Matthew Dicks's Blog, page 581

A waste of time well spent

I avoid most videogames.

I do not load games onto my phone.

I have never even seen a Facebook game.

As a kid, I spent hours playing the Atari 2600, the Atari 5200, various iterations of the Nintendo gaming system and PC games.

Not to mention the thousands of quarters dropped into arcade games over the years.

For a long time, videogames occupied an enormous part of my life. 

I've written about my gaming life.

I've complained about the videogames of today.

I even married a gamer of sorts.

I do not regret the time spent playing videogames.  It was an entertaining and challenging way to spend time with my friends and family.

But today, I have more important things that need to be done. I have goals to accomplish, dreams to fulfill and a family to support.

Other things have pushed the videogames aside.  

I still love playing videogames and will play with my buddies from time to time, but I have structured my life in such a way that the temptation to play cannot be readily satiated. 

No games on my phone.  No games on my laptop.  No gaming systems in my home. 

I have built my life in such a way that except for online poker (which is at least profitable), I cannot easily access a videogame.  

But occasionally, the Internet will intervene, breaking through my gaming firewall, introducing me to some online variant of the gaming I once knew and I will become briefly obsessed by a game. 

Sometimes it's even worth my time.

It happened today. 

I suggest you give this game a try. 

Impressed. Briefly.

When my daughter was an infant, she rode in my car once.

Since then, every ride has been in my wife's car.

No room for babies and car seats with the golf clubs and golf shoes and bucket of range balls that populate my back seat. 

Until today.

When she got into the newly-installed car seat today, she  looked around, smiled and said, "Nice car, Daddy."

About three minutes later, she looked like this. 

Getting noticed

I was in the tandem drive-thru line at my local McDonald's, having just ordered my Egg McMuffin and Diet Coke. 

A tandem drive-thru is one in which there are two speakers to take customer's orders and two initial lines of cars that funnel into a single line after the speakers. 

As a result, customers must take turns merging into the single line.  One car enters and then the other. 

Yesterday morning, the drive-thru was moving especially slow.  I placed my order, pulled forward, and allowed the car to my right to merge first, appropriately waiting my turn. 

When that car finally moved, I depressed the gas pedal and began moving forward, but I was immediately cut off by an older man in a sedan who jumped ahead of me, accelerating quickly and pulling in front of me before I could merge.

I was mad. 

There was no way that this guy didn't know that he was cutting me off.  Just the way in which his car shot in front of me was indication enough, but the line was also moving exceedingly slow, so there had been plenty of time to watch the cars alternately merge to know that it was my turn. 

He had cut in front of me, and he knew it.

Because the line of cars was still not moving, the man had been forced to stop directly in front of me.  Our cars formed a slightly askew letter T, with his car filling the horizontal top line and mine the slightly-less-than vertical line. 

Had I pulled forward, the front of my car would have smashed his driver side door.

I had the urge to do just that.  

Instead, I glared at the man.  But even though I was pointed directly at the jerk, he refused to look in my direction.  As I glared, he faced forward, fixated on some spot in the distance, refusing to turn his head even an inch in my direction.  He looked like a statue behind the wheel, not moving a muscle.   

The jerk was trying to avoid eye contact.  He knew what he had done was wrong, had probably not expected to end up in this exceedingly awkward position, and in all likelihood was praying that the line of cars would move quickly so he could escape my interminable glare. 

I glared again, leaning forward this time, and still he refused to look in my direction.  It was still dark, so I flashed my high beams at him, illuminating this car, but still his eyes remained pointed unnaturally forward and frozen in space. 

Finally, I exited my car.  With the line still not moving, I stepped out, walked forward and stood directly in front of my car, close enough to lean back on the hood and cross my arms.  I was standing less than five feet from the guy, looming over him.  Finally, excruciatingly, and probably out of some fear for what I might do, he turned his head and made eye contact with me.

I smiled.  I looked at the drive thru speaker, then at my car, and then at his car, motioning the procedure he should have followed moments ago before cutting me. 

He turned and faced forward once again, a mixture of fear and irritation on his face.   

I did not move. 

A few seconds later, he turned again, once again making eye contact with me.  Still smiling, I shook my head in disgust. 

Then I returned to my car, waiting for the line to move.

My wife can't stand when someone cuts her in line.  It's one of the only times that I've ever seem her become confrontational with a stranger.  She will stop the line in mid-stream and demand that the person doing the cutting return to his or her proper place.

It's quite a sight to behold.

Perhaps I was channeling a little bit of my wife yesterday morning.

Or perhaps I was just being myself.   

Best to-do list ever

I love this list more than I can describe.

It's so good.

I want to be friends with the person who created it. 

I think I'm going to try the first item at the Patriots game this Sunday. There's just enough crazy at an NFL game for people to believe that I might be drinking Windex.

The third one will be tough, since the closest IKEA is about an hour away, but I'll keep it in mind the next time I find myself at a furniture story.

Even if the IKEA was next door, though, it's still a logistically difficult goal to accomplish. Even if I was able to squeeze myself into a wardrobe without attracting attention, how long would I have to wait before someone actually opened it?

Probably a long time. 

Still, it's a brilliant idea.

As far as the second item goes, my rock opera debuts at the Playhouse on Park in about two weeks, so that should count in terms of going to a play.

But even better than trying to complete this list myself, I'd like to try to produce my own to-do list each week, modeled after the ingenuity, originality and humor of this one.  . 

So I'm challenging myself.

One creative, ingenious and amusing to-do list every week, to be posted every Friday morning. 

I probably don't need another challenge in my life, but whatever.

This video made me laugh, but it strikes fear in my heart as a father and teacher, too.

My two-year old daughter can take my iPhone, turn it on, switch off the app that I was previously using, swipe three screens over to her selections of apps, and choose one.

She's been able to do this for more than a year. 

And she doesn't use the iPhone very often at all.  We use it to keep her still when we are changing her diaper or brushing her teeth, and we'll also turn to it in our most desperate moments in restaurants and the car when everything else fails. 

I don't mind that she is so proficient with the device.  The iPhone has actually helped her to learn all of her letters, expand her vocabulary, learn to count and distinguish between a hexagon and an octagon (something my fifth graders still can't do). 

But it makes me nervous.  She loves books, and I don't want that love to evaporate in a haze of touch screens and interactive media. 

We don't own an iPad, partially because I have yet to find a real need for one, but also because Elysha's mother owns an iPad, and I sometimes think Clara loves it more than she loves me.

The girl loves her some iPad. 

But I worry that the iPad and other interactive media distribution devices will replace her love for books in a time when it is critical for her love for books to grow.

I have seen what happens when a child spends more time playing videogames and watching television than he spends reading. 

I fight those battles every day with my students.

I know the challenges that lie ahead of the struggling reader. 

It is a trap into which I never want my daughter to fall.

I think this amusing yet frightening video demonstrates my fear perfectly: 

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Fatherless. Thanks a lot, Transformers.

I want to put this out there before I stuff these feelings away once again:

Now that I am a father, I can no longer make excuses for my father. 

His perpetual absence from my life was unconscionable, and though I will deny this in the light of day, I have probably been driven as much by his absence as anything else in my life. 

I also suspect that my fierce streak of independence and the extreme value I place upon those who are capable of taking care of themselves and succeeding without the benefit of family has a lot to do with emotional self-preservation. 

If I were ever to stop and acknowledge the utter lack of parental (and specifically fatherly) involvement in my life, I might get upset. 

But by embracing the need to take care of myself at an early age and cherishing the strength and determination developed through through this forced independence, I am not required to wonder why the people who were supposed to care about me most in life seemed to care so little.

No.  Not seemed to care so little. 

Cared so little.  

When I find myself rushing home from work to see my daughter or wishing that she would call my name in the middle of the night so I could go to her crib and hold her for just a few more minutes, I think about how incomprehensibly complete my father's absence from my life was, and it baffles me.   

Sometimes, it crushes me. 

Today it crushed me. 

Bizarrely, this emotional outburst is credited to The Transformers II, the film that was playing as I began running on the elliptical this afternoon. 

As the television switched on, protagonist and father were having a father-son moment amidst battling robots, exploding rockets and crumbling Egyptian ruins, and even though the movie was on for less than a minute before I managed to change the channel, it still killed me.

These moments always kill me. 

In this terrible, stupid movie, a boy was saving the world from a race of poorly named alien robots, and his father was unquestionably proud. 

I have never, ever felt a father's pride. 

Despite my accomplishments, I have never known a father's admiration or love. 

I suspect that this has played an important role in who I am. 

My inner drive and desire to succeed is born from many things.

Two near-death experiences and a subsequent awareness and fear that I could die at any moment.

An impoverished childhood and a desire to never be hungry again.

A need to prove my worth to myself after a lifetime of so many struggles.

A desire to provide for my wife and daughter so they never have to experience the financial destitution that I have suffered. 

The inherent, insatiable, sometimes insufferable need to be the best.   

But the desire to make a father who I have never known proud of me is certainly on the list as well. 

There are many, many things that people must suffer without in life, but for me, the absence of my father has been the one that angers and confuses and hurts me the most. 

Especially now that I am a father and know how precious every moment that I spend with my daughter is. 

How desperately I want to spend every moment with her.   

In many ways, it is this knowledge, and indescribable love I feel for my daughter, that makes my father's absence more difficult to bear.

Some days impossible to bear.   

Stupid Transformers.

I hated the movie the first time I saw it, and now it's managed to ruin my day again. 

I deny all knowledge of her outlandish accusations

Little did I know that my sister would so badly impugn my reputation on our brother-sister blog.

She makes me out to be a complete brute.

I may have to rethink this blog, but based upon her newfound enthusiasm, I suspect that there's no stopping her.

First carrousel ride

The first time my daughter saw a carrousel, she cried.

The second time she saw a carrousel, she cried again. 

I thought it would be years before she ever boarded one. 

But while she and Elysha were in New York last weekend, she rode her first carrousel in Bryant Park, and she didn't cry the entire time.

She didn't sit on any horses, but she did go round-and-round while sitting on one of those benches.

Elysha took her for her first and second rides (sans tears) and her aunt took her for the third, more tear-filled, ride. 

I was in Foxboro, Massachusetts, at the time, watching the Patriots defeat the Jets, which is one of my favorite things in the world to do.

Watching any Patriots game is always spectacular, but to watch my team crush the Jets produces near euphoria. 

But I must admit that watching my little girl take her first carrousel ride would have been just as good. 

Maybe.  

 [image error]    

Women need not consume

Companies are free to market to any segment of the public that they'd like, but this just strikes me as an especially bad idea.

Why so blatantly alienate half of your potential customers?

What so lobsters and cul-de-sacs have in common?

I like it when perceived extravagances and status symbols are proven to be not so extravagant and rather artificial. 

A century ago, lobsters were so plentiful and inexpensive that they were routinely fed to domestic servants and other low-wage workers.  The servants detested these "cockroaches of the sea" so much that their employment agreements often demanded that lobster be served no more than twice a week.

Until recently, lobster was considered an ill-tasting, ugly-to-look-at, impossible-to-eat food item only suitable for the hired help.

Then, thanks to decades of overfishing, lobster populations plummeted. 

As the scarcity of lobsters rose, prices increased, and before long, the "cockroach of the sea" was considered a delicacy.

Not because they tasted better or were any more appealing, but simply because they cost more.

I do not eat lobster.  I don't mind the taste of lobster but find the process of eating a lobster slightly disgusting and thoroughly unrewarding.

A lot of effort for a small amount of average-tasting food.

Any food that is normally dunked in butter before eaten cannot be that good.

But when I hear people extoll the virtue of lobster, I cannot help but think of how their love for this food is not based on the food itself but the time in which they live and the modern-day price of the product.

Nothing more.   

I recently read a piece about cul-de-sacs that gives me a similar pleasure. 

The cul-de-sac has long been viewed as a suburban ideal, the place where your children can play in the street in relative safety and neighborhoods can once again become the close-knit communities that they once appeared to be on black-and-white television.

Homes located within cul-de-sacs are almost always priced higher than those in less idealized locations, and many homebuyers specifically target cul-de-sacs when looking to purchase a home. 

And yet data compiled from studies on traffic patterns and the frequency of accidents shows that cul-de-sacs aren't as safe as you might think. 

"A lot of people feel that they want to live in a cul-de-sac, they feel like it's a safer place to be," Marshall says. "The reality is yes, you're safer – if you never leave your cul-de-sac. But if you actually move around town like a normal person, your town as a whole is much more dangerous."

It turns out that if you live in a one-cul-de-sac town, you're probably okay. 

But if the suburban sprawl of your hometown is littered with cul-de-sacs and similarly designed streets, you're children are in more danger than those living in the Bronx, at least when it comes to traffic.

Perceived extravagance fails again.