Matthew Dicks's Blog, page 337

Celebrating Columbus Day is one of the stupidest things that Americans do. Let's replace it with this amazing Russian holiday.

It's Columbus Day. Just like last year and every year before, I find myself at home day with my kids, honoring a villain who did nothing worth celebrating, despite what my daughter was taught at school last week.

I didn't have the heart to tell her that you can't discover a place that's already populated with more than 10 million people.

And you can't discover a place that the Vikings actually explored and colonized four hundred years earlier.

I didn't want to tell her that Columbus murdered, mutilated, and enslaved Native Americans, precipitating one of the worst genocides in the history of the world.

I didn't want to tell her that Columbus never actually set foot on the continent. That he mistook the islands of the Caribbean for Asia. That he wasn't even Italian.   

When it comes to the stupid things that Americans do, celebrating Columbus Day is one of the most blatantly stupid. It's ridiculous. It's as if we are trying to be stupid.  

I'd like to propose an alternative to Columbus Day. Rather than engaging in a protracted fight over which worthy historical figure should be celebrated in his place, I'd like to adopt a modified version of a Russian holiday called Conception Day.

On Conception Day (also known as the Day of Procreation), Russians are given the option of staying home from work to try to make a baby. The holiday was originally initiated by Lenin in order combat low birth rates and reaffirmed a few years ago by Vladimir Putin for similar reasons, adding the chance for cash and prizes to couples who manage to give birth to a child exactly nine months later.  

The United States doesn't suffer from a declining population, but why not just give Americans a day off to stay home and have sex?

Even the most ardent (and clearly brain damaged) supporters of Columbus would agree that sex is better than Columbus, and given the laundry list of benefits to having sex, it only makes sense for the government to support a little more fooling around amongst its citizens. 

If the United States ever chose to adopt this plan, I want to make it clear that children should not be learning songs about Procreation Day at school.

A song full of lies about a murderous villain is still better than listening to my daughter sing a song that encourages me to have sex.  

My daughter has become a same-sex marriage activist and a storytelling promoter

As we were leaving the playground yesterday, a little boy approached my six year-old daughter and asked to be her friend.

I wasn't surprised. In the span of about an hour, Clara had organized the other four girls at the playground - all older than her - into a massive game of 'Neighbors" and had placed one of the girls in charge of her younger brother, Charlie. She was leading Charlie through the maze of tubes and holding his hand as he slid down the slide. 

The boy must've seen Clara as some kind of organizational friendship savant.  

Clara asked the boy for his name - which I can't remember - and then suggested this:

"You should ask your mommy and daddy, or your mommy and mommy, or your daddy and daddy if you can come over my house sometime."

Then she gave the boy our address, thankfully reversing the two digits of our house number. She asked the boy for his address, but he didn't seem to understand the question. 

Then she said (as I feverishly recorded her words into Evernote):

"Do your parents ever go to Speak Up? That's a show that my mommy and daddy own, and they do shows all over the place, so maybe your parents know my mommy or daddy, because they know a lot of people and a lot of people go to their shows. And if they don't go, they should. It's great. Except I've never gone. I always have a babysitter, which is fun, too. "

At this point, the boy - who was about Clara's age - looked shell shocked. Too much information for him to process at one time. 

Clara then reached out, hugged the boy, and said, "Maybe I'll see you here sometime. Go play with those girls. I taught them Neighbors."

She waved goodbye, and we walked away, leaving the boy looking a little lost.

"That was a nice boy," I said to Clara.

"Sure," Clara said. "But he didn't really talk much."

Her willingness to share our address with a stranger was mildly disconcerting, but otherwise, I couldn't have been more proud of my little girl. Her acceptance of same sex marriage always warms my heart, and her promotion of Speak Up was impressive.

But mostly, I am astounded by her ability to talk to strangers with such ease. Two nights ago, while eating dinner at a restaurant, she walked across the room to a table where a woman was eating dinner with her sister and her infant son.

From afar, I watched Clara chat with these women for at least three minutes for returning to the table to tell me that the boy's name was Nathan. He was three months old. He likes to eat. He doesn't cry much. This was his first time in a restaurant.       

As we were leaving, the mother called me over to her table and told me that talking to Clara was like talking to one of her girlfriends.

Her mother gets the credit for most of this. Whether it's genetic or a learned behavior, she is slowly becoming the spitting image of Elysha. 

Thank goodness. For a while, it was looking like she would be more like me. 

The conspiracy of the uninvited, unannounced pickle must end.

I despise pickles. They are a despicable and hideous creation. They are also one of the only foods that are capable of contaminating their environment and ruining a perfectly good meal. 

Open a jar of pickles and everything in the room will smell and even taste a little bit like a pickle.

Stick a pickle on a plate alongside a pile of French fries and a cheeseburger and you've likely contaminated the entire plate of food with the underlying taste of pickle. 

Get a little pickle juice on your hand and your hand will spell like a pickle all day.

This is why it's crazy for restaurants to randomly place pickles on plates without any warning.

What other food item is indiscriminately placed on a plate without any indication in the menu or by the waitstaff? What right do pickles have to this uninvited, unannounced, surprise inclusion?

Who the hell do pickles think they are?  

Finding an unannounced pickle on your plate is akin to finding a single chicken nugget, a cube of braised beef, or a scoop of vanilla ice cream alongside your chicken piccata. As a general practice, restaurants don't place unannounced food items on our plates.

Except when it comes to the goddamn pickle.

Not everyone enjoys a pickle. Many people despise them at least as much as me. I know many people who agree with me about their insidious nature.  

This random, unannounced,  surprise pickle inclusion must end. 

I'm doing my first full hour onstage for the Pound Ridge Storytelling Festival on Saturday night. And I'm a little nervous, which almost never happens. Here's why:

On Saturday night, I will be headlining the Pound Ridge Storytelling Festival in Pound Ridge, New York. It will be my first hour onstage.

If you're in the neighborhood (or even if you're not), you should come. I'll be telling a series of interconnected stories from my dozen years working for McDonald's. There will be a lot of laughs, plenty of suspense, and perhaps even a few tears.  

Up until this point, the longest time I've spent on stage telling stories (other than hosting a slam) has been about 15 minutes. 

I'm excited. Perhaps a teensy-weensy bit nervous.

But in terms of being nervous, here is what I have discovered about myself:

1. I am rarely nervous about performing. Almost never. In fact, early in my storytelling career, one of my storytelling heroes and a many-time Moth StorySLAM and GrandSLAM champion took me aside and said, "The problem with you is that you're never nervous, so you need to tell a great story every single time. The audience has no reason to like you until you start speaking, and what you're saying had better be good."

He made a good point. I often take the stage supremely confident, and this may not be terribly endearing to the audience. And these words came from one of the best storytellers in the world, and also from a man who looks at least a little nervous (and sometimes a lot nervous) every time he takes the stage.

2. I am never nervous onstage. In the handful of times that I have felt truly nervous, it was always before the performance. Anticipatory nerves. Once I am in front of the microphone and speaking, any nervousness that I am feeling washes away. 

3. I become nervous when expectations are high.

I became nervous four years ago before taking the stage at the Nuyorican Poet's Cafe to tell my first story for The Moth. I became nervous before a Mainstage performance at the Wilbur Theater in Boston when I discovered how much the tickets to the show cost.  I became nervous at my first Moth GrandSLAM championship when I saw the founder of The Moth, George Dawes Green, sitting in the audience for the first time. I feel a little bit nervous about Saturday night because I know that the people who run this festival are depending upon me to perform a solid hour of storytelling and essentially close their festival on a high note. 

In the first three cases, those nerves disappeared once I began talking, and I am certain that this will be the case on Saturday night as well. 

If not, it will perhaps be even more interesting to watch. 

My daughter's amazing list of proposed weekend activities

My wife is going away for the weekend, leaving me alone with the kids until Monday afternoon. In preparation for the weekend ahead, my six year-old daughter wrote a list of proposed activities last night.

She opted to write it in pencil on blue paper, so it's tough to read, and her spelling isn't exactly correct. It reads:

Go to the multi-colored playground.Have a tea party.Have art time.Have a marching band.Do all kinds of stuff.

It's going to be a great weekend. 

Announcing your goals makes it less likely that you will achieve them, but what if you're not an idiot?

Readers of this blog will know that for more than five years, I have posted my yearly goals and my progress (or lack thereof) every month as a means of holding myself accountable. 

Oddly, these are often some of my most popular posts. 

You may also know that there is enormous amounts of research, summarized in this TED Talk by Derek Sivers, indicating that announcing a goal to friends, family, or even strangers makes it less likely that you will achieve that goal. Psychologists have discovered that announcing a goal to another person tricks the brain into believing the goal is nearly complete, and as a result, effort wanes and failure results. 

I believe that I have personally disproved this research through my relentless posting and accomplishing of goals over the last five years. I don't think I have disproved it entirely, but for myself, the findings do not seem to apply. 

I also believe that this research is accurate. I believe that the data is true. In general, it appears that the public announcement of a goal makes it less likely that you will achieve that goal.

Does this make me an outlier? Perhaps.

But as with all research of this nature, I can't help but wonder about the stupid people. 

When psychologists conducted this research, they presumably studied a random slice of humanity, which means that half of the subjects in the study possessed a below average IQ and a below average work ethic. Some of them were presumably exceedingly low.

What if all the dumb and lazy people are skewing the results? 

I wonder about this with most studies that require human subjects. Do the findings apply to a true cross section of humanity, or have all people of less than average intelligence (and truly dumb people) slanted the findings in such a way to make them less applicable to the above average individuals?

I want to see the findings in studies like this be broken out in accordance with IQ. I want to know how the results of the study pertain to people of below average intelligence, average intelligence, and above average intelligence. I want to know if stupidity causes people to behave stupidly and make the rest of us look a little stupider, too.  

Scientific results can't possibly apply equally across the distribution of intelligence. Right? 

It only makes sense that dumb people would be tricked into believing that announcing their goal is nearly akin to completing their goal. 

And perhaps people of even average intelligence are often tricked into believing that announcing their goal is nearly akin to completing their goal. 

But are highly intelligent people similarly tricked? I'd need to see the data to believe it.

When the results of research are as counter-intuitive as these, I can't help but wonder who they really apply to.    

It's true that I may simply be an outlier. 

It's also true that I could be completing even more of my yearly goals if I was keeping them private, but I don't think so. I already do a lot, and I know how I feel every time I post my goals and results to this blog. For me, the public accounting of my progress fuels my fire.

It's also entirely possible that I'm not as smart as I seem to think. I've taken informal IQ tests in the past and scored well, but I'm hardly in the genius category. Maybe I'm just a jerk who thinks he's smart but is just as average as most, and as a result, these findings apply to me as well.  

Regardless, I'd still like scientists and researchers to report their research as it applies to subsets of the whole, and to display these subsets across as many variables as possible, including IQ, age, sex, socio-economic status, and more. 

I'd like to know if the dumb or the lazy are making us all look a little more moronic than we really are.   

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This is a contract from hell. Or heaven, depending on your current disposition and predilections.

HBO is adapting the 1973 science fiction-western-thriller Westworld into a series that will air later this year. predilection

Before you decide to audition for a lead role on the show, take a look at the contract that background actors are required to sign. Depending on your disposition, you may be perfectly fine with the requirements outlined in the contract, but I suspect that many people (and their spouses) would not be thrilled with the demands listed in the fine print. 

Frankly, this contract is too outrageous to be believed, and yet I have checked. It's completely legit. 

And horrifying. 

“This document serves to inform you that this project will require you to be fully nude and/or witness others fully nude and participate in graphic sexual situations. By accepting this Project assignment, you may be required to do any of the following: appear fully nude; wear a pubic hair patch; perform genital-to-genital touching; have your genitals painted; simulate oral sex with hand-to-genital touching; contort to form a table-like shape while being fully nude; pose on all fours while others who are fully nude ride on your back; ride on someone’s back while you are both fully nude; and other assorted acts the Project may require.”

Sometimes a student writes a sentence that I wish I had written. This is one of them.

"Even though he had braces, he still had a dream."

I hit the greatest golf shot of my life. Then a squirrel did something even more amazing.

Yesterday, while on the golf course, I holed a 100 yard chip for a birdie.

It was perhaps the best golf shot that I have ever made.

On the next two holes, I scored a combined 15, including a 10 on a par 5.

I couldn't help but feel like those three holes encapsulated my life's trajectory almost perfectly.   

We also encountered a squirrel, who climbed up a friend's golf bag while he was putting, opened a zippered pocket, removed the bag of nuts that he had been eating, and fled to the trees.

It was amazing. It may have been the most ingenious squirrel on the planet.

The squirrel also stole the nuts just a minute or two after I hit my greatest golf shot ever, thus stealing quite a bit of my thunder. As remarkable as it may be to put a 100 yard chip in the hole, it's exponentially more amazing for a ninja squirrel to ambush a golf bag, open a zippered pocket, and steal a bag of nuts.

Also a fairly apt metaphor for my life.