What’s in a name? Several literary references.

It’s a boy! In case you haven’t heard, my wife gave birth to a beautiful baby boy yesterday named Charles Wallace Dicks.

Charlie was born at 3:09 PM. He is 7 pounds, 1 ounce and 18 inches long.

We chose Charlie’s name for a number of reasons.

To start, we liked the name Charles a lot. We liked the old feel of the name and the way it seems to match well with his big sister’s name (Clara). I’m also an enormous fan of Charles Dickens (I have three plants in my classroom named Pip, Philip and Pirrip), so the connection to this literary giant didn’t hurt.

We also love the nickname Charlie. My favorite moment during Charlie’s delivery happened just seconds after Charlie was born. With The Byrd’s Turn Turn Turn playing in the background, a nurse asked us what his name was, and Elysha called out, “Charlie!” When I heard her say his name aloud, in what I can only characterize as the most beautiful singsong voice I have ever heard, I knew we had chosen the right one.

It was one of those moments I will never forget.

As for the Wallace, a couple literary thoughts guided our decision.

First, Charles Wallace is the protagonist in Madeleine L’Engle’s WRINKLE IN TIME series, which are books that Elysha and I both adored as children. In fact, I had recently expressed hesitancy in re-reading the books as an adult, in fear that they won’t hold up to my fond memoires of them, but I guess I have no choice now.

Elysha and I are also fans of the poet Wallace Stevens, who lived and worked in Hartford, the city where Charlie was born. We especially love the poem 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird and have taught it to our students every year. Every year, I discover new depth hidden within the poem, and I hope I can say the same about my son someday.

Our perfect little boy, Charles “Charlie” Wallace Dicks!

My career as a professional best man is hindered only by a lack of teleportation

I had a third person inquire about hiring me as a professional best man this week. Unlike the first two, this potential client lives within the United States but on the west coast, making it impossible to serve the duties of the office faithfully.

When I first proposed the idea of a professional best man less than a year ago, I never thought for a moment that someone might take me up on my offer.

Now I’ve had three people serious about hiring me.

It’s another reminder of the importance of putting yourself out there.

I suspect that working women are more mentally tough than Barbara Walters believes

Barbara Walters had this to say about the recent TIME magazine cover: 

“This is such a guilt trip for working women.”

Is it naïve of me to suggest that Barbara recall the words of the great Eleanor Roosevelt:

“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”

Exposing the lunatic Little League coaches for who they really are.

Here’s an idea I’m considering: Write a blog that examines the youth baseball culture in my town and/or  neighboring towns, with specific emphasis on assessing and critiquing the coaching style and the overall effectiveness and efficacy of the adults involved.

It’s recently come to my attention that although most of the coaches and parent volunteers involved in these organized baseball leagues are skillful at their jobs, a small percentage of coaches should not be working with young people. These are the coaches who take their team’s win-loss record personally and treat this childhood game as if it were their own version of professional ball. They are the screamers and the demeanors: the men who believe that a child will hit a ball more frequently and farther if he or she is made to feel rotten about each and every strike out.

It occurred to me that parents might want to know who these coaches are. They may want to know which coach berates his players on a regular basis and which coach circumvents the league rules in order to play only his best players in the playoffs.

Apparently there are also a number of backroom deals taking place at the beginning of each season that allows for certain teams to be stocked with the league’s best players year after year while other teams are comprised almost exclusively of less inexperienced, less effective ballplayers.

Not only would this be good information for parents to possess before deciding if their child should join a league or team, but I would love the opportunity to explore the motives behind a man who is willing to manipulate the system in order to ensure that his team of twelve-year old boys competes for the championship each year.

I’d also very much like to expose these jerks for who they really are.

But is this something that parents would bother to read before deciding upon leagues and teams?

While I’m at it, I might also want to address the behavior of umpires working in these leagues, at least if the umpire in the video below in any indication of the kind of men umpiring Little League games. If it were my son who had just struck out and been greeted by this umpire’s third strike call, it would’ve taken all my self control to not walk over to home plate and punch the guy in the face.

Fostering disobedience

My three-year old daughter, Clara, and her younger friend, Ella were playing upstairs while the adults were chatting downstairs. I was sitting at the top of the staircase, listening to ensure that neither of the kids jumped out a window or set their underwear on fire.

My daughter asked Ella to take off her shoes so she could jump on the bed with her.

“My mommy said I have to leave my shoes on,” Ella said.

“But your mommy isn’t here,” Clara replied. “You can take them off.”

I couldn’t believe it. Mt daughter was attempting to corrupt someone younger then her.

I was both horrified and a little proud of my little girl in that moment.

Not exactly a solution to my existential crisis, but it's a start.

I’m not sure where this bit of dialogue originates. I saw it posted on Twitter and immediately fell in love with it. It encapsulates an enormous part of my life philosophy perfectly:

“Life is too short,” she complained, “I want more.”

He grinned, “Wake up earlier.

Plants have a sense of smell. A SENSE OF SMELL, PEOPLE! This brings them one step closer to chickens and cows and pigs.

I have always secretly hoped that someday we would discover that plants are just as sentient as animals, and as a result, all the ethical vegans of the world would be forced to come to terms with the fact that when it comes to food, they are no less murderous than cow and chicken eating people like me. With the remarkable discovery that plants have a sense of smell, we have taken an enormous step in that sentient direction.

Brace yourself, my vegan friends, We may soon discover that plants are capable of playing chess and debating the merits of a Parliamentary government.

Will she be asking to meet for coffee next?

As I kissed my daughter goodnight and exited the bedroom, my wife offered to sing her customary song before following me downstairs.

“No, Mommy,” Clara said. “No song. Let’s talk.”

“You want to talk?” Elysha asked, unsure if she had heard correctly.

“Talk to me for a while, Mommy,” my three year old requested.

Did my daughter just take her first tiny step toward womanhood?

  

There must be something wrong with people who tan on a regular basis. Right?

Is it wrong for me to assume that anyone who is still using a tanning bed on a regular basis, after all the evidence linking tanning to skin cancer, is clearly plagued by issues related to poor self esteem, feelings of worthlessness, and a lack of self concept? Or perhaps mentally ill?

Is there any other reason why a reasonably intelligent person would risk skin cancer in order artificially darken his or her skin tone?

Mind you, these are not people who fail to reapply sun screen after two hours in the sun or forget to wear a sun hat to the beach. These aren't people going a couple times before their wedding because they think they will look better in the photos. These aren’t even people who forget the apply sunscreen altogether. This is not a case of carelessness or laziness.

These are people who pay money to regularly fry their skin under concentrated UV lamps because they believe that others will think better of them, or they will think better of themselves, if their skin is darker than their natural skin tone.

It sounds insane. Doesn’t it?

In discussing this with my wife, she compared the dangers of tanning to that of smoking, and while I agree that both carry great risk, I think there is an important difference between the two:

Though smoking is exceptionally dangerous for your health, cigarettes are also highly addictive. Nicotine is one of the most addictive substances on the planet. Yes, smoking is a stupid and disgusting thing to do, but quitting the habit can be exceedingly difficult.

Quitting tanning is as simple as deciding that your natural skin color is acceptable and that you need not to be browner than most in order to feel good about yourself.

This is not a case of addiction. It’s simply a case of placing one’s vanity ahead of one’s health.

It’s sad and stupid. Right?

Hate reading and hate watching: What a stupid, disingenuous waste of time

In case you aren’t familiar with the terms, hate reading is the idea that a reader can despise a book and everything it stands for but still find pleasure in reading it all the way through. Please note that this is very different from reading a book that you expected to love but did not. Hate reading is actively choosing to read a book that you expect to despise under the premise that you will enjoy hating it.

For example, I've known several people who have told me that they read 50 Shades of Gray for this very reason.

The same concept has been applied to television and film as well. With the start of The Bachelor, I've seen many people on social media explain how they only watch the show because they hate it.

I have been thinking about the concept of hate reading and hate watching and have arrived at a conclusion. Specifically, if you are in the business of hate reading or hate watching, I believe that you probably fall into one of two categories:

1. You are utilizing the concept of hate reading or hate watching to conveniently explain your consumption of content that you genuinely enjoy but consider beneath your typical standards of good taste. It is a dishonest and hypocritical attempt to mitigate any potential embarrassment over the pleasure that one is garnering from what he or she has deemed low brow content.
2. You have far too much free time on your hands. If you have hours to spend reading or watching content that you knowingly despise, you should seriously reconsider the way in which you are utilizing the precious minutes of your life. With all the great literature and film in this world, it strikes me as idiotic to spend even a minute consuming content that you know you will hate.

Despite my position on hate watching, my wife and I  inadvertently hate watched a show this week called America’s Got Talent. Before switching over to Mad Men on the DVR, we caught about 45 seconds of the show, which turned out to be about 35 seconds longer than we should have given this piece of trash. We watched a troop of mimes and a guitarist get booed off the stage by an exceedingly angry audience and immediately felt like we needed to take a shower.

But it left me wondering how anyone could spend even a minute hate watching something with so much great film and television available, especially now that it’s possible to watch almost any television program or film ever produced from the comfort of your couch, and with the touch of a button.

I simply cannot accept that someone would read page after page or watch episode after episode of content that they loathe without also thinking that choice either utterly stupid or a pathetic attempt to mitigate embarrassment over something they love but feel they shouldn’t.

Either admit that you genuinely enjoy The Bachelor and 50 Shades of Gray, or acknowledge that your life is so empty of meaningful pursuits that you have the kind of time on your hands to watch a television show that you genuinely despise.

Go to bed (in a whisper)

Two days ago my daughter took a rather hard lined (and hilarious) approach to the animals in her book while putting them to bed.

Just one day later, her position had eased considerably.

How to win at tug of war

Victor Mather of the New York Times proposed 10 Olympic events that should be resurrected for the upcoming London games, including tug of war. Tug of war was an annual competition at Yawgoog, the Boy Scout camp where I spent many of my childhood summers, and my troop, Troop 1 of Blackstone, Massachusetts, was a frequent winner.

Unfortunately, we were also frequently accused of cheating.

In order to ensure a fair competition, a weight limit was set for each tug of war team. Only so many pounds of boy were allowed to pull on the rope during a competition.

Our strategy was to place as many boys on the rope as possible, regardless of their size or strength. In fact, the smaller the boy, the better, since an especially small boy meant we might be able to squeeze an additional body onto the team. My Scoutmaster, an apparent tug-o-war mastermind,  understood that lower body strength was far superior to upper body strength in a tug of war competition. So while the opposition might have a half a dozen muscle-bound monsters on their end of the rope, we would have a dozen or so kids who were less than half their size pulling on our end while I anchored the end.

To an outsider, it looked like our troop didn’t stand a chance. Our team consisted of small, wiry, middle school boys whose voices had yet to change, and we were competing against teams of high school juniors and seniors who looked more like men.

Yet almost without fail, we would win with ease, causing the other troops to question our compliance to the weight limit. More than once, our team was  forced to mount the scale and confirm our total weight.

It was one of the few instances in life when the little guy was able to defeat the big guy in a contest of strength.

Heady days that I will remember with aching fondness until my last breath.

A rare glimpse at a master teacher at work

Hans Rosling is an incredible teacher. One of the best I have ever seen. I was completely mesmerized by his TED Talk despite my initial lack of interest in the subject.

This is the sign of a master teacher at work.

Go to bed!

Our new favorite video.

It involves Clara and a book, of course.

Deathbed regrets revisited: 2012

Two years ago, in response to a piece listing the most frequent death bed regrets of the dying, I listed what I thought would be my most likely death bed regrets. There were:

1. I did not travel enough.
2. I never pole vaulted again after high school.
3. I did not spend enough time with Clara.
4. I did not get into enough fist fights.
5. I started publishing novels too late in life and did not have a chance to tell all my stories.

Looking at this list two years later, it holds up surprisingly well. I have still not traveled nearly enough, I have yet to pole vault (though I may do so in the near future), I never feel like I spend enough time with Clara, and I still have a pile of story ideas clamoring for a place on the page.

In terms of fist fights, however, I may need to change my thinking a bit. When I was younger, I fought a lot, and though there was always inherent danger involved, the adrenaline rush, the primal nature of hand-to-hand combat, and my surprising ability to take a punch and remain calm in the midst of violence always made fighting a thrill for me.

Then I grew older and fighting ceased to be a part of my life. There were simply fewer and fewer instances in which people wanted to throw down.

Actually, fighting didn’t entirely stop. I punched a guy last year in an effort to break up a fight at the local gym, but that was a single sucker punch. Hardly a fight at all.

And perhaps I’m lucky that this was all the fight amounted to. Slate’s Brian Palmer recently wrote a piece about how easy it is to kill a man in a fistfight:

It happens more than twice a day, on average. Fists and feet were responsible for 745 murders in 2010, or 5.7 percent of all murders that year, according to FBI statistics.

Though Palmer goes on to explain that although most of these deaths are the result of the continued beating of the victim once he is unconscious, single blows to the head and chest have also resulted in death.

Although I may regret the lack of fist fights in my life, perhaps it is a regret that I should more readily accept. As he father of a three-year old and a baby on the way, there is no need for me to risk my life or the life of another human being in order to enjoy a brief adrenaline rush or demonstrate my proficiency at fisticuffs.

Best of all, in the two years since I first assembled my list of death bed regrets, I cannot think of another regret to add to my list, and the list of most common death bed regrets still do not apply to me.

Yes, I’ve made no progress in eliminating any regrets, but I have yet to add any to my list. A small victory.

Not that I plan on ever dying, but it makes for an interesting means of examining one’s life.

I don't like hot drinks. I may be a thermal taster. Kind of like a superhero.

I don’t drink coffee, which places me in an extreme minority, at least among my friends and colleagues.

I also do not drink tea or even hot chocolate. For years, I have told people that I don’t like hot drinks, a statement that is often greeted with a furrowed brow and many questions, particularly on a frigid day.

Now my unusual taste preference may have an explanation.

A study reported in Scientific American finds that the intensity of some flavors varies with temperature.

While this might not be terribly surprising, the study also finds that for most people, temperature can enhance flavors. But for some, dubbed thermal tasters, temperature alone can be a flavor. Heating or cooling parts of the tongue creates the sensation of taste without food.

So my distaste for anything other than a chilled drink may have less to do with the actual taste of the liquid and more with its temperature.

Hot drinks just taste bad to me.

Except for coffee. That stuff is gross regardless of temperature. Even coffee ice cream makes me want to wretch.

Do you have any idea how difficult it is to ruin ice cream?

Ranking Stephen King’s 62 books: Some minor quibbling on my part

Vulture recently ranked Stephen King’s 62 books. Not an easy task, and overall, I think they did a surprisingly good job. I have read all but one of King’s books (see below), and despite the excellence of Vulture’s rankings, I would like to quibble a bit about a few of their decisions. First and foremost, I would have lumped all seven (and now eight) of King’s Dark Tower Series together or (preferably) excluded them from the rankings entirely. Though I admire the attempt to rank each book individually, these novels are inseparable in my mind. Had I been forced to include them on the list, I would have lumped them into one entry and placed them in the first position.

Ideally, however, I would have left the Dark Tower books off the list completely, explaining that they are quite separate from his stand-alone books. Placing them on the list is akin to comparing apples to oranges.

Other, more minor quibbles:

• I would rate Insomnia and Black Housemuch higher on the list, but this is admittedly because their connections to The Dark Tower series were readily apparent and much appreciated by me.
• I would rate Duma Key and Christine much lower. Duma Key is the only Stephen King book that failed to hold my interest, and the premise for Christine was just too silly for me to accept (but the movie might have also ruined this book for me).
• I did not love Rose Madder, but I do not think it is King’s worst novel. I would reserve that position for Cell (you can’t simply turn your derision for cell phones into a novel) or Duma Key.
• I was happy to see that the short story collections Hearts in Atlantis and Night Shift were placed in the top third of the list. I feel hat they are often overlooked. Both are better than Skeleton Crew, another short story collection which is also excellent but should be ranked below them.
• I liked From a Buick 8 but it does not belong as high as #16.
• I did not like Under the Dome. I found the novel to be long and disappointing. I felt it was one of King’s worst books. The ending of the story was a complete letdown. Placing it at #12 is crazy. Vulture’s worst decision.
• Danse Macabreis an interesting and well written work of nonfiction, but it does not stack up to his best works of fiction. It has no place in the top 20.
• I have never read Lisey’s Story, which is ranked #10. This is an oversight on my part that I will soon correct.
• I would have placed The Green Mile in my top 10.
• I am so happy that It was placed at #3. This is exactly where I would have rated it as well. I freakin’ love that book.

• I was equally pleased to see the respect given to On Writing, a book that inspired me to continue writing when all hope was seemingly lost. It is a brilliant combination of memoir and inspiration.

• I think Vulture’s top 5 are ranked perfectly. I think this is the most impressive aspect of their entire list. The wisdom to place It and On Writing along such obvious choices as The Stand and The Shining is impressive.  Misery is ranked #6. I think I would have placed Salem’s Lot at #6, but Misery would have remained in my top 10.

A rare moment of recollection

On our brother and sister blog, I responded to my sister’s recent post about our childhood babysitting misadventures and had an opportunity to correct her recollection of an event that took place.

This has never happened before.

This is absolutely true for men. Not so sure about women.

I saw this quote on Twitter last week, posted by a woman:

“Men socialize by insulting each other, but they really don't mean it. Women socialize by complimenting each other, but they don't mean it either.”

The first half of this statement is most assuredly true. In fact, I would argue that men often socialize with women by insulting them, too, but without meaning it.

I cannot confirm the accuracy of the second, at least on a regular basis.

Ladies?

Three bits of wedding advice at the beginning of wedding season

The wedding season has begun. Last week my DJ partner and I worked our first wedding of the year. As the reception came to a close, I had a few thoughts on wedding receptions that may help you the next time you are planning or attending one: 1. As charming as it may seem to make an impromptu toast, don’t do it, for several reasons:

• Wedding and receptions are often timed to the minute. An unexpected five minute interruption can cause problems that you cannot begin to imagine.
• The order in which people are chosen to speak is often decided upon for a specific reason. The bride and groom, for example, may ask the Maid of Honor to deliver the final toast because she is funny and will alleviate some of the weight of the Best Man’s toast, which references the groom’s grandmother who died two weeks ago. Your unplanned toast may defeat this purpose entirely.
• Brides and grooms choose the people to deliver speeches carefully. Oftentimes a request to speak is declined for the sake of time or a myriad of other reasons (If we let you speak, we’ll have to let Uncle Joey speak, and that would not go well). Assuming that your toast will be welcomed and appreciated is wrong.
• If the bride and groom had wanted you to speak, they would have asked you to speak.
• Delivering an impromptu toast or speech is an excellent way of appearing attention-seeking and narcissistic on a day when you are clearly not supposed to be the center of attention.

2. As a bride and groom, if you intend on tipping your vendors, consider tipping them at the onset of the reception. While I like to think that my DJ partner and I work incredibly hard at every wedding, we feel the added weight of obligation when tipped just prior to the reception and will actively seek out ways to go above and beyond the call of duty for the bride and groom.

3.  This is a piece of advice that my partner gives to brides who have  especially challenging mothers-in-law:

You only have one chance to make your mother-in-law feel included in the planning and execution of your wedding day, and it is a day that will be remembered more than almost any other in your relationship with her. Don’t blow it. Compromise. Your relationship with her will last long after the final song at your reception is played. Keep that in mind when she suggests what that final song should be.