If the teacher tells you that your child is not gifted, it’s more likely that it’s the teacher who is not gifted.

The most common response to a piece I wrote last month entitled 12 Things Teachers Think But Can’t Always Say to Parents was a suggested addition to the list. It was phrased in many ways, oftentimes sarcastically, and it generally went something like this:

Your child is not as gifted as you think he or she is.

There was a reason I left this particular item off my list:

It’s stupid. It’s shortsighted and narrow minded. It’s unproductive. It’s adversarial. It’s not true.

This is not to say that I haven’t heard this sentiment expressed many times in my 17 years as a teacher. But whenever I hear a teacher express this idea, I push back immediately, and I push back hard, for three reasons.

1. Parents are supposed to think that their child is gifted.

It’s only natural for them to think more highly of their child than the rest of the world does. Their child is the most important thing in their life. They will invest more time, money, and energy into their child than anyone or anything before or after. It makes sense for them to believe that the person who they love the most in the world is gifted in some way.

And we all deserve to have someone in our lives who believes in us above all others. It should be our parents. They should be our champions. To think that parents should feel differently is short sighted and stupid.

2. Wouldn’t it be a better world if every teacher thought like parents and assumed that every student in their class was gifted in some way?

I’ve taught about 350 students in my 17 years as a teacher, and I have yet to meet a kid who I didn’t believe was gifted in one way or another.

In fact, some of my most accomplished students were the ones for whom learning came the hardest. Their gift was not intellect but effort -  a willingness to do whatever it took to succeed.

Give me a student gifted in effort over a student gifted in intellect any day. 

I assume that every one of my students is gifted, and this assumption has served me well. When a teacher sets remarkably high expectations and demands more from his students than ever before, students perform better. The research on this is irrefutable. 

Yet history is littered with presumptuous, ignorant,  and arrogant educators who assumed that their students wouldn’t amount to much and were later proven wrong.

Albert Einstein. Helen Keller. Robert Strenberg. Thomas Edison. Louis Pasteur. Enrico Caruso. Ludwig Beethoven. Leo Tolstoy. Louisa May Alcott.

     

Many more. Too numerous to count. Myself included.  

Each of these men and women were told by teachers that they were hopeless, half-witted, and doomed to a lives of mediocrity.

It turns out that it was the teachers who were hopeless, half-witted, and mediocre.

As a teacher, why not err on the side of gifted? Why not assume the best? Expect the best. Demand the best. Give students the chance to shine by assuming that they can and will shine.   

3. Why promote an adversarial relationship with parents?

If a parent thinks that their child is gifted, and you – for whatever reason – disagree, why not find some middle ground?

Yes, it’s entirely possible that your child is gifted, and if he begins working to his fullest potential, we may start to see more evidence of that. Let’s find a way to make that happen.

There’s no reason to quash a parent’s hopes and dreams for their child. The teacher-parent relationship is one of the best tools available in my teaching arsenal. When it is strong and trusting, learning increases. Behavior improves. But that relationship only exists because I understand how parents feel about their children, and I embrace those feelings.  

Yes, your child is gifted. I’m not sure about the scope of that giftedness, but let’s get your child working as hard as possible and find out together.

That strikes me as a more productive and respectful position than the smarmy “You’re child isn’t as gifted as you think” response that so many teachers who responded to my initial piece seemed to default to.  

Every child in my classroom is someone else’s whole world. I try to remember this at all times. When I do, it’s never too hard to see every child in my classroom as gifted in some way.

Students were required to listen to Ted Cruz - under threat of fines - which seems just plain mean. Also agonizing.

In case you didn’t hear, the students at Liberty University were required to attend Ted Cruz’s speech announcing his candidacy for President last week.

Failure to do so would have resulted in a fine of $10.

Even worse, when students attempted to leave after realizing that they were at a political rally, they were refused exit.

“I felt very acutely that I was being used as political bait today” sophomore Emily Foreman said on Monday. “I think our freedom of speech was hampered today when we weren’t allowed to leave.”

A slightly embarrassing launch to a dead-in-the-water Presidential campaign

Most important, you can’t make this stuff up.

14 Things That Annoy Me (and probably you)

1. People who live in the suburbs of a city but claim residence to that city

2. Drivers who fail to understand that “No Right on Red” really means “Be careful before making your perfectly legal right on red.”

3. Continuous discussions about body ailments and/or illnesses

4. Invitations to play stupid Facebook games

5. The recounting – word for word – of conversations that are clearly only interesting enough to warrant paraphrasing

6. Missing out on an argument or debate because I was a second too late or unaware of the proceedings

7. The massive stores of memory lost forever when a person dies

8. The almost universally incorrect use of the phrase “Begs the question”

9. The New Yorker way of saying “on line” instead of “in line”

10. The bizarre pride that some New Yorkers feel (and openly express) about saying “on line” instead of “in line”

11. Songs about specific people that are named after those specific people (Elton John’s Daniel, Journey’s Amanda, Eric Clapton’s Layla)

12. The muddy, brown, cold days between winter and spring

13. The rhetorical use of the question “Guess what?” – as in “I listened to everything he had to say, and guess what? I didn’t believe a word he said.”

14. Almost every rhetorical question ever asked

The two reasons that people like foods that they initially despise are exactly the two reasons that I still don’t like those foods.

I’m known to have a limited palate. It’s not as limited as many of my friends contend, but there are admittedly large numbers of foods that I do not like, including salad, a great number of vegetables, many nuts, most Asian cuisines, most sauces and dressings, and more. I also don’t drink coffee or alcohol. People have many theories on my limited palate. People like to express these theories to me often.

I have many theories on their more expansive palates, including the belief (backed by science) that we have little control over the foods that we find palatable, so shaming, harassing, or otherwise disparaging a person’s food preferences is insensitive and stupid.

My friend actually purchased a testing kit and confirmed that I am a supertaster, which means that I taste more flavors – and am therefore sensitive to more flavors – than the average person, which goes a long way to explaining my limited palate.

I am tasting all the awful flavors that your less effective taste buds are missing.

Recently, Paul Rozin, a cultural psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, has added to the research on food preferences. Rozin is especially interested in why people learn to love foods they initially hated, a phenomenon he calls “benign masochism.”

He has come up with two reasons to explain how this happens:

1. Repeated exposure
2. Social pressure

This explain a lot in terms of my limited palate.

Repeated exposure means that in order to learn to like a food that I don’t – say avocado – I would have to suffer again and again until I theoretically began liking it.

This sounds insane. I have to eat a food that I can barely swallow without feeling ill or vomiting in order to expand my palate? There are far too many palatable foods in the world for me to spend time torturing myself over a food item that doesn’t even grow naturally where I live.

But it’s the aspect of social pressure that perhaps explains my palate best. I am and have always been a nonconformist in the most extreme sense of the word. Social pressures have never meant all that much to me, oftentimes to my detriment. The thought that I might eat a food that I consider unpalatable in order to better align myself with the people around me sounds ridiculous.

Then again, I am often sitting at the table in a restaurant, staring at people who are enjoying the salad course while I gnaw on a piece of bread and politely readjust my napkin on my lap.

This doesn’t bother me, but perhaps it would make most people uncomfortable.

Maybe it’s a person’s desire to join his friends for sushi after work on Fridays that causes him to find a way to enjoy eating something that should obviously be cooked before eating.

Maybe it’s the incessant fawning over guacamole – made right at the table! – that pushes the avocado hater over to the dark side and decide to dip a chip.

Maybe it’s the pervasive, inexpensive nature of salad that causes so many people to adopt the dietary habits of small woodland creatures.

Rozin’s theory makes sense. If social pressures cause people to walk around with brand names plastered to their clothing and handbags and somehow think this is a good thing, then why would this not also apply to foods that initially make us feel ill?

Rozin also coins the term “hedonistic reversal” – the ability of our brain to tell our senses we’re going to turn something we should avoid into a preference. This applies to the person who decides that the spiciest buffalo wings are his favorite, mostly because he has become convinced that eating foods that most people find unpalatable makes him feel superior.

You know the type. These are the people who eat eye of newt because it’s the newest, latest food trend, and they want to appear cutting edge. Hip. Brave.

They never do. Instead, they often appear cloying. Desperate. Sad.

I’m not that kind of person, either. I hope.

I want this life.

   

The author Julian Barnes would kill me, and defacing books is a terrible thing, but don’t you think this is also an AMAZING idea?

While attending a book club recently, a woman told me that the book they read before my book was Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending.

“And something really strange happened with that book,” she said.

Almost as soon as the discussion began, the woman became confused. “It was as if they had all read a different book than me. They were talking about an ending that I hadn’t read.’

After some investigation, she discovered that the last ten pages in her book were missing.

The Sense of an Ending has lost its ending.

When I asked her if she thought it strange that the book stopped midsentence and ended so abruptly, she said, “Of course. But the book is called The Sense of an Ending. I thought the author was trying to say something specific by ending it like that. Like maybe this is the true sense of an ending. Without fanfare. In life, things stop suddenly. We don’t get neatly wrapped endings.”

Then I had an idea. The author in me despises this idea.

The rest of me adores it.

Wouldn’t it be amazing to go to the bookstores and tear out the last 5-10 pages in every copy of The Sense of an Ending that you could find? Give every reader the same experience that this woman had when she can to the false ending of the book.

Tear out the ending in The Sense of an Ending.

It’s a great prank. Don’t you think?

My son’s excitement over a recent visit to the mall is slightly disconcerting

Thankfully, I think it has nothing to do with the shopping and everything to o with the indoor play area.

Teachers of writing at any level: Read this immediately. Nothing is more important.

The 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Patrick Modiano, who had this to say about the writing process during his acceptance speech:

Writing is a strange and solitary activity. It is a little like driving a car at night, in winter, on ice, with zero visibility. You have no choice, you cannot go into reverse, you must keep going forward while telling yourself that all will be well when the road becomes more stable and the fog lifts.

Similarly, here are some other comments on the writing process from a variety of accomplished and respected authors:

Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you’re doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.
~E. L. Doctorow

Start before you’re ready. ~Steven Pressfield

It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.
~ William Faulkner

There are hundreds more like this.

Why do I bring this up?

In hopes that all of the teachers who require students to complete graphic organizers or planning sheets or move little pencils across bulletin board displays of the writing process or force their students to work on one piece at a time or assign their students specific topics for their writing assignments will knock it off and learn to write themselves instead of subjecting their students to their bizarre, inaccurate, nonproductive, and likely damaging perceptions of the writing process.

This is not to say that organization and planning should never be used when writing. About half the writers of the world plan in some way. Mystery, historical fiction, and many nonfiction writers plan their stories with great detail before they begin writing, but not all, and even when they plan, this process is often as amorphous and convoluted as the writing process itself. Rarely does it fit into little boxes and pocket charts. 

If you are teaching writing but not writing yourself on a regular basis, you are probably – no, definitely – doing more harm than good. Your ignorance of the writing process – coupled with the way you teach it – is turning out ineffective, uninspired, under confident writers.

You have made the ability to write well and love writing a rare commodity. You have made people like me more singular and valuable than we should be.

The writing process is not some finely delineated series of steps. It is not a codified system of applying words to the page. It does not adhere to structure or schedule or graphic representation. It is none of these things.

If you teach writing to students of any age, my advice is simple:

Write.  

Write. Write. Write. Learn about the process that you are teaching instead of making bizarre and wildly inaccurate assumptions about it or replicating the terrible instruction that you received long ago that never actually turned you into someone who loves to write or you would already be writing and wouldn’t be forcing students to do such ridiculous things.

Just write.   

See how often you use a graphic organizer.

See how much you appreciate being assigned a specific topic.

See how productive you think it is moving a little paper pencil across a bulletin board from one facet of the writing process to another.

See how much you value the notion of prewriting.

See how un-delineated things like writing and revising and editing are. See how amorphous and undefined the writing process is, and how stupid stupid stupid it is to force students to work on one of these parts of the writing process and not another.

Please. Just write.

Either that or your choice is simple:

Stop teaching writing altogether. You’re doing more harm than good. Just let your students write, absent any instruction or interruption. Sit at the back of the classroom and read. Or eat a sandwich. Or take a nap.

Your students have a far greater chance of leaving your classroom loving to write than if you open your uninformed mouth and do all the ridiculous things that non-writers think belong in the instruction of writing.

I don’t know Kathleen Hampton, but based upon her lawsuit, I suspect that ‘entitled and insufferable” are likely descriptors.

Perhaps you’ve heard about the woman who wished to dine solo at a Portland, Oregon restaurant on Valentine’s Day and is now suing the restaurant because she claims she received rude service.

Kathleen Hampton is asking for $100,000 in damages and apologies both in person and in print in ‘the news and local newspapers,” so we already know – regardless of what actually happened that night – that she is insane.

Insane is probably the wrong word. There are better choices:
Entitled. Myopic. Despicable. Miserable. Haughty. Insufferable. Undatable.  

Hampton claims that the restaurant refused to seat her because her reservation was for two but she was dining alone. She claims that the manager also refused to provide her with takeout service.

The restaurant’s manager tells a very story.

“She made reservation for two and when she got there, said: ‘Oh just by myself.’ We offered for her to sit at the bar with other single diners since Valentine’s Day is very busy and all we know is she got up and left without paying after she drank two glasses of wine.”

It was an amusing enough story on it’s own, but when I read the complaint, which Hampton filed herself, amusing quickly transformed into hilarious. I suggest you read the whole thing (which isn’t very long but is filled with hidden gems), but if you’re pressed for time, the section that Hampton has labeled “WHAT I WANT” is entertainment enough.

WHAT I WANT

I want to be made whole by public apology both in person and in writing in news and community newspapers. I don’t want this to happen to anyone in the inner North/Northeast area. When you don’t have business owners that don’t live in the area they don’t have a vested interest in community. I also want $100,000 to make sure all business owners on N.E Alberta know we are serious about our community

I chose not to reproduce the random spaces or superfluous capitalizations that Hampton frequently uses in her complaint, mostly because the actual demands that she makes say more about her character than any amusement that I might have at the expense of her writing skills.

It’s hard to imagine that people like this exist outside of fiction. Even if Hampton’s complaint is true, it’s hard to imagine why her husband or a family member or friend didn’t advise against these genuinely stupid demands, suggesting instead that perhaps this was not as big a deal as she seems to think and maybe restitution in the form of a free dinner or two at a restaurant of her choice might make more sense, rather than attempting to bankrupt a restaurant for what amounted to rude behavior.

Is Ted Cruz really this stupid or is he simply pandering to idiots?

Serious, sincere question:

When someone like Ted Cruz continues to reject the realities of climate change like he did last week on Late Night, does he really believe what he is saying, or is he merely pandering to the idiots he needs to win a primary?

I really want to know:

Is Ted Cruz a liar or an idiot?

If it’s the former,  please add his name to United States Politicians in 2015 Who Denied the Existence of Manmade Climate Change Despite Overwhelming and Undeniable Scientific Evidence in Order to Further Their Political Careers At the Expense of Future Generations. 

Everyone deserves to have fans.

I’ll be showing this clip to my students. Sportsmanship can mean so much when it’s done right.

It’s rarely been done better than this.

Still, I want to know who won the damn game.

The consistently late are the scum of the Earth. Here’s a simple strategy to avoid being late in the future.

I’m a timely person.

I’m timely because I think it’s rude to be late. 

Even worse, I think it’s despicable for a person to be consistently late. The consistently late are a selfish pack of uncivilized heathens who should be pay higher taxes and be forbidden from ever celebrating Thanksgiving.

Consistently late is also a sign that you suck at life. It’s perhaps the clearest sign of all. If you’re a member of the consistently late clan, you should know that we all think this, and we despise you for it. We may like or even love you, but we despise you, too, for your selfishness and inability to act like a decent human being.    

TIME offers 9 Habits of People Who Are Always on Time. It’s a good list. I particularly like numbers 1, 2, 4, and 8. Adopt these habits and you’ll be much better off.

Allow me to add a tenth to the list:

Prepare yourself to leave the house well in advance of actually leaving the house.

For example, if you’re meeting friends for dinner, and you plan to leave the house at 6:00, don’t wait until 5:30 to get ready, even if it normally takes you about 30 minutes to get ready.

This makes no sense. Frankly, it’s insane.

Requiring 30 minutes to get ready is also insane, but that’s an entirely different set of problems.

If the last thing you do before leaving the house and prepare to leave the house, all it takes is one setback in your preparation process to cause you to be late. One item of clothing that unexpectedly needs ironing. One wardrobe reconsideration. One spill. One hangnail. One malfunctioning hairdryer. One unavoidable phone call. One screaming child. 

If you plan to leave the house at 6:00, why not get ready to leave at 4:00? Just be ready. Whatever benefit you think you are deriving from showering and getting dressed and applying makeup just prior to leaving the house, I promise you that you are the only person noticing it.

More importantly, the people who you are meeting would undoubtedly favor less attention to your physical appearance and more attention to your timeliness.

In fact, valuing your physical appearance over arriving on time is the epitome of selfish.

“I made you wait so my hair could look just right.”

Disgusting, yet it’s essentially what people do all the time.

I’ve proposed my idea to several of my friends and colleagues over the past week, and almost universally, they think it’s a ridiculous idea. “Get ready two hours before I leave the house?” said one. “That’s stupid.”

The only two people who have agreed with the merit of this proposal are the two people in my life who I can depend upon the most to be on time.

One woman and one man. Always on time, regardless of weather or traffic.

Also two of the most impressive and accomplished people who I know.

This is what happens after you behave well during your doctor’s appointment

The Joyful and Effective Use of Condoms in the Latter Years of Life: My latest workshop

I’m hired from time to time to deliver talks and teach workshops on a  variety of topics. I’ve delivered inspirational speeches. Commencement addresses. I’ve hosted conferences and story slams. I’ve taught workshops on storytelling, teaching, writing, personal productivity, and more. And while I’m hardly an expert on anything in particular, I’ve always felt that if given the time, I can be effective on almost any topic. 

The toughest talk I ever delivered was the inspirational address at the end of a policy conference on human trafficking.

It turned out well, but I was not without some trepidation. 

Last night, I dreamt that I had arrived at a weekend retreat, thinking that I would be speaking about the effective use of storytelling in the classroom.

Instead, I discovered that I had been mistakenly assigned a six hour workshop entitled:

‘The Joyful and Effective Use of Condoms in the Latter Years of Life”

Rather than panicking or attempting to correct the mistake, I spent the rest of the dream planning my presentation, finding ways to fill all six hours of the scheduled workshop with informative, entertaining, and persuasive material about condom use in the latter years.  

And by the end of the dream, it was done. Ready to go. And it was good.

I’m a little disappointed that I won’t ever be able to put my plan into action.

Unless, of course, you are a conference organizer and think ‘The Joyful and Effective Use of Condoms in the Latter Years of Life” would be a compelling offering.

If that’s the case, call me. I’m ready to go.

A brilliant way to turn incessant texting into something splendid and amusing

A tweet that I saw a couple days ago:

@DaveHolmes: Right now my friends and I are sending vague texts to the people in our contacts whose names we don't recognize.

Brilliant. Right? I sent two yesterday. Both said the same thing:

Can you believe that guy? Does he really think we are going to believe that?

I have yet to receive a response from either contact.

Today I feel like a real author – which doesn’t happen often – and not for any reason that you might imagine.

I’m not sure if other authors feel this way, but most days, I don’t feel like a real author.

Its ridiculous but true.

I’ve published three novels – two with Doubleday and one with St. Martin’s Press – and I have a fourth publishing in September. My last book was translated into more than 25 different languages and was an international bestseller.

   

All three of my novels have been optioned for film or television.

I receive emails and tweets from readers all over the world daily about my books.

And yet when I’m completely honest with myself, I don’t ever feel like a real author. At best, I feel like I’ve fooled people into believing that I’m a real author, and at any moment, the literati will discover the truth and my last book will be my last.

Someone recently asked me, “When did you know that you had finally made it?”

Without any attempt at humor or self-deprecation, my instant response was, “You’re probably the only person on the planet who thinks I’ve made it. I’m not even close to making it. I don’t even know what making it looks like. I don’t think I’ll ever make it.” 

I have no evidence, but I suspect that these feeling are true for many authors.

Thankfully, there are moments when this stupidity is challenged. Yesterday a reader send me a photo of her Book of the Day calendar. March 18 had been given over to my last novel, Memoirs of an Imaginary Friend.

Oddly enough, this tangible mention of my novel, sitting atop a reader’s desk on a square of paper, made me feel more like a real author than many of the moments that should’ve convinced me long ago.

And I have no idea why.

This is the real reason you go shopping before a snowstorm

Daniel Engber of Slate offers an explanation as to why people behave like idiots before a snowstorm, rushing off to a grocery store that will undoubtedly be open at some point the next day.

The word is hunkering, in the specifically American sense of digging in and taking shelter. It’s the anxious form of self-indulgence, where fear is fuel to make us cozy.

I agree that hunkering is part of it, but I also think there is something even larger at play:

People want to be involved in momentous events. They want to feel like they played a part in a historical moment. By role playing panic – which is essentially what a person does when he or she is willing to wait in an endless line for milk that will be readily available in 24 hours – people feel like an essential part of the oncoming snowstorm. They are like actors, committing to a part that their friends, colleagues and the local media have been undoubtedly hyping for three days.

It’s no fun to be liaise-faire. Being able to remain calm in an actual emergency is a skill that is valued by all, but remaining calm in a fake emergency is no fun for anyone involved. It just makes the people pretending that they are in the midst of an emergency feel stupid or angry or both. It’s like when little kids are running around the playground, pretending that a dragon is chasing them, but one kid just stands there and shouts, “There is no dragon! There is no dragon!”

But there is no dragon, people. New England just experienced one of the worst winters in terms of snowfall ever, yet in my part of Connecticut – which received near-record snowfalls – there was never a storm that kept the roads from being cleared and the stores opened within 24 hours, and most of the time, considerably less than that.

In most cases, the roads were impassible for a few hours at best and the stores never actually closed.

My wife and I never went shopping before a storm this winter – despite the fact that we have two small children who drink a lot of milk and eat a lot of bread – and we were never wont for either item. If you don’t have enough food in your house to survive 8-24 hours, the problem isn’t the storm. It’s with the way you shop for groceries.

If you’re looking for something to panic about, why not make it climate change. I realize that it won’t allow you to go shopping (which also plays a role in the pleasure of pre-storm pretend panic), and you won’t find yourself in the midst of the pretend panicked nearly as often, but at least you’ll be panicking over something that is real and worthy of your concern.

Malcolm Gladwell on shorter attention spans, inherent unfairness, and the selfie.

From an interview with Malcolm Gladwell in The Guardian comes a few of his more interesting comments:

I don’t know why people think attention spans are getting shorter. Thirty years ago, you could go and get a sandwich in the middle of a Kojak episode, come back and still follow it. Today, if you get a glass of water in the middle of Homeland you have to pause and go back.

Running teaches you about the inherent unfairness of the world. Two people can work exactly the same, in fact, one can be infinitely more devoted and train much harder and not do as well. An object lesson in how unfair life is.

On a personal note, the inability to acceptance that life is inherently unfair seems to be one of the greatest stumbling blocks in people’s lives and the reason why so many fail to realize their dreams. I rarely receive more pushback from readers than when I write about this. 

Gladwell also prefers the selfie when someone who has recognized him request a photo, mostly because it’s quicker to take a selfie than get a third party involved to take the picture.

I’m not so sure about this opinion, mostly because I almost never get recognized, and when I do, no one wants a photo with me.

The single greatest death bed regret of Generation X (and maybe beyond) will be this:

On their death beds, the people of my generation will lament the time the spent driving – sometimes daily – from grocery store to grocery store, chasing the freshest produce, the finest meats, the best seafood, and the lowest prices, when they could’ve been spending that time reading, watching a film, climbing a mountain, writing a novel, playing with their kids, or having sex.

My mother shopped in one grocery store for all of her life. She went shopping for groceries once a week. She made a plan. Made a list. Shopped. Moved on with her life. 

Today she would be considered an aberration. An outlier. A dinosaur.

There are grocery stores that have managed to place almost every grocery item you’ll ever need under one roof, and yet people in my generation now prefer to shop in stores that deliberately avoid stocking every item, necessitating trips to multiple stores throughout the week.

It’s insane. 

It seems as if more time is spent traveling between grocery stores and pushing carriage up and down aisles than is spent actually eating the food.

It makes no sense.

There are more than 30 full size or midsize grocery stores within 15 minutes of my home.

Good food is important, but time is by far our most valuable commodity. My generation has chosen to spend a significant portion of its time looking for parking spots, pushing carriages, waiting in checkout lines, and plucking food items off a multitude of shelves in a multitude of stores.

The 90 year-old versions of themselves are going to be so annoyed.

I didn’t respond to a stranger’s unsolicited manuscript for 48 hours, so his angry response was probably justified. Right?

On Wednesday of this week, I received an email from someone who I don’t know. This is the entirety of his message, minus his name and the Word document that was attached.
___________________________

I play poker in las vegas, and not a week goes by that someone doesn’t say your the politest poker player.
Poker is a nasty brutal game but it doesn’t mean I have to be like all the others.
most people mistake politeness for weakness.
I am not a writer and doing this hard for me
I have attached my personal project on winning, poker, aggression, OODA LOOPS, women, the marines, alcohol, loneliness, insanity, hell and my 2 cents on all of the above
enjoy the quotes
back to my cave of darkness
___________________________

Two days later, the same person sent me this email:
___________________________

I know how extremely busy you are - so to take time and reply with such an awesome and considerate e mail  is something I will always remember

OH I FORGET- YOU COULDN`T EVEN BE BOTHEREDT TO HIT REPLY AND SAY THANKS FOR YOUR INTEREST OR DROP DEAD--

I know it would have taken maybe 2 seconds
Oh well just another dick
will ignore you in the future

___________________________

I’d like to say I was surprised, but I really wasn’t. I receive messages from people like this from time to time. Sadly, I’ve become fairly accustomed to this level of surprising vitriol when I fail to respond to someone in what they perceive to be a timely manner.

A couple years ago, I was in the process of reading the first 30 pages of an unsolicited manuscript that I actually liked a lot when the writer emailed me and told me to delete her manuscript from my computer immediately. I had taken too long to reply to her unsolicited request, so she called me a bunch of terrible names and demanded that I never read her story.

I can’t imagine what these people are thinking when they do this kind of thing. Is burning a bridge really going to help?

Nevertheless, I replied to my most recent attacker, hoping that perhaps he would reconsider such actions in the future.
___________________________

Seriously? You sent me something on Wednesday, and two days later, you send me this?

Listen, man. I'm an elementary school teacher. An author on deadline. The founder and producer of a storytelling show that has three shows in the next two months. I was teaching a storytelling workshop on Wednesday night. I’m have six pages of a comic book due on Monday and an entire musical that should’ve been finished a month ago. I had parent-teacher conferences this week. I spent the week reviewing report cards. I'm the father of two kids ages six and two. Both of them are sick. Oh, and I’m a husband, too. 

Yeah, it's true. Your email was sitting in my inbox, waiting to be opened. 48 hours later and I hadn't had a chance to reply or even read it yet. You weren't exactly my priority.

Are you kidding me?  

Your email was insanely rude. I can't believe how rude it was. I hope, with all sincerity, that you learn from this mistake going forward. There’s no need for this level of rudeness. It gets you nowhere.   
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Less than 24 hours later, he replied.
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I DID NOT READ YOUR RESPONSE-

I can only hope that is how your are treated
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I replied instantly.
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I don't believe you.
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No response from him yet.