Matthew Dicks's Blog, page 458

More!

When my daughter was a baby and not speaking, my wife and I taught her to use sign language for several words, including “More.”

“More” is supposed to be signed by tapping the fingertips of both hands together several times. My daughter learned this sign and several others until she was able to speak. It was helpful and damn cute.

We tried to teach our son this sign, but he rejected it, developing his own, equally effective sign.

I kind of love the idea that he refused to conform to standard sign language and created his own sign.

To be honest, I like his version of “More” better.

Another argument against the death penalty

I don’t support the death penalty because I think it’s barbaric, but more importantly, it endangers the lives of innocent people.

Human beings are fallible. The justice system makes mistakes. To think otherwise is stupid, except think of a word that means stupid a thousand times over.

I don’t know what that word is, but that’s what I think of the death penalty.

Mistakes happen. They have in the past, and they will again. Innocent people will die at the hands of the state. 

For example:

On this date in 1456, Joan of Arc was declared innocent for heresy.

Unfortunately for Joan, that was 25 years after she was burned at the stake for her crime.

Another Speak Up date added to the calendar

Please mark your calendars! Again!

Our next Speak Up storytelling event is on Saturday, September 28 at 7:00 PM at Real Art Ways in Hartford, CT. The theme of the night is Schooled: Lessons Taught and Lessons Learned.

This week we added Saturday, November 9 to the calendar for our third storytelling event. Same time and same place.

The theme of the night has yet to be determined.

Our goal is to produce 4-6 shows a year.  

Speak Up is an evening of storytelling open to the general public. Eight storytellers will take the stage to tell true stories on an assigned theme. Each storyteller has an 8 minute time limit and will tell their story without the use of notes. This is a curated show, meaning that my wife and I choose the storytellers for each event.

Our goal is to handpick about half of the storytellers for each event from a stable of storytellers who we already know and choose the other half from new storytellers who will have the opportunity to pitch their stories to us.

If you’re interested in pitching us a story, stay tuned. The process will be explained shortly once everything is in place.

Stay calm.

My daughter spent about 15 minutes this morning looking for Bear before finding him (or her) in the bottom of the toy box.

“I don’t want Mom to know I found Bear,” she said. “It’s a secret.”

“Why?” I asked. “So you can surprise her?”

“No!” she said, sounding incredibly frustrated. “I don’t want to tell her. You guys get too excited about stuff. I just don’t like that.”

Bare-breasted women are perfectly fine but Dicks was offensive?

Though my most recent novel, MEMOIRS OF AN IMAGINARY FRIEND,  is published in England (and doing quite well), I’ve never had the pleasure of visiting the country.

But it has come to my attention (through its publisher’s recent defense) that The Sun, a popular British tabloid newspaper, publishes large, color photographs of topless women on Page 3 (so ubiquitous that it is routinely capitalized) every day.

When I say popular, I mean popular. The Sun has the ninth-largest circulation of any newspaper in the world and the largest circulation of any daily newspaper in the United Kingdom.

Other interesting facts about Page 3:

After polling its readers, the Sun also instituted a policy of only featuring models with natural breasts.
Up until 2003, The Sun could legally publish photographs of 16 and 17-year old girls.
The Sun also has an official Page 3 website, Page3.com, which is one of the most trafficked websites in all of the United Kingdom.

After reading all this, I am confounded.

This the same country where I was required to change my last name because my publisher feared that Dicks would be considered too offensive.

Bare-breasted women intermingled with the important news of the day is apparently just fine with British audiences, but a book with the word Dicks on it, even if it’s clearly a last name, would be too much for them to bear.

I don’t pretend to understand the British psyche, but I’m also not sure if it’s even possible to understand.

My daughter loves butterflies and tarantulas.

As I was driving my four year-old daughter to preschool, she revealed that her two favorite insects are butterflies and tarantulas.

 

I know.

She explained that she loves butterflies because they are beautiful, and she loves tarantulas because “they’re the only bug that makes a good pet, too.”

We don’t own a tarantula, nor will we ever own a tarantula, but she has seen so many of them at the museums and zoos that she’s grown accustomed to their creepiness and thinks of them more like a dog or a cat than the terrifying subject of a 1955 monster movie.

The girl thinks refuses to eat chicken and hamburger because she says it’s disgusting, but she loves tarantulas.

As a teacher, my inclination was to use this as a teachable moment to introduce the word dichotomy to her. I tried to explain how her affection for butterflies and tarantulas represented represented a dichotomy in terms of her insect choices.

One is light, winged and colorful. The other is large, dark and hairy.

She was quiet for a moment and then said, “Dad, can we just listen to some music now?”

After 15 years of teaching, I’ve learned that not every teachable moment is a teachable moment.

When I started working as a wedding DJ in 1997, the world was damn near prehistoric.

My partner and I started our DJ business 17 years ago on a whim. We had no experience and no equipment but thought we could make it work.

Since 1997, we’ve performed at more than 350 weddings. 

Over the course of that time, I’ve also married more than a dozen couples.

We’ve done two weddings for the same groom after a divorce and second marriage.

We have many, many stories.

Though we constantly contemplate retiring, our company goes on. We’ve reached the point in our careers that we turn down many weddings. We pick-and-choose our clients and wedding venues carefully. We only work when we want to work. 

It occurred to me today, as I was working at wedding #353, that when when I started my career as a DJ in 1997:

Smoking was still permitted in most wedding venues.

Digital photography did not exist in its current form. Every single professional photographer was still shooting with actual film. In fact, my partner and I carried two extra rolls of film with us after multiple photographers had run out of film at weddings.

Digitized music did not exist. Every song that we played was purchased at a brick-and-mortar store.

We still played some songs on cassette tapes.

There was no online mapping website or software. Directions to wedding venues and client’s homes had to be taken over the phone and written down by hand.

Seventeen years is a long time to be doing anything.

The toughest question of the year

As a teacher, I am asked hundreds of questions a day. Occasionally I am asked a question that is so new, so strange or so challenging that I make note of it.

Last year’s most memorable and challenging question was asked by a student in the throes of adolescent love.

The student asked, “Mr. Dicks, why is love so hard?”

Had I been better prepared, my answer might have been better or at least more utilitarian. I might’ve offered some useful advice. But I can count the number of times a student has asked me a question about love on one hand.

It’s not exactly my area of expertise. 

My answer was this:

“Love is hard because the heart wants what the heart wants. Even when your head knows that love will be hard and maybe even impossible, the heart doesn’t stop loving until its ready to stop.”

My student did not seem overly impressed with my answer.

Rightfully so.

A lesson in bubbles

Watching my daughter teach my son something new is just about as good as it gets.

   

A pill that reduces the amount of sleep that a person needs? Blasphemy!

Slate’s Matthew Yglesias reports on the economics of a new drug called Modafinil, which appears to let people get by with much less sleep than they do today.

When I first read about this drug, I was thrilled.

I can’t stand sleep. I don’t like to sleep. I’m appalled by my need for sleep. Sleep is like death. I’ve always thought that sleep was human being’s greatest weakness.

If this drug could allow us to continue to function normally on less sleep, this would be a crowning achievement of the medical and pharmaceutical establishment.

Then I realized the possible personal implications involved.

I already require less sleep than most people. I slept a little more than five hours last night. The previous night I slept four. I probably average about five hours of sleep per night.

Some might argue that I actually require more sleep and am depriving my body of what it needs. A recent report in the New York Times argues that people who believe they can get by on 5 or 6 hours of sleep are probably shortchanging themselves when it comes to the rest they require.

I admittedly got nervous while reading this piece until I came to the list of effects of this self-imposed sleep deprivation:

From infancy to old age, the effects of inadequate sleep can profoundly affect memory, learning, creativity, productivity and emotional stability, as well as your physical health.

I don’t think I suffer in any of these effects. In fact, I think I excel in many of these areas. They are some of my areas of greatest strength. 

Don’t get me wrong. I have many, many shortcomings (22 in all by the latest count), but none of the effects of sleep deprivation appear on the list.

As a result, I have 2-3 extra hours a day in comparison to the average American. Add to that this that the average American watches about six hours of television per day and I average less than one and it’s easy to understand why I manage to get so much done.

One of the questions I’m most frequently asked at my author talks is how I manage to squeeze so much into a single day.

I often cite my near-death experiences as  providing me with an ongoing, diabolically existential crisis that makes me want to suck the life out of every minute of every day.

I speak about my experience working at McDonald’s, learning and embracing the idea that unwavering, well-planned routines boost productivity.

I talk about how daily exercise boosts my energy level. I talk about my belief in minimalism as a means of stripping my life of unneeded noise and clutter. I talk about my ability to prioritize tasks and delegate.

All of these things are true, but at the heart of my productivity is the fact that my day is 2-3 hours longer than the average American, and if you factor in the amount of television that the average person watches, it’s 6-8 hours longer.

I simply have more time in the day than most.

This is why I find myself despising the idea of a drug that reduced the amount of sleep that a person requires. I have a hard enough time keeping up with the added hours in my day. My reduced need for sleep is the closest thing I have to a super power (other than my immunity from bruising, hangovers and vomiting).

This pill would render my super power meaningless. 

How would Superman feel if everyone could take a pill and suddenly leap tall buildings in a single bound?

Depressed is my guess. Downright annoyed. 

It’s how I feel now.

I’m secretly hoping that the clinical trial for this new drug fail miserably. Maybe the mice will grow a third eye or get lost in the simplest of mazes.

Anything to maintain give me an edge on the average person.

My advice to you:

Get plenty of sleep. Maybe even more than you require. Don’t take any chances. Did you see that list of adverse effects of sleep deprivation? Memory loss? Emotional instability? A lack of creativity? It’s nothing to mess with. Go to bed early and wake up late. Sleep until noon on the weekends.

Embrace your bed for the friend and companion that it should be.

Sleep, my friends. Sleep long and hard.

I need all the help I can get.