Matthew Dicks's Blog, page 493

I’m not anti-feminist. I just don’t like stupid.

For the record, my persistent use the word “mankind” has nothing to do with my support of the patriarchy.

I just think the word “humankind” sounds really, really stupid.

New Year’s Resolutions 2013

The following are my New Years resolutions for 2013. As always, I reserve the right to alter the list for one week after posting.

Suggestions are still welcome.

1. Don’t die.

This was suggested to me by a reader a couple years ago, and it makes sense to keep it on the list. It is my most important resolution. 

2. Lose ten pounds.

After a year of stagnation, I intend on moving the needle on my scale in 2013.  Ideally, I’d like to lose about 20 pounds and get down to my ideal weight (as defined by my lunatic doctor), but after last year’s failures, I’m keeping things realistic.

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.

This goal is the same as one I accomplished in 2012. I considered adding to the goal, since I typically exceed the 100 mark on a daily basis, but again, why not be realistic?

4. Launch at least one podcast.

The equipment has been purchased. The format of the podcast has been decided. Even the name has been chosen (thanks to a reader’s suggestion). I need to learn how to post a  podcast to a website and iTunes and complete a few simple tasks and I’ll be ready to go.  

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

This is a goal that I failed to complete in 2011 and 2012. I should stop torturing myself and abandon the goal, but I want to play the flute again, damn it.  

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

My fifth novel, THE PERFECT COMEBACK OF CAROLINE JACOBS, is not finished but should be. I’ve given myself 75 days to complete it. 

7. Complete my sixth novel.

Relying heavily on my summer vacation, I intend on completing my sixth novel by the end of 2013. 

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

I have three children’s books in various stages of revision and completion.  My goal is to sell at least one of them to a publisher in 2013.        

9. Complete a book proposal for my memoir.

I have no experience writing a book proposal, but I know that it requires an outline, at least three chapters and a lengthy cover letter of sorts. I intend on accomplishing this in 2013.  

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

One entry per month is a reasonable goal, though  ideally I would like to post more often. As reasonable as it may sound, however, we failed to achieve this goal in 2012, coming up two posts short. Giving my sister a laptop will hopefully make this goal easier to accomplish.  

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

I need to complete one more class in order to become certified to teach English in grades 6-12. My wife has found a local community college offering the required class. Though I have no intention of leaving the elementary school classroom, I like to keep my options open.  I will begin my fifteenth year of teaching teaching elementary school in the fall of 2013, and there may come a point when I desire a change. I want to be prepared for that moment. 

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

I would like to think that I could publish more than one in 2013, but I failed to achieve this goal in 2012, so I am not getting my hopes up.

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

I attended eight Moth events in 2012, so this seems like a reasonable goal. Ideally, I would like to attend one event per moth and will try to accomplish this in 2013, but setting a goal of 12 seems unrealistic.

I also considered setting a goal related to winning a specific number of Moth events, but this goal also seemed unrealistic. Many factors influence a storyteller’s chances of winning, and some of them are beyond the storyteller’s control. I would very much like to win a GrandSLAM championship in 2013, and I have at least one opportunity to do so, but again, establishing that as a goal seems unrealistic.  

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

After next weekend’s performances, my writing partner and I will hopefully have our rock opera ready for a full run at a willing playhouse. Admittedly, most of the work involved with finding a playhouse will fall into the lap of my partner, but I will be supporting his efforts every step of the way.

15. Give yoga an honest try.

I have been critical for yoga for years but have never actually attempted yoga (a source of consternation for my yoga-loving friends). I intended on correcting this in 2012 by participating in at least half a dozen yoga classes in order to gain a better understanding of it. I failed to do so but have made it a goal in 2013. 

16. Meditate for at least five minutes every day.

This goal was recommended by a handful of readers in 2012, so I thought that it was worth investing five minutes a day in order to see if meditation could make a difference in my life.  I don’t know if it has actually helped my life in any tangible way, but I have gotten quite good at clearing my mind for 5-10 minutes at a time and plan on continuing this in 2013.

17. De-clutter the garage.

I own a two-car garage that is essentially being used to store unused furniture. This will end in 2013. 

18. De-clutter the basement.

The addition of Charlie to our family, as well as my wife’s temporary departure from teaching, has caused the basement to fall into a state of disorganization. This will end in 2013. 

19. De-clutter the shed 

There is a shed at the rear of our property that I have yet to clean or organize since moving into the house. It is full of gardening paraphernalia from the previous owner. This will end in 2013.

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

I drink a lot of Diet Coke. It concerns my wife. In 2013 I plan on cutting my soda consumption in half. In order t do so, I must first determine how much soda I drink on a given day. I will keep a 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.

I successfully completed this goal in 2012 and feel that it’s worthy of repeating.  

22. Conduct the ninth No-Longer-Annual A-Mattzing Race in 2012.

After unsuccessfully attempting to be cast for The Amazing Race years ago, I decided to plan, organize and run my own Amazing Race as a means of convincing producers that I was destined to be on the show. My first Amazing Race went off well, and I soon stopped caring about being on the show and instead wanted to run more races of my own. Thus the A-Mattzing Race (so named by a friend) was born. The last race took place in September of 2008, and while all good things must come to an end, I am not ready to allow this part of my life to come to a close yet.

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

My 2012 Christmas haul

For the past three years, I have been cataloging the Christmas gifts that my wife has given me, primarily to demonstrate her extraordinary ability to please with the simplest of presents.

In 2009, the haul included a signed first edition of Kurt Vonnegut’s MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY.

The 2010 haul included a Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure pin and a Patriots house key.

Last year’s gifts included a Darth Vader pen and Mr. T in a Pocket.

As you can see, it doesn’t take much to please me.

This year’s haul is no different. In addition to a tour of Yankee Stadium and lunch at a restaurant that only serves hot dogs, the 2012 haul includes two toys that make noise and a pen designed to shoot rubber bands.

I don’t require much to be happy.

Resolution update: 2012 in review

The following is the December update and end-of-year review of my 2011 New Year’s resolutions.

I am currently in the process of deciding upon my 2013 goals and will post them later in the day.

Of my twenty New Years resolutions established at the beginning of 2012, only six were successfully completed. This has been my least successful year in the seven years I have establishing goals and posting them to my blog. 

Of the goals achieved, I am most proud of my Moth performances and next week’s opening of The Clowns. Both of these achievements were unfathomable just two years ago.  

Of the goals I failed to complete in 2012, the failure to complete my fifth novel looms large.  It impacted completion of many other goals and hangs like an albatross around my neck.     

The success or failure of each individual resolution is as follows: 

1. Don’t die.

2. Lose ten pounds.

My weight is exactly the same as it was on the first day of the year.

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

I end the year with a broken flute and not a single hour of practice.

5. Complete my fifth novel before the birth of my next child.

Still not complete. My greatest failure of the year, and the cause of many other failures.

6. Complete my sixth novel.

Though I wrote parts of my sixth (and seventh novel), neither is even close to completion.  

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

Three children’s books are in various states of completion, and an editor is interested in looking at them, but until I finish my fifth novel, all other writing projects were put on hold, preventing pursuit of this goal.

8. Complete the book proposal for my non-fiction, photographic  collaborative project.

See above.

9. Complete three chapters of my memoir.

Parts of three chapters have been written in preparation for stories that I have told at Moth StorySLAMs in 2012, but nothing formal or comprehensive has been written yet.  

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

A total of ten posts were written for 2012.

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

One class was completed in the fall of 2012. The second class is not available until 2013.

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

Many pieces were written. Few were submitted. None were accepted. The failure to complete the fifth novel made this goal exceedingly difficult to achieve.

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

I attended a total eight Moth events in 2012, exceeding my goal. Seven StorySLAM’s and one GrandSLAM.

I won two StorySLAMs, placed second in three other StorySLAMs, placed second in the GrandSLAM, and was not called to the stage for one StorySLAM.

In terms of goals achieved in 2012, this is by far my proudest. I told my first Moth story in July of 2011, and since then, I have taken the stage for a total of eight StorySLAMs and two GrandSLAMs. I won three of the StorySLAMs, took second place three others, and placed second in this year’s  GrandSLAM.

The Moth has become an important part of my life in a relatively short time.

14. Complete the necessary revisions of our rock opera (The Clowns) so that it can be staged as a full production in 2013.

The Clowns opens on Friday for a weekend run. Are you coming?

15. Rid Elysha and myself of all education debt before the end of the year.

Incremental progress was made throughout 2012.

16. Give yoga an honest try.

This did not happen, despite the efforts of friends to help.  

17. Meditate for at least five minutes every day.

This has been my most surprising achievement of 2012. Not only do I spend every morning meditating, but recently, I was able to enter a state of meditation in a room full of people. For at least a couple minutes and maybe more, I managed to eliminate all distraction and empty my mind. I had been trying to do this for much of 2012, and though I only managed it once, I was thrilled.

18. Agree to try at least one new dish per month, even if it contains ingredients that I wouldn’t normally consider palatable.

I tried at least twelve new dishes in 2012 and found at least a few that are palatable.  

19. Conduct the ninth No-Longer-Annual A-Mattzing Race in 2012.

This goal went uncompleted as a result of my failure to complete my novel.

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

Considering that I forgot to post results for the last two months, I can hardly consider even this to be a success.

My secret wish for 2013 is for Comic Sans

My secret wish for 2013 is for the New York Times to publish an edition entirely in Comic Sans, just so we can watch its more staid, crotchety and snobbish readers lose their minds for a day.

That would be AWESOME.

This girl does not look three

Sometimes she doesn’t make it to the potty quick enough and sometimes she looks old enough to drive a car.

Mr. Boo

This video was sent to me by Chris Harris, filmmaker who created this short film about an imaginary friend about a few years ago. He recently read MEMOIRS OF AN IMAGINARY FRIEND, and it naturally made him think a lot about Mr. Boo.

I loved the film and wanted to share it with you. It’s about four minutes long and worth every second. Intriguing, mysterious, clever.  And I thought the actors were brilliant in their performances.

So much story in just four minutes.    

Overdressed or underdressed?

A podcast that I listen to discussed this question:

Do you prefer to be overdressed or underdressed?

Not surprising to many, I always prefer to be underdressed (even ahead of appropriately dressed), for three reasons:

1. It’s always more comfortable to be underdressed (at least for me), and as a human being and a grown man, I have a right to value personal comfort over the judgmental eye of others.

2. Being underdressed is a more approximate physical reflection of the person I am. By nature, I tend to be a person who rejects tradition and challenges norms, and in almost all things, I tend to lean toward the disentanglement and destruction of staid society.

I am the teacher who would prefer that his students call him by his first name.

I am the person who thinks that a verbal thank you mitigates the need for a formal thank you note.

I am the writer who tends to avoid profanity in his work but thinks the restrictions on profanity in television are ridiculous and unnecessary.

Being perpetually underdressed is just another way that I lean away from tradition and societal expectations. 

3. It is exceedingly rare that someone cares if you are underdressed.

Case in point: I attended a wedding last week of a friend. I wore pants, a shirt and a blazer. No tie, of course, because I ceased wearing ties years ago. I was aware that I would almost certainly be in the minority in this regard, and I knew that my wife thought I would look better with a tie, but I simply cannot strap that noose to my neck any longer.

Surprisingly, it turns out that I was the only man at this fairly large wedding not wearing a tie.

Did anyone notice this except me? I don’t think so.

Did anyone care? Certainly not.

In the unlikely event that someone did notice or care, do they even remember the absence of my tie two weeks later? Not likely.    

In fact, I have found that when I dress more formally than my instincts tell me that I should, there is almost always someone dressed similarly to the way I would have preferred.

Years ago I attended an engagement party at a country club, and after some cajoling on my wife’s part, I agreed to wear a suit despite the heat of the day. It turned out that the only two people wearing a suit were my father-in-law and me. We were both sweaty and uncomfortable for the duration of the affair.

At a recent family gathering, my wife asked me to replace the tee-shirt that I planned on wearing with a sweater or buttoned-down shirt. She almost never asks me to change something I’m wearing (a credit to her), and in truth, I thought it was probably a good idea, too. But when I arrived at the party, I found the host wearing not only a tee-shirt but sweat pants as well. It turned out that my original plans for jeans and a tee-shirt would have been fine.

This is not to say that underdressed is the right answer to this question. I know a guy whose wife teases him because he spends his evenings at home dressed in a button-down shirt, sweater and dress pants at all times. For reasons that I don’t understand but respect, he prefers a more formal look to tee-shirts and jeans, even while relaxing.

The right answer to “Overdressed or underdressed?” is not what everyone expects you to wear. The right answer is what you want to wear.

Outsourcing my New Year’s resolutions again: Would you like to play a role?

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you probably know that I take my goal setting and New Year’s resolutions very seriously.  Except of course, for the months of October and November of this year, when I completely dropped the ball. No idea why. Just busy, I guess.

At the end of every month I typically post the progress of each of my New Year’s resolutions, and I am tough on myself when I fail to achieve my goals. 

I’d begun the process of deciding upon my 2013 goals when I came upon a piece in the Wall Street Journal on New Year’s resolutions that suggests that outsourcing your resolutions may improve your ability to achieve them.

Most of us could use help achieving our goals. Who better to tell us how to improve ourselves than someone who knows us well—perhaps better than we know ourselves—and even may be all too happy to offer up some tough love? And if we promise to check in regularly with this person to discuss our progress, we’ll probably do a much better job of keeping our resolutions.

“We all have blind spots, but the people we are intimate with can see through them,” says David Palmiter, a couples therapist and professor of psychology at Marywood University, in Scranton, Pa. A loved one can encourage us to meet our goals and hold us accountable when we slip, he says.

I’ve always asked a select group of friends to suggest goals for my upcoming year, but after reading this piece, I thought it might be a good idea to open up my goal selection process to anyone who might want to participate. 

So if you’d like to suggest a goal for me in 2013, I would love to hear your ideas. Please note that this does not guarantee that I will adopt every suggested goal, but I will seriously consider all that are submitted. 

Also note that all goals must be empirically measurable, so a goal like “Be less of a jerk-face” could not be included in my list of resolutions because there is no way for me to determine if the goal was met.

But you’re welcome to tell me to stop being a jerk-face at any time if you’d like. Not need to wait until the end of the year to make that request. 

Lessons from my third Moth victory

On Thursday night I was fortunate enough to win my third Moth SotrySLAM of my storytelling career at The Bitter End in New York City. The theme of the night was AFTERMATH. I told a story the decisions that my parents made when I was a child and how the birth of my own children has cast those decisions in a new and unfortunate light for me.

Following every StorySLAM, and especially every victory, I like to try to analyze my performance in order to glean any lessons or insight that might help me in future competitions.

It was an unusual StorySLAM in a couple ways. First, though The Bitter End was jammed with people, it wasn’t the usual raucous Moth crowd that I have come to expect at these events, perhaps because it was the week following Christmas and the audience was made up of many non-New Yorkers who were in town for the holidays. I suspect that there were a lot of people taking in The Moth for the first time and were not accustomed to the level of enthusiasm exhibited by typical Moth audiences.

It wasn’t a bad crowd. Just a quieter crowd. A little harder to make laugh. 

Whatever the reason, the story I had prepared for the evening was not supposed to be funny, and it was probably the perfect kind of story for this particular audience.

It was also the first (and hopefully the last) time that I have heard storytellers call out other storytellers while onstage. It made for a couple of odd and slightly uncomfortable moments, to say the least. The first storyteller attempted to be funny by opening his story with a jab at previous storyteller’s story. The subsequent storyteller then attacked the first storyteller, calling him a douchebag for his criticism. Both remarks quieted the crowd and elicited groans from the people around me.

Another storyteller took the stage and opened his story by thanking us for braving the cold and the long line, attempting a Kumbaya-like moment with the audience.

I don’t think any of these things helped the storytellers in terms of their scores, nor did they serve to endear them to their audience.

I have always been a fan of getting on the stage, telling the story and getting off. Save the commentary for the host of the evening. That is what they are there to do. 

That’s exactly what I did, but in truth, luck played a large role in my victory on Thursday night.

First, I was the final person to be called to the stage, which is an enormous benefit to any storyteller. The first storyteller of the night was someone I know well, and her story was outstanding. Humorous and revealing and full of suspense. It should have at least been contending with mine for the win, but because she went first, her chances for victory were exceptionally small.

I’m not sure if the first storyteller of the evening has ever won a StorySLAM.

I also changed my story dramatically while onstage. On the drive to the city, I practiced my story in the car for my friend, but the story that I had written at home and told in the car was vastly different from the one told two hours later in front of the audience. I was fortunate. In the midst of telling the story, I found a couple of surprise transitions that helped propel it forward at a more rapid clip, and I stumbled upon two funny lines that worked very well.

Like I said, I got lucky.

As a storyteller, I feel that there is a delicate balance between being prepared and being over prepared. I have taken the stage at The Moth with a story that I have memorized almost word for word and done well, but it seems as if I am more likely to find success if I have a general idea of my story, a few moments of planned transition and an opening line ready. By not memorizing the story entirely or even planning every moment of the story, I have more flexibility onstage and a greater opportunity to gauge the audience’s reaction, adjust if necessary and find those surprise moments that often work so well.

Of course, this can be dangerous, too. If I have not prepared enough, I might find myself lost in the story at moments, unable to finish it succinctly.  

Like I said, it’s a delicate balance.

Also, for the first time ever, I took note of the location of the judges in the room. On Thursday, the three teams of judges happened to be located in the same general area, in front and to the left of the stage. Knowing that there were no judges to my right, I didn’t turn in that direction and establish eye contact with those audience members as often as I normally would have. Instead, I focused most of my attention straight ahead and to the left, where I knew that judges were seated. I’m not sure if this made a difference, but I can’t imagine that it hurt. 

I’m still walking on air following my Moth victory on Thursday night. It broke a frustrating string of four second place finishes and will give me another chance at winning a GrandSLAM.

I love taking the stage and telling stories at The Moth. I feel exceptionally fortunate when my name emerges from that tote bag, allowing me the opportunity to tell my story to a willing audience. If it was not a competition but simply an evening of storytelling, I would still be dropping my name in that bag, hoping for it to be drawn.

But I won’t lie. The competitive aspect of The Moth adds an additional layer that I like very much. Win or lose, I love knowing exactly how I did on any given night. Having spent much of my childhood playing videogames, I like to know my score. I like to know where I placed. I like to know if and how I should improve.

The Moth offers that as well.

And when you actually manage to win, you get to walk on air for a few days. Not a bad reward.