Resolution update: 2010 in review

2010 is about to become a thing of the past, and as such, it is time to review my successes and failures from the previous year. It’s wasn’t my best showing by resolution standards. I successfully completed 7 of my 16 resolutions and made considerable progress on two others.

Not great.

Here are the final results of each resolution, some of which will most assuredly make a repeat appearance on my 2011 list:

1.  Lose seventeen more pounds, bringing my weight down to 185 pounds, which was my high school pole vaulting weight.

I added a total of five pounds to my weight since January of 2010. Terrible.

2.  Complete CHICKEN SHACK by April 15.

Not only did I finish CHICKEN SHACK, but I am nearly finished MEMOIRS OF A IMAGINARY FRIEND, which my brilliant agent has already sold rights to in six different countries.

CHICKEN SHACK has yet to be sold, but with luck (and a little revision), it will end up being my third book written and fourth book published.

3.  Eat three servings of oatmeal a week in order to reduce my cholesterol.

I’m going to call this a success. Though there were weeks in which I ate less than three bowls of oatmeal, those were few and far between and were far outpaced by the weeks in which I ate decidedly more than three bowls.  I won’t know if my cholesterol is actually lower as a result until my physical late next year, but the goal of eating oatmeal was achieved. More importantly, eating oatmeal has become a routine that I will continue in 2011.

4.  Try liver.

I failed to eat liver in 2010. The easiest of my sixteen resolutions went undone.

5.  Publish an Op-Ed in a national newspaper.

I failed to publish an Op-Ed in any newspaper in 2010. I attempted to publish one piece in four separate papers and was rejected each time.

6.  Participate in The Moth as a storyteller, at a live show or on their radio broadcast.

I pitched one story for The Moth’s radio broadcast and was rejected. I attended one live Moth event, but it was a GrandSLAM, so I did not have the opportunity to participate. Another failure.

7.  Complete the rock opera.

While we continue to tweak the rock opera, it is complete. My partner and I listened to it last night, in fact, and took some notes on some possible revisions. We hope to see a staged reading and/or actual performance in 2011 at one of our local theaters.

8.  Read at least six novels that were published in 2010.

I finished reading fifteen novels published in 2010 and am in the midst of reading two more. A rousing success.

9.  Organize my basement.

Work on the basement is incomplete. My hopes of completing it during my December vacation evaporated with the deadline for my new book.

10.  Learn to use Dreamweaver with reasonable skill.

Success! I am able to edit my webpage at will using this software.   

11.  Land at least one paying client for my fledgling life coach business.

Not a single paying client in 2010 despite the glowing recommendations of my two pro-bono clients.

12. Go to at least twelve movies this year, continuing to debunk the myth that the parents of newborns are no longer able to go out to the movies.

I finished the year with exactly 12 movies, and that brings my two year total to 29. Almost thirty movies seen in a theater or at a drive-in since the birth of my daughter. Myth officially debunked.

13. Rid Elysha and myself of all education debt before the end of the year.

Incomplete. With the foreign sales already made for the new book, it’s likely that 2011 will be the year that Elysha and I become debt-free, but this year was a failure in this regard.

14. Replace the twelve ancient windows on the first and second floor of the house with more energy efficient ones.

Also incomplete due to lack of funding.

15. Make one mortgage payment from poker profits.

With a last minute surge in poker profits (from an especially profitable cash game last week), I came ever so close to this goal, falling about 22% shy of the mark. A failure, but one that I feel good about considered how little poker I played in 2010 in favor of writing.

16. Post my progress in terms of these resolutions on this blog on the first day of every month.

I missed one month in 2010 but am willing to call this a success.

Three very different films

I watched three movies over the course of the last two days. Here is my brief summation of each film: Tron Legacy:  Dumb and fun. Kind of like the girl you are willing to date but never get serious with.

The Social Network: You leave the theater wondering if Zuckerberg has Asperger's Syndrome or is simply a jerk (the last line of the film seems to imply the latter, but it was a stinker of a last line, and I remain unconvinced). You also find yourself wishing that real life dialogue was as bristling and witty as Aaron Sorkin envisions. But that happens with every Sorkin script.

The King’s Speech: The Karate Kid meets speech therapy. I am fairly certain that the real King George VI was not this funny nor this pathetic.

For the record, I thought The Social Network and The King’s Speech were outstanding, and Tron Legacy was a suitable afternoon diversion.

Yes, I’ve posted a cat video. Don’t judge me.

I have never posted and have rarely seen an online video involving cats.

But this one was too good to pass up.

Creativity runs in the family

Elysha was looking on Etsy.com for a handmade gift for our friend’s daughter’s first birthday and found a barrette holder that she thought would be perfect.

Something like this:

The little girl, whose name is Ella, wears a lot of barrettes and bows. 

She was about to click on the purchase button when it occurred to her that she could just make one herself. 

Three hours later, this is what she had created.

Not bad.  Huh? 

Good information. Bad writing.

After seeing the Tron Legacy this afternoon, I was left trying to remember which came first: The film or the video game?

I was pretty sure that the film preceded the game, but in order to verify my suspicion, I checked the Wikipedia entry.

The first line of the Wikipedia entry reads:

Tron is a 1982 American live-action-computer animated science fiction action cult film written and directed by Steven Lisberger.

Did you catch that? Seven descriptors for the film.

Not the best writing. I adore Wikipedia, trust its editors almost implicitly, and often find myself reading interconnected stories for much longer than I should.

But the writing is sometimes less than outstanding.

UPDATE:

Before I even had time to finish and publish this post, the editors of Wikipedia had revised the first sentence of the Tron entry to read:

Tron is a 1982 American science fiction action film written and directed by Steven Lisberger.

Much better. Still a little wordy for me but a noticeable improvement.

And because of Wikipedia’s transparency policy, you can go back in time and see the version that I read while eating lunch this afternoon.

And all this for free. My daughter is growing up in a fantastic age.

Oh, and I was right. The film preceded the video game that I adored.

True friends hurt one another whenever possible

By now you have probably heard about New York Jets head coach Rex Ryan and the foot fetish videos that he and his wife have posted to the Internet.  When asked about them, Ryan has indicated that this is a personal matter that he would prefer not discuss. In talking about the situation on ESPN radio, former NFL offensive lineman turned sportscaster Mark Schlereth was asked about how a football team might handle a situation like this in terms of the coach’s feelings.

To paraphrase, Schlereth said that the players would first determine if the coach’s marriage was potentially in trouble or if he was simply caught in an incredibly embarrassing situation. If the situation proved to be the latter, the entire team would most assuredly attend the next meeting barefoot, and the torment that the coach would receive for something like this could last for months.

“We would bring it up at every opportunity,” said Schlereth.

He went on to describe a prank in which a rookie was served falsified court documents indicating that he was being sued for sexual harassment after he  had been seen flirting with a sound engineer on the sidelines during a game.  The coach allowed that prank to continue for an entire day before letting the rookie off with a warning.

“There are no rules in an NFL locker room when it comes to this stuff,” Schlereth explained. “And the best defense is a good offense. So you nail the low-hanging fruit whenever you can.”

I like this philosophy a lot.

In my own life, my friends fall into two categories:

Those who believe that the world should operate like an NFL locker room and those who do not.

And in almost every case, there is no middle ground. Either you’re someone who is willing to engage in this kind of cruelty or you avoid it at all costs. You learn very quickly who can take it and who cannot.

Unfortunately, a majority of my friends (and perhaps people in general) cannot. For whatever reason, they tend to be (in my mind) overly sensitive to this kind of behavior. For these people, pranks end up being watered-down excuses for what could have been or are avoided altogether.

I cherish my friends who share my no-holds-barred philosophy. I admire their willingness to suffer embarrassment for the amusement of others. I respect their ability to laugh at their own foibles, regardless of how personal in nature they may be. And I readily accept their desire to do the same to me.

In my most treasured friendships, there is little room for hurt feelings. We give no quarter to one another of the battlefield. We show no mercy.

In the words of Mark Schlereth, we nail the low hanging fruit at every opportunity.

I never had the opportunity to play organized football (one of my three greatest regrets in life). My high school did not field a team and by the time I finally made it to college, I was working more than forty hours a week in order to pay the bills. Red-shirting as a freshman was not an option.

But I wish I had. I think I would’ve fit in well with a football team.

I tend to do a lot of stupid, prank-worthy things.

And my mind is constantly filled with hurtful comments and ideas for acts of supreme cruelty.

I fear that my talents are often going to waste.

Avoid ambiguity in the demise of a character

I don’t mind endings that make you wonder what might happen to a character had another scene been written or filmed. Both Something Missing and Unexpectedly, Milo end with the protagonist’s future in doubt. But at least you know that both protagonists will have a future.

What I despise are endings in which the existence of the protagonist in a subsequent scene is in doubt.

This is why the last episode of The Sopranos annoyed me.

Either kill Tony or don’t. Don’t avoid taking a position on the matter by creating some multi-layered scene that might be interpreted as Tony’s eminent death but might not.

This was a mobster show. Whack the guy or don’t.

This is why I didn’t like the ending to The Wrestler.

Yes, it’s very likely that the viewer is meant to assume that Randy dies at the end of the film, but again, his fate is ultimately left to interpretation.

Does he suffer another heart attack as he dives off the top ropes?

Possibly. Probably.

But aren’t there medical personnel on hand?

Didn’t he survive his first heart attack?

Kill him or don’t.

Ambiguity in the possible death of a character is an act of cowardice on the writer’s part.

Need a grocery store? We have plenty.

Slate’s Chris Wilson reports on a 2009 study by the Department of Agriculture found that “2.3 million households do not have access to a car and live more than a mile from a supermarket. Much of the public health debate over rising obesity rates has turned to these ‘food deserts,’ where convenience store fare is more accessible—and more expensive—than healthier options farther away.”  

An interactive map of these food deserts can be found here.

I’m stunned by these findings.

And I’m ready to help.

As I’ve written about before, the area of Connecticut in which I live in inundated with grocery stores, and while their presence alone does not adversely impact me, their sheer number seems to compel consumers to frequent as many of them as possible in a given week, thus clogging my highways and surface streets with people who somehow manage to find the time to shop for meat at one store, fruits and vegetables at another, bulk items at a third, prepared foods at a fourth, and so on and so on.

I wish I had that kind of extra time on my hands.

The lack of efficiency in this model offends me on a personal level.

The amount of fuel being used to shuttle oneself around to these stores is destructive to the environment.

The presence of these multiple-grocery-store-maniacs on the roads slows me down.

Seemingly gone are the days when a family was able to do its food shopping for the week on a single day.

In the land of fast-paced, on-the-move, not-enough-hours-in-the-day lifestyles, the majority of people who I know somehow manage to carve out enough time to shop for food three or four days a week.

This makes absolutely no sense to me.

Using Google Maps I was able to determine that within a single mile of my home are a total of eight full-sized grocery stories, including two Stop & Shops and two Asian grocers. Had I stretched the range out to two miles, I would have more than doubled this total.

So what if we ship half of the grocery stores in my area of Connecticut to a place more needy? Mississippi, Louisiana, West Virginia, Georgia, Arkansas, and parts of Texas could all use one of the Stop & Shops within a mile of my home, or one of the two Asian markets or three Aldis or two Shaws within two miles of my home.

Lift these suckers up and send them someplace else. Reduce the congestion on my roads, replace the vast acreages of parking lots with trees and grass, decrease the amount of fossils fuels burned while driving to these stores, and perhaps encourage consumers to return to a time when families did the bulk of their shopping on a single day at a single store and transform the time spent turning our towns into giant farm stands into something more productive.

Food deserts?

I’m drowning in food over here.

The price of wealth

A quote from Heather O’Neill from This American Life: No one from a rich background can ever be cool.

The more I think about it, the more I am certain that it is true.

Topless, frigid and amusing

As a season ticket holder, I sit in the same seats at every Patriots game. As a new season ticket holder, those seats are far from the field. My friend, Shep, and I sit on the 45 yard line, four rows from the very top of the stadium.

To be honest, we like the seats a lot. It can get windy up there, but we have a good view of the action at all times, regardless of where on the field the ball may be. It’s actually a view similar to the one I see on television except I can see the entire field at one time.

The guys who usually sit to my right are police officers, and throughout the season, I have heard them tell one another stories that make the hair on the back of my neck stand on end and cause me to wonder about the sanctity of their profession.

I’m quite certain that many of the tactics that they describe are not legal, and they always make me a little nervous.

I already have good reason not to trust all police officers.

The cops were not at the most recent Patriots-Green Bay contest. It was a Sunday night game, so perhaps they were busy conducing illegal searches or smacking around prisoners in handcuffs or racially profiling motorists at stop lights.

All actions described during previous games.

Instead, I found myself sitting beside two Asian men whose enthusiasm for the game was sadly not matched by their understanding of the lexicon of the game. Though supportive of the team, many of the things that they shouted weren’t quite right, and as a result, I laughed throughout much of the night.

A few of their more memorable remarks included:

C’mon defense! Interfere the ball!

Drop them on the bomb, defense!

Crack that punt!

C’mon Pats! Win me a touchdown!

Pass that skin, Brady!

Tackle their legs into a little ball!

Midway through the third quarter, three guys off to my left decided to remove their shirts despite the sub-freezing temperatures. This bizarre ritual typically occurs in inverse proportion the outside temperature:

The colder the temperature, the greater the likelihood that guys will remove their shirts.

I am mystified as to why grown men choose to inflict this kind of suffering upon themselves and then pretend that the freezing temperatures don’t bother them. If asked, they might say that they are expressing support for their team, but I suspect that Tom Brady (who literally wears a scuba suit in cold weather) and his teammates would be less than impressed by this demonstration of stupidity.

Instead, I suspect that these morons require more attention than their clothing-clad bodies can provide. And while I’ll admit that removing your clothing on a 10 degree night will garner you attention, but not the kind of attention that most people desire.

After watching these fools remove their clothing, the Asian man directly to my right decided that he would do the same and began stripping off the layers covering his torso. Eventually he got down to just his tee-shirt, at which point he stood up, gripped the shirt around its bottom, and prepared to lift it over his head. He held it there for about a minute before releasing the shirt and standing with his hands by his side. He remained this way for another two minutes, seeming to ponder his next move, and then finally he began putting his sweatshirts and coat back on.

Smart move.

“There’s hope for you!” I said to him.

He smiled and thanked me as he pulled his hat down over his head.

I’m so jealous

Can’t decide which is better.  Like choosing between hot dogs and ice cream.

I did not grow up with children’s books

Am I the only person in the world who has seen the film version of Where the Wild Things Are but has never read the book?

My 2010 Christmas haul

My wife is the best gift giver on the planet. In addition to getting me tickets to the last two Connecticut Forums in 2011 (Temple Grandin/Steven Pinker and John Irving/Jonathan Franzen/Azar Nafisi), she stuffed my stocking with three items that are my three favorite gifts of the year.

• A Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure pin (there was a time when I could recite this movie word-for-word)
• A New England Patriots house key
• A pair of boxers (she always gives me underwear) with images of headphones covering them (I live most of my life with a pair of headphones perched atop my head)

Some people might prefer a video game system or a fancy watch or a cashmere sweater.

I like these things, too (maybe not the sweater and definitely not the watch), but like the books that I write, I tend to like the quirky gifts the best.

These three gifts are simple, inexpensive, and infused with great thought and love.

I wouldn’t trade them for anything.

  

Jewish infiltration at the North Pole, perhaps?

My daughter, Clara, and I spent part of Christmas day watching the Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer TV special. My wife is Jewish.

I celebrate all holidays involving anthropomorphic creatures and gift-giving.

As a result, our children receive a mixed-bag when it comes to holiday celebrations.

I think it’s great. The best of both worlds.

My wife grew up in a Jewish household, so she is quite young in Christmas years and has no understanding of the fundamental importance of these stop-motion animation Christmas specials.

I’m happy to be passing the tradition onto Clara.

With all this in mind, I found myself with a new perspective as I watched Rudolph for perhaps the two-hundredth time.

Specifically, I had an insight on Hermey, the Christmas elf:

Hermey is a self-described misfit who prefers studying dentistry to making toys. Abandoning Santa's workshop, Hermey runs away, leaving Santa Clause and Christmas behind.

Rejects Santa Claus and Christmas?

Chooses dental school over the toy industry?

Jewish, perhaps?

How to turn a toy gun into an appropriate gift

A few pre-Christmas observations: 1. Men are simple creatures. As I meander up and down the aisles of Toys ‘R Us, I continually to stumbled upon toys that I would love to receive as a gift. Remote controlled helicopters and cars, sling shots, Nerf guns, yo-yos, jump ropes, board games, skateboards, video games and more.

While I struggle to fill my wife’s stocking with anything but candy every year, she continually packs mine with the cleverest of gifts.

In fact, she’s the best stocking stuffer I have ever known.

But I realized as I made my way through the toy store that this is because men never outgrow the toy store. Filling a man’s stocking is easy because men continue to play with toys throughout their lives, and the toy store will always be a place where a clever woman can shop for her man. I don’t know what Elysha has planned for this year's stocking, but I promise you that her choices are likely to be small, silly and some of my favorite gifts of the year.

3. F.A.O Schwarz has apparently leased a section of the Toys ‘R Us store to sell their own merchandise, and at the beginning of this section is a kiosk selling F.A.O Schwarz gift bags for 98 cents each.

Correct me if I am wrong, but the implication here is that there are consumers in this world who shop at Toys ‘R Us but who purchase an F.A.O. Schwarz toy in order to convey the appearance that the gift was actually purchased at the world famous store in New York City.

Is there any other explanation for a brand-named gift bag?

The presence of the kiosk or the bags themselves didn’t bother me so much.  As much as I like to think that austerity is slowing creeping into people’s mindsets, there will always be people on the bottom end of the sensibility bell curve.

But the fact that the kiosk was capable of holding hundreds of bags and yet was nearly empty was my greatest cause of concern.

3. Searching for a gift for twin boys, I came upon an enormous section of Nerf guns. A glorious collection of handgun and rifles that fire small, soft Nerf pellets at their target.

I stared at the choices for a long time and finally texted Elysha.

Me: Can I get the boys toy guns? Nerf guns.

Elysha: Not sure…

Elysha: I think so. Is there something else as good?

Me: Nothing is as good as a toy gun.

I continued staring at the array of weaponry before me, trying to decide if the boys’ parents would approve. I thought about the parents' careers, their religious beliefs, their political leanings and examples of their parental decision-making from the past. I thought and thought, and then the solution struck me like a thunderbolt.

I bought four guns. One for each boy and one for each parent.

Buy a gun for everyone and it becomes time well spent with family.

Sort of like buying Monopoly. Only a hell of a lot better.

Best Christmas gift of the day

I will write about the outstanding gifts that my wife gave me later today (they really are outstanding), but the best Christmas gift that I have received thus far has been listening to my 23-month old daughter count to 20 for the very first time.

And then the second time. 

And then a third time.

And now I think she’s just showing off.  

I managed to coax her into counting for the camera (by doing a little counting myself), but she did so while stuffing Cheerios in her mouth, so she wasn’t at her best. 

She counted perfectly at least three times before I tired to capture it on film.  

Maybe we can get her to count to 100 before she turns two.

I constantly dream about the apocalypse. Is this normal?

A friend of mine recently expressed concern when I told her that I dream about the apocalypse a couple of times a week. But it’s not always nuclear holocaust that fills my dreams. Giant asteroids, air-born plagues, alien invaders and zombie infestation are just a few of the horrors that fill my sleepy time.

It’s not like I’m fixated on one specific method of worldly destruction.

Then there are the personal apocalypses as well, which are actually far more common:

Home invasion, armed robbery, airplane crashes, swarms of killer bees.

I spend many of my evenings struggling to stay alive.

It's not the best way to spend a night in bed, but it certainly makes sleepy time more exciting. I also like to think that my nightly experiences with these disasters prepare me for their eventuality, as this video does so well:

The essence of me, as distilled by my wife and my high school sweetheart

I was speaking to a professor and researcher who are investigating the possibility that people who hated school make better teachers. This is a theory that I have long espoused, and I was both shocked and pleased to hear that others share my belief.

In talking about this research with friends over dinner, I was asked why I didn’t like school, and for a moment, I was stumped. There were a multitude of reasons that led to my negative opinion of school, but I had difficulty summing them up in one sentence.

Then Elysha did it for me.

“Matt doesn’t like to be told what to do.”

And in those nine simple words, I believe that my wife described the most fundamental aspect of my being.

More than anything else, I do not like to be told what to do.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons why I became a teacher, a writer, and a small business owner. In all three professions, I enjoy an enormous amount of freedom when it comes to how I perform my job. I may have principals and editors and business partners supervising me to a degree, but most of the time that I spend working is done without direct supervision.

There is no one telling me what to do.

I was telling this story to Laura, my high school sweetheart, and though we haven’t seen much of each other in more than twenty years, she wholeheartedly agreed with my wife’s summation, adding this one addendum:

“This is why you are the master of your destiny. You can do anything you want because you refuse to do anything that other people want you to do.  You published those books because you didn’t listen to people who told you that it would be impossible. You just like to prove the opposite is true, no matter what the opposite may be.”

She’s right, too.  In fact, between the two of them, I think Elysha and Laura have established the guiding force in my life:

Don’t tell me what to do. I am a contrarian who is just looking for a chance to do exactly the opposite of what you want me to do.

Some might argue that this philosophy amounts to the mental framework of a five year old.

I agree or disagree depending upon your opinion.

Either way, it’s interesting (and a little disconcerting) to listen to other people distill the essence of my being into a few simple sentences that you perhaps understood but could not articulate.

While I’d like to think I’m a slightly more complex being, I think that they are right.

What would Emperor Hirohito think?

I’m happy that I am able to watch so much BBC programing here in America, but I think US television networks are missing a golden opportunity by not broadcasting more Japanese game show insanity. 

What will your last words be? Are you prepared?

Richard Holbrook, American diplomat and primary architect of the Dayton Peace Accords, died following emergency heart surgery. He was serving as a special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan at the time of his death. His last words:

“You’ve got to stop this war in Afghanistan.”

This story got me thinking about my possible last words, because one can never be too prepared. While I admittedly have no intention of ever dying, it’s at least a worthy mental exercise.

Considering my heart and respiration have stopped twice, it seems prudent.

So my possible last words include:

• One consolation: With my death, my enemies will now be burdened with idle hands to match their idle minds.
• Don’t let anyone fool you. Death is hardest on the dead.
• Please serve macaroni and cheese with hot dogs at the wake.

Opinions? Revisions? Additions?

I recently dreamt that a nuclear bomb detonated within miles of my home, and as the shock wave approached that would most assuredly kill me, I looked to the sky and shouted, “Goodbye world! This really sucks!”

See what I mean? Preparation is important or you end up sounding stupid.