Matthew Dicks's Blog, page 410

A more accurate Out of Office reply

Here is my friend’s Out of Office reply:

I am out of the office until 3/24/14. I shall happily reply to your message upon my return.

Shall happily reply upon my return?

This is not the man I know.

The man I know has never happily replied to anything in his entire life. He has rarely done anything happily ever.

There are brief moments of happiness when he is drinking, but even that doesn’t last long. It eventually gets ugly, especially if the Patriots are losing.

If Out of Office replies were required to reflect a person’s true nature, his would read something like this:

Why are you contacting me? Solve your own damn problem. Besides, I’m out of the office until I feel like it. Call back if you have something to say that I will care about. When in doubt, I don’t care.

A humble offer to Dunkin’ Donuts

I don’t drink coffee. I rarely eat donuts.

Even still, I’d like to humbly offer my services to Dunkin’ Donuts, a business that has six locations (no exaggeration) within one mile of my home (also no exaggeration).

I watched this commercial last night, waiting for the irony… the moment when the commercial would turn on itself and make fun of its own stupidity, except that never happened.

Someone actually wrote this, filmed it and broadcast it, thinking it was good. Thinking it would make viewers want to purchase Dunkin’ Donuts coffee. 

Dunkin’ Donuts chieftains, I promise you this:

I will write 50 commercials better than this one. Maybe 100. I realize that I am establishing a low bar based upon the mediocrity I witnessed tonight, but I will exceed that bar y a wide margin. I promise.

Make me an offer. Seriously. Make me an offer.

Awaiting the return of King of the Bed

I haven’t touched my children in two days. I miss them. I have been away from my kids for days at a time, but this is harder. I see them. I hear them. But I can’t touch them.

Yesterday my daughter gave me a stuffed lion and said, “Everyone needs to cuddle with someone, so you can use Lion until you feel better.”

As soon as I’m feeling 100%, we’re having another full-blown King of the Bed wrestling match like this one. 

King of the Bed has only three rules:

The only person you may ever wrestle in your entire life is Daddy.
You may hit Daddy as hard as you want.
Last one on the bed wins.  

   

Words of encouragement

It’s a rare thing when the worst part of feeling the worst ever is missing work because it means missing your students.

Lest I forget how much I miss them when I am not at school, I received several emails from students yesterday, including this one:

Hi Mr.Dicks. I heard you were sick. I hope you feel better. Remember we will always want you here.
Come back tomorrow please.

I also received this one:

I thought you were a tough guy. Get out of bed and get back to school.

Also this one:

I guess your record of not throwing up in like 30 or more years is up. Oh well. Get over it and get back to school.

Nice to see that I have taught them well.

So much for “Vomit-Free Since ‘83”

After 31 years, the phrase “Vomit-Free Since ‘83” no longer applies to me.

Apparently I have a stomach flu of sorts, which resulted in the loss of a 31 year absence from intestinal distress. The last time something like this happened to me was on The Music Express at Rocky Point Amusement Park in the summer of 1983. 

Apparently I had been saving up for this moment. Elysha later told me that it was the most horrifying thing she’s ever heard.

Honestly, I don’t know how you people do it more than once every 31 years or so.

As a newcomer to any kind of stomach distress, I can tell you that the complete lack of appetite is astounding. I ate an Egg McMuffin about 30 hours ago and nothing but Jell-O and popsicles since.

I can’t imagine ever eating again. Ever.

I also miss my family. I have become a pariah in my own home. I’m relegated to the bedroom and am avoiding the wife and children like the plague.

Actually, I’m the plague. They are avoiding me.

Clara came downstairs last night while Elysha was out getting me popsicles and told me that she needed a cuddle. I had to say no. Then she told me I never have time for her anymore and went back upstairs.

It was almost worse than the stomach pain I was feeling.

But here’s the real problem:

Vomiting is now a thing for me. Something I’ve avoided for more than three decades is now on the list of possibilities, and it scares the hell out of me. I never want that to happen again. Ever. I can’t imagine anything worse.

It was awful.

But now I think it will happen again someday. I’m no longer the super hero I thought I was. I’m no longer Mr. Indestructible.

Last night, in the midst of my five minutes of retching, a scene from Rocky 4 entered my mind.

I know it sounds strange, but it really did. It sums up the sudden fragility that I feel perfectly. And horribly.

It was this scene:

Judd Apatow’s Freaks and Geeks determined the plot. My characters do the same.

From an interview with Judd Apatow, I learned that the characters and plot for Freaks and Geeks (a television show I never watched) were designed around actors.

First they found their actors. Then they developed the stories based upon those people. Their predispositions. Their predilections. Their personal histories.

I’m fascinated by this. 

Similarly, the plots of my books are very much determined by my characters. I find the characters (usually a single protagonist), and then the characters strike out and find the plot.

I just write, hoping that they will find a plot sooner than later.

It’s worked so far. In fact, the only book that I started with plot rather than character first was the book that required the most revision.

Most of my novels were exceptionally light edits. Ready to go.

It turns out that if I take Judd Apatow’s Freaks and Geeks approach and allow my characters to dictate the story, things work out better.

Great even.

How strange. It’s almost as if the more control we relinquish over plot, the better our stories will be.

No one taught me that in college.  

Starting early

To think that I didn’t begin using a computer until I was eighteen years old, and I was an early adopter.  

I have students who have great difficulty using a mouse pad.

One of my friends still routinely connects a large, bulky mouse to his laptop. 

For better or worse, my children’s generation (and my son in particular) are exceptionally adept at using technology. I sometimes think that it’s locked in their DNA.

   

Parenting does not suck. It’s just that some people suck at life.

Slate’s Ruth Graham recently wrote a piece entitled “My Life is a Walking Nightmare.” Why Do Parents Make Parenting Sound So God-Awful?

Graham does not have children but experiences the constant stream of whiny negativity from her parent friends on a daily basis.

My Facebook feed is an endless stream of blog posts and status updates depicting the messy, tedious, nightmarishly life-destroying aspects of parenting. I’ve gawked at “15 Unbelievable Messes Made by Kids,” “All the Birth Control You’ve Ever Needed in Six Pictures of Ponytails” (which appeared on a blog called Rage Against the Minivan), and this uterus-shriveling poston how “You will not get anything done when you are home with a baby.” There’s this one on how you’ll give up on your values, your body, your style, and your hygiene after you have kids. There’s that British comedian’s stand-up routine, which has been viewed more than 4,700,000 times on YouTube, about how even leaving the house is a miserable odyssey of screaming and fighting.

I’ve never understood these people. I’ve always found the incessant whining and persistent warnings about parenthood to be a sign of a person who sucks at life and wants others to feel the same.

Or perhaps the sign of a pie-in-the-sky parents who thought babies came straight out of the womb potty trained and ready for kindergarten.

Or maybe parents whose upper middle class lives have been so free of strife or turmoil that even a stuffed puppy could’ve upset the apple cart for them.

Either way, I encourage the childless like Ruth Graham and the expectant parents to ignore these whiners and complainers.

Even better, tell them to shut up. Tell them to go whine to a wall. Tell them to go home and never leave the house again. There’s no need to ruin a pregnant mother’s day with your inability to find happiness in the company of your child.

A couple years ago, I wrote a piece entitled “Raising my daughter is a piece of cake, and there’s a good reason why I say this as often as possible” in response to this negativity. Our daughter was three years-old and my wife was pregnant with our second child. Two years later, everything that I wrote is still true, despite such witticisms as “One plus one doesn’t equal two when it comes to kids!”

Last year I wrote a piece entitled My children absolutely adore each other. If you feel the need to tell me it won’t last forever, shut the hell up. It was in response to the idiots who saw photos of my children playing together and said things like “You just wait. Things will change between the two of them,” and “Just wait until he can walk and talk. Then all that love will be out the window.”

Imagine how much you must hate yourself to say something like that to a proud father.

If you’re like Ruth Graham and hearing this kind of nonsense or reading it on social media, turn away. Read my posts instead.

Believe them. Embrace them.

Parenting is not easy. It’s glorious.

 

Toys don’t mean as much when you’re not allowed to play indoors.

My siblings and I did not take good care of our toys.

We did not keep track of pieces. We were never careful with fragile parts. We smashed and crashed and broke our toys at every turn.

We would throw our toys out of our second floor bedroom window onto the driveway just to see what would happen. We would tie rope to action figures and drag them along the road as our mother drove down the highway.

Considering that we had very little growing up, this has always surprised me. I’ve often wondered why we didn’t take better care of the little we had.

I watch the way that my wife takes care of our children’s toys today, trying to keep every piece of every train set and Lego set together and repairing toys when they break, and it makes me wonder about my childhood even more.  

It has baffled me. Why were children with so little so careless?

Then I had a thought.

As children, we played outdoors at every moment possible. We were sent outside after breakfast and invited back inside only for lunch and dinner. We were sent out in the rain and the snow. Only extreme weather kept us indoors.

We has few restrictions on where we could go, so the world was our playground. We had fields and orchards to sprint across, trees to climb, forests to explore and ponds and rivers and streams to splash through. We had a barn in our backyard that we used as a clubhouse, a poorly maintained pool for swimming and bicycles that could take us anywhere.

We never had time for toys. When you are required to play outside all the time, toys quickly lose their meaning. Action figures, stuffed animals, board games, and Matchbox cars are nothing compared to a fishing pole, a bicycle, a length of rope, a baseball glove and acres of unsupervised forest and field.

Perhaps we didn’t take great care for our toys because we never had time to play with them the way my wife did as a child and my children do today. We were so rarely inside our home that we never even saw most of our toys on a daily basis.

Maybe we threw toys out of our bedroom windows in the same way that our parents tossed us out of the house everyday.

This makes sense to me. It feels right. I think I’ve found an answer.

A different kind of sibling love

I just can’t imagine that my brother and sister and I were ever as copacetic as my children are when we were little.

Yes, my kids are sitting atop a coffee table, but watching them sit and sing and share without complaint or argument astounds me.

I’m fairly certain that I would’ve been hitting my brother over the head with one of these puzzles and screaming at my sister to stop singing her stupid Little Mermaid songs.