A Long overdue goodbye to Summer

Even though I haven’t been motivated to vent my spleen in a while, I’m hammering out this post because we apparently have a new policy at CN where you could lose your blog space if you don’t post periodically or frequently enough or something.

Don’t feel neglected readers, I haven’t been posting on social media much either.   On Facebook, if I post anything too liberal, my right-wing boyfriends come out of their basements to set me straight.   And if I say anything that doesn’t perfectly align with the lefty talking points, my SJW girlfriends put me in check as well.

It. is. Exhausting.

How was your summer?  Mine was meh.  The weather this summer was, to use the technical term, sucky. For every decent weather day, there were two rainy, humid or hot as hell days. There weren’t as many sit on the front porch and enjoy my coffee (or back deck and wine) moments like last year.  Because the weather wasn’t favorable, it wasn’t always possible to let the kids spend time in the backyard burning off energy.

Heard a crash at 3 am and found this!

We spent a considerable amount of money trying to get this house in shape for if when we finally pull the trigger and decide to move.  We love our house and our neighborhood, especially now that Portage Park is starting to become a little more trendy.  But the house has some warts and with two growing kids, the thought of sharing the largest of 2.5 bathrooms with them doesn’t appeal to Nightingale.  And there’s the school thing.  Our neighborhood school is okay but not great.

On the other hand, would God put a Binny’s and a Culvers around the corner from us if she wanted us to move!  Besides, we don’t know where to move.  We don’t have any ties to any particular suburb here and a better school would mean less home than we have now or a much bigger mortgage.  Nightingale’s family is mostly in Memphis and we wouldn’t fit in there.

Gonna need a little more than duct tape to fix

A big change occurred at the office at the start of summer.  By that I mean I no longer work at an office.   One of the other work groups expanded and needed my seat.  The dude in charge of office seating asked if I really, really, really, really needed a seat in the office.  In spite of him being subtle, I was able to discern that he would rather not try to find me a seat.  So rather than wind up in a broom closet, so now I’m 99.9999% WFH.   I’ve gone into the office a total of three times since Memorial Day.

There are ups and downs of working 100% remote.  When you are at the office but not at your desk, people assume you are somewhere nearby.  In the breakroom, bathroom, meeting room, out having a smoke (even though they know you don’t smoke) or just out to lunch.  Kidding; no one takes lunch in Corporate America.

But when you are home, if you don’t respond within one-tenth of a second to an email or Instant Message, you obviously must be in the backyard sipping margaritas and working on your tan.  How absurd is that?  I drink Manhattans, not margaritas.

On the other hand, it is nice not having an hour plus door-to-door commute.  It’s even nicer when my kids aren’t being douche nuggets and I can get drop them off at daycare and get back with a little time before I clock in so I can sneak in a choir like mowing the lawn.

Let me know how your summer in the comments below and thanks for reading.

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Summer of 99: When It all went to Hell

This time of year always brings me back to the Summer of 1999 when I experienced a terrible Series of Unfortunate Events.  I lost my job.  I broke my toe.  My roommate and I were not getting along.  I got mugged.  And I let someone special get away.

Hat tip to Nina Vallone of YouKnowKeen.  She inspired me to write this based on this post.  

It always works out in the end; if it hasn’t worked out, it’s not the end

Back in the day, before the Marathon Era of my life, I ate, slept and breathed Volleyball. I wasn’t tournament level good but I was decent enough. We use to play volleyball on Tuesdays and Thursdays in Lincoln Park.  We would play until the sun went down, then head to the bar. It was usually very late nights but I still managed to get home just before midnight and get enough sleep to make it through my mindbogglingly boring job as a paralegal the next day. At the start of summer the sun would still be out while we were finishing up the last games. But about this time next week or two, it would start getting a little darker as we finished our games.
Those were fun times but I don’t think I really ever appreciated them for what they were. I should have really just appreciated the fact that I was enjoying all the city had to offer.

“My life was a mess. I was breaking down who I had become. Knowing all too well, I was existing for the moment, living my life, hurried and worried.”

And it all came to a head on the Friday of July 19, 1999.  This was the day I got fired from my dead end job as a paralegal at Big Bucks Law Firm 1.0.  That morning started out on the wrong foot.  I was running late and as I entered the lobby, I ran into a former co-worker.  We hugged and did that thing were you try unsuccessfully to catch up on two years in 30 seconds.

Seeing her was a foreshadowing of things to come.

I don’t want to relive the dirty details of all the Unfortunate Events.  The broken toe meant I couldn’t  defend myself well against the muggers; the getting fired made me too embarrassed to call her back.    I was in G-school but couldn’t get a job in technology because I had neither a degree or experienced.  The irony of that is I wasn’t any smarter the day I got my diploma than the day before but we value that piece of paper, or at least we use to.

At the time, I felt like I was at the end of my rope.  And then I had my epiphany.  And then my Year of Hell, taking on student loans and 3 course per quarter so I could graduation within a year.  And a crappy job at a DotCom.  Things didn’t get better until they did.  And there were other special someones until there was The Special Someone.  And I learned not to be afraid of the Dark.

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Doxing is bad, but it’s even worse when you do it to the wrong person

Hey, didja hear the news? The guy who moved in down the street is a child molester who burned down an orphanage and kicks puppies. Kicks puppies! Let’s go give him a piece of our mind.  I heard it from a friend, who heard it from her brother’s girlfriend’s, uncle’s cousin’s, baby momma’s doctor who lived next door to an old class mate’s mail man, so it has to be true.

Mob burns down his house.

Oh hey, turns out we had the wrong Mr Nobody. Whoops, our bad.

Doxing: search for and publish private or identifying information about (a particular individual) on the Internet, typically with malicious intent.

 

People mean well but execute poorly.  After the shooting of Trayvon Martin, Spike Lee posted what he thought was the address of George Zimmerman.  The address in question, however, turned out to belong to Elaine and David McClain, who had nothing to do with the shooter.

“My youngest son, his last name is Zimmerman and his middle name is George,” Elaine McClain told Orlando’s WKMG TV.Apparently Lee obtained the address from one of his Twitter followers and as is par for the course with social media, shared it quickly without vetting it.  Now he is being sued for $1.2 million.

Remember Cecil the Lion?  He was hunted and killed by a Minnesota dentist named Walter Palmer.  This sparked an international outcry and greater scrutiny of trophy hunting wild animals.  The outcry lasted almost a month but I’m not so sure about the other part.  But lost in all that is the fact that many outraged individuals visited Palmer’s office and harassed his staff…who had NOTHING to do with their employer’s actions.

It’s hard to keep up but recently there were two other people who committed terrible and perhaps unnecessary acts against fellow world citizens and public opinion outrage ensues.

A Walgreens pharmacist refused to provide an Arizona woman with miscarriage medication, citing his ethical beliefs. I never understood why people with these beliefs become pharmacists. It’s not like you didn’t know you’d have to fill these prescriptions in pharmacy school!

I’m having trouble finding a legitimate news site to verify but someone posted on Facebook that a woman was kicked off a Delta flight at the Fort Wayne International Airport over a dispute about whether or not the woman’s phone was on airplane mode.  Honestly, the electronics causing interference on flights is a bit suspect,  but rules are rules.

Let’s not forget that revealing the identity of Wrigley Field’s most infamous fan sent him into hiding for the better part of two decades.

The point of all this is that even though your intentions may be good, your actions may help pave the Road to Hell.  Life is filled with unintended consequences and you just never know what might happen if you provide an angry crowd with the address of a person who had a moment of dickness.  Maybe their 4 year old kid has to learn about  bad words much sooner than any parent would like, or worse.

There are other ways to get back at these people.  Better, legitimate ways that are perhaps a little harder to implement but have much more satisfying effects with fewer unintended consequences as the byproduct.

 

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Writer’s block comes in many forms

If you are a ChicagoNow fan or junkie, you probably have noticed a few changes around here.  Some good like the front page getting updated with new posts more often.  Some questionable like the Ask ChicagoNow posts.  ChicagoNow has always been a Hogwart’s for bloggers and our Dumbledoore left a few months ago (at least he wasn’t killed by the Defense Against the Dark Posts blogger).

They are definitely plotting their next move

At the same time, though unrelated, I have been in a slump since the start of the year. First off, my daytime paying job has been busy, stressful and more demanding than usual.

Second, I’m going through what I refer to as the Groundhog Day Phase with my kids.  Everyday it’s pretty much the same thing:  Fight with them to wake up in the morning, get them dressed and off to daycare.  Then scramble to get to work at a time that is in the ballpark of “Start Time”.   Hope that things are quiet enough that I can leave on time and meet my wife at daycare and bring the mini-tyrants home, feed them and fight with them to go to sleep at a decent time.  Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

Finally, while I have from time to time thrown my opinion in on Worldy News Events, things happen so fast that by the time I form a useful opinion on something, many more talented people have already opined on it six different ways to Sunday.

The irony is that this is the best time to be blogging for ChicagoNow because a lot of bloggers aren’t publishing as much and most of the heavy hitters are invisible! Minor leagues like me would get more exposure than ever.

You know how everyone is writing their Jimmy Memorial Posts and recalling how they got their blog started? I had to beg for mine and it was only after CN changed its model and let anyone who wanted to blog (and stopped paying bloggers) blog that I got mine. [No disrespect to Dumbledore, I mean Jimmy, he has been nothing but supportive and helpful.]

Another cost cutting move that the Chicago Tribune made was to eliminate all the stipends for those few bloggers at ChicagoNow who were getting one. I was lucky enough to be one of them. I had a contractual agreement to earn $50.00 a month for my blog for the past several years.

Frankly I’m not surprised because I always knew the CN we know (Hogwart’s for bloggers) couldn’t last forever.  I suspect things are going to change even more and someday ChicagoNow might either go away or become irrelevant. I know blasphemy, right.  My advice is to CN Bloggers is to get all the posts you can out of your system and let whatever happens, happen.  Now to just follow my own advice.

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Facebook Take a Break Feature puts friendships on Life Support

It’s not okay if we agree to disagree on this one

The other night a friend from my College Years posted something on Facebook that could be perceived as racist, if read in a certain light.  Specifically, any light bright enough to read her status post in.

It would be easy to unfriend her and not look back.  In fact, since I am trying to trim down my Facebook friends list, I may one day unfriend her completely.  But for the moment, I decided to use the Take a Break feature instead.

Facebook has a “new” feature called Take a Break.  As far as I can tell this is a more nuanced setting than simply hiding someone and obviously less severe than unfriending or blocking them.  It also appears to be meant for people who were in more intimate relationships that have now cooled but not completely diminished.

In the early years, Facebook had a little known setting called See less of/See More of.   It wasn’t easy to find and I don’t know if many people used it.  The setting has long since been deprecated but I suspect that if you implemented it, the affects are still in use.

The HIDE feature hides the person in question from your feed, but I suspect it also hides you from theirs.  This could be an unintended tell that you hide them when they suddenly stop seeing your cat video posts.

The Take A Break feature lets you chose if you want the “break” to be mutual or one sided.  Apparently you can hide your feed from them, but still see their posts; or vice versa.  I call this last one the narcissistic option.

This is the part where I justify not unfriending my little racist friend.  I really don’t have a good reason other than nostalgia or loyalty for keeping her around.  While I have not talked to this person IRL in decades, I am fond of the time we spent together in a sleepy little backwater college town.  I don’t think she realizes her racism overprivilege and I like to think that by staying connected to her, somehow I may influence her to reevaluate her outlook at social issues and inequality in America.  Now who’s being narcissistic.

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When you go from living Paycheck-to-Paycheck to Credit Card Cycle to Credit Card Cycle

Today is the closing date for my main credit card.  That means I start a fresh cycle and have already racked up $380 in charges for things I put off paying for until today.  That doesn’t include the $105 I spent on my belated Father’s Day present yesterday…I had to pull the trigger and purchase yesterday because it was on one of those One Sale per Day sites.

What you eat when you are poor

In my days of living paycheck-to-paycheck I would often play my special brand of  Credit Card Roulette, where you charge everything on one card one month, then a different card the next, paying off the previous card.  This kicked the expense down the road but never really resolved it.  You’d tell yourself that you wouldn’t spend as much the next month, but when your only expenses are food, rent and utilities, it’s kinda hard to cut back.  Oftentimes I would have to float a balance and pay interest.

My wife and I treat money slightly differently.  She absolutely abhors carrying a balance on her credit card and paying even a minute amount of interest.  I on the other hand, will pay interest to float a balance on a credit card rather than disperse large amounts of money from my bank account.  I might be “throwing away” money in interest payments but I believe that the credit card companies reward me with a better FICO score.  [Oh no wait,  that’s because I’m an old, straight, white guy.]

What you eat when you are less poor

The reasons for this are probably enough to keep a therapist in business for years, but my inner armchair psychologist says it’s because I have always gone through life without much of a safety net.  I came from a poor family and I didn’t get a good paying job right out of college.  I’m one of the very few “rags to slightly better rags” tales I know of.  I climbed the socio-economic ladder in sprints rather than steady strides, which means I struggled for years before making even decent coin.

The thing about being poor once upon a time is that you never feel like that time is over or very far away.  I always feel like I’m two unfortunate events and one bad decision away from being back to being broke.   So I pay a little interest because I figure if push comes to shove, and I have to choose between paying rent and paying my credit cards, I can always defer the cards until I have to declare bankruptcy.

 

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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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There is a world of difference between Being Critical and being Negative

You’ve probably seen those memes that advocate eliminating negativity, or banning negative thoughts from your life, or putting negative people in concentration camps.  Okay I made up that last one until a reader goes to meme generator…

What I don’t like about the concept is that it doesn’t make a distinction between Negativity and simply being critical or challenging.  Conceptually it shouldn’t have to, one should know the difference.

Scenario 1:  your team is trying to solidify the date for a new annual event the company will sponsor.  Someone suggests the 3rd week in April.  Person says “it will probably rain.”

Scenario 2:  same thing except someone suggests the 2nd weekend in May.  Person says “well every few years it will conflict with Mother’s Day.”

I’m all for mitigating and insulating against negative drama.  Unfortunately many weak minded people don’t differentiate between the two.  And sometimes a conniving or Machiavellian-esque person will define negativity so fluidly so as an excuse to kick someone out of their social circle.

I’ve seen this movie before, it goes like this:

Step one:  communicate to world/friends in common OMG did you see what so-and-so did/wrote/said?
response:  No what was it?

step two:  I cannot even repeat it but trust me, it was awful so trust me when I deem it too harsh for human eyes.

Now you have two choices: conform or be cast out.

I’ve never been accused of being overly optimistic.  Or regularly optimistic either.  Or confident.  But I have been accused of making pointlessly derisive remarks.  While one person’s pointlessly derisive remark is another person’s merely challenging comment, whatever I allegedly said got me unfriended.

I don’t recall the comment.  It is possible that I wrote something that just wasn’t bursting with sunshine and kittens but we’ll never know because she went all FoodBabe on me and deleted the comment.

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Flashes of Confidence

No one has ever accused me of posing an overabundance of Confidence. There have been glints, glimmers, and flashes, but at best I usually oscillate between cautiously optimistic and Fake It Til You Make It, with a heaping helping of Second Guessing thrown in for good measure.

Now the question  I have is, is it Fake it until you make it, or Fake it Til you make it or Fake it Till you make it?

By the way, there is absolutely no point to that last sentence and if I were a better writer, I’d just edit it out, but now that I’ve written it and then written about it, I just can’t seem to let go. Or writing about the sentence. OMG, what if I can’t finish this post because I’m stuck on this shit now?

Let’s get back to Serious for a minute.  Confidence is something you gain when you have successful outcomes and experiences.   And most of my life that was not the case.

Growing up in Humboldt Park, I got my butt kicked a lot for being a white kid in a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood.  It doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence when you know any stupid disagreement that kids have is gonna end up with someone starting a fight with you.

I remember being confident (or was it just cocky) in college.  Something changed somewhere during my time at NMSU.  When I first arrived I had confidence but by the end of my time there I lost my confidence.

And of course, any Modicum of Sureness after college was beaten out of me at my first job in Corporate America.

Even when good opportunities with lots of potential presented themselves, I would somehow either fuck them up myself or they would not match my perhaps disproportionate expectations.

I still don’t really have confidence so much as Bravado, or as it’s known by its scientific name: chutzpah.  At this age, my confidence is more just not having many fucks to give about things. I don’t back down and crumble when a friend doesn’t like something I say on Facebook.  I stand up for myself and defend myself better, though I willingly adapt my thinking upon receiving new factual information, like when I’m really being a jackass.

In a nutshell, I’ve become Bugs Bunny and that rabbit oozes confidence.

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Three valuable Friendship Lessons

Stop me if I’ve written about this before…or just read anyway.  Recently a friend reached out to me about Mutual_Friend who was being a twatcycle to them.  I listened for about 20 seconds before interrupting:  “oh sorry to hear, I’m sure it will work itself out.”

If you don’t know me, that’s not that kind of thing I usually say.  I’m usually a good listener when friends want to vent.  That’s a 100% US Grade A Choice blow off remark.  But I had to use it and I think my friend got the point, though they probably have no idea why I used it.

The thing is, some time ago, Mutual_Friend was being a twatcycle to me.  And Friend wasn’t exactly sympathetic to my situation.  I guess it didn’t occur to them that if Mutual_Friend was being a twatcycle to me, Mutual_Friend could do the same to them.

Lesson:  you don’t necessarily have to take a side when a friend vents about a mutual friend, but you do have to listen and offer some empathy.

They say You can easily judge the character of others by how they treat those who can do nothing for them or to them.—from The Sayings of Chairman Malcolm

Another friend reached out to me because he is trying to rent his condo in the West Loop.  He asked me to forward his link to the apartment.  In the days before Facebook that would have been a blast email to my address book.  Today that is either cutting and pasting a link or hitting the share button.

Any of these are help I can provide from the comfort of my couch yet I’m not compelled to do any of them.  Because when I was trying to sell my condo, this friend was not among the 6 people who shared the listing.

To be sure, I have no illusion that forwarding a link to a reality listing on FB is going to yield a buyer.  But what it does is show your friend that you care enough about them to generate the warm fuzzies by doing something that won’t benefit you in the slightest but earns you potential brownie points in the future.

People will post cat videos and share stupid statuses that are so fake, Snopes sheds a tear every time someone searches for it, but they won’t do something like sharing your news unless it benefits them in some direct way.

Lesson:  pay it forward, especially if the level of effort is so minimal you can literally do it from the comfort of your couch.

Finally, I have been skipping some social events and using Moose and Squirrel as an excuse.  Most of these are hard to make but there are a few that I could have sucked it up and made it to.  But with most of the hosts, I have over a decade of history where they skipped my dog’s birthday party but insisted I come to their cat’s wedding.  years of last-minute cancellations or not wanting to travel to my far off where the brown line goes to die neck of the woods.

Lesson: If you want people to care about your “cat’s wedding” you have to care about their “dog’s birthday party.”

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