Jewel of the Fleet

A conversation with a high school senior had me reminiscing about my first vehicle.  

Sometimes a manufacturer produces a product so simple, so beautiful, and so effective that it completely changes our lives: the Iphone, the refrigerator, and Sour Patch Kids, for example.  The 1987 Mercury Topaz, my first car, was not one of those things.  But like us all, it played the hand it was dealt.

 She began her life with us as the family's primary vehicle.   She was white with crimson interior and  was not destined to win any beauty pageants.  Her four cylinder engine was capable of reaching breakneck speeds of almost 55mph and probably produced the power of a small horse or two.  The seats were covered in vinyl - vinyl that on a hot summer day could absorb all of the Earth's available heat and then conduct it directly into the delicate skin on my ass.  There was no CD player - hell there wasn't even a cassette deck - but the knob driven AM/FM radio seemed sufficient at the time.  She had manual windows, manual locks, and if it had air conditioning I doubt it worked by the time she was mine.  

Subjected to two young children with a propensity for fast food and wonton destruction, the Topaz almost immediately assumed an odor best described as "despair."  We spilled, we dropped, we forgot.  I remember a day trip to Hannibal and Mark Twain Lake during which I dumped the entirety of a Dairy Queen Blizzard in the back floorboard.  This seems a tragic waste of soft-serve goodness in hindsight. 

Aging like a banana on the counter, the Topaz was passed onto my sister round about 1996.  She continued to deliver the standard of care the Topaz was accustomed to, but this time with the added bonus of a fender bender or two.  But like any old soldier it survived, if with less spring in its step, until it reached me - its true master.  

I ran that Topaz like an old Cowboy does his most trusted horse, all over creation, or at least as far as my grocery store job could buy gas.  We were inseparable and we were indestructible ... until the fall of my junior year of high school.  If I recall correctly it was September of 1999, and as a new school year dawned I was finally allowed to drive myself to and fro every day.  Looking back, there are few greater freedoms in our young lives, and at that age we are dumb, we are reckless, and we are invincible.  It was in that spirit that I barreled through a stoplight (thinking about the things that 16 year old boys think about) when I happened upon a line of cars stopped in the middle of the street.  Hell of a thing for a line of cars to do on a perfectly good street, don't you think?*  Regardless, I tried to stop, I really did, but stop I did not.  I plowed the Topaz into the rear car, in turn pushing it  (at a slightly lesser speed) into the next one in line.  That's right, with one fell swoop I pissed off multiple people, earned a chance to have a nice chat with a policeman, and had my first (and to this point, only) trip to a courtroom.  

You know the worst part, the real bitch of the situation?  The Topaz took the worst of it.  She was shorter than the bumper on the car I hit, so instead of bumping that bumper with my own, I instead forced it through the grill (well, if there had been a grill - it had been missing for several years), through the radiator, and into the guts of the operation.  It had to be towed home, and eventually my saint of an uncle pieced it back together from scrap yard parts and various things he found in various ditches.  But with all of the king's horses and all of the king's men he couldn't fix the transmission - not without fully replacing it at the cost of thousands of dollars for a car worth $100, maybe - so it leaked transmission oil for the rest of its life, and twice a week or so I would have to refill it.  Even worse, the shattered transmission would perform admirably up to about 35mph, at which point it was disinclined to shift higher, or go any faster.  Thus we spent our final 18+ months together at a leisurely pace, which actually turned out to be helpful...

It was the next fall, probably October of 2000, when the Topaz and I had our next adventure.  I had just turned 18 - and that fact somehow qualified me to operate a 650 degree F conveyor oven - so I had moved to the grocery store pizza shop.  I was to open the shop at 9am one fall Saturday morning and I rose and prepared as I normally would.  I walked outside to find it was cool and the world was covered in dew, but I thought nothing of it.  This would become relevant.  I leapt** into the Topaz, fired her up, and backed out of the driveway ... but I backed too far, taking her back wheels off of our gravel and onto the downward slope of bedewed grass that began where the driveway ended  The Topaz, being light, underpowered, and fundamentally wounded from the year before, got stuck on the slick grass and she wasn't going to budge.  So I stopped and I did what a person does in this case: I pondered the situation.  My mom wasn't home and my dad was taking advantage of a chance to sleep in.  Attracting anyone's attention to this situation would only lead to embarrassment, which was out of the question.  So how could I get the Topaz back and going all by my lonesome?  Quite the conundrum ... and then it hit me: I'd leave it in drive (hell, it wasn't going anywhere anyway) and I would get out and push it up to the top, where, being an obedient, rational being, it would just stop and wait for me to get back in.  Like a horse, except, you know, mechanical.  Imagine my surprise when I pushed, it got to the top of the slope, and it kept going. 

 There really isn't a chapter on this in the textbook of life, so I did what seemed prudent - I chased after it.   Luckily it turned away from homes and towards the grassy lots to the south of our house.  I chased it.  I even caught it once, managing to get the door open and almost getting myself in before falling to the grass, thereby resigning myself to watch it from there.  It was at that moment that little baby Jesus may have taken the wheel himself, as it crashed softly, so very softly, into some bushes and stopped dead in its tracks.   My dad watched the whole affair out of my parents' bedroom window and all he could do was shake his head.  

The next May, I graduated from high school and used the proceeds of my graduation party to buy a new car - the car I still have.***  The Topaz was put out to pasture, never again to be mistreated by a Magruder.  We had done enough.

*full disclosure: this line of four cars were waiting for the car in front to turn left, which was in turn waiting for the traffic going the other way.
**using creative license here.  neither the Topaz nor I ever did much leaping at this point.
*** What can I say, I get attached.
****It just occurred to me that a friend once bought a vintage pornographic magazine at our town's short-lived "adult store" and left it in my car, under the front passenger's seat.  I had no idea it was there until months later when putrid smell sent me to investigate every nook and cranny of the interior, only to find a rotting porn mag was the culprit.  He thought that was hilarious.

Financial Aid

On five occasions throughout the school year, we host large Saturday campus visit events at which hundreds of families attend from as far as six hours away.   For the past couple of years I have been fortunate enough to give our "financial aid" presentations on these days.  I really do enjoy giving these (two back to back) presentations for three reasons: 1. I enjoy talking, possibly more than anything else in this world, 2. it gives me an excuse to insert pictures of puppies into a presentation* and 3. this is absolutely crucial information for families as they work with their child to make a college decision.  I usually have about 100-120 total people attend these presentations - parents at rapt attention, usually with scowls upon their face; students, bored to death and possibly sleeping on their neighbor's shoulder.  I sympathize with the children: it's hard to process anything when we're 17, let alone the reality that these loans will be OURS and they are OURS to pay back and that can take a WHILE and one day this will mean A GREAT DEAL to us but today is NOT THAT DAY. 

If we take cold calling apathetic high school students who have a penchant for hanging up on you out of the running, financial aid is probably the hardest thing about working in college admissions.  It's important, crushingly so.  It makes college a reality for some students and it destroys dreams for others.  It swells the ranks at the community college and stifles the small, private college.  It keeps parents awake at night and occasionally leads them walk into our office, eyes red with tears.  The problem is simple: there isn't enough money.*

There are those who think they deserve a full ride by the grace of God, and there are those who will scrimp and save and take every dollar worth of loans that they can get, and still can't cover costs.  Regardless of motive, this is a problem.  For reasons good and bad, people don't have savings.  For reasons that pass my understanding, many parents don't want to contribute to their child's college education.***  College is getting more expensive, sometimes shamefully so.  College is a business, and if nobody pays, no school stays afloat.  Aside: states are cutting, swapping, and dealing education funding, while in the land of my birth, right-wing nut job legislators would rather posture about nullifying federal gun laws than accomplish anything.  I understand if they would like our state to be known for more than meth amphetamine (but hey, with Breaking Bad that's cool now, right?) and the adult superstores along side I-70, I just wish they had chosen a tactic other than "hey everybody, we're idiots AND SOMEBODY VOTED FOR US"  

Anyway, on Saturday afternoon I will take that stage to an expectant audience, one that is hoping I can provide them with the secret to a full ride.****  Instead I will give them all the info that they can handle and puppies. They're probably going to leave disappointed.  

*Yes, there are puppies.  And it is awesome.

**  My institution has nothing to be ashamed of when it comes to tuition and aid, and yet people still struggle to close the gap.  THAT is a problem.

*** Favorite reasons given for this:

      1. We paid $20,000 a year for private high school so we wouldn't have to pay for college.  (anvil drops on their head)

      2. My parents didn't contribute to my college education, why should we?  (remind them that college was 30 bucks a credit hour at that point, then anvil drops on their head.)

**** Here it is - are you ready?  Really?  Can you handle it?  Ok.  The secret to a full ride is  your child somehow becoming Lebron James overnight.  Good luck.  

  

Fat Loss, Episode 2: Food, Exercise, and Sleep

I had literally written 1,500 words on the standard American diet and why it sucks and who is to blame when it came to me: this is dumb, get to the point your flowery bastard.  So here we go.

Food:
- Eat whole, natural foods that can be easily identified as "food."  That means lots of meats and lots of vegetables.  Base every meal around these, the two most nutrient dense and valuable sources of food we have.

- Fat is not bad.  In fact, fat is awesome, and its the most likely explanation for why we got here in the first place.  Our ginormous brain, the one that allowed us to invent Sour Patch Kids and the McDouble, is largely due to an evolutionary diet that included tons and tons of nutritionally dense fat.  Marrow.  Organs.  Yes, even other brains, allowed us to build our brains.   Good fats from EVOO, butter, grass fed beef, cold water fish, avocados, and the like are the body's preferred source of energy, and a body that is adapted to deriving its energy from fat is a body that is more able to burn the fat it has already stored.  Oh, and that's another thing - if our body didn't like fat, why would it store energy for later in a fatty form?

- Excluding the aforementioned vegetables, carbohydrates (sweets, refined grains, and fruits) are largely unnecessary and often deleterious to health.   There is nothing that fruit gives us that veggies can't give us without the damaging sugars.  Gluten from wheat, rye, barley is implicated in about 190 human diseases and I firmly believe, if nothing else, that it is really bad for me and is generally to be avoided.  Starches like sweet potatoes, rice, and white potatoes have their use in restoring muscle glycogen for the very active among us.  Other than that, the only reason to eat dense carbs is that you like them, which is fine, unless your goal is burning fat.

- Intermittent fasting can be beneficial for fat loss and general health, and three meals a day is arbitrary.  We certainly didn't evolve over millions of years eating at defined intervals everyday.  We progressed as a species eating a lot when we had a lot, and not at all when we had nothing.  That's one argument for the body's super-efficient fat-storing procedure - we had pressing reasons to store our energy for later.    Digestion is an intense, demanding process, one that consumes a great deal of calories itself.  After a meal a great deal of the body's resources are consumed by the digestive process.  As a result, digestion, though very important to our health, does divert resources from other bodily repair processes.  By eating 3 meals a day (or six small meals, as was long recommended for weight loss) we are constantly digesting something, with no break.  There are any number of fasting protocols - one 24 hour fast per week, only eating in an 8 hour window (skipping breakfast, eating lunch and dinner, generally my preference), or even eating in a 6 hour window (eating late lunch and dinner) - and all give the body a respite from the rigors of digestion and a chance to restore other tissues.  There is also some evidence that fasting helps primates live longer and decreases the incidence of diseases as we age.

Sleep:
This one's pretty simple: sleep more.  Sleep a lot.  Sleep is awesome.  In modern life, this is probably the most unappreciated facet of health.  In the negotiation of life, we often take, and take, and take from our sleep - to get things done for work or for our kids, to watch the tv show we couldn't get to before, and sometimes just because we don't like going to bed.  The problem with this is that sleep is truly one of the body's miracle drugs.  Not only do our brain and tissues repair and recharge during sleep, but this is also when the body bathes in its highest levels of powerful hormones like human growth hormone and testosterone.  These hormones burn fat and build muscle - very good things.  Shortened or low quality sleep we don't get as strong of a hormone response, and thus we get lesser results.  In fact, it is very possible that a person who is doing everything right except for their sleep may not get any results at all.  We are generally told that we should get 6-8 hours per night for optimum health, and many people struggle to get the 6.  However, in reality our general recommendations should probably be 8-10 hours per night, with flexibility based upon the time of year - in summer, when it's light more, sleep less.  In winter, when it's dark more, sleep more.

Exercise:
In short, more is not more.  Ok, there's an exception - walking.  Walking is great for the mind and body, and instituting more walking into one's life is one of the easiest and most effective health changes any person can make.  I try to walk at least an hour a day, in addition to any other purposely movement    Exercise has long been portrayed as the cure-all for fat loss and health, when it very much is not.  Exercise is a stress, a stress designed help your body cope with more stress.   Take lifting weights, for instance: an intense weight-training session actually makes the utilized muscles weaker, in the short term.  You have damaged them and it will take time for your body to repair and reinforce. The purpose of it all is that when the recovery process is complete, the muscles will be capable of better handling future stress.  But even beneficial stress is still stress, and there comes a point where the detriment outweighs the benefit - oh hey there chronic cardio.  Chronic, steady state cardio (jogging, ellipticals, stair climbers, etc.) of more than 20 minutes in duration has long been cast in the role as "fat burner," and it is true that this prolonged exercise is burning calories while you're exercising.  The prolonged nature is also producing stress hormones like cortisol - which promotes fat storage - because the body itself, namely the sympathetic nervous system (fight or flight) doesn't know that the chronic exercise is just for fun.   All the body knows is that it's having to do something really unpleasant for a really long time and likely running from something, so it has to engage the mechanisms to protect itself.  Not only that, steady state cardio burns little to no calories after the exercise is complete and is really good at making you really hungry.

So what should the goal of exercise be, then?  To me, you're looking for exercise that:
1. is intense enough to provoke an adaptation, while short enough that it doesn't overload the stress system.
2. burns calories during and after the actual exercise
3. is an efficient use of time

So what meets these requirements?

1. Weight training.  Lifting heavy weights is not only provides an intense workout during the act, it also provides the most long term metabolic benefits.  Damaging and rebuilding muscle means that your body will be burning more calories than normal for days after the actual workout.  Muscle also has a high metabolic cost, which means that your body will burn more calories, require more calories, and can tolerate more calories.  All good things in maintaining or losing body fat.

2. High Intensity Interval Training (aka Burst Training): these short "sprints" punctuated by rest can be running, stationary bike, rowing machine, or airdyne machine.  The goal is to do a series of balls to the wall work, rest, go balls to the wall, rest.  And balls to the wall doesn't mean try harder than normal, it means go as hard as you can.  As a fatty, I generally do intervals on the stationary bike of 20 seconds of madness followed by about 80 seconds of rest, and repeat.   If you don't feel like shit at the end you didn't do it right.  In a very short amount of time you not only get a hell of a workout, you create an oxygen debt that your body has to repay for several hours afterward, which equals burning more calories long after you've left the gym.  In fact, one of the most humbling things in the world is the tabata protocol: 20 seconds of all out work, 10 seconds of rest, then repeat for 8 sets.  Yes, less than 5 minutes of work and it makes you seriously rearrange your live priorities.  

And did I mention walking?  Walking is about the second best thing you can do for yourself.  The first?  Sleep.  Duh.

*jogging is also hell on the knees, killer on the feet (plantar fasciitis anybody?), and usually undertaken in sneakers that our feet, ankles, calves, and knees were not designed to utilize.  Oh, and those who chronically job are more likely to have thickened heart walls and the bad things that you would expect to arise from thickened heart walls.

On Dignity

I am not a rabid fan of college football (and ignore the professional league), but rather a life-long fan of one team.  When that team is on the television I will watch and usually talk with any of the several of my siblings who are also fans (of that team in particular).  But when that game is done, I am done with football until they play again. However, football is all pervasive on television on fall Saturdays, and one cannot but hear other scores.  This weekend, four games struck me as evidence of the deep moral emptiness of much of college football.

1. #4 ranked Ohio state beat Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University 76-0
2. #7 ranked Louisville beat Florida International University 72-0
3. #16 Miami (of FL) beat Savannah State 77-7
4. #20 Baylor beat the University of Louisiana-Monroe 70-7

These were simply the most egregious examples of running up scores over clearly over-matched opponents, the Idaho State- (#17) Washington and  (#8) Florida State-Bethune-Cook games were nearly as egregious, but fell just short of the low standard set by their aforementioned colleagues.

To be blunt (as in Mack truck blunt), each of these winners (and coaches, athletic directors, and university presidents)  should be ashamed of themselves, and we as fans should be ashamed of them as well.  To applaud this kind of needless humiliation is to applaud the 6th Grader who beats up a kindergarten student, regardless of the provocation.  Just because we can do something is not reason enough to act that way.  Why should we glory in the humiliation of others?  What faith or creed not arranged by lunatics suggests that we should?  It is appalling that the NCAA permits Division I football teams to schedule opponents at the I-AA or II level.  That alone illustrates the complete moral vacuum which is the NCAA (hardly surprising I suppose from an organization which refused to issue the death penalty to a program that knowingly protected and abetted a serial child molester and rapist and pedophile).

The counter-argument, as always, issues forth from the simple-minded market enthusiasts, "those schools knew what they were doing; they were eager for the payout and the exposure."  That is true, as these schools each probably collected a minimum of $800,000 and perhaps more.  Yet, that money went to the schools, not to the players.  The screwy nature of our bizarre macho-killer-exceptionalist-shownoweakness culture means that every one of the defeated coaches has to state their public happiness at the sportsmanship of their opponents; to note their late game efforts to hold down the score! http://scores.espn.go.com/ncf/recap?gameId=332640194  is just one example.  I have no doubt that they believe what they say, which just illuminates how ingrained humiliation is in college football. This is how hegemony works, even the oppressed cannot conceive of their oppression.

It is unlikely that this pattern of behavior will change, lamentably.  But we should at least acknowledge this and work to make something positive from it.  We could start by eliminating the stats in the record books that come from these kinds of games.  The NCAA should set a high minimum payment (at least $3 million dollars) which must be made into the endowments of their opponent in addition to covering all direct costs of the game.  The DI school should be responsible for the entire cost of all injuries inflicted on their down-schedule opponent during the game. 

Fat loss, Episode 1: The Beginnings

Author's Note: the following posts present my opinion and do not generally agree with conventional wisdom.  They come from the perspective of fat loss for male, which is completely different, and frankly much easier, than fat loss for a female.  You are welcome to disagree with me but that is not the point.

The last time I stepped on a scale (Friday morning), all of my awesomeness weighed in at 276.5lbs.  That is a substantial chunk of awesomeness.  When it comes up in conversation, people universally say "Surely you don't weigh that much!"  While I appreciate that sentiment, gravity doesn't give a damn.  Although the severity has varied, I have been perpetually overweight since I was six years old.  At my heaviest in the spring of 2003-4, I recall weighing around 330lbs.   I have no excuse for that - I like food (and drink), I'll never be tall, and for much of my life I would have climbed a tree to avoid exercise.  I have battled this weight with success on occasion: in two different periods in adulthood I have lost north of 40lbs, and in both cases my motivation was a girl.  Between June of 2004 and August of 2005 I actually lost about 90lbs to reach 240 - proof of the power of a young man's hormones.   After grad school, more eating and less activity saw me generally in the 270s and 280s.  Between January and June of 2011 I lost 48 lbs and reached 230 - my lowest weight as an adult.  Now I sit here at 276.5 because I like beer, a lot.  I like food, a lot.  And a girl (or any other person, really) is a shitty reason to do anything.  

I write this post, and those that follow, as a method of accountability as I once more head down the path of lifestyle transformation.  This time I do it for me; I do it because I'll be 31 in two weeks and for the rest of my life my cells will only do things more reluctantly and less efficiently.  I do it because I will never be a world class athlete but I believe that I can be strong, agile, and robust, if I give myself a chance.

   The truth of my current weight is that it's actually about 8lbs less than I was about a month ago.  An even more important truth is that it's largely irrelevant.  Weight, though it measures the "heaviness" of an object, tells you nothing about the "health" of that object.  A person purposely starving may lose 20lbs of water and lean tissue, thereby lessening their scale reading while certainly lessening their health.  A person deprived of anything in order to decrease that scale reading will most likely return whence they came, eventually.  A 140lb marathoner may die of a heart attack at 50 while a 250lb weight lifter may outlive them by 40 years.  

I remember my past weights because they have been a siren calling us to the rocks.  It's quantifiable, allowing us to see our results and feel good about what we are doing.  The problem is that this becomes an obsession, a neurosis.  We step on the scale everyday - even multiple times a day - hoping for that affirmation.  Yesterday a Facebook acquaintance of mine posted a self-portrait in which they were in a gym wearing sweat pants and a hoodie, captioning it as getting ready to "sweat it out for 30 minutes of HIIT* before a weigh-in", like she was a high school wrestler.    This particular person is getting married and has had some great results in the past few months, but photos like this make me worry for their long term success, their health, and their sanity.  Weight turns us into raving lunatics.

It is with all of this in mind that I will focus on the harder to quantify in a number but easy to notice metrics of:
 - how I look
 - how i feel
 - how I perform

My goals will focus on habit change, fat loss and muscle gain, not weight loss.  
- Prioritize sleep by sleeping and waking at the same time everyday, seven days a week.
- Make wise food choices second nature, "default" selections
- Fit into size 38 jeans (to start with)
- Strength increases on the squat, deadlift, bent-over row, and overhead press.
- Decreased 2,000 meter rowing machine time.
- Be able to do a pull up.  Yes. Just one.  I've never been able to do one.

If we ignore the factors we cannot change: age, gender, pre-existing health conditions, etc.; there are generally four factors we do control in the fat loss process.  In general level of importance they are: food, sleep, exercise, and stress.  The subsequent posts will discuss how I plan to tackle each.

*High Intensity Interval Training

Scant yards from Indiana

Greetings from Danville, IL, the last desperate gasp of Illinois on the I-74 corridor.  In fact, my current location is more yards from Indiana than it is miles.  This is a nostalgic stretch of highway for me - for two years this was my path to graduate school and many times the Intrepid and I churned across this prairie.  Danville is like countless other rust belt towns, clinging to what it has in an era in which what it has isn't considered to be much.  Tomorrow I will wake up and do it all in reverse, and one day I may even write a full post about it.

Fun Danville fact: it was the boyhood home of Dick Van Dyke.

On Memory or Nostalgia

Let me preface this entire post with the following disclaimer: I am in the business of the past; a doctorate in history being the ultimate (in its ordering usage) consequence of a series of poor life choices that result from an unchecked affection for the past.

Over the past ten days I have posted more than a score of old photographs to Facebook, although my intent had been to scan only two.  The batch spanned about a decade from 8th Grade through the year or two past college.  I expected a few comments from close friends, but I wanted them up for me more than anything else.  However, they have touched a chord with friends (some of whom I haven't seen save for social media in nearly twenty-five years) and the comments and "likes" have brought me an immense joy and a deep sense of how camaraderie transcends time (as it should).  I have been lifted up in mind and soul by everyone's else evident joy in the images and the fond memories they bring to mind.

One comment has stuck with me, and I have been considering its meaning for several days now.  The picture in question (for those who are interested) depicts my high school marching band providing live music for a Halloween parade at one of the elementary schools in my home time.  It is not posed, and shows most of the band from that year, many, many dear friends.  On seeing it, a good friend wrote, "I want to crawl inside this photo and live there for a few weeks."  I basked for a while in the happiness of that thought as indeed music and the music program in general was the gravitational rotating mass of my high school years.  Ask me to talk about classes, and I'll struggle to come up with anything save less pleasant memories, but ask me about band and I'll drown you in the torrent of my stories. But he captured my sentiments perfectly (he is in the book editing business so he knows how to turn a phrase) because nostalgia is joyful and a place of solace from the cares of today. 

That comment lead to a series of comments questioning (all good-natured) the difference between memory and nostalgia.  And there is a difference, indeed.  History while never recorded perfectly, and often shading out the worst bits at least stands up to reasoned scrutiny.  Nostalgia obscures or even re-writes the bad and lifts up the good and paints the past as better than today.  In our own lives we tend to engage in the most rank declension-ism.  A fascination with the separation between nostalgia and history (a divide quite apparent to me even as a young fellow) led me to my life's work.  I seek the history of the past in my own work and look askance at both memory and nostalgia as falling outside of the realm of the "provable."  However, I am not against nostalgia in all its forms (although "historical" re-enactment can take me to some dark places in the mind).  In fact, as an archivist (another skill-set) I recognize that what we save is often a reflection not of preserving memory but of nostalgia (think Kafka asking Max Brod to burn his letters after his death in order to help craft his posthumous literary memory). 

Composed (indoors with an outside temp of 101.5 'F) to the compositions and performances of J. Shogren on his 2008 album "American Holly."

Don't do that.

Song as I write this: "True," Spandau Ballet

In my perfect world, talks with high schoolers revolve around my philosophical waxings: "Back in my day, kids, we had floppy disks an they were even floppy."  "We didn't have cell phones we just tried to yell real loud."  "Our text messages were written on paper and delivered by dog sled."   Etc.   Or, more seriously, "Being an adult means that you don't do things because you want to.  Being an adult means that you whether at work, at home, or with family, you do things because you should, whether you want to or not.*"  That has long been my defintion of adulthood.  Now I'm adding an amendment: sometimes being an adult is defined by the three words that title this post.

There's a bar scene in Good Will Hunting, a film I'm quite fond of, in which a stereotypical 
Harvard  windbag tries to impress a girl at the expense of Will's best friend, Chuckie.  Will, the boy genius, swoops to Chuckie's rescue, embarrasses the windbag, and impresses the girl as follows:
"See, the sad thing about a guy like you is in 50 years you're gonna staht doin some thinkin on your own and you're gonna come up with the fact that there are two certaintees in life. One, don't do that. And Two, you dropped a hundred and fifty grand on a fuckin education you coulda got for a dollah fifty in late chahges at the public library" 

Dumb Boston accent aside, point one has long stuck with me - "Don't do that."   Three simple words.  Don't do that.  In some ways its a good motto for life.  Don't do that.

We have a new staff member who has the sometimes less than pleasant job of coordinating appointments with campus academic departments.  Sometimes we take for granted that the way we want to do things (which happens to be the way we can do things with most people) is the way we can do things with everyone.  This is not always the case, for a variety of reasons. My colleague learned this week that not only won't everyone on campus do things the way they would like, sometimes they can't even explain their point in a civil manner.  In this particular case, our staff member contacted another campus assistant about scheduling an appointment. The person across campus felt they had made it abundantly clear in a previous email that THIS IS NOT THE WAY THAT YOU DO IT. They felt this was so clear, in fact, that they took a screenshot of their previous email and pasted it into an email which upbraided our (again, new) employee.**  

We all miss emails.  We all read emails with the best intentions and later legitimately forget about them, as we only have a finite amount of room in these brains of ours.  And I think we all know ways this situation could have been handled better, with a bit of consideration.  'As I mentioned in a previous email...'  or 'Please contact ______ for this request...'  etc.   Don't do that.  

Last week I was at the end of my rope.  I typed out a nasty email.  Twice actually.  But I didn't send it.  Why?  Don't do that.  

The story?  Our institution is an organism, with frequent cooperation and collaboration between disparate offices.  For my part, let me say that when I need something from someone else on campus (which is often), I try to be as gracious and accommodating as possible.  I realize that my request is adding work for that person.   Last weeks' frustration was due to the fact that a staff member across campus, one who clearly outranks me, needed something in an area of my direct responsibility.  However, this person never approached me, instead one of my supervisors as a middle man, dictating to that person what was needed from me.   Better yet, what this person needed was not only going to make my life harder, it was going to make life harder for several of the people I work with this fall, and it was a project I have reservations about anyway.  However, I did what was asked, because that is my duty.    In fact, I provided more of my time and effort to that person's task than I think could have been reasonably expected, and then I dutifully sent it along.  Never once did that person express thanks to me OR to the supervisor they were using as go-between.  Not only that, when provided with my initial work, they implied that it was insufficient and asked for more.  Don't do that.   

More than once this summer, and yet again this week, I was contacted by someone with a message in this vein:  "Oh, you said _____  in a previous email, not _____"  or "It's getting late and we haven't received your RSVP for this..."  In each case I had "Said this", or "RSVP'ed for that," and I could pull up the very emails from days or weeks before in which I had made my intentions very clear. ***  In each case, I was tempted to forward to the person  my time stamped email disproving their claim.  In each case, I didn't.  And when there was blame implied, I took it.  I'm a know it all, but with each passing day I learn more and more that being right for right's sake accomplishes nothing, and burning bridges might feel good.  For about 10 seconds.  Don't do that.  

Consider other people.  Follow your dreams.  Don't do that.  

*This is why every Saturday I have risen at  5:30am to help my mother set up her booth at the Farmer's Market.  God it sucks.

*** And once, petulantly, I even showed my supervisor where I had not only "Said this," but the person in question had agreed to it.  That one's on me.  Don't do that.  

On the issue of christian names

I admit to a certain prickliness (some would emphasize the first syllable in describing this particular aspect of my personality) regarding academic titles.  I also admit to a usual sloth when it comes to defending the same (save when it involves medical doctors), except while I am on the job.  Now, I've earned a doctorate (probably in stupidity for gettin' the damn thing in the first place) and here in sunny California where I reside such things are not held to much esteem unless you are counseling Hollywood b-listers (hey, that's funny) about sex addiction.  This is even more the case at the university which employees me, where most of my colleagues have adopted a studied (yep, that was deliberate) nonchalance about titles.  They encourage students to call them by their christian name, which is bad enough (insert that first syllable here), but it torques me to no end when students use my first name even after I patiently discuss my hailing preference (Dr.)  in the syllabus and during the first class.  I have even been called a fascist by a colleague (only partially in jest) for wearing a tie.

Remember, Woody Allen famously said that the only advantage to California is that right turns on red are permitted.

Bedrock.

A note on the blog url: in 2009 a coworker asked what he could do to win my friendship and I answered honestly - he could give me a pony.  Unfortunately, he did not procure an actual horse for my amusement, but instead he bought a toy zebra and laboriously covered its black stripes with whiteout.  I guess the effort won me over.  He was christened "Cubicle Pony" and he became our unofficial mascot.  Although the pony itself has moved on down the road, that gentleman is now one of my best friends in the world.  This is just another example of me being blessed with better friends than I generally deserve.

I had a blog once.  Okay.  I've had about five blogs once, and in some cases, little more than once.  I'm a flake. I'm impetuous.  I'm lazy.  I have high expectations.  Really, I'm kind of an ass.  These qualities are not beneficial to sticking with something, especially something that requires work and discipline, something like a blog.  But here I am again trying to flex my long-atrophying writing muscles.

I enjoy writing, I really do. One doesn't succeed (wildly, dare I say) in six years of history coursework without being able turn a phrase.  In retrospect I was much better at that part than the research, inquiry, and analysis that truly make up the craft. Regardless, I think it's fear that has kept me away - fear of the rust, fear that I really don't have anything to say, and fear that I don't have the ability I'd like to think I do.

I need to say that although I try to use punctuation, there are few things I hate more in this world. I use it as I see fit and I make no pretense that I'm using it correctly.  In my dreams I'd write like a slightly more whimsical Cormac McCarthy; short, direct, hurtling ever forward.  So before we begin let me say that I'll pause when I want to pause, I'll continue when I want to continue, and at all times I will hurtle.  Oh, I will hurtle.

My goal with this internet oasis is to flex my compositional (probably not a word) muscles and take you down the rabbit hole with me.  This fall I hope to craft at least one post a week while traveling middle America, writing as I spread my own brand of hate and discontent, my unique bouquet of giggles and grins, all over Northeast Missouri and central Illinois.  Buy the ticket, take the ride.