Matthew Dicks's Blog, page 518

The big guy is three months old today!

 

Safety warnings ignored at risk to Lamby

Apparently my daughter has chosen to ignore the recent Bumbo seat safety recall. I found this in the living room today:

How do I tell her that the sunglasses won’t make a damn bit of difference if Lamby falls out of that seat?

Impromptu driving range

For someone who loves golf and entrepreneurism as much as me, I thought this was impressive:

While waiting in line for a Moth StorySLAM last week in SoHo, I watched a man set up a driving range in an alley between two building. Using real golf clubs and crushed milk cartons, he charged people for the opportunity to hit the milk cartons down the alley and into a green, plastic bin.

I was standing there for more than 30 minutes and he was never without a customer. 

I don’t think the man is getting rich off his idea, nor do I think it’s scalable to a larger market, but anyone that can bring golf to the city and make a buck at the same time is alright in my book.

   

The lowest forms of human communication

The following are the four lowest forms of human communication, in no specific order.

I’m willing to consider additions to the list, so please feel free to offer me your thoughts.

1.  The demanded apology

2.  The absence of a thank you note complaint

3.  The “I’m angry at you and will therefore write an email rather than speaking to you in person or at least calling you” email

4.  The anonymous critique or attack, in any form

First haircut accomplished.

After allowing our daughter’s hair to grow past her waist, my wife and I decided that it was time for my daughter’s first haircut.

We expected it to go poorly. Our daughter is a slow-to-warm-up child who does not embrace change and tends to avoid new experiences whenever possible. The idea that a stranger would be cutting off pieces of her hair was a concept that we did not think would sit well with Clara.

To be honest, I was dreading this day. If it were up to me, I would’ve allowed Clara to look like Cousin It before taking her to the hair salon.

 

Thankfully, my wife did some research and found a hair salon that specialized in children’s haircuts, and the process was shockingly easy.

In truth, it was fun.

The hairdresser knew exactly what to do to put Clara at ease and allow her to enjoy the experience without fear or anxiety. She was a true expert and professional when it came to cutting children’s hair, and in the end, Clara had as much fun as my wife and me.

If only you could hire a professional for every potentially difficult moment of a child’s life.

A professional time out assigner.

A professional dinnertime nutritionist.

A professional potty trainer.

This last one would be especially valuable in the case of my daughter, who has yet to express a willingness or a readiness to be trained to use the potty. I recently offered someone $2,500 if they would train our daughter to use the potty, and I thought it would have been a bargain.

My wife thought my offer was high and said that $1,500 would have been more appropriate.

Either way, you can see how desperate we’ve become.

And we don’t want to hear that you can’t train a toddler to use the potty until she is ready or that when she is ready, it will happen almost overnight. None of these possibly true statements make us feel better right now, and that is all that counts. 

   

This is not supposed to be a complicated game.

My daughter doesn’t understand tag.

She thinks that the person who is “It” is the one who is supposed to be chased. She points her finger at me, shouts, “You’re it!” and then waits for me to run away so she can chase me.

I have tried and tried to convince her that it’s the other way around, but she just doesn’t get it.

I’m legitimately worried that she will be playing tag with her friends someday and look like a fool.

I have no idea what to do.

Alex Pareene’s takedown of Andy Borowitz’s humor in Salon is a joke.

Alex Pareene wrote a takedown of humorist Andy Borowitz that I found so infantile that I felt obliged to write a takedown of his takedown here, even if it means garnering Pareene more attention than he deserves.

Based upon his opening paragraph, I knew that I would despise this piece:

Andy Borowitz makes dad jokes for self-satisfied liberals. If you think Sarah Palin is stupid and Mitt Romney is rich, Andy Borowitz has some jokes that will decidedly not challenge a single one of your prior assumptions!

It’s a terrible opening paragraph. He opens by using two unsupported, undefined, vaguely indiscernible adjectives that I still don’t quite understand. First, he refers to Borowitz’s jokes as “dad jokes,” and while I may have an inkling of what Pareene is implying with the use of the word dad, I am still not entirely certain, and this is the first statement of his piece.

Are his jokes corny? Aged? Obvious? PG?     

Actually, this statement comprises the first five words of the piece, and even if I am right in one of my assumptions about the negative use of the word dad, Pareene does nothing to support the claim for at least three more paragraphs.

Pareene then describes Borowitz’s audience, still in the first sentence, as “self-satisfied liberals.”

I honestly have no idea what this means or why it is bad.

Then he ends his opening paragraph with an exclamation mark, which is something I might expect to see in an essay written by a high school freshman but not a piece in Salon.

Pareene spends the next three paragraphs, which amounts to 36% of the total words in the piece, attacking Borowitz for his sitcom work in the 1980s and 1990s. Why he thinks that Borowitz’s work on The Facts of Life or The Fresh Prince of Bel Air has any bearing on whether or not he is funny twenty and thirty years later is beyond me, but he seems quite angry about the amount of work that Borowitz did in the past and fixates upon it for quite some time. He’s also generous enough to mention that Borowitz was the editor of the Harvard Lampoon, but he only includes this fact parenthetically, as if it is fairly irrelevant in comparison to Borowitz’s shameful work with Will Smith and requires the sequestration of parenthesis lest it be viewed as an important part of Borowitz’s comedic career.

In this same paragraph, Pareene attacks a Borowitz joke from 2o08.

Five years ago.

Does he think that any comedian could stand up to this kind of scrutiny? If we examined every joke told by any comic from the last five years, does Pareene really think that we wouldn’t find more than a few clunkers? I don’t get it. It’s not as if Pareene is even attacking a recent joke. He goes back five years to find one that he doesn’t like. Later on in the piece, he goes back to 2004 to find another joke to fit his argument.

In fact, Borowitz’s has tweeted more than 8,000 jokes in the past three years alone. Pareene cites a grand total of ten of them while criticizing the comedian. That’s .00125 percent of all the jokes Borowitz has attempted, and this only amounts to the jokes he has posted on Twitter, which is the area in which Pareene is directing the brunt of his post-millennial criticism.

What comic doesn’t miss on .00125 percent of his or her jokes?

Then Pareene makes this statement:

I am not a comedy expert, and nothing is less interesting than listening to any self-proclaimed comedy expert expound on comedy, but I thought it was at least generally agreed that the best humor involves the element of surprise.

The best humor involves the element of surprise? This is generally agreed upon? By whom? Had Pareene lost his mind? There are many ways to be funny, and while surprise is certainly an effective one, it is not agreed upon to be the best by anybody.

It’s surprising how stupid Pareene’s statement is, for example, but that doesn’t necessarily make it funny.

Pareene then spends a paragraph criticizing Borowitz for including celebrity culture as a part of his comedic repertoire. Does he expect anyone to believe that Borowitz’s decision to write jokes about Hollywood starlets and reality television buffoons is a signal that Borowitz is a hack? What comedian doesn’t reference celebrity culture in his or her comedy? Even a comedian as hyper-focused on politics as Bill Maher takes advantage of the horrors and stupid of Hollywood when telling jokes.

Does Pareene really think the world of celebrity culture should be taboo to serious comedians?

Pareene follows this nonsense with claims that Borowitz’s humor is most appropriate for old people, because apparently in Pareene’s estimation, old people suck and aren’t funny. In defense of this argument, he cites Borowitz’s appearance on CBS Sunday Morning as evidence that his ideal audience is old people.

Of course, CBS Sunday Morning has also featured comedians like Louis CK, Chris Rock and Sarah Silverman, just to name just a few, so they must suck, too. Right? 

Pareene then proposes a formula for creating a Borowitz joke and attempts to create a few of his own, none of which are funny (nor is the Pareene’s formula bit), all the while lacing his piece with more unnecessary exclamation marks and the incredibly stupid double question mark.

Pareene ends his piece by suggesting that Borowitz should work less often, not only for the good of America (yeah, he said America, and I know he used it as an exaggeration, but sometimes exaggeration is so obvious and cliché that it no longer serve as exaggeration), but for Borowtiz’s own good.

He uses a couple extraneous exclamation points here as well. 

I guess it wasn’t such a takedown after all. In the end, Pareene must like Borowitz a great deal. Apparently he wrote this whole takedown as a way of warning Borowitz about the dangers of overexposure and a life spent consumed with too much work and not enough play.

Pareene also states that less Borowitz would be good for his Twitter feed, but apparently Pareene doesn’t understand Twitter.

Rather than writing a hack takedown piece in Salon, just unfollow the guy if you don’t like him. It would be better for you, Alex Pareene.

See? This isn’t a takedown of a takedown after all. I’m just looking out for you, Alex Pareene.

I mean, for you!

The many faces of Charles Wallace

Personal competition gets stuff done

A post on Time Management Ninja entitled Be More Productive by Making Your Life a Game struck a chord with me. While I do not adhere strictly to the premise of the article, I often transform aspects of my life into a game in order to accomplish more or increase my level of engagement.

Three from this past week:

In order to save time, I often challenge myself to complete my shower in 150 seconds or less. I actually count aloud as I shower, and though this may not sound like a lot of time, I’ve found that if I apply myself and not waste a second, I can accomplish this goal with relative ease. The average American shower lasts 8-10 minutes. If I can keep mine under 3 minutes, I gain 5-7 minutes per shower over the average American, and while a shower may be relaxing, I typically have more pressing matters.

Our two month old son likes to be held in our arms as often as possible, which is nice because when my daughter was his age, she wanted nothing to do with me. The downside, of course, is that I have a ten pound baby in my arms and a long list of goals to accomplish. Rather than waiting until my wife is available to take Charlie, I often challenge myself to complete as many chores as possible with him still in my arms. Emptying the dishwasher has proven to be rather simple. Sweeping and mopping the floor is not too hard at all. Folding laundry is exceptionally difficult but not impossible. It would be easy for me to simply wait until I have some help, but by turning these tasks into baby-laden challenges, I manage to accomplish goals while adding a competitive spin to the chore and taking Charlie along for the ride.

I entered the grocery store on Wednesday with 12 items on my shopping list. Therefore I gave myself 12 minutes to locate the items and place them in my cart. Since I had never purchased two of these items before and wasn’t sure where they were located, this proved especially difficult. I was forced to run through the store during the last three minutes of the challenge in order to accomplish my goal, but I succeeded with almost 30 seconds to spare, and I did not get sucked into any additional purchases that I did not need.

I play games like this with myself all the time.

Some might say that a more leisurely shower, a few minutes of idle time with my infant son, or a shopping trip that does not require a stopwatch and a last minute sprint down the aisles are more important to a person’s well being than the few minutes that I saved by challenging myself.

I would say that that those people fail to understand a fundamental reality of life:

These minutes add up surprisingly quickly. Five minutes here and ten minutes over the course of a day, week, month or lifetime can quickly equate to hours of additional time to accomplish goals.

In this life, there are people who accomplish a great many things and those who do not. I suspect that those who take leisurely showers,  allow themselves to browse the grocery store for an hour and lack a general sense of urgency are less likely to accomplish great things.

This does not mean that everything that you do must be done with haste and immediacy. If the shower is the one place in your life where you are able to relax and collect your thoughts, spend as much time in there as you need. If you treasure the moments when you can lie beside your infant and stare into his eyes, by all means do so (I can often be found doing this as well). I am speaking more about a person’s general disposition in life.

You are either a person who moves quickly, maintains a sense of urgency and seeks opportunities to recapture lost minutes in the day, or you are not.

If you are the former, I believe that the chances of achieving your goals are much greater.

On my death bed, I suspect that I will not be wishing that I had spent more time in the grocery store or the shower.

The most critical lessons that I teach my students each year

As I prepare to re-enter the classroom next week for another year of teaching, I was thinking about some of the most important lessons that I will attempt to impart on my students in the coming school year. There are too many to even begin to try listing, of course, but there always seems to be a few that become a constant refrain throughout the year.

The following is a list of twelve that came to mind:

_______________________________________________

TWELVE OF THE MOST CRITICAL LESSONS THAT I TEACH TO MY STUDENTS EACH YEAR 

1. One exclamation point. Never more than one regardless of circumstances.

2. Never ever ask a woman if she is pregnant.

3. The world is full of talented people who did nothing with their lives because they didn’t try. Effort is everything.

4. If you learn to use you’re and your, too, to and two and there, they’re and their correctly, you will already be better than half the writers of the world.

5. If you learn to write in complete sentences, you will be better than the other half.

6. Memorization of the multiplication tables is essential if you want to be successful in math. You will fail if you do not memorize them.

7. If you cannot find a good book, you are not trying very hard.

8. Acknowledge blame quickly. Apologize sincerely.

9. Understanding of basic geography will prevent many moments of academic and social embarrassment.

10. Lots of great music was made long before you were born. Don’t be an ageist. Give older music a chance.

11. Excluding anyone from anything for any reason will always make you look like a coward and the biggest jerk in the world.

12. You are the hero of your own story. Act like a hero.