Matthew Dicks's Blog, page 592

My wifes reaction to my latest idea was predicable and understandable.

I had an idea yesterday, probably born from several sources, including my recent success at the MOTH, a sudden burst of amusing anecdotes and my bi-weekly intake of Marc Maron's popular podcast dealing with the world of comedy.

The idea:  I want to try stand-up comedy. 

I told my wife about the idea, and she looked at me as though I were crazy.

I knew this had nothing to do with her estimation of my potential as a standup comic.  She has always found me amusing (and occasionally infuriating), and while I may not have the chops for standup comedy, I think she would give me a reasonable chance at success.

Her concern had nothing to do with the probability of me bombing onstage. 

Instead, she was looking at a man who had just spent the day setting up his classroom (in record time, I may add) and is preparing for another challenging year of teaching fifth grade.

A man who is also in the midst of writing four different books.

A man who would be meeting with a client later that night to discuss their wedding, where he would serve as both DJ and minister.

A man who just picked up his first paying gig as a life coach job.

A  man who asked one of her friends yesterday if she would be willing to sit down with him to talk about the requirements of becoming a sociologist.

A man who brought his podcasting equipment out of storage earlier that day in hopes of launching his first podcast soon.  

So yes, on the face of it, declaring that I want to try standup comedy might have seemed a little crazy. 

But I'm not talking about a career in comedy.  I just want to try it out.  See what it's like and find out if I could be successful with it before it's too late.

I look at the next twenty years as potentially the most productive years of my life.

I spent the first twenty years of my life as a kid.  I had fun and learned a lot but had nothing to show for it. 

I spent the second twenty years of my life struggling to keep a roof over my head, stay out of jail, find a career, and start a family.

With all those things in place, I want these next twenty years to be a time of great accomplishment.  I want to write many books, teach many children, try many new things and dedicate vast amounts of time to my wife and daughter.

And become a much better golfer. 

And so this is the time to try standup comedy.  Not to earn a living or become famous, but because it's there, and I think there is a small chance that I could be good at it.      

And so I told my wife that I will write the requisite ten minute set, practice it, and then go to an open mic night, hoping to eventually get onstage.

"Ten minutes," I told her. "Not a career."

"Okay," she said.  "But if it becomes a career, you have to quit being a DJ."

I was willing to live with this compromise.

Clara Dickss first original story

My daughter told me to go to sleep (a frequent demand), and then, instead of waking me up with a kiss or (more often) a smack on the butt, she proceeded to tell me a bedtime story. 

She said, "Once upon a time there was a bear. She ate dinner. The End."

And there, my friends, is my daughter's first original story.

A future novelist takes her first tentative steps into the world of fiction.

A messy ABC

My daughter knows almost all of her uppercase letters and a few lower case letter, though she you wouldn't know it based upon this video. 

The girl refuses to perform on camera. 

She is the Aloysius Snuffleupagus of home movies. 

What would you tell your pregnant self?

Nummies, a maker of maternity bras, asked women what they would tell themselves if they could go back in time to just before their first baby arrived.   They produced a video of the mother's responses. 

Along similar lines, NPR's The Baby Project asked mothers and fathers:

If you could go back in time before your first baby arrived, what would you tell yourself? 

My responses:

When your wife's water breaks, go to the hospital. Don't tell her to relax and go back to bed.
No behavior, routine or chore is permanent. Sick of having to place every item of food into your child's mouth?  Relax. She'll be scooping things up with her fingers before you know it. Change is rapid and unexpected. Even diapers will end someday. 
   A seeming majority of parents are determined to convince you that parenting is incredibly difficult, presumably because if you find it easy, you will serve as an indictment of their own parental skills. Don't listen to their doom and gloom stories. Ignore their complaints and warnings. Even better, tell them to shut the hell up. 

You called me an idiot. You said I acted like a bully. You told me that I was cruel. I respond.

In regards to the much critiqued post about my handling of the slow driver, I offer a few comments:

1.  Opening with the question "Was this mean?" wasn't smart.  I know what I did was mean. I knew it was mean while I was doing it.  I should have asked if my actions were justifiably mean or mean-but-amusing. 

That said, I doubt that any of the responses would have changed.

2. A clear majority of people responding on this blog and via Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, email and in real life do not approve of my actions in the slightest.  I was referred to as an idiot, a plonker (a British term for idiot), a bully, a mean jerk and cruel. 

3. The three people who approved of my actions found them to be more amusing than intelligent.

4. In retrospect, there were many reasons for the man in question to be driving so slowly, and I admittedly failed to realize even one of them at the time.  While I think it more than likely that he was driving slowly because that was his preferred speed, there were many other possibilities that I should have accounted for prior to taking action.   

5.  For the kind souls who wrote to me in an attempt to bolster my spirits in light of the harsh criticism I received, fear not.  If I can dish it, I must also be able to take it, and I am.  Readers need not respond kindly to my posts.  I simply ask that they be honest and transparent.  They were.   

6. A few readers wondered if I engage in this kind of behavior in order to have something to blog about on a daily basis.  I assure you that this is not the case.  In fact, I only wrote about this particular incident after mentioning it to a friend at dinner and suddenly wondering what other people might think.  For every encounter of this kind that I write about on this blog, there are many more that never get written about.

Or as my wife said, "You were doing this kind of thing long before blogs even existed." 

Very true.

7.  In the end, my intention is rarely to be mean.  Instead, I seek to challenge social conventions. 

When someone tests the door to a public restroom, finds it locked, and still knocks, I could remain conventional and say, "I'm in here!" or "I'll be out in a second!"

Or I could shout "Bring out your dead!" or "A plague on both your houses!" as I've been known to do, because I think that finding a restroom door locked and then knocking on it anyway is stupid. 

Sometimes I run the risk of being mean or stupid when challenging a social convention, and sometimes I initiate genuine change.

Yesterday I was mean.  And slightly vindictive. 

If I had the chance, I would probably apologize to the man who was driving slowly.

But only after questioning him about his reasons for driving so slowly.

Sometimes I just can't let things go.

Authors should not meet their editors at baseball games with pee-stained shorts

My editor was kind enough to take Elysha and me to a Mets game last week, and though I am a Yankees fan, I love baseball and was looking forward to seeing Citi Field for the first time. 

It didn't disappoint.

Citi Field is a beautiful ballpark with a small, almost minor league feel which suits its almost minor league team well.  Our seats were spectacular and gave us access to an air-conditioned lounge with an all-you-can-eat buffet and bar.  And as expected, the company was superb.  My wife, my editor and her assistant and I enjoyed a perfect day at the ballpark.

A couple observations from the day:

1. I received a surprising amount of flak from Mets fans and parking attendants for wearing my Yankees jersey to a Mets game.

I found this cute.

Yankee fans tend to spend a lot less time thinking about the Mets, since they so rarely pop up on our radar.  A subpar team across town is hardly worth our time or attention.  But Mets fans seem to possess a genuine disdain for the Yankees.

This reminds me of the Red Sox-Yankees fan relationship.  No Yankee fan likes the Red Sox, but you can attend a Yankees-Blue Jays game and never hear a single mention of the Red Sox.

Attend any Red Sox game, regardless of opponent or standings, and you will eventually hear a "Yankees suck!" chant, even if the Yankees are beating Seattle on the west coast 39-0.  And you'll tee shirts referencing the Yankees in a variety of negative ways being worn and sold throughout the stadium.

The Evil Empire has apparently entrenched itself in the minds of Mets and Sox fans, which I find both amusing and a little sad. 

2. New rule: I no longer drink anything if I am headed into New York City.  For reasons that I do not understand, there are no viable exits for restroom breaks once you cross over from Connecticut to New York, so if you haven't remembered to stop on the border and use the restroom, you're doomed. 

On Wednesday, this meant almost peeing my pants after a two-hour drive to the game turned into four-plus hours thanks to construction on the Whitestone Bridge. 

It became a serious situation.  Desperate to avoid me arriving to the game in pee-stained shorts, my wife actually handed me a cup and insisted that pee into it.

I realize that men can pee against a tree (and many other things) with relative ease, but to pee from behind the wheel of your Honda CRV into a cup while in traffic with your wife sitting next to you is a feat even I am incapable of achieving. 

For a minute, I considered climbing into the semi-private backseat and attempting to use the cup, but we had arrived at the tollbooths to the Whitestone Bridge, and my wife doesn't like to drive over bridges.  I figured I'd get us over the span and then trade places with her.

But we approached the base of the Whitestone, I spotted a small copse of trees and brush wedged into a triangular shaped hill of dirt.  I pulled into the breakdown lane, exited the car amidst the concerned protestations of my wife, leapt the jersey barrier (almost peeing my pants as I did so), and scrambled up the hill.  I then selected one of a half a dozen small trees and proceeded to relieve myself in front of three lanes of stopped traffic. 

Like I said, I'm never drinking a thing before heading into the city again.

A sequel to SOMETHING MISSING: Martin Railsback, FBI tactical operations double agent

A reader sent me this NPR story about the FBI's tactical operations team. 

For those of you who have read SOMETHING MISSING, you'll understand when I say that the story is so eerily reminiscent of Martin Railsback, the book's protagonist, that I'm wondering if I worked for the FBI in a previous life.

A few excerpts from the story: 

When some people go away this summer, they may have no idea that somebody dropped by their house while they were gone. Hundreds of times each year, teams from the Federal Bureau of Investigation slip into houses and office buildings. Armed with a judges warrant, they seek information or plant bugs, and if all goes well, sneak away.

There are about 70 agents on about seven different teams. And these teams spend weeks watching the target to see who goes in, to see if there are any dogs. In the case of dogs, they will show a photograph of the dog to a veterinarian who is on contract. And the veterinarian, based on the weight of the dog and the type of dog, will prescribe just the right amount of tranquilizer and the agents will use a dart gun and shoot the tranquilizer into the dog. And then at the end of the break in...

They each have a specialty. One will just watch to see if anybody is coming once they're in. One will take photographs of what the premises is like when they go in. If they have to move a chair, lets say, they put a tape where the chair was and then they move it back.

One of the most fun parts of writing SOMETHING MISSING was the idea that I was inventing a new career.  Legal or otherwise, Martin was making a living doing something that I was thought was completely plausible and yet, to my knowledge, never previously attempted.

Apparently the FBI was one step ahead of me.

But perhaps I have found an answer to the hundred of requests for a sequel to SOMETHING MISSING. 

Maybe Martin could bring his talents to the FBI tactical operations team. 

As an outside consultant, perhaps, critical of the wasteful nature of their large teams and overly complex methodology.

Or maybe as an FBI double agent, exposing a corrupt tactical operations team by using his own similar but superior tactics against them. 

Martin Railsback, the FBI watchdog. 

To be perfectly honest, it's probably not the kind of book that I could write.  Thrillers like the books I have just described are probably not in my wheelhouse. 

A sequel to SOMETHING MISSING (undoubtedly titled SOMETHING FOUND) would invariably deal with Martin's struggle to relinquish his criminal career in order to bring love and family into his life. 

But that book has yet to speak to me.  It may never speak to me.

But imagining Martin Railsback going to battle with a team of FBI agents is certainly fun to imagine.      

When an overly slow driver pulls to the side of the road to allow you to pass, even though you are driving the speed limit, what is a man to do? Heres one idea:

Tell me if this was mean.

I was on my way to the post office yesterday, driving on a rather short street, when I came upon a car driving exceedingly slowly.  I looked down at my speedometer and determined that I was driving at the speed limit (35 MPH) and guessed that the car in front of me was probably going about 20 MPH. 

Though annoyed, I maintained a safe distance from the slowpoke, fearing that his reduced speed might be an indication of his poor driving skill.  Then the car's right directional began flashing and the car pulled over to the side of the road.

There was nothing at this point on the road to indicate that the man driving the car had reached his destination, so I assumed that he was pulling aside to let me pass.

I decided to take action.  Though it doesn't happen often, I have always been infuriated by these drivers who pull over to allow me to pass when I am driving the speed limit and maintaining a safe distance.  There is a posted speed limit on every street, and it's expected that you will drive at or near this speed.  In fact, you can be ticketed for driving too slow.

And 35 MPH is hardly breakneck speed.   

Had I been speeding or tailgating, I would understand the man's desire to pull over. but to do so when the car behind you is clearing driving the speed limit at a safe distance is like a vehicular accusation of what he perceived to be my substandard driving proficiency. 

"Hell no," I thought.  "Not this time."   

So instead of passing, I also switched on my directional and pulled over to the side of the road behind the man, bringing my car to a halt about two car lengths from my accuser.  A second later the man rolled down his window and waved his arm to indicate that I should pass. 

I shook my hand and smiled as if to say, "No, that's quite alright" and proceeded to check my email on my phone. 

He waved more insistently, and I once again indicated that I was perfectly fine where I was. 

After a minute or two, the man switched on his the left turn signal and pulled back out on to the road. 

I did the same, following the man for about less than a mile before turning into the post office.   

I felt good about my decision as I crossed the parking lot and entered the post office, but I also thought that some might find my actions overly cruel, finding reason to side with the man and make excuses for his slow driving. 

I still feel good about my decision a day later.  I did not break any laws.  I did not yell or curse at the man.  I did not waste any time. 

Best of all, it was fun.

Thoughts?

The Clowns: One step closer to reality

The promotional poster for our rock opera is finished.

It almost feels real now.

If its important and its lacking, TEACH IT.

I don't understand the teacher who complains that his or her students don't do something that is easy to fix.

A good example is the use of the word please.

I can't tell you how many times over the years I have heard a teacher complain about the lack of manners in their students. 

But the absence of many behaviors that constitute manners is not akin to a learning disability or an emotionally troubled child. 

Manners, like many things, are an easy fix.

And they also have to be learned.  

With the application of instruction, consistent role modeling, practice and positive feedback, the use of the word please, for example, is not a difficult behavior to foster and reinforce in a student.  

And being that the person complaining about the absence of the word please is a teacher, wouldn't instruction like this be in his or her wheelhouse anyway?

If a teacher is struggling with a student because he is apathetic, angry, effortless and three years behind his classmates in terms of learning, I understand the occasional complaint.  It doesn't mean that the teacher has given up.  Sometimes it's just healthy to express your frustration.

But to complain about a student who isn't using the word please or doing something that is simple to fix has always seemed a little silly to me.

Perhaps some people are more prone to complaint, but I have always believed in avoiding complaining whenever possible.  So when it comes to easy fixes, I just do my job and keep my mouth shut. 

And I also suspect that despite the persistent belief that kids these days don't have the same level of respect for their elders, teachers two hundred years ago were probably complaining about the same kinds of things.