Matthew Dicks's Blog, page 482

Resolution update: February

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 February. 

1. Don’t die.

I didn’t even require any CPR this month..

2. Lose ten pounds.

The four pounds I lost in January shrunk to three pounds in February, putting me seven pounds from my goal. But it’s been a week of dining out, which never helps.

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.

Done. 

4. Launch at least one podcast.

Equipment purchased. Software downloaded. Expert onboard to assist if needed. Work begins on April 1 when the book is finished.

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

The broken flute remains in the back of my car. I think. I haven’t actually bothered to look for at least six months.

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

Work continues.

7. Complete my sixth novel.

Work will not begin on this goal until the fifth book is complete.

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

Work will not begin on this goal until the fifth book is complete.

9. Complete a book proposal for my memoir.

Work will not begin on this goal until the fifth book is complete.

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

No blog posts written yet for the year.    

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

I received an email from the Connecticut Department of Education yesterday informing me that I am now just one class and an additional $50 away from achieving certification. That class will be taken in the summer. 

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

I had another piece published in the Huffington Post yesterday. While this isn’t an actual print newspaper, do those even matter anymore? I may need to rethink this goal.

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

I attended two StorySLAMs in February and planned on telling a story at both. Unfortunately that did not happen. Fate denied me the opportunity. I will be at the Bell House in Brooklyn on Monday night with the hopes of telling a story and back n Brooklyn ten days later for the GrandSLAM.

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

The script, the score and the soundtrack are now in the hands of the necessary people. Fingers crossed. We also plan on applying for a New York theater festival in 2014, though that application process has not yet begun.

15. Give yoga an honest try.

Though I’m ready to try this whenever possible, the summer might be the most feasible time to attempt this goal.

16. Meditate for at least five minutes every day.

Done.

17. De-clutter the garage.

Progress! Our town’s sanitation department picks up two bulk items each week free of charge. On Tuesday an old bed frame and an ancient table were removed from the garage. In about six weeks all the old and unused furniture will be gone forever.   

18. De-clutter the basement.

No progress. 

19. De-clutter the shed

No progress. In fairness, it was impossible to reach the shed with the recent blizzard, but this is definitely a summer job.

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

I begin recording my soda intake this month. My plan is to record of my soda consumption for a month in order to determine the average amount of soda I drink in a day and will then seek to reduce that number by 50 percent.

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

In February I tried acorn squash and did not hate it.   

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

Work will not begin on this goal until the fifth book is complete.

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

Done.

Wife and daughter are capable of even making The Moth better.

As much as I love The Moth, the drive into the city immediately after work is never easy for me. I don’t get a chance to see my family, and I often arrive back home well after midnight, when everyone is deep in sleep.

It’s also not easy for my wife, who spends the entire evening alone with a nine month old boy and a four year old girl. As well behaved as our children are and as skilled a mother as Elysha is, it’s still not exactly a piece of cake.

All this makes these already over-the-moon-precious goodnight messages all the more meaningful to me.

I am truly the luckiest man I have ever known.

 

Football is better than fashion, even if both are inane.

On Sunday night, my wife turned on the television half an hour before the Academy Awards were to begin to watch the fashion on the red carpet.

Less than two minutes later she turned it off.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“It’s just so stupid,” she said.

I love her so much.

On Monday morning I criticized the existence of a piece in Slate entitled Oscar Shocker! Movie stars rivet the entire world by wearing stunningly conventional evening gowns and all the Oscar fashion talk in general. On Twitter, I questioned why anyone even cares about this nonsense.

A few people responded, questioning how one’s love for red carpet fashion is any different than my love for sports, and my initial response was that they were correct.

My love for the New England Patriots is illogical and fairly stupid.

The love for red carpet fashion is the same.

The people who questioned me were satisfied with his response.

But I think I’ve changed my mind.

Essentially, these people were arguing that it’s not fair to judge a person’s personal interests. To each his own. Some people like sports, Some people like fashion. Some people like bird watching.

Who’s do say which is better?

But I found myself thinking that some areas of interests and some hobbies have inherently more value than others, and there’s noting wrong with valuing one over another.

Take sports versus fashion, for example.

I attend Patriots home games with friends. I spend a day outdoors in the company of friends. While tailgating prior to the game, we cook and enjoying a meal together, listen to music, engage in conversation and meet new people. Then we enter a stadium and watch world class athletes who have trained for the entire lives compete against other world class athletes on the field of play.

Contrast this to the person who sits in front of the television for two hours before an award’s show begins in order to examine the clothing choices of actors entering a theater. These movie stars answer questions like, “Who are you wearing tonight?” and “Which movie do you think will take home Oscar?” Then the next day these actors and actresses are subjected to hundreds, if not thousands, of best and worst dressed photo galleries and glossy magazine covers in a spectacle not unlike high school. Discussion often includes the actor’s weight, nipples, makeup and hair.

Are these two areas of interest really comparable?

If you’re opposed to football because of the violence and sexism that it admittedly embraces, substitute it with tennis. Women’s basketball. Minor league baseball. Soccer. Track and field. The Olympics.  

As a parent, would you prefer that your child become a sports fan or a fashion fan?

Would you prefer your child to read an article about Anne Hathaway’s nipples (of which there are hundreds) or one about the rise of women’s soccer in the United States.

I don’t even think all aspects of fashion are bad. As hesitant as I am to admit this (for the ammunition that it will provide my friends on the golf course), I have watched every season of Project Runway and loved them all. Unlike red carpet fashion, Project Runway is a television show that honors creativity, intelligence, competition and excellence. It is a show about designers who utilize their expertise, wits and problem solving skills to create amazing objects in a short period of time.

This is an aspect of fashion that I can embrace.

Even if you want to argue that fashion is better than football (and I could probably make that argument even though I might not believe it), can’t we at least agree that a hierarchy of value exists when it comes to personal interest? That a day spent reading or painting or listening to music or playing tennis with a friend (or even bird watching) has more inherent value than one spent watching Celebrity Rehab III or playing Farmville on Facebook?

“To each his own” is a valid way of viewing the world, but that does not mean that each choice is equal in terms of value and merit.

Some are just stupider than others.

When it comes to the pre-Academy Award red carpet television show, I’ll defer to my wife:

“It’s just so stupid.”

When do I write? In the cracks between my toddler’s poops and my wife’s contractions.

Two years ago, I spoke at a nursing home about my most recent novel.

I take any gig that I can get.

In a sparsely furnished basement room, standing in front of a 78-inch television, I read a little bit from my book, told a few stories, described my writing process and watched as the smattering of men in the audience all nodded off almost simultaneously.

At the end of my talk, an elderly woman approached and told me that she had an “amazing story that will someday make a great book.”

“How old are you?” I asked.

“Eighty-seven,” the woman replied.

“Then shouldn’t you start writing your book today,” I asked. “You could be dead tomorrow.”

This remark earned me an angry glare from the woman and a punch in the arm from my wife, who was standing beside me, but I stand by my statement. That old lady needed to get writing immediately if she ever hoped to finish her book.

She’s probably dead today. More importantly, she’s almost certainly unpublished.

This was not the first time someone has spoken to me about their desire to write without any actual writing to show for it. These future literary giants, who I call someday-writers, are filled with excuses as to why they are not writing.

Some assure me that they are awaiting retirement, a sabbatical or their child’s graduation before beginning the great American novel.

Others blame their delay on location, claiming they can only apply pen to paper in a non-franchised, locally owned coffee shop while sipping organic cappuccino and listening to the soothing sounds of Nora Jones unplugged.

Still others assert that they can only write on a Macbook Air, a Moleskine journal or a yellow legal pad.

These are not writers. These are romantics captivated by the false trappings of an authorial career. They idealize the writing process because the one thing they know about writing is that it’s hard and therefore assume it requires the ideal conditions.

I write in the cracks of my life. The spaces between work and family. I can often be found sitting at the kitchen table, typing with one hand while balancing my eight month old son on my lap and keeping one eye on my four year old daughter, who is sitting on the toilet, straining to make a poop while watching Max and Ruby on the iPad. Though long, uninterrupted afternoons in idyllic pastoral settings would be an ideal way to write, this is unrealistic for most writers.

For so many of us, we write wherever and whenever we can.

Nothing epitomizes this reality better than the day my daughter was born.

My wife, Elysha, and I arrived at the hospital at midnight. Her water had broken but she was not yet dilated.

I still don’t know what dilated means, and please don’t tell me. The less I know about the lady bits, the better.

After being assigned our room, I was ordered to eat Jello in the lobby while my wife was given an epidural, and then she went to sleep for six hours. With pain medication onboard, Elysha slept soundly. I was provided with an arcane, back-breaking torture device upon which to sleep, so rather than suffering, I opened up the laptop and began writing.

Nurses came in and out of the room throughout the night to check on my wife, giving me odd looks and sidelong glances when they saw me sitting in the corner, pecking away, but Elysha didn’t mind a bit. In fact, during one of these checks, she awoke, turned to me and asked, “What are you working on?”

“Milo,” I said, referencing my manuscript.

“Good,” she said. “Keep working.”

I did.

Eventually it was time for Elysha to push. A nurse told me to grab a leg and refrain from passing out. I complied, but during the first hour of pushing, the contractions were spaced far apart and a monitor alerted us to when each contraction was coming. Rather than wasting precious time, I rolled back and forth across the room on a wheeled stool between contractions, from my pregnant, panting, ready-to-pop wife to my laptop and back.

The nurses didn’t appreciate this one bit.

But this is how writers write. We are either writing or waiting for that next moment to write. And these moments rarely happen at a handmade butcher block table in a fair trade coffee shop at the corner of Trendy and Hip Streets.

Writing happens in the mess of our lives, in the cracks between poops and contractions.

Dicks serves a purpose

My last name has not always been the easiest thing to live with. It’s resulted in teasing, the occasional crass joke and even a smattering of confusion when people over the phone ask me to repeat my last name two or three times, seeming unable to believe it each time. 

It’s even necessitated the use of a pseudonym in the UK.

But my last name has proven to be beneficial at times as well.

It’s toughened me up considerably and probably contributed to my ability to disregard what other people think of me.

I suspect that it’s also contributed to my sense of humor.

My last name was also an integral part of my first Moth StorySLAM story, which I won.

Now it appears that there is a scientific advantage to my last name.

It turns out that the first letter of a childhood surname determines much about our consumer behavior as adult, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research.

The authors studied how quickly adults responded to opportunities to acquire items of value to them. They found that the later in the alphabet people’s childhood surnames were, the faster those consumers responded to purchase opportunities.

Children with last names that fall late in the alphabet are often at the end of lines or at the back of the class. “The idea holds that children develop time-dependent responses based on the treatment they receive,” the authors explain. “In an effort to account for these inequities, children late in the alphabet will move quickly when last name isn’t a factor; they will ‘buy early.’ Likewise, those with last names early in the alphabet will be so accustomed to being first that that individual opportunities to make a purchase won’t matter very much; they will ‘buy late.’”

I went to school with a girl named Melissa Zarnick. If the research is correct, it’s likely that Melissa is one of the worst impulse shoppers on the planet and in serious credit card debt.

Dicks isn’t as good as Allaire or Archambault (other last names in my high school class), but it isn’t bad in terms of its placement in the alphabet.

To prove my point, I’m currently driving a ten year-old car and watching an eleven year-old television connected to a fifteen year-old combination VHS/DVD player. The television is not HD and cannot stream content and the remote control on the DVD player no longer works.

I am the epitome of “buy late.”

There are no easy answers when it comes to video games and violence. Nor is the research on the issue settled.

Do violent video games result in an increased level of violence among young people?

It’s easy to say yes. It seems to make sense. It allows us to direct our efforts  at a specific source. But consider research reported in the New York Times:

The proliferation of violent video games has not coincided with spikes in youth violent crime. The number of violent youth offenders fell by more than half between 1994 and 2010, to 224 per 100,000 population, according to government statistics, while video game sales have more than doubled since 1996.

In a working paper now available online, Dr. Ward and two colleagues examined week-by-week sales data for violent video games, across a wide range of communities. Violence rates are seasonal, generally higher in summer than in winter; so are video game sales, which peak during the holidays. The researchers controlled for those trends and analyzed crime rates in the month or so after surges in sales, in communities with a high concentrations of young people, like college towns.

“We found that higher rates of violent video game sales related to a decrease in crimes, and especially violent crimes,” said Dr. Ward, whose co-authors were A. Scott Cunningham of Baylor University and Benjamin Engelstätter of the Center for European Economic Research in Mannheim, Germany.

This does not mean that violent video games are not contributing to some of the violence that we have recently seen from young men in this country. There are statistics in the New York Times piece that also lend credence to the argument.

It simply means that there are no easy answers to this difficult question, and we must be wary of latching onto the easy answers, lest we ignore the ones more difficult to surmise.

Baby talk

He’s not talking yet, but this might be better than actual words.

The twenty-first century is such a tough time to be alive.

A piece by Drake Baer in Fast Company entitled Slacking At Work Is A Controversial Productivity Tool–So Is There A Better Way? opens with this sentence:

More and more of us find ourselves unable to juggle overwhelming demands and maintain a seemingly unsustainable pace,” Tony Schwartz recently wrote in The New York Times.

“Overwhelming demands.” “Unsustainable pace.”

Shut up.

We could be living through World War II right now. The fear of invasion. The loss of so many American lives. The almost complete transformation of our peacetime economy to a wartime economy. The rationing of food, fuel and metal for the war effort.

Or the Great Depression. Crippling unemployment. The bread lines. Homelessness on a national scale. The Dust Bowl. Hoovervilles. The constant fear of starvation.

Or how about the eighteenth century? A time when Americans had to grow their own food, make their own clothing, build their own homes and store enough firewood to survive the harsh New England winter. It was an age that lacked indoor plumbing, electricity, insulation, basic communication, the combustion engine and antibiotics.

How about the Civil War? Or Vietnam?  

Why not spend a day imagining what it was like to be an African American on a slave plantation in the deep south prior to Emancipation. 

Overwhelming demands. Unsustainable pace.

Seriously. Shut the hell up.

What motivates me?

Spite
A desire to impress my wife (and before that, the desire to impress girls)
The fear of poverty
The need to create something that will last beyond my lifetime
The personal satisfaction that comes with success

But mostly it’s spite and the desire to impress my wife.

Government with a splash of humor

The Illinois board of tourism created this video in honor of Abraham Lincoln and the attention he will be receiving at the Academy Awards this evening as a result of the Spielberg film.

It’s a bizarre film by any standards but even more so considering it comes from a governmental agency responsible for bringing tourists to their less-than-touristy state.

Government is so often devoid of humor. I love it when someone working in the bureaucratic machine manages to be creative.