Matthew Dicks's Blog, page 424

Resolution update: 2013 in review

In an effort to hold myself accountable, I post the progress of my yearly goals at the end of each month on this blog.

The following are the results through December, and thus through the end of 2013.

I managed to completed 14 out of the 23 goals that I set for myself back in January for a 61 % completion rate. This is actually fair good in comparison to previous years.

In the three years that I have been charting my goals for the year, my completion rates have been 30% (2012), 62% (2011) and 44% (2010).

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1. Don’t die.

Done. 

2. Lose ten pounds.

I had hoped to lose another ten pounds after reaching this goal back in June, but no luck. 

3. Do at least 100 push-ups and 100 sit-ups five days a day.  Also complete at least two two-minute planks five days per week.

I missed less than 5% of the required days in 2013.

4. Launch at least one podcast.

Though it has not been officially launched, we are ready to go and will have our first episode online in January.

5. Practice the flute for at least an hour a week.

Losing my flute made this a tough goal to reach.

6. Complete my fifth novel before the Ides of March.

Done.

7. Complete my sixth novel.

The first 60,000 words of my sixth novel are in the hands of my agent and being pitched for sale now.

8. Sell one children’s book to a publisher.

Failed for the second year in a row.

On a positive note, I wrote a new children’s book this week, and I’m excited about it.  

9. Complete a book proposal for my memoir.

A golf memoir was written in 2013. I’ve also written the first five chapters of my originally planned memoir.  

10. Complete at least twelve blog posts on my brother and sister blog.

One new post in December completed the 2013 goal.

11. Become certified to teach high school English by completing two required classes.

I remain one class and $50 away from achieving certification. Since I have no intention of leaving my elementary school within the next two years, I put this goal on hold in 2013.   

12. Publish at least one Op-Ed in a newspaper.

I published three pieces in the Huffington Post and two pieces in Beyond the Margins. I had several pieces rejected from The Hartford Courant and The New York Times. Based upon the readership reached via these online platforms, I’m calling this a success.

13. Attend at least eight Moth events with the intention of telling a story.

I told stories in a total of 15 Moth events in 2013, including my first Mainstage show and a GrandSLAM. I competed in 13 StorySLAMs and won 8 of them.  

14. Locate a playhouse to serve as the next venue for The Clowns.

The script, the score and the soundtrack remain in the hands of a New York City playhouse.  

15. Give yoga an honest try.

Failed for the second year in a row.

16. Meditate for at least five minutes every day.

I missed less than 10% of the required days in 2013.

17. De-clutter the garage.

Done.

18. De-clutter the basement.

Failed for the second year in a row.

19. De-clutter the shed

Failed.

20. Reduce the amount of soda I am drinking by 50%.

Though my soda intake has been reduced significantly over the past two months, I have no way of verifying the 50% success rate, nor do I think I achieved the level of success required.

21. Try at least one new dish per month, even if it contains ingredients that I wouldn’t normally consider palatable.

I tried two new cheeses in December, completing the goal.  

22. Conduct the ninth No-Longer-Annual A-Mattzing Race in 2013.

Failed for the second year in a row.

23. Post my progress in terms of these resolutions on this blog on the first day of every month.

I forgot to post progress for the month of October. Still, I’m counting it.

Say my name

My son, Charlie, said his own name for the first time yesterday then continued to be cute just to spite me.

Choosing goals for 2014

I am in the process of reviewing the completion of my New Year’s resolutions and establishing new goals for 2014.

If you have any suggestions, please let me know. I’m always happy to listen and incorporate feedback whenever possible.

This boy is all boy

Stick a piece of construction equipment outside the house, and this boy thinks it’s better than any television, water slide, swing and iPad combined.

Compelling? Truthy? Horribly narrow minded and sexist? I’m not sure.

From a piece in TIME entitled It’s a Man’s World, and It Always Will Be by Camille Paglia (author and professor at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) comes these two paragraphs which I found incredibly intriguing and thought provoking. 

I’m not saying I fully agree with what Paglia asserts here, but I’m not saying that I disagree, either.

I’m not sure. It has the air of truthiness to it, but at the same time, it doesn’t feel quite right.

It also makes use of two unnecessary exclamation points, which doesn’t help her argument at all.

I would love to hear what you think about the paragraphs and perhaps about the entire piece.

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After the next inevitable apocalypse, men will be desperately needed again! Oh, sure, there will be the odd gun-toting Amazonian survivalist gal, who can rustle game out of the bush and feed her flock, but most women and children will be expecting men to scrounge for food and water and to defend the home turf. Indeed, men are absolutely indispensable right now, invisible as it is to most feminists, who seem blind to the infrastructure that makes their own work lives possible. It is overwhelmingly men who do the dirty, dangerous work of building roads, pouring concrete, laying bricks, tarring roofs, hanging electric wires, excavating natural gas and sewage lines, cutting and clearing trees, and bulldozing the landscape for housing developments. It is men who heft and weld the giant steel beams that frame our office buildings, and it is men who do the hair-raising work of insetting and sealing the finely tempered plate-glass windows of skyscrapers 50 stories tall.

Every day along the Delaware River in Philadelphia, one can watch the passage of vast oil tankers and towering cargo ships arriving from all over the world. These stately colossi are loaded, steered and off-loaded by men. The modern economy, with its vast production and distribution network, is a male epic, in which women have found a productive role — but women were not its author. Surely, modern women are strong enough now to give credit where credit is due!

Twas the Night Before Christmas

As our holiday season draws to a close, I wanted to point this out to you. It’s a Christmas special that I watched and loved as a child and adored entitled Twas The Night Before Christmas.

I showed it to my daughter a couple days before Christmas, and she’s watched it at least half a dozen times since.

She loves it as much as I still do.

The story is clever, the music is great (and highly addictive) and for a daughter who can barely get through the Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer Christmas special because of the Abominable Snow Monster of the North and had to bail entirely on Santa Claus is Coming to Town because of the Winter Warlock, this special is decidedly free of angry, toothy monsters.

The shifting opinions about Santa

   

At last a disease I can get behind

There’s a line in Regina Spektor’s brilliant song “On the Radio” that goes:

While we were on our knees
Praying that disease
Would leave the ones we love
And never come again

It kills me every time. Disease sucks. It creates such heartache. It’s created such heartache in my life. 

At last I’ve found a disease that I can get behind:

From a TIME piece on the subject:

Ethan Couch, 16, was on trial after he stole beer from a Walmart, got drunk at a party, and gunned his car into four victims who had stopped on the side of a Burleson, Texas road to help a stranded motorist. All four died, and both passengers in Couch’s pickup truck who were riding in the open bed were tossed from the vehicle. One is unable to move or talk due to brain injuries.

But even though Couch was behind the wheel, it wasn’t he, argued psychologist G. Dick Miller, who should bear the burden of punishment for the tragedy. Instead, it was his parents, who raised their boy with few limits and even less discipline, indulging him to the point where he was unable to appreciate the importance of rules and laws, not to mention the consequences of breaking them.

This complete lack of discipline and overindulgent lifestyle is referred to in psychological circles as affluenza, characterized by, among other things, the guilt that wealthy young people feel as a result of their extreme privilege.

And it worked!

Rather than a possible 20 year prison term, Couch will receive a year of rehabilitation at an in-patient facility near Newport Beach, California and ten years of probation.

Good news for privileged Americans everywhere:

If you’re wealthy enough and spoiled enough, you can apparently get away with murder.

Or at least vehicular homicide.

While I’m not interested in affluenza as it relates to petty theft and vehicular homicide, I’m more than happy to bear the burden of affluenza if someone is willing to indulge me to the levels required to acquire the disease.

I’d even be willing to submit to rigorous scientific study in order to understand this terrible disease better, as treacherous and potentially dangerous as that may be for me.  

At last I’ve found a disease that I wouldn’t mind acquiring again and again.

Portuguese!

The Portuguese edition of Memoirs of an Imaginary Friend.

I love this cover.

Want to maintain longer lasting friendships? Here is my simple piece of advice.

A friend on Twitter recently asked for advice on maintaining long-term friendships. She was having a hard time remaining connected in meaningful ways with her friends and was searching of ideas.

My advice was simple:

Center each friendship on a project, activity or goal.

Always have something to do.

Perhaps this is a male instinct, but all of my closest male friendships are anchored by specific activities and/or goals. You will never find me having coffee with a friend (my hatred for coffee none withstanding). I don’t meet with my friends for brunch unless our spouses are included. I don’t chat with my friends on the phone.

My friend and I do stuff together.

Bengi (my friend of 28 years) and I have owned a DJ company for the last 17 years together. Though our friendship does not rely on the DJ company, our business forces us together more frequently than we would otherwise. Bengi has been a a storyteller for Speak Up, the storytelling organization that my wife and I founded this year. He attends Moth events with me. We are planning to write a book together.

Shep and I are Patriots season ticket owners. We spend about ten Sundays a year together, and we spend the rest of the NFL season communicating through email and texts about our team, our tailgate plans and more. We golf together during the summer and often catch movies together in the middle of the day. He has attended Moth events with me. He is one of the first and most valuable readers of my fiction.

Tom and I play a great deal of golf together. I recently enlisted Tom to become the producer of our soon-to-launch podcast, and he is now recording the audio at our Speak Up events as well. In the past, Tom and I have played a lot of poker together. Tom joins me from time to time at Moth events in New York City and hopes to one day tell a story on a Moth stage.

Until last year when he retired, Plato and I had worked together for fifteen years. I taught his daughter in third grade. Plato and I also play golf often. He has been a Speak Up storyteller. Recently he joined me for his Moth StorySLAM. In the past, I have acted in plays that Plato wrote and directed at our local playhouse. He attends Patriot games with me. We have written articles and presented together at conferences. We are apocalypse partners in the event that society crumbles, zombies rise from their graves or aliens invade. 

In 2006, he married me and Elysha. We are ministers for the same online church, and we have even worked a wedding together as minister and DJ.

 

Jeff and I teach together. He is my daughter’s godfather. We play golf often. We used to play a lot of poker, and I hope to play again someday soon. He reads my completed manuscripts and offers input. Over the years, we have attempted to launch several businesses together that have failed to get off the ground. We have a dream of opening our own one room schoolhouse in five years. We are constantly scheming. 

Andrew is my son’s godfather. I taught both of his children, including his daughter in third and fifth grade. We are in a book club together. He has attended Moth events with me. Two years ago I introduced him to golf, and it has become his obsession. We play together a lot. We have played together in the snow and the rain. I have become good friends with his nephew, who lives in New York and joins me for Moth events often. 

David is one of my more recent friends. He is a screenwriter. We don’t write together, but we frequently talk about our writing projects and share our work with each other. We listen to some of the same podcasts. We alternately encourage and berate each other when needed.

Though the tendency to anchor a friendship on an activity or a goal seems to be a more male-dominated trend, I have female friends with whom I share similar relationships.

Andrew’s wife, Kim, for example, was probably my friend before Andrew was. She is Charlie’s godmother, and she is also in a book club with me. She is also a Speak Up storyteller, and other than Elysha, has attended more Moth events with me than anyone else. She has also been an early reader of my fiction (Andrew has yet to read any of my novels), and when her children were in my classroom, she would spend a couple hours each week volunteering.

My friend, Donna, and taught together for the last 15 years, and except for two years when we were purposefully separated, we have always been in the same grade level. Donna and I golf together. She’s a character in my most recent novel. She’s old enough to be my mother, so there is a generational gap at times (she just learned how to text with reliability), but we still manage to do things together.

Admittedly, however, Kim and Donna are the exception when it comes to my female friendships, and even these friendships seem less dominated by activities and projects than my male relationships.

I’m not sure why this is the case. Maybe it’s just a male tendency. 

Regardless, these are some of my closest friends. As you can see, our relationships are very much centered around the things that we do. Though there have been some heart-to-heart conversations with these men and women over the years,  these talks often happen on the golf course, the basketball court or in the car on the way to a football game.

Bengi and I recently spent the day together driving to and from the Berkshires to pick up some furniture for my home. We talked for more than five hours about many things.

Some topics were silly. Others were serious.

But all of this conversation happened in the midst of driving, carrying couches and squeezing in a burger at McDonald’s.

We would never even think about meeting for coffee or lunch or talking about these things over the phone.  

Coffee and lunch can be too easily skipped. Too easily rescheduled. Too easily avoided. Too many things can take priority over coffee or a phone call.

Besides, the idea that we would sit across from each other at a table without a deck of cards or something else to do while we are eating is ridiculous.