Matthew Dicks's Blog, page 657

Pouty Sanchez

Tim Graham of ESPN writes:

The Jets want Mark Sanchez to stop pouting. To force Sanchez into acting as regal as a franchise quarterback should, offensive coordinator Brian Schottenheimer and backup quarterback Mark Brunell have been fining Sanchez for undesirable body language. This sounds like "Romper Room" stuff. Remember when the Jets color-coded Sanchez's play-call wristband last year? Schottenheimer suggested the fines are enacted for fun, but the team obviously felt something needed to be done. Perhaps the fines will help Sanchez refrain from whining to officials, gesturing to his receivers over drops or haggling with pizzeria employees over 59-cent dipping sauces .

Three initial thoughts:

1.  I'm glad the quarterback of my favorite football team doesn't need to be fined for whining.

2.  Being fined for whining sucks.  Having news of the fines reported in the national media is downright humiliating.

3.  Can you imagine what defensive linemen are going to be saying to this guy on Sunday when they line up against him?  I hope NFL films have enough microphones on hand to catch what promises to be a relentless wave of trash-talking and insults.

But more importantly, imagine how wonderful the world would be if people could be fined for whining in real life.

Fines for those who complain that life isn't fair.

Fines for those who whine about their job being too hard.

Fines for whining about the weather or the wife or the rotten children. 

As someone who has been known to whine on what I hope is a very rare occasion, I would fully support a national whining policy, complete with monetary fines and optional community service, if only to make the world a more productive and palatable place.  Not only is whining uninteresting and stupid, but it is also counter-productive and often a signal of cowardly passive-aggressive behavior.

Whining about your job, for example, does not make it better.  And the energy invested in whining could have been used to improve the state of your career. 

Whining about your boss or your spouse is usually an indication of an unwillingness to be forthright, direct and honest with that person, which all but guarantees that things will not change for the better.

And whining about things that are beyond your control (like the weather) amounts to little more than noise pollution. 

In fact, the only whining that I support is the whining done by immature New York Jets quarterbacks in the midst of a game, and only because it hurts their team.

I hate the Jets.

Defeated by the elderly

In a follow-up to the post about my lack of cultural awareness comes this evening's revelation that my wife's 88-year-old grandmother is more culturally aware than either one of us. 

On our way home from dinner, she began discussing the television show Two and a Half Men, mentioning that the lead actor ran into some trouble this week.   

Apparently he was prominently featured in the news for an alcoholic tirade in a hotel room.

I did not know who the lead actor was, and neither my wife nor I knew anything about the trouble that he had gotten into this week. 

Adding insult to injury, apparently this television show has been on the air for about a decade and my wife and I know nothing about it. 

Again, I ask:

Should we be watching a little more television if only to be aware enough to remain in the mainstream conversation?

When an 88-year-old is more culturally aware than me, I start to wonder.

My verbal sparring playbook

I am a direct person, and I have always considered this quality to be an asset.  Furthermore, I have always had difficulty understanding why anyone in my life would not also appreciate the quality in me. 

If I have a problem with you, I'll let you know.  There won't be any behind-the-back, anonymous backstabbing nonsense ever from me.  If I am displeased with you, I will either determine it unimportant and say nothing or confront you. 

And I appreciate this quality in others.  A few years ago I knew a guy who did not like me very much and had become the bane of people's existence.  He was self-centered, abrasive and rude, and by the time he was getting ready to move, people were happy to see him go.  But he was always direct with me, and for that reason, I respected him even though I didn't like him, and when he was gone, I told people that I missed him, because it was true. 

Give me a thousand abrasive, self centered jerks who are direct and honest over a small cabal of anonymous, back-stabbing cowards.

But not everyone has always appreciated my directness.  For all the value of open, honest communication, it turns out that some people would prefer a pleasant lie to an unpleasant truth. 

And then there is the issue surrounding how I handle confrontation.  While I have always considered myself an expert at verbal jujitsu and a master argumenteur (I credit my evil stepfather and a childhood full of verbal bashing for this skill, and yes, I made up the word argumenteur and I LOVE IT), I have been told that I can too abrasive, too combative, too acerbic and too mean.

A couple years ago one of my closest friends described my methodology of argument as thus:

Disagree, Disbelief, Discredit, Dismiss, Distemper, Dismember

While the list is creative and possesses a certain air of truth, I explained to my friend that I only reach the last two stages of the process if the person isn't smart enough to back down and admit fault before hand. 

Seems reasonable.  Right?

Spiders in a Volkswagen

A few weeks ago I wrote about the best gift that I have ever received, and it included a story about my friend, Tom, and his fear of spiders.

In the flurry of tweets and Facebook postings that followed the post, I indicated that I actually had three stories involving Tom and spiders, and I would eventually share them all. 

Here is story #2:

Tom and his wife, Liz, were kind enough to drive Elysha and me to Bradley Airport on the Monday following our wedding.  We were on our way to Bermuda for our honeymoon, and we didn't want to leave our car in long term parking.  We were speeding up Interstate 91 in the wee hours of the morning, my wife and I in the backseat and Tom and his wife in front.  Tom was driving, and despite the darkness of the hour, I happened to notice something move on the collar of Tom's shirt.  Looking closely, I realized that it was a spider.

I wasn't surprised that the little guy was crawling around Tom's car.  Tom burns several forests worth of wood during the winter, and at the time, his car was doubling as a deforestation vehicle.  It wasn't uncommon to see wood piled in the back of the car, and even that day, there was evidence of a recent load of timber on the floor of the car.

Tom was driving about 70 miles per hour at that moment, and the spider was moving towards his neck.  I knew about his irrational fear of the little creatures, and I knew that he might panic if he were to discover how close it was to crawling down his shirt. 

I had three choices:

Tell the man who is utterly terrified of spiders that there is a small but significant arachnid  moving up his back while he is operating a moving vehicle in traffic…

Or attempt to extract the spider from his back myself without surprising him, frightening him or alerting him to the spider's presence…

Or say nothing and hope he never notices the thing. 

It doesn't seem as big a deal four years later as I sit here and recount the story, but at the moment, I was scared out of my mind. 

After a few precious seconds of indecision, I opted to flick the spider off his back, deciding that if I failed in my attempt, I would tell him that I was brushing away a sliver of wood that had affixed itself to his shirt.

Holding my breath, I reached forward and flicked, and the little creature went flying off the collar of the shirt and into the darkness between the seats.

I felt like I had saved our lives in one quick, dexterous motion.

On a side note, Tom saved my life later that morning when he brought my wedding ring, which I had left at home, back to the airport and somehow got through a side door at gate security in order to hand it off it to me.  Knowing how unhappy Elysha was with the prospect of heading off on her honeymoon with an idiot who had forgotten his wedding ring, Tom and Liz drove the 45 minutes back to our home, found the ring, and had returned to the airport before our plane boarded.

It wasn't quite as death-defying as the flick of a spider, but it was appreciated nonetheless. 

Cartoon babe?

Was Scooby Doo's Daphne actually hot, or was her hotness the result of her juxtaposition to the dreadful looking and more dreadfully named Velma?

Simple and doable

Here is the best solution that I have seen to my recent electronic voting rant:

Brilliant idea

I dont know who Snooky is or if Lady Gaga wore a meat dress but Im probably happier than you.

My wife and I do not watch very much television. 

Last night, for example, I watched the fourth quarter of the Celtics game.  Otherwise the television did not go on.

The night before that, the television did not go one.

On Sunday, I watched the Patriots-Vikings game and parts of the Jet-Packers game, but otherwise the television did not go on.  And had it not been Halloween, I would have been at the Patriots game rather than watching it on television. 

When my wife and I do watch television, we tend to watch one show at a time on DVD, plus a smattering of regularly scheduled programing.  For example, we just finished watching the second season of Breaking Bad on DVD, and we currently watch The Office and Community, two half-hour comedies, which air on Thursday nights.

We were watching Project Runway as well, but that show has since ended. 

There are no other television shows in our current schedule, though I just began recording AMC's The Walking Dead in hopes that it's as good as the critics claim. 

And as a whole, I'm happy with our limited television viewing.  It has given me to the time to write, to read, to play with Clara and to occupy my time with things other than television.

However, I've started noticed that I am beginning to fall behind in terms of popular culture, and references that I may have once understood are now impenetrable to me.

Just this weekend, I heard the following things that made little to no sense to me:

Someone on NPR's Wait Wait Don't Tell Me made a joke about a show called The Cougar Town.  I did not understand the reference.

A friend compared an ex-girlfriend to Snooki.  I know this person is on a show called The Jersey Shore because a man called The Situation once co-hosted an ESPN news show and mentioned her during the course of the program.  But I don't know who these people are, why they are relevant, and how this comparison to Snooky delineated the character of my friend's old girlfriend.

A friend referenced The Rocky Horror Picture Show, causing me to assume that she had attended a live event.  As a card-carrying member of The Rocky Horror Picture Show fan club, I became quite excited about the news that she was a fan of the cult hit and the live theatrical events until she told me that her reference had noting to do with the actual movie but a show called Glee.

Twice this weekend someone referenced Lady Gaga's meat dress.  I am still not sure if this is real or these people were being facetious. 

On The Office, one of the characters dressed up as Lady Gaga for Halloween.  I could not figure out who he was supposed to be until he was speaking to a character about specific Lady Gaga dance moves. 

A friend referenced a show called The Event.  I thought that he was saying "the event" and had not finished his sentence.

All these from a three-day period.   

As these confusions pile up, I start to wonder if I am going to become so culturally detached to the world that stories, jokes, references and innuendos will start to make no sense to me at all. 

How much television must an American watch to remain in the mainstream conversation?  And am I missing out on something meaningful through my limited television viewing?  While there are television shows like Mad Men and Dexter that I would like to watch, my current schedule only allows for one show at a time, and even then, Elysha and I probably average about an hour of television a day. 

This doesn't allow for a lot of catching up. 

Just when I was started to feel a little disconnected from the mainstream conversation, good news was laid upon my doorstep.

"An extensive research study has found that unhappy people watch more TV while those consider themselves happy spend more time reading and socializing.

The University of Maryland analyzed 34 years of data collected from more than 45,000 participants and found that watching TV might make you feel good in the short term but is more likely to lead to overall unhappiness.

'The pattern for daily TV use is particularly dramatic, with 'not happy' people estimating over 30 percent more TV hours per day than 'very happy' people,' the study says. 'Television viewing is a pleasurable enough activity with no lasting benefit, and it pushes aside time spent in other activities -- ones that might be less immediately pleasurable, but that would provide long-term benefits in one's condition. In other words, TV does cause people to be less happy.'

The study, published in the December issue of Social Indicators Research, analyzed data from thousands of people who recorded their daily activities in diaries over the course of several decades. Researchers found that activities such as sex, reading and socializing correlated with the highest levels of overall happiness.

Watching TV, on the other hand, was the only activity that had a direct correlation with unhappiness."

I often tell people that I am the happiest person that I know, and in the past, I've actually written on the subject (perhaps I should update my happiness status in a post soon). 

Perhaps my limited television viewing is an indicator of my overall happiness.

Maybe I don't ever need to know if Lady Gaga really wore a meat dress or if dating a girl like Snooky is a good or bad thing,  

I'm suddenly feeling a lot better about myself. 

I can tell you one thing for certain: 

I would not have found news of this University of Maryland study in the Times had I been watching The Jersey Shore or The Event.

Multi-tasking and knitting

I'm hesitant to say that I've discovered a new phenomenon, because perhaps it's been around for a while and I'm just horribly inattentive. I've missed other, fairly obvious cultural changes before, so it's not uncommon.

But this phenomenon is new to me.

I was attending a meeting a few months ago, run by a fairly important person and dealing with fairly important matters, and throughout the entire meeting, two of the attendees were knitting. They had an entire back table set up for themselves, complete with balls of yarn, knitting needles, and even a basket of knitting paraphernalia.

Please don't get me wrong. The two women in question were certainly paying attention to the proceedings and even participating in the discussion, but they were knitting as well.

Then a few weeks ago I attended a workshop and encountered the same thing. Three women in the back, knitting needles flying, listening attentively.

Last week I attended a concert and encountered the same damn thing. Women sitting in their seats, listening to the music, and knitting.

I'm not sure how to feel about this.

That's not true.  I know how I feel about it, but I'm just not sure if my feelings are justified.

I'm offended by this behavior, and not because I don't think that these women should be able to knit while listening to a discussion or music. I am offended because there is nothing in my multi-tasking arsenal that has been deemed socially appropriate that would allow me the flexibility or freedom of these women.

And it's just not fair.

Somehow these women have found a way to make knitting an acceptable activity with which one can engage while focusing attention elsewhere. But it's not as if these women are darning socks for the poor or knitting sweaters for their tragically sweater-less children. These women are knitting because they enjoy it, and it really irritates me.

I don't knit, and please don't suggest that I take up knitting in order to solve this problem. I'm happy that people can find joy in this activity.  My wife knits, and she loves it.  But as long as there are people who are willing to knit so that I can go to the store and purchase a sweater, I have better ways to spend my time.  But with a lifetime of endless meetings, workshops, classes, and concerts ahead of me, I'd like to be able to find something as acceptable and productive to keep me busy as knitting, but I have yet to find anything to fill this space.

For example, when I find myself in a wireless environment, I could certainly be playing poker online while listening. In fact, I'm playing poker as I type. Since I fold six out of every seven hands that are dealt to me, this has proven to be a very simple and enjoyable task that I can handle while doing most other things.  I've made $23 in the last 40 minutes that I've been sitting at my desk, reviewing election results from last night's midterms and writing this post.  But to open up this software and start betting in a meeting would be socially unacceptable, and depending upon the setting, occupational suicide, even though I would argue that poker requires less sustained mental energy from me than knitting does for these women who literally set up shop in the back of rooms.

And how about reading?  While certainly not conducive to meetings, what's wrong with doing a little reading while listening to a concert?  People read in coffee shops while a soloist is performing.

Hell, the band played on while people piled into lifeboats aboard the Titanic. Why not allow the audience at a classical music performance to read while listening?

I recently attended a social media conference in Boston.  Over the course of two days, I attended about eight different workshops, and in each one, attendees were encouraged to be actively engaged on their laptops while listening and participating.  We relayed content throughout the conference via Twitter, blogged about the content on their own personal websites, and conducted research on the topics begin presented and shared this research during the workshop.  As the speaker presented, people pecked on their keyboards and no took offense.  For this small, geeky segment of the population, the understanding that one can be listening to a speaker while engaged on a laptop was understood and embraced, and as a result, many ideas were shred between the workshops.

But other than an event centering on social media, populated by a bunch of geeks, I do not see this opportunity coming in my near future. 

Best news from our little bundle of joy

On a night when I received stunningly good news about deals that we accepted from Spanish and Italian publishers for my partial manuscript, MEMOIRS OF AN IMAGINARY FRIEND, the best news of all came while reading to my daughter before bed. 

I recounted the event on Greetings Little One, the blog that I use to write to Clara daily:

_______________________________________________________

Tonight I began reading one of your favorite new books, little one. 

Miss Spider's New Car 

I began reading the first line:

We need a car – just yours and…

And then I paused before reading the final word on the page, thinking I heard Mommy calling for me.  In that empty space before the final word, you called out, "Mine!" which was the last word on the page. 

Stunned, I turned the page and read the next line:

I mustn't screech or growl or…

And then I paused again, this time on purpose to see what you would do.  Immediately, you said, "Whine!"

Correct again.

Somehow in the course of two weeks, which is about how long we've been reading these books to you, you have managed to memorize the rhyming pairs of words on almost all the pages.

Mommy and I were stunned.  We're still stunned.  We'll probably remain stunned for quite some time.     

And just as we managed to re-hinge our jaws and erase the looks of shock that were plastered across our faces, you proceeded to reproduce the same results with your other current favorite, Miss Spider's Tea Party.

On nearly every page, you were able to fill in the last word. 

Is this an amazing feat of memorization for our 21-month old baby?

We have nothing with which to compare, but we tend to think so, little one. 

Either way, we're proud as hell of you tonight. 

Inexplicable engineering stupidity

Could someone please explain to me how the banking industry manages to flawlessly dispense millions of dollars in cash each day from the thousands of ATM machines around the country, all the while providing every customer a paper record of the transaction, yet we cannot create an electronic voting machine that is equally effective?

I mean, how hard could it be?