Before getting married, ask yourself this:

It’s a picturesque Friday afternoon in mid-September. I am supposed to play golf with friends immediately after work and then join my wife and daughter for dinner at a restaurant of her choice following the round. Elysha has been at home alone all day with our daughter and can’t wait to get out of the house.

What I thought would be a 3:45 PM tee time turns into a 4:20 PM tee time, setting our round back considerably. As I round the bend and approach the third hole, I see that there are two groups backed up and still waiting to tee off.

I’ve never seen this course play so slowly.

As I wait under the shade of a maple tree, I realize that there is no way I am going to make it to dinner with my wife and daughter.

At this rate, I might be playing the last couple holes in the dark.

I decide that I should walk off the course so I can keep my dinner date with my wife and daughter.

I text her the news.

Her reply:

Finish the round. Try to make the most of it. It's gorgeous out. You're with your best friends. Relax and have fun. We can have dinner another time.

I know. It’s unbelievable.

Here is my advice to anyone thinking about getting married.

If you think you have found Mr. or Mrs. Right, ask yourself this:

Had you been standing at the third hole that day, offering to walk off the course and head home, would your future spouse have sent you a text like the one I received?

If the answer is no, cancel the wedding and keep looking.

Every time I show this text to someone, I am told how incredibly lucky I am to have Elysha for my wife.

A couple of people have read the text and actually stared at me in disbelief.

One person sighed the sigh of someone longing for a better in life.

I know how lucky I am. I know very few few women as supportive of their husbands as Elysha, and I know even fewer husbands as equally supportive of their wives.

It is true. I am incredible lucky.

But doesn’t everyone deserve to be as lucky as me?

Marcel Proust’s childhood sucked

"There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favourite book.” - Marcel Proust As a lover of books and an author, this is a lovely thought, but Proust’s childhood must have really sucked for him to feel this way.

I have many wonderful childhood memories of time spent with books, but can a rainy day spent reading a great book really trump an afternoon of tackle football in the mud or fishing from a canoe with the prettiest girl in school or getting lost for two days in the White Mountains of New Hampshire with your best friend?

I don’t think so.

Proust’s childhood must have really sucked for him to have felt this way.

Andy Rooney and I have similar thoughts on sleep

Rooney and I are both exceedingly efficient when it comes to sleeping. We can sleep anywhere, regardless of comfort, and we can fall asleep almost immediately.

Rooney seems to enjoy napping, a practice that I vehemently oppose, but perhaps when I am his age, my tune will change.

But in terms of thoughts on sleep, we agree on three things:

• It’s a terrible shame that most people spend a third of their lives sleeping.
• Anyone who is sleeping more than 8 hours a day is sleeping their life away.
• Most people could probably benefit from a little less sleep and a little more life.

Not exactly potty training…

… but it’s a start.

This is my daughter’s new potty, which she specifically requested after watching some kids begin to use the potty at school.

My wife and I are secretly hoping that she will come home one day and be magically potty-trained by her teachers at school.

My solution to the soul-crushing nature of meetings

You’re in a meeting. The meeting is crushing your soul, as most meetings do.

You’ve already scanned the agenda and marked the items that could have been handled through a simple email.

It’s most of them, of course. It always is.

One or two people slow the proceedings by making useless, inane comments in order to hear themselves speak or ingratiate themselves to the speaker.

Minutia takes over.

The despair that comes with time wasted and minutes forever lost fills you.

There is little you can do to recapture the joy of being alive. You have been forced to surrender your humanity. You have become a thing. A listening box for the mindless, incessant droning of another.

This is the moment when I raise my head and look to the speaker. I focus intently, waiting for the moment when our eyes meet. When they do, I lock on, trying with all my heart to convey a sense of absolute focus.

Not interest. Not curiosity. Not understanding.

Just focus.

Then I do not move. I keep my eyes fixed on the speaker with laser-like precision while simultaneously assuming a countenance of intense disinterest. I flatten my features, dull my gaze and freeze all movement. I wait for the moment when I feel compelled to smile, furrow my brow, or best of all, nod in agreement.

The moment will come. It always does.

Regardless of the stupidity of the speaker or the meaninglessness of the meeting, there will be a moment when the speaker expresses a thought or conveys an idea that will naturally engender a physical response.

An approving nod. A questioning tilt of the head. A widening of the eyes.  A silent snicker of mutually-understood frustration.

When this happens, I do not move. I continue to stare at the speaker, dull and emotionless. As others around the room nod and smile and scribble notes that  will be thrown away minutes after the meeting concludes, I am a statue in a sea of inexplicably genuine and understandably feigned interest.

Having stolen my time and crushed my soul, I give to the speaker the only thing I have left:

Motionless, emotionless, unwavering disdain.

As my daughter would say, it feels me better.

Male self-deception is a beautiful thing. Sincerely.

From a New York Times piece on recent testosterone research:

This is probably not the news most fathers want to hear.

Testosterone, that most male of hormones, takes a dive after a man becomes a parent. And the more he gets involved in caring for his children — changing diapers, jiggling the boy or girl on his knee, reading “Goodnight Moon” for the umpteenth time — the lower his testosterone drops.

So says the first large study measuring testosterone in men when they were single and childless and several years after they had children.

While the research is interesting, I thought the first line of the piece was shortsighted, misinformed and silly.

Most fathers wouldn’t give research like this a second thought because most fathers are men, and men are imbued with three unique, protective traits:

1. The innate ability to assume that research like this may apply to most men but never to them.
2. The absolutely certainty in the depth and breadth of one’s manliness and corresponding levels of testosterone.
3. The unflinching self-assurance that even if one’s testosterone levels were exceedingly low, he could still overcome any hormonal limitation through sheer force of will.

Dr. Peter Ellison is quoted in the piece as saying, “Unfortunately, I think American males have been brainwashed to believe lower testosterone means that maybe you’re a wimp, that it’s because you’re not really a man.”

Dr. Peter Ellison is an idiot.

American males have been brainwashed into navigating life with blinders on.  We hone in on good news, compartmentalize the bad and think of ourselves as a self-actualized super beings whose flaws and foibles are merely the result of the misunderstanding of others.

My testosterone has been reduced since becoming a father?

Nonsense.

But if true, irrelevant.

And if relevant, ultimately meaningless.

My new favorite Clara photo

I know a lot of great photographers, and my father-in-law is one of them.

The Moth and The Clowns: Save the dates

A couple of Save the Dates I wanted to make you aware of in the event that you are interested in attending: First, I am performing at The Moth's GrandSLAM storytelling event on Monday, October 17 at the Highline Ballroom.

431 West 18th Street in NYC.

Doors open at 6:00 for dinner and drinks. Stories begin at 7:30.  I will be competing against ten other StorySLAM winners from the previous six months of competitions. I’ve attended a GrandSLAM once and it was a lot of fun.

Obviously I don't expect any Connecticut friends to join us for a Monday night in the city, but tickets will be available soon if anyone is interested in attending.

If you'd like to come, let me know and I'll inform you when tickets are available (it should be very soon), or check The Moth's October event listings for when they go one sale.

Second, The Clowns, the rock opera that Andy Mayo and I wrote, will be performed as a staged reading at the Playhouse on Park in West Hartford, CT on Saturday, November 5 at 8:00 PM and Sunday,November 6 at 2:00 PM.

No advanced ticketing. A suggested donation of $5 is being accepted at the door.  And please spread the word. We'd love to fill the playhouse for both shows!

Mark those calendars if you are interested in attending either event, and thanks as always for all of the support!

 

Most embarrassing golf shot ever

I was standing at the 18th tee on Sunday, moments away from one of the worst golf shots in human history.

Throughout the morning, I had been experimenting with moving the ball forward in my stance during my tee shot, and the change had improved the trajectory and consistency of my drives considerably.

For my last tee shot, I decided to move the ball up even further. I had no chance for a decent score, so a bad tee shot was not going to ruin my day.

I was wrong.

I had placed the ball so far forward in my stance that as I swung, I had to reach out and bend in order to hit it, causing the ball to fly straight up and curving right in the direction of the the first green, about 30 yards to my right. Four guys were on the green, lining up their putts, unaware that the moron on the adjacent tee box had somehow found a way to hit a ball at a 90 degree angle in their direction.

I saw the ball almost immediately and nearly yelled “Fore!” before determining that its trajectory would thankfully land the ball well short of the green and at a safe distance from the foursome who were preparing to putt. They might see or hear the ball land nearby, but none were in danger of being hit by it. I sighed the sigh of someone who has avoided embarrassment and humiliation of the worst kind.

Then the ball landed, striking the asphalt cart path and launching 30 feet back into the air in the direction of the green again. Before I could warn the guys on the green, my ball landed in the middle of the foursome, barely missing two of them as they prepared to putt.

I am rarely embarrassed on the golf course. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I was embarrassed. Since I am a below-average golfer, I feel very little pressure while playing, and even the worst of shots don’t rattle me.  The best players in the world hit horrendous shots. I just hit more of them.

But hitting your tee shot onto an adjacent green while a foursome is putting is pretty bad (and probably impossible to ever repeat), and failing to warn the players that the ball was coming makes it even worse. I’ve been playing golf for four years and have never seen anyone come close to hitting a tee shot onto an adjacent green.

To their credit, the foursome did not give me a hard time. They smiled as I approached the green, and the one closest to me grinned and said, “So I guess you’re putting for eagle.  Huh?”

I’m not sure if I would’ve been so kind.

I’d also like to add that I hit a clean 7-iron off the green with my bag still strapped to my back (a shot I’d never been required to make before), so at least I experienced a smidgen of success in my midst of my abject failure.

A bouquet of amusing words

My daughter is two-years old, and as a result, she has a lot of amusing things to say.  A few gems from the past couple days include:_______________________________________

Me: Why didn’t you take a nap this afternoon, Clara?

Clara: A lion is coming. I have to tell someone.

_______________________________________

A conversation that Clara had with herself while looking in a mirror at the mall:

"I'm wearing my doggy shirt. We're both wearing doggy shirts."

"I have my hat tat (her word for hair elastics). We both have hat tats."

And the best one:

"I'm Clara. I'm Clara, too."

 

_______________________________________

While negotiating a split between football and Peep and the Big Wide World on Sunday afternoon:

Me: Okay Clara, it’s my turn to watch football now.

Clara: NO! Peep doesn’t want to watch football! Peep wants to watch me! I’m running away!

The way the Patriots played on Sunday, I would have been better off watching Peep.

Bumble-Ardy lives again

I remember this Sesame Street clip from the 1970’s quite well. In fact, though I have not seen it in almost forty years and had forgotten that it even existed, I can still recite parts of it word for word. It was written by Maurice Sendak, and he recently adapted it for his newest children’s book, his first in nearly 30 years.

I love this story, undoubtedly because I loved it as a child, but also because of it’s less than pleasant features:

• The frightening voices of the pigs
• The mother’s maniacal grin when she threatens the pigs with death
• The references to wine on a children’s television show
• Bumble-Ardy’s sneakiness and near-sadistic pleasure in mayhem

Could a video like this be made today?

I don’t think so.

In response to today’s more delicate sensibilities, Sendak was forced to make several changes for his new book, including changing wine to brine. 

Why anyone (even pigs) would bring brine to a party is beyond me.

Sendak also transformed Bumble-Ardy into a pig, which broke my heart a little.  But he seems to balance this by including a dark prologue in which his parents are eaten, leaving Bumble Ardy’s aunt to raise him.

I still haven’t read Where the Wild Things Are, but this one sounds like a gem.

Are digital wedding invitations acceptable?

In this week’s episode of Manners in the Digital Age, Farhad Manjoo and Emily Yoffe debate whether it's acceptable to scrap the paper wedding invitation and use digital invitations instead. Just for the record, I fully support the use of digital invitations for weddings and wish my wife and I had gone this route. Our invitations were lovely and incredibly expensive.

A few comments from this podcast that I thought were interesting.

First, in posing the question about the acceptability of an electronic invitation for their child’s wedding, a listener writes:

“I’m worried that guests receiving an evite will chuckle derisively…”

I’m always surprised to hear from adults who are still so concerned about the opinions of others when it comes to something so trivial, trite and ultimately forgettable as a wedding invitation.

I think Manjoo says it best in the podcast:

“For a guest to scoff or chuckle at the medium someone uses to invite you to a wedding is rude.”

As uncouth, improper, ill mannered or cheap as a person may seem, it is always more uncouth, ill mannered and improper to talk about these perceived flaws behind the person’s back.

I know many people who think quite highly of their manners and sense of decorum who could benefit from this lesson.

Not surprising, the very traditional Emily Yoffe does not support electronic invitations for weddings, but she says a couple very important things during the podcast that I admire:

1.  She acknowledges that her opinion will probably change in 5-10 years.

2.  She tells the concerned parents who have posed this question that once they have stated their opinion regarding the invitations, they need to step back and allow the adults who are getting married to make the final decision without any protest or pleas for reconsideration.

I cannot tell you how often the parents of brides and grooms place their own concerns for image, appearance and taste over their child’s desires for their wedding day. Some parents are downright rotten when it comes to their child’s wedding, and I will never understand it.

When and if Clara gets married someday, the last thing I will be worried about is what my friends think about my daughter’s wedding.  Clara can do as she pleases, as long as she is happy.

3.  When asked what she would think if she received an evite to a wedding, Yoffe answered, “I’d think I’m really old.”

She wouldn’t think that the senders were cheap or stupid or ill mannered.  As traditional as Yoffe tends to be, she is also flexible in her thinking, adaptive in her attitudes and relatively open minded.

She’d probably make a great mother-in-law.

The curse of the hyper productive

A friend of mine included the following paragraph in an email about productivity and our mutual inability to relax:

The irony is that people like us will not have a deathbed in which to reflect upon our lives. We will keel over sweeping the kitchen floor or cleaning the litter box, typing a blog, or unpacking grocery bags. At most we will have a fleeting moment to realize that the task we are in the middle of will go unfinished. And as our last act, we will probably make arrangements for it to be completed.

Never before have I read something that sounds so accurate and so depressing and yet so good, too.

Such joy!

A new hat, a pair of red rain boots and a plethora of puddles and pebbles.

If only I could find as much joy in the simple things of life.

Juggling?

While Clara was taking her bath last night, she handed me three rubber balls and demanded that I juggle. Juggle?

Who taught her that word?

When I tried to ignore her request, she demanded I juggle again. “Juggle, Daddy! Juggle! Please!”

So I juggled.

Except I can’t juggle, so I tossed two balls in the air at a time while holding the third, assuming this would placate her.

“No,” she said. “Three balls. Juggle, Daddy. Juggle with three balls!”

I tried. I failed. The rubber balls bounced on the bathroom floor.

Clara stared at me for a minute. She looked disgusted with me. Disgusted with me for the first time in your life.

It was not my finest moment.

Who the hell taught this girl about juggling?

More important, who led her to believe that everyone should be able to juggle?

Homework blues start early

My daughter was given the first homework assignment of her life last week.

She had to decorate a “Me Doll” in a way that reflected aspects of her character.

I thought it would be a silly waste of time, but it turns out that the assignment was actually fun and fairly productive.

Still, a two-year old doing homework?

  

I loved kickboxing. Kickboxing did not love me.

In 2002 I took kickboxing lessons for about six months. I was excited about the lessons. I thought the sport was going to be a lot of fun.

I like to punch things.

But the class was all-female with the exception of me, so the instructors structured the class such that it was 80% kicking and 20% punching.

The ladies, it was explained to me, were more interested in working on their legs and butts than their shoulders and biceps.

But I stuck with the class anyway, learning to take pleasure in kicking the hell out of things almost as much as punching, until the day that we were allowed to finally spar with an opponent.

Since the class was all-female, I was forced to spar against a male instructor.  After donning head gear and gloves, we met in the middle of the room.

About ten seconds later, the instructor was removing his head gear, informing me that he would no longer be sparring against me.

“You don’t understand the definition of sparring,” he said. “You’re not supposed to try to kill me.”

I had landed a couple jabs and an uppercut before he knew what had hit him.

In fairness, I don’t think he ever expected the vicious assault that I launched upon him. He had his gloves up, but had lifted them a second before my first jab.

That was my last kickboxing class.

Cracked ribs, cracked shmibs

Much has been made about Tony Romo’s return to the football game on Sunday and leading his team to victory with broken ribs.

Words like courage and heroic have been bandied about quite a bit when describing Romo’s performance. 

The last time I played flag football with my buddies, I suffered a concussion and my friend, Shep, broke two ribs. 

The only difference is we kept playing despite the pain, and no one called us heroes. 

Shep didn’t even realize that his ribs were broken until a few days later. 

Just sayin’.

An addendum to my list of flaws and shortcomings

Last week I posted a list of my shortcomings and flaws and asked for any other suggested additions to the list. Not surprising, there were plenty of suggestions.

One of my friends from high school, who is now a licensed clinical psychologist, analyzed my list of flaws and made this comment:

Starts off with a strong hint of Asperger's (and Feeding Disorder), moves into a touch of Oppositional Defiant Disorder, then gives us probably the most likely DSM diagnosis - Simple Phobia (needles).

To be honest, that analysis hit a little too close to home for me.

And when I read the comment to my wife, she was uncomfortably agreeable to all of my friend’s comments as well.

Nevertheless, I offer you five additional flaws to add to the list. Each of these have been vetted and approved by the committee of two who know me best:

My wife and my best friend of 25 years.

The additions to the list are:

1. Bees kill me dead.
2. I am incapable of carrying on small talk for any length of time and become extremely irritable when forced to do so.
3. I pout and become sullen and sometimes inconsolable when the New England Patriots lose a football game.
4. I lack compassion and empathy for adults who are not very smart or resourceful. While some might argue that this flaw was already covered by item #6 of the original post, it was agreed by all that this is an important distinction.
5. I can be judgmental about things that I have limited knowledge of and are inconsequential to me.

While this last item survived the vetting process and made the list, it is the suggested flaw that I disagree with the most.

I find nothing wrong with formulating an opinion on a subject based upon the information that a person possesses, even if the person’s understanding of the subject is incomplete, as long as the person is flexible in his or her thinking as more information is acquired.

The example cited by my friend was my opinion of yoga.

No, I have never attempted yoga, but yes, I think it’s kind of stupid based upon what I have been told by people who do yoga.

Am I really supposed reserve all judgment on yoga until more data is obtained?

Is there something wrong with formulating an opinion based upon the data I have already acquired?

Must every opinion be based upon a full and complete analysis of a subject?

If this is the standard, how can we have opinions about anything unless we are experts in the field?

When I try yoga and discover that it is not stupid or am convinced by someone that it is not stupid, I will be more than willing to alter my opinion.

In fact, I have paid for 20 yoga lessons via a recent Groupon that I am just waiting for the opportunity to use. So although I have already formulated an opinion on yoga, I am also aware that there is more to learn on the subject and that my opinion may be flawed.

But still, can’t I have an opinion on the subject?

It should also be noted that this flaw only seems to apply to negatively-held beliefs. If my opinion of yoga was positive despite my lack of personal experience, I don’t think my friend would consider my ill informed opinion to be a shortcoming.

Only when the opinion is critical do people complain.

I find this intellectually inconsistent and stupid.

But I’m willing to hear more on the subject.

An acceptable alternative to everlasting life

Anyone who reads this blog regularly knows that I am both slightly obsessed with and terrified of my own death. Having come so close to death on several occasions (including two in which my heart actually stopped), I am keenly aware of the fragility of life. As a result, the possibility that I could die at any moment almost never leaves my consciousness. It is like an omnipresent balloon, floating just about my head, its string visible to me at all times.

It’s a difficult reality in which to constantly live, but it has also served as the impetus for much of my productivity, efficiency, and drive to succeed.

In that way, it has served as both a blessing and a curse.

A friend recently told me that he knows a person who approaches life in the same way I do. Eerily similar, in fact. And she is also the survivor of a near-death experience.

In describing our remarkable similarities, my friend lamented that he hadn’t been fortunate enough to almost died as well.

His comment sounded ridiculous, but then again, I wouldn’t change my past if given the chance. Living with the specter of death looming over me at all times isn’t fun, and years of suffering with PTSD  before seeking help were difficult, but I suspect that I would be a very different and far less successful person had I not endured those struggles.

Still, the constant awareness of death can be distressing at times.

If we could just solve the problem of death before I actually die and grant eternal life to all (or at least me), I could not die a happy man.

Is that too much to ask?

But there is an alternative, at least in Kurt Vonnegut’s mind.  In rereading Slaughterhouse Five, I came upon the Tralfamadorians, a race of alien beings that have the ability to experience reality in four dimensions; meaning, roughly, that they have total access to past, present, and future. They are able to perceive any point in time at will.

Able to see along the timeline of the universe, the Tralfamadorians know the exact time and place of its accidental annihilation as the result of a Tralfamadorian experiment, but are powerless to prevent it. Because they believe that when a being dies, it continues to live in other times and places, their response to death is, "So it goes."

Most important to my purposes, Tralfamadorians may die, but they never cease to exist, because they exist at all points of their lives simultaneously.

I could live with this.

Or not live with it, to be more precise.

And the appeal of the Tralfamadorian powers made me realize something very important:

I am not afraid of death. I am afraid of not existing.

While this distinction may seem like one and the same, it’s not.

Though never dying is certainly preferable, it is the loss of everything that has passed and everything that is to come that I fear the most. The complete erasure of all word and deed, both past and present, with the end of my existence.

But if I were able to continue to live in those past moments, re-experience them as the Tralfamadorians do, while simultaneously watching the future unfold from a detached state, that would be an acceptable alternative to everlasting life.

A damn good alternative, in fact.

While I would love to be able to live into the distant future, the ability to see it unfold, even if I am not a part of it, would be fine by me.

So it’s simple. I just need to learn to perceive the world in four dimensions.

I’ll Google it.

Google knows everything.