Matthew Dicks's Blog, page 582

Our favorite video of all time

Someone taught our two-year old daughter to dance, and it wasn't us.

In the midst of shopping with Elysha this weekend, the right song came on, and this happened.

Where did she learn to do this?  Seriously.

Tears of joy

My wife reacted similarly when I told her about my first book deal.

I've been trying to make her cry ever since.

Its easy to be self-righteous and stupid when youve never known hunger

Sesame Street decides to portray poverty in an attempt to raise awareness and allow the impoverished and hungry children of America to feel recognized and validated and Fox News decides to attack?

Shame on these people. 

Have they lost their goddamn minds?

I grew up on the free lunch and breakfast program, which required me to raise my hand in order for my teachers tallied the number of free and reduced meals were required for the students in my classroom.

It was embarrassing, isolating and saddening.   

It made me wonder why my parents couldn't feed me while so many other parents could.

It made me feel like something was wrong with me and my family.  

Thankfully, I was not hungry very often when I was a child. These programs served me well. 

But there were days when I was hungry. Plenty of them.  

And I would have loved to have seen someone in the media representing my plight.

I suspect that these idiot pundits on Fox wouldn't know the first thing about being hungry.  I suspect that they talk about the free and reduced lunch program but have never eaten a meal courtesy of the program.

I suspect that their children have never been required to self-identify themselves in front of their peers as coming from an impoverished family.

This is not Democrat versus Republican.  This is not liberal versus conservative. 

This is sanity versus insanity.  Understanding versus ignorance.  Good intentions versus the desire for a sound bite.

If you don't want to watch the interview, I have pasted a couple of their most inflammatory remarks below:

Fox News anchor Eric Bolling:

"I get it, and boy, take this in the right way here, but are we singling out a poverty stricken little girl? Does my son need to see that?  My little boy need to see that's going on. You don't single out other groups. You don't single out the little gay Muppet, or the little black Muppet, or the little Hispanic Muppet do you?  No, they're are intertwined in the ensemble."

Republican strategist Cheri Jacobus:

Look, it is up to the parents to explain some of the more difficult aspects of life to their children when they feel the time is appropriate, and one of things we do as taxpayer to make sure we don't have children who go hungry is we have the school lunch program, the school breakfast program, and in some cases the after school snack that we do. We have a lot of programs, so that while it's not always a great situation we do have some protections in place, and I think it's not appropriate for PBS and Sesame Street to take it upon themselves to give these more difficult lessons of life to little children."

Everything I wrote before the age of 30 was terrible

Ira is right.

Ira Glass on Storytelling from David Shiyang Liu on Vimeo.

Lunchbox notes for the ladies

Redbook recently posited the importance of men telling women why they love them in a piece entitled 50 Weird Things He Loves About You.

In the same week, The Wall Street Journal published a piece about the extraordinary efforts that parents are taking  when packing a note into their child's lunchbox, including the use of preprinted notes: 

Lunchbox Love, a line of preprinted cards from Say Please, Inc., are priced at $3.99 for a small box of 12 at Pottery Barn Kids. Messages include "You've become so mature," "I love you unconditionally" and "I can't believe how creative you are."

I'd like to combine these two ideas and create a line of preprinted cards that men can use to explain why they love the women in their lives.

Doesn't that sound romantic?

Cards based upon some of my past relationships might include:

I love the way you expect me to understand the source of your anger based upon the quality of your silence.

I love the way your feelings about your outfit dictate your overall mood. 

I love your random and seemingly innocuous use of turn signals when driving.

I love the way you can sometimes encourage me to do something and sometimes express your disapproval for the same thing using the exact same words. 

I love your appreciation for spontaneity as long as you have plenty of time to dress appropriately for the occasion.

I love how you so readily embrace of martyrdom for the smallest of problems.

My preprinted card for my wife would read:

I love you because you love me for exactly who I am.

Nervous

Our little girl gets very anxious every time we read Are You My Mother to her.

I guess that big, loud Snort can seem kind of scary.   

   

Boy learns that Darth Vader is Luke Skywalkers father for the first time

This is hilarious, and I will certainly make a point of doing the same someday for Clara when she discovers the secret of Darth Vader.   

Better still, it makes me wonder what other reactions might I want to record. 

Thoughts?

The super cool 1987 version of myself

My sister, Kelli,  wrote the following for our brother-sister blog. 

Reading it made me both happy and very sad.

It's strange to discover how your sister felt about you twenty years after the fact. 

It makes me smile to discover that she was thinking about me at all when she was 14-years old, but I also find myself wishing that I had known about some of these things at the time, so I could've fixed what is now too late to fix. 

My sister also gives me entirely too much credit. 

Yes, I had some great friends in high school, but I'm not sure how cool that made me at the time, and I suspect that many would disagree with her assessment of the 1987 version of her big brother. 

________________________________________________

It was New Year's Eve 1987. I was 14-years old, and I was grounded.

Eating was illegal in my house, and I had been caught eating a Pop Tart that I had bought with 50 cents of my own money at the snack bar at school.

As a result, I had been grounded for a month.

All of my friends were going to the New Year's Eve party at Roller Kingdom and I was on lockdown. My parents were going out, and my brother, Matt, was allowed to have an unsupervised party at our house.

At the age of sixteen.

I couldn't eat a Pop Tart that I had purchased with my own money but my 16-year old brother could have an unsupervised party with girls. Go figure.

Matt came up to my room after the parentals left. He invited me to his party. I wasn't too excited at first. I hadn't known my brother very well for some time, as he was older and didn't really talk to his baby sister much. All I knew about him was that he worked at McDonald's and was able to get me all the Happy Meal toys I wanted.

It was cool to be a teenager at Roller Kingdom, but I still liked kiddie things, too.

Again, go figure.

So thanks to a horde of Happy Meal toys, I thought that my brother was cool. I had no idea how cool until that night.

Matt let me come out of my room to his party. He let me picked the music from his collection of cassettes. That was the night that I fell in love with the songs Sister Christian, Desperado and Hotel California. I probably never would have heard and appreciated those songs if it weren't for my big brother. I listened to and played my brother's music and thought "Wow, my brother is kind of cool."

After being at the party for a short time and listening to his friends talk and listening to him talk, I realized, "Wow, my brother is totally cool".

I had always known that he worked at McDonald's, but I never knew that at the age of sixteen, he was the manager.

I never knew he had cool "Milford" friends.

The respect kept growing.

Around 10:30 PM his friends began getting hungry and wanting food. I was sure that I would be left behind. The first thing my brother did was invite me. He took me to Woonsocket A place that I was not allowed unless it was Roller Kingdom and I was being driven by another parent.

Not this night.

Matt was taking me with his friends. We went to Moonlight Pizza, long before the restaurant's renovation. It was dirty with a single, unisex bathroom and a bullet hole in the wall. It was so dangerous in my mind. So cool. In a bad part of Woonsocket without my parents....my night was so much cooler than my friends' night at Roller Kingdom. I was with older kids, and I was cool.

I realized that night how cool my brother was. It was the first time in a while that I looked up to my brother and wanted to be like him. Not having a Dad and having a step-father who you could compare a pile of manure on a hot summer's day, I had finally found a man to look up to.

I had a peek into my brother's secret life, and it was cool.

I realized that night my big brother was cool.

I understand why you think this is about you, but its probably not about you at all.

I have something that needs to be said. 

For the third time in the past month, someone has assumed that something I wrote on this blog pertained to them, and in all three cases, they were wrong.

After reading a post offering advice on choosing a potential spouse, one of my friends assumed that the comments written about my wife were actually a veiled criticism of his wife and the way in which she fails to conform to my advice.

"No," I explained. "I was writing about Elysha. That's all."

In a post on the reasons why I do not compliment students' physical appearance, a friend and colleague assumed that I was referencing her recent compliment of a student's new haircut while in my presence. 

I explained to my friend that:

The inspiration for the piece was the article that I quoted in the post I had no recollection of her recent haircut compliment Regardless of my opinion, teachers comment on student appearance every day. I could have been writing about anyone. 

Despite all this, she was still convinced that I had been writing about her.

Another person assumed that my post on the soul-crushing nature of meetings pertained to a meeting that she had recently conducted.

The origins of this post were actually two years old and pertained to a two-day training session in which the outside facilitator wasted much of our time on inane minutia and assigned our seats as if we were rowdy kids on a school bus. 

It was during this training session, as my anger boiled over, that I first refused to give the speaker an approving nod. 

The idea about refusing to give a speaker an approving nod remained on a list of ideas in my journal for a long time until I found myself in another soul-crushing, non-work-related meeting where I once again refused to give an annoying, time-wasting facilitator the approving nod.

It was in this meeting that I began to write the post longhand.

Granted I cannot recall a single meeting in my entire life that I actually enjoyed, so my feelings about meetings in general extend beyond this particular soul-crushing incident, but I'm pretty sure that most people find meetings difficult to bear and share a sentiment similar to mine. 

But she had assumed that my post was directed specifically at her, and it was not.  I work as a teacher, an author and a DJ, and I am also a life coach and minister.  I meet with all sorts of people and find myself in all sorts of meetings and training sessions. 

I could have been writing about almost anyone. 

But at the same time, I understand the reaction of these three individuals, because in all three circumstances, it was easy to assume, based upon personal circumstances and unfortunate timing, that I was writing about them.

Recently I was meeting with one of the people to whom I serve as a life coach, and I was demonstrating the ways in which I organize my thinking and writing.  I showed this person the lists of possible ideas of have for blog posts, newspaper articles, short stories and novels. 

These lists, separated by topic, span six pages of a Word document.

Then I showed him Evernote, the place where I collect my ideas when I am mobile.  There are currently 32 separate entries in Evernote, and each entry pertains to an idea that might eventually become part of a blog post, newspaper article short story or even a novel. 

Then I showed him Live Writer, the software that I actually use to write a blog post.  There are currently 18 partially written blog posts in my Live Writer account, the oldest spanning back to March of 2010. 

Sometimes an idea takes a long, long time to germinate.  More often, a single idea is not enough, and I am waiting for something else to connect to it and allow it to become a fully-formed thought or idea.

Even yesterday, as I was sitting in a training session, I filled a notebook page with five new ideas that might eventually become blog posts.  These were ideas born from the discussion we were having in our group, as well as my reactions to certain aspects of the training.  I may never write about these ideas, or I may not write about them for months, but when I do, someone may once again incorrectly assume that I am writing about them.

In most cases, I am not.

Here's a good rule of thumb:

If I'm writing a piece that is critical of a friend or acquaintance based upon something that he or she has done, I will likely wait a long time before writing the piece in order to avoid hurting someone's feelings, and I will probably write it in such a way as to conceal the true origins of the post.

This does not apply to certain friends who do not care and welcome the criticism (see Shep), but those people are few and far between. 

But in most cases, I attempt to conceal identity and true intent whenever possible.  

Of course, in doing so, it appears that I may risk offending someone else who now incorrectly assumes that I am writing about them.

If this is ever the case, I suggest that you approach me directly, as the people I described above did.

I will always be honest with you.

Our childhood revealed (and another goal achieved)

One of my New Year's resolutions is to convince my sister to write a blog with me that tells stories from our childhood from both perspectives.

The purpose is threefold:

1.  To create a reservoir of stories for our children to enjoy someday.

2.  To tap the superhuman memory that my sister possesses and recover memories lost to me. 

3.  To trick my sister into writing large parts of my memoir.

After ten months of pushing and prodding, I think I've finally convinced her to start writing.

The fact that she's not working four jobs might be contributing to the free time as well.

She wrote her first post in months last night, and an hour later, a second post arrived via email. 

I'm hoping this is a sign that she's caught the bug. 

If you're interested in reading, the blog is titled 107 Federal Street, named after the address of our childhood some, and can be found here.