Bryce Moore's Blog, page 209

A Brave New Headache

I’ve experienced a fair range of headaches through my life. Virtual headaches, like reinstalling operating systems when your computer goes horribly wrong. Real headaches, like the awful migraines I get every year or two. Small headaches that pop up in the afternoon. Eye strain headaches. Stress headaches.

Me and headaches. We go way back.

Which is why last night was so strange. I’d been feeling really tired and worn out for the last while–it’s the final push for Denisa to finish teaching her classes, and we’ve had all the Christmas preparations to do in addition to that, plus work . . . I don’t want to whine here too much, so let’s just say it’s been busy. I stayed in bed the whole morning, asleep. I woke up refreshed and in a good mood. Then, around 4 o’clock, I started getting a headache that ran in a strip down the left side of my head–like someone had painted a stripe of pain from my left eyeball, up my scalp, and down to the back of my head. It wasn’t intense, but it was annoying.

Still, there were no visual auras that come with migraines, so I just dismissed the headache and went about taking a lazy Sunday.

Except the headache didn’t want to be dismissed. It gathered its forces and dug in right behind my left eyeball, and then it started drilling. Quite literally. It felt like someone was jabbing something through my head back there.

But like I said, I know me some headaches. I ignored it. Watched a movie. Read a book. Checked fantasy football scores–anything to keep my mind off that pain.

Around 5, I finally gave in and took some ibuprofen. That’s usually the biggest sign that my headache is bad: when I’m willing to take drugs to try and dull the pain.

The headache laughed at my puny efforts, and kept drilling.

What followed was anything but pretty. Was I writhing in pain? Yup. For hours on end? Yup. I’ll spare you the details. Suffice it to say it was like a migraine without all the special effects. No numbness, no aura. Just pain pain pain.

Yeah. It was an interesting Sunday.

I’m mostly better now, thankfully. Just really drained and exhausted. Severe pain for that long really takes a lot out of you. I’ve done a bit of Googling, and I still have no idea what this headache was. The symptoms sound like a cluster headache, but those happen repeatedly. Does this mean I can expect another one soon? I really hope not.

Anyone out there have any experience with headaches like this? How do you treat them when they come? I’d love to know how to avoid another yesterday . . .

An Update on the Mice

Just realized that it’s been a few weeks since I told the world all the sordid details about my rodent infestation. Nothing like a Friday to remind you of the little things in life, right? Well, wonder no more, my friends.

As you’ll recall, when last we met, the mice were waging full out war: they’d gnawed through the phone line to my DSL router, then the power cord to that router, and then they’d chewed off part of the seal to the washing machine. (Had I mentioned that online? I can’t remember. It was a bad day.) Things were so bleak that I came |—–| this close to going nuclear and getting a cat from the shelter. If we hadn’t been leaving for PA the next day, I would have done it. But the thought of having a strange cat in my house for the week I was gone was not a thought that filled me with glee.

So we didn’t.

We set the thermostat to 50, and we left for 10 days.

When we returned, I checked all the traps. No mice. Well, one mouse in the garage, and a mouse tail there too (no idea where the rest of the mouse was. Did it gnaw its own tail off?). But no mice elsewhere. And so Denisa and I resigned ourselves to more skirmishes with the rodents.

Except they didn’t happen. No mouse sounds. No mouse chewings. No mouse signs at all.

The mice are officially gone.

I don’t know what happened. Maybe it got too cold for the critters, or perhaps they were visited by three spirits that showed them the fate that lay in store for them if they continued down this path. Maybe when we said a prayer that our house would be protected, the mice were smitten with a biblical plague, or maybe they all went up in a big mouse rapture.

The fact is, I don’t care what happened to the mice. I just care that they’re gone. (Got the repair bill for the internet fix at my house. $95. Stupid mice.) I’m definitely going the poison route earlier next year. Better a dead mouse I’m smelling in the wall than the live mouse that’s ruining my appliances.

But in any case, you may now stop holding your breath, knowing that my house is once again pest-free. (Well, as long as you don’t count me as a pest . . .)

And there was much rejoicing.

The Parable of the Puddle

This semester, since Denisa’s had class every Tuesday and Thursday morning, I’ve had kid-getting-on-the-bus duty. It’s much more stressful than you’d figure. On a typical work day, I head in early, and I have some peaceful quiet hours before the students arrive–time when I can gather my thoughts and really get ready for the day. When I’m getting the kids ready? Chaos, between getting the lunches set, making sure breakfast is eaten, teeth are brushed, snow clothes are on, MC is fed and changed, bags are packed, homework is done–and there’s a hard deadline to boot? Yeah. Quite a bit different, especially when you’re not in practice.

But I digress.

This morning once I’d gotten the kids out the door and we were waiting for the bus, DC and TRC were bemoaning the rain and what it had done to our snow. (Still a fair bit of snow, but not nearly as much as there ought to be. I want my winter!) But then DC saw it: big and tempting and right there in the middle of the driveway.

A puddle.

“Oooooh!” she said, her eyes brightening. “A puddle.”

“Right,” I said. “Don’t jump in it.”

Her shoulders slumped. “Why not?”

Do I really need to answer that? “Because it’s cold out, and you’re wearing snow pants. If you jump in the puddle, you’re going to be soaked for the rest of the day, and we don’t have time to get you into dry clothes.”

She nodded in agreement. Hard to argue with logic like that. But both she and TRC kept finding themselves back at the edge of that puddle, as if the thing had its own gravitational pull. We’d be down on the other end of the driveway, and yet somehow their eyes would keep drifting back to it.

“Don’t jump in the puddle,” I reminded them.

They both nodded, content for the moment to put the tips of their boots into the puddle and dream of how awesome it would be to jump into it.

“I mean it,” I added. Just in case they couldn’t tell by the tone of my voice.

Meanwhile, I’m walking up and down the driveway, trying to get a bit of steps in while I’m carrying MC. Multitasking for the win, baby.

“TRC!” DC cries out while my back is turned. “Don’t!”

“Dad said don’t jump in the puddle.” TRC’s voice is full of confidence. He’s found the loophole and is on firm legal ground.

I turn around to see him standing in the puddle. Good thing those boots are waterproof.

Time to change the contract. “Don’t go in the puddle or anywhere near the puddle.”

TRC obeyed, and it wasn’t too much longer before the bus came and the puddle was forgotten. But the experience has stuck with me, mainly because I think there’s a lot to be learned about myself in that. How many times do I do things that I know are a bad idea? Things other people have counseled me against–and I do them anyway. “Don’t stay up late tonight, Bryce.” “Don’t eat all the brownies, Bryce.” “Don’t lose your temper, Bryce.”

In each case, I know in theory what the right decision is. And in each case, I seem to find myself continually drawn back to the bad choice. I stare at the puddle. Dip my toes into it. Maybe even stand in it.

Who am I kidding? I jump in that puddle and splish splash around until I’m soaked from head to foot.

And then, when I’m wet and miserable, I wonder what in the world I was thinking.

Until the next puddle comes along.

Who knows–maybe the next time I’m tempted to make a really boneheaded choice, I’ll think back on this experience. I’ll recognize the puddle for what it is and just keep away from it.

It could happen, right?

On the CIA Torture Report

Remember how I wrote yesterday about how important it is to approach feedback the right way? This post is a bit of a riff on that. Like many of you, I’ve been reading the Senate report on CIA torture since it was released yesterday, and my jaw is kind of just permanently left slack. For those of you who might have missed it, the basics are pretty terrible. Yes, the CIA and others dispute the facts, but one fact can’t be disputed: a governmental investigation into CIA practices claims our operatives did horrible, awful, despicable things to captives, all in the name of getting “actionable intelligence.”

Waterboarding was one thing. It sounded horrible, but people protested that it never put the people in any real danger. (Well, ignoring the fact that the report says some of the victims died in the middle of the process and had to be brought back by doctors). But even putting that argument aside, I don’t think anyone–anyone–is going to argue that “rectal feeding” is something the good guys ever resort to.

Americans like to think of ourselves as the good guys. The cowboys with the white hats, not the black ones. This report? It kills that myth with one blow, regardless of whether it’s true or not.

Because the flip side of feedback is that the people giving the feedback don’t ever have to return to your work again. If I don’t like a book by an author, I don’t read another book by him or her. If I dislike a movie by a director, I don’t typically seek out another one.

If people hear that the US is torturing people, they give up on thinking of the US in any sort of a knight in shining armor way. One strike and you’re out.

I’m going to switch metaphors, mainly because this whole Senate report is leaving my brain scrambling to try and make sense of it. To line up the country I live in and the people who live here with the actions described in this report. I want to think it’s a lie. I want to believe they’ve got it all wrong. But then I fall back on an argument I make watching sports–when close calls by the refs determine the outcome of the game. A good team doesn’t put itself into a position where a close call by the ref has any real effect on the outcome at all. A good team trounces its opponents through and through.

A good country doesn’t go anywhere in the same time zone as the accusations present in this report. A good country is so far away from these things that it’s never in any doubt. Argue about the details all you like, but the fact remains: we’re very far from where we like to think of ourselves as a country.

When I lived in Germany, I had the chance to talk to a lot of people who lived there during the Holocaust. Pop culture likes to portray WWII Germans as fanatics across the board. Nazis through and through. Evil everywhere you looked. My conversations helped me to see Germans during that time were just people. Not caricatures. People.

It’s easy to argue that those Germans didn’t stand up enough for the rights and the lives of the people their government was murdering. But I take a look at some of the actions of the US government and people in authority in this country the last while, and I start relating far too much to those Germans I spoke with almost 20 years ago.

I’m not a bad person. I live off in rural Maine. I have no connection to the CIA or to any of the cities where these racially-charged killings are happening. But I live in the same country. If I leave this country and go abroad, the people there won’t see me as anything other than an American. And believe you me when I say I’m confident that many of them would blame me for the actions of this country–or at least demand an accounting for why it’s happening.

It’s been years now since we’ve stopped using torture (I hope.) But the memory of this is going to stay with the world for a long time. For some people in the world, it’s never going to go away again. The saddest part is that I can understand where it came from. I know how much fear we were living in after 9/11, and how we wanted to look at the world in simple good guys/bad guys terms. These captives they were questioning–they were terrorists. Who cared what happened to them?

We should have cared. We should have demanded our leaders cared. And we didn’t. And that’s on us.

I’m shaken by this report. I keep thinking about it. There’ve been times in my life where I discovered that the things I had been doing were wrong. That I was messing up. And I had to face myself and admit that, and this report feels a lot like that to me. My hope is that we as a country can accept this–learn from it–and learn how not to repeat it. I hope in this two party us/them country we have at the moment that we can go beyond party lines and agree we don’t want to be doing these things. That we never want to be doing anything that could be seen as doing anything like these things.

And that’s all I’ve got in my at the moment.

Listen to ALL the Feedback, But Only Pay Attention to Some

I just had the chance to read over the feedback from the Maine Library Association’s annual conference, and it made me think a bit about feedback in general. As an author, I’ve had plenty of different opportunities to receive feedback on many different levels, from alpha readers giving their first impression of a draft, to professional reviewers saying what they thought of the final version, to actual readers giving their honest opinion. And with all that feedback, I’d like to think I’ve learned a thing or two about how to respond to it.

First up? People can’t have wrong opinions. If someone says they hated your book or your presentation or whatever, then they’re entitled to that opinion–even if it’s for crummy reasons. Telling someone that their opinion is wrong is just a useless argument to try and have. So listen to that feedback, and then weigh it for how much you want to pay attention to it. Is it an opinion expressed by others? If you’ve got a hundred responses, and one person says one thing and 99 say something else, do yourself a favor and listen to the 99.

Unless it’s 99 family members, I suppose.

That goes both ways. I’ve had to really work on not focusing just on the positive feedback or negative feedback. Each comes with a price. I don’t watch American Idol anymore, but back in the day, the audition rounds were full of people who only listen to positive feedback. They’re shocked–shocked–when the judges tell them they’re no good. They protest, saying how much their mom/friend/teacher/dog likes their singing. And then they fume. They put the blame on the judges, saying the judges don’t know what they’re talking about.

Classic signs of only listening to the positive.

The other side is just as bad, however. Only listening to the negative? Why do that to yourself? I think this is often caused because we can all feel like we’re just pretenders. As if any moment, everyone’s going to find out that we’re not nearly as good at what we do as we try to claim we are. And that first bit of negative feedback? That’s the tip of the iceberg waiting to sink our Titanic. But negative feedback isn’t weighted any more heavily than positive feedback. Just because 10 people disliked something doesn’t discount the 10 who liked it. In the conference feedback, some people listed as their least favorite presentation the same exact presentation that others listed as their most favorite.

No one’s right or wrong in that argument. It’s all a matter of taste.

So if you have one student who hated your class and 15 who loved it? Don’t dwell on that one. I’ve got 239 ratings on Vodnik at the moment on Goodreads (wow–up to 239? That’s cool–I hadn’t checked in a long while). 6 people gave it 1 star. Should I freak out that those 6 people didn’t like the book? Nope.

Feedback is there to make us better. That’s it. As long as you always remember that and use it for what it’s there for, then you can’t go wrong. Lots of people saying something’s not working? Fix it. Lots of people loving something? Remember it, and do the same thing next time. If you’re using feedback to validate yourself as a writer or librarian or teacher or whatever, then you’re setting yourself up for the day when Simon Cowell tells you how awful you are. If you’re using feedback as an excuse to give up being a writer or librarian or teacher or whatever, then you’re throwing your dream away just because someone didn’t like what you did.

That’s a terrible reason for giving up.

(Look at me–giving you negative feedback on your decision to listen to negative feedback. How meta do we want to get here?)

And I guess that’s all I have to say about that.

When Disney Movies Go Terribly, Horribly Wrong

I watched Babes in Toyland once growing up, and I’ve had it in my head for a long time under the “good movies I’d like to watch again sometime.” Netflix added it to the collection a few weeks ago, and I so I sat down last night to watch it with the kiddos.

Oh. My. Golly.

It starts off light and fun enough. Fairy tale people having fairy tale problems. Annette Funicello is always a plus, and the songs weren’t too bad. About what I expected from a movie I’d watched once as a kid and remembered being good. The plot is simple: two fairy tale characters want to get married, and a villain wants to derail that. And how does he do that? By hiring two goons to drown the boyfriend. Fair enough. And true to plan, they knock him over the head with a  mallet and cart him off to throw him into the ocean.

Until . . .

They notice there’s a “Gypsy Camp” on the way to said ocean. And since Gypsies like to buy children, why not sell the guy to the Gypsies? Nothing like reinforcing a stereotype for kids watching the movie, right?

And then Annette–now without a fiance–must face the awful truth: she’ll be without someone to take care of her. Cue the musical number.

Cursed addition and subtraction! How ever will a woman be able to handle it all without a man to help out?

And then the Gypsies show up for a song and dance number:

Followed by this “gem” sung by the fiance dressed in drag (sorry–couldn’t find the video clip):

And why stop there? We finish our traipse down cringe-inducing clips with this great song about how girls are essentially toys created for guys:

You can’t make this stuff up, people. I recognize that a lot of this has to do with culture shift, and what was acceptable in 1961 is definitely UNacceptable today. But still, it’s amazing to me what was so commonplace at the time, and how it can really undermine a society on a fundamental level.

Some of you might be rolling your eyes and dismissing this post. I get that. “It’s a kids’ movie. Lighten up.” And honestly, the bit with the Gypsies is something I can understand for the most part. I mean, here we are 50 years later, and it’s not really any better. (How sad is that?) But the songs about women? Really?  I don’t consider myself a foaming-at-the-mouth feminist, but how can you not watch those today and wonder what in the world they were thinking?

DC was watching the movie with me. Do I want her growing up thinking that unless she’s got a man around, she’s hopeless/useless? Of course not. But that’s the underlying message of those songs, and there isn’t even any wink winking about the subject matter like you get in A Secretary is Not a Toy (done 6 years later):

Anyway. Don’t think I’ll be adding Babes in Toyland to the yearly Christmas rotation. Ugh. And I’ll get off my soapbox now and let you resume your normal Monday routines.

How to Pronounce Bangor

I’m off to Bangor for another library meeting, and I thought I might do the rest of the country a favor and teach you all how to pronounce Bangor the right way. The way locals pronounce it.

Ready for this?

It’s a hard “g.”

I know. I just kinda blew your mind there, didn’t I? It’s okay. Breathe. You’ll get over it in a minute.

So, just to reiterate. It’s BANG-gore, not BANG-er. I’d do the IPA transcription, but I’m too lazy to figure out how to do that in WordPress.

So there you have it. Next time I go to Bangor for a meeting, you’ll be able to look at the word and say it in your head the *right* way, instead of that stupid way you’ve been saying it for the last forever. Aren’t I nice?

The Chaos of Christmas

I love me some Christmas, and I love a well-decorated house, but so help me if getting that house to “well-decorated” status isn’t pretty much impossible some years. This year seems especially bad, with Denisa teaching all her classes and all of our stuff from our Thanksgiving trip scattered throughout the house.

We’ve gotten all of the decorations out of the basement, at least. Does that count? Can we just stick a few ribbons on the boxes and call it good?

Something tells me the kids wouldn’t be okay with that.

I suppose a lot of this is something we brought on ourselves. The decorations have a tendency to snowball year after year, as we keep picking up more. And more. And more. We already were pretty much full up, and then we picked up a slew over in Germany two years ago. So when I’m elbow-deep in Christmas decorations, trying to frantically get the presents ordered and the food figured out and help Denisa grade tests and lesson plan . . . I think it only natural to take a step back and ask myself why in the world I’m doing all of this?

Why bother with all of it?

That was me last night. And the answer was pretty obvious: I do it all because I want my kids to have the fun sort of Christmas I had growing up. The crazy thing is that I’m not even certain what sort of Christmas I actually *had* growing up. I know what my memories of it are like, and it’s those memories that I’m trying to capture and pin down and make sure I pass on. The trouble with memories is they tend to age very well. They get better over time–or at least mine do, it seems. Nostalgia adds a whole bunch of extra awesome to Christmases of yore, and it’s really hard to compete with that sort of thing. (One of the reasons Indiana Jones IV and the Star Wars prequels flopped, I believe.)

But I’d be lying if I said it was just so my kids could have the sort of Christmas I had, because I’m also always on the hunt to have the sort of Christmas we had a year ago, or two years, or three. We’ve had a lot of fun at Christmas, Denisa, me and the kids. And I don’t want to miss one of those in the future.

I don’t know. This post isn’t really coming together like I was hoping it would. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. My point is that the chaos of Christmas is worth it. It’s like this every year, and every year I’ve forgotten all about how chaotic it was as soon as the last decoration is hung and the house is more or less back to order. A bit of upset and disorder is a small price to pay for the fun memories I’ve accumulated over the years.

Even if it doesn’t feel like that at the beginning of December.

Which is just a long way of me saying that I really have to stop blogging now and go clean some dishes.

Grateful for the Obvious

I had a half snow day this morning(!) And while I was out snowplowing my driveway, I remembered two earlier times in my life–one from about 10 years ago, and one from last year. First up? Last year, when I went to turn on my snowblower, gasoline started shooting out the side of it. This year? I used it with no problems at all. And while I expected it to work when I turned it on, I’m definitely grateful that it *did* work this time without any incident.

Because who needs a gasoline fountain?

Then there’s the simple luxury of working at a place that lets me have snow days. 10 years ago, I was a gas meter reader out in Utah. That was a job that made me really dislike two things that I’d always loved before: dogs and snow. It’s not that I began to hate dogs and snow, but I certainly had more than my fair share of incidents with both of them, and when that happens to you enough, you inevitably begin to dread them.

(Two quick dog story asides: First, I was reading meters one day and was at a house that hadn’t been read in months. It was my first time there, and I thought the reason it had been skipped was that the meter was deep in the bushes. There were bushes all around this house, and a big fence to boot. So I decided I’d actually get a reading this month instead of making a guesstimate. I’ve got the whole top half of me submerged in shrubbery, and then I hear it: a deep, bellowing bark that only a dog with extremely big teeth can really manage. I jumped out of that shrub faster than Usain Bolt, and there was this angry Rottweiler bearing down on me.

That was an interesting day. The day I learned you could use a clip board as a shield against angry Rottweilers. Good times.

Second dog story? When you’re reading meters, there’s a spot for people to write notes to future readers. Things like where the meter is, or tricks to getting a good read. Or notes about dangerous dogs. I was reading one house that had a huge 6 foot fence and a single note: WARNING: Doberman can jump fence. Let’s just say I took that house very cautiously.)

In any case, snow when reading meters was almost always yucky. You’re walking from house to house, and suddenly you’re not walking, you’re wading for a few miles. Talk about getting tired. It was the one time in my life when I consistently hoped for no snow around me.

I was reminded about those days when I was lying in bed this morning checking emails, letting the freezing rain do its thing outside while I was inside. I’ve been at this job over 7 years, and it’s easy to begin to take things for granted. To start thinking you have a right to them, and that they’re not just a luxury. So it’s helpful now and then to remind yourself what a luxury they are.

Working snowblowers and snow days are awesome

And that’s my deep thought for you today.

What’s the Most Comical Near Death Experience You’ve Had?

Long time readers know me well enough by now to know that sometimes I think about some pretty strange things. Up for today’s thought of the day? Comical near death experiences. This isn’t something that happened recently, but I don’t think I’ve blogged about it before, and so I’ll share it with you all this fine Tuesday.

The justification I often use for not doing some death-defying thing is that I don’t want to die doing that, and then in heaven have to sit around telling everyone how I died time after time after time, and feel stupid about it every. single. time. (This is what happens when you really, truly believe in life after death, I guess.) Honestly, I think this stems from the scene in Defending Your Life, where they’re all talking about how they died, and Meryl Streep admits she died by tripping.

Anywho.

Comical near death experiences.

Despite my best efforts, there have still been a number of close calls with disaster. Calls that would have been very embarrassing had that been the way I had to make my final exit. Some were due to my own stupidity, but the one that stands out the most in my mind would have to be the time the toilet exploded and almost killed me.

See? I told you it was funny.

Denisa and I were living at BYU at the time. Student housing, and they had these high-pressure toilets. Toilets that didn’t flush the water down so much as blast it down with a firehose. (Maybe to reduce clogs? I have no idea why. I’ve always been content with a gentle swirl of water to bid the waste adieu.) In any case, that puppy was *loud.* Flush that in the middle of the night, and you might wake up the neighbors.

Still, you get used to anything after a while. And one day I was simply going about my business. Nothing out of the ordinary. I just flushed the toilet and went to wash my hands.

When an enormous *BOOM* went off right behind me. It took me a moment or two to figure out I hadn’t been shot. Some sounds are expected in the bathroom, but this was like I was on a Mythbusters finale. I turned around to see what had happened.

The toilet had exploded behind me, sending shards of porcelain all around the room, knocking the bathroom light off its fixture. The high pressure tank had just lost it, and the lid of the toilet tank had shot up into the air in pieces. A jagged piece had zoomed right past my head.

I reported it to facilities, of course. They’d never heard anything like it happen before. (Whose toilet explodes? Enough to make the company recall the toilet, it looks like. And you thought I was making it up . . .) And at the time, it was just a funny story. But I look back on it now and then and realize it could have been much worse. If it had exploded when I was closer, or the shrapnel had gone a different way . . .

I could have been stuck telling people “I died when my toilet blew up” for eternity.

Close call.

So that’s my story–and it’s a true one, at that. I wondered if any of you might have had similar brushes with fate. Things that are funny to look back on, but could have been quite different had they gone just an inch or two to the left. If you do, I’d love to hear them. Please share!