what color pants I am wearing unless I look down and check.  So my auditory prowess is not all roses.  

Nevertheless, this makes listening to an audio book a breeze for me.  In fact, I am often able to listen to an audio book or a podcast while simultaneously watching a television program, monitoring the two audio streams without difficulty, a feat that makes my wife a little crazy.

Don’t tell anyone, but I am often carrying on a conversation and listening to a podcast at the same time as well.

But although I adore the audio book and sing its praises to everyone I meet, I also have my share of complaints, and they tend to center around purchasing of audio books on disc rather than downloading the digital files.

As a member of Audible.com, I download almost all of my books from the website directly to my iTunes client and my iPhone, and the process is seamless and efficient. 

This is not the case when downloading a book from a disc. 

Recently, I purchased Malcolm Gladwell’s WHAT THE DOG SAW on disc from Barnes and Noble, using one of the many gift cards that I receive as a teacher.  The problems with downloading and listening to this book on my iPhone (or any other MP3 player) are numerous.

First, the tracks on discs like this are often inconsistently titled, which creates problems when attempting to load a book onto a device in the correct order. 

For example, the first disc might be labeled as Disc 1: #1, Disc 1: #2, etc.

Then the second disc might be labeled as Disc #2: #1, Disc #2, #2. 

See the difference?  The use of the extra pound sign on disc 2 can cause the tracks to misalign when they are imported into my iPhone, resulting in a skewed track order and the need for me to manually rearrange them. 

It’s also highly likely (almost a certainty) that disc 10 will be listed before disc 2 on the iPhone, since disc 10 leads with the numeral 1 and disc two is never listed as 02.  Therefore, 10 will come before before 2, as will every other disc labeled in the teens.

Frustrating?  Hell yes.

These are simple, easily corrected errors made at the time of recording, but they are still made on a remarkably consistent basis. 

Also, audio discs are usually recorded in tracks 3-7 minutes long, with no attention paid to chapter endings.  This means that when I stop listening to an audio book that originated on a disc, I must note the track number where I have left off for when I return, or I will not be able to pick up the story in the correct spot.  There is simply a list of one hundred or more tracks, and in the mind of the MP3 player, they are no different than songs.  Exit the playlist and you start the list over. 

Contrast this to GAME CHANGE, the audio book that I am currently listening to.  This book was downloaded from Audible, so there were only two tracks that I needed to place on my iPhone (WHAT THE DOG SAW was comprised of 114 tracks) and the chapters are divided into easily-defined sections on each file.  I know what chapter I am listening to and how much time is left on the chapter.  More importantly, every time I start and stop the audio book, I am brought back to the correct spot. 

No notation required.

I have only one complaint with audio books that I download digitally from Audible, and it’s a small one.  Recently, I finished listening to Jasper Fforde’s LOST IN A GOOD BOOK.  Like GAME CHANGE, it was comprised of two tracks.  When the first track ended, the narrator made this announcement:

This audio books has been broken down into multiple parts to make the download faster.  You have reached the end of a part but not the end of the complete audio book.

This announcement is made on most of Audible’s downloads, and I find it more infuriating each time I hear it.  I know that the damn book hasn’t ended yet.  I’ve been listening to the story for five hours.  Do the producers really think that anyone might be fooled into believing that the book has ended halfway through?  Have you ever read a book and thought that the halfway point might make a good ending?

Ridiculous.

But again, a small complaint. 

As I said, there is no bigger fan of audio books than me.

Never again

I refuse to purchase a greeting card wrapped in cellophane ever again. Not because it's the green thing to do (which it is) or to save cash (which it would).

It is simply a rejection of pretension. A refusal to acknowledge the existence of such a ridiculous product. A challenge to senseless overspending and a heightened sense of importance.

Can I get an amen?

Moose!

When I was seventeen years old, I was canoeing across a lake in northern Maine.  The lake was so large that I couldn’t see the shore on three sides.  The water was still, the air humid, the sun high in the sky.  The only sounds were the distant twitters of birds and the gentle splashes made from oars striking the water.

The out of nowhere, across our bow, a moose swam by.

A moose!

Well over a mile from the nearest shore, a moose paddled by, calm and relaxed in its strokes. 

I couldn’t believe it.  And when I told my wife about the encounter years later, she didn’t believe me either, until I directed her to the Internet and some amazing facts about moose. 

First, moose can swim great distances and have been known to migrate from island to island, sometimes crossing ocean water in order to do so.  In fact, the moose on the Isle Royale in Lake Superior have been spotted on nearby smaller islands around the main island because they swim across to give birth. This allows for them to give birth and raise their young without the threat of wolves preying on their young when they are vulnerable. Once the calves are physically mature, they are able to swim back, and are then able to better protect themselves from wolves, as they are then in their prime years.

Moose have even been found in the belly of killer whales off the coast of Alaska.   

These are just a few of the amazing facts that I have discovered about moose since seeing that moose swim in from of my canoe twenty years ago.  I’ve actually written a children’s book about moose as a result of my encounter and my subsequent research, and perhaps someday, I will try to have this book, along with the many other children’s books that I have written, published. 

But I have THE CHICKEN SHACK on my plate at the moment and another book just begging to be written, so they’ll have to wait.

But I was reminded about my moose encounter today when I was directed to this photograph of our twenty-sixth President, Teddy Roosevelt, riding on the back of a moose in order to ford a river. 

More than likely the photograph was staged in order to promote Roosevelt’s failed attempt at launching his Bull Moose party, but still bad-ass nonetheless. 

Hudson recommends SOMETHING MISSING

It never gets old.

Walking through Fort Lauderdale International Airport, we walk by a Hudson Booksellers.  On the front table, in one of the best locations possible in terms of visibility, I spotted SOMETHING MISSING on their “Hudson Recommends” table.

There have been many thrilling aspects to publishing my first novel.  Spotting my book out in the wild like this is one of them, and to see it positioned so prominently, more than six months after publication, makes it even more thrilling.

Stuck in the minority

Late in the fall, I spent the afternoon in Northampton with my wife, my daughter, and my in-laws. We had a delightful lunch and spent the afternoon time touring the town, peaking into stores and generally ambling about. It was a good time, but after about an hour, I was done. Despite the fine company and beautiful weather, I simply do not enjoy touring retail establishments for any length of time. I do not like to shop, there is very little that I want, and so this kind of activity eventually becomes quite difficult for me to bear. Here’s the problem:

Walking around a quaint New England town on a perfect summer day, stopping into shops, taking in the scenery, doing a little shopping and chatting on the sidewalks is the kind of universally-accepted activity that almost everyone seems to enjoy to one degree or another. It’s the way that many people would love to spend an afternoon, as evidenced by the large numbers of people on the street, so when you find yourself in the extreme minority, despising the activity, it’s difficult to justify your dislike and genuine abhorrence for this means of spending one’s time.

If you complain, people think you're crazy.

If you ask to cut the afternoon short, you instantly become the bad guy.

If you slouch or trudge or frown or express any displeasure, people can’t help but feel like you’re acting selfish and immature.

But here's the thing:

What if I were to ask these same people to spend four hours on a basketball court with me? Or a baseball diamond? Or a poker table at a casino? What if I invited them to sit beside and spend an afternoon writing?

To refuse to spend an afternoon on the basketball court or at the poker table seems perfectly reasonable to people, since these are activities with narrowly-defined interest levels. The majority of people are not expected to enjoy a game of two-on-two on a hot, summer day or a six-hour poker session at Foxwoods. No one thinks it reasonable to be expected to sit at a table all afternoon, writing fiction.

But I feel the same way about an afternoon of shopping in Northampton as many people might feel about donning sneakers and shooting free-throws for hours on end. The same way they might feel about pounding away on a keyboard for an afternoon or evening. Yet because these activities do not enjoy the same universal appeal as shopping and walking about a quaint retail district, I am presumed to be the pain-in-the-ass.

The lunatic.

The selfish jerk.

The nonconformist.

But it’s really not fair to ask me to spend my afternoon in a way that you enjoy, regardless of how many people also enjoy the chosen activity, without a willingness to reciprocate for me.

Don’t you think?

I sacrifice a Tuesday in Northampton if you are willing to join me on a Thursday for a game of hoop or an afternoon of composition and literary critique.

Am I wrong?

Upcoming events

Next month I will be speaking at my hometown library as part of a program that is geared at offering an education in writing and publishing to anyone interested in attending.  Local author Peter Cimini will talk about writing his first novel, THE SECRET OF OPI on March 22, and I will follow up his talk with one of my own on Wednesday, March 31. 

It appears that a large number of people have already registered for both events (though registration is not required), so it should be a fun evening of discussion.  if you’re in the area, drop on by and say hello.

In conjunction with the program, I will also be conducting a pair of evening classes on writing with local high school students as well.  While I adore my job as a fifth grade teacher, I can also see myself teaching high school or college English someday, so these classes should give me an interesting peek into the world of the high school English student.

Additional information about these upcoming events can be found in a recent article in the New Britain Herald.

Why my wife will never allow me a Freebie List

There a amusing tradition amongst spouses that each can create a Freebie List of people who they are allowed to date in the event that the opportunity ever presents itself. Actors and actresses, sports stars, models and musicians often top these fantasy lists. Lat night I was meeting with a couple in my capacity as DJ when this topic came up. The future husband and wife began playfully arguing about how many people should be allowed on their Freebie Lists. After listening to them debate the merits of George Clooney and Jennifer Aniston for a while, I offered my own advice:

If my wife ever wanted us to create Freebie Lists, I’d simply choose semi-attractive friends and neighbors for my list, and whenever possible, single or recently divorced women as well. Not the most attractive people I know, but middle-of-the-road attractiveness.

“Sure, honey, you can have Brat Pitt and Johnny Depp. Hell, why not take Puff Daddy and Tom Brady while you’re at it. I’ll just take our pretty friend stuck in the bad marriage, my recently divorced colleague and that twenty-something from up the street.”

As you can see, Freebie Lists do not work when at least one member of the couple is both strategic and realistic.