Matthew Dicks's Blog, page 433

The nightmare of the pre-Internet

Someday I’ll show this video to my children and make them understand how legitimately awful and ridiculous my childhood was.

Could someone please invent quiet juicing?

Does the first step of a juicing regime require you to tell every person you know that you are juicing?

Asking for a friend. 

The boy is one.

In case you were wondering how old he is, he can tell you now.

Sort of.

Crying at work

The Telegraph asks: Is it ever OK to cry at work?

Sheryl Sandberg says yes. Nigella Lawson says no.

I agree with Nigella. I have no idea who she is, but I agree with her anyway.

Other than tears of sadness upon saying goodbye to graduating students or retiring colleagues, I have cried at work exactly once in my life. It happened while managing the opening shift at a McDonald’s restaurant in Hartford, Connecticut about 18 years ago.

At the time, I was attending Trinity College and St. Joseph’s University more than fulltime while working more than fulltime at McDonald’s and part-time in Trinity’s Writing Center in order to make ends meet.

A busy time in my life to say the least.

And it was exam week.

When I arrived at work at 4:30 in the morning for my opening shift, I hadn’t slept in more than 48 hours because of the mountains of end-of-semester work that I was attempting to complete. While handing food out the drive-thru window, I started to cry. I wasn’t feeling sad or even overwhelmed. I was simply exhausted. One of my employees turned to me and said, “What’s the matter?”

Between sobs, I said, “Nothing. I’m just really tired.”

My tears were a physical reaction to a lack of sleep.

Other than that moment, I have not cried in the more than 25 years in the workforce. The reason I have not cried is simple:

I have yet to face a workplace situation that might cause me to cry. Regardless of the pressure, conflict or stress of a situation, work has never been so overwhelming to bring me to tears.

Unfairly so, perhaps, I tend to see people who cry at work as lacking perspective or significant life experience. Between their sobs, I find myself wanting to remind them that their job does not constitute a life or death situation and that there are far worse things in the world than a tough day on the job. We didn’t just lose a patient in open heart surgery. We didn’t just cause two planes to crash in midair. We didn’t cost 10,000 people their jobs because of a stupid financial decision.

Perhaps if I were in one of these positions, I would cry more often.

I’m not.

As a teacher, I have an enormous responsibility to the children who are in m classroom and the families who depend upon me to educate their kids. But a poorly delivered lesson, a less than glowing evaluation from an administrator or a meeting with a disgruntled parent will not make or break my school year, and it will not permanently damage the future of my students.

On most jobs, no single moment  on the job will cause irreparable damage to anyone. 

The same goes for every job that I have ever had. In fact, the highest pressure job that I’ve ever held is probably wedding DJ, where a faulty piece of equipment or the accidental press of a button can ruin a moment that a bride has been dreaming about for years.

As a wedding DJ, I have five or six hour to ensure perfection, and if I don’t, a day that has been planned for months or years can be ruined.

Still, I’ve never cried, perhaps because I’ve never ruined someone’s wedding day, but even if I did, tears would not help me in that situation. I would be too busy repairing, recovering and attempting to salvage the day as best as I could to spend a moment consumed with my own emotions.

I realize that it’s almost always wrong to base my opinion of this or any other subject on my own personal reaction. The way that I handle a situation is not automatically the correct way to handle a situation. It’s at the very least stupid and self-centered to think, “I don’t cry at work, and therefore it’s wrong and no one else should, either.”

But I’m stupid and self-centered, so I’m saying it anyway.

Save your tears for home. No one wants to see you sobbing at the workplace. It’s awkward. It makes people uncomfortable. Unless something legitimately terrible has actually happened (and it almost certainly hasn’t), crying only serves to undermine your credibility and demonstrate your lack of perspective.

Save your tears for something that really matters.

And if you must cry, take a walk or go to the restroom.

Seriously. No one wants to see it.

I hated it, then I loved it.

For the first minute or so of this Jimmy Kimmel segment, I hated it. I thought it was cruel and exploitive.

By the third minute I thought it was hilarious.

By the fifth minute I was willing to do the same to my own child.

I have no idea how or why this dramatic shift in opinion happened. Perhaps the gag is simply too funny to be thought of as cruel. Maybe the pain is worth the pleasure. Maybe I was simply being too sensitive in the first minute.

I’m not sure.

As I know is that it’s gut-wrenchingly hilarious.

This won’t be cute forever

By the time my daughter is able to read these words and click on this video, a demand like this might seem a lot less appealing.

But at four years old, it’s pretty damn cute.

When was the last time you were bored?

Slate’s Gemma Malley makes the argument that extending a human beings lifespan would result in inexorable boredom.

Do we really want to extend the human lifespan indefinitely? Would it really make us happy?

To which I believe the answer is no, and no.

What we forget when we focus on extending our lifespan as long as possible is that things make us happy because they are rare, finite, and therefore valuable and precious. Diamonds. Newborns. Laughter. Great first dates. Great third dates. Sunshine. (I live in London. Trust me, sunshine is very rare and very finite.) Make these things available to everyone all the time, and they would lose their glow, become mundane.

Two thoughts:

1. Nonsense. This may be true for some, who seem perpetually bored even in their twenties, but certainly not for all.

2. Other than the times when I am forced to sit through a meeting, I can’t remember the last time that I was bored. I gave a talk to a Happiness Club last week, and the central theme of my talk was to say yes to everything that life has to offer, regardless of how busy you already are. 

“Be so busy that you wish you had more time for television.”

This is what I have done with my life. It occurs to me that my wife and I have not watched a single minute of television since last Thursday night.

More than a week ago.  

Don’t get me wrong. We want to watch TV. We enjoy watching TV. There are even shows on the DVR that we would like to see. We just don’t have the time to sit down on the couch for an hour.

Boredom has become an impossible-to-imagine concept in my life, and I’m willing to bet on my continued ability to fill my life to the brim regardless of how long I live.

So I’m willing to risk the inherent perils of eternal life. Bring it on.

Why do people cheat? Why do children misbehave? The reason is oftentimes simple.

A new study entitled “The Cheater’s High: The Unexpected Affective Benefits of Unethical Behavior” has shown that as long as you didn’t think your cheating hurt anyone, cheating often makes people feel great. Researchers attribute the exhilaration that people feel to pride and admiration in their own cleverness.

Apparently, this is not good.

“The fact that people feel happier after cheating is disturbing, because there is emotional reinforcement of the behavior, meaning they could be more likely to do it again,” said Nicole E. Ruedy, the study’s lead author and a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Washington’s Center for Leadership and Strategic Thinking.

None of these findings come as a surprise to me. Nor should they.

Of course cheating feels great. Conquering the system, subverting authority, sticking it to the man, profiting from your wits and taking advantage of loopholes have always been reasons for celebration.

As long as no one is being harmed, I would feel great, too. 

One of the advantages that I have as a teacher is that I wasn’t a well behaved student throughout much of my childhood and teenage years. This offers me a perspective that the average teacher, who tended to love school and was exceedingly compliant, does not to possess.

I often find myself in a conversation with a colleague who says something like, “I just don’t understand why he would run down the hallway like that.”

My response is always something along these lines:

“Don’t you understand? Running down the hallways is fun. Fooling around with your friends instead of summarizing an magazine article or solving a division problem is fun. Interrupting the teacher to make the class laugh is fun. This is why many students misbehave. They are simply making the choice that will lead to the most immediate enjoyment.”

This isn’t only true for children. As an adult, I still think that running down the hallway is fun. I still think that fooling around with my friends is better than writing the required report or attending the latest professional development workshop. I may be more compliant and feel a greater sense of responsibility now that I am an adult, but there is also a part of me that desperately wants to do whatever the hell he wants, regardless of what the rules or expectations are.  

This makes sense. It’s certainly not a novel concept. Most rules are in place because the alternative is more appealing. If driving fast wasn’t so much fun, we wouldn’t have speed limits. If simply taking whatever you wanted from the store shelves without the exchange of effort wasn’t an ideal way to live, we wouldn’t have laws against theft.

There would be no need. 

I often tell these teachers that if given the chance, I would love to sprint down the hallway, throw rocks through windows, toss televisions out of eight story windows and slam sledgehammers into drywall because destroying things is fun, too.

Still. Even at my age, these things are appealing.

We misbehave because it is often the choice that leads to the most immediate excitement and happiness, oftentimes at the expense of our future selves.

Misbehaving is fun. It’s often costly and detrimental to your long term goals, but try making a ten year old understand that.  

Or even a forty year old.

 

Speak Up storytelling: Anita Flores

Our next Speak Up storytelling event is on Saturday, November 9, at 8:00 at Real Art Ways in Hartford.

Tickets can be purchased online here or purchased at the door, provided that we don’t sell out prior to Saturday.

This week we introduce you to the storytellers who you will be hearing from on Saturday night. Hope to see you there!

_______________________________

Anita Flores was born in Astoria, grew up in West Hartford, CT. She currently works on MTV’s True Life. She tells stories and does a web series for My Damn Channel called Questionable Drawings where she interviews comedians and animates their responses. She writes for Nerve.com on a column called “Talking with Strangers” and also does a sex advice column where she asks comedians for romantic advice.

Speak Up storyteller: Donna Gosk

Our next Speak Up storytelling event is on Saturday, November 9, at 8:00 at Real Art Ways in Hartford.

Tickets can be purchased online here or purchased at the door, provided that we don’t sell out prior to Saturday.

This week we introduce you to the storytellers who you will be hearing from on Saturday night. Hope to see you there!

_______________________________

Donna Gosk is a mother of three and grandmother of four children. She loves to spend time with them. In the meantime she plays golf, reads and follows the Red Sox and Patriots. She teaches fifth grade, loves her job, loves her students, loves her colleagues and enjoys every day of her life.