Every Couple needs a Secret Language

Every couple, gay or straight, whether married or in a LTR, needs their own secret language. I’m not talking Lovey-Dovey baby talk but some simple words, phrases and even gestures that seem straightforward to circumstantial eavesdroppers, but have a clandestine meaning to you and your partner.  Think of these as your safe words for non-sexual situations.

You can just feel the passion burning between these two!    (Photo Courtesy of Ryan Lintelman)

One common event every couple goes through is a situation where one of you wants to leave a scene and the other may not or may not be aware. Nightingale and I don’t have this yet because we can still use the ole “gotta go, kids are about to have a meltdown,” but I have come up with what I call the Traffic Light Protocol.

• Green Light
• Yellow Light
• Red Light

Let’s say you are at a party and you are done doing the smiling and making small talk and just want to go home, but it’s not urgent. A Green Light phrase might be “honey, did we remember to take the laundry out of the washer? I don’t want mold to set in on my work clothes.”

In the Green Light phase, you’re telling your mate that they have about 20-30 minutes to make the rounds, talk to anybody they really want to speak with and then get out of there. You are going to turn into a pumpkin soon.

Now let’s imagine a different scenario. Same party but perhaps its even duller and you just are not feeling it. A Yellow Light phrase might be “honey, I’m pretty sure we didn’t take the laundry out of the washer and I don’t want mold to set in on my work clothes.”

This is a way to say okay wrap up with ever smooching and dealing you’re doing, but don’t engage anyone new and let’s get out of here in 15 minutes or less. You are turning into a pumpkin right now.

Now let’s imagine the same party but perhaps something transpires that irks you or someone is there that annoys you, or you’ve already given the Green or Yellow alert. A Red Light phrase might be “honey, our neighbor just texted that our laundry room is flooded.”

This is the 2-minute warning. You are beyond your limit and are going to turn a Rage Beast in 30 seconds or less. Wrap it up. No long good-byes.

One last thing: You must use these sparingly and judiciously. Also, you definitely should not use phrases that will blatantly insult anyone’s intelligence.

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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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These letters have been in a shoe box for over 25 years. Find out what I’m going to do with them

Back in the day, people wrote one another because phone calls were expensive, especially if they were long distance.  I have this box of old snail mail

Treasure Trove, junk mail, it’s a fine line

letters from my college days and shortly thereafter.  A treasure trove of envelopes of multitudes colors and sizes, stamps of all varieties, and postmarks from exotic places such as Kirksville, Missouri.  Yes, I saved them all, sentimental fool that I am.

I tend to hold on to things too long. Old memories, mementos and more than a few grudges.  I’ve been holding onto these letters for decades, moving them from home to home but never looking at them.  So I figured the time has come to deal with them once and for all.

I thought I could take a quick, first pass through them and cull the less meaningful, superficial ones.  They cannot all be gems.

This proved harder than I thought because often within the contents of a typical boring letter are nuggets of goodness. I see things that I missed, undervalued or outright ignored the first time.

The Case for Getting Rid of It

You should only hang onto old memories, and their physical artifacts, for two reasons. One, they provide some warm fuzzies that elevate your mood. Two, they remind you of what to do or not to do when life throws you in that situation again.

These letters meant something to me decades ago. Leaving NMSU back in my college years was traumatic for me.  I had a good group of friends.  I was doing okay academically and repairing the damage to my GPA that my clueless freshmen self-inflicted.

Alas, I had to leave because of finances and for years I tried to get back to Planet Kirksville and the life I had to leave behind.  I would visit Kirksville and later St Louis, even considering relocating there to be with my college friends.

I spent a lot of my 20s struggling because I didn’t have the support structure here that I had there (or thought I had there).  I spent a lot of time and energy holding onto something that didn’t exist anymore and probably didn’t really exist in the first place.  And had I been able to let go sooner, I probably would have had a better 90s and 2000s.  It wasn’t until I built something solid here that I was finally able to let go.

I saved these letters because I figured I might read them in my old age and enjoy some warm memories. But honestly, if I have to read these to have warm memories when I’m nearly 80, my life didn’t turn out so well.

The Case for Keeping Some of It 

Back then, they only duct tape the important meaningful letters

I googled what do to with old letters and surprisingly half a dozen articles appeared with that title (hence why I’m not using it as the headline for this post).  The best advice was Get rid of all cards and letters that don’t add to your happiness. You know, the letter from someone who promised they’d write and at the tail end of summer you get a postcard saying “hey dude, how’s your summer been? ready to get back to classes,” Signed: Somebody That I Use to Know.

Since I have access to an Enterprise sized scanner I am scanning everything, significant or insignificant.   But this is proving to be a challenge since many of these letters are folded, crumpled odd-sized pages and as such, are a bitch to get into the feeder.

There are a few people I will be able to send the originals back just in case genealogists and family historians want some insight into how their ancestor thought, what made them happy, and what broke their hearts.

Stay tuned.

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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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You can show Empathy, Outrage and Restraint all at the same time

Hey, did you hear about that Thing That Happened just recently moments ago?  It’s all over the Twittersphere and my Facebook feed has gone nutzo with everyone posting the same headline that totally and accurately Sums Up Everything That Happened.

Now the story has just come out, but of course we know everything about it because we are experts.  On EVERYTHING.  Let’s all board the Outrage Train.  Wait a minute…this just in.  New Information that totally turns the story around on its head.  Quick cue the backlash.  Now the backlash against the backlash.

Oh and look, now come the Johnny Come Lately friends who are sharing older versions of the story versus the Johnny on the Spots who share every new tidbit of info even if it later turns out to be untrue.  And of course the Mimes sharing Memes.

Oh let’s not forget clueless bloggers trying to ride the waves for page views (looks in mirror.)

Finally it devolves into a My Belief System versus Your Belief System.  Because if two people have a difference of opinion, it has to because of influence from the right or left, not just thinking for oneself.

Here’s a picture of some cute kids obviously up to no good.

If you are reading this on the date this post was published, I’m likely talking about the incident on United flight 3411 where an Asian doctor was forcefully removed from his seat.  But I could be talking about the Pepsi Commercial fiasco or anything that happens day and day, week after week in our Immediate News Cycle and Instant Gratification Society.

This is a paraphrase of I wrote in a private FB group when the story first came to my attention:

This is one of those Viral Outrage stories that always seem to follow a pattern. Look for some “additional” info that might justify the actions. then the back lash against the back lash. wash. rinse repeat.  I was speaking generically about the pattern of event like this: something happens, it looks like X, then more info is revealed, suddenly it’s less clear cut. In this particular instance agreed it would be hard pressed to justify dragging and injuring a passenger.

I wrote it too quickly and should have added that there is nothing I can think that would justify how this guy was treated. However, the pattern still remains: event | outrage | new info | back lash | backlash against backlash.

I got a little pushback from another CN blogger who implied I was Tone Policing:  “when someone has been victimized in any context, the demand to hear the other side because there must be more to the story is VERY hurtful to people who have already suffered very publicly.”

 I think her assessment was a bit strong but I apologize I came off that way.  I’m not saying the outrage is never justified. I’m just saying it’s okay to wait 5, 10, minutes or so to gather all the facts.  And sometimes I think the knee-jerk response seems to be more outrage than sincere empathy.

Thank you for reading and I hope you will comment below. 

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7 Practical Life Lessons everyone should figure out

Earlier this year, I wrote a post about some awful cliches and what they really mean.  Today’s post is meant as sort of a follow up to that one, which is a fancy way of saying using the left over material that didn’t make it into the first piece. Enjoy.

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If you like this post, you might also like 7 awful cliches and what they really mean.

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