Big news does not mean big numbers when it comes to same sex marriage.

Arizona, Idaho and Kansas are the three most recent states to attempt to legalize discrimination based upon sexual orientation.

Arizona’s law passed through the House and Senate before the governor vetoed the bill.

The Kansas bill passed the House on a clear majority before dying in the House.

The decision on the Idaho bill, which is the most egregious of them all, is pending.

It’s easy to see these state legislators take positions against same-sex marriage and civil rights and think the sky is falling, but before you start sounding like Chicken Little, remember this:

The combined population of these three states barely exceeds the population of New York City.

Legalized discrimination is big news, as it should be, but these three states combine for a little more than 3 percent of the total US population.

The most recent polling indicates that 53% of Americans now support same sex marriage and 17 states now recognize same sex marriage with three more pending appeals.

It’s true. The sky is falling. It’s just falling on the bigots. 

Ginger was a ginger

A ginger, in case you didn’t know, is a word used (oftentimes in a derogatory manner) to describe a red-headed person.

Ginger from Gilligan’s Island was a red head, thus making Ginger a ginger.

Does anyone else find this odd and possibly disconcerting?

Teaching is not quite a minimum wage job, despite what my students may think.

My students were reading an article about the proposed increase in the minimum wage in their Time for Kids magazine.

I was secretly listening to their conversation.

Student #1: “If they increase the minimum wage, at least Mr. Dicks will get a raise.”

Student #2: Mr. Dicks doesn’t make minimum wage.

Student #1: I thought teaching was a minimum wage job.

Student #2: I don’t think so. Maybe? I don’t know.

The Reverse Nap: Mounting evidence that I am not a crazy person

I’ve been reversing napping for more than a year now.

I go to sleep at my regularly appointed hour, usually somewhere between 11:30 PM and midnight.

Then I wake up at some point in the middle of the night, usually around 2:00 AM. I climb out of bed. go downstairs and work for about 90 minutes. I write, revise, empty the dishwasher, walk the dog, pay bills, read.

Then around 3:30 AM I return to bed and experience all the joys of climbing into a warm bed and falling asleep for a second time that night. I sleep for another 90 minutes or so and then wake up again and begin my day.

The Reverse Nap.

I don’t do it every night, but I do it many nights.

When I first started reverse napping, people thought I was crazy. Then I wrote about it, and shortly thereafter, a few people began trying it and wrote to me, singing its praises.

Then I found research suggesting that segmented sleep, with two periods of rest separated by a period of wakefulness, was the dominant form of sleep in Western civilization prior to the Industrial Revolution. Human beings, it turns out, are already wired to reserve nap and did so for centuries.

Then I found research suggesting that if you are already awakening in the middle of the night and struggling to fall back asleep, remaining in bed can actually lead to “learned” insomnia, a kind of sleeplessness is caused by anxiety that comes from trying too hard to doze off when you can’t. 

Last week, New York Times science columnist Anahad O’Connor answered a question from a reader who falls asleep easily but is wide awake after only 3-4 hours.

O’Connor turned to Dr. Meir H. Kryger, a professor at Yale School of Medicine and the author of “The iGuide to Sleep,” who suggests the following:

If you wake up at night and find that you still cannot get back to sleep after 20 minutes, do not lie there in anguish staring at your clock. Get out of bed and do something that distracts and relaxes you, like reading a book. Then return to bed when you feel sleepy.

Dr. Kryger is suggesting the Reverse Nap.

Perhaps I’m not so crazy after all.

Ignorance is bliss

Three words that my daughter continues to use incorrectly:

• “Last day” in place of any day before today  
• “Oh” in place of “Or” 
• “That wise” in place of “That's why”

She also thinks that the person who is “It” in a game of tag is the person being chased rather than the chaser.

I’ve never loved ignorance so much.  

The Moth: Shoe Thief

The following is a story that I told at a Moth StorySLAM at The Bell House in Brooklyn in March of 2012. 

The theme of the night was Theft. I told a story about the theft of shoes from a local show store.

I finished in first place.

What kind of food is this?

I was visiting the pretend diner at Kid City, a local children’s museum. I was sitting at a Formica table, waiting for my daughter to serve me some plastic food on a plastic plate.

These are the two items she placed in front of me.

I honestly have no idea what either of these things are supposed to be. Nor did my wife.

Thoughts?

Joining the war against nonplussed is flammable/inflammable

Since launching my war against the word “nonplussed” last week, the campaign has been proceeding surprisingly well. In addition to my own use of the word “nonplussed” at least half a dozen times last week, I’ve received reports from several recruits who have also been aggressively using this ridiculous word in an effort to confuse people and ultimately turn them against it as well. At least two recruits have even utilized “plussed” in a sentence, which is a word that doesn’t actually exist except NOW IT DOES!

And good news! I’m pleased to report that recent negotiations have led to an agreement with forces hoping to align themselves with the anti-nonplussed movement. In return for their support, I have pledged to launch a new offensive against the words “flammable” and “inflammable.”

“Flammable” and “inflammable,” in case you didn’t know, mean exactly the same thing. Conveniently, I despise the stupidity of these two words as well.

 

My plan of attack is simple:

Utilize the words “flammable” and “inflammable” in the same conversation interchangeably. If possible, use the two words in the same sentence. Act as nonchalantly as possible while doing so.

For example:

The problem with wearing a long beard is that human hair is highly flammable, so until we find a way to make whiskers less inflammable, men with beards should avoid roasting highly inflammable marshmallows over a campfire.

The goal of this offensive is to draw awareness to the stupidity of these two words and their single definition in hopes that one of them (“inflammable” would be my choice) is eliminated from the English lexicon altogether.

Finding legitimate uses for these two words in everyday life is admittedly challenging, but when found, I think the execution of this plan will be great fun.

Who is with me?

I’m launching an email newsletter. What should be included?

The publishing Gods (Jane Friedman and many others) have declared that the most important tool that an author has for building a platform and marketing a book is a strong mailing list and a regular newsletter. 

Having used a mailing list as the sole means of promoting Speak Up, our Hartford-based storytelling organization, I have come to understand the power of this seemingly old fashioned form of marketing. We have sold out every one of our shows simply through the power of an email.

I’ve been collecting email addresses for more than five years. There’s a place on my website and blog to enter your email for my mailing list, and this somewhat annoying field disappears once you have signed up. After five years, I have a surprisingly large mailing list.

The question is what to include in a newsletter.

Here are my ideas so far:

• Links to the top 3 blog posts from the previous week, with commentary about reactions to the post when appropriate
• Updates on upcoming storytelling and speaking appearances
• Links to any recent videos of me performing for The Moth, TED and similar organizations
• An update on the progress of my books and any behind-the-scenes peeks into the publishing world that I could provide.

Do you have any thoughts on what you’d like to see included in a newsletter from someone like me? I’d love to hear your thoughts. Since I write a blog and post regularly, I’m looking for content that does not appear already on the blog. Something different and special that will make people open the newsletter when it arrives in their inbox.

The experts say I should be sending a newsletter to my readers at least once a month, and preferably one a week. I ‘m considering splitting the difference and sending one every other week.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this as well.

For my daughter. And all daughters.

Advice To Young Girls: If you have a choice between being the thin one or the pretty one, choose to be the funny one.

Megan Sass posted this to Twitter on Saturday. I don’t know Megan Sass, but I love Megan Sass.

In a platonic sense, of course.

Megan is a writer and a performer based in New York City, so perhaps our paths will cross someday. If they do, I will introduce myself and offer an awkward hug. And if Clara is with me when we meet, I’ll be sure to introduce her to the woman whose words I’ll have read to Clara again and again.

The many faces of Charles Wallace

                

The peanut butter and tuna fish sandwich

For people like me who hate mayonnaise (and there are many of us), foods like egg, chicken and tuna salad sandwiches are not viable options for us.

When I was a kid, my mother didn’t especially care about my hatred for mayonnaise. When the canned tuna fish was on sale, we were eating it, damn it. Initially, this meant tuna fish straight out of the can and onto Wonder bread for me. The result was a dry, bland sandwich, but even worse, it was impossible to keep the tuna inside the bread without the mayonnaise adhesive. Invariably, I’d end up holding two slices of bread in my hands with a pile of tuna fish in my lap.

In an effort to solve this problem, I began experimenting with alternatives to mayonnaise.

Catsup was not good.

Butter was ineffective.

Honey was a disaster.

Then I stumbled upon the solution:

Peanut butter.

Heat up a few tablespoons of peanut butter in the microwave or a sauce pan on the stove until it is warm and thin, then mix it with tuna fish.

It’s a protein-packed alternative that holds the tuna together nicely and actually tastes good, too.

I know you probably think I’m crazy, but years ago, a task in one of my A-Mattzing Races was to eat a peanut butter and tuna fish sandwich (the race’s theme was me). While not every competitor extoled the virtues of this combination, a handful did, and at least one continued to eat it in his regular life.

Tuna fish and peanut butter. Try it. And let me know what you think. 

A death threat, courtesy of the Yellow Pages

The Yellow Pages is a telephone directory of businesses, organized by category, rather than alphabetically by business name and in which advertising is sold. The directories were originally printed on yellow paper, as opposed to white pages for non-commercial listings.

I mention this because it’s entirely possible for anyone after 1990 to have no idea what this ridiculous fossil of a bygone era is.

This year our Yellow Pages delivery person placed our copy, wrapped in its protective plastic bag, on top of our trashcan.

Just one step away from where it belonged.

Maybe next year, he or she will toss it into the trashcan and finish the job.

My friend’s Yellow Pages delivery person was not so kind. His text to me:

Snow blowing. Rolled over yellow pages that were buried under snow. Broke the snow blower. Had to shovel. Two hours. Who the !#$*# uses these !#$*# yellow pages anymore???? Who?!?!?!?

I responded by telling him that real men shovel their driveway.

His response:

I’ll kill you.

While it’s true that I don’t own a snow blower and shovel my driveway like a real man, there is also an older woman across the street with a snow blower who has been known to clear much of my driveway if the snow is especially deep. I don’t ask her to do so, but other than feigned assurances that I can manage on my own, I don’t stop her, either.

The Moth: Black and White in Washington

The following is a story that I told at a Moth StorySLAM at Housing Works in New York City earlier this year. 

The theme of the night was Summer. I told a story about my pursuit of a girl while working in Washington DC and the unexpected and unfortunate turn that it ultimately took.  

I finished in first place.

A silver lining to rapidly increasing climate change

This is scary stuff.

The one benefit to rapidly increasing climate change is that many of the naysayers and deniers will still be alive when all the polar ice is gone and coastal cities begin to disappear into the ocean.

At least we’ll be able to say, “I told you so” to the morons.

The average husband would choose the cash and time over well appointed fingernails.

I’m not criticizing the value of a manicure or pedicure. At least not at the moment.

If a manicure or pedicure makes a person happy, that’s a wonderful thing.

I’m not sure if I really believe this, but for now, I’ll stand by this statement so as to not confuse the issue. For now, here’s the question:

A friend told me that she was getting a manicure because she knows her husband likes it when her nails look good.

“Did your husband actually say this?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “But I know.”

I disagreed. While I’m sure that her husband thinks that pretty nails are pretty and finds his wife’s post-manicure appearance appealing, if given the choice between a wife with well-appointed nails or $35 (the price she quoted) and 90 additional minutes to spend with his wife, I think he (and most husbands) would choose the latter.

If you are getting a manicure because it makes you feel good, that’s great (at least for the sake of this post). But I have a hard time accepting the premise that most husbands (and spouses in general) would not choose the additional time and cash over the painted nails if given the option.

I think my friend is kissing herself if she believes that she is getting manicure for her husband and not herself.

Thoughts?

What the hell is going on in Kansas?

Kansas state representative Gail Finney has proposed a bill that defines acceptable forms of corporal punishment in both schools and home as “up to ten forceful applications in succession of a bare, open-hand palm against the clothed buttocks of a child and any such reasonable physical force on the child as may be necessary to hold, restrain or control the child in the course of maintaining authority over the child, acknowledging that redness or bruising may occur on the tender skin of a child as a result.”

If this bill passes, teachers and parents in Kansas will be able to hold children down and hit them to the point of bruising. 

What the hell is going on in Kansas?

Last week it was a bill seeking to impose Jim Crow-like laws on same-sex couples (which overwhelmingly passed in the House and thankfully died in the Senate), and now this.

If this were Dorothy’s Kansas, I suspect that she might be tapping her ruby red slippers and saying, “Anyplace is better than home. Anyplace is better than home. Anyplace is better than home.”

Everything happens for a reason, especially when your life is good.

When I hear someone say that "everything happens for a reason," I remind them that they might find this to be a less plausible premise if they had been sold into sexual slavery as a teenager or forcibly recruited into a Somali militia before their tenth birthday or were dying of smallpox in a mountainous, isolated region of Afghanistan. The belief that everything happens for a reason seems to be directly correlated to the quality of a person’s life.

The better your life, the stronger the belief.

This strikes me as rather convenient for the believers of this nonsense.

With all the pain and suffering in this world, “Everything happens for a reason” is a stupid thing to say and an ignorant thing to believe.

It belittles the genuine suffering that people experience that is beyond their control.

Advertising goes both ways.

My daughter didn’t see a commercial until she was almost three years old. Though we thought this moratorium was a good idea, it turns out that she is now completely susceptible to advertising.

She’s once asked Elysha what stain remover she uses and was dissatisfied with the answer.

She still doesn’t watch very much commercial television, but when she does, she wants just about everything that she sees on the commercials (though thankfully she doesn’t seem to form any lasting attachments to any of it yet).

But it’s not all bad.

Today she saw a commercial for Chuck E. Cheese. I braced for the request. It didn’t come.

I got curious. I thought for sure that she would enchanted with the images presented on the television.  “Do you think we should go to Chuck E. Cheese someday?” I asked.

“Someday,” she said. “But the kids in that commercial are all look older than me, so it must be a place for big kids.”

That commercial just spared me at least a year of Chuck E. Cheese visits.

Advertising isn’t all bad.

Food allergy skeptics suck.

A Boston Globe piece entitled Skeptics add to food allergy burden for parents describes the challenges that parents of food allergic children face when closed-minded morons accuse a parent of being overprotective rather than vigilante when it comes to the health and safety of their kids.

The number of children with reported food allergies continues to rise — from 3.5 percent in 1998 to 5.2 percent in 2012, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. With that increase has come a heightened awareness of allergies, but some parents of allergic children say they are sometimes branded hypochondriacs or labeled as overprotective by neighbors, late-night comics, and even grandparents.

Beyond suspicion that allergies can’t be fatal — particularly non-peanut allergies — some parents say they face disbelief that their children’s allergies exist at all. That’s a perception fed in part by the enormous number of Americans who avoid things like gluten or dairy for lifestyle rather than life-and-death reasons. Skepticism was likewise fueled by a 2010 study in the Journal of Pediatrics that found an overreliance on blood tests to diagnose food allergies had led to avoidance of foods that could actually be eaten.

“It makes it harder because people think we’re all misdiagnosed, that we’re hypochondriacs,” Francoeur said.

My daughter is allergic to peanuts. I have yet to run into one of these skeptical idiots, but if someone ever questioned my daughter’s food allergy or the caution that we take (Clara included) to ensure that she is safe, I suspect that I would do what I do best:

Find ways of verbally abusing them until they were silenced, embarrassed or crying.

Hopefully all three.

Unfortunately, I have encountered people who bemoan the sudden increase in food allergies and ask me why I think so many children today suffer from this condition.

My typical response is something like:

Did you mistake me for a medical research scientist? Or some all-knowing seer? How the hell am I supposed to know? Why would you even ask me that question?

I don’t ask these questions nicely.

Though I have yet to encounter any skeptics in regards to my daughter’s allergy, I have dealt with skeptics like this before in regards to my own allergies.

I am allergic to bee stings and mustard. Each of these allergies illicit different types of responses from skeptics.

When a bee is flying in close proximity to me, my reaction is to exit the area immediately. While most people see this as a perfectly rationale approach (especially given that I nearly died and required CPR following a bee sting once). an occasional idiot will scoff at my avoidance strategy and assure me that if I don’t move, the bee won’t sting me.

First, I wasn’t moving when the bee that almost killed me stung me, so this is simply not true.

Second, I think of bees as tiny bullets. While bees might rarely sting a person who is not moving, rarely is still enough to kill me. I often ask, “If a man was waving a loaded gun in your face, would you remain seated and calm, even if he assured you that he would not fire if you remained still?”

This usually shuts the person up.

The most common response to my mustard allergy is to doubt it’s existence entirely. Since these people have never encountered a person with a mustard allergy before, they assume that my allergy must not be real.

Several years ago, one of these skeptics was present when I accidentally took a bite of a burger with mustard and had an immediate reaction. My face and hands broke out in hives and breathing became difficult for me. While I do not enjoy this reaction, it was quite satisfying to experience it in front of my skeptic.

The best response to these food skeptics is to ignore them. Their skepticism is merely a sign of their stupidity, and stupid people are best ignored.

If this proves impossible, the next best response is to respond immediately and harshly. Hit them where it hurts. Acquire allies. Make a scene. Call them names. Divulge long-held secrets. MAKE THEM CRY.

Ensure that they will never openly doubt the food allergy of another person again.