Conor Grennan's Blog, page 7

Sports are the Most Important Thing in the World

There are millions of women sports fanatics. We know that. But I wanna talk to the fellas right now because I literally don’t even know many guys in our population who don’t Completely Lose Their Minds when it comes to their sports teams. Do you?

How many things can you say that about? How many things unify mankind in their utter lunacy? Maybe politics? But at least politics has some kind of actual bearing on society, right?

What do sports actually…do? You have ninety thousand people packed together in a collection of seats that cost a billion dollars to assemble to watch one person throw a ball and another try to catch it. If your team does catch it? You go insane with joy. Because that glory belongs to you, guy balancing nachos on top of a Miller Lite. (What glory, exactly? Doesn’t matter! GO TEAM!!!)

Also, if you’re good at catching a ball – not building artificial hearts or inventing Velcro – your annual salary is about a million dollars a month.

I say all this, admittedly, as a complete and utter sports nut. So I know that the highest emotional highs and the lowest lows come from this nonsense. And many teams I love are, alas, traditional losers. The Mets, the Knicks, the Giants (New York football this year – lord). My Virginia Cavaliers.

So when your team loses and your spouse says to you, quite reasonably, “Can you please just lighten up and try not to ruin the entire day with this black cloud over your head?” What do we say back? We may grumble “Fine” but what we mean is “You. Don’t. Understand.”

We say that because we don’t actually have any reasonable response for them.

We don’t actually know why we get so high and so low. Our response – because we’re invested in this team! – is circular logic because we are invested in them because we care about them and we care about them because we are invested in them. And what does that even mean?

My point here is NOT that we should not take sports so seriously. Because I take sports seriously. And my point is NOT that we shouldn’t let it affect our emotions. Because that feels like an empty cliche. Yeah, we already know. Also we shouldn’t get upset when somebody cuts the take-out line at Cheesecake Factory (it’s just cheesecake!) but we JUST DO because we’re human.

So what is the point?

The point is that we can either a.) spend all this time saying that we shouldn’t get upset when our team loses a game or b.) we can change how we look at it and start trying to see people as humans with feelings.

Let me tell you about a moment, a moment that lasted probably all of ten seconds, that completely changed my view on sports forever. You ready?

I was visiting Nepal back in October, 2015. Liz and I have a nonprofit there called Next Generation Nepal, we rescue trafficked children and reunite them with their families. We were bringing along some friends to see it up close for themselves.

On our way into some rural villages, we got stuck in a major traffic jam in one of the only roads leading out of Kathmandu.

And I’m not talking about a normal jam – I’m talking about people getting out of their cars to go for walks to stretch their legs. But whatever – this was Nepal and we knew to be patient.

So let me set the scene for a second here:

The views from the mountain road were spectacular. We were traveling with some of our dearest friends in the world in a convoy of three SUVs. We were about to visit a village that had been reduced to rubble following an earthquake months earlier, to see some of the amazing work our team had done to help rebuild and also to protect children from being trafficked in a vulnerable time. We had prepared for this trip for months. This was a special moment.

And yet all I could think about in that moment was whether or not the Mets had won Game 4 of the National League Divisional Championship against the Dodgers.

I was obsessed. Like, couldn’t focus on anything else. The game was just finishing back in the US and I had no means of checking the score. But my friend Mark, in the vehicle ahead of me, was in contact with his office back in the US and had a phone. He told me he would let me know as soon as he knew.

So in the middle of this traffic jam, Mark gets out of the car and walks toward me. My heart was in my throat. My breathing was shallow.

So stupid, right? So stupid! It’s a game!

And he walked right up to me and said: “The Mets lost. I’m so sorry, man.” And he gave me this big hug.

It wasn’t that news that changed my life. It was how Mark delivered it.

What Mark did in that moment was that he put aside in his own mind how stupid sports were. He put aside the fact that I was obsessed about a Mets game while we were on this life-altering mission surrounded by people who were struggling to survive. He put aside how foolish and self-centered and ridiculous that was. He put away all judgement and entered into my pain.

The source of the pain didn’t matter. He didn’t put a value on it. He just knew that this thing hurt his friend. It didn’t matter why it hurt is friend or whether it SHOULD hurt his friend. It hurt his friend and he was going to comfort him.

And suddenly I was okay that the Mets has lost that game. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it hurt, and the next day I was elated that they won Game 5 and continued on to the World Series that year. The reason I was okay with it was that Mark validated that I had made Sports the Most Important Thing in the World in a completely inappropriate moment in time. It mattered to him that this thing mattered to me. The rest, I could sort it out myself.

Don’t misunderstand me: I still get really up and really down about sports. I watch basketball through the spaces between my fingers. I perch on the arm of my couch like gargoyle out of sheer nerves. If you measured my heart-rate during March Madness you’d think I was being chased by a shark.

The difference is that now I just treat it as an emotion and not as something I need to defend or feel guilty about.

When my team loses I concede that, yes, the world is actually ending, and I give myself a minute. Then I do something that has saved my marriage: I go and I tell Liz that I’m feeling really bummed because my team lost and I know it’s stupid but that’s just me and I’ll be fine and I’m sorry in advance for the whole dark cloud thing. And she gives me a big hug and tells me that must really stink and that she’s sorry.

And that gives me the strength to go on.

Until the next game.

You and Me and Your Shopping Cart

I was in Stop and Shop last Saturday, perusing the aisle for honey – not the one shaped like a bear but the normal one – and I found myself slowing to a standstill. I was being blocked by an unattended shopping cart, abandoned in the middle of the aisle like a burned out Toyota in a zombie apocalypse.

I scanned the area. Up the aisle and to the right, a lone woman, glasses perched on her forehead, was squinting at the label of a jar of almond butter, oblivious to the fact that her cart was blocking the entire aisle.

Being a good Christian, I stood patiently, even pretending to take a sudden interest in a nearby selection of organic jams, giving the woman time.

That lasted about three seconds, at which point I decided I had waited long enough. So I coughed, which is the supermarket version of a light toot of the horn.

Still she needed more time with the almond butter.

Well, at that point my patience was utterly exhausted – and frankly I’m surprised I’d made it that long. I began to push past her cart with mine, bumping it gently and blurting little utterances that sounded like “Oops! Whoooops!” every time my cart tapped her cart.

Now she was actually comparing two jars of almond butter, like they could be any different? It’s butter made out of almonds – it’s gonna taste like almonds. Just pick one already.

Enough was enough. I let out a loud sigh, that must have sounded, in the otherwise empty aisle, like a foghorn, and physically lifted her cart, making as much noise as possible.

At which point she turned around, embarrassed, and said “Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry! Let me move that.”

I waved her away with a gentle laugh and reassured her that heaving her thousand-pound cart was absolutely no trouble at all. But of course in my head I was all like “Well, at least she realized she was in the wrong. You’ve taught that woman a valuable lesson, Conor.”

I was pretty confident I’d won that shopping trip.

Until about five minutes later, when, while picking out granola bars in that same Stop and Shop, I heard somebody moving my cart behind me, and noticed a skinny older guy lifting my cart out of the way, which I had accidentally left in the middle of the aisle. I turned and apologized, and he assured me it was no trouble as he grunted in a way that told me it was, in fact, quite a bit of trouble.

I found myself quietly seething at the guy for making such a big deal out of moving my cart. Just push it out of your way, dude – it has wheels. You gotta go all Joan of Arc on me?

So….it turns out there’s a bit of a pattern here. And it turns out that pattern is sort of the pattern of my entire life.

I, my friends, believe that I am in the right. I am the good guy. All the time.

But am I? Am I actually the good guy? Because it’s all relative, isn’t it?

That’s the problem with relativism. There’s nothing objective to hold on to and thus no way to benchmark whether you are actually the good guy or not.

I sometimes think of mice when I think of this. Me, I’m terrified of mice.  But then I’m watching that Pixar movie Ratatouilli, about the mouse in the kitchen? I’m watching that with my kids, and we’re all on the mouse’s side. The mouse that is in a French kitchen messing around with the food that is going in your mouth, by the way – that’s the good guy.

Why is the mouse the good guy? This is why: Because we get an intimate look at the mouse’s life and we can see ourselves and our story in the mouse. That mouse is us.

And that’s just a mouse. A cartoon mouse that talks and somehow controls the boy-chef by yanking his hair under the chef’s hat, which would never work, by the way. And yet we see ourselves in that mouse.

But we can’t see ourselves in that other human – the one with the shopping cart.

This happens to me in traffic jams all the time. Somebody is trying to merge in. No way I’m letting this person in, right? I mean, they cut the line from way back. Somebody has to stand for justice!

So I do that thing where you keep so close to the car ahead of you that your front wheels are practically driving up their hatchback and you stare straight ahead to avoid eye contact.

Then, the window of the Evil Merger comes down. The arm comes out. It’s a human inside, as opposed to what I had imagined, which was the Terminator when his skin had been burned off in a fiery half-death. That human mouths “Could I cut in?” And suddenly I’m remembering all the times I screwed up and forgot to merge in when I was supposed to, and the exit was coming up and I needed to get over and what was I supposed to do and why wouldn’t these car-jerks let me in?

And I let the person in.

It’s incredible, my ability to not see myself in others. That I am unable to imagine that they, too, may be stressed, or having a bad day, or making a mistake that they feel bad about. Or maybe they’re just human doing human things.

So I’m working on that. Sometimes I tell myself that they’re in a rush, trying to get to the hospital, or they’ve probably had a bad day, or something like that. But maybe I can just imagine that there is a reason that there’s a rule out there known as the Golden Rule which means that it’s worth more than other rules. And maybe I can try to think about that.

Also, it wouldn’t kill them to make the aisles a few feet wider at these grocery stores.

Failure and Goose Poop

If you don’t know what goose poop looks like, lemme tell you something – it looks a whole lot like a mossy little rock. And you’re probably asking “Who cares what goose poop looks like?” But you’re only asking that because you weren’t the one skipping stones with your son and you weren’t the one who picked up goose poop with your bare hands. If you were, then I promise you, you’d be very interested in what goose poop looks like.

I was only picking up that goose poop in the first place because Liz and Finn were tossing stones into the lake. Lucy was next to them, picking what I assume were poison berries. I didn’t feel like picking poison berries with my daughter (though I did say “Try not to eat those poison berries!” so I feel like I did my job there). So stones it was.

I heard Finn and Liz talking as they threw. Or rather, I heard them pause, each with a stone in hand, look at each other, each say something, and then throw. I got closer to listen to them. (Which is probably why I was distracted and picking up goose poop instead of stones.)

What they were saying was pretty cool. They would name a thing that they wanted to get rid of, thoughts and fears they wanted out of their lives, and then hurl the stone into the lake.

We had learned this from some friends who run a ministry up here in Connecticut. I won’t say what Liz’s and Finn’s things were, because that’s theirs to tell or not tell, but I’ll give you an example from when I did it myself, back when I was doing this retreat with some guys.

 

 

When I did it, we actually wrote something on the stone itself. The thing that I wrote on my stone was this: Failure.

I didn’t write Failure because I was going to metaphorically toss Failure away from me forever. That I, Conor, would never fail again! Victory, now and forevermore!!

No – I wrote that because the truth is that I am slightly terrified of failure.

When I was young and single, I rarely thought about failure. But something changes for men when we get married. At least it did for me.

When I was single, if I failed, who cares? I would suffer a setback, maybe embarrassment, maybe disappoint myself and others. But now, as a father, failure is a whole new kind of predator. Because as a father, you have built yourself into something different entirely. I have portrayed myself to my family and to the world as someone who will succeed through sheer force of will. I will provide. I will care for my wife and my children. I will be the strong one. I will come through, again and again, without fail, because I am the rock on which this family stands.

Which means that failure no longer is about disappointing myself. It isn’t even about disappointing others. It is about something far bigger: It is about being exposed. It is about being found out. It is about being discovered to be a fraud.

That is a fear that maybe more men than just me experience, though I can’t say for sure, since I can’t read minds. (Or maybe I’m just not trying hard enough to read minds. Fail!)

So I wrote Failure with a brown Sharpie on the flat side of the stone and I threw it into a lake.

This is the first time I told anyone what I’d written on it. I didn’t even tell the other guys that day.

It felt good. The act of throwing a rock into a lake felt in some small way like releasing the Fear of Failure. Far away, into a lake, where there’s probably all kinds of goose poop. (Eat that, Fear of Failure!)

I haven’t released it completely, of course. But when I threw it, something interesting happened. Almost immediately, I had an odd moment of clarity in which I realized that there was a momentary gap in my psyche – a gaping hole where Fear of Failure lived. Fear of Failure turned out to take up a lot of real estate in my head and heart.

This is what I came to realize as I looked to fill that hole:

….Before I go on, this is a solution based on something I believe in my faith. So this might not be for everyone. But like I said, I’m a Christian dad now, so take that for what it is….

This was the thought that filled the hole where Fear of Failure once lived:

I am not, and I cannot be, the the one who protects and provides for my family. Everything that I have I have been given by the grace of God.

Now, as a former atheist, I used to believe that this idea – that God provided everything – was just an excuse not to work hard, or not to take antibiotics when you were sick because all you needed was God, or do something similarly insane. I thought that all crazy Bible Thumpers believed that all they had to do was put their hands on a broken pipe that was spewing water all over the kitchen and pray that God would fix it. (BTW, I knew a guy that actually did this. It didn’t work.)

It’s not that. Provision through grace should inspire the opposite of laziness. It should inspire hard work. I have an enormous responsibility to my wife and my children and I take that seriously. And I do work hard. But I am not in control. My Fear of Failure comes when I believe the lie that tells me I can be in control of everything in this life if I just work hard enough and want it badly enough.

So the act of throwing a stone may seem like a small and kind of dumb way to fix a deep psychological issue. And listen – it doesn’t fix it. It is merely the best thing I can do in the moment.

Because there are few permanent fixes in this world; there are only reminders of who we are and what we can do, and a fix often looks like merely deciding to take a step in the right direction.

Like throwing a rock into a lake.

Also, it works better with actual rocks and not goose poop.

 

Social Detox

Liz is going through a Facebook detox for Advent – she says she’s starting a little early. Which is the thing I wanted to bring up here.

But first I have to confess that I wrote that first sentence and then realized that I wasn’t totally sure when Advent was supposed to start. Or  if  the word “Advent” was supposed to be capitalized.

I’m also not completely positive what Advent is.

Look, I’m not an idiot – I know it’s around December. And I know it has to do with the Christmas season because we have an Advent Calendar. You open these little doors every day and bam – chocolate.

I use the word Advent for one reason – I’m a Christian and I’m supposed to know what it means. I’m pretty good at using the word in a sentence to sound like I know what I’m talking about. For example, if I’m walking through the lobby in church and I pass some cinnamon-scented potpourri or something, I’ll smile serenely at the person next to me and say, “Don’t you just love this holy season of Advent?”

There are times when I find myself caught up in the air using a Christian term and I realize that I don’t actually know precisely what I’m talking about. And I know that I should know, but I became a Christian in my thirties and so I have these embarrassing gaps in my knowledge. I also know that the first commandment ain’t “learn what Advent is,” it’s “Love Your Neighbor” and so I’m gonna focus on that one. For everything else I have Wikipedia.

But here’s the thing – I’m not one to actually admit that I don’t know things like that.

I, my friends, am a gifted faker.

I became a gifted faker by working hard at it. I was driven to it (thanks for asking!) because I don’t like people to know that I don’t know something. Especially when I strive to be what we call the spiritual leader of our family (which, to non-Christians, probably sounds like some kind of dead-eyed shaman). That means I am supposed to be a model of servant-leadership. You know, like Jesus. And nothing screams Jesus like faking like you know vocabulary words so you won’t look like an idiot.

So as you can imagine, with all my fakery-talent, I’m an ideal Facebook user: All image, All the time. You think I’m posting photos on Facebook of what I’m doing right now? Hanging out in sweatpants eating old Halloween candy?

 

 

Milk Duds. Man, I don’t even like Milk Duds.

So why is Liz doing a Facebook detox through Christmas? Because of people like her husband. Because I am determined to show my super-ultra best self on social media.

No– wait. Even that’s not true.

It’s not true because me on a beach in Cape Cod with my daughter on my shoulders, hair coiffed, with just the right filter, on an autumn day? That’s not the best Conor at all. That’s the Conor I hide behind so that nobody asks me if anything’s wrong. Or worse, people thinking something’s wrong and not asking me and instead just talking about how something’s wrong with me behind my back. And of course something’s wrong! Because that’s life! But ain’t no way I’m gonna share that on social media. My problems are mine alone, and I’ll deal with them like a man: By sitting around in sweatpants with college football on in the background, eating old candy that he stole from his kids.

Now, the right thing to say – the rallying cry –  is that I’m going to start posting REAL STUFF on Facebook, right? Yeah! The revolution begins now, people! Who’s with me!?

But I’m not going to do that. Because I have my limits, friends. And I don’t need to be prancing around Facebook with caramel stuck in my beard and posting updates about how I just burned dinner but somehow found a way to blame my third grade son because he was asking me for help on his homework while I was cooking.

Check my feed. That picture ain’t there, people.

Facebook can be poisonous to our psyche. Liz is right to call it a detox.

The reason I restarted this blog was to try to work out where I’m failing. Not to beat myself up, but because I am human and deeply flawed. And the sooner I recognize that, the sooner I can be humble in front of my wife and my kids and ask for forgiveness when I screw up.

Then maybe I can tell my kids that it’s okay when they don’t know precisely what “Advent” means because I didn’t really know what it meant either and I’m forty three.

Speaking of which, I looked up Advent. “The first season of the Christian church year, leading up to Christmas and including the four preceding Sundays.” So technically it starts next week. In case you were wondering. But at least I know now. Because being ignorant doesn’t mean you can’t start learning new stuff. I encourage my kids all the time. And forty three seems like a good age to start encouraging myself, too.

The Hamburger Phone

Liz and I are blessed to be able to provide for our children. Our kids have shelter from the elements and food to sustain them. I have lived in places that have taught me to never, ever take that for granted.

That being said….

I am obsessed with maintaining this tip-of-a-pyramid balancing act of providing for my kids without them becoming spoiled. Nobody wants spoiled kids, right? So the metric I use (imperfect as it may be) is the number of toys Finn and Lucy have. I would be strolling through Target with the kids and they would leap onto the cart and point as if they had spotted the white whale, their vibrating finger revealing something that they needed, please Dad! I won’t ask for anything else if I just get that!

And I, the Good Parent, would give them a self-satisfied smile and say something pithy, like “We can’t get that, honey. But! Good news! …I love you!”

I say that so much that they now mouth the words along with me, eyes rolling. They hadn’t really expected me to say yes, after all, and to their credit they would almost always drop it immediately. In that moment I would swell with pride that I had once again parried the Demon of Entitlement and poured still more Concrete of Righteousness in the moral foundation of my children.

Then, yesterday came. Yesterday I realized that I had failed wildly in this regard. That moment came when, while walking through our playroom, I tripped over an object I literally didn’t know we owned. That object was this:

It’s a hamburger phone.

I don’t know where it came from.

You can see that the cord is severed, so it isn’t even a functioning hamburger phone. Not that I’d likely use it anyway, what with the prevalence  of mobile technology. It also would not be comfortable to hold for long conversations. Here – this is what it looks like open, you’ll see what I mean:

(BTW, that black label on it says “Hamburger phone.” Yeah, dude…We know.)

My point is that if there’s a hamburger phone in the playroom that I didn’t know about, then the kids probably have too much stuff.

But I had to reexamine one of the Big Questions for Parents:  How can I know how much to give my kids? Where is the line between spoiled and deprived? What’s okay to give them and what’s not?

When Liz and I lived in New York City with our newborn son Finn, this question answered itself because there was no space for anything anyway. If I came home with an extra bunch of bananas I better eat them before I got in the door because otherwise we’d be trying squeezing past them all week. In NYC you’re forced to make choices. Our son’s tiny nursery had space for either A.) a few toys for Finn or B.) Finn.

Connecticut is different. We have a big playroom in a finished basement. It can fit tons of stuff. (True story: I once accidentally set up an outdoor trampoline down there that I was never able to fit up the steps and so it’s still there and will be until the ice caps melt and it floats up. But that’s for another time.)  But with more space comes more responsibility. I am forced to actually be a parent around this Stuff Issue, and Liz and I have to make decisions as to what’s best for our kids.

Now, I’m going to confess something here.

You know how every good parent says they want the best for their kids? Well, I’m not sure I actually want that. (I’m cringing reading that sentence.) But just hear me out for a second, and know that I love my kids more than my own life.

I just mean that I’ve gone through times in my life where I’ve been poor. And I’ve gone through times when I lived in inner-city neighborhoods that were flat-out dangerous. I’ve also gone through periods when I’ve had money. Those times of poverty were hard in the moment, but lemme tell you something – I had life by the throat. I don’t mean that in a corny way, either. I was dead broke in my early years out of college, living alone in Prague in the mid-90’s, and I can still remember the smallest victories in those times, when necessities like warm meals felt like achingly wonderful luxuries. I remember my days in high school being afraid every day when I walked to school through the worst neighborhoods in Jersey City, and the daily tsunami of joy when I made it home without getting attacked or shoved to the ground or intimidated.

I’m not saying I want any of that for my kids. I want the opposite. I would do anything in the world to protect them from it.

But I also want them to be alive. Really alive, where they have to struggle and learn and grow. I want them to know what it feels like to earn those small victories. But to know that feeling, they have to go through a period of being without. They have to experience life as a have-not.

I want them to know – to know it deep in their hearts – that they don’t need stuff to make them happy. They need to know that they are loved by their parents and loved by God and that’s what they carry with them as the walk out the door every morning.

But I still can’t bring myself to throw away that stupid hamburger phone.

Because here’s what I have to remember as I am pretending to be a good father: I have to remember that I am clinging to stuff, too. Even stupid stuff. And before I start taking toys away from my kids to prove this point that they-have-enough-when-they-have-God or other truisms that I spout to my children, I better take stock of what I am holding on to that I refuse to let go, and what things I am pointing at in life and telling God that I need that! Please! I won’t ask for anything else if I just get that!

So I need to stop asking myself if I’m giving my kids too much or too little and start asking what my kids are seeing in their father.

I think once I figure that out, the hamburger phone isn’t going to seem like such a big deal anymore.

Kick in the Pants: Return of the Blog

When I was a senior in high school in Jersey City, my English teacher, Mr. Delo, assigned us a project: Each of us would keep a journal every day for consecutive seven days. He wasn’t going to read it – he wasn’t some creepasaurus rex – he would just make sure we had written something.

“Anything? Like, it doesn’t have to be good, just write anything?”

“Anything. It’s just to get in the habit of writing regularly.”

“What if we just, like, copy the phone book for seven days?”

Mr. Delo shrugged. “You wanna copy the phone book, copy the phone book.”

Copying the phone book turned out to be staggeringly boring. So instead I wrote. Just one single page, about what happened that day. I wrote a page the next day, and the day after that, too.

I wrote in that journal every day for the next thirteen years.

In 2004, I stopped journaling and started a blog, because I was going around the world and my friends begged me, please, in the name of all that is holy and good, to stop emailing them my wacky travelogues.

In early 2009, a literary agent called me out of the blue to say she’d read my entire blog – which apparently totaled 1500 pages – and wanted to make it into a book.

In 2011, Little Princes was published by HarperCollins.

The moral of the story, my friends, is that every good thing in my otherwise lazy life has had the same genesis: I decided to just start doing something.

So today is National Conor Is Going To Start Something Day!

You know, that name sounded much better in my head, now that I see it on paper. Not catchy at all. And as the name implies, it’s pretty niche. What do you, reader friend, get to celebrate on this day? Nothing – that’s what you get to celebrate.

On National Conor is Going to Start Something Day, I’m restarting my blog! (Okay, now the name of the day is not just cumbersome, it’s inaccurate. But ‘National Re-start Day’ sounds lame too.)

All this begs the question: Who and what am I now, that I wasn’t back then, back when I kept my old journal and in the early blog days? Three important things: I’m older, I’m a husband, I’m a dad, and I’m a Christian.

Four things. Sorry.

But lemme talk for a second about the last thing: Christian. *Deep breath.*

Having been an atheist for the first 32 years of my life, my gag reflex is still triggered when I see social media bios posted that include the word “Christian” in them. Because usually they read something like “Christian First! Also, Nobel Prize Winner and President of Iceland (Yes, that Iceland!!)”

Those kinds of bios used to make me feel like Christians wore a cloak of moral superiority. It had me searching for hypocrisy in their every step. And I often found it, because it turns out Christians are humans. I shouted about their hypocrisy from the rooftops of the blogosphere. That was me.

So now you can perhaps imagine a younger, cooler, blogging-and-world-traveling-2004-era Conor time-traveling into the future and breaking into the upstairs bedroom of today’s Conor, who is living in Connecticut with a wife and two kids and leading a weekly bible study in his house (!) and snoring in his bed, and hissing in his ear, “Wake up, old man! I’m gettin’ you outta here! You’ve been brain-washed! Get on my back, I’ll carry you! Oh man, your breath…”

But that’s who I am now.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not religious in the way I used to think of religious people. (Ugh – just threw up in my mouth again at the word “religious.” Also, the body’s puke hole should really be situated so the puke doesn’t graze the taste buds on the way up.) I do believe in something bigger and greater, that’s true. I believe in loving my neighbor, whoever that neighbor is. I screw up badly every single day (I call it ‘sinning’ now because Christians get to sling around cool words like that) and I believe that I have Someone that can and does forgive me when I mess up.

In short, I am……… a Christian dad. (Which makes me sound sort of pasty and also like I’m wearing a brown sweater that bulges in the wrong places.) I am not particularly cool.

But I still believe in great things. And great things need to begin. So that’s what I’m doing with this blog: I’m beginning something. Again.

Busy

I imagine that if aliens came to earth and landed in America, they would probably come away believing that in our country the way that we say hello is “How’s it going?” and the polite and appropriate response to that is for the second person to say “Busy!”

There may be a more overused word in our language, but I’m not sure what it would be.

The thing is, “busy” is just so darn useful. It is the single most effective way to get out of any commitment, it’s a way of making oneself sound important, and it’s an excuse we can use that is essentially unchallengeable. Because really, you can be busy with anything.

Thus: “I’m just so busy!” is the reason why I don’t really write on this blog much anymore.

But it’s not really true. I just have chosen in this time of my life to focus on other ways to spend my waking hours.

For example, instead of writing here on my blog, I work on projects that remain mostly on my desk (or at least in the circuitry of the computer on my desk) because I apparently cannot be satisfied with the first thirty or so drafts. I love writing. If I wasn’t doing other projects I’d be writing here, I’m guessing.

Instead of writing this blog, I sometimes post on Facebook. I like Facebook. I know it gets a bad rap sometimes and people say that only old people use it but I guess that’s me – I’m old. I’ll be 40 by the end of the year. My old bones really like Facebook. I like to talk to people and put up pictures of my kids and look at pictures of other people’s kids and see who might be riding a camel this week or waiting on line for a Cronut.

Instead of writing, I’m spending time with my kids. Finn is five, which means he gets to chew one piece of gum on the weekend, and Lucy just turned three, which means she’s only two years away from being able to chew a piece of gum on the weekend. I spend time with Liz, whom I love more than anything in the wide wide world. I go to church and see my friends on occasion and sometimes I have to go to CVS.

Instead of writing, I’ve started a job full time – and as clichéd as this may sound it’s about as close to my dream job as I could have ever hoped to find: Dean of Students at NYU Stern School of Business. That’s my alma mater, where I got my MBA back in 2010.

I can’t even tell you how much I love this job.

I’m not exaggerating when I say that the student body is the most brilliant collection of minds in one building. Maybe ever. Every day in my new job I get to sit back and listen to brilliant people talk about brilliant things, and I get to say “That’s a great idea!” or “Huh! I never thought of that!” I haven’t used the word “terrific” yet, but it’s only a matter of time. (I’m kind of saving that one in my hip pocket for when something’s really terrific.)

Because NYU Stern is downtown in New York City and I live in New Canaan, Connecticut, it also means that I’m on the early train. I have a lot of train time these days. But people are nice and nobody talks loudly on their phones or plays music or anything. I like it.

All those things put together means that my days are quite full with the things I’ve chosen to fill them with. And my work days are very full with activities that I think make me a more effective Dean of Students.

I really like my life these days. I miss writing here sometimes, most of all when I’m actually writing here (like this VERY SECOND), but I like knowing that it’s here, and that there may come a point in my life when I brush the cobwebs off this thing and get back to writing a blog in earnest. Maybe about my kids growing up or my work or my new flying robot car that mines our post-apocalyptic world for base metals.

Until then, I’d better get back to it. Pretty busy over here.

The Beautiful Normal

It’s fall! And we’re in New Canaan, Connecticut, did I tell you that? We moved back in May after our crazy year in LA, though I’m beginning to suspect that every year in LA is a crazy year.

We probably didn’t make it any less crazy by living in Hollywood, I should add. Like, The Hollywood – and throw in the fact that driving Finn to preschool involved passing a whole lot of shops that sold things that you wouldn’t even be able to mention on basic cable, let alone want your four year old son to see, but I’ll tell you what: there are no hurricanes in LA, and for that we were grateful.



I’ve been doing a lot of writing stuff but just not on this blog. Now, I don’t know about you, but I’m a Grand Master at putting pressure on myself. Which means I never seem to write a blog entry unless I think I have some grand and wise to say. Well, I woke up the other day and realized what you have all known for many years, which is that I never really have anything grand or wise to say. (Unless I have an open bottle of Snapple and I can check the lid and tell you that a strawberry is not really a berry but a banana is (say wha??) or that a worm has five hearts.

I also love writing for the Huffington Post, but that too I’ve been lax on, in favor of other stuff I’ve been doing. I’m also not sure I can deliver all those articles with snappy headlines (“10 Ways to Make Your Life Perfect in the Next 20 Seconds” and “14 Ways of Knowing if Your Hair is on Fire”), though I do like to try.

Anyway, that’s not to say stuff isn’t going on around here.

It is.

All kinds of stuff.

For example, Finn and Lucy are 4 and 2 years old, and they started pre-school. That’s Lucy’s first day of school ever. There’s something about that for a parent, letting your child go off to school, and peeking at them through the window while they play with other kids. I’m not sure what makes it so beautiful and heartbreaking at the same time. Do other animals get all teary when their young head off into the woods to search for grubs?

I think it’s that it’s the first time I was seeing Lucy as a real person, rather than just an extension of myself. Liz and I have been so blessed to be able to work from home, and maybe in the back of my mind I thought that Lucy was only Lucy when I was there. I don’t think I ever believed that her huge personality could be brought out into the world and shared with other people.

Because that’s the thing about kids, isn’t it? They develop who they are at a really young age, and they stick to it, but the real beauty comes when you hear others confirming it.

For example, a couple of days ago Finn and Lucy knocked heads, and Finn got a black eye. It was pretty shocking to see, actually – a black eye is a pretty dramatic thing. For one thing, it makes you look super tough. That night at dinner I was trying to get Finn to eat his peas and he said he didn’t want them, except this time he had that tough-looking black eye, and so I didn’t push it.

What I knew, though, was that while it was painful in the moment, that there was really no greater gift Finn could get than to be able to walk into school sporting a black eye. The attention! Lordy. Everybody wanted to know more. I encouraged him to say that he had encountered a bear in the kitchen and he beat it up, but he insisted on telling the truth, because that’s Finn – he can’t lie – and so he said his sister gave it to him. Then Lucy would come twirling into the room in a little tutu and it sort of ruined the toughness effect.

Those are the memories that are sticking with me these days. Not whether we are living in LA or in Connecticut, not the seasons or the nice weather or our careers or where we go on vacation. It’s those kids, and being able to share that with Liz. Makes me happy just thinking about it.

The Seven Principles of Moving

Like a New Year’s resolution, packing up your house begins with burning passion and world-conquering confidence and ends flat on your back in despair, with a sigh and a mouth filled with trans-fats.

You’d think we would be used to moving by now. Liz and I have moved house – believe it or not – seven times in six years (not including my move from Kathmandu to DC in 2007). The smells of cardboard and bubble wrap are like crocuses in spring. Through the process, I’ve discovered that moving is a science. Unfortunately, I suck at science.

But for those of you who are desperate for somebody to tell them what to do, allow me to share….

The Seven Principles of Moving, by Conor, Who’s Not Very Good at This.

1. You Need More Boxes Than You Think. No – More Than That. Yes, Really. Right, Now Double That. Okay, Now Double That. Now Go Buy Some More Boxes.

Anyone that’s moved before knows this already. Here’s the general thought process:

Okay, you think, looking around at your tiny one bedroom apartment. How many boxes will I need here? Let’s see…I have a closet of a bunch of clothes, shoes, stuff like that. Then there are the books on the shelf, and those little framed photos that statue thing of the rooster and that alcohol that’s gathering dust and coffee cups and silverware and whatnot. Oh, and those wooden bowls and other stuff in that drawer with the stamps. So maybe… thirteen boxes? Seventeen, just to be super safe?

That turns out not be accurate. The actual number of boxes you need is forty thousand.

I’ve gotten better at estimating number of boxes. But I’ve never managed to buy too many, which is my real goal. I want to sit there and look at all the extra boxes and chuckle and say “Well, we can always use boxes, I guess!” instead of blazing through the aisle of Home Depot, trying to get home to the movers who already have loaded everything else on the truck, with boxes stacked so high on the shopping cart that it looks like a Dr. Suess drawing.

2. Your Household Items Will Literally Get Larger The Day Before You Move.

Stuff that used to fit in your car no longer fits in your car. You strain your back lugging that rocking chair out to your car, because when you bought it six months ago it fit neatly in your hatchback. Now that same rocking chair is actually larger than the car itself, and that if anything you should put the car on the rocking car and push that.

3. Start Packing Early.

I’m talking early. A good rule of thumb is when you’ve been a new place about a week, that’s when you should start packing up for the next move.

4. Pace Yourself.

You can always tell what you’ve packed first, because that’s the box that you open with each item carefully wrapped with exactly the right amount of bubble wrap, nestled in a bouquet of carefully crumpled paper. It’s labeled with each item that’s inside, color-coded for the room it’s going into. The next box will be a little less perfect, with just some bubble wrap sort of stuffed among your valuables. The last boxes, I find, are usually overflowing with shards of teapots and wine glasses that look like they’ve been dropped from an airplane and the box is labeled “WHATEVER!!” in old eyeliner you found in the trash.

5. Just Pack It. You’re Not Going to Use It. Seriously, You’re Not Going to Use It.

One of the hardest things about packing is knowing what not to pack. For example, the first things you should pack are the spare vases, rather than, say, your heart medicine.

Also, you’re not going to need that cooking stuff. I see you standing there, three days before you’re about to move, staring at the bread maker that has an inch of dust on it and a tag on it that says “Congratulations Newlyweds!!!” and thinking “You know, I bet I’ll really up for some fresh bread tomorrow morning.”

Pack the bread maker. You’re not making bread. You’re not making it now, you’re not making it next year. You’re never making bread.

6. Don’t Mark Any Box “Urgent.”

Yesterday I went down to the basement and was bringing up boxes that I hadn’t opened since the last move, and buried deep in there was a box marked “Urgent!! Open Immediately!!!” and inside was stuff like my passport and an envelope full of cash and about a hundred other things that I had been stressing about losing for the last twelve months. I’m just sayin’.

7. Don’t Move. Ever.

Go back to Connecticut. You like it there. You love the people and you adore your church. Go there and stay there until you are dead.

Pretty good rules, right? I know!

The truth is, when you’re packing up your stuff in boxes and dragging it from one house to another, it’s hard to figure out what’s important and what’s not – what makes you happy and what’s just stuff. And then a Saturday morning will roll around, and the kids will climb into bed with us and I’ll have my family cuddled around me and it will occur to me that we just spent a ton of money boxing up and moving things that have, alas, nothing at all to do with my happiness.

Back in the Swing

It’s a nice feeling to be back writing on this blog. Who knows how much I’ll have time to do it, but I’ve got good intentions, and as you know, the road to Candy Land is paved with good intentions, so we should all be in for a delicious treat!

The truth is, I’ve missed writing here. Like most of you all (unless you’re, like, a starfish or something), I’ve been super busy with life. When that happens, the blog sometimes gets away from me.

That’s not to say I’ve not been writing – I have, and I’ve written a bunch of stuff for The Huffington Post (which still sounds like a stoner magazine to me) and other stuff, but I’ve wanted to specifically get back to this, my own blog, for two reasons.

First, this blog is where my writing all began. Sort of.

My writing actually began with a journal that I kept for eleven years. I wrote in it every single night. Not because I felt a burning desire to lay my soul on paper but because it was a homework assignment for Mr. Delo’s AP English class in my senior year of high school. When we went to turn them in (he had promised he wouldn’t read them), he refused to even accept them, and instead gave us all A’s.

“I just thought it would be fun,” he said happily.

Most of my classmates thought that was pretty pointless, but I discovered I really liked writing. In my journal I wasn’t getting all deep – I felt like I was writing for others, trying to entertain and be funny, even though I never showed anyone my journals. It was fun to think about finishing a whole journal and going back and re-reading a book where I was the star.

That actually makes me sound like the most self-centered person on the planet. Note to self: delete that last paragraph before posting this blog entry. Replace with stuff people like. (Bald eagles?)

The second reason I’m getting back into the blog is that people sometimes check here if they’ve read the book I wrote, Little Princes. When they read old updates they think that my life is frozen in time many months ago, and they think my daughter Lucy is a wee little baby and not the two year old fireplug that she is. (I’m not sure fireplug is a word. I need a different description. Lucy’s really cute and huggable and also crazy and unpredictable and independent and getting her dressed in the morning is like trying to dress a raccoon.)

I like being up to date, is all I’m saying. Or up to date-ish, at least.

So for the purposes of just getting us up to date a bit, I’ll go ahead and recap some stuff in my life, in case anyone cares.

Here are the questions I get the most, in general order of frequency.

Have you had bicep implants? Because your biceps are incredibly large! (Also, is it true you can see them from space?)

Thank you, but no, I have not had bicep implants. (That’s a weird question – are they all going to be weird?)

Are you still involved with Next Generation Nepal?

Heck yeah! I’m the President of the Board. (You want to be president of something, all you have to do is start it yourself – not like anyone promoted me, so it’s sort of nepotistic, which, let’s face it, is how I got ahead in this organization.)

How’s Next Generation Nepal doing, and how are the kids doing?

Great, and amazing. NGN is going strong, our staff has increased to something like 25 people. The dedication and loyalty of our staff to the children of Nepal is like something out of Game of Thrones.

The kids themselves are doing wonderfully well. The older ones are approaching university, one is actually already studying to be a dentist, which blows my mind right out of my ear holes. And of course NGN still rescues trafficked kids and still searches the mountains for their lost families. I’d be happy to answer questions if I can in the comment section if anyone has any.

What are you doing now?

I’m eating some Triscuits. Why? You’re not going to ask me to help you move a couch or something, are you? Because my biceps are a little tight after this monster workout I just did…

No, I mean in general – what are you doing now in life?

Oh. A bunch of things! I’ve been doing a lot of writing and a lot of speaking. I’m blessed to be able to go to schools and universities, many of which have chosen Little Princes as their Common Read, and talk about Nepal. It’s been pretty dreamy. But I’m also thinking about exciting things to do next in life. That’s not to discuss here – you know, sausage-being-made and all.

Where are you living these days?

The Grennan family – that’s Conor, Liz, Finn (age 4), Lucy (age 2) and Emma (age Dog) – have been in Los Angeles for a year, and we’re now moving back to our home in Connecticut at the end of April. We couldn’t be more excited. It’s been a great adventure, and we wanted to spend time near Liz’s mom in San Diego, but our home is Connecticut. Our church is there, our community is there, our friends are there. Those are things that are incredibly important to us.

How often to you get back to Nepal?

About once a year, in October. Mostly to see the kids, but also to talk strategy with the team. But really to see the kids. They’re like family and I miss them every day – I really do. Kathmandu feels like home. And if you told me ten years ago that I was going to write the sentence “Kathmandu feels like home” I would have assumed that you were screaming it with your face smushed against the bars of your cell in the Billowing Meadows Home for the Crazies.

Okay, those are some of the basic questions. I’ll let you get back to moving that couch.

Nice to be back, friends. I missed this place. Come say hi!