Matthew Dicks's Blog, page 647

My three little treasures

My wife is the best gift giver on the planet. 

In addition to getting me tickets to the last two Connecticut Forums in 2011 (Temple Grandin/Steven Pinker and John Irving/Jonathan Franzen/Azar Nafisi), she stuffed my stocking with three items that are my three favorite gifts of the year.

A Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure pin (there was a time when I could recite this movie word-for-word) A New England Patriots house key A pair of boxers (she always gives me underwear) with images of headphones covering them (I live most of my life with a pair of headphones perched atop my head)

Some people might prefer a videogame system or a fancy watch or a cashmere sweater. 

I like these things, too (maybe not the sweater and definitely not the watch), but like the books that I write, I tend to like the quirky gifts the best.

These three gifts are simple, inexpensive, and infused with great thought and love. 

I wouldn't trade them for anything.

  

Diversity at the North Pole, perhaps?

My daughter, Clara, and I spent part of Christmas day watching the Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer TV special. 

My wife is Jewish, and I celebrate all holidays involving anthropomorphized creatures and gift-giving, so Clara receives a mixed-bag when it comes to holiday celebrations. 

I think it's great.  The best of both worlds.

My wife grew up in a Jewish household, so she is only six in Christmas years and has no understanding of the fundamental importance of these stop-motion animation Christmas specials. 

I'm happy to be passing the tradition onto Clara.

With all this in mind, I found myself with a new perspective as I watched Rudolph for perhaps the two-hundredth time.

Specifically, I had an insight on Hermey, the Christmas elf:

Hermey, a self-described misfit who prefers studying dentistry to making toys.  Abandoning Santa's workshop, Hermey runs away, leaving Santa Clause and Christmas behind. 

Rejects Santa Claus and Christmas?

Chooses dental school over the toy industry?

Jewish, perhaps?

How to turn a toy gun into an appropriate gift

A few observations from the day before Christmas:

1.  Having done no shopping save one online purchase before December 24 and having yet to decorate our tree, procrastination wasn't so bad this year.  A visit to Santa in the morning, an afternoon of shopping, and an early evening spent trimming of the tree and we were ready to head out to our annual holiday party.

I was actually an enjoyable way to spend the day before Christmas.  

And even though Clara didn't love Saint Nick, it was a great day for her, too.

 [image error] 

I may procrastinate next year, too.

2.  Men are simple creatures.  As I meandered up and down the aisles of Toys 'R Us, I continued to stumbled upon toys that I would love to receive as a gift.  Remote controlled helicopters and cars, sling shots, Nerf guns, yoyos, jump ropes, board games, skateboards, video games and more. 

While I struggle to fill my wife's stocking with anything but candy every year, she continually packs mine with the cleverest of gifts.  In fact, she's the best stocking stuffer I have ever known.  But I realized as I made my way through the toy store that this is because men never outgrow the toy store.  Filling a man's stocking is easy because men continue to play with toys throughout their lives and the toy store will always be a place where a clever woman can shop for her man.  I don't know what Elysha has planned for this year, but I promise you that her choices are likely to be small, silly and some of my favorite gifts of the year.

3.  F.A.O Schwarz has apparently leased a section of the Toys 'R Us store to sell their own merchandise, and at the beginning of this section is a kiosk selling F.A.O Schwarz gift bags for 98 cents each.

Correct me if I am wrong, but the implication here is that there are consumers in the world who shop at Toys 'R Us but purchase an F.A.O. Schwarz toy and want to convey the appearance that the gift was actually purchased at the world famous store in New York City.

Right?  Is there any other explanation for a brand-named gift bag?

The presence of the kiosk or the bags themselves didn't bother me so much.  As much as I like to think that austerity is slowing creeping into people's mindsets, there will always be people on the bottom end of the sensibility bell curve. 

But the fact that the kiosk was capable of holding hundreds of bags and yet was nearly empty was my greatest cause of concern. 

Are so many people still so image conscious and materialistic?

4.  Searching for a gift for twin boys, I came upon an enormous section of Nerf guns.  A glorious collection of handgun and rifles that fire small, soft Nerf pellets at their target. 

I stared at the choices for a long time and finally texted Elysha.

Me:  Can I get the boys toy guns?  Nerf guns.    

Elysha:  Not sure…

Elysha:  I think so. Is there something else as good?

Me:  Nothing is as good as a gun.

And so I continued staring at the array of weaponry before me, trying to decide if the boys' parents would approve.  I thought about the their careers, their religious beliefs, their political leanings and examples of their parental decision-making from the past.  I thought and thought and then the solution struck me like a thunderbolt. 

I bought four guns.  One for each boy and one for each parent. 

Buy a gun for everyone and it becomes time well spent with family.

Sort of like buying Monopoly.  Only a hell of a lot better.

Best Christmas gift of the day

I will write about the outstanding gifts that my wife gave me later today (they really are outstanding), but the best Christmas gift that I have received thus far has been listening to my 23-month old daughter count to 20 for the very first time.

And then the second time. 

And then a third time.

And now I think she's just showing off.  

I managed to coax her into counting for the camera (by doing a little counting myself), but she did so while stuffing Cheerios in her mouth, so she wasn't at her best. 

She counted perfectly at least three times before I tired to capture it on film.  

Maybe we can get her to count to 100 before she turns two.

A little apocalypse never hurt anyone

A friend of mine recently expressed concern when he learned that I dream about the apocalypse a couple times a week.

But it's not always nuclear holocaust that fills my dreams.  Giant asteroids, air-born plagues, alien invaders and zombie infestation are just a few of the horrors that fill my sleepy time.

It's not like I'm fixated on one specific method of worldly destruction.

And there are the personal apocalypses as well:  home invasion, armed robbery, airplane crashes, swarms of killer bees.

I spend many of my evenings struggling to stay alive.  

And I like to think that my nightly experiences with these disasters prepare me for their eventuality, as this video does so well:

My wife and my high school sweetheart agree

I was speaking to a professor and researcher who is investigating the possibility that people who hated school make better teachers. 

This is a theory that I have long espoused, and I was both shocked and pleased to hear that others share my belief. 

In talking about this research with friends over dinner, I was asked why I didn't like school, and for a moment, I was stumped.  There were a multitude of reasons that led to my negative opinion of school, but I had difficulty summing them up in one sentence.

Then Elysha did it for me.

"Matt doesn't like to be told what to do."

And in those nine simple words, I believe that my wife described the most fundamental aspect of my being.

More than anything else, I do not like to be told what to do.

And perhaps this is one of the reasons why I became a teacher, a writer, and a small business owner.  In all three professions, I enjoy an enormous amount of freedom when it comes to how I perform my job.  I may have principals and editors and business partners supervising me to a degree, but most of the time that I spend working is done without direct supervision.

There is no one telling me what to do.   

I was telling this story to Laura, my high school sweetheart, and though we haven't seen much of each other in more than twenty years, she wholeheartedly agreed with my wife's summation, adding this one addendum:

"This is why you are the master of your destiny.  You can do anything you want because you refuse to do anything that other people want you to do.  You published those books because you didn't listen to people who told you that it would be impossible.  You just like to prove the opposite is true, no matter what the opposite may be."

And she's right, too.  In fact, between the two of them, I think Elysha and Laura have established the guiding force in my life:

Don't tell me what to do.  I am a contrarian who is just looking for a chance to do exactly the opposite of what you want me to do. 

Some might argue that this amounts to the mental framework of a five year old.

I agree or disagree depending upon your opinion. 

Either way, it's interesting and a little disconcerting to listen to other people distill the essence of my being into a few simple sentences, and while I'd like to think I'm a slightly more complex being, I think that they are right.

What would Emperor Hirohito think?

I'm happy that I am able to watch so much BBC programing here in America, but I think US television networks are missing a golden opportunity by not broadcasting more Japanese game show insanity. 

Brilliant or brat?

I love and hate this boy all at the same time.

I'm conflicted.

And incredibly amused.

First time I was paid to write

The Chronicle of Higher Education posted a fascinating story about a man who makes his living writing papers for college students.

Reading it reminded me that this was how I was first paid to write.

Back in high school, I was paid by classmates to write term papers.  Though unethical and illegal by high school standards, it proved to be a profitable venture: 

$25-$75 per paper depending upon the size and subject matter.

Papers related to history, for example, were discounted since this was typically an area that I enjoyed researching.

Papers involving an analysis of ETHAN FROME were heavily surcharged even though I had already read the book.

I hate the book. 

I didn't keep accurate financial records at the time, but I probably wrote about three dozen papers over the course of two years, and I could have earned even more had I been able to type the papers. 

Unfortunately, I ran into some trouble when it came to typing, which is a story for another time. 

Tomorrow perhaps.

So instead of delivering ready-to-submit manuscripts, I was paid to produce a hand-written copy of the paper that my customers would then type themselves.

And to be honest, it made me feel a little less dishonest knowing that the actual paper that I wrote was not the one that would ultimately be turned in.

I also wrote papers for my high school sweetheart (one analyzing The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe) , but I never charged her for them.

I have always been charitable when it comes to love.

After graduating high school, my writing career dried up for a time.  For about a year, I posted a weekly column on a bulletin board system for about a dozen readers, but I wasn't paid to write again for another ten years, when one of my poems won a contest sponsored by the now-defunct Beginnings magazine.

$100 plus publication. 

A few years later, I earned a couple hundred dollars via Google's AdSense for advertising placed on one of my early blogs, and then came my first book contract and the opportunity to make this writing gig an actual career. 

But I like the fact that my beginnings were less than honorable.  Nefarious, even.  While I wrote those term papers for profit, the knowledge that my actions served to subvert the teacher's ability to accurately assess student performance and undermined their power was ample reward.

My arguably nerdy way of sticking it to the man.     

Oh, and here is the winning poem mentioned above:

Save Your Money Next Time and Just Give Me the Box

Thank you Mother,
for the red, aerodynamic toboggan
that I found under the Christmas tree this morning,
with it's chiseled runners and
precision steering wires.

But Mother dearest,
in the future,
please know that I have found nothing more exhilarating
than a steep, muddy hill
and a sturdy refrigerator box.

-Matthew Dicks

Denial is a powerful tool

Faithful readers might have noticed that I did not post yesterday.  That does not happen often.

On Sunday night I was in Foxboro, watching the Patriots beat the Green Bay Packers in a nail biter.

I got home around 3:00 AM and climbed into bed around 3:30 AM.

Then I arose at 7:00 AM for work. 

No time to write.

During the school day, I began to get sick.  Flu-like symptoms in NFL terms.

Football players never have the flu.  They have flu-like symptoms.

When the school day ended, I played basketball with colleagues for 90 minutes.  Probably not a great idea considering my oncoming illness, but it's basketball.  "A binding social contract," I explained to Elysha. 

I had to play.  I wanted to play. 

And to be honest, I felt a little better while playing the game.  My lethargy disappeared, and for a while I was feeling great.

Then I collided with a colleague going for a rebound and came down hard on the concrete floor, smashing my knee and elbow.  Hurt like hell.

Shortly after the game, my flu-like symptoms returned as my wife and I made our way to our friends' new restaurant for a tasting.  During dinner I began to get the shivers and my body began aching.

The food, however, was phenomenal.  

By the time I arrived home, I was definitely probably sick.  As I crawled into bed at 8:30, the earliest recording sighting of Matthew Dicks in a bed in decades, I wasn't sure if I felt lousy because I had slept just three hours the night before or I was actually getting sick. 

Or had my collision with the concrete floor during basketball have something to do with how lousy I was feeling?

Elysha rolled her eyes and told me that I was sick, but sometimes I think that denial can make an illness go away. 

It's worked before. 

Last week I received a notice with my paycheck indicating the number of sick days that I have accumulated during my 11-year teaching career. Had I never taken a sick day during my career, I would have accumulated 165 sick days up until this point. 

The notice indicated that I had 155.5 accumulated days.  This means that over the course of 11+ years of teaching, I have missed 9.5 days of work because I was ill, and that includes two bouts with pneumonia and at least two days taken for physicals and medical tests.  

I don't get sick very often, and when I do, I usually try to tough it out.

Or deny that there is anything wrong. 

And so I awoke this morning feeling slightly better.  Not great, but better.  No chills and almost no fever.  My entire body is aching, but I'll chalk that up to the basketball collision rather than any illness, because that is more convenient and decidedly more manly. 

I have a pounding headache as well, but I just slept nine hours, which is more than I have slept in years, so my body is probably acclimating itself to the world after an extended period of unconsciousness. 

And I'm probably dehydrated.  I just slept for nine hours.  I haven't had anything to drink in nine hours. 

How do people sleep so much on a regular basis without turning to dust?

See how easy it is to talk yourself out of being sick and into going to work?