Matthew Dicks's Blog, page 514

Gift giving is not supposed to be an opportunity to show us how special you are.

A friend and I were recently speaking about the upcoming wedding of a mutual friend. Specifically, we were discussing the gift that she planned on bringing to the wedding. I told her that I knew that the couple could use cash to help them pay for the wedding and had put the word out to their friends and relatives, but she said that she would never consider giving cash to the couple.

“Is it just that you don’t like to give cash?” I asked.

“Oh no,” she said. “I just have the perfect gift idea for them. They’re going to love it.”

“But why not just give them what they’ve asked for instead of assuming that you know better?”

“You don’t understand,” my friend said. “I have the perfect gift.”

“Is it at least on their registry?”’

“No, but it’s something I’ve been wanting to give them for a long time,” she said.

My friend is an example of the kind of person who associates gift giving with ego. A wedding gift is an opportunity to demonstrate her superior taste and discerning eye. Rather than giving the couple something they have asked for and need and waiting until their first anniversary to be creative, my friend is turning the gift into a moment for herself.

She is the same kind of person whose investment in the subsequent thank you card will probably border on obsessive.

I do not support this type of gift giving. If a couple is financially secure and nonspecific in their request for gifts, then the giver is welcome to be as creative as possible.

But when a couple is starting a life together by paying for their own wedding and were very specific in their financial and material needs via word of mouth and a gift registry, it is nothing more than ego, selfishness and self-centeredness that causes a person to completely disregard the couple’s need and give a gift that fulfills some hole in their own self-worth. 

Just send a check, damn it. It’s not about you.

Caine’s Arcade is back with an equally joyous follow-up story

In case you didn’t see Caine’s Arcade when I posted about it last spring, you should take a moment and watch it now. It is pure joy and inspiration.

If you’ve already watched it, you might want to watch it again.

I did, and it was ten minutes well spent. Again.

Best of all, there’s a follow-up to Caine’s Arcade that will bring you just as much joy as the first video.

Caine has been a very busy boy in the past year.  

I refuse to give the high school jerks a free pass, regardless of conventional wisdom

Logic says that we shouldn’t continue to blame a person for being a jerk in high school because it was high school. Teenagers are not fully developed human beings, peer pressure can be incredibly intense and people often change a great deal in the years following high school.

But here’s the thing:

Many people chose not to be jerks in high school.

Despite their popularity, wealth or sports acumen, many teenagers choose the path of kindness, empathy, generosity and decency, even when their status would allow them otherwise.

So while we might not judge a person based solely on their actions during their sixteenth year of life, shouldn’t we at least admire the hell out of the people who treated their peers with decency and dignity in high school when so many others around them were doing otherwise?

It’s true that Glenn Bacon has probably grown up a great deal since throwing that music stand at my head like a spear during our junior year. If I met him today, I might find him to be a decent, upstanding man. But he still threw a music stand at my head and refused to take responsibility for his actions when blood was streaming from a cut above my eye and I was unable to regain my feet for a full fifteen minutes.

Sure, he was a teenager, but it was a stupid, cruel, cowardly and dangerous thing to do, and that remains true at any age.

If I met Glenn today, I wouldn’t base my opinion of him solely on his behavior in the music room that day, but this actions would continue to carry weight because of guys like Peter DiCecco or Mark Wojcik, who opted out of that kind of behavior and treated the people around then with decency and kindness despite their age and ability to do otherwise.

At least give credit to the good guys for choosing to be good much earlier than many others. 

We won that game three separate times, and then we lost.

Excluding Super Bowl losses and a playoff loss to the New York Jets a couple years ago, yesterday’s Patriots loss to the Arizona Cardinals might have been the most difficult loss to bear in my entire life, for the following reasons:

1. It broke a home opener winning streak which began ten years ago with a miracle comeback victory against Buffalo that I watched from within the confines of Gillette Stadium. It was one of only three times that my friend has ever been willing to hug me.

2. It was a perfect day for a football game, and home openers are always special. Troy Brown was inducted into the Patriots Hall of Fame and Drew Bledsoe threw him one more pass on the turf of Gillette Stadium. Military jets soared overhead as the national anthem concluded. The sky was blue, the air was warm and the bacon-wrapped chicken chunks were a thing of beauty. The steak was cooked to perfection. It was a day fitting of a victory. A blowout, even.

 

2. The Patriots lost to the Arizona Cardinals at home. The Cardinals are not a good team.

3. The Patriot were not outrun, out passed or out tackled yesterday. They did not play well, but they were beaten by a blocked punt, a tipped ball that resulted in an interception, a phantom holding call and a phantom false start. Though the Patriots certainly deserved to lose the game, they lost the game thanks to a handful of unusual and somewhat freakish plays.

4. Worst of all, I thought the Patriots had won three separate times.

First, there was the fumble with two minutes to go that gave the Patriots the ball back within field goal range, down by two. Though it was foolish to begin celebrating the victory at this moment, we did.

Next was Danny Woodhead’s touchdown run which would have put us ahead by 5 with less than a minute on the clock, only to be called back by the aforementioned phantom holding call. We had already been celebrating victory for a full 30 seconds before we even saw the flag.

Finally, there was a the missed field goal, which looked good from our angle in the stadium, prompting us to begin celebrating victory again only to learn 10 seconds into our leaps and screams and high-fives that the kick went wide left.

The kicker had already made four field goals that day with ease. Two were over 50 yards. He had successfully kicked 24 consecutive fourth quarter field goals up until that point.

Then he missed a 42-yard field goal with one second left on the clock.

It was a series of emotional swings over a five minute period of time like few I have experienced in my life, and it left me empty and exhausted.    

My former students have said that I can be surly and demanding the day after a Patriots loss. My current batch of kids should count their lucky stars that we have the day off for Rosh Hashanah.

Perhaps I will feel a little better tomorrow.  

30 real reasons to be grateful for living

I did not enjoy Barrie Davenport’s piece entitled This.

The chance to watch Facebook die a slow, painful death.

Just admit that you think homosexuality is yucky. Don’t drag religion into it.

A couple days a ago I posted a letter that was forwarded to me by a reader regarding gay marriage. It was pointed out to me soon after that The West Wing has a scene that conveys a similar message.

The message in both the letter and the scene from The West Wing is simple:

If you are going to use The Bible to justify your bigotry toward homosexuals, then you should be required to adhere to all the bigotry that The Bible demands. The word of God should not be digested buffet-style. Either it represents the infallible word of God or it does not.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the last couple days, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s this inconsistency that bothers me most about these bigots.

If you don’t like my gay friends or believe that they are not entitled to the same rights as all Americans, I can at least understand this. Hating people for being different is nothing new. While I don’t agree with your position, I can at least attribute it to basic human nature. The human race has a long, unfortunate history of treating people poorly because they are different.

We’ve seen your breed of stupidity before.

But when you use The Bible as justification for your bigotry while ignoring those passages that are inconvenient to your cause (or demand that you stone your mother to death for wearing that Christmas sweater), you offend me and like-minded people on the grounds of logic and reason. Simply admit that you find homosexuals despicable or inexplicable or yucky, and I will at least respect you for your honesty. Defending your ignorance through blatant hypocrisy and intellectual dishonesty only serves to further highlight your ignorance.

And while I may not be a religious person, this buffet-style approach to Biblical  doctrine also does great harm to the people of faith who sensibly acknowledge that the lessons of The Bible are not absolute. It’s the radicals, the lunatics and the hypocrites who cast a pall on the good work of the believers. Defending your opposition to gay marriage on religious grounds diminishes their good work and causes people like me to question religion in general.

Besides, anyone with half a brain knows that there is nothing redeeming about the Old Testament argument anyway. We all know that the same book that justifies your hatred of homosexuals demands that we kill anyone who works on Sunday.

By your logic, I should be stoning the New England Patriot players tomorrow at Gillette Stadium rather than cheering them on.

Please just admit that you are grossed out by the idea of two boys kissing and move on.

Leave religion out of it. 

The boy loves his name

We clearly made a good choice when we decided to name him Charlie.

I don’t care about fairness as long as no one is being harmed in the process.

Here’s the scenario:

A rule is established in the workplace that I choose to violate but my colleague does not. Violation of the rule does not impact my colleague or anyone else in any adverse way. The only possible repercussion from my indiscretion is disciplinary action by my boss.

In this instance, should my colleague care if I choose to violate the rule?

I think not, but apparently I am in the minority.

I have always felt that as long as a person’s actions do not harm me or anyone else, I do not care what a person chooses to do. This means that if I choose to adhere to a policy while a colleague chooses to ignore the same policy, I don’t give it a second thought unless someone is being adversely impacted in the process.

I have been told that it is an issue of fairness. It’s a “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander” situation.

But if my actions do not impact my colleague or anyone else in any way, why should anyone care?

Some, or even most, might say something like, “It’s not fair that I am following this rule and you are not.”

Or “Why should you be able to ignore the rule while the rest of us have to follow it.”

My response is always something like this:

“You don’t have to follow the rule. You can do the same thing that I am doing and risk the repercussions. But why do you even care since my actions have no bearing on you or anyone else?”

And the reverse is true as well. As long as I am not being harmed, and no one else is being harmed, you are free to violate whatever policy or rule that you’d like and I will not care in the slightest. I won’t even hope that you get caught. As long as the only risk is to yourself, go right ahead. Break every rule imaginable. Fairness be damned.

I can’t imagine thinking otherwise. 

Then again, I graduated from kindergarten a long time ago. “But that’s not fair!” is a refrain I stopped using many, many years ago. 

Marriage deconstruction tool

In 2011, Facebook was cited as a contributing factor in one-third of divorces. 

The most common reasons cited as evidence were inappropriate messages to members of the opposite sex, separated spouses posting nasty comments about each other, and Facebook friends reporting spouse’s inappropriate behavior.

I find these statistics tragic and unfathomable.

Facebook?

I have three close friends who do not have a Facebook account. All three are men.

I’m starting to think that they are smarter than the rest of us.

Quite the magician

Oh, to believe that magic is this simple!