Matthew Dicks's Blog, page 650

Topless would have been better

Emily Yofee in her role as Dear Prudence offers advice to a married couple who met while the wife was putting herself through college by working at a topless bar. 

The wife complains of frequent embarrassment when asked about how she and her husband met, and she would like Yoffe to give her some advice as to how to avoid this awkward question without lying.

Yofee suggests stretching the truth by telling people that they met while she was waitressing.

I think they should just tell the whole truth.  It's a great story.

I kind of wish it was Elysha and my story.   

Our story is decidedly less risqué.  Elysha and I met at work.  I was separated from my first wife at the time, and Elysha was engaged to another guy.  In fact, our first conversation took place during an overnight field trip to a YMCA camp.  As we hiked around the lake, we chatted about her wedding plans. 

Ironically, we were both initially intimidated by one another. 

Elysha thought that my friend, Donna, and I were the "cool kids" at our school (we were not), and I thought that she was too beautiful and too clever to even be friendship material (she was).  

Probably a good way to start a relationship. 

We spent the first year that we knew each other as colleagues, the second year as friends, and in our third year together we began dating.  I was divorced by then, and she had called off her engagement.  We fumbled around a bit, unsure if we were simply becoming close friends or something more, and then one day Elysha took my hand as we hiked down a mountain, signaling to me that something had changed. 

Later that night, we kissed for the first time.  

Actually, she kissed me.  Just for the record. 

And even though we've been together for more than seven years, I still have these "Elysha Green Moments" in which I cannot believe I am married to this amazing woman.  I find myself wondering how I could ever be so lucky.

It should also be noted that Elysha overcame her intimidation decidedly quicker than I have, and she has never reported any Matthew Dicks Moments.     

But had she been a topless dancer when we first met, I bet those Elysha Green Moments would be even more frequent. 

Headstones and high-fives

I was back in the classroom on Tuesday after having spent an interesting Monday in Massachusetts. 

My mom passed away almost three years ago, and I had yet to return to the cemetery since the funeral.  My family has a large stone engraved with the names of family members, and my mom was buried in the shadow of that stone.  At the time I had assumed that my mother's name was being added to the family stone, but it turns out that it was not.  So I spent Monday arranging to have a stone put in place and cutting through the necessary red tape to do so.

I was hoping that my sister would join me to help make some of the necessary decisions, but she couldn't make it so I brought my friend, Shep, instead.  Shep and I had plans to attend the Monday night Patriots-Jets game that day, so he agreed to accompany me to my hometown, help me make the arrangements for at the cemetery, and then we would head to Foxboro together for the game. 

Logistically, it made a lot of sense.

And as I said, it was an interesting day.  It was the first time I had returned to my mother's burial site, a cemetery in which I was first taught to drive and where I later taught my high school girlfriend and my best friend to drive as well.  It was also the place where my grandparents and great grandparents are buried.  While it could have been an emotional moment for me, the absence of the marker and the presence of my Patriot-clad friend helped to make it more business and less personal.  Thankfully. 

And then we were off to Foxboro Stadium for the Monday night game.  If you haven't heard, the Patriots defeated their arch-rivals, the much despised New York Jets, in a blowout, the final score was 45-3.  It was one of my happiest moments as a New England Patriots fan.

But not everything about the game was easy.

It was bitterly cold that night, with temperatures in the low teens and a 20-30 mile an hour wind whipping through the stadium.  Light snow was falling, and though I was dressed in eight layers of clothing, causing me to resemble the Stay Puff Marshmallow man, I was cold.  Four hours in the parking lot before the game, plus the nearly four hours spent inside the stadium, can take a toll no matter how much winter garb you have donned.   

The game ended around midnight, and I pulled into my buddy's driveway around 3:00 AM, only to find my car's battery dead.  After jumping the battery and driving home, I managed to crawl into my bed a little before 4:00 AM.

A little less than three hours later, I was climbing out of bed for work.

After work, I played basketball ball with colleagues until 5:00, and I followed this up with a parent-teacher conference.

I arrived back at home around 6:00 that night, admittedly tired.

Shep took Tuesday off.  Smart man. 

A couple people at work shook their heads and expressed incredulity at the thought of spending hours in sub-freezing temperatures to watch a football game.  They were baffled by my decision to operate on a couple hours sleep when the game could have been viewed from the warm confines of my home, with network television's superior camera angles and multiple replays enhancing the viewing experience.

At least one person who is younger than me said that he was "too old for that kind of stuff anymore."

But I think one of my colleagues, an older woman with children and grandchildren, said it best when she said, "Life is an adventure if you are willing to get off your couch."

I survived Tuesday quite well.  I had prepared my lessons beforehand and had several parent volunteers in my classroom that day.  Had I asked any one of them if I seemed lethargic or off my game, I think their answer would have been no.

And I played hoop fairly well after school.  I was on the winning team for all three games and handed out my share of hard fouls and flagrant elbows. 

Tuesday wasn't an easy day for me, but it wasn't impossible either.   

And three days after the game, as I sit here warm and well rested, all I have left to show for the hours spent in freezing temperatures and the lack of sleep is a pair of chapped lips (the first of my life) and the unforgettable memories of a night spent with a friend in the upper decks of Gillette Stadium, high-fiving and hugging strangers as Patriot after Patriot found the end zone.  Hundreds of tiny little moments forever engrained in my memory that I will cherish for the rest of my life.

It was one of the Patriots finest moments, and I was there to watch it.

Freezing you ass off and missing a night of sleep is sometimes necessary in order for life to be an adventure. 

The thing I do best

I was recently asked by an editor to describe my strengths as a writer, and after some fumbling about, I had to admit that I did not know.

It's a question that I've asked myself over the years, since so much of my success seems accidental. 

I do not know the plot of any of my stories before I begin writing.  Instead I choose a character and a place to begin and start tapping keys.  While a story eventually emerges, it's hard for me to take any credit since so many parts of my stories reveal themselves to me through the process of writing. 

My books are said to be funny, but I never make any overt attempts at humor.  In fact, when readers first told me that SOMETHING MISSING was funny, I thought that they were not reading carefully enough.

Even the occasionally clever turn-of-phrase is often stumbled upon as my finger connect with keys. 

As a result, I've often wondered about what allows me to be successful as an author.  Is it simply persistence and blind luck, or is there something specific that I do that makes my stories successful.

Then I saw a quote last week by author Ethan Canin that summed up what I think I do best.   

Canin said:

Don't write about a character. Become that character, and then write your story.

This is what I do well.  This is how I write.

Rather than envisioning a story, complete with characters, setting, conflict and themes, I simply imagine a character.  I enter that character's mind.  I become that character, and then I begin writing.

As I wrote one of the final and most pivotal scenes of SOMETHING MISSING, in which Martin climbs a set of stairs, prepared to meet his fate, I was inside Martin's head, climbing those stairs with him, unsure of how the encounter would end.  As the events unfolded for Martin, they unfolded for me as well, unexpected and surprising, because in that moment, I was Martin.

As I wrote the opening chapter to UNEXPECTEDLY, MILO and the word conflagration popped into Milo's head, it popped into mine as well, without a hint of forethought or planning.  Milo's compulsions, a critical aspect of the book, came as a surprise for me, and they were delivered to me in the same way that Milo experiences his compulsions, suddenly and unexpectedly, because in that moment, I was Milo. 

That is what I do well, and that, I believe, is why my writing career has taken off.  For reasons that I cannot explain, I can occupy the mind of my characters with surprising effectiveness. 

I am not the most talented writer.  I have many weaknesses, some of which my agent and editor effectively conceal from the general public, and some that still find their way through into my stories.  I am not the finest wordsmith, nor is my prose terribly sparkling.

But I can become the character, and then I can write his story.

That is what I do best.

The the little things that make me feel the most stupid

There are many little things that I cannot do that make me feel stupid.

After returning home around 3:00 AM from the Patriots Monday night football game, I found the battery in my car dead.  While I know how to jumpstart a car and hade the cables to do so, I could not open the hood of my car.

Try as I might, I can never find the damn latch.  And even though my friend, Scott, was also unable to find it a couple years ago, I still felt exceedingly stupid when I had to ask Shep to open the trunk for me last night.

That is just one of many small tasks that I am unable to complete. 

I cannot sharpen a pencil using a non-electrical sharpener. 

I cannot throw a baseball with any degree of effectiveness.

I cannot snap my daughter's pajamas closed without mixing up the snaps.

I cannot determine the ripeness of an avocado.

I cannot change the oil in my car.

I cannot remember how old I am without doing the subtraction.

And I cannot fold a fitted sheet. 

Perhaps until now. 

Potential dead friends

I'm in the process of revising my Friendship Application. 

As I've debated new categories to add to my list and the revision of others, I've begun to wonder about who I might have befriended from the days of yore. 

In short, what dead men and women I would have wanted as friends. 

And so I've begun a list.

It only contains men so far, and white men at that, so if you can think of anyone who I might want to add to the list, let me know.

My criteria is this:

The person must be a slam dunk.  An absolute definite.  In the past several days, I have considered dozens of maybes and probablys, but unless I can say for certain that I would call that dead person my friend, he or she is not added to the list.  I cannot add people to the list for curiosity sake.  For example, I would love to hear the truth about the Kennedy assassination from Lee Harvey Oswald, but that desire for information is not enough to befriend him.  I am seeking people of similar mindsets and sensibilities, as well as those individuals who so thoroughly impress me that I would want to spend as much time as possible in their company. 

Here's what I've got so far, in order of preference:

HL Mencken Voltaire Jonathan Swift Mark Twain Roald Dahl Oscar Wilde Douglas Adams Thomas Paine

If you have any suggestions for additions, please send them along. 

And if you would like to generate your own list and share it with the rest of us, that would be even better.

Cheat cheat never beat. Except by accident.

During a recent visit to our home, my wife's grandmother asked me, "Did you ever cheat in school?

"Absolutely," I said.

"Oh good," she said.  "I can't stand those people who say they never cheated."

Though my response was immediate, I can recall just two incidents of cheating in my lifetime, if I don't count the various term papers and book reports that I sold to classmates and wrote for girlfriends back in high school.

I think of those incidents more as entrepreneurial endeavors and flirting, respectively.

Yes, that's right.  I wrote term papers as a means of flirting with girls. 

You can imagine how successful I was. 

The first incident of cheating, one involving Herman Melville's Omoo and a book report, is chronicled in a previous post. 

The second incident occurred during my sophomore year of high school, and while I didn't mean to hurt anyone in the process, I most certainly did.

Part of my science class requirement that year was to enter the school's science fair.  At the time I had no desire to enter the science fair, and I had even less desire to win.  I found the requirement to be arbitrary and simply a means by which the science department could guarantee participation in their science fair, so I responded to the assignment as I responded to most assignments in high school:

I procrastinated.

With a day to go before the fair and no project even started, I saw a news story about the recent famine in Ethiopia.  The report explained that poor crop management had caused the Ethiopian soil to wash away, leaving farmers with nothing in which to grow their crops.  I wondered if new soil could be imported or if they Ethiopians could synthesize new soil with its varying components. 

The idea of synthesizing soil from its basic components popped into my head, and finally I had a science fair topic.  A good one, too. 

Less than 24 hours before the science fair was to commence.

It might have been an interesting project had I given myself enough time to complete it, but absent the time required to grow plants, I went into my backyard and extracted soil from two different locations: the pine forest behind the house and the field adjacent to he barn.  Both soil types looked different enough, so I declared one naturally-occurring soil and the other synthesized soil of my own making and labeled them accordingly. 

Then I went back into the pine forest and plucked several ferns of various sizes, placing the smaller ones in the naturally occurring soil and the taller ones in my self-proclaimed synthesized soil. 

Experiment complete, I spent the rest of the evening forging data, writing a brief report and constructing a display.  The next day I went to school with my finished project, and that evening, I was manning my post, ready to meet the judges and explain my project to them.

I was a little nervous about being exposed as a fraud in the eyes of the judges, but I felt that I had faked enough material to satisfy the class's requirement.  That was my only goal.   

And yet somehow I managed to place third in the science fair, a shocking turn of events.  I have always been a good public speaker, and I am adept at thinking fast and talking even faster, and I think it was these skills, above and beyond the actual science that was on display, that vaulted me to my third place finish.

I still have the trophy that I was awarded that night.   

My fellow winners of the science fair included a classmate named Eric whose project topic now escapes me and a junior named Mike who I knew well from our Scouting days.  Mike had taken first place for building a homemade radon detector. 

Standing alongside Eric and Mike, I felt like a fraud.  A clever fraud, but a fraud nonetheless.

Even worse, the top three finishers in our science fair were given the opportunity to bring our projects to Worcester Polytechnic Institute to compete in the statewide fair.  I was awarded a day off from school to spend wandering the exhibit halls of WPI with my friends, checking out the other science fair projects and presenting my own to the judges. 

Though I was still nervous about presenting a falsified science fair project to a group of actual scientists, I managed to win an honorable mention and took home a $150 savings bond. 

I've always felt rather clever about the success of my science fair scheme, but I'm also aware that I took the rightful place of someone much more deserving.

Someone who had actually completed the work. 

It was the last time I ever cheated in school.

And now I am left with this question:

Someday Clara is going to ask me the same question that her great grandmother asked a couple weeks ago.

Did you ever cheat in school? 

What am I to tell her?

Should I be honest and tell her the stories of my successfully malfeasance, encouraging her to learn from my mistakes and not repeat them, or should I lie to her until she is an adult and less susceptible to the potential corruption of a beloved father?

Cheating has become considerably more difficult in today's world. with economists and statisticians now able to detect cheating by students and teachers simply by examining a class's test scores.      

In the world that Clara will grow up, the risks are more considerable than my days in high school. 

Case in point:  More than 200 students at the University of Central Florida recently came forward to admit to cheating after their professor gave a lecture on ethics in response to a statistical examination of midterm grades. 

it's quite a lecture:

So what is a father to choose?

An honest account of my moral failings or a dishonest representation with the intent of providing my daughter with a better role model than I actually am?

I am not sure.  And I probably have less than ten years to figure it out. 

Cheat cheat never beat. Except by accident.

During a recent visit to our home, my wife's grandmother asked me, "Did you ever cheat in school?

"Absolutely," I said.

"Oh good," she said.  "I can't stand those people who say they never cheated."

Though my response was immediate, I can recall just two incidents of cheating in my lifetime, if I don't count the various term papers and book reports that I sold to classmates and wrote for girlfriends back in high school.

I think of those incidents more as entrepreneurial endeavors and flirting, respectively.

Yes, that's right.  I wrote term papers as a means of flirting with girls. 

You can imagine how successful I was. 

The first incident of cheating, one involving Herman Melville's Omoo and a book report, is chronicled in a previous post. 

The second incident occurred during my sophomore year of high school, and while I didn't mean to hurt anyone in the process, I most certainly did.

Part of my science class requirement that year was to enter the school's science fair.  At the time I had no desire to enter the science fair, and I had even less desire to win.  I found the requirement to be arbitrary and simply a means by which the science department could guarantee participation in their science fair, so I responded to the assignment as I responded to most assignments in high school:

I procrastinated.

With a day to go before the fair and no project even started, I saw a news story about the recent famine in Ethiopia.  The report explained that poor crop management had caused the Ethiopian soil to wash away, leaving farmers with nothing in which to grow their crops.  I wondered if new soil could be imported or if they Ethiopians could synthesize new soil with its varying components. 

The idea of synthesizing soil from its basic components popped into my head, and finally I had a science fair topic.  A good one, too. 

Less than 24 hours before the science fair was to commence.

It might have been an interesting project had I given myself enough time to complete it, but absent the time required to grow plants, I went into my backyard and extracted soil from two different locations: the pine forest behind the house and the field adjacent to he barn.  Both soil types looked different enough, so I declared one naturally-occurring soil and the other synthesized soil of my own making and labeled them accordingly. 

Then I went back into the pine forest and plucked several ferns of various sizes, placing the smaller ones in the naturally occurring soil and the taller ones in my self-proclaimed synthesized soil. 

Experiment complete, I spent the rest of the evening forging data, writing a brief report and constructing a display.  The next day I went to school with my finished project, and that evening, I was manning my post, ready to meet the judges and explain my project to them.

I was a little nervous about being exposed as a fraud in the eyes of the judges, but I felt that I had faked enough material to satisfy the class's requirement.  That was my only goal.   

And yet somehow I managed to place third in the science fair, a shocking turn of events.  I have always been a good public speaker, and I am adept at thinking fast and talking even faster, and I think it was these skills, above and beyond the actual science that was on display, that vaulted me to my third place finish.

I still have the trophy that I was awarded that night.   

My fellow winners of the science fair included a classmate named Eric whose project topic now escapes me and a junior named Mike who I knew well from our Scouting days.  Mike had taken first place for building a homemade radon detector. 

Standing alongside Eric and Mike, I felt like a fraud.  A clever fraud, but a fraud nonetheless.

Even worse, the top three finishers in our science fair were given the opportunity to bring our projects to Worcester Polytechnic Institute to compete in the statewide fair.  I was awarded a day off from school to spend wandering the exhibit halls of WPI with my friends, checking out the other science fair projects and presenting my own to the judges. 

Though I was still nervous about presenting a falsified science fair project to a group of actual scientists, I managed to win an honorable mention and took home a $150 savings bond. 

I've always felt rather clever about the success of my science fair scheme, but I'm also aware that I took the rightful place of someone much more deserving.

Someone who had actually completed the work. 

It was the last time I ever cheated in school.

And now I am left with this question:

Someday Clara is going to ask me the same question that her great grandmother asked a couple weeks ago.

Did you ever cheat in school? 

What am I to tell her?

Should I be honest and tell her the stories of my successfully malfeasance, encouraging her to learn from my mistakes and not repeat them, or should I lie to her until she is an adult and less susceptible to the potential corruption of a beloved father?

Cheating has become considerably more difficult in today's world. with economists and statisticians now able to detect cheating by students and teachers simply by examining a class's test scores.      

In the world that Clara will grow up, the risks are more considerable than my days in high school. 

Case in point:  More than 200 students at the University of Central Florida recently came forward to admit to cheating after their professor gave a lecture on ethics in response to a statistical examination of midterm grades. 

it's quite a lecture:

So what is a father to choose?

An honest account of my moral failings or a dishonest representation with the intent of providing my daughter with a better role model than I actually am?

I am not sure.  And I probably have less than ten years to figure it out. 

Hardest decisions are usually the best decisions

Case in point:

As an educator and a parent, I am opposed to placing a television in a child's bedroom.  With the kind of programming available on TV today, as well as the fierce competition that our children will face in a global economy, there is no time and no need for unmonitored television viewing in the bedroom.

I am not saying that children should not be watching television at all.  Just that the placement of this device is a child's bedroom amounts to an utter disregard for the realities that face our children today and the research which clearly shows the damage that a TV in the bedroom can do.  

In 2008, the New York Times reported that children with televisions in their bedrooms score lower on school tests and are more likely to have sleep problems.  Having a television in the bedroom is strongly associated with being overweight and a higher risk for smoking.

In addition, a television in the bedroom increases the total amount of TV that a child views in a given week by nearly 9 hours, from 21 hours to 30 hours. 

All three of those numbers are staggering.

Every year I survey my students, asking how many of them have televisions in their bedrooms, and anecdotally, I can assure you that after more than a decade of survey and observation, the data is accurate.  Children without televisions in their bedrooms are better readers and more focused learners.

Does this mean that I have never had any high achieving students who also had televisions in their bedrooms?

Of course not.

But I also wonder how much potential was lost because of the television. 

Could one of them been the next Einstein had they not been watching reruns on the Disney channel?

Lost potential is difficult to measure and convenient to ignore. 

With this in mind, I routinely advise parents to remove the television and gaming systems from their child's bedroom (one year taking action myself by going to a student's house and removing the power cords from the three game systems he had in his bedroom and not returning them until the end of the school year), and in the decade that I have been offering this advice, I can count the number of parents who have taken it on one hand.  There are lots of reasons why parents ignore the data and the advice of professionals but it typically comes down to this:

Removing the television from the bedroom would be hard.  My child has gotten accustomed to the television and would be angry if I removed it.  And then we would not be able to watch two different shows at the same time. The family would have to compromise on a show, and that would cause problems as well.

I agree with this sentiment.  I do not doubt its veracity.  I know, because I once made the mistake of placing a television in a child's bedroom.

When my former step-daughter was ten years old, I purchased a new television for the living room and I placed the old TV in Nicole's bedroom, thinking it a nice gesture and a means of alleviating the constant debate over what we should be watching. 

Less than a week later, I had realized that by placing a television in her bedroom, I was seeing considerably less of Nicole.  She was spending more time in her bedroom, with the door closed, watching TV while doing her homework.  I also realized that I was unable to monitor what she was watching and how much programming she was consuming in total. 

All things I probably should have realized beforehand but did not.

In short, it took me a little more than a week to realize how stupid it was to put a TV in her bedroom, so I removed it.

Nicole was inconsolable when I removed the television, and more than ten years later, this twenty-year old girl is still angry over the decision I made that day.  Even though she now has a television in her bedroom, she describes that day as one of the angriest moments of her life.  For years after removing the TV, she would still complain about the decision to me, her mother, family members, friends and even strangers who were willing to listen to her tale of woe. She would describe me as mean, cruel and uncaring.  She would lament over the the fact that all of her friends had televisions in their bedrooms and ask why I did not love her enough to do the same.

And all this coming within the complex, tenuous and oftentimes uncertain dynamics of a step-father/step-daughter relationship, and with almost no support from her mother, who disagreed with my decision. 

And yet I did it, knowing it was best for Nicole.  My hope was that she might someday thank me for caring enough to endure six years of constant badgering and complaints, but that moment of appreciation has never happened.   

As I said, she is still mad as hell about it.

But I made the difficult decision because I knew it was right, and because I know that the hardest decisions are usually the best decisions. 

In that same New York Times article, Dr. Leonard H. Epstein, professor of pediatrics and social and preventive medicine at the School of Medicine and Biomedical Science at the State University of New York at Buffalo, is quoted as saying: 

"Once the set is in the child's room, it is very likely to stay.  In our experience, it is often hard for parents to remove a television set from a child's bedroom."

Why is this true?  Because too many people are unwilling to make the difficult decision.   

As parents, we are all capable of making stupid decisions.  In the course of raising Clara, I expect to do a lot of foolish and tremendously dumb things. 

This is the cross that every parent must bear. 

But it is our willingness to undo our stupidity and make the tough decisions that set us apart.  And more importantly, it is what will ultimately set our kids apart as well.

So stop ignoring the data and take the advice of an experienced educator and parent capable of some very stupid things:

Get that goddamn television out of your kids' bedroom today.

High expectations not always good

Thankfully, I haven't run into many people like this.

Unfortunately, I've met a few.

This had me laughing out loud. 

Anatomy of a toddlers conversation

This just happened a minute ago.  I transcribed it word for word.

_____________________________

Clara (enters room):  Uh oh.

Mommy:  Uh oh what?

Clara:  Uh oh Clara.

Mommy: Why oh oh?

Clara:  I fell.

Mommy:  You did?

Clara:  Yeah.

Mommy and Daddy:  Are you okay?

Clara:  Yeah.

Daddy:  Where did you hurt yourself?

Clara:  Head.

Mommy:  Where?

(Clara touches forehead)

Mommy:  You want a snuggle?

Clara:  Yes.

(Mommy and Clara snuggle)

Clara (30 seconds later):  Alright!

_____________________________

This ability-to-communicate-in-words thing is pretty cool.