Taking the long view

Within the past 12 hours, both of my kids have asked me to explain the "fiscal cliff" (and doesn't the need to put that in quotation marks just about sum it up?) to them and in the course of explaining it, I'm finding it impossible to avoid using the phrase "because the current Republican party is insane" repeatedly.

I remember reading a book by the conservative former National Lampoon editor PJ O'Rourke where he said "The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it.”  Clearly, much of the dysfunction of the past few years has been the result of a clear Republican strategy of weakening the Federal government in particular but all governments in general. I'm starting to wonder though if the current lunacy is a strategy or an unintended consequence.

You can argue it either way. You can say, oh poor John Boehner (Republican Speaker of the House), he can't control his caucus and he can't get anything done. And he does seem like a sad, pathetic figure, and that's how he's portrayed in the media and the public's view of Republicans and especially congressional Republicans is very negative.

But maybe it's all an act. Maybe the bigger idea is a game of chicken, where the Republicans do everything they can to screw things up in every way with the hope that they can make the whole thing collapse before they're run out of town. It's not hard to see why they'd do that. They know they're losing the demographic battle and there's only a certain point to which they can succeed in trying to keep Democratic types from being allowed to vote. It's just a matter of time.

So why not throw the Hail Mary pass (a phrase which either originated with Notre Dame in the 30's or with Roger Staubach and the Dallas Cowboys in 1978) and see if you can just blow everything up and leave the Democrats presiding over nothing? Yeah, it's kind of a nihilist approach, but that's entirely consistent with their behavior.

PHSSD

I am feeling assaulted. That's pretty much my theme for 2012 (note to myself: vow to be reflective at some point other than the week between Christmas and New Years). The first 2/3 of the year brought other people's overwhelming medical issues and the incessant tension surrounding them. When that finally dissipated, shingles got me within a week. Now that's fading out after nearly 4 months, and I'm reeling from weeks media frenzy, which may have been there all along but I'm just really honing in on it now.

I think that it struck me right around Christmas day, because there was an ad inserted in the paper that screamed in bold type Doors Open at 7:00AM December 26 and in subhead type Redeem Your Giftcards.

Having just endured what seemed like an endless series of sales, from Black Friday to Cyber Monday to Free-Shipping Day, still every day there is someone screaming at me to buy something. NOW!

I'm at the point now where I don't even want to buy the stuff I need to buy, which is bad because I really need to buy that stuff. I feel like I should be waiting for a sale, or even better, a DOORBUSTER SALE.

I'm being only slightly facetious here. I always liked reading ads, but at this point it's simply too much shouting. We'll go right from New Year's to post-holiday clearance to White Sales to Valentine's Day to President's Day. It will never stop.

Book report, part 2

Although I was shamed into beginning The Count of Monte Cristo, it took almost no time at all for me to get completely wrapped up in the story. I knew virtually nothing about the book before I started, but it takes only a few pages to offer sufficient hints to understand the path of the story.

It's clear from the outset that a virtuous character will suffer grievous harm at the hands of those jealous and selfish in fairly short order, and that the remainder of the book will be devoted to his efforts to right those wrongs. And boy, does he ever. It's a classic of revenge, slowly built and intricately constructed and definitely served cold.

Even though it's easy to suss out the basics of the story, nothing prepared me for the richness of detail and florid descriptions of every setting, from abodes both modest and opulent to prison cell to palace to den of thieves. We follow the hero from prison to the island of Monte Cristo, where we leave him while the remainder of the sprawling cast of characters is introduced and brought to life.

And then the plot plays out. We learn gradually how the Paris social web inhabited by these characters is woven and how the Count becomes part of it. Slowly and subtly so as to be beyond the notice of the offending few, the noose tightens, and by the time the Count, brilliant, rich beyond compare, master of disguise and everything else, reveals his identity to the villains they are completely undone.

I don't want to reveal more. The free digital version (from iBooks) that I read is 1600+ (small with big type) pages but it moves along without ever dragging (though I'll admit I did not read every detail of every luxurious salon) or skipping ahead too fast. I could not recommend it more highly.

Book report, part 1

We didn't go away this year, for a variety of reasons. Usually when we travel,  I do a great deal of reading and so decided to undertake to do some at home as well. Choosing a book is always the rub.

I have always tended toward reading non-fiction rather than fiction, which I don't think reflects well on me (and why else would someone do something other than to have it reflect on them). Non-fiction is simply too easy, and worse, much initially interesting non-fiction doesn't bear finishing. From my experience, a great number of popular and/or worthy non-fiction books make their points clearly and well within the first 50-100 pages. The rest is merely amplification and explication. No matter how well-written and interesting, non-fiction books tend to have a point of diminishing returns. If I get the point, I get the point. I don't need it explained and exemplified to me repeatedly.

Fiction, on the other hand, is a building up process, and requires more patience. You inhabit a new world and have to decide if you want to live in it for a while, and you never want to leave the best of the lot. I also like when you reach the point where you're thinking and sometimes even talking in the style of the book. This is particularly true when reading something like Jane Austen. That kind of language is addictive.

It's hard to choose fiction, so even though I rarely read it, I'll often read book reviews just to keep current. It was in this spirit that I read a critic's top ten list, and though I didn't read anything on the list, I did see something that intrigued me. In her description of a book called "The Black Count", a biography of Alexandre Dumas' father, Salon's book critic, Laura Miller begins: If you’ve ever read Alexandre Dumas’ swashbuckling novels — and if you haven’t, what a sad, drab reading life you’ve led, my friend —and it stopped me dead.

How had I never read any of those books- Three Musketeers and the others? The comment cut me to the quick. It was Christmas Eve Day and all the libraries were closed, but I was certain that the Gutenberg Project would have all of them, so down to my iPad it loaded and I have spent the past few days immersed in The Count of Monte Cristo. All I can say here is Oh. My. God. For more, see part 2.

Overheard in line

As is our Judaic duty, we were planning on seeing the 3:10 showing of Les Miz at the local cinema. There was an unruly, ethnically homogeneous crowd in front. I stood on line and chatted with the woman right of me, a retired teacher who told me the guy at the window was "an idiot," and who did not want to come back at 6:30 (it was about 3 at this point), so she decided she would see Lincoln now and buy a ticket for Les Miz on Friday. She approached the booth and:

"Can I get a ticket for Lincoln?"
"Yes."
"And can I have a ticket for Les Miz on Friday?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because you didn't tell me what time you want to see it."
"When is it playing?"
"Twelve o'clock and 3:10."
"Three-ten."
"One?"
"Oh, there's a show at 1? That would be better."

At this point the 'idiot' rolled is eyes and I started laughing so I didn't hear the rest of it.

Down the rabbit hole again

It's depressing to think how my recovery has taken so long that I can think of it in stages, but since all the world's a stage, I guess I can deal.

I have reached the stage formally designated at Screw This (this is one of the seven stages of recovery and an important part of any 12-step program). In my case, that means I'm getting off my medication and damn the consequences. I have no idea whether I even need some of the stuff I've been doing/taking, so I'm in the process of chucking it all.

I don't recommend this in all cases- it's probably a bad idea for cancer and heart patients- but I'm at a point where I seem to have 2 symptoms and that's it. The pain part I think I can manage and again, I have no idea that the prescription stuff helps anyway. I do know that the medication has potential side effects, and I'm more concerned with that than the pain. I would, for example, be able to have more than one glass of wine if the situation calls for it, and truly, what situation doesn't? If it wouldn't benefit from a nice glass of wine, it's not much of a situation.

Seriously, though, the most troublesome things at this point are my memory lapses. These could be caused by (1) aftereffects of the shingles, (2) medication side effects, (3) getting older, and (4) an overestimation of how good my memory was in the first place. Medication cannot help with any of these things and might even be prolonging the problem, so why bother? This will be different, and as Phil Connors would say, anything different is better.

Earlybird special New Year's resolution

Given everything I've observed over the course of the year, I've decided that in 2013 I will readjust my charitable giving downward somewhat and spend the difference doing as much shopping as I can at local businesses and buying American-made, preferably union-made products.

I'm not going to absolutist about it. Chain stores are more convenient at times and have longer hours. I don't live in New York where I can go to Fairway or West Side markets a 11PM. And there are some things, like office supplies for instance, where the small businesses have completely disappeared, at least around here and there are some things specifically made for chain stores that I like. This all necessarily means buying more organic, or at least locally produced items, and that's fine with me as well.

I do not kid myself into thinking this will work for everyone. I am very fortunate to have both the financial flexibility and the variety of local outlets to do this. But I am very worried about the future of my country and I owe it to myself and everyone involved to put my money where my mouth is.

Just a routine pick-up

I promise you that I am neither inventing nor exaggerating anything here.

My daughter finished her final exams on Wednesday and so after work Thursday we headed up to New York to pick her up. We decided years ago to give up our SUV, keep smaller cars and rent something big when we needed it. So I started the morning by walking to the local rental car place because if I drove over there I'd have to drive 2 cars at once which I'm not good at.

As it turned out, I only got a few feet from my house when a neighbor drove up, stopped and asked if I wanted a ride. He has a very nice car so I said okay. He is also someone who smokes cigars while he drives, which I'd forgotten. I asked him how he was and that took up the entire ride. I gave him openings to ask how I was but he was clearly uninterested. I'm guessing his motivation is that he wanted to talk and preferred to have someone listening while he did so.

So I get the minivan and take it home and then off to work I went. When I got home a bit after 1, we headed out. There was no traffic at any point. We were speculating that this was because of all the GRIDLOCK ALERT - USE MASS TRANSIT signs on the roads, though how someone who is driving on a highway is supposed to stop and take mass transit is beyond me. You'd think that message should be imparted before you get on the highway.

We make one short stop and get to the dorm at 4:30. My daughter disliked her suitemates, so she decided to change rooms after this semester. She had been assigned a new room and was supposed to find out if we could just move the stuff over instead of bringing it home or back. She said it was fine, so we packed 2 sets of bags- dorm and home. This made packing the car kind of like a number squares puzzle, because the pieces all needed to fit and we needed to be able to get the dorm bags out without having to remove the home bags as well.

The loading and packing took about 2 hours, mostly because the carts the school offers to move things just barely fit into the elevators, meaning that if there was more than one other person in the elevator when it arrived, you had to just wave it on and ring again. There are 15 stories in the building and only 2 elevators, so you can imagine how often it was arriving completely empty.

But finally we finished, and we went over to the other building. My daughter went in to get her key; I hesitated to unload because I didn't want to unload the stuff and then have to reload it if it turned out that she couldn't get the key. Unfortunately, that turned out to be prescient, as there had been some sort of mix-up and the key was in an office which was closed by that time.

At this point, we needed food and my wife wanted pizza, so she Yelped our way to Koronet Pizza on Broadway and 111th Street. Koronet has an unusual way of utilizing resources because they figured out that the way to get the most pizza into an oven is to have it be one big piece, so their pies are (almost) as wide as the oven, yielding slices that look like this:

Yes, pizza bigger than your head (not specifically my head). Pretty darned good too.

Pizza in lap, we went downtown and out by the Lincoln Tunnel, which, by the way, seems to have approximately 43 different entrances, stretching from 9th Avenue and 40th Street to 11th Avenue and 36th Street. Pretty remarkable for one tunnel and almost too silly to be called confusing.

Then finally we were on our way, cruising down the Jersy Turnpike when, just a couple of miles south of Exit 11, the "low tire" indicator came one. I've had these in my cars from time to time, but this was an unfamiliar car, so I slowed down in case it got bad, and sure enough, it did.

So to set the scene, we're at Mile 90, in the cars only lane, on a shoulder big enough to fit the car and plenty big to get in and out of the car if you're Flat Stanley. Otherwise, it was terrifying, standing 18 inches from cars going 70 miles and hour. We called AAA and the ordered us up some service.

After about 25 minutes, a van pulls up behind us. A big young guy comes over, explains the costs, (like I'm going to negotiate, like no way I'm paying $30 for this. I've got a van full of clothing and supplies, I'll start a new life right here on the shoulder). Meanwhile, I'm thinking we're going to have to unpack the whole car to get the tire out. The good news is that minivans (or at least Chrysler minivans) don't have the spare inside the car. It instead hangs underneath, so total unpacking was not necessary). The guy tells me he needs to get in the driver's seat to lower the tire, so I get out.

It certainly was pleasant out there.

I hang out and then another guy gets out of the van. He's not as big, but they start discussing things. I'm presuming it's some sort of division of labor thing, but then they come back to me and ask where the owner's manual is. Uh-oh, so they don't actually know how to get the tire ("We're trying to get it out without breaking the bracket..."). But back at it they went. Eventually they booted my wife out of her seat as well, leaving only my daughter in the car. She enjoyed their little Two Dumb Guys show (favorite quote: "My title is mechanic but I like to think of myself as a technician.") while Ronnie and I sat in their van to keep warm, since it was about 35 degrees and windy. After a total of about 30 minutes, the big guy comes around back with the spare. He consults with the other guy in animated fashion and then comes back to the van and announces that we have to get out of the van.

"Why?" I say.
"I need to go get some equipment"
"What kind of equipment?"
"Well, we don't have a jack."

So there you have it, ladies and gentlemen. They dispatched a guy (the non-technician was just along for the ride) to fix a flat tire and he neglected to bring a jack. Why, one might ask, does he even need to remember to bring it? Do they not know who is working for them? Are there flat tires that can be changed without a jack? Are the service vans not loaded with at a minimum the equipment needed for the simplest of services?

Back into our own car we go and wait. After another half hour, the van returns and we feel the rear of the car start going up. I don't really think you're supposed to do that with people in the car, but hey, I'm not the technician.

Finally they come back to roust us, and I pick the tire up off the shoulder and somehow squeeze it into the packed read of the car. I then ask, what's the range on these donut tires? "Oh, around 50-60 miles." This sounded too vague for me, so I looked it up. Seventy miles seems to be a popular number. I then check Google Maps and how far are we from home? 71 miles.

Hmmm. So I ask if they think they have replacement tires at the rest area and they have no idea. They said if I called the rental company that they'd have me go back to Newark Airport because that was the closest open branch. I said no f---ing way was I going there because (1) by the time I got turned around it was 30 miles back to there, and (2) rather than replacing the tire they would almost certainly want to just replace the car, which would entail unpacking and repacking the entire thing. Uh-uh. I decided we should go for it.

My daughter was impatient to get home, but was mostly motivated to get to a rest room, as were we all. One of the myriad of ways you can divide people into two groups is that there are people who "do" other people and those who don't. By "do" I mean do impressions. My daughter is one of those "do" people, and she had us laughing the whole way to the rest stop reciting their conversations.

I should note here that 71 miles, while not too bad when you're going 70-75 mph, feels very far when you're going 50 mph, the max for the spare. But after an hour and a half or so, at 11:30, five hours after leaving Manhattan, we pulled into the driveway, spare intact. It had been raining steadily for most of the drive back (though not while we were standing on the Turnpike shoulder) and I uttered 6 words (three of them being 'no, way, and now'), lay down on the couch, pulled a blanket over me and the next thing I knew it was 1AM.

Which way is up?

Today, I was showing the Calculus class how to analyze graphs using something known as a side chart, which is a number line with random-looking scribbling on it. I was setting this up and somebody gently asked, "Is it okay if I put -2 to the left of 0 and 2 to the right of 0?" So I looked and saw that I was doing my number line backwards, counting down instead of up as I moved from left to right. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this. The number 2 is not to the left of 0 any more than North on a map is actually up.

There is no correct way to make a number line, no matter what the math teacher and book says. When you are doing one "correctly," what you are doing is what the convention is and what the authority figure told you to do, nothing more. In fact, any Algebra book is filled with number lines that don't go from left to right. Every graph has one that goes up and down as well, and a 3D graph would have one sticking straight out from the page, if lines were actual things. Any convention that is dependent on the orientation of your paper is just silly (what I did would be perfect if you were looking at it upside-down) and violates the beauty of working with something that is entirely conceptual. Math certainly has plenty of absolute rules, but none of them say anything about left, right, up and down.

Maps, on the other hand, are a completely different thing. North and South are just ways of going around in a circle, and there's nothing up or down about that. And making a map means taking the surface of a sphere (or spheroid, anyway) and translating onto a 2-dimensional representation. There are few things less 2-dimensional than a sphere, so the whole idea is a travesty and a sham. It's done for people's convenience with no regard to accuracy. It's a mess and I just hope nobody ever tries to do it to me.

Teevee

This may surprise you, but I can't wait for the Bachelorette wedding. Those two are so cute. I'm not going to watch it or anything.

Though the DirecTV commercials with the DVR warning screen are tasteless and awful, they do highlight perhaps the quintessential First World Problem of the early 2010's- the overflowing DVR. How the hell did this become a stressful thing? Do we really need to have so much stuff ready to watch at any one time?

Here's my observation, and correct me if I'm wrong. I believe that if you have so many episodes of something on your DVR that they're beginning to drop off, you're never going to watch the show.

And speaking of dropping off, what is the deal with the phrase, "Dropping like flies?" Someone told me last week that so many students were getting sick that they were dropping like flies. As the designated flycatcher around here, I can assure you that flies have a limited action vocabulary. They fly and when they're not flying they are standing on something, usually a window. I've not seen them drop, but I've not seen students drop either, so I guess it is the same.

Back to TV. I'll tell you my mom's favorite story about my TV watching when I was a kid. When I was around 8, I was limited in how much TV I could watch. Not sure why then in particular, but I was told that on school nights I could watch only 1/2 hour of TV. I accepted the news with grace and dignity (I assume, I don't remember this), and then came back a few minutes later with a piece of paper and reported to my mother: "Okay, I'll watch 8 minutes of Bugs Bunny, 5 minutes of Sandy Becker (a local fave), 10 minutes of the Flintstones and 7 minutes of Yogi Bear." My mom always thought that was very funny, but little did she know how well I had anticipated the modern ADD world in which we live in.

We got our first color TV in 1967. I remember clearly because we got it in time to watch the very first Super Bowl. It was a 13-inch GE Portacolor, the first portable color TV. Portable was important then, because most people only had 1 TV. Having a second one you could relocate was a luxury.

That TV figured prominently in my most frightening TV-watching experience. We brought the portable TV up to our new country home. My parents went out to a friend's house, leaving me and my friend, Charlie Broadwin, also Brooklyn born and bred, alone in this isolated, unfamiliar house in the woods. We started watching a movie called The Beast with Five Fingers, where Peter Lorre hallucinates that a severed hand is chasing him and is trying to strangle him. Near the climax of the movie, Lorre is sitting in a room, paralyzed by fear; he hears a distant thump, a creak outside the room, a shutter blows in the wind and bangs against the window, a lute mounted on the wall has one of its strings suddenly break, he quivers with fright. And then, perfectly in rhythm with the scene, the handle on the top of the portable TV, by which you carried the TV from room to room, the handle tipped over from its upright position and fell against the top of the TV with a loud bang, and Charlie and I both suddenly levitated about 3 feet, straight up, and ran out of the room. My most memorable TV-watching experience.

Just sayin'

Maybe it's just because of the election followed by Hostess and Walmart, the Michigan legislature's rush to do every possible bad thing in 4 weeks before they're booted out, the tax/debt standoff and now yet another school tragedy, but I've never been more aware of how today's Republican party has taken the stance of, "What position should we take on this? What would the worst person, the most evil, selfish a--hole I know say about it?"

From what springs all the anger, resentment, lack of empathy and vindictiveness? How bad can their lives really be? Because this is not principled conservative thinking. It seems like barely thinking at all. I've generally leaned liberal, but not always and not on every issue. But now it's really hard to continue seeing these people as opponents and not see them as out and out enemies. I can't be the only one thinking this, am I?

Scan this!

In a rather unusual phrasing, N. Joseph Woodland, the grandfather of the bar code died today. To get funeral information, just scan below:

It's kind of unusual to have the grandfather of something noted, but it appears that there wasn't any father of the bar code. This clearly makes no genealogical sense at all, but he was the guy who, while a student at Drexel, came up with the idea (drawing lines in the sand at the beach with his fingers and thinking it reminded him or morse code) that someone else perfected (with his assistance). 

Having grown up during the time when supermarket checkers entered prices by hand on cash registers (there were typically keys for cents, multiples of 10 cents, and dollars), so a price tag was affixed to everything and the adding up of the grocery bill was about as accurate as anything people enter into calculators. Meaning pretty accurate, but far from perfect, and slow.

The whole story is pretty interesting, and if you want to read the guy's obituary, it's here, and make sure to click through to the 2011 obit of Alan Haberman, the supermarket guy who implemented the codes and oversaw its advancement for many years. His story is maybe even more interesting.

Attention to the bold (or bolded, at least) advice

I've occasionally ranted about the need for people to pay attention, just to one's life in general. The explosive increase in stimuli has ignited a debate (not literally, though that would be fun), on what constitutes attention. Is it focus, implying attention to a single thing? Or is it, I don't know what the word for the opposite of focus is aside from blur? Blur implies that no one thing is more in focus than anything else, so I can go with that. What it refers to is attending to multiple stimuli concurrently.

My generation as a whole thinks that blur is bad and focus is good, but I'm not ready to accept that this isn't an archaic idea. How do we know which is better than the other? Maybe the best is to be able both to spread your attention and to focus, depending on what is required of the moment.

The best example I can think of where blur is superior is driving. No, I don't mean driving with blurry vision. That would be bad. I mean playing attention to many things simultaneously.

The objective of driving, let's remember, is to get from one place to the other without bumping into anything. Necessarily, this elevates giving attention to all potential bumpees at all times. I've spread this advice around before, but I'll repeat a bit here.

First of all, stationary objects require the least amount of attention. Trees, lampposts, buildings and the like can have their position noted and avoided, no more. Cars and pedestrians, on the other hand, have a tendency to move around and are therefore much more likely bumpee candidates. So the safest way to drive is to do everything possible to avoid them.

I'll tackle cars here (again, not literally and not even potentially as entertaining as igniting a debate), since there tend to be more of them on the road, at least around where I live. The good thing about other cars is that they are big, recognizable (as cars) and easy to spot. The bad things about other cars are that they (1) do not sit still and prone to changing speed and direction, and (2) are controlled by someone other than you and therefore somewhat unpredictable.

Since most people can recognize the presence of cars pretty easily, you should use that information to keep away from them in every way possible. This entails leaving as much space as possible between your car and the others. Since a car is pretty rectangular, that means there are 4 sides, all of which must avoid the other cars. Front is easy because it's right there- you just have to look straight ahead, something even the most attentionally challenged can do if they're not texting. Don't follow another car closely. Cars have a nasty habit of stopping or turning without giving you advance notice.

The rear is accessed my a mirror. A taxi driver once told me that the front of the car was his problem, the rear was his insurance company's problem, and that's true. If someone hits you from behind it's almost never considered your fault if you weren't breaking the law (see the above note about not following closely). I check the rearview mirror occasionally, but mostly to see if someone is getting closer to me. I do, however, always check the rearview mirror when I brake, because I don't know either if the car behind me knows I'm braking or if they're unable to stop for some reason. I've avoided accidents of both sorts by checking, one of which probably would have been fatal to people in the other car. (By the way, that thing they teach you in driving school about not turning your wheels when stopped and waiting for a left turn but instead waiting until you stop moving is very good advice. I know from potentially disastrous experience).

The sides of the car are tricky because you can't check them both at the same time and because there are typically places you can't see at all without moving your head around. Cars on the side of you are more likely to hit you than cars either in front or behind, because they potentially can't see you either. Therefore. they should be avoided at all costs. It's fine to clump up at a traffic light when you're not moving, but otherwise, if you're driving on a multi-lane road, do not drive with another car next to you. This will (1) avoid another car hitting you, and (2) give you an escape path if something happens in front of you. I can't count how many accidents this has saved me. If traffic is moving slowly and the spacing doesn't permit this, try to place yourself at least slightly in front of the car next to you. This makes you much easier to see.

There's way more to it than this, but it's a start.

My mind is literally in the gutter, or on the gutter

I was driving near my daughter's school today and suddenly it got very loud in the car. I looked around and saw that some vandal had cut strips out of the road. I was annoyed, but then I saw signs on a lamppost that said RUMBLE STRIPS. And they certainly were that. You'd think they'd fix the road instead of just calling attention to what was wrong with it.

But seriously, these thing were near an intersection where there was a fatal accident a few weeks ago, so I guess they want people to slow down. And to aid the slowing down process, they also are employing something called SPEED CUSHIONS. What the hell are speed cushions? I've seen speed bumps and even speed humps. Maybe the speed cushions is where the speed bumps do their speed humps. You can fill in where the rumble strips fit in.

Starting over anew again

Today was my third first day of the school year. I had one back in September, then another a few weeks ago when I returned to teach one class, and now today when I added a second class. If all goes well, I will have yet another first day after winter break when I add my third (and for this year final) class.

This has required some adjustment on my part. Over the course of the past week or so, I've become more and more aware of what I'm dealing with. My energy level is noticeably better and can stay that way for hours, then suddenly I'm wiped out and need to lie down. My brain is acting a little wonky too. I have a touch of memory loss. Not the fun kind like in movies or soap operas where you have amnesia and don't know who you are or where you are and you get to live your life anew, perhaps even falling in love again, only this time with your true love, not that loser you were with before your accident.

No, not like that. Like, being reminded that a week ago you said you'd do something and now have no memory of ever talking about it. I've forgotten appointments and have forgotten to look at my calendar to check. I have a slight suspicion that I'm being punked at times, but I have no way of knowing for sure. We're not talking Memento, but still.

It's weird, because if I'm teaching I'll have blank moments, but because I'm standing in a classroom at a whiteboard writing something down and a bunch of kids are watching me, I have a bunch of clues as to what I'm doing and how I need to fill things in (looking at what I just wrote is a good one). But without that kind of specific context, it can be difficult.

So the only conclusion I can reach is that my mind is having the same kind of reactions that my body is, where it will be humming along (literally, I hum incessantly) and then just stop operating properly. This would probably be bad if it happened when I'm driving, but everyone on the road is always so insane at this time of year that nobody would notice.

More than anything, this reminds me of an old SNL bit. Guess I just have to see what happens next.

Update on my favorite topic- me

I got a personality test back yesterday. Don't ask why I has a personalility test done in the first place; maybe I wanted to make sure I had one, but mostly it had to do with it being free. Apparently, my personality passed, because they didn't arrest, institutionalize, or eject me when they gave it back. In fact, it was very disappointing in that it was boring. I sounded so normal and well-adjusted. As a psychological therapy consumer, this is crushing.

Last time I had one of these things done there was much more drama in the analysis. I was someone who was completely out of balance because I would generally withdraw from situations, but would kind of pop in from the periphery to disrupt things from time to time. The phrase they used was "bomb thrower." I took great pride in that. Now I get "...prefers to attain a balance between emotion and intellect, using rational decision-making and pragmatism." How dull does that guy sound? I really should have had my daughter fill it out for me like I was originally going to do. That's what I get for being respectful of the psychological process, so here's something less respectful.

So I'm sitting in the room with this group, and the psychologist, as an example of a particular sort of behavior, is describing someone who had been a client at some time in the past. The description is a well-constructed blend of vagueness and specificity to allow us to understand the point without violating anyone's privacy. Anyway, as the description builds it begins to remind me of something, and suddenly it hits me, I know this person. Someone once said similar things to me and matches this description. Now this was a very long time ago, like over 200 in dog years, but we're talking about a pretty unforgettable character, brilliant and attractive and funny and sociopathic. Sounds like a perfect date, yes?

And I'm dying to call out, I know them! That was the person who recommended you to me in the first place! And I went along with it because if you could handle someone that insane, you could certainly help me with my first world problems. But I couldn't because that would violates all the rules and would blow up the entire point we were trying to make, so maybe I was being respectful of the process at that moment, but I'm biding my time.

Did you know there are people inside banks, not just ATMs?

Because I have a sarcastic sense of humor, people regularly refer to me as being cynical. I consider this unjust, because I think I'm an optimistic realist. I try to see things clearly and not get caught up in what other people want you to think. And I think people who spend time with me find me to be a pretty upbeat, positive person.

Part of the problem is my marketing background. Marketing is all about manipulation, developing communications that affect people's behavior. That's why it's fun, getting people to try something new, or keep doing what they've been doing even though they might want to make a change, or whatever. It's always about understanding who you're communicating with, what they think now, and what you want them to think when you're finished with them. This kind of background doesn't make lead one to unthinkingly take things at face value. Everything done in a good business is done for a reason, and I'm always looking for it.

I understand that it can seem cynical, but it's not. I won't even say that the people crafting the messages are cynical. It depends. Sometimes people really should stop behaving in one way and start in another. However, I gotta say, there's something about going at PNC Bank, anywhere, but especially in Bryn Mawr, that sets off my coded message detector.

I'm not sure what's gone on there, but beginning about a year ago, when I walk into the branch, I am besieged with friendly greetings in a way that seems suspicious. Oh, Frank, you may say, there you go taking a cynical view of people being friendly. Au contraire, mon frère. I have no problem with people I know or am acquainted with being friendly. I'm friendly to people sometimes myself when it suits me. But I'm not friendly all the time no matter what. And I don't effusively greet people I barely (if at all) know every single time one walks through the door. And keep in mind that while I never found it unpleasant going in the bank, the level of personal interaction never really registered with me. But now it's a minimum of 4 or 5 enthusiastic "hellohowareyoutoday?" people every time.

So here are the possibilities that I can think of: (1) Something changed markedly for the better in the lives of all of the people who work at PNC and made them all more friendly and cheery and they're just all living the dream. (2) They fired all the normal people who worked at PNC and replaced them with Stepford (I'm sorry, that was cynical) genuinely friendly creatures. (3) Or everyone miraculously got the same idea about how to reach when customers come into their place of business, or (4) There was a corporate directive that noted that people were a) starting to really hate banks, b) beginning to especially hate huge banks like PNC, and c) seek other places to park their money, and which told everyone who work in the branches that they'd better be friendly to the customers or else.

I'm not faulting the people who work at the bank on this. They do a reasonably good job of being friendly, and it helps that I always try to talk to customer service people as if they're real people, not machines that take care of stuff for me. It's just kind of creepy, that's all.

Buttoned up

I am dreadfully sick of people asking me how I feel and even more tired of talking about how I feel, so rather than just be rude to everyone (though that sounds entertaining, come to think of it, and people would excuse me because "Poor Frank, he's not feeling well and that's why he's being rude," so it's a win-win) I'm going to just wear a button that says "Don't Ask," and for school I'll have another one that says, "Oy, Don't Ask."

Well, isn't that convenient?

I know I'm not venturing into a new topic here, but convenience foods are on my mind. I was reading the coupon insert that got stuck through our mailbox yesterday (who doesn't?) and was $1 off a bag of "flame grilled" Ball Park frozen hamburgers. Yeah, already cooked, microwaveable. This disturbs me on 3 levels. First, just ugh. Second, I'm never getting a hamburger at a ballpark again because I'll assume they're using these. Third, how frigging hard is it to make a hamburger? Who doesn't know how to flatten a lump of ground beef, put it in a frying pan and cook it? And if that's beyond your skill level, how can you afford the frozen precooked kind?

It's like pancake mix. I make pancakes from scratch every week. You know what's in pancakes? Flour, salt, sugar and baking soda in a bowl, and pour in an egg mixed with milk. And it you go from start to serving in 10 minutes tops. Is this so hard you need to pay 5 times the price to get a mix? Or buy them frozen? Oy.

I like my convenience foods to add value. Like a chocolate bar. That's convenience food. It's hard to make chocolate. Or even cereal. Even if I can find corn, I don't have the steamroller thing they use to squish it into flakes. And whatever it is that makes Cap'n Crunch so crunchy? I'm pretty sure I don't have any in my house. So come on food manufacturers! Come up with some better ideas!

Easily worth 30 second of your time

We were talking about the awful and funny side effects of botox, which I'd mentioned in a previous post, and what I kept going back to is one of the funniest commercials I've ever seen, a spot from the pre-baby E-Trade campaign. I have nothing to add, so enjoy:

My new perspective will be to keep everything in perspective

I've been sick, more or less, for nearly 3 months now. That's a long time to be sick, especially for someone who's not really used to being sick. My therapist (yes, I go to a therapist sometimes. I'm neither proud nor ashamed of it. It's just helpful sometimes, like when you've been sick for a long time) says that having to partially shut down the way I have can give me a new perspective on life. It reminds me of something I read in a baseball magazine when I was a kid. It said something like, "Hank Aguirre arrived at spring training and announced that he was starting the year with a new attitude, setting a new major league record for consecutive years, new attitude by right-handed pitcher. Aguirre said his attitude this year would be surly."

So what is the new perspective that I've gained? The usual stuff- appreciate what you have, live each day to the fullest, blah, blah blah. The thing is, I've been through a lot of crap in the last few years, and the last thing I really needed was some catastrophic event to remind me of how lucky I am. Keeping things in perspective and being thankful for what I have are kind of obsessions for me. So the best I can hope for is to be reminded of things.

Given that reduced goal, and setting aside trivial like the fact that I hate being a passenger in a car, I can come up with 2 things. First of all, slowing down is a good thing. Being really busy doesn't make you a better person- it just makes you busy. Even if you're "productive." So what? The other thing is, and I have to credit my daughter for reminding me of this, all the best stuff happens when you get outside of your comfort zone. The best thing you can say about a comfort zone is that it's comfortable. That's admirable for a couch or a pair of shoes, but it's not much of life goal. It's in unfamiliar circumstances that you feel most alive. I think that's why I like traveling so much, even to places that aren't considered exciting. As Bill Murray says in Groundhog Day, anything new is good. And my illness, by limiting my possible activities, has cut almost every shred of novelty out of my life.

I guess that's not the worst thing someone could come up with. We'll have to see if it sticks once
I'm better or if I just forget it and go back to whatever it is I used to do.