Matthew Dicks's Blog, page 578
November 1, 2011
Her first letter was a V.
My two-year old daughter was using bathtub crayons for the first time last night. Anything to get that kid in the bathtub.
After coloring on the walls for a while, she said, "Mommy, help me with my V."
My wife looked. Written in dark blue was the letter V.
Clara can identify all of her capital letters and many of her lowercase letters, but until now, she has never attempted to write a letter. She frequently asks us to write letters and words for her, but she has shown no interest in writing them herself.
Now she's written her first letter.
The letter V.
Or perhaps she accidently scribbled two lines in the shape of a V and subsequently identified them as a letter.
This is possible but not nearly as exciting as the thought that she made the letter intentionally, so I reject this idea outright.
She wrote her first letter. It was a V. Call Harvard.
October 31, 2011
A tale of two storms
The damage done by Hurricane Irene:
The damage done by the stupid October snowstorm:
The Clowns final rehearsal
Just one week before The Clowns, our rock opera, hits the stage!
The band had a final rehearsal during Saturday's snowstorm.
Next Saturday, the band and the actors come together for the first time for an all-day rehearsal before the Saturday evening performance.
This all began back in 2007 when friend and colleague Andy Mayo approached me with nine songs, all recorded and sung my him (female parts included), and the basic outline for a rock opera.
Looking for someone to flesh out the story and write the dialogue, he asked me if I would be interested.
I said yes, assuming that nothing would ever become of it.
Boy was I wrong.
Here's a peek into a few of the songs that will be performed at part of the upcoming show. The person singing is Andy Mayo, who will be required to sit throughout the rehearsal and performances on Saturday and Sunday.
I don't see it happening.
October 29, 2011
Freakin October 29th
The autumn leaves and the snowflakes are falling simultaneously.
Low self confidence makes people annoying
This is probably mean and judgmental, but I also think it's fairly accurate:
If you are offended more than once a month (and even that is a lot), you have to ask yourself why your self confidence is so low.
If you speak more than you listen, you have to ask yourself why your self confidence is so low.
If you wear makeup to the gym, you have to ask yourself why your self confidence is so low.
If you are unwilling to acknowledge the possibility that you could be wrong at almost any moment of the day, you have to ask yourself why your self confidence is so low.
If you require an apology after your feelings have been hurt in order to restore order to a friendship, you have to ask yourself why your self confidence is so low.
Confluence of cuteness
What's cuter?
Her little face?
The inexplicable butterfly wings?
Or the fact that my little one is spending her Saturday morning reading in bed?
Little Bo Peep, I think.
October 28, 2011
My successful evasion of police pursuit
This wiki answers the question:
What's the best way to escape the police in a high-speed chase?
The short answer:
Don't. It's damn near impossible.
It did, however, remind me of the one time in my life that I escaped the police.
Admittedly, it wasn't a high-speed chase. More like an exceptionally brief, side street sidestep, but still, I felt pretty bad-ass after the encounter.
And why, might you ask, would a fine and upstanding individual like myself do such a foolish thing?
To impress a girl, of course.
I was seventeen at the time and driving through the town of Hopedale, Massachusetts. I had just picked up Linda, a fellow McDonald's employee, and was driving her to work.
I wasn't actually working that day, and to drive to Hopedale for the sole purpose of bringing this girl to work was out of my way to say the least, but Linda was cute and I had a huge crush on her. We had been working together for more than six months, side by side in the drive-thru, after school and on weekends. For almost that entire time, I had been searching for an opportunity to give Linda a reason to flirt with me so I could flirt back without risking rejection.
I was a real player back then.
Having heard that she needed a ride to work, I quickly offered my services for the following day even though I was not scheduled to work myself.
About ten minutes after picking her up at her home, I was speeding down a back road when I drove through a speed trap. I instantly knew that I was in trouble. I was driving at least 20 miles an hour over the speed limit, and Hopedale was (and still is) famous for its aggressive ticketing of speeders.
Sure enough, as I glanced in my rearview mirror, I saw the police car pulling out from his hiding place on the side of the road, blue lights already flashing.
Had Linda not been in the car, I would've pulled over immediately.
Had I not been so familiar with this particular stretch of road, I would've pulled over immediately.
Had conditions not been favorable for an escape attempt, I would've pulled over immediately.
But Linda was in the car and I was coming upon a series of sharp curves in the road that I knew well.
The desire to impress Linda, combined with a moment of criminal inspiration, forced me to grip the wheel hard and press the pedal to the floor.
As I took the first sharp curve in the road, I looked in my rearview mirror to determine if the police car was still in view.
It was not.
Hoping that the cop was far enough back for me to execute my escape plan, I spun the wheel left and skidded up the driveway of the nearest home. The driveway ascended a gentle incline to the right of the house, ending with a series of flowers and bushes adjacent to the side door of the house.
When I reached the top of the driveway, I continued past the house, running over flowers, a lawn ornament and a stone path and onto the backyard grass. Then I turned left again before skidding to a halt behind the house, my car entirely shielded from the street.
All this happened extremely fast. Linda didn't have a moment to say a word as my car flew up the driveway and skidded into this unknown person's backyard. When the car finally came to a stop, she was silent for about a few seconds before launching into a profanity-laden tirade about the stupidity of my actions.
Her complaints included (but were not limited to):
1. The stupidity of running from the police
2. The physical and legal danger in which I had placed her
3. The possibility that someone might be inside the house even though there was no car in the driveway
4. Her longtime certainty of my utter idiocy
As she was screaming at me, two thought ran through my mind in alternating waves:
Did the cop see me pull up the driveway? I just escaped from the police! Did the cop see me pull up the driveway? I just escaped from the police! Did the cop see me pull up the driveway? I just escaped from the police! Did the cop see me pull up the driveway? I just escaped from the police!
After a few moments, I concluded that the cop mustn't have seen me or he would've followed me up the driveway and would already have me in cuffs.
Upon this realization, my thought process quickly shifted to two slightly different, alternating waves:
I just escaped from the police! Why isn't Linda impressed? I just escaped from the police! Why isn't Linda impressed? I just escaped from the police! Why isn't Linda impressed? I just escaped from the police! Why isn't Linda impressed? I just escaped from the police! Why isn't Linda impressed?
It made no sense to me.
I had just done something brave and clever and cool. And it involved a car.
Had had just escaped the police, damn it!
How was Linda not tearing off her and my clothing at that very moment?
When she was finally finished screaming at me, she sighed, took a deep breath, and said, "Just bring me to work and don't talk to me."
I smiled, held my breath in hopes of finding a way to break the bad news to her, and finally said, "We can't actually leave yet. The cop saw my car and is probably still looking for me. Hopedale is tiny. We're going to need to wait awhile."
"How long?" she asked.
"Half an hour?" I posited. "Maybe an hour. If we leave to soon, we're definitely going to get caught."
We sat in that backyard, my car idling, without saying a word, for almost an hour. Never before and never since have a seen a person express so much anger and loathing without uttering a single word.
It's cliché, I know, but the silence in that Toyota Tercel was deafening.
In the end, Linda was late for work, and I was forced to explain the reason to the boss. Though she would eventually begin speaking to me after several weeks, my chances with her, which never actually existed, were over.
Isn't that the way it always is with teenage boys?
We think that the best way to impress a woman is to do something dangerous and stupid in an attempt to demonstrate out bravery and mettle, when the only people impressed by these acts of lunacy and stupidity are other teenage boys.
Youth is truly wasted on the young. And the stupid.
October 27, 2011
How did you choose your career path? or did your career path choose you?
Someday I want to write a book that examines how people end up doing the work they do.
It's a topic that has always fascinated me.
Few people end up in the career they envisioned as a child. Though I was fortunate enough to make my childhood dreams of becoming a writer and a teacher come true, I never envisioned some of the other positions that I have held during my lifetime.
For more than a decade, I managed McDonald's restaurants. This was a job I fell into back in high school when my friend, Danny, informed me that McDonald's was one of the only places in the area paying slightly above minimum wage. I started working at the age of 16 and was managing the afternoon and weekend shifts by the time I was 17.
Ten years later, I was still managing McDonald's restaurants while putting myself through college.
For about five years, I worked in banking, first as a bank teller and then as a customer service representative and assistant manager. I fell into this job after answering an ad in a newspaper for the now-defunct South Shore Bank of southern Massachusetts. Eventually I would work for the also defunct Bank of Boston and the Bank of Hartford before leaving banking entirely and going to college.
My career as a wedding DJ began with a phone call in 1997 from my best friend, Bengi, who was looking for a way to make some more money and had recently been disappointed by the DJ that he had hired for his wedding.
Having hosted many parties when we lived together following high school, he thought we could do better.
"Do you want to start a DJ company?" he asked. "You know… for weddings?"
"Sure," I said. "Sounds good. But I've got a paper to write for my Econ class, so let's talk about it later."
That was all it took.
Three months later, we hosted a company launch party for our friends and family at a local VFW, and three months after that, we were working at our first wedding.
I decided to become a life coach after listening to someone Elysha knows describe the life coaching classes that she had just completed in order to become a certified life coach. I was fascinated by the idea that someone with a relatively uneventful life and limited personal success might think that a series of college classes would make him or her an effective life coach.
I realized that if I were to hire a life coach, I wouldn't want someone merely schooled in the art of life coaching. I would want a coach who had overcome great obstacles in life and achieved significant personal and professional success despite the challenges placed before them.
In that moment, I decided that I wanted to be a life coach.
Three years later, I had my first paying client.
When I meet a person for the first time, I often inquire about the path they choose to the career they have today, and how little choice plays a role. These stories are often filled with chance, coincidence, luck and unexpected twists.
It fascinates me to realize how little control so many people have over their career paths, and how few people fulfill their childhood dreams, not because those dreams changed, but because a more viable, convenient or profitable opportunity presented itself.
Recently I read about Richard Branson's path to founding Virgin Airways, and couldn't help but smile. The man who owns one of the premier airlines in the world and is making strides to become one of the first commercial airlines capable of taking passengers into space began his career thanks to a cancelled flight.
"In '79, when Joan, my fiancée and I were on a holiday in the British Virgin Islands, we were trying to catch a flight to Puerto Rico; but the local Puerto Rican scheduled flight was cancelled. The airport terminal was full of stranded passengers. I made a few calls to charter companies and agreed to charter a plane for $2000 to Puerto Rico. Cheekily leaving out Joan's and my name, I divided the price by the remaining number of passengers, borrowed a blackboard and wrote: VIRGIN AIRWAYS: $39 for a single flight to Puerto Rico. I walked around the airport terminal and soon filled every seat on the charter plane. As we landed at Puerto Rico, a passenger turned to me and said: "Virgin Airways isn't too bad – smarten up the services a little and you could be in business."
Imagine how different Branson's life would have been had that flight to Puerto Rico not been cancelled.
What was the path that you took to your career?
as it fraught with chance, happenstance and dumb luck?
Or was planned and executed with precision?
