last year marty subbed for three weeks. after the tour i asked her if there were any noticeable changes in the classroom over the last decade. she said, yes, one, there were no smartphones ten years ago.
now that she's there more often her time off is showing in other ways too. when the teachers were getting their rooms ready marty walked into the science teachers office and asked:
MARTY
does anyone have an easel-pad.
YOUNG COLLEAGUE
what's an easel-pad?
MARTY
it's a big sheet of paper you can write stuff on.
YOUNG COLLEAGUE
i don't have an easel-pad but i think i got some slates you can borrow.
i've been sittin' on this one for a few weeks. a past student shared it with me before it exploded. it you haven't watched it yet, it's juicy good, like a just right porterhouse.
one of the family that came of marty's smores party had four kids. all boys. their children's ages perfectly align with our kids except they have an extra one, a three year old, on the end. with four kids eleven and under in your care, you can imagine how little uninterrupted social time they had to talk with others. all evening their kids ran up interrupting their conversations in need of help with a toy, a thirst, or an injustice. as the night wound down and the father gave the five minute warning, the children disappeared from view and never returned (excepting the three year old who was asleep on the mother's lap). after ten minutes time and conversation the man said, "wow. i haven't seen any of my kids since i told them we would be leaving soon. this is kind of nice. in the future i think i'll give the five minute warning ten minutes after showing up."
his discovery reminds me of the advice my father in law, pappa ken, gave me after we had kids: "you just gotta be smarter than your kids." i know i've mentioned this wisdom before, but i think of it often. surprisingly often. on paper it sounds trivial enough. in practice it is most slippery.
there's more than one reason they call them scratchers
at my last job once a week the database guy at my shop walked the aisles of cubes collecting money for lottery tickets. everyone would hand him a wrinkled buck or two, he'd make a scratch on a small piece of paper, and move to the next. then at lunch or on the way home, he'd buy a block of lottery tickets with the money. routinely i was the only one who did not participate. routinely he was the one who would shake his head and tsk-tsk my decision, saying i'd be really sorry if they ever won because i'd be the only one left in the office to hold all of these systems afloat. to this i said if they all won, in a year's time i'd be the happiest one of everyone involved. that comment bought me many a debate on the merits and ills of an average person coming into an un-average flood of money.
my belief on the lottery system spread through the office and my lottery-playing co-workers would appear at my cube in twos, threes, and fours to confirm what they heard and question the source. i would confess to the row of bemused expressions that i did believe they would all be miserable if they won the lottery. when pressed on how that could possibly be i would explain. i would single out one of the gawkers asking about their family. parents still living? how many siblings? aunts? uncles? friends? after getting a sense for the inventory of friends and relations i'd ask what their plan for all of them was. they always had a plan which i imagined got drawn up in their forty plus minute commutes home. their presence would gain a beat as they excitedly stepped through the awards each tier of the family would get thinking they were the first to stagger the amounts with such acumen. i'd then move us along saying ...
ok. so you give the sister you don't like so much and her husband fifty grand just like you did for your other siblings and in nine month's they're reporting the t-shirt decal business they invested in went under because there are now printers and special paper that can make decals every bit as good as theirs. but now they have a great new idea and it can't loose but they just need another thirty grand to get it off the ground. what do you say to this? (now some people say they will give them the 30k. when that happens, i bring the bad business duo back in another five months asking for more. and again. and again. eventually everyone says they have to at some point say no.) i agree. you do have to say no. but what do you think that eventual line in the sand will do with your relationship with your sister who you previously had no significant angst with? and then how do you react when your other siblings call and express shock that you wouldn't give her more, and they just had a bad break, and you've got so much, more than you can even use, and it's not like you did anything to earn it, how could you tell your own sister no, how could you be so heartless? then your dad calls. and then your mom. and then what does the next family gathering look like? you pulling up in your fancy car while you're sister couldn't come because she and her obnoxious hubby are getting put out of their duplex because they lost their business just because you wouldn't give them another thirty grand which for anyone else under the picnic gazebo would be like dropping a dollar bill in the turned up hat of a sightless beggar. you're fully convinced it was the right choice. maybe it was the right choice. but do your friends and family agree?
while all of my arguments were based on simple conjecture which were based on scenarios i'd drawn up in my head, after more than a decade of my lottery-conviction, i heard my first bit of first-hand evidence through the aunt of a close friend of mine (and a woman i had socialized with as recently as six months back). four years ago this woman's christmas list was 225 addresses long. then her husband died and she was awarded one point five million dollars. guess how many names were on her christmas list last year, or rather, three years after she was handed one point five millions dollars? when i asked bella this question, she guessed 1,000. i had to tell her the real answer was seven. and then less than three months after the seven-name christmas she took her life with a handgun she had from earlier times.
there's a lot of wisdom packed into that 8 year-old, fifty pound frame
alex grabbed a heavy rain-coat as we were heading out for dinner. i told him to lose the coat as it was nice out. he said he wanted to take it. shrugging my shoulders in a 'whatever' manner i ushered him out the door. after we ate and were about to walk out to the car we found it pouring rain. the only one of us who didn't groan in the doorway was alex, given the raincoat he was pulling on at the sight of the torrent. after racing through the puddled parking lot and piling into the van, marty told alex it was smart of him to bring the coat. to this he said, "well, it rained earlier in the day and when it rains once it can always rain twice. you just never know about the weather."
you may remember when bella took a break from her reading to describe me in my biking shorts as definitely not being eye candy. the next time i passed her geared up for my exercise, she stopped me long enough to say i had to stop walking around in those because i was now giving her "eye cavities". it's most evident they're cute when they're young by design. many wouldn't make it otherwise.
best email exchange from last week came after i botched an online chess move with bookguy. i wrote:
i have made some of the most obtuse moves possible in the latter half of this game. it's almost like i forgot the rules of the game.
and his reply:
i do appreciate all your generosity and maybe if you get your head out of your wife's skirts in the morning before school you could better recall the rules of chess.
obviously in reference to the recent troyscript, thursday morning.
yesterday i talked up a book i recently read. today i'm sharing the best thing i've read on the net in the last four years (the prior favorite read being merlin mann's BETTER essay). below you will find a few excerpts from a speech delivered to a group of first-year west point students by essayist William Deresiewicz.
How do you learn to think? Let's start with how you don't learn to think. A study by a team of researchers at Stanford came out a couple of months ago. The investigators wanted to figure out how today's college students were able to multitask so much more effectively than adults. How do they manage to do it, the researchers asked? The answer, they discovered—and this is by no means what they expected—is that they don't. The enhanced cognitive abilities the investigators expected to find, the mental faculties that enable people to multitask effectively, were simply not there. In other words, people do not multitask effectively. And here's the really surprising finding: the more people multitask, the worse they are, not just at other mental abilities, but at multitasking itself.
One thing that made the study different from others is that the researchers didn't test people's cognitive functions while they were multitasking. They separated the subject group into high multitaskers and low multitaskers and used a different set of tests to measure the kinds of cognitive abilities involved in multitasking. They found that in every case the high multitaskers scored worse. They were worse at distinguishing between relevant and irrelevant information and ignoring the latter. In other words, they were more distractible. They were worse at what you might call "mental filing": keeping information in the right conceptual boxes and being able to retrieve it quickly. In other words, their minds were more disorganized. And they were even worse at the very thing that defines multitasking itself: switching between tasks.
Multitasking, in short, is not only not thinking, it impairs your ability to think. Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it. Not learning other people's ideas, or memorizing a body of information, however much those may sometimes be useful. Developing your own ideas. In short, thinking for yourself. You simply cannot do that in bursts of 20 seconds at a time, constantly interrupted by Facebook messages or Twitter tweets, or fiddling with your iPod, or watching something on YouTube.
I find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is always someone else's; it's always what I've already heard about the subject, always the conventional wisdom. It's only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts of my mind come into play, that I arrive at an original idea. By giving my brain a chance to make associations, draw connections, take me by surprise. And often even that idea doesn't turn out to be very good. I need time to think about it, too, to make mistakes and recognize them, to make false starts and correct them, to outlast my impulses, to defeat my desire to declare the job done and move on to the next thing.
... You do your best thinking by slowing down and concentrating.
Now that's the third time I've used that word, concentrating. Concentrating, focusing. You can just as easily consider this lecture to be about concentration as about solitude. Think about what the word means. It means gathering yourself together into a single point rather than letting yourself be dispersed everywhere into a cloud of electronic and social input. It seems to me that Facebook and Twitter and YouTube—and just so you don't think this is a generational thing, TV and radio and magazines and even newspapers, too—are all ultimately just an elaborate excuse to run away from yourself. To avoid the difficult and troubling questions that being human throws in your way. Am I doing the right thing with my life? Do I believe the things I was taught as a child? What do the words I live by—words like duty, honor, and country—really mean? Am I happy?
...
So it's perfectly natural to have doubts, or questions, or even just difficulties. The question is, what do you do with them? Do you suppress them, do you distract yourself from them, do you pretend they don't exist? Or do you confront them directly, honestly, courageously? If you decide to do so, you will find that the answers to these dilemmas are not to be found on Twitter or Comedy Central or even in The New York Times. They can only be found within—without distractions, without peer pressure, in solitude.
...
These are truly formidable dilemmas, more so than most other people will ever have to face in their lives, let alone when they're 23. The time to start preparing yourself for them is now. And the way to do it is by thinking through these issues for yourself—morality, mortality, honor—so you will have the strength to deal with them when they arise. Waiting until you have to confront them in practice would be like waiting for your first firefight to learn how to shoot your weapon. Once the situation is upon you, it's too late. You have to be prepared in advance. You need to know, already, who you are and what you believe: not what the Army believes, not what your peers believe (that may be exactly the problem), but what you believe.
i know i'm in a scrubby, small camp, but i wish more folks were preaching the gospel of thought.
alex came into pee moments after i stepped out of the shower. we said our good mornings and each went about our ablutions. instead of leaving after washing and drying his hands, he leaned against the sink and watched me, with great curiosity, rub gel into my hair. after a few moments he studiously asked, "why do you put glue in your hair?" without looking away from my task i matter of factly replied, "because that is what you do to broken things alex."
if you gave me three months to come up with a better answer than my from the hip quip, i'm sure i could not.
i may have been the only guy in st louis who was hoping texas would win game seven. my logic, the cardinals got game six, it only seemed fair and just to give the series to the never-won rangers. that way everyone walks away with a positive. but it was not to be. in honor of their effort, allow me to share my all-time favorite texas-related string of words. it is a bit of advice from a texas father to his boy.
Son, it is very rude to ask a man where he is from. If he is from Texas, you will find out, and if he's not, don't embarrass him.
from a 1944 pro-texas booklet called Texas Brags that was put together by a fella named john randolph. i came upon it in a recent new york times magazine.
we went camping again this last weekend. i'll just go ahead and confess that i did blow another pair of boxers out. the equation was too similar (old man, old boxers, missouri heat, and lots of sweat) to perfectly identify the culprit so i'm sticking with thread-bare, decade old boxers not having the same elasticity they once did.
the best line of the weekend was while the kids were asking me to make a fire in the hot morning so they could have smores for breakfast, one of the two dogs at our site attempted to mount the other. as we all glanced at this scene and the dog's owner called their dog off, one of the other dads observing this casually quipped, "looks like desi's looking for smore of that in the morning too." i can't tell you how much i wish i thought of the smores line. sadly, my fumbling that moment is what i'll most remember from the trip.
the best result of the trip was that it didn't hurt to clean my glasses at the end. this would also prove to be good evidence against the "old-man" debate which i'm sure will re-surface sooner or later.
and the very best part of spending time out of doors continues to be the post-camping tick check. i've never had a single one but don't want to let that make us ignore good and proper practices.
anthony was standing in line at school. he reached forward and took something from the boy standing in front of him. the boy started crying. a teacher seeing this approached the boys and told anthony that we don't take things away from our friends. anthony looked at the boy and then back to the teacher and said, "but he's not my friend."
bella and i snuck in our father-daughter day on the last weekday of summer. now that she and alex are going to the same school, and it was alex's first year at the school, bella let him have his day out on the last day of school and said she'd take hers later. later almost didn't happen.
we again went to six flags and then longhorn steakhouse at day's end. my favorite ride was the tidal wave. hers was the tony hawk roller coaster. the best food of the day was the porterhouse, easily, given how famished we were after a day in the ninety degree heat and our sack lunches. the best piece of advice dispensed during the day: always be friendly with bullies but never be their friend. the only problem with the advice was it was bella who dished it to me. we were soaking wet and excitedly walking up to get back on the tidal wave ride. i'm not even sure why the topic came up but she just said it with me trotting behind her and lapping it up like some adolescent fan-boy.
BELLA
always be friendly with bullies but never be their friend.
TROY
always be friendly with bullies but never be their friend? i like that. that's good. where'd you learn that?
BELLA
horse camp.
TROY (contemplatively)
hmm. can you explain why this is true?
BELLA
well you don't want to be their friend because then they will expect you to do bully things with them. and you don't want to be their enemy because then they will bully you. so you just act friendly and all (smiley face) 'hey there' and then they'll leave you alone.
you would think on a nine hour father-daughter day outing, the more mature, more experienced, more educated father might be the one delivering sage counsel to the child but i can't honestly be expected to compete with tutelage as insightful as that, can i?
i'm the better for the day. i only hope bella benefitted and enjoyed her time a fraction as much.
i was walking to my office when bella, who was using marty's computer, stopped me. she said i had to see this. she said it was so awesome. i pulled up a chair and sat next to her. she had a youtube video cocked and ready. the moment i was situated and looked at the screen, she hit play. three seconds into the video she paused it, turned to me and launched into a verbal dissertation that went somet...
people never knew the fountain of youth was actually just a pond, and in their own back yard
saturday bella ambled down for breakfast around 10:20 in the morning. she took her spot at the breakfast bar and professed to me, "i like sleeping late, reading for an hour and then eating breakfast five minutes before its lunchtime."
after she finished her proclamation, i stopped what i was doing to look at her. she could have passed for a preacher, prophet, philosopher, and truck driver, or all of them wrapped up into one which obviously looked peculiar coming from a well-rested, and mid-summer sated nine year old girl wearing pink pajamas with prancing horses on them.
after a long family road trip and a week in a space that is not our home, the thing i found most surprising from this year's trip is how well our kids travel. they fare far better than i did as at their age(s) and i can't help but think they're better passengers than the seven kids packed into marty's family's wood-paneled station wagon, cage-match style. marty and i tried to dissect what it was that made our ilk so amenable to repeated twelve hour stretches in the car. i suggested that it was because they didn't routinely watch tv so their stimulus requirements haven't been unfairly "adjusted" thus making the notion of sitting in car for hours and hours untenable (we don't have a tv in our home so we obviously don't have one in our car, portable or otherwise).
but then there is also all the preliminary work marty does up front with their bins. here she goes out and buys a lot of dime store trinkets and activity books and travel games before the trip. she then sets each kid up with a bin or backpack of stuff they can do and throughout the trip sneaks new things into their stashes. although the older kids are now wise to her game and ask before we even leave if they can have a new thing now and if not when. also, with each new thing they get, alex is quick to ask if there are more new things or if the new thing supply has been depleted. hearing there might be another bauble or two in the wings creates a christmas eve like jittery anticipation.
this year i did something new and bought one thing to be worked into each kid's rotation. the one that got the most play was a license plate tracker game. it was a sturdy wooden plaque with the map of the us. on top of each state was a small block of wood that could be flipped. to start, you flip all the states to a text description of the state and its capital (after the kids learn the states, there is also a blank side option so you have to pick/find the state as well). when you see a car with a plate from that state, you call it out and whoever has the board will find the state, quiz the car on the capital and then flip it over, revealing a graphical representation of the state's license plate. the state capitals is something i never knew and would like to so i thought this would be a good way for me (and inadvertently my children) to learn them. it proved to be a great distraction and added a sporting element to our car time.
the other game i got for the trip and liked was a hangman game by the same company who made the license plate game, melissa and doug. although we only played a few actual games of hangman on it, it was mostly used by anthony to practice writing letters in the dry-erase part. what he would do is flip all the letters and body parts face down and then randomly turn the letters over one at a time. after flipping a letter he would draw it with the pen, and then erase it with his finger and go onto the next. i never quite figured out what criteria he used for flipping the body parts but there was some sort of logic at play in his head. in testament of how effective this was, before the trip anthony couldn't write a single letter, aside from the occasional, incidental capital i, and now the dude has written the entire alphabet many times, and with startling improvement.
another thing marty added this year, which i think started last year, was the kids get to pick one thing out at every gas stop. while the initial downside is it adds a small expense to the bottom line, the great upside is that they no longer clamor for mcdonalds which we only would ever eat at on vacation but have learned that they just want the toys and never eat more than six bites of the food and wind up starving again within the hour. and i've come to a point in my life where i can no longer stomach mcdonalds at all. and back in my work-traveling days, because of routine twenty minute lunches, there would be times i'd eat mcdonalds every day of the week, multiple weeks in a row ... and even liked it fine. but the best thing about the gas station allowance is watching the sorts of things the kids pick, the regrets they have about lesser picks, and how their choices fluctuate, sometimes wildly, seeing everything from bubble gum tape to a bottle of gatorade. the child's mind is a fascinating thing to watch, especially when it is confronted with selecting a single item in a labyrinth of florescent-lit of shiny, shrink-wrapped treats and eats.
i was kicked off AOL 32 hours after opening the account
when my boss interviews technology people, there is a question he likes to ask towards the end of an interview. if the conversation is going well and he's liking the candidate, he will ask them, "what is the most fun you've ever had with a computer?" then after a pregnant pause and gauging their initial reaction to the question, he adds, "that you can talk about in a job interview."
one of my personal hobbies is collecting thoughtful thoughts. i don't care what the focus or the nature of the thought is, only that it was born out of thoughtfulness. this interview question is one of my collection favorites.
the fourth guy to make me think getting old just might be fun
i recently overheard a story in the office about a young woman who had just earned her phD and was getting ready to embark on her first job. she was understandably nervous about the transition from student to professor and consulted one of her mentors for advice. he was one of the older faculty members on staff and very near retirement. when this skittish girl in her mid-twenties came to him for counsel he said to her ...
to be a college professor you just need to remember two things: make sure you always have a box of kleenex in your office and never scratch your balls with chalk in your hand.
has a young woman entering professional adulthood ever received more inspired advice? i confidently think not.
i imagine it feels good when the work starts paying off
the Liefer family of five were walking along. one of the younger children did something that caused a parent to chastise them. the child resisted the parent, asking why they couldn't do what they wanted to do. the parent stalled, unable to verbalize the reason. the first parent looked to the second parent for help. before either parent could say why they wanted the behavior to stop, their oldest child, a girl of ten, interrupted the process saying, "you can't do it sam because it's not the Liefer way".
alex had some friends over to the house and we were playing ogre and chase and rough-housing. at one point in the mayhem, one of alex's friends stopped his play, turned to the side protectively and said with a serious urgency to one of the other boys:
watch out, you almost hit my tenders.
that is probably the most accurate, heartfelt expression i've ever heard for a guy's junk, like, ever.
this year i did something new and bought one thing to be worked into each kid's rotation. the one that got the most play was a license plate tracker game. it was a sturdy wooden plaque with the map of the us. on top of each state was a small block of wood that could be flipped. to start, you flip all the states to a text description of the state and its capital (after the kids learn the states, there is also a blank side option so you have to pick/find the state as well). when you see a car with a plate from that state, you call it out and whoever has the board will find the state, quiz the car on the capital and then flip it over, revealing a graphical representation of the state's license plate. the state capitals is something i never knew and would like to so i thought this would be a good way for me (and inadvertently my children) to learn them. it proved to be a great distraction and added a sporting element to our car time.
the other game i got for the trip and liked was a hangman game by the same company who made the license plate game, melissa and doug. although we only played a few actual games of hangman on it, it was mostly used by anthony to practice writing letters in the dry-erase part. what he would do is flip all the letters and body parts face down and then randomly turn the letters over one at a time. after flipping a letter he would draw it with the pen, and then erase it with his finger and go onto the next. i never quite figured out what criteria he used for flipping the body parts but there was some sort of logic at play in his head. in testament of how effective this was, before the trip anthony couldn't write a single letter, aside from the occasional, incidental capital i, and now the dude has written the entire alphabet many times, and with startling improvement.