Matthew Dicks's Blog, page 286

Unfair assumption #29: Football fans are more effective in emergencies

As we left the house last night, our 19 year-old babysitter was settling in to watch the end of the Atlanta Falcons - Seattle Seahawks playoff game.

She'd been watching the first half of the game at home before coming over.   

When I arrived home from the show five hours later, she was sitting in the living room, watching the Patriots - Texans playoff game. She was kind enough to turn the game off as I entered the house so I could watch it on tape delay (after ensuring that her father was recording it at home as well), but still, she was watching intently when I walked in the door.

Just so we are clear: She watched NFL football on her own for almost the entire time that I was gone.

I know it's entirely unfair to assume anything based upon her viewing preferences, but if the house suddenly caught fire, a bear clawed its way into our home, or the Russians invaded our town Red Dawn style, I can't help but think that this 19 year-old woman would handle the situation with ease.

Or at least more competently than the babysitter who spends the evening watching the Kardashians or The Family Feud.  

An unfair assumption to be sure, but it's a gut feeling that I can't help but think is at least a little bit true.  

When I explained my assumption to Elysha, she informed me that our babysitter is also attending Harvard University and is home on break.

Perhaps my gut instincts are more accurate than previously thought. 

Springsteen on parents (and perhaps a path to my salvation)

“We honor our parents by carrying their best forward and laying the rest down. By fighting and taming the demons that laid them low and now reside in us. It’s all we can do, if we’re lucky. ”

— Bruce Springsteen

I have walked for a long time in the shadow of parents whose decisions I could not understand. Decisions that still hurt me to this day.  

I have been unable to find the forgiveness required to put the past behind me and move forward. Perhaps I never will.

But these words have perhaps shown me a path to that forgiveness. A means by which I can step outside that shadow and find some light.  Whether I can ever take those steps is still uncertain, but for the first time in my life, I feel like I can see the way. 

The best thing about my wife's family might surprise you (but shouldn't)

There's many things I love about the family that I have married into. 

Their absolute acceptance of me despite our many differencesTheir support and encouragement of my teaching, writing, and performing career Their unbridled love for my children

There are also some quirky aspects of the family that I have grown to adore.

Their insistence of a full account of every one of my medical or proposed medical procedures (and their subsequent demands for a fourth opinion).Their reverence for the morning-after-the-visit breakfast of bagels and locks (necessitating an overnight stay when I could've just as easily driven home the night before).   Their need for gifts to be opened as absolutely soon as possible (once before I even removed my coat).

But the thing that appreciate about them most is perhaps this:

No one in my wife's family has ever proposed that we run a 5K on a holiday.

No Turkey Trots. No Ugly Sweater Runs. No Snowflake Shuffles. No Jingle Bell Jogs. No "Ringing in the New Year" Runs.   

I can't begin to imagine the agony and ruination of the poor soul who marries into a family who thinks that they best way to spend a Thanksgiving or Christmas or New Year's Day morning is to drag their asses to some arbitrary starting line in the freezing cold to run alongside a bunch of equally brain damaged lunatics.

Sometimes it's the little things that matter most. 

Little Guy Defeats Big Guy

It's sometimes hard to imagine but important to know that the little guy is perfectly capable of defeating the big guy, as improbable as that may seem. 

When it doubt, remember this:

Spare your parental advice unless you know how to give parental advice

If you're a parent of a child of any age, I would like to suggest that before you dispense with any parental advice to fellow parents, you carefully consider if you're qualified.   

Much of the advice that I am offered or overhear has one or two problems:

It presents a bleak future. It's often inaccurately bleak. 

Rather than talking about the joys that come with raising a child, so many parents seem hell-bent on assuring anyone who will listen that the diapers will be endless, the costs will only rise, the middle school years will be torturous, the high school years tumultuous, and you will be exhausted at all times. There will be talk of cracked nipples, late-night feedings, vomit and snot, never-ending carpools, and the inability to ever see a movie in a theater again. 

It's a lousy way to represent parenting to someone whose children are younger than yours or whose child has yet to be born.

No, lousy is not the word. It's a selfish and ignorant way to present parenting. It's despicable.  

Even if it were all true, it's still a rotten thing to do.

But it's also so often an inaccurate depiction of parenting, for one of two reasons:

1. It suffers from human being's tendency to remember the bad and forget the good. You go on a weeklong vacation to Bermuda and come home talking about the three hours spent on the runway when the plane needed repair or the lost luggage or the two days of endless rain, and you fail to mention (and sometimes fail to even remember) the five or six perfect days of sun and fun. 

The same thing happens with parenting. You stare into your baby's eyes and experience a love that you have never felt before in all your life. You rock your baby in your arms and become convinced that you could remain in this chair with your baby forever. You understand the meaning of bliss for the first time in your life.

Six hours later, that same baby vomits all over you. When someone asks the next day for parenting advice, you talk about cleaning up vomit instead of love.

I hear parents do this all the time. It's awful and unkind and unfair.  

2. The advice is also wildly inaccurate because parents assume that their experience will be everyone else's experience, when this is almost never the case. Every parent and every child is wildly different from the next. If every input is different, how could the output possibly be the same?

I was told by many friends, for example, that my children would invariably sleep in my bed for a sizable portion of their young lives, whether I liked it or not. I was told that it would be impossible for me to keep them off of my pillows. One of my friends became angry with me when I suggested that perhaps he didn't need to be sleeping in his kids' beds more than his own.

"You just wait and see," he said. "It isn't as easy as you think!" 

Today my kids are seven and four years-old, and other than about half-a-dozen late night bad dreams, neither child has ever slept in our bed. All of the doomsday advice that I received about sleeping - from many apparently well-meaning parents - was nonsense.

These inaccurate, self-assured descriptions of parenting are endless. 

I listen to the parents of teenagers warn the parents of infants about the hazards of social media, failing to realize that social media will be entirely different and probably unrecognizable in ten years.

I listen to them warn about nightly homework battles and restaurant temper tantrums and sullen. silent teenage boys. I hear about the pressures of high school and the ubiquity of drugs and alcohol and the battles with teachers over this and that.

I don't doubt that these things happen. But they don't always happen. Just because they happened to you doesn't mean they will happen to anyone else.

As a teacher for almost 20 years, it has become abundantly clear to me that children come in a multitude of varieties, and although the notion that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree is sometimes true, it's also true that parents and kids can also vary in surprising ways. The most capable, competent, consistent parent can raise the most challenging child, and the most ineffective, uninformed, inconsistent parent can raise the most respectful, responsible child ever.  

To think that your experience with your child will be like another parent's experience with another child is ridiculous. 

So if you want to give parents advice, here is what I suggest:

Be positive. When asked for general advice, I often start by telling parents that parenting is better than most people say or believe. I tell them to remember that whatever their child is doing to make them crazy is probably temporary. It will eventually be replaced by something equaling annoying, but children's behaviors tend to change rapidly. Don't think that anything is forever.  

I tell them to avoid the perils of the false threats. If you tell your child that you are going to do something, do it every time no matter what. Don't make promises you can't keep. 

I tell them to take as many photos as possible. Write down the hilarious and clever things that their children say when they are young. Drop everything and play with them whenever you can and every time they ask. I tell them to smell their child's hair and pick them up as often as possible while they still can. I tell them to invest in a self-rocking cradle and to remember that making mistakes is normal. It's exceptionally hard to break a child.

I don't tell them about the difficult times unless they ask, and even then, I try to keep it positive if possible.

Yes, my son spent two years biting Elysha, but eventually it stopped. And I was kind of jealous he only bit me once.

Yes, my daughter still won't eat a chicken nugget or any leafy vegetable, but she's growing like a week and as strong as a bull. She'll find her way.    

And yes, the two people in the world who I want to see more than anyone else - even when they are acting like rotten little brats - are my kids. I love them in a way I didn't think possible. It's glorious.

And yes, we're incredibly busy today. Hardly a free moment. But I put myself through college - a double major - while working 40-60 hours a week managing a fast food restaurant. I was once homeless and in jail. Tried for a crime I didn't commit. 

Busy? Sure. But this parenting thing is a hell of a lot more fun than anything I've ever done before. I'll take as much of it as I can get. 

This is what I tell parents. It's what you should tell parents, too.  

Speak about the joy. The laughter. The love.

If you have to speak of the vomit or the diapers or college tuition, find a way to be positive.

Either that or keep your mouth shut. 

On rare and special occasions, darkness can breed such light. This is one such occasion.

It's so uncommon for darkness to bring such light into the world, but I think this Volvo commercial does exactly that. 

I laughed out loud at this commercial, which is saying a lot. 

How many phone numbers do you know?

The ubiquity of cell phones have caused people to stop memorizing phone numbers. Scroll through a list of names or start typing their first name and you can be calling a person in seconds. 

Many of my students don't know a single phone number save the landline at their home (if they even have a landline). In fact, as part of a basic skills test that I give kids every year, I insist on having them learn a back-up phone number in addition to their parent's number.

It led me to wonder what phone numbers I still know or can recall. There was a time when I knew the phone numbers of most of my friends and many of my family members. Dozens, I'd guess. Today there aren't nearly as many, and most of them are vestiges from a time before cell phones. 

The phone number attached to my childhood home (defunct)The phone number attached to my first apartment in Attleboro, MA (defunct)The phone number of the Milford, MA McDonald's where I once worked (still in operation) The home phone number of my best friend's parents in Milford, MA (still in operation)The phone number attached to my first apartment in Connecticut (defunct)The phone number attached to my first home in Connecticut (defunct)The phone number of the Hartford, CT McDonald's where I once worked (still in operation)My father's phone number (still in operation)My friend Jeff's cellular phone number, memorized only because I use his name and phone number when renting golf carts in the event I don't return one someday (still in operation) My wife's cellular phone number (though it occasionally slips from my mind) (still in operation)Our current landline (unfortunately still in operation)

Not many. 

I don't even include my own cellular number on the list because I often have to look it up. 

When I tell my students that I once had dozens of phone numbers memorized (as a means of berating them when they don't memorize their multiplication facts), they find this incomprehensible. 

Dozens of seven-digit combinations? They can't believe it. 

I almost can't believe it, either. 

The countdown begins...

In his first post-election interview with The New York Times, actor Alec Baldwin said that despite his contentious relationship with the president-elect, he does not "hate" Donald Trump.

“I’m a performer, an actor that’s here doing a show. It’s a great part," Baldwin said of his portrayal of Trump on Saturday Night Live. "I don’t hate him. I want him to enjoy his life. I just want him to not be the president of the United States — as quickly as possible.”

Baldwin added on Twitter, "We are not far from the day when the most reviled candidate in our history will become President. Unwanted by a significant majority of of voters. A man who has projected little other than an empty braggadocio and synthetic rhetoric about both his qualifications and plans, but Inauguration Day means the beginning of the countdown to when he will be gone. And he will be gone. January 20. The countdown begins." 

I like this sentiment a lot. 

This correction could only be found in a New York Times wedding announcement

I'm not a fan of the New York Times wedding announcements.

Based upon some number crunching by The Atlantic, it's clear that these announcements amount  to lists of white people who graduated from Ivy League schools, work as Congressional staffers, and/or work as elite attorneys.

Not exactly scintillating reading.

Not exactly folks in need of any more attention than they're already received in life.

There's actually a website designed to a searchable database of nearly 60,000 NYT wedding announcements from 1981 through 2016 that allowed you to plot n-gram frequency and visualize trends across 30+ years of nuptials.

The website creator's goal: The New York Times’s wedding section is a perfect natural experiment designed to answer the question: What do the world’s most self-important people think is important?

All you have to do is watch how phrases like "Prospect Park," "magna cum laude", "hedge fund," and "met at Harvard, Yale or Princeton" have soared in popularity in the last 10-20 years to know who you are dealing with in these announcements.

While this correction from an October wedding announcement is certainly not indicative of every New York Times wedding announcement, I suspect that it could only happen in a New York Times engagement announcement.

Best introduction ever

I find myself speaking on stages quite often these days. Prior to taking the stage, I am often introduced by a host of some sort, and the introductions are often quite lovely. Kind words, generous anecdotes, and long lists of accomplishments.

It's great to hear someone speak so highly about you in such a public way, but it can also be a little daunting. It sets a very high bar for my performance and raises expectations considerably.  

Sometimes a low bar is a very good thing. 

The best introduction I have ever received was for a TED Talk last year. A couple minutes before taking the stage, the emcee asked me how I wanted to be introduced. I said, "How about telling them that I'm one step above an idiot? Let's set a low bar."

I never thought she would listen to me. She had my bio in hand. But as she took the stage to introduce me, she said, "Our next speaker is Matthew Dicks. He describes himself as one step above an idiot."

It was perfect.

As I walked over to that classic TED red circle, the audience was already laughing. I had made them laugh without saying a word.

I had also demonstrated a combination of self deprecation and confidence that I know is appealing to most people.

Best of all, her introduction set a low bar. Rather than the bestselling novelist who has won 28 Moth StorySLAMs and was once named Teacher of the Year, I was just a regular guy trying to do a good job. 

My wife and in-laws were in the audience that day, and they questioned my choice of introduction, and rightfully so. When you love someone, you don't love hearing them referred to as "one step above an idiot," and it's probably not an introduction I can get away with again.

But for that one day, I couldn't imagine a better way to take the stage.