Matthew Dicks's Blog, page 653

Unable to give thanks on this Thanksgiving

One of the problems with being an atheist is that there is no one to thank for much of my good fortune.

I was born a white male in the United States in the late twentieth century. That alone provides me with advantages that billions of people do not enjoy.  In the grand scheme of things, these facts alone are the ones that have made the greatest impact in my life, yet it was only blind luck that made it happen. 

Had I been born in Africa, the Middle East, South America, many parts of Asia, or hundreds of other locales, I would've likely faced hardships that I will never know as an American.  Disease, hunger, a lack of basic human rights, Third World economic limitations, and millions of other factors could have hindered my success.

Had I been born a woman, I would have spent my life battling the proverbial glass ceiling, sex discrimination, reduced wages, the lack of acceptance on a football field, perpetual chills regardless of temperature, and the stupidity of high heels.

Had I been born a minority, I would've undoubtedly faced prejudice and racism throughout much of my life.

Had I been born earlier than 1971, I might have faced combat in Vietnam, Korea, or in the European or Pacific theatres during either of the World Wars. I could have suffered through the Great Depression or the Civil War, or been subjected to untold numbers of diseases that have since been eradicated.

I was born at the dawn of the Internet, a member of the last generation of human beings to grow up without the Web but enter adulthood during its emergence.  As a result, I enjoyed an offline childhood but an online adulthood.  Perfection in my opinion.  

I am also healthy and intelligent.  I don't require a great deal of sleep and have exceptionally good blood pressure. 

Without even mentioning my remarkable wife, my perfect daughter, or my assortment of amazing friends, I am already ahead of billions of people on this planet, and it was through no real effort of my own. It was simply a geographic, genetic luck of the draw.

Religion provides people with the notion that God has placed them in this place, in this time, for a specific purpose.  Fate and chance had nothing to do with their birthplace, the color of their skin, or the period in history in which they were born. For the devout, God had a hand in all of these decisions.

While I find this sentiment silly and self-centered, I also find it tragic that so many people can believe that an all-powerful deity has blessed them with such great fortune, above billions of other human beings, and yet they still choose to squander these imaginary blessings on lifetimes of middling, ordinary, lazy existences.

What would God say if he was generous enough to place you in America during a time of relative peace and prosperity only to find that you spent 28 hours a week watching television? 

If he's the Old Testament God, watch out for the trapdoor that you're likely standing on! 

All I want to do is thank someone for being born where I was, when I was, and as I was.

Yet in the end, it was nothing more than dumb old luck.

You are a stupid person who cannot drive

This evening I was cut off by a woman who clearly did not believe in speed limits, turn signals or the willingness to acknowledge other cars on the road. 

After managing to position her car in front of mine, I watched as she proceeded to creep forward into the crosswalk of three consecutive intersections while awaiting for a red light to turn green, as if the fifteen feet that she saved by partially blocking traffic would dramatically improve her position on the road or allow her to arrive at her destination any faster. 

She was clearly a stupid person, and my inability to tell her as much was quite annoying. 

Part of me wanted to follow her until she reached her destination, so that I could exit my car and inform her of how fundamentally stupid she was.

The more reasonable part of me suspected that my wife, who was in the car at the time, would not willingly stalk this woman with me, and it was this part of me that kept me from following her when she failed to turn onto my street.      

But I wish there were a way to communicate with stupid people like this on the road.  Not those drivers who are victimized by bad luck or an unexpected blind spot. 

I'm talking about the kind of people who consistently drive like selfish idiots.   

And don't get me wrong.  I have no expectation of improving these anyone's driving skills.  Once an idiot, always an idiot. 

I'm just desirous of a little satisfaction through the beauty of unsolicited criticism.  

When you are supposed to like it

I listen to Sam Tanenhaus's New York Times Book Review podcast every week, and as much as you can know a man though a podcast (I also read his biography on Whittaker Chambers about ten years ago when Don Imus was raving about it on his radio show), I like Tanenhaus a lot.

But the most recent podcast featured Tanenhaus's ongoing and seemingly intractable support of Jonathan Franzen's FREEDOM.  Franzen's novel was left off the short list of National Book Award nominees, and in a segment that was meant to discuss the winners of this year's National Book Award, Tanenhaus focused primarily on the reasons why FREEDOM might have been spurned by the judges.

Two thoughts ran through my mind as Tanenhaus expressed his displeasure over what he perceived to be a snub by the judges:

1.  Hasn't the New York Times Book Review given FREEDOM enough attention already?  The paper published two stellar reviews of the book on the day of publication, one written by Tanenhaus himself, and Tanenhaus has discussed his adoration for this book on many previous podcasts.  When does the line between book review editor and Franzen fanboy get crossed?

Because I think Tanenhaus crossed it a long time ago. 

2.  I read FREEDOM, and I didn't like it. 

I didn't hate the book, but I did not think that it deserved National Book Award attention either.  I thought that the novel lacked immediacy at key moments and opened with a series of events that I found improbable and unbelievable and established a precarious footing for the subsequent action.

So now I find myself in this awkward space in which I feel like I was supposed to like the book, that not liking the book is a failure of sorts on my part, and that admitting that I did not enjoy the book is to spurn all of the literary movers and shakers of the publishing industry, Tanenhaus included, who referred to FREEDOM as "a masterpiece of American fiction."

What would Tanenhaus think of me if he knew that I did not like the book that he considered this year's masterpiece? 

Does this make me a hack in Tanenhaus's eyes?

What is an author to do?  It's a precarious position. 

I want Tanenhaus to like me and someday read my work.

I would love for him to write a glowing review of my next book on the front page of the NYT Book Review (just one review would be fine).

I even want Jonathan Franzen to like my work and would love for him to write a blurb for me someday.

And yet I find myself not liking his masterpiece very much.

I felt the same way in college when I came to the conclusion that I despised the work of Virginia Woolf.  I was an English major at a small, liberal arts college, attending several classes on feminist literary criticism, and I found Woolf's work to be impenetrable and boring. 

I felt like a complete failure. 

Thankfully, it is highly unlikely that Tanenhaus or Franzen will ever read this little blog, so my opinions will fall on deaf ears. 

But I wish that I had loved FREEDOM.  I really do. 

It's not often that I want to follow the crowd, but in this case, it would make things a lot easier.

Better than some actual SNL episodes

Would I still think this is brilliant if I didn't spend about ten minutes every morning watching Sesame Street with my daughter?

I think so.

Cookie Monster hosts SNL

This is disturbing

Perhaps it should be everyone's goal to one day be the subject of a Chia Pet sculpture.

I've added it to my list. 

Seriously.

[image error]

Okay?

A new book entitled OK: The Improbable Story of America's Greatest Word, leads me to ask:

Which do you prefer?

OK?

O.K.?

Okay?

I'm an okay man, myself. 

I like to avoid ambiguity when it comes to punctuation and those messy periods followed by apostrophes when a word needs to be pluralized or used in the past tense. 

the book also leads me to wonder: Can someone really fill the pages of a book with the story of an abbreviation?

I'll have to find out.

Definition of insanity

Albert Einstein once said that the definition insanity is "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."

Benjamin Franklin and Rita Mae Brown are often credited for this definition as well. 

And while I understand the meaning of the statement and agree that there are times when this general premise is true (particularly in the case of carefully controlled scientific 0experimentation), I have two thoughts on the subject:

1. This is not the only definition of insanity.  In fact, it's not a definition at all.  It's little more than a small bit of sometimes-applicable wisdom.  A proverb, perhaps (in fact the definition is also credited to an ancient Chinese proverb).  Yet time and time again I hear this definition quoted as if there is some profound truth behind it. 

There isn't. 

It's merely a way of saying that in some cases, banging your head against the wall again and again is stupid.

2. It's rarely an accurate statement.  Once you leave the laboratory, there are many, many instances in life in which you can do the same thing over and over again and expect a different result.

I know an author who wrote three novels and failed to sell any of them before launching a successful career with her fourth book.  Had she adhered to this definition of insanity, she would still be an advertising executive today. 

Were this definition of insanity true, none of my students would ever memorize their multiplication tables or learn the proper use of the words their/they're/there.  There are times when knowledge and skill acquisition require repetition.

Practice your multiplication tables enough and you will eventually memorize, even if you are doing the same thing over and over and over again.  

Were this definition of insanity true, I would've quit the game of golf after my very first round.  It is only through the hitting of ball after ball after ball that muscle memory begins to kick in and allow you to strike the ball with consistency and effectiveness.  It is only through doing the same thing over again and expecting different results that a golfer can become a better player.

These seem like fairly obvious examples of times in which this so-called definition does not apply, yet I continue to hear this definition repeated again and again as justification for a variety of decisions and changes in strategy.

Utilizing a misunderstood definition of insanity over and over again and expecting a different result seems more like insanity to me.   

Not terribly exciting but full of truthiness nonetheless

I know it doesn't make for great reading, but let me brag about my wife for just a moment. 

This weekend was quite busy for me.

On Saturday Elysha, Clara and I went to breakfast with one of my former students before we headed back home to play with Clara before her nap.  At 1:00 I left for a wedding and didn't return until 10:00 that evening.

On Sunday, Elysha, Clara and I went to breakfast again before I left at 10:00 for a Patriots game and did not return until 11:00 that night.

In short, I did not see my family much this weekend.

As I was getting ready to leave for the game on Sunday, I told Elysha how much I was going to miss her and Clara.  "Even though I'm going to have fun at the game, I'm going to miss you guys and feel bad about being gone all weekend."

Elysha immediately responded by telling me that she was happy that I was going to spend the day with my friends in Foxboro and that I deserved to have some football fun after working so hard.  "Don't feel bad at all," she said.  "Have fun."

I know it doesn't sound like a big deal, but it is. 

Even though Clara is an easy baby and a generally happy kid, Elysha spent most of the weekend taking care of her without any help, and yet she didn't possess an ounce of resentment as a result.  She was genuinely happy for me and wanted to be sure that I left for the game without an ounce of guilt or regret.

"Have fun," she proclaimed.  "Don't worry about a thing."

This is less common than you might expect.

Lee Trevino once said:

My wife doesn't care what I do when I'm away, as long as I don't have a good time.

This is obviously not a universal sentiment amongst all or even most wives, but it's not the first time I've heard feelings like this expressed from both husbands and wives, and the statement has a ring of truth to it.  Even in the best of marriages, I hear these feelings expressed from time to time, and in some of the worst marriages, the amount of time that a spouse spends away from the home having fun is often traded with the ferocity of two kids trading baseball cards. 

You went out on Monday, so I'm going out on Thursday.

Last weekend you played golf.  This weekend I am going to the spa.

You spent almost $100 on dinner with your friends last week, so I'm going shopping. 

While equity in a marriage is important, this kind of horse-trading of time and money invariably leads to distance, anger and resentment.  And it's more common than you might think. 

Elysha and I prevent this pettiness from ever entering our minds because we are genuinely and enthusiastically happy when either one of us has a good time.

Again, I know it doesn't sound like a big deal, but it is.  

For example, ss much as I would have liked to have stayed home with Clara during her first eighteen months in this world, I went back to work and never resented a minute of Elysha's time at home with our baby.  I have incredibly happy that she and Clara had that time together, even if it meant that I had to work twice as hard to make it happen.  While I would have loved to join them for those first eighteen months at home, that's the difference between envy and resentment. 

"I wish I were you" is very different from "I'm mad that you are you."

To top things off, I arrived home last night to find two enormous piles of leaves piled up on the edge of the street in front of my house, ready for pickup.  This was a job that I had planned to do on Friday when all of the lunatics were crowding the streets and stores for Black Friday.  Instead, Elysha hired two former students who recently launched a lawn care business and paid them in a combination of cash and the bartering of services to start and finish my fall cleanup. 

And because I told her that I didn't want to pay anyone to do this job, she purposely spent no money this weekend, shifting all of the funds that she would have used to go out with Clara to taking care of this job for me.

While I was chowing on steaks and watching football with my buddies, my wife sacrificed large parts of her weekend to surprise me, and did it all with a smile on her face and happiness in her heart.

Perhaps you are as lucky as I am  to be in this kind of relationship, and if you are, congratulations. 

It's a rare thing, indeed. 

The tranquility of a cheeseburger

I am off to the Patriots game today, an almost all-day affair in which we will spend the afternoon watching the first game on a television mounted in the back of my friend's car followed by three hours screaming and cheering inside Gillette Stadium.

Food, poker and the tossing of the pigskin will fill much of the afternoon as well. 

My friend, Shep, can get quite emotional in the midst of a Patriots game, particularly if a referee, a pass interference call on either side of the ball or a gain of two yards on a running play is involved.  While I tend to be more cerebral in my analysis of the game, Shep is pure emotion while watching a game, capable of firing off a string of curses that would embarrass Rex Ryan.  When there are kids around, I sometimes need to remind him of his language.

But I think I've found a much better way to help Shep manage his emotions:

Meat. 

Researchers at McGill University in Canada have found that merely looking at a photograph of cooked meat has a calming effect on men.

The results were published earlier this week.

Researchers explain that this effect probably has an evolutionary basis.  While the acquisition of meat in our earlier hunter/gatherer days might have been a stressful endeavor, the moment of consumption likely had the opposite effect on men.

"It wouldn't be advantageous to be aggressive anymore, because you would've already used your aggression to acquire the meat, and furthermore, you'd be surrounded by people who share ... your DNA," lead researcher Frank Kachanoff told the Montreal Gazette. "One of the basic principles in evolution is to want to preserve not only your DNA but also that of your next of kin."

I could offer the same rationale to Shep, explaining that there is no advantage in being aggressive in regards to the referees or the play calling when when your seats are adjacent to the press box and 60,000 screaming fans are sitting between you and the field.  But perhaps I'll simply take a photograph of the sirloin that will be cooking prior to the game and flash the image to him from my iPhone from time to time. 

Especially if there are little kids around.

Even God can have a bad day

Regular readers of this blog will know that I can be critical of religion at times, especially when religious belief creeps into the public domain, threatens the separation of church and state, or results in harm to individuals or groups of people. 

But sometimes there is such a perfect storm of bad religious news that even I feel sorry for my religious friends, who are forced to endure the lunacy, hypocrisy and stupidity of their religious leaders.

Today was just such a day. 

The perfect storm included:

1.  News that Reverend Cedric Miller, who made national headlines last week when he told church members to delete their Facebook accounts lest they destroy their marriages by falling into temptation with former lovers, admitted to a three-way sexual affair with his wife and a male church assistant after a New Jersey newspaper reported the relationship.

Hypocrisy at its best.

2.  News that Catholic leaders are attending a conference this weekend in order to deal with the sudden increase in requests from parishioners for exorcisms. 

Yes, that's right.  Catholicism still makes room from demon possession. 

"Not everyone who thinks they need an exorcism actually does need one," said Bishop Thomas J. Paprocki of Springfield, Ill., who organized the conference. "It's only used in those cases where the Devil is involved in an extraordinary sort of way in terms of actually being in possession of the person."

I have to think that my Catholic friends must cringe at the sight of a piece in the Times detailing the need for exorcism training in their Church. 

3.  But the most unfortunate piece of news came out of the Vatican today. The Pope has reportedly decided that condom use may be an acceptable means of preventing the spread of AIDS.

From Reuters: 

In excerpts published in the Vatican newspaper on Saturday ahead of the book's publication next week, the pope cites the example of the use of condoms by prostitutes as "a first step toward moralization" even though condoms are "not really the way to deal with the evil of HIV infection."

While this change of policy is good news, how many millions of lives have been lost while Catholics waited for condoms to finally be condoned by their Church?

Kind of reminds me of the Church's treatment of Galileo in 1633, except without all the dead bodies to show for it.

Oops.  We were wrong. Sorry about that.

A tough day for my religious, and especially my Catholic, friends.