Matthew Dicks's Blog, page 333

I have seen the devil, and he looks something like this.

You probably thought the devil looks something like this:

Wrong. I have seen the devil, and he looks a lot more like this: 

For the record, I don't actually believe that the devil exists at all.

Unless the machines rise up and take over the world. If so, then yes, the Ecolog 590D and the Kesla 28RH might as well be the devil. 

Boy vs. Girl: Episode 3 - Gender-Neutral Bathrooms, Salutations, and Bathing Suit Bottoms

Episode 3 of Boy Vs. Girl, our podcast about gender and gender stereotypes, dropped today. Listen to Rachel and I discuss the problems with gender neutral bathroom, the need to change female salutations, and the real reasons why women wear form-fitting bathing suit bottoms and men do not.

If you've missed any of our previous episodes, you can find them here. 

You can subscribe to Boy vs. Girl in iTunes or wherever you listen to your podcasts or listen below in Soundcloud.

If you like what you hear, please consider leaving us a review in iTunes. Reviews help listeners find the podcast, and the more listeners we have, the more likely Rachel and I will become ridiculously wealthy and be able to spend our days lounging on a Tahitian beach. 

Two death bed mysteries and one piece of death bed advice

Why do we climb into bed at night but lie on our death bed? 

Strange. Right?

Speaking on death beds, why do so many people die in the absence of music? 

I have no intention of ever dying, but if I was ever lying on my death bed (merely hypothetical), there would be music playing at all times:

Springsteen. The Beatles. The Who. Van Morrison. The '80's metal bands of my youth.

Why die listening to the beeps and whirs of medical machinery or the hum of passing traffic? Give me Thunder Road, The Bright Side of the Road, and Paradise City.

I'd go out listening to the stuff that I love. You should, too. 

7 more ways that saboteurs attempt to destroy workplace productivity

Last week I wrote about the myriad of ways that productivity is destroyed at the workplace - both intentionally via an OSS manual from World War II as well as my own observations.

Reader Anne McGrath - who used to consult with non profit groups and now does organizational assessments, offered these additions to the list that I thought were well worth sharing. 

Assume no one has ever attempted to do what you’re trying to do, and start from scratch.Hide mistakes along the way and don’t bother collecting or sharing ideas for your best-practices or lessons-learned folder.  Spend no time identifying & recruiting effective partners or participants for your project, just invite anyone and everyone, regardless of what they’d bring to the table.Have murky or never discussed vision, goals, purpose and values. Assume everyone has the same identical end goal in mind.Don’t evaluate leadership capacity. Just use the leader you’ve always used for every project.Don’t engage the people you are trying to help.  For example, If in a school, leave students out of the equation re: all decisions that will directly impact their lives.  End meetings with no clear action plan for things to accomplish and bring back for next meeting. This helps create meetings that go on forever with nothing changing.

Underoos: Possibly inappropriate. Mildly exploitative. Creepy, even?

I mentioned underoos in class last week, and it turns out that none of my students are aware of the matching top-and-bottom underwear featuring superheroes, Star Wars characters and other heroic characters that dominated so much of my childhood.

Underoos were so ubiquitous when I was a kid that I assumed they still exist today, so I went to the Internet in hopes of showing my students an underoos commercial from the 1980's as a means of defining this product. But when I started watching the commercials on YouTube, I couldn't help but think that they were at least mildly inappropriate and possible exploitative to the children appearing in them. 

Not to mention that the production values of the commercials are horrific. 

Perhaps I was overreacting, but I can't believe that these commercials were on television when I as a kid. Little kids in little, form fitting underwear dancing all over the screen? And why the hell are little girls wearing bra-like tops?

Am I overreacting? Would these commercials be permitted to air on television today? Do you find them as creepy as I do? 

Before watching, it should also be noted that this is not the first time underoos have been mentioned on this blog. Almost exactly a year ago, I became aware of the existence of adult underoos and wrote about them as well. 

My "Diet Coke and aggressive attitude" didn't exactly match the yoga aesthetic, but I somehow managed to fit in anyway.

Last weekend, I performed 90 minutes of storytelling to a capacity crowd at Kripalu, a yoga and fitness center in the Berkshires. I spent the weekend at Kripalu, teaching a weekend-long storytelling workshop to about two dozen people, but the show on Saturday night was open to the general public.

The room was crowded and hot, but it went well.  

My weekend stay at Kripalu included a room, meals, and all of the amenities that the facility has to offer. I actually participated in a sunrise yoga session and spent an afternoon hiking around the lake. Despite the fact that my workshop attendees began to refer to me as a "yogi" and repeatedly assured me that my philosophies about storytelling, productivity, and mindfulness fit perfectly into the Kripalu philosophy, it didn't take me long to realize that I didn't exactly fit into the Kripalu aesthetic.

The first thing I noticed was that I walked at least three times as fast as everyone else. I was charging through the hallways like a bull on fire while everyone around me was walking slowly and contemplatively. 

When I looked at the extensive lists of breakfast options, I could not identify a single item on the menu. NOT ONE. Instead, I left the facility and enjoyed an Egg McMuffin and a Diet Coke at a nearby McDonald's.

I definitely swore more than anyone around me, and I am not a person who typically curses with any regularity. However, no one spoke a single swear word in my presence for the entire weekend, but in the course of my performance and my teaching, I swore a lot by comparison. During my performance, I fired off an expletive in the general direction of a couple people in the audience, causing Elysha to shake her head and offer me a disapproving stare.    

Silent breakfast was impossible for me. It turns out that I make noise even when I'm not speaking. I sigh loudly. Hum. Laugh to myself. Tap my feet. Pound on my keyboard. Audibly scoff. Constantly. 

Also, the concept of silent breakfast struck me as fairly insane. 

But the clincher came at the end of my performance on Saturday night. When the lights came up, a long line of people approached to chat. One woman began to ask if the stories I had told were really true but stopped short, noticing the scars on my face and quickly realizing that the story about my car accident (and therefore the rest of the stories) were true. She traced the scar on my chin with her index finger and said, "You lovely man."

This is something that could only be said about me at a place like Kripalu.

Another woman approached and said, "I wasn't sure if I wanted to come for tonight's show. but you walked into the room carrying a Diet Coke, a McDonald's bag, and an aggressive attitude. These are all things we have never seen before at Kripalu, so I knew it was going to be good."

It was odd to be in a place that seemed so right for me and so wrong for me at the same time.

It's true that the teaching I do as it relates to finding stories in our lives, exploring their meaning, and bringing that meaning to bare in a performance aligns almost perfectly with the recent mindfulness movement (though the word "mindfulness" is kind of stupid and the movement tends to lack the kind of specific, highly targeted, easy-to-follow strategies that I teach). Though I didn't initially believe it, it's true that the philosophies espoused at a place like Kripalu align quite well to my own.  

But at the same time, it's also true that I am happiest and most relaxed when I am doing something. Moving forward. Making progress. Affecting change. Eating a cheeseburger. Hitting a golf ball. Shoving an opponent under the basket. Tickling my kids. Hitting on my wife.  

The quiet, contemplative, farm-to-table, macrobiotic existence is not for me. That level of quiet and thought, absence movement and action, makes me crazy.  

At least for now.  

If only we all had this problem...

My son, Charlie, has been doing an outstanding job in regards to his potty training. He is in underwear almost all of the time now and rarely has an accident. 

Two hurdles that are still left to overcome:

Charlie is terrified of the hand dryers in public restrooms and will flee the restroom as soon as he spots one.He is afraid to use a toilet if he doesn't have a smaller ring to put over the seat, telling Elysha recently that he has "a tiny tushy" and is afraid to fall in. 

100 Most Evil People Ever Experiment

I need your help. I'm conducting an experiment. In order to maintain the validity of this experiment, I cannot reveal my hypothesis at this time. But part of the experiment is to assemble a list of the 100 most people people ever. These can be both real and/or fictional beings.

Would you like to help?

If so (and I hope you will), simply send me your suggestions for the list. Send one name or ten names or 100 names. Every contribution will help. Post the names in the comment section of this post or send me an email or tweet the names of evil people with the hashtag #100EvilPeople.

If you could share this with your friends, that would help, too. As with most experiments, the more data I gather, the better. 

Once the list is complete, I will share it here and reveal the purpose for its creation. 

The truth will set you free

My wife put my three year-old son, Charlie, into timeout after he hit his sister. Ten minutes later, she returned. "Do you know why I put you in timeout?" she asked.

"No," Charlie replied, defiantly.

"Fine, then you'll stay in timeout until you can remember."

My wife turned and took one step before Charlie shouted, "Okay! I slugged Clara!"

Folded like a cheap suit.

Boy vs. Girl: Episode 2 - Insult Culture, Female Sports Fans, and the Need for Snuggies

The topics for this week's episode include: 

The difference in the way men and women insult each otherFemale sports fansBathing suit bottoms 

Please consider subscribing to Boy vs. Girl in the iTunes music store or on Stitcher, Overcast, or your favorite podcast platform.

If you like the show, please consider posting a review to iTunes. Reviews help listeners find out podcast and increase the chances that my co-host, Rachel, and I will become rich and famous.