Matthew Dicks's Blog, page 153

Feeling good about cats

I believe in being kind to yourself.

Celebrating achievements.
Honoring sacrifices.
Telling yourself that you’ve done a great job.

When I see our boys, Tobi and Pluto, sitting together like this, I give myself an enormous pat on the back. I remind myself of how much good we have done for this world.

Tobi and Pluto are brothers who emigrated from Egypt and now share a home with us.

Tobi was very ill when he was born and nearly died more than once. In the words of his Egyptian kitty fairy godmothers, Tobi was “saved from the hug of death” at least two times.

They really didn’t think he would survive.

Pluto actually required CPR two years ago to restore his life when stones in his urethra elevated his potassium levels and stopped his heart. In order to prevent this from happening again, Pluto underwent the very expensive, feline version of gender reassignment surgery.

Two brothers, whose mother was rescued from the streets of Cairo, born in a shelter half a world away, now living with human beings who love them dearly, and who love us just as much.

If you’ve ever taken in a rescue pet like our boys, pause for a moment and congratulate yourself on bringing an astounding amount of happiness and joy to this world. Credit yourself for doing something incredibly righteous and good. Feel great knowing you have offered safety and bliss to your small, furry friends.

The lives of Tobi and Pluto would’ve been very different had someone not rescued their mother from the streets and found these two boys a loving home in America.

I can’t begin to imagine what their lives might’ve been like. Frankly, I don’t want to imagine. I love them too much to even begin to ponder that fate.

Instead, I remind myself of how much good we’ve done taking these wonderful brothers into our home and making them a part of our family.

Celebrate your achievements.
Honor your sacrifices.
Tell yourself that’s you’ve done a great job.

I do so every time I see our happy, healthy, mischievous cats enjoying their day.

Be kind to yourself and do the same.

A different way of scoring

I played golf with Charlie on Sunday. A glorious afternoon as always.

This is Charlie’s first season of golf, and for the first time, he decided to score his round.

“I’m putting my name on the scorecard,” he declared.

When I returned to the cart a few minutes later to record my bogie for the first hole, I noticed Charlie’s score:

A smiley face.

He explained that he was pleased with his first hole. It probably took him a dozen shots to put the ball in the hole, but he only putted three times and had a nice 7-iron out of the rough.

So a smiley face.

It’s not how I would ever score a round of golf. My relentless pursuit of improvement and a need for scores to determine success or failure, numbers mean a lot to me in golf.

How far did I hit that drive?
How close did I land that chip?
How many total putts did I have in a given round?
What was my final score?

I treat so many things the same way:

Judges’ scores in Moth storytelling competitions. Miles traveled and calories burned while riding the bike. Minutes spent grocery shopping or showering.

I’m in a constant pursuit of data. Always looking for personal bests. Constantly seeking an edge.

But Charlie’s scoring system was a good reminder for me:

Sometimes we don’t need to consume ourselves with numbers and data. The relentless pursuit of excellence isn’t always required. It’s okay to do something without affixing a final tally to the result.

It might be better to occasionally put aside the scorecard and simply enjoy the moment, regardless of how well we’re doing. Maybe we could treat ourselves with a little more kindness and generosity. Be a little gentler with our souls.

I can’t actually imagine doing any of this, but maybe if I spend enough time with Charlie, I can learn to do so.

I didn’t call him a thin-skinned snowflake

I’m pumping gas. I’m wearing a mask because I put it on to use the restroom and didn’t take it off.

I forgot it was even there.

The man at next pump looks over and asks, “Why are you wearing a mask?”

He sounds aggressive. No curiosity in his tone. More of a challenge.

So many responses run through my mind. Good ones, too. Sharp, biting retorts. Amusing barbs. But keeping Elysha in mind, and specifically her request that I avoid conflicts with strangers, the response I choose is this:

“I’m trying to trigger thin-skinned snowflakes.”

Please note:

I didn’t call the man a thin-skinned snowflake. I merely stated that I was wearing the mask to trigger people who fit that description. If he felt triggered, that was on him.

I thought it was a fairly diplomatic response.

I also didn’t start this. He engaged me.

The man stares at me for a long second. I assume he’s trying to figure out if I just called him a thin-skinned snowflake.

Had he dared to ask, I would’ve said, “Only if my mask triggered you.”

Sadly, he returns his gaze to the pump.

When I’m back in my car, I describe the encounter to Elysha via text message.

Her response:

“Please try not to get punched or worse.”

I’m surprised. I text back:

“I thought my response was good. Didn’t actually call him a name. I left it up to him. I thought you’d be happy.”

Her response:

“I’m happy.”

I don’t believe her.

She later confirms that this assumption was correct.

Still, I think this was a considerable improvement from what I might’ve said even six months ago.

Administrators should also be teachers.

The problem with educational leadership is this:

Every step on the career ladder takes a person farther and farther away from students.

If you want a higher salary, greater responsibility, an elevated title, and everything else that comes with leading a school or a school district, you must spend your time primarily in the company of adults.

The higher you climb, the greater the distance from the individuals who matter the most:

Kids.

As students change, pedagogy evolves, and our communities undergo enormous economic, cultural, and sociological changes, administrators observe from afar.

They stop teaching.

In some cases, they stop teaching for decades, yet they continue to make decisions that impact the classroom in profound ways. They assess teacher performance. Make critical curricular decisions. Determine the direction of their school.

It’s never made a lick of sense to me.

I thought the same thing while managing McDonald’s restaurants. In order to climb that corporate ladder, you had to move farther and farther away from the profit centers of the company:

The restaurants.

Also never made a lick of sense to me.

This is not to say that school administrators don’t perform well despite their distances from students. I’ve known many administrators who lead with expertise, integrity, empathy, and ingenuity. I’ve also known some who work hard to keep in touch with students by involving themselves in student government, athletics, the theater, and more.

I have worked for some extraordinary leaders in my 23 years of teaching. Truly gifted and inspiring people.

But could they have been even better had they remained a little closer to students? Stayed in better touch with the realities of the classroom? Kept one foot in the trenches?

I think maybe so.

Last week, I was consulting with schools in San Fransisco and found myself working with a district that requires all administrators to teach in the classroom for at least one hour each week and monitor at least one recess or lunch period every week, without exception.

Brilliant.

Every school district should do this.

I suspect that the information gleaned from preparing and teaching lessons and monitoring children in less structured environments would guide their leadership decisions in profound ways.

I’m sure the argument would be made that administrators are too busy to surrender two hours of their week to this exercise, but that, of course, is ridiculous.

The investment in time would pay off enormously, but more important, no administrator’s time is too precious to spend a couple hours per week with kids.

Masked all day. No so bad.

On Wednesday, I was trapped in a seemingly endless TSA bubble – airport and airplane – for 19 consecutive hours.

On Friday, I was trapped again for 16 consecutive hours.

Friday’s bubble from hell included numerous delays, an aborted landing seconds before touching down, a broken jetway that trapped us on the plane for an extra 30 minutes, and an all-out sprint across the Denver airport, making my connecting flight by the skin of my teeth only to sit on the runway for an hour while waiting for thunderstorms to pass.

Those were two very long days.

But here’s the thing:

Other than the occasional meal, I was masked for the entire time. Hour upon hour upon hour of wearing a mask.

It wasn’t great, but it wasn’t all that bad, either.

If you’re refusing to wear a mask in locations that require you to be masked, or even if you’re complaining about recent mask mandates in response to the Delta variant and rising infection rates and hospitalizations, grow up.

Shut up.

Find some goddamn mettle.

Think about someone other than yourself.

Be better.

Wearing a mask is annoying and inconvenient, but it’s hardly a sacrifice.

My father was drafted and fought in Vietnam.

My grandfather fought the Nazis in Europe.

I don a mask to prevent the spread of a disease that has killed twice as many Americans as World War II and Vietnam combined.

I’m hardly doing anything, and I’m helping to save lives.

If you find wearing a mask too onerous, too upsetting, too irritating, or too restrictive, please take a long, hard look in the mirror and ask yourself how you ended up so selfish, so weak, so callous, and so unpatriotic.

Then fix it. Be better for your own sake and for the sake of your community and your country.

The stuff you can’t see

I have seen one thousand red tailed hawks in my life. They soar overhead as I play golf, monitor students  at recess, and play in the backyard with my kids. If you live in New England, chances are that a red tailed hawk is flying nearby.

Yet I had no idea that as they soar overhead, they are able to keep their heads perfectly still in order to improve their ability to find prey, as this 2021 Audubon Photography Award winning video remarkably shows.

All these years, red tailed hawks have been flying overhead, staring down at me from eyes that were remarkably still despite the movement of the rest of their body.

Crazy. Right?

You can stare at a bird overhead for all your life and have no idea what’s really going on.

It’s a reminder of something I think about all the time:

We just don’t know what we don’t know.

A little less certainty and a little more curiosity is a good thing.

He’s killing me

Kayaking with Charlie earlier this week, we passed by a dead fish floating on the water.

Charlie stopped paddling, looked across the water at me, and said, “Death is very peaceful, but the moment of death… that will not be peaceful.”

It’s never great when your son somehow finds the single shard of existential glass most capable of piercing my soul.

The boy’s waters run deep. Too damn deep.

A good bad day

Rough day.

Awoke at 3:30 AM catch a 6:00 AM flight to San Fransisco via Detroit. My plan was to land in San Fransisco at 10:30 AM and spend the day touring the city before working the next day with a client.

I checked my phone as I popped out of bed. A text message indicated that my flight had been delayed. Then it was delayed again and again.

Long story short: I sat in Bradley International Airport from 7:00 AM until 10:00 AM. Then I flew to Detroit and enjoyed an 8 hour layover before taking off to San Fransisco at 8:00 PM. I landed in San Fransisco at 11:00 PM thanks to the time change, waiting 45 minutes for an Uber, and finally got to bed well after 1:00 AM Pacific time.

4:00 AM Eastern time.

I was awake for nearly 24 hours.

Then I awoke four hours later at 6:00 AM for a day of consulting.

Oh, and the space bar on my laptop stopped working about five minutes after arriving at the airport.

Instead of a glorious day and night in San Fransisco, I spent the majority of it in the Detroit airport and on airplanes.

But relentless positivity saved the day.

I saw someone reading “Twenty-one Truths About Love” in Bradley International Airport. My first “in the wild” airport sighting of one of my books. Surprisingly exciting.I was upgraded to first class on both flights for free.I have a backup laptop ready at all times, so thanks to the third delay of my flight, Elysha was able to drive the 22 minutes to the airport and drop it off for me. My regular monthly maintenance of my backup laptop saved me once again.The Detroit airport features live music all day long. Two pianos. A trumpet player. A folk singer with an acoustic guitar.I completed an enormous amount of work.I found myself in the midst of a family feud at one point, with half a dozen people on either side of me shouting at one another in something other than English while their dog took up a position between my feet and barked (also not in English). Not exactly lovely, but interesting.I scheduled a tee time for Sunday.I sent a video to Charlie that featured a moving walkway, a moving tram, and a moving plane all in one shot.Facetime, a technological development that seemed impossible when I was a child, allowed me to see and speak to Elysha and the kids. The kids are very cute. Elysha is very beautiful. Lucky me.About an hour before boarding, I watched a man drop to one knee in the middle of the airport and propose to a woman. She said yes. About two dozen people – myself included – cheered. I channeled my inner Elysha Dicks and offered to takes some photos with their phone.Someone in San Fransisco was willing to pay my speaking fee plus all travel expenses for me to travel 3,000 miles to speak to them about storytelling, communication strategies, and culture building. Lucky me.My Uber driver was the happiest driver I have ever met, telling me everything about the city and laughing constantly.

A long time ago, a teacher told me that “A positive mental attitude is your key to success.” That stuck, and it’s been one of half a dozen mantras that echo in my mind all the time.

It’s true.

Relentless positivity, fueled on this day by perceptive. A lost day of travel is not ideal, but it had some silver linings, too. You just need to look for them.

Ask questions.

I was speaking to the person cutting my hair yesterday. Both of us were masked even though both of us are also vaccinated. As she began to cut, we  lamented the apparent step backwards our country has taken thanks to the Delta variant. “If everyone who could get vaccinated would get vaccinated,” I said. “We would be in such a better place.” She paused. Seemed to measure her words. Then she said, “Yeah, but even though I’m vaccinated, I worry. Someone told me that the government is injecting microchips into our blood with the vaccines, and I think there are serious concerns about fertility. I had my babies already, but what about young women?” I wanted to pounce. Debunk and disassemble every ridiculous conspiracy theory just uttered. Instead, I decided to ask a lot of questions. I’ve learned that instead of berating people like her, it’s best to ask questions and force them to explain themselves if you hope to genuinely change their mind. Force them to probe their thinking and confront the ridiculousness head-on.  “Where did you hear that?” I asked. “A friend,” she said. “On Facebook, I think.” “Is your friend a doctor?” I asked. “No.” “Does your friend have any medical training or background in virology or biotech?” She laughed. “Not at all.” “Have you heard about the Russian and Chinese disinformation campaigns designed to slow our vaccination rates and further divide us?” “No,” she said, sounding a little alarmed. To her credit, she stuck with me as I asked question after question after question until I finally dared to offer a suggestion: “Here is what I suggest:  Believe nothing unless it comes from your doctor. Anyone can say anything on the internet. Anyone can mistakenly believe anything in the internet. Anyone can repeat anything on the internet. Don’t try to parse the data. Don’t try to follow the science. Just listen to your doctor.  Your mom listened to the doctor and got you vaccinated as a baby. My mom listened to the doctor and got me vaccinated as a baby, too. Thank goodness. No measles. No polio. No hepatitis. Now it’s our turn to listen to the doctor.  Okay?” “Okay,” she said, and I believed her. She’s already vaccinated, so I didn’t add to the army of the vaccinated, but she’s also chatting with more than two dozen clients every day. The last thing I want is for her to be talking about microchips and fertility issues with her clients. I hated asking questions. My instinct is to pounce. Bring out all of my training in debate and all of my love for conflict and go to work. But it turns out that attacking people, making them feel stupid, and telling them that they’re wrong is not an effective way to change a mind. It feels good, but it’s not going to change hearts and minds.   Asking questions may not work either, but it’s been proven to be more effective than berating and belittling. You need someone intelligent enough, wise enough, and brave enough to examine their own beliefs absent the power structures that put those beliefs in place.  I also got lucky. I was the only client in the salon at the time. Had other clients been siting in the chairs adjacent to me or another hair dresser been on duty, that conversation might not have happened.  I was talking to the right person in the right place at the right time.  But when you find someone like this – a non-ideologue who can question assumptions and challenge convention – progress can be made.   

Best banana idea since the slipping on the banana peel trick

Not only has South Korea handled the pandemic far better than the United States:

40.69 COVID-19 deaths per million compared to the 861.71 in the United States2,104 total deaths in South Korea versus 613,679 in the United States

… but they also kick ass in the banana department, too.

Brilliant. Right?