Three bad luck moments that happened at the best time

I refer to this as the Crisis Of the Week, or COW for short. It may not be earth shattering or life threatening, but it generally consumes 80% of your attention. It may not even be an entire week’s length of time. I guess there could be other permutations as well such as:

• COD – Crisis of the Day
• COM – Crisis of the Month
• COY – Crisis of the Year

Lot’s of possibilities.

Then the thing passes. Finals come and go. The deadline arrives and then ends. The breakup occurs. Maybe things were a disaster or maybe they weren’t as bad as they seemed. Whatever happened, the next thing you know, there’s a new new thing on your radar to replace the thing that passed.

Recently my wife and I had three little COWs.  Note: some of these events occurred in the distant past but I only just now got around to publishing this post. 

First COW: my car battery died. My wife was going to pull the car out of the garage into the drive way so we could put spare child car seats in it. But the battery was dead.

Silver lining: we discovered the problem on Sunday of Labor Day weekend instead of Tuesday as I was heading to work.

Second COW: Our not quite 1 year old twins developed hand, foot and mouth disease (I like to say Hoof and Mouth disease for humans). This meant we had to keep them home from daycare — which we still have to pay for!

Silver lining: This happened the Tuesday after Labor Day and we were going out of town the following Friday, which means we only had to scramble for three days instead of a typical week of five.

Third COW: I paid our Home Depot bill twice! This is because I schedule the payment from the Home Depot account and it withdraw from my account, then I also paid it directly from our Joint account.

Silver lining: While $200 is nothing to sneeze at, we will survive being down $200 this month. We will likely buy something else at Home Depot and it will cancel out or eventually HD will send us a check because they are designed to float a balance for all eternity.

The takeaways from this are: 1) it’s never as bad as you think, and 2) while at the time these events occurred, they seemed catastrophic, I can guarantee neither I or my wife even remember how stressful those events were, because they have long since been replaced by other COWs and then more COWs along with a few CODs, COMs and even a COY for good measure.

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What would you do with a Time Machine?

I posited the following question on my FB the other day:

If you had a time machine, describe your first trip…what time period would you visit, what would you do?

Some of my friends played along and came up with interesting things like “witness the Resurrection of Jesus” or “see Einstein and Eddington prove relativity.  Others were a little more subdued, wishing to spend more time with their kids when they were toddlers or go back far enough to place lucrative sports bets.

Many suggested going back and picking different forks of roads they they long ago traversed. Some hinted at bad decisions, others described them in specific details, clearly still haunted by the Spectres of the Past.

and of course someone pointed out the time travel paradoxes.

Photo curtesy of Rodger Evans

Time Continuum Theories and Paradoxes

Purist believe that any change, ever so slight, will change the future. i.e. you go back in time to when you meet a friend for a drink but this time you order white wine instead of red. BOOM: 9/11 didn’t happen.

Then there is the Destiny Strives to Reassert Itself camp. you go back in time to when you meet a friend for a drink but this time you order white wine instead of red. BOOM: 9/11 still happens regardless. Dune author Frank Herbert believed that individuals do not significantly impact or change the direction of  civilization.  A  Pearl Harbor or 9/11 is going to happens it just becomes a question of when and not if.

I’ve always liked to believe that minor things would cancel each other out, for good or bad.  I’d also like to think that I could go back and mitigate, alleviate and outright avoid many of the pitfalls and painful events that Life threw my way and I’d still end up where I am today with regards to my wife and kids.   Like if I avoided all those playground fights, would I really not have toddler twins today?

What would you do with a Time Machine?  Passively witness an Historical Event or change your past?   Tell me about it here in the comments, then swing by my Facebook page and LIKE it! You’ll find funny, informative links and interesting pictures. Don’t worry, your FB feed won’t get overwhelmed.

 

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Who cares if Cursive Writing becomes Extinct?

 

I have always hated my manual writing.  Both my cursive and my printing suck (my writing sucks in many ways, but it is especially noticeable on the visual level).  I do take pen to paper now and again when taking notes or writing up the first draft of some writing opus.  But I usually very quickly switch to electronic writing whenever possible.  Cursive Penmanship makes me curse…But not as much as those who have to read my handwriting.

In school, I’m sure it often dinged me a few points on any written assignment.  I suspect my hatred of handwriting came about because I was one of those people who should write with their Left hand but was prematurely converted to a Righty.

But therein lies the problem with handwriting:    No two people do it the same way.  Some people have lovely penmanship, their todo lists belong in the Smithsonian.  Others have crappy writing as if they are on an Optometrist’s payroll.  Then there are people whose writing cannot be discerned at all, see doctors.

Luckily I was born in the Era of Word Processors with computers putting typewriters out of a job.  In college, I was able to type out many of the letters I wrote to friends in the computer lab.  I still had to print them and snail mail like a caveman but it was a start.  I was actually too ahead of my time as friends lamented that I used the same template for all my letters.

Cursive Writing had its function once upon a time.  Being able to write legibly and clearly so that other people could easily read your handwriting was a necessary skill, at for those who could read and write.  But that time has passed.  cursive writing came about because in the early history of our species we didn’t have iPhones!  No one writes in hieroglyphics or Sanskrit anymore and humankind seems to be muddling along okay.

People lament that penmanship and calligraphy are becoming lost arts.  So the fuck what?  We have machines to do this stuff for us now.

In researching this post I read all the internet about cursive writing so you don’t have to and the arguments for it can be summed up as:

1.  Good penmanship helps to teach kids discipline and develop the fine motor skills needed for other tasks in life;
2. Being able to sign important documents with a unique signature to prove it was YOU that signed them;
3. How are we going to be able to read the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence?

I’m sure we can find other ways to teach kids motor skills and it certainly doesn’t seem like anyone is reading The Constitution lately amirite?  And when it comes to my signature, not only is it never the same way twice but I usually half-ass it and write a squiggle for most of it.

 

How do feel about the Demise of Cursive Writing? Tell me about it here in the comments, then swing by my Facebook page and LIKE it! You’ll find funny, informative links and interesting pictures. Don’t worry, your FB feed won’t get overwhelmed.

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Planning a Wedding? Don’t do these things

Weddings can be very stressful, not only for the people who are getting married but also for the people who are part of the wedding party.  The Wedding Industry doesn’t help by making things redunkulously expensive.  But there are some things you can do to help mitigate the stress.

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Here’s some more good wedding advice.   If you liked this post you’ll love this  one and this one.

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The Commencement Address I’d love to give

How much longer do we have to listen before we can go Part-tay?

It is extremely unlikely I will ever give a commencement speech in this lifetime.  I’m really okay with that too because just the shortlist of People More Qualified than I is a group known as Everyone Else on the Planet.  However, if I were ever asked, here is what I would like to say.

Class of 2017 graduates,

I want to take this opportunity to offer you the benefits of all the wisdom I’ve accumulated in the three decades since I was in your position: fresh out of college and about to enter the workforce bright eyed and ready to change the world.  So I will keep this short because Twentysomethings are a group with less memory retention than a litter of concussed amnesiac kittens please remember the following as you move forward in life:

1. Corporate America sucks.   You will likely get an entry level job that is more Sinecure than upwardly mobile career.  (Unless you have connected parents BTW if your parents are rich and helping you out, you can skip the rest of this speech.  The race is easier the closer you start from the finish line and why are you still here, don’t you have a new car to wreck?) The good news is as you won’t be burning a lot of brain cells, you will have a lot of downtime to work on your KSA: Knowledge, Skills and Ability. You might get lucky and work for a company that has good in-house training and continuous education initiative take advantage of it.  If your company doesn’t offer this, it is up to you to seek it out on your own time.  Your future depends on it.

2. Don’t move out of your parents home until you have to.  Unless you really really have to such as having crazy strict, crazy religious, or just crazy dysfunctional, stick it out as long as you can.  Pay your parents something in rent  and pocket the rest into a savings account that you DO NOT TOUCH.

3. Learn to cook and pack a lunch. Not just a bunch of frozen TV dinners or weight watchers crap but actual food that you buy weekly at the grocery store. You will save money and eat more healthy.

4. Exercise and stop eating crap all the time. I’m not saying you have to sub salad for french fries at every meal, but eating good during the week will allow you some leeway on the weekends.  Yes your young body can process most of that stuff now, especially if you are active, but there will come a time when you cannot burn off the double cheeseburger as easily as you once did.

5. You cannot recreate your college HeyDays.  You can visit your college town for homecoming and/or College Prom*  once, maybe twice and then stop.  just stop.  You are much older than even the oldest co-ed and it’s just creepy if you are trying to hook up with them.  Also, be prepared to lose your college friends, or at least regulate 90% of them to acquaintances you hear from on birthdays and major holidays.  Those nights of stayed up late talking about philosophy and sex and psychology and sex and politics, and sex…are over.  They won’t have time to shoot the shit with you, especially if you live beyond easy visiting distance from one another.

6. Get a 2nd job working weekends or even a couple nights a week.  It won’t kill you and the extra money will come in handy.  It also limits the time at home with your parents if that’s a concern.  Plus you might be able to pick up an auxiliary skill that augments those KSA I mentioned (you’re were paying attention at the beginning of this right?)

7. Finally, This is the best time in your life to screw up at virtually Anything!   As long as you don’t do anything detrimental (think felony or debilitating meth habit)  the consequences of failure are so much less serious now than they will ever be.  Want to open a Seashell themed Coffee Shop?  Go for it.  Move across the country?  No one is stopping you.  Once you have a family, that all changes.  You have more responsibilities – children, spouses, financial obligations.  You might even have to take care of those pesky parents.

 

Best of luck to you, you’re gonna need it.

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