25 Random Thoughts Or Facts About Me

Last month I got a slew of Facebook notes that people had tagged me in a note about “25 Random Things About Me”. I didn’t respond right away because I didn’t want to help perpetuate a viral lemming, to use the term a friend of mine applies to all types of chain/spam/forwarded email, since I have done so a couple times in the past to certain people’s annoyance. However, once that very same friend sent me the note, I decided to jump on the band wagon too, albeit after it had left the station and no one cares any more, if I may mix metaphors and Phil Collins lyrics. To freshen up the concept though, I decided to make it a posting to my blog where I could go into a bit more depth on each item. Of course that doesn’t mean I’m not going to tag you back, I just don’t expect you to forward it to anyone else. Not even if someone might die if you don’t pass it along to 25 other people! (Which actually might happen, the way my luck has been going lately. I don’t like the spectre of death noticing me, even peripherally.)

1: Let start somewhat basic. Not quite as basic as what my name is, because if you don’t know that already then you must be on the wrong site and if so, how on earth did you wind up here? (If I do a search on the internet, I can’t even find my own site.) Let’s start with my favorite colors. Yeah, I’m a guy but blue is not my favorite color. It’s my second and eighth favorite color. My very favorite color is emerald green. I have no idea why. I think part of it may be because my birth month jewel is the emerald. Another part of the attraction is that the emerald is cut to reflect light, similar to a diamond, but that also adds variation to the green color so that some parts of the emerald seem light green while others are a darker, more mysterious green that is still somehow optimistic. So when I see an emerald green color, it reminds me of the gemstone. I sort of lump hunter green in with emerald green because no (basically) two-dimensional object like a shirt or piece of paper can exactly capture the facets of a gemstone so hunter green is a close approximation of the dark angles of an emerald. That’s the same reason my second favorite color is midnight blue- it reminds of the moody, dark color of a sapphire although midnight blue is not as optimistic as emerald green. It’s a bit more passionate and troubled. My third favorite color is lilac. It’s like purple, my fourth favorite color, but with a friendlier attitude and I don’t look as pretentiously regal wearing it. Only Prince can pull off purple on a regular basis. Lilac is easier to do.

Next on my list is pastel green, then pastel yellow and then any other pastel, like blue, orange, pink, etc… Pastels remind me of spring, and warmth and Easter and they evoke happy feelings. I’ve never been harmed by anything pastel colored or by anyone wearing pastels whereas basic “boy” blue is a different story. After those comes all the other colors- sunshine yellow, typical blue, bright red, burnt orange, etc… I’m not sure where I stand on black however. That is the absence of color though (or it’s all colors depending on who you ask.) Black looks cool, and I have many black clothes and objects but don’t think I consider it a favorite color per se. I have a different issue with electric pink (and most electric colors are favored over their basic, non-pastel color counterparts) in that it is an enjoyable color, but it isn’t very practical. You shouldn’t buy furniture in that color, electric pink clothes take a lot of coordinating to work well (have you ever seen me wear my pink shoelaces?), and it isn’t an easy color to use as a computer font. So there you have it- more discussion of color than you’ve had since 5th grade art class.

2: Next time you go to see a play or a musical, try playing the Law & Order game like my friends and I do when we see a show. This is what you do: Once you take your seat, open up the show’s “Playbill” and take a look at the cast’s credits. Invariably some of the cast members will list an episode of Law & Order on their performance credits. For instance, from last month’s play A Delicate Balance by Edward Albee, there are six cast members in the production. The first one- Kathleen Chalfant- lists End Game, which she won an Obie Award for, the Broadway appearance of Angels In America, which gave her a Tony Award nomination and then continues on with a whole paragraph of other plays and television appearances including one for Law & Order. The next person lists his credits including his roles on “Law & Order(s)”. The third actor has only one television credit in her list and it’s for Law & Order. No L&O for the fourth person and none for the fifth although he does list a role on Homicide. The sixth did Law & Order and L&O: Criminal Intent. So more than 60% of the cast appeared on a famous cop show. The first play where we were cognizant of this fact, we thought it was an inside joke by the cast but after we started checking and saw that it was in every Playbill, we realized it was a badge of honor to be on the show. That’s when we started making guesses as to how many of the cast members will have it in their bios. It’s an amusing way to spend a few minutes before the curtain goes up. It may be an East coast thing though. I don’t know if any of you West Coast folks can play since Law & Order is set in New York and it’s a lot easier for people here to get to the Big Apple. You all may have to find a different version, like the CSI Game.

3: I often wonder why people who think they are “green” or businesses who try to promote green-ness miss so many opportunities to truly do something about pollution, waste and the environment. Let’s just look at grocery stores as an example. For the last two decades I’ve been miffed about the switch from paper bags to plastic bags. I think the only reason plastic became the standard is because no one could figure out a way to keep the handles on paper bags from tearing off. Don’t plastic bags take several hundred years to decompose, whereas a paper bag is gone in a few years? Or a few seconds if you carry something home in one during a rainstorm? If I want to eat healthy, I’ll get a salad which should be a good thing because it’s an (hopefully) all-natural product but then what do most grocery stores provide for you to put that salad in? Hard plastic containers or Styrofoam, both of which are horrible for the environment. There aren’t any alternatives either because I’m certain that if I tried to bring in my own container or reuse one of theirs, they wouldn’t let me because of some state or federal law worrying about if the container is unsanitary.

Bottled water- another thing I’ve been irritated by for two decades. You pay money for water in a non-biodegradable container. Why not install drinking fountains around town instead? Because the water is bad? Of course it is- you have factories spewing out waste so they can make plastic bottles. Catch 22. All the packaging in grocery stores- plastic. What ever happened to metal or waxed paper? Yeah, I know food would go stale quicker, but that’s a lifestyle choice not an environmental argument. Gift cards? Plastic shopping baskets? Shrinkwrap? Styrofoam trays for fish? Non-local produce trucked in from another country? (Although I really like my Chilean grapes at Safeway so that’s a bit hypocritical of me.) I question how much people are really willing to sacrifice in order to call themselves green. Heck, I still remember years ago when Adam and Michelle were turned away from the newspaper recycling location because they had “too many newspapers already and couldn’t accept anymore.” We aren’t equipped to really go green in a way that makes a difference and even if we were, I’m not sure people would buy into the concept because it would affect their lifestyle too much. Sorry to say it but just buying a hybrid car doesn’t qualify you as being a greenie. You are destroying the forest while saving a tree.

4: I have been to 34 states and 19 countries. Part of that is because I was a military brat and part is because I love to travel and have done a lot of it in the last 8 years. As a kid, I lived in Florida, Michigan, Germany and Virginia, plus often visited my grandparents in Sweden. In the last few years, I’ve done road trips to the Pacific Northwest, the South, the New England states, Texas and rural Virginia plus I did some overseas trips like Iceland, Russia and a Danube River cruise. The states I have not yet been to, either as a passenger in the car with my parents when I was young or as an adult taking a trip, are: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah, Wyoming. The one’s I’m most eager to knock off the pending list are Hawaii, Wyoming, Arizona, Utah and North Dakota because they promise to have some interesting sites once I get there. Of the states I have been, I’m pretty enamored of Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maine and Washington (State). Virginia appeals to me because I love variety in my landscapes. Virginia has a coastline, flat land, hills and mountains. It has temperate weather and you actually experience all four seasons. The cities and towns have variety too- small towns in rural parts and bigger cities like Richmond, Alexandria and DC- which I consider as part of Virginia. Heck, we used to own it in colonial times before it was annexed. This is the same reason I like Pennsylvania- variety of landscape and variety of city sizes although there aren’t as many memories from that state since I haven’t lived there 35 years like I have with Virginia. Maine and Washington State I like because of the rugged terrain. I love forested mountains, cliffs, big hills and all wooded areas. When I retire, I want to live on a wooded mountain about 20 minutes from a big city. There are some other states that I think would like if I had a chance to spend more time exploring different parts of them and seeing more than what I’ve seen so far. These states are New York, California, North Carolina, Michigan and New Hampshire/Vermont (They should just combine the two states, just like Maryland should absorb Delaware).

The countries I have been to are: the Bahamas (Nassau), Canada- British Columbia, Canada- Ontario, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Holland, Italy, Mexico, Norway, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Iceland, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia and Hungary. My favorites have been… all of them. I can’t think of one I wouldn’t want to go back to. Rome is probably tops on my list of places to return to soon, before it gets radically commercialized. That’s part of what I liked about the Danube cruise- I saw places that were still unintentionally quaint. They weren’t commercialized or designed to be quaint. After Rome comes Germany. For a place that is part of my personal background, I don’t know enough about it. Places I want to get to are pretty much everywhere I’ve never been. I’ve only been to three of the seven continents, assuming I can fudge things and consider Russia to be part of Asia. Any place in Europe is a definite visit, Australia and New Zealand absolutely, some places in Asia like China, Hong Kong or Japan, Antarctica yes, parts of Africa, parts of South America, more of Canada and maybe Costa Rica or Mexico in Central America. Anyone interested in going someplace, let me know- as long as your snoring isn’t as bad as my roommates on the Danube trip.

5: I’m a multi-billionaire. Granted, it is in Serbian dinars but I still have money totaling more than a billion units of a currency. While on my Danube River cruise, we stopped in Belgrade. Our guide told us that the currency had been so badly devalued during Serbian-Croatian war that Serbia actually had a 500,000,000,000 note. It has since been phased out of existence but street vendors sell the old notes for about $3 or 3 Euros. Naturally I bought one from an old lady selling them on the corner. I only had a US $20 bill but she could make change. As I left with my bill and my change I realized she had only given me back $14. I almost went back to argue with her but then figured what the heck. I was a billionaire. I could afford to be generous with a street hustler.

6: I’ve been lucky or unlucky about injuring myself, depending on how you look at it. I’ve broken my wrist, but since it happened when I jumped off a moving car, it could have been much worse. I’ve had pencil tips broken off in my hand, I’ve been kicked in the head, had a Lincoln log stuck down my throat, been shot at with a BB gun, been whacked upside the head with a Flying Ginny and simultaneously had mono, anemia and jaundice. These ailments resulted in stitches, medication and tears but nothing worse than that which I would consider a lucky outcome. I’ve also had several food injuries, including my latest which is a soup injury. Suffice to say, styrofoam does not hold up well to lengthy microwaving and I have the blistered skin to prove it. I’ve sliced off part of my thumb with a cheese slicer, lost a tooth to a gummi bear, branded myself pulling a cake out of the oven and choked on rice. That doesn’t even include the remote controls I’ve damaged with spatter from oranges or the amount of liquid I’ve sweated out eating curry and other spicy foods. The food injuries at least had the benefit of occurring while enjoying food, unlike regular injuries, but I wonder what it means when my food injuries almost outnumber my normal personal injuries.

7: Icing is made with sugar. I mean that as a personal statement, not a question of fact. Some people think that the whipped, pseudo-sweet cream some places put on a cake is icing, but it’s not. Icing is sugar. I don’t know what the necessary proportions of sugar, butter and egg are but if I lick the icing off the top of a cupcake and it reminds me of whipped cream, it has been made wrong. Also, icing goes great on any pastry- brownies, cookies, cakes, doughnuts, etc…

8: I started a blog: http://richardsrantingandramblings.blogspot.com/ Check it out if you like. I’d love to hear any feedback or suggestions.

9: I’m a moderate sports guy. I don’t get obsessed with sports because there are too many other activities that are worth engaging in to be spending all my time as a sports spectator. When I do watch, I like seeing tennis & soccer in general, and certain teams in the NFL and NBA. I always watch the tennis Major tournaments and pretty much any other tournament that is televised. I watch MLS soccer (i.e. US teams) and World cup games and qualifiers. If I tried to follow any other soccer league I’d have no time for anything else. I watch all the Utah Jazz NBA games plus whoever is in the playoffs and for the NFL, in the background I’ll watch whatever is on while I’m doing something else. If it is a Colts or Redskins game, I’ll specifically watch them. I love underdogs which is why I root for the Texans and Cardinals, which turned out well this year. I don’t watch hockey (sorry, Trevor) or baseball unless it is the playoffs. I’ll watch Nascar if it is the last 5 laps.

10: Mormor, my grandmother in Sweden, died last month. She hadn’t been feeling well and was staying in bed a lot. At one point, she was talking to my mom and told her she felt too weak to get up and go to the bathroom. That’s when my mom insisted that she call an ambulance and go to a hospital. Surprisingly, she did that even though she had always been a bit of a “rugged individualist”, to use an American expression. My mom called to tell me this and then a few days later called to say that Mormor was getting better, that she was feeling a lot stronger. A few days after that, she called and said that Mormor had died. That really took me by surprise. Mormor had always been there for me. She was part of my mental foundation. Even if I didn’t see her on a daily basis, I knew she was there in Sweden thinking of me. It made me feel good knowing that. Some of my most cherished memories are traveling to Sweden and looking at the airport waiting area and seeing Mormor and Morfar up in the observation area waiting for us to get thru customs. In the last dozen years, after Morfar had passed away, Mom and I would go visit and take the train into town rather than have Mormor come get us. Still, as we walked down the street towards her apartment, I would look at her kitchen window and see her standing there, keeping an eye out for us. She was waiting because she was excited to see us. It was so nice knowing that there was always somebody waiting for me, with unconditional love and acceptance. No matter what, Mormor loved me and I could count on her being there for me whenever I looked for her. Now she won’t be there anymore. She won’t see me this spring, when I had planned to visit with Mom. She won’t see me 40 pounds lighter than before. She won’t get to see my sister’s son in person- her first great grandson. She won’t see me get married or have kids either. She won’t even see the next spring season, which always made her happy. She liked the nicer weather and growing some flowers in her garden or her window box. I’m not going to get any more wonderful Christmas cards from her. No more birthday cards with some money inside the envelope. No more trips to Falkoping, no more home cooked Swedish meals, no more black & white checkerboard cookies, no more beautifully decorated rooms, no more Christmas morning phone calls. No more Morfar, no more Mormor. The world just got a lot lonelier.

11: I have a Slurpee addiction but I’ve mostly weaned myself off of it by creating and following a Slurpee 12-step program.

12: I want to lose 16.5 pounds. Within the last two years, I’ve lost 45 pounds altogether and then sort of leveled off around 175 pounds. Since the beginning of February though I’ve gained back eight of those pounds. I don’t think it had any connection to Mormor passing away (although I didn’t do much in Sweden except pack up her belongings and eat stuff that was bad for me). It’s more that in the last couple of months I’ve been succumbing to my main weaknesses- sugar and bread. I can feel the fat accumulating again. My jawline is becoming less defined, I can pinch extra flesh on my hips and thighs and I’m feeling more sluggish. That’s why I want to get start dropping weight again, get back on a healthy eating cycle and start exercising more often. My preliminary goal is to hit 160 pounds and then level off at 165 and stay there for good. Sugar and sweet products will be hard to give up now that I’ve been indulging again (like with my kick in Sweden with the gummi/pectin raspberry racecars) but it’s doable if I can shake off the habit and stay sugarless for a week or two. Bread will be the tough one though. I’m always in the mood for bread. Bread is my favorite food. I’ll keep trying though. I have at least started a new rule about bread- don’t waste calories with bad bread. If I’m going to be bad and eat bread, it has to be good. No Wonderbread type bread, no soggy sandwiches, no mediocre breadbaskets. I’m hoping by summer, I will have achieved my goal. Wish me luck (and hide the M&Ms.)

13: I have an absurd fear of zombies. Unlike a UFO encounter, no one you know has ever claimed to see the undead walking around trying to eat them. Not even the National Enquirer has tried to claim they are out there. So I know they don’t really exist, yet I’m still terrified of them. As a kid, I used to be scared of the normal things- monsters in the closest, vampires, crazy burglars, escaped murderers. I didn’t even really pay attention to zombies until the 1980’s when a wave of remakes and sequels started popping up. By that time, I was watching television and going to movie theatres so I saw all the ads and previews for things like the remake of “Night Of The Living Dead” and especially “Return Of The Living Dead”. Seeing the decomposing creatures shuffling towards me on screen and muttering something about eating my brains totally freaked me out. Yes, they were slow and easily avoided, unlike say a werewolf, but they were relentless. You could wait until daylight and be safe from Dracula but not with these things. They are always there- you didn’t dare rest or relax your guard for a second. And they liked to congregate so what was only one annoying, easily handled creature in the morning becomes a dangerous horde by nightfall. Plus by this time I was aware of how much I hated irrational thought. I dislike being around people who were guided solely by their id or who refuse to listen to reasonable explanations and logical arguments. Doesn’t that sound exactly like someone who’s undead? All they do is look to sate their appetites and they won’t be swayed by anything you say, unless you say it “metaphorically”, like with a shotgun blast to their head.

For about fifteen years, this fear of zombies slowly built up as new movies kept coming out. It went from being a non-existent fear to an all-consuming one, if you’ll pardon the pun. Sometime in the mid 1990’s, I decided to confront my fear head-on. I would watch a couple of zombie movies so I could see how ridiculous they were and how unbelievable the creatures were. Big mistake. It scared the crap out of me even more. Since then if I walk around the house in the dark, I don’t watch out for Freddy Kruguer or Jason, I listen for moaning noises or the tell-tell sound of shuffling feet. Resident Evil is the one that pushed me over the edge. It moved me from passive fear to active engagement in the absurdity. That’s when I started watching every zombie movie I came across, so I could learn how to protect myself. When I look out the window, I make sure there are no corpses staggering around before I go outside. If I pass a doorway, I look to see who, or what, is in the room. I always make sure my door is locked behind me as soon as I go inside. I look in the shower and closets before going to bed. When I drive to work in the morning, I scope out the houses and buildings around me to see which ones look secure in case I have to quickly take shelter in the event of a zombie attack. Do they have high walls? Are there defendable points of entry? Are the windows narrow and high up? Is there food nearby? Are there likely to be lots of (undead) people nearby right away or will I have time to prepare? Is there a gun store or sporting goods shop in the vicinity? That’s why this fear is absurd. It affects how I view my surroundings even though I know it is ridiculous to think this way. On the plus side, I no longer worry about vampires, werewolves or escaped mental patients. I’m not sure that’s a good trade-off but it is too late to do anything about it now. I wish I could go back to the normal fears I had as a kid, like snakes, ghosts and Bigfoot. Oh, and if you get a concussion or bodily injury in my vicinity, I would suggest you don’t moan and shuffle in my direction looking for assistance. I’m likely to cut your head off, just as a preventative measure.

14: I always root for the underdog. I identify with the underdog, the loser, the person with something to prove. I won’t get into any psychological examinations about why this may be, but you would probably be safe in assuming I’ve always considered myself an underdog. Mostly though, it just makes for a more interesting experience. How many of you watch the Superbowl whole-heartedly when the score is 30-7 at halftime? Would Britney Spears’ comeback be as interesting to the world if she hadn’t totally screwed up her life? Would Rocky (or even Rudy) be as heart-warming a movie if the character succeeded right away? My friend John watched the first MLS soccer championship and counts it as one of the best sports experiences he’s ever seen. They staged a late game come-from-behind win that was electrifying. When I watched tennis back in the early 1990’s, I never rooted for Jim Courier because he always won, methodically grinding out win after win. Then Pete Sampras started doing the same thing but was more arrogant about it so there was no way I could root for him. That’s why I like Andre Agassi. He provided some competition for Sampras, brought him down to earth. Plus, Agassi learned about humility when he went from a top ten world-ranking to the 200’s. He was written off for two or three years and then decided to pull himself together. He played Challenger events, which is like Roger Clemens playing AA-League baseball. Andre then worked his way back into the top ten and went on to win more Grand Slam titles after he turned thirty then he did during the sports' “peak” age of the mid 20’s. I eventually started rooting for Courier once he lost a step and had to fight for wins, which he did in a dramatic fashion, especially for Davis Cup matches. You can also understand why I currently prefer Rafael Nadal to Roger Federer and I love seeing the Yankees lose. Being the underdog keeps you honest and makes you work on improving your skills.

15: I was in ROTC. All four years of school, I had to wear a camouflage outfit twice a week. I didn’t mind that part actually, nor did I mind the classroom stuff or most of the field exercises. What I disliked was the forced discipline. If a superior told me to do something, I would do it. I didn’t want to have to say “Sir, yes sir!” before doing it though. I felt ridiculous saluting people. I don’t want to sing Army songs while jogging. Standing at attention is very uncomfortable. Requiring my boots to be super shiny is silly, especially since during actual combat, you don’t want shiny surfaces giving away your position to enemy troops. Also, if you know my fondness for sleep, you can guess what I thought about the early morning P.T. sessions.

16: “Yeah, no”. A few years back, I noticed the prevalence of this phrase. I really wonder how it came into existence, because it is an absolute contradiction and makes no sense. Yet, you hear it all the time. If I asked someone “Did you like that movie?” and they didn’t like the movie, why would they start their response with “Yeah, no.” before explaining that “It kinda sucked. It wasn't very funny and I didn’t like the person who played the main character.” Clearly they didn’t like the movie and the answer to my question is assuredly “No.” Have people gotten so unwilling to say anything negative that they start any possible criticism with a positive sounding “Yeah” to salve the sensibilities of the recipient? I never hear anyone say “No, yeah.” It’s always the reverse. I thought no meant no. Doesn’t putting a yeah in front of it weaken the integrity of the word? What if I only hear the yeah part and I start doing something you didn’t want done? If I utter a phrase like “Would you like me to hit you with a hammer?” you probably should not let the word “Yeah” escape your lips for some time. Listen next time people are talking and see how often you hear this. I even heard it on TV last night, which means someone wrote that into a script deliberately. I’m amused and confused by how much I hear this contradiction in everyday conversation. (And I’ve even said it myself, although I chastise myself immediately after doing so- “Yeah, no- you shouldn’t be saying that. It’s, like, bad grammar, you know?”)

17: Along the same lines (I get annoyed by lots of things these days), have you ever gotten an email and seen this message: “In order to protect your privacy, Outlook prevented automatic download of this picture from the Internet.”? Our spam blocker at work does it to messages all the time and it always irks me because it has nothing to do with privacy. Privacy is about being left to yourself and keeping other people from knowing things about you. What the spam filter did is protect my sensibilities, my delicate nature, from potentially obscene or disgusting pictures. I think Outlook is using the word “privacy” because they can’t think of a better metaphor for “filthy smut”. The only reasonable argument I can think of in Outlook’s favor is if someone is actually getting an email at work with embarrassing pictures. In that case, they wouldn’t want it to be seen by their co-workers but if that’s what they are up to, shouldn’t they get embarrassed by the computer, just on general principle? Besides if Outlook really wanted to protect me, it would have stopped all those George Bush jokes from coming my way in the last 5 years.

18: I’ve been playing a lot of poker. Texas Hold’Em specifically. Generally two or three times a week, at a local bar. It’s free to play and if I win that night I get a gift certificate for the bar/restaurant. Every three or four months, I play at John’s house when he does a barbecue/poker night. I’ve even started playing for money once or twice a month. Nothing big, but I do it since the players are usually better and less stupid when cash is involved.

19: I love competition but I hate to lose, so I resist doing things I don’t think I can do well.

20: My favorite movie stars are: (Women) Sandra Bullock, Marisa Tomei, Reese Witherspoon and Deborah Foreman and (Men) Harrison Ford, Ben Stiller, Bruce Willis and Clive Owen. You might be thinking “Deborah who?” Well, she’s the girl from My Chauffeur, Waxwork and April Fool’s Day. Still nothing? She was also in Valley Girl. Now you can say “Oh, yeah. But she hasn’t done anything in twenty years, has she?” No she hasn’t but that’s how much I like her. Her old movies are better than any new movie from Jennifer Lopez, Beyonce or Nicole Kidman.

My 10 favorite movies from last year were: 10) Forgetting Sarah Marshall; 9) Quantum Of Solace; 8) Slumdog Millionaire; 7) Tell No One; 6) Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist; 5) Wall-E; 4) Dark Knight; 3) Sex & the City; 2) Tropic Thunder; 1) Iron Man. The worst movies, or at least the ones that made me feel like I wasted my money, were The Spirit, Four Christmases, Burn After Reading, Transporter 3, Made Of Honor, Harold & Kumar Escape Guantanamo, You Don’t Mess With The Zohan and Max Payne. I don’t know if this list says anything about my taste in movies or rather the state of the movie business. Draw your own conclusions.

21: I like sharing music with people. I listen to a lot of music and I know other people don’t, even if they want to so I try to recommend things I think they might like. I can’t imagine going through life without music, much like I don’t understand people who don’t like to read. Other people have introduced me to songs and bands I’ve loved, so I feel an obligation to pass along the experience. I know that just because I like something is no guarantee others will like it too (You mean you don’t like disco or industrial music? Really?) but when they do, it’s such a cool experience. You’ve given someone else a happy feeling, something they enjoyed. What could be better than that? Music is the perfect medium for sharing because it can be absorbed quickly. A book recommendation takes a lot longer to get through and if they hate the book you suggested, you’ve used up several/many hours of their time. I’m still amazed that someone didn’t like the Bernie Rhodenbarr series I suggested. I mean, they love Janet Evanovich so how could they not like a series about a literate, pithy burglar? Was there not enough slapstick for their taste? Of course, they also disliked Fargo, which someone else at work recommended to them so who knows what’s wrong with their mental wiring. That brings up another category- movies- that are harder to recommend. Movies cost so much to make that the studios are forced to spend lots of money on advertising to get a large audience to see it so they can recoup their costs. With such a big marketing and promotional push behind it, it is hard for someone not to be aware of a movie so the recommendation is unnecessary- people already know if they are interested in a certain movie. It’s harder to discover a great, hidden gem of a movie. A movie would have to bomb at the box office and disappear quickly yet still be really good. How often does that happen? Office Space naturally springs to mind, which has been an automatic recommendation of mine ever since John and I were two of the twelve people who saw the movies in the theater. So if you want recommendations, I’m happy to oblige. Let me know generally what you like though, so I don’t recommend Fargo to someone who thinks a great movie is something starring Kevin James as a mall cop or a WWE wrestler as an action star.

22: Motorcycles scare me. Conceptually and in reality. So do roller coasters, although for a different reason. If you are riding a motorcycle on the highway, you need to be alert at all times, watching out for other vehicles and perfectly judging the road conditions in inclement weather. If you misjudge anything or get distracted even briefly, you lose control and turn into hamburger, as my Dad likes to say. What is your reward for all this risk? You get to your destination with bugs on your clothes. The absolute downside is death. At least in the NFL or NASCAR, where you also risk bodily injury during your efforts, there is a monetary reward. With motorcycles, nothing. A convertible car has most of the same benefits of riding a motorcycle and lot fewer dangers. Roller coasters bother me because the whole object of the ride is to simulate falling through the sky. You get taken up in the air and then plummeted earthward. For amusement. Normally that’s a bad things- no one gets off a plane that had massive turbulence or altitude drops and says “That was exciting. I hope it happens next time I’m on a plane.” On a coaster, you have no control over the descent and occasionally riders have been beheaded by faulty equipment. Explain the fun part of that to me (and I repeat- occasionally riders have been beheaded.) I know I’m probably a bit more risk adverse than some people but any recreational activity that significantly increases my risk of death is hard to enjoy. It the same reason I don’t do drugs.

23: Not married, no kids. I want both. I’m not sure if it hasn’t happened yet because of my ineptitude at dating or the fact that I’m basically unlovable.

24: I like food combos that seem weird to other people. As a kid (okay and all through college too) I would eat licorice dipped in frosting and people would give me weird looks. When I mention that shrimp goes good on pizza, nobody else seems to agree. Fried cheese should be dipped in ranch dressing, not marinara. Fruit flavored yogurt and Bugles go great together. Pickles actually taste good in grilled cheese sandwiches. Pear ice cream is a flavor that needs to be introduced to the U.S. Surely I’m not the only one who feels foods should be experimented with and mixed together? I’m certain that’s how fondue was invented and how else do you explain the idea of fusion cuisine? Stop giving me that funny look!

25: I’m usually laconic and succinct unless I’m writing, then I’m verbose, effusive and just can’t stop. I’m not sure which is the better state of being. At least for now though, I’m going to shut up.

The Lost Art Of Letterwriting

This morning I was writing an email to someone I knew from college but hadn’t spoken to in more than 15 years. In the course of attempting to catch him up on my personal history, I thought back to when we knew each other on freshman hall and what was going on at that point. His immediate recollections were of my addiction to Swedish Fish and my fascination with the Beatles. In turn, I associate him with Bruce Springsteen, imaginary girlfriends, going to the Caf for dinner and splitting pizzas late at night. As I responded to the email, I tried to decide whether it was a good or a bad thing that email has replaced letter writing. During freshman year, I was in a long distance relationship so I spent a lot of time writing letters and now I was writing about that period to someone fifteen years later using a technology that was almost non-existent back then. Composing my reply, I happened to digress from the topic at hand (as I often do, hence the title of this blog site) into a comparison of the merits of email versus old fashioned pen and paper letters. I’m pretty qualified to compare them because I’ve done massive amounts of both in my time. At first, I thought email would be the clear favorite but the more I thought about, the less certain I became.

On the plus side, you can write an email and get it to someone quickly. As soon as you have written your message (or before if you aren’t careful with your Send button), you click one or two buttons and it gets dispatched. A few seconds later, it is in that person’s inbox regardless of whether they are in the next cubicle, the next state or across an ocean. Ding! They have mail. There is no wait for the mailman to slog through rain, sleet, snow or dark of night on his appointed rounds. An email doesn’t get delivered to the next door neighbor or mixed up with the junk mail circulars or returned for insufficient postage. Yeah, maybe you want to argue about how a bad email address bounces something back or that spam filters zap it before it gets to you, but that’s beside the point. A vast majority of the time, it’s there. Right away. Almost as soon as you think a thought, it gets shared with someone else. Even if it takes a few days for them to get around to reading it, it’s waiting for them when they do. Of course that means when I take three weeks to respond to an email, I feel much guiltier about it now. If it arrives instantaneously, why did I take so long to respond? I can't even pretend that the mail was slow. In the old days I would pretend there was a delay in receiving a letter, like the post office messed up somewhere along the line, which wasn’t hard to believe. I would blithely condemn my mailman and just hope no one checked the postmark on the letter.

Also, with email you have the text right in front of you and you can append your thought onto theirs. You don’t have to flip through the pages of the letter to find a particular passage, write a summary of what it says and then make a response to that. You just follow the commentary thread and insert your comment after theirs. There is no such thing as sloppy handwriting and Spell Check will take care of your spelling errors (as long as you know what the error is and that the correct correction is being made.) You can excise the irrelevant stuff, insert pictures, use colors and highlights. You can send the exact same letter to multiple people and have a copy for yourself without involving carbon paper or Xerox machines in the process. If it gets lost or deleted, it is easy to resend it, verbatim. You don’t pay any postage, you don’t have to find pretty stationary at the store and you don’t have to walk to the mailbox in the rain or worry that you missed the pickup time for that day. It is a very efficient and versatile method of delivery. These are just some of the many reasons why email is a wonderful innovation.

On the negative side, email can't replace the physical and psychological sensations of sending and receiving an actual letter through the mail. As a kid, one of my favorite noises was the sound of gravel crunching underneath a tire. That meant one of two things- that the mailman had pulled alongside the road to deliver the mail or that my parents were home and I needed to turn off the TV since I was most likely restricted from watching it due to my report card. If it was the mailman, I would dash outside to get the mail because I loved to sort through and see what I got. Did my grandmother send me a letter? Was there something from a pen pal or an old friend? Were there birthday cards or Christmas cards or Easter cards for me? Did I get a catalog of some sort? An email can’t compare to the full engagement of the senses that occurs when you receive a letter. First, you feel the texture of the envelope and your fingers gauge the thickness of it. If it is from a grandparent, is it thick enough to maybe have some money in it? If it’s from a friend, does it feel like they wrote several pages? Your eyes take over as you look at the handwriting , check out the return address to confirm who it came from and then peer at the stamps. That’s something I’ve always liked about Mormor’s (my maternal grandmother) envelopes- the stamps are always interesting and colorful. I’m not sure she ever used the same kind of stamp twice. If the letter was from a friend, did they write something on the back of the envelope? Julie would often jot one last thought on an envelope before sending it to me. Sometimes it was affectionate, sometimes it was embarrassing and sometimes it was just a P.S. With email, there really isn’t anything like a P.S. anymore. If you remember something later on, you go back up into the body of the letter and add it in where ever it belongs. The need for a post script is gone.

Once you’ve run your fingers over the envelope, absorbed the beauty of the stamps and seen everything on the outside of the envelope, it is time to run your finger underneath the seal and tear open the envelope. You ears drink in the slow, lazy sound of paper tearing and separating and the rustling as a sheaf of papers is withdrawn. You start scanning the pages and reading what they contain. Maybe the pages were scented if it is from a girl, so your nose gets in on the act as a floral smell wafts up. Maybe there is a lipstick imprint and you feel the waxy or creamy texture of the imprint. You observe the beauty of the handwriting (or the lack thereof), check out any pictures, newspaper clippings, cartoons or drawings that were enclosed. Michelle always sticks in something extra, like a catalog page for those colorful and/or patterned plastic rainboots that seem to be a big fashion trend right now. Despite what John thinks, Michelle and I have seen evidence that people wear them as a fashion statement and not just "because it’s raining.” Michelle is also the only letter writer to engage my fifth sense. Sometimes she will send me a big envelope that contains Peeps or Red Vines so I can taste something as well as see, touch, smell and hear the letter being perused. So it is kind of hard to have a comparable full-sensory experience with email, unless you are sniffing the keyboard and licking the monitor and if you are, I don’t want to know about it.

Writing a letter evokes the same psychological pleasure for me. I pull out some nice stationary, grab a pen and start writing. No matter where I am doing this, I imagine myself as Jane Austen sitting in the parlor amidst a bustling family, composing her thoughts and committing them to paper. Don’t ask me why I don’t imagine myself as a male letter writer like Abraham Lincoln or Oscar Wilde. I just don’t- I’m Jane Austen for whatever reason, which is odd since I’ve yet to read one of her books. Earlier, I mentioned a long-distance relationship and that involved lots of letters and they were often quite lengthy- six to eight pages on average. During the summer after my sophomore year of college, I was corresponding with more than half a dozen people because I had nothing else to do. All the people from school were scattered around the state and country but none were near me. I couldn’t drive around to visit them because I was busy working at my summer job so letters were the only things reliving my boredom. I wrote and wrote and wrote and when I heard the sound of crunching gravel I ran out to the mailbox to see if I had a response. With email, there is no sense of anticipation- if it’s there, you know it. You see it onscreen or your mail system dings you, letting you know “You have mail!” So that summer and the one after that, I wrote a lot to people from my dorm or that I talked with on Parti because I hated to not get a letter in the mail. As soon as I read it, I would write one back. When I was done with a letter, I would put stickers on the envelope or find some cool stamps to use although now I use the self-adhesive stamps so I don’t engage my sense of taste when writing a letter. Nor have I lately included a gift or a clipping like Michelle does because I’m a lazy, selfish jerk but that’s a subject for another time.

Since that time, I’ve tapered off on my letter writing. After school, my group of friends narrowed, people stopped writing back as often, life got busier, and I got more jaded about mail. As a kid, mail was always exiting to get. As an adult, mail now means bills and donation solicitations and junk mail and advertising flyers and pizza coupons (Wait, I actually enjoy those even if I rarely use them. It’s fun to imagine eating the pizza in the picture.) The boxes of stationary in my drawer are the same ones I had ten years ago. Email has almost totally replaced letter writing for me for the reasons I mentioned above. To be honest though, I don’t really hear from many people by U.S. mail these days either. At best, I’ll get a Christmas card with a few lines scrawled inside the card. Not that I want that to stop, mind you. I appreciated the cards I did get. Mike’s card was a river scene from the Alexandria waterfront, John and Vicky did a picture postcard of their kid as did my sister and the Bondis usually do the same although I think I got dropped from their list this year. A couple people at work handed me cards and Kevin, Millie and George were nice enough to get me something personal too. My aunt sent a card that was created from one of her own paintings which was really fun to see. (As always, this does not apply to Michelle. She does fantastic letters.) So I did get some nice cards but not much personal information. Again, not that I don’t appreciate the cards. To be fair, I no longer send out Christmas cards either or letters in general. If you aren’t Mormor, you aren’t likely to get a letter from me. Again, that selfish jerk thing. I admit contributing to the death of letter writing although I do send out postcards. That is something I pride myself on. If I go on a trip, I’m very adamant about sending people a postcard, whether they want it or not, and I usually write pretty small so it is like a mini-letter rather than a generic sentiment of two sentences like on the stereotypical vacation postcard. It’s my compromise to the desire to write to people and the realization that I’m not likely to get a response. I won’t get depressed about no replies in the mail if I delude myself with the thought that it wasn’t really a letter, just a vacation postcard.

Lately though, I’ve been pleased with all the substitutes for letters. Of course, there is the phone but that’s a complex issue and it requires advance planning to avoid being a nuisance to people. I’m thinking more along the lines of email, blogs, cell-phone texting, websites like Facebook and all the other new media. With Facebook, you can post a few thoughts or some quick updates and they go to numerous people. It eliminates the amount of time required to correspond with numerous people and therefore makes it easier to manage. I equate it with William & Mary’s Parti computer program which was a precursor to the current deluge of social networking sites. The concept of blogs implies a more fully-developed, personalized statement. I would equate it to keeping a journal, just one that lots of people see (unless you’re me and having been posting for awhile but not letting anyone know about it. If you blog and no one reads it, do your thoughts exist?) Email is, of course, the natural successor to letter writing. It has many advantages to physical letters although it lacks some of the mystique or the romance of a handwritten missive. You have the practical, efficient, almost robotic tool of email versus the sentimental, old-fashioned, time-delayed system of letter writing. I’m almost afraid to say what my conclusion is- that I prefer email- because it may make me appear more heartless than I already do. At the start of this post, I thought I was undecided about a preference but by the end I’ve concluded that whatever “romance” is lost by using a new medium doesn’t outweigh the benefits. The whole idea of letter writing is to communicate with other people. Even though the old method of pen and paper, mailboxes and anticipation, may be gone, there are new ways to accomplish the same thing and they can be even better. I’m no longer going to get a package of Red Vines licorice in the mail or see a lipstick kiss on the back of an envelope, but right now I’m typing at my computer at work after everyone has left for the day and darned if I don’t still feel like Jane Austen.

No Fate But What We Make?

The other day, my mom was telling me about a man she had talked to in her housing community in South Carolina. They had just met each other so they did the requisite exchange of background facts and personal history details. Naturally, this involved talking about kids so Mom mentioned that I worked for AAA in Virginia. He wondered which office it was and what I did, so when she told him I was the office manager at the Alexandria office, he started describing me to her. Apparently, he had been into my office when he lived in the area, and had enough dealings with me that he remembered who I was and what I looked like. I thought that was an odd bit of happenstance. As a manager, I’m mostly behind the scenes but I do interact with customers here often enough that some of them may remember who I am. What are the odds though that one of them would happen to move into my mom’s community, two states away, and strike up a conversation with her?

That got me thinking about other random coincidences that have happened. About four years ago, I got back in touch with someone I went to high school with because she happened to see my name on a school website called Classmates.com. Her name was Carla and she was one of the five or six people from high school that I was interested in hearing from. There are a few other people I wanted to hear ABOUT, like which cheerleader became an alcoholic stripper, which geek was an Internet start-up millionaire, which teacher was a pedophile or frustrated novelist, who married whom and which jock now worked as a “sanitation engineer”. There weren’t many people I wanted to hear FROM though. I emailed back and forth with her for a year or two but I haven’t seen her in person since she lives in Decatur, Georgia. This year, I happened to be contacted by Cat, another one of the people I wanted to hear from. She saw my name on Facebook and wondered if I was the Richard Goodman. Of course I was him- there is only one of us who went to Thomas Dale High School in Virginia in the mid-1980s (and likely the only one there ever.) Besides, I always think of myself as the Richard Goodman regardless. I don’t think there is much competition out there either, unlike my friend Adam Rifkin who sometimes gets confused with Adam Rifkin, the B-list movie director.

So Cat and I have been talking lately and I ended up sending her a CD of songs. When I got her address, it turns out that she lives (you can see where this is going) in Decatur, Georgia too. Her job has no correlation to Carla’s job, she has no relatives in the area and she had no contact with Carla since high school, yet here were two of my former friends from high school living in the same city. Once this tidbit emerged, Cat realized that both her and Carla had some involvement with the Wiccan community in that same area so they likely know some of the same people even though they hadn’t ever bumped into each other. This seems to stretch the concept of coincidence pretty thin. I know the saying about it being “a small world” but the reality is that there are 6 billion people in the world and we live in the third largest country in the world and have the third largest population in the world. When people move out of state, there are thousands of possible cities for them to settle in. Nor are Decatur, Georgia and Ft. Mill, South Carolina such big cities or developing hot spots that everyone is moving there. Also, my circle of friends and acquaintances isn’t exactly vast. With a high school population of maybe 400 people, a college of 5,000 people (most of which I never met), neighbors tallying fifty perhaps, and 300 people in the course of various jobs, that means all the people I have known somewhat well probably number under three thousand people. That’s less than .0000098 % of the population of the United States. You’d have to talk to more than one hundred thousand people to come across one I know and that would only happen if you lined everyone up and talked to them. If you sprinkled them around the third largest country in the world, then that makes it even more unlikely you’d stumble across a familiar face once they left the same general part of the state as you.

Now that is just two examples that popped up this past month. When I gave it some more thought, there were even more oddities that came to me. In the back of my mind, I’d been pondering the concept of coincidences, happenstance, serendipity and flukes since November. What got me thinking back then was the news that Michael Crichton had died. When I saw that headline on the morning paper, I was on my Danube River cruise at the time, drifting past Serbia while relaxing in the lounge with a book. It was a paperback book that I had brought with me and of course it was a Michael Crichton book, the first one of his I had read in the last two years. What made me bring along that book when I had 130 others to choose from? Why was I reading that one at that exact moment when I had three other books and twenty magazines I had brought along as well? When I saw the news, why did I happen to be reading a book instead of eating breakfast or taking pictures at a tourist spot? It just struck me as odd, but I was also thrilled with the synchronicity of the moment. If it happened in a movie, you’d be thinking “Yeah, right. Deus ex machina.” It just seemed so preposterously apt that it got me thinking about things like fate, God, intelligent design and chaos theory. What constitutes a random occurrence, a convergence of chance events versus intelligent design, a divine force guiding the universe towards some desired outcome unknown to its’ participants? At what point can you realistically say that the mathematical odds of such a situation happening are basically impossible? And if it happens a second or third time, does that prove the existence of some higher power?

Such deep and abstract thoughts invariably led me to Ian Fleming’s book Goldfinger, just like so many philosophers and religious scholars before me. Okay, so maybe no one else but me has ever made such a connection but I did pull out the book because I remembered a quote in there about chance and circumstance. Granted, having just seen Quantum Of Solace that week, the new James Bond movie, also helped bring Bond books to the top of my brain since the new movie’s title came from a short story in the For Your Eyes Only collection. The quote though, right at the top of the table of contents page, read as follows: “Goldfinger said, ‘Mr. Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence and the third time it’s enemy action.’” So according to Goldfinger, once the improbable happens three times, it isn’t random. It is a deliberate action.

Although I’m not Goldfinger and don’t have to worry about secret agents stopping me from destroying the gold supply of Fort Knox or encrusting beautiful women in gold paint, I did start listing more of the recent coincidences that have occurred to me and I quickly came up with way more than three of them. Some are admittedly just “Huh, that’s unusual” situations but others are more along the lines of “Mathematically, that should be impossible and yet it happened. You need to go play the lottery right away.” For instance, here are some that are not that far-fetched. When my parents moved away from the Richmond, Virginia area, they settled in a town called Denver, North Carolina which was near where my sister lived. A couple years later, my sister’s job required her to move to another state. She now lives in Denver, Colorado. I have to pretty careful now when addressing letters to my parents or sister so that I don’t inadvertently write down the wrong state for their Denver. My friend Steve Bondi used to live in New York City before work required him to move to Seattle. After a little while there, he moved again, to Manhattan. Manhattan, Kansas that is. Two examples that are interesting but not unlikely although how many of you have ever heard of Denver, North Carolina or Manhattan, Kansas? Anyone? My high school chum John (I love using the word “chum”- it is so Hardy Boys) moved to northern Virginia for his last two years of high school. He hated his new school so he finished both his junior and senior classes in one year and went off to college. I finished in real time and went off to college too, ending up in William & Mary just like John. Not earth-shattering, I know, because there are only about four schools in Virginia that either of us would have considered attending but John’s family pushed a bit for him to go to school in Boston, so selecting a Virginia school was not a given. Where did I end up living my freshman year? In the freshman complex of Botetourt, in Faquier Hall which is right next to the German House where John was living as a sophomore. I did not know this before I was assigned to that dorm.

The other day, I got a “friend request” online from Mike Gunnels, a kid I knew back in elementary school, when I lived in Fort Lee, Virginia. He was one of my three friends from that neighborhood. I thought of him occasionally throughout the years, but I didn’t think he would remember me, much less look me up 30 years later and be able to find me based on the information I have posted on my profile. Okay, one last location-based item. Three years ago, Elizabeth and I went to eat at an Italian place near her house in the Springfield. We hadn’t been there in at least a year, so we decided to try it for dinner. During the meal, she looks over at another table and says “There’s Julie Meloro!” Sure enough, someone we had both worked with was sitting at a table across the room. They liked the place even though it was far away from them- they lived in Herndon- but they decided to come for their anniversary dinner that night. We hadn’t been there in a year, nor had the Meloros, yet we both decided to go there on the same day. Maybe it is just a small world after all, as the theme park ride says, and I can chalk up these examples squarely to the coincidence category. A little unusual but nothing that couldn’t happen under certain circumstances, right?

Let’s move on to the improbable situations. One day at work this year, I am answering calls on the membership phone line. It’s not part of my normal job but I do this every now and then when we are short-staffed and I want to be sure we don’t lose any sales calls to other offices or the call center. The phone rings, I pick up and I recognize the caller even before his name pops up on screen. His voice sounded like someone I play poker with at one of the neighborhood bars and once his name does appear on my computer, it confirms my suspicion. I proceed to blow his mind by saying “Is this the John Van Brocklin that plays poker at Pepi’s Pizza Box”? He says “Is this the Richard who plays poker at Pepi’s?” Yes he is and yes I am. Yeah, I know that we both live in the same general area and if I work for AAA and he is an AAA member, it is possible we will cross paths at some point. Still, how did I happen to answer the phone when he called? More to the point, we have 3.2 million members in the AAA MidAtlantic club with about 1.5 million of them in the Washington DC metro area. What is the likelihood that I will know any given caller even vaguely, much less personally?

Speaking of AAA, that brings up another example. In the course of catching up with Carla, she mentioned that her sister who still lives in the Richmond area was dating someone who worked at AAA. Upon asking several tough, probing, journalistic type questions (“What’s his name? Which office does he work at?”) I realized that he was our membership contact in the Richmond Headquarters, someone I would talk to a semi-regular basis. Another random thread in life’s tapestry turns out to be connected to me. Here’s another improbable example. In senior year of college, several friends and I decided to “take over” part of one floor of a dorm. We were able to get good lottery numbers for the room selection process so we got three adjacent rooms in a decent dorm. Adam Rifkin and I were in one room, Steve Fridella & Steve Bondi were on one side and Bondi’s friend Phil was on the other side, along with Phil’s roommate Mike Huffman. We all got to know Mike a bit better that year as we would all hang out in each other’s rooms or go do things together. Turns out Mike even dated John’s “friend” Melanie at one point. Stuff like that happens though on a campus where there are a finite number of people in a centralized area.

Eventually we all graduated (with eventually being the operative word for a couple of us) and moved away. Mike moved back to northern Virginia and I ended up in the same vicinity, oddly enough sharing a house with Adam’s girlfriend Michelle (Which was a great experience. She’s terrific.) Mike and I stayed in touch and maintained our friendship. Mike went to work for AAA and I worked for a music store. We were both really maximizing our degrees as you can see. Eventually Mike realized that he hated people so he went to night school and got an accounting degree. I still liked people, in theory, so I stayed in retail and customer service fields in managerial positions at the music store and later a video chain. I made some good friends there especially Elizabeth, a bright, amusing fellow cynic. We would periodically do things together and in the course of that, I got to know her sister Leona as well. Gradually, I got sick of not having any sort of regular schedule to my life at the video store chain because as the store manager, I regularly worked till midnight and later as a district manager I was technically on-call any time of day one of my stores needed me. So I answered an ad in the paper and got a job at AAA, a few months before Mike left to get an accounting job elsewhere.

Okay, in these last two paragraphs, I’ve casually mentioned several more connections and you are wondering if that was the point I was trying to make. Nope. Let’s cut to the chase on this one. Mike got a job with an accounting firm, of which there are hundreds in the Washington DC area. I have only five friends who live in the area, one of whom has a sister Leona that works for an accounting firm. Does Mike end up at the same firm as Leona? Of course he does. How could he not? It’s the same way the odds work when I am playing poker. If someone has a near impossible chance of beating my hand at poker, they will do so. They will get their “3-outer”, one of the three possible cards remaining out of fifty-two that will beat me. Yeah, you might think 3 chances in 52 isn’t improbable and neither do I but when the same person does it two or three times in a night, over a long period of time, you start to reconsider the concept of odds. If I have pocket kings, an ace comes out on the board. I never hit my “four flush” if I go all in but my opponent will always hit his to beat my straight. It’s almost a guarantee. I think I live in a world of reverse probability.

Sometimes, I don’t mind living in this zone though. Like when an movie actress I adore decides to do a television show, it is often I show I watch. Considering my track record with supporting shows destined to quickly depart the airwaves this has to be a fluke. I watched Sliders most of the 4 seasons it was on and the last two seasons featured Kari Wuhrer, one of my celebrity crushes (that no one has heard of though.) When that show was cancelled and her film career didn’t re-start, she went on a daytime soap opera. Of course it was General Hospital, the only one I’ve ever watched. When Marisa Tomei did guest shots on TV she appeared on Seinfeld, which I watched along with everyone else, and Rescue Me, which I watched along with 12 other people (It’s on the FX Channel. Which you’ve probably never heard of either.) Now that I’ve digressed a bit to gush about my celebrity crushes, here’s another example of the interconnectedness of things that has nothing to do with me. It’s just a “You don’t say. Really?” type of thing. Christmas day, Harold Pinter died, as did Eartha Kitt whom you may remember from the Batman television show. She was also a singer and in checking my facts on Wikipedia.com, it says that “She was perhaps best known for her 1953 Christmas song ‘Santa Baby’.” In other words, the originator of the Christmas song ‘Santa Baby’ died on Christmas Day. Things that make you go hmm, as C&C Music Factory might say if this was 1990.

I’ve shown you all kinds of examples, from the unlikely to the improbable. Let’s move on to the impossible though. In the interests of your potential lack of interest, I’ll just give you one example before wrapping up here. While in high school, I decided to volunteer for a 4-H summer camp. I have no idea why. I didn’t get paid even though I had responsibilities. Heck, I wasn’t even in 4-H! Still, for 10 days one summer I could tell people “I’ll be your counselor for this summer.” Some of the campers flirted with the counselors and vice versa which wasn’t too creepy in the case of fifteen year old campers flirting with the seventeen year old counselors. The ten year old campers were destined for heartbreak though. In one group of campers- not mine unfortunately- there were two really cool chicks. Stacy and Julie were the two campers all the counselors wanted to flirt with. They quickly picked their summer romances which is why it was odd when Julie told me Stacy had a crush on me. Um, she already picked someone and it wasn’t me. Still, I was flattered to be crushed so I plotted with Julie about how to sway Stacy away. During all the “accidental” meetings Julie helped engineer, I realized how cool Julie was though and wished she was the one who had a crush on me. At the end of the ten days, all the counselors and campers climbed back on our different buses to return home. Julie wanted a hug before we got on our separate buses. Of course I obliged. As the buses pulled out, someone commented on the big goofy grin on my face. Another person asked who Julie was and why her name was on my back. Huh? I reached around and pulled a sticker off my back. When we hugged, Julie slapped a sticker with her name on it on my back. It said “Property Of Julie”. She was claiming me. She did like me! That’s why I wasn’t surprised when she later appeared at the end-of-summer camp for just the counselors and older campers. It wasn’t fate- it was mutual attraction. We hit it off so well then that we became pen pals afterwards. (Tween translation: Being pen pals is kind of like chatting online, only with paper and pens instead of a computer. And it’s not instant. And you can’t include songs or photos. And it costs more to send a message that it does to text one on your phone. Still, it was the thing back then. In the 1800’s. Then again, I’ve always been a little retro.) It ended the way most pen pals relationships did when you were too young to drive and the person lives several counties away- we gradually stopped writing and lost touch with each other.

So, you are likely asking right now how on earth that has anything to do with fate or debating the existence of randomness in the universe. Well, for one thing, I had to lay the groundwork. For another, I was pretty convinced for a number of years that Julie was my soulmate and no one likes to attribute meeting your soulmate to pure coincidence. There has to be some magic spark, or predestination or divine guidance, right? No one tells the story of meeting their spouse by saying “Yeah, we happened to walk past each other in the supermarket and that was that. Random chance” Nope, there always has to be something special about it, like a certain slant of light coming from the clouds or a unicorn frolicking in the garden. Well, I didn’t end up marrying Julie. In fact, I never even thought I’d hear from her again because I didn’t know where she lived once she ran away from her foster parent’s. One day in high school I’m walking to my locker when a voice calls out to me. “Hey, it’s Julie. Remember me? You liked me or at least you did at summer camp.” Yeah, I remember. You’re pretty unforgettable. Turns out that she was put into a new foster home and it was in my school district so she was going to my high school. She had been there a week and noticed me a couple days earlier but was too nervous to talk to me until now. That’s pretty unusual how things worked out. We became friends again and started hanging out, mostly after school since we had different lunch periods and different classes. It was pretty easy to hang out after school because…she lived three freaking miles from my house! Nah, there is no such thing as a design to the universe. I see no evidence of it. Show me some more proof, concrete proof. Show me a manual, some book detailing the plan.

I found the book twenty years later. By then, I had basically been out of touch with Julie for ten years. Somewhere in that span of time she had gone to college, majored in English, divorced Tommy, and then married Reinhold. I think she has kids too- don’t ask me why I think that but I think I’m right. As far as I know, she is still living in Richmond with Reinhold and hopefully she’s happy. A few years ago, Elizabeth was on an Oscar Wilde kick. She was proclaiming his genius and encouraging everyone to read his stuff. Not that I disagree, but it did involve seeing a bunch of plays and movies and one Christmas, everyone got the collected works of Oscar Wilde as their present. When I was in Paris, I even decided to stop by his gravesite. One day I was at a book sale at the library and I was rummaging through the classics section. Since it was the year before I got the Wilde “doorstop” book for Christmas, I bought a couple of the Oscar Wilde books they had so I could read some Wilde. I’ll buy anything for a quarter if I’m even mildly interested in it. At home, I flipped through Dorian Gray and wondered what people other than Elizabeth thought of Wilde, not that it was a conversation you can start with too many people these days.

This book had some notes in the margins and some underlined passages so I skimmed through those to see if they could validate Elizabeth’s current obsession. As I read through various notes on many of the pages, they bothered me for some reason. I went back to the beginning of the book with the intention of going through all of them again front-to-back. On the front, I see a handwritten notation- Julie Yates, the name I first knew her by- in the same style handwriting that my former pen pal had. I had to find out if it was hers. I was even willing to make that awkward phone call, the one where someone you had long lost touch with calls you with some weird question or lame attempt to reconnect. Still, it was very gratifying to hear that yes, she read Dorian Gray for her English degree, yes, she makes notes in her books, no, she no longer has the book. I was positive that this book was hers and somehow over the last 20 years it had gotten from Richmond to Washington DC, so that when I was at this one particular book sale, I happened to pick up a book I likely would never had glanced at had Elizabeth not been currently enthralled with the author. This particular book would have absolutely no relevance to anyone other than me (or maybe Julie) and it winds up in my hands, twenty years later. That is my definition of impossible. I don’t know if I quite believe in God but I no longer believe in coincidence.



That last paragraph would have been the end of this column except for one small matter and let me just start this footnote by saying…Oh my god! As I was spell-checking this column, I went to Wikipedia again to see if I was spelling “Deus ex machina” correctly since Word’s spell-check is useless. Turns out I spelled it correctly but I kept reading through the entry to make sure I was also using it in the proper context and I came across this section:

“Modern uses- In fiction writing, the phrase has been extended to refer to a sudden and unexpected resolution to a seemingly intractable problem in a plot-line, or what might be called an "Oh, by the way..." ending. Some critics think that a deus ex machina is generally undesirable in writing and often implies a lack of skill on the part of the author because it does not pay due regard to the story's internal logic and is often so unlikely that it challenges suspension of disbelief, allowing the author to conclude the story with an unlikely, though more palatable, ending. A well-known modern example of deus ex machina occurs in the Michael Crichton book The Andromeda Strain: the pathogen referred to in the title is suddenly rendered non-lethal by a random mutation which apparently affects every existing virus particle instantaneously.”

The entry refers to Crichton, the exact person that got this whole train of thought started. How on earth can there be unexpected connections like this and not have everything be part of some larger order? If I were Goldfinger, this would be irrefutable proof for me. Of course, if I were Goldfinger I would also be a crazy, evil billionaire mastermind which I’m sure must have some kind of downside, even if I can’t see it at the moment. Life is not guided by chance. It can’t be, can it?

Christmas Ruins

My sister ruined Christmas. She didn’t mean to, at first, but by the time she was finished she had totally demolished it, leaving it strewn across the floor like a big, fancily wrapped present attacked by a hyperactive 5 year-old on a Snickers bar and fruit juice binge. Susan started her destruction three years ago, with a slightly frantic phone call to my parents on Christmas Eve. She was at the airport but she had some problems that caused her to miss her flight. At first, she didn’t say why she had missed it so we were left to imagine all kinds of things- she overslept, traffic to the airport was bad, she and Kevin had a fight before leaving the house, she went to the wrong airport or maybe there was a pilot’s strike. We had no idea and since I have a vivid imagination, you can guess what kinds of theories I came up with. A few calls later we found out the actual story. She was at the airport about to get on the plane for North Carolina but security had stopped her because her bag was supposedly too big to allow through as a carry-on. Of course, the agents at the check-in area didn’t warn her that this would be an issue. No, it was only the security folks who thought it was troublesome even though they aren’t the ones who operate the planes or load the baggage.

This meant that Susan had to go back to the check-in area to check her bag then go through security again. Naturally they didn’t allow her to go to the front of the line after checking her bag. Nope, she had to go to the end of the line, which caused her to miss her flight. That’s when she called us to tell us the news. Now she was on standby for the next available flight. Since it was Christmas Eve, you can imagine how many unoccupied seats there were. In other words, she didn’t make the 1:00 flight, the 2:00 flight, the 3:30 flight or even the 4:00 flight. Each time she called to update us on her status she was a bit more hysterical. The four of us- my sister, my parents and me- have always been together on Christmas Eve. I don’t recall a single time that wasn’t the case. When my Dad was in Vietnam, there may have been some missed Christmases but I was too young to realize it. When he was stationed in Alaska without us, there may have been a missed Christmas but I was old enough by then that I probably would have remembered that happening.

So basically every Christmas that Susan and I can recall, we went to my parent’s house and celebrated. We followed the same rituals every year. It started with listening to Christmas songs while eating nuts and oranges during the day on Christmas Eve, a ham dinner for supper, opening one present that night then poking and prodding the rest of them before bedtime to see if we can guess what they were. The next morning we checked out our stockings, often having to guess who got which one since they didn’t have names. This was a bit easier when our dog Perky was still around because the one with a rawhide chew in it was usually his. Then we opened the rest of the presents after breakfast, including those that “Santa” had brought overnight. We would call relatives on the speakerphone, thank them for any gifts and wish them a Merry Christmas before tucking into a big dinner, usually a turkey dinner. Then it was time to relax for a bit, maybe read a book and eat stocking candy or perhaps watch some of the Christmas specials on television. In the last few years it also meant Susan or I heading to the airport late in the afternoon- me for a flight home and Susan to meet Kevin at her in-laws’ house in Michigan.

Now those traditions were in jeopardy. If Susan could not get on a standby flight, everything goes down the drain. We can’t give her our presents, hers are in that no-longer-a-carry-on bag. The food is getting cold, and poking at presents isn’t as fun without her. By 5:00, with no good news from Susan, we figured the worst. By 6:00 gloom had descended. My parents were stuck with just me- not a spunky attention-craving daughter, no successful and engaged child to share career and marital advice with. Nope, just me- the quiet one who doesn’t say all that much and isn’t as interesting. Then at 7:00, we got another call. Susan had made it onto a flight and would be at Charlotte airport around 8:00. Christmas was saved! The traditions had been trampled on but the holiday was still salvageable. It was the Goodman family equivalent of the Grinch pulling the sleigh back from the edge of the cliff. There was much rejoicing in our Whoville.

Then came the next Christmas. The following year, Susan must have been over-confident about squeaking out last year’s last-minute miracle because she gave herself an even bigger handicap this time. On the day of her flight, she wasn’t even in the same state. She was in Arizona, driving back to Colorado from a work meeting. She had planned to fly back to Denver and pick up her suitcases from home before flying to North Carolina but a huge snowstorm in Denver had closed the airport. She could rent a car and get back home earlier than she could by waiting for in-bound flights to resume. I was already at my parent’s house since I normally get there a few days before Christmas so I can interact with them before being overshadowed by Susan. It was amusing to hear Susan call and give us updates about what state she was in, whether the airport was open yet and if her flight was back on schedule. By the time all those things aligned, there was no time left for us. If she came to North Carolina, she would only be able to stay part of Christmas Day before leaving to catch her flight to Michigan. She would be able to keep the second leg of her Christmas tour intact though if she cancelled on us. I was a bit disappointed but it made sense. I would probably do the same thing if I was in that situation. Heck, if it was me I wouldn’t even try to do a back-to-back, not with the limited amount of vacation time she had left these last couple of years. I would flip a coin and see who to visit this year: heads- the Goodman’s, tails- the Schaub’s and if it lands on its’ side then me and the hubby are going to Italy by ourselves.

I think of this second Christmas dilemma as the speakerphone Christmas because that’s how we celebrated Christmas morning. Mom, Dad and I unwrapped the presents that were there with Susan listening to us on the speaker phone and she unwrapped some gifts on her end. There was no fighting over where to sit at the dinner table or who got to eat all the stuffing or whether it was time to stop peeking at the presents. Mom told me which stocking was mine, I couldn’t guess Susan’s presents before she opened them and Susan and I didn’t go for a walk around the neighborhood with our folks. Our traditional celebration had now been hit by a bus, sent to Intensive Care and was eating liquid food through a tube. We were experiencing more folly than holly jolly.

Christmas couldn’t get much worse, right? I didn’t say that out loud at the time, I only thought it but someone must have heard because the following year the good news was mixed with a big dose of bad news. The bad news was that Susan wasn’t coming for the holiday. She wasn’t even planning to come, let alone getting waylaid by weather, security guards, delays or timetables. She was staying in Denver and ending the Christmas traditions of her own accord. No more family festivities, no more rituals, no more quality time. I had upheld my end of the ceremonies, coming home every year, not expecting others to come to me, not getting married. (Wait, should I consider that a virtue or just stupidity?) My parents also did their part- no Christmas trip to Europe, no bizarre holiday in Florida, no nursing homes. Nope, it was Susan who ended things. She pulled the plug on our Christmas which was on life support. She’s the one I can point my finger at and say “Ah! It was you!” Her excuse was pretty good though- that was the good news. She was eight months pregnant. Baby Brendan was due in January so she couldn’t very well get on a plane at the end of December, nor would she want to. If anything, we should go to her but we didn’t. I’m not quite sure why not- something to do with bonding time with the in-laws- but we instead tried something new.

Mom, Dad and I joined Aunt Pat and Uncle Bill in Texas for Christmas, along with my cousins Alan & Wesley and his wife and Bill’s son and Bill’s “foster” son and girlfriend. Oh, and four dogs, an RV, and a timeshare condo an hour away. Yep, it was definitely something new. A whole different kind of family experience but that’s another story. Today I just wanted to look at how Christmas was taken out in the alley and beaten up by Susan. I also wanted to thank her for that because sometimes you need to try different things and go outside your comfort zone. I really enjoyed the Christmas with my other relatives; it was an interesting change of pace. This year looks to be unusual as well. My parents are staying home while Susan and I go to Michigan to spend the holiday with her in-laws. Again, I’m not quite sure how this all came about because the original plan was for all of us to go to Susan and if that didn’t work out then it would be the parent’s and I in Florida while she stayed in Denver. No, I don’t know why Florida was under consideration. I don’t decide these things, I just report them. As it happened, Susan’s invitation to me to come to Denver was converted to an invitation to join her in Michigan which I readily accepted. This means that I’ll get to see my nephew for the first time and also spend more than a few minutes around Kevin and his parents. I’ve asked them not to get me anything because I would have no idea what to get them in return so the holiday will really be about spending time with people and I’m happy about that. Maybe some new traditions can start. Plus, there is a much greater change of having a white Christmas in Michigan than there would have been in North Carolina or Florida.

I think the only thing that I’ll be sad about will be the fact that Mom won’t be making the stuffing. She does it exactly how I like. It’s better to fight with your sister over how much stuffing to have then to have all you want of some that is no good. I’m still holding out hope that whoever does Christmas dinner makes it right or that we go out to eat at some place like Boston Market where the odds of good stuffing rise exponentially. So I’m actually excited about Christmas this year rather than just being generally happy about the holiday. Of course that means it could turn out horrible and somehow end in bloodshed and burnt Christmas trees but I’m choosing to be optimistic. If I won’t be home for the holidays, at least I’ll be entertained for the holidays. This might even be the start of a new tradition, which is no traditions. I’ll let you know how it goes.

The Change We Need Or The Change We Want?

This presidential election has seen the word “change” used a staggering number of times. The candidates’ slogans are about “Change you can believe in” or “The change you need” or “It’s time for a change.” Barack Obama made “Change you can believe in” the cornerstone of his improbable run to the Democratic Party nomination and likely the Presidency. Much of the time, it seemed like the slogan was used in place of an actual platform. Hillary Clinton was probably exasperated about having to defeat a catchy slogan rather an actual candidate. I understand her angst and why she fought so long for the nomination. It was the Al Gore-like disbelief about losing to a guy with no experience, just a slogan and mainstream popular appeal. The Republican nominee, John McCain, touts his decades-long proclivity for change and reform. He is even saying that the country needs a change from the policies of the current Republican administration and that he is the best one to provide it. It takes some balls to join in the opposing parties’ rote chant to throw out the current bum and put them in there instead. When Obama started to gain momentum, McCain briefly changed his slogans to include the word change also. I also find it amusingly ironic that Obama, the supposed agent of change in this election, is the one to have selected a vice-presidential candidate who is an old white guy with years of service in Congress while the Republican nominee chose a woman. I think the VP debates should have come with identifying subheaders so casual observers could tell which candidate was the Democrat or the Republican. Both presidential candidates are even changing their long-held beliefs in order to be more electable, although with Obama “long held” might not be a precise enough term since he has only been in Congress for two years. McCain is appearing to side with traditional Republican beliefs to win over the party faithful and Obama is ignoring past promises like campaigning in all 50 states and accepting funding from the Presidential Election Campaign Fund. That’s why you see his ads everywhere- he is outspending McCain by about four to one and will soon have set the record for most money spent on a political campaign. Selfish, big spending by a politician during an economic downturn? Not quite the kind of change people are expecting but presumably, that will be just an aberration that was necessary to gain the White House.

It seems pretty clear that this presidential campaign is all about change, real and rhetorical. The thing is, what is so great about change? “The change you need” sounds like I’m going to be forced to swallow something unappetizing. I’m more interested in change I want, not change I need. In fact, lately I’ve been sounding a bit like a grumpy old man, grumbling about everything changing and how things used to be. Yes, I would like to see us get out of Iraq and stay out of dangerous military situations but is that change? We weren’t in Iraq 50 years ago. We were just peacefully living in our “Leave It To Beaver” world and trying to avoid tangling with Russia during the Cold War. Then something changed in the 1990’s and 2001 and we went into Afghanistan and Iraq, twice. Do we need to fix the financial markets? Yes we do but things had been going fine until Bill Clinton’s presidency. Then things changed because he aggressively pushed to loosen up the credit requirements for a loan so it got a lot easier to buy a house, even if you couldn’t really afford one. Heck, you could even get a home loan despite not having enough income to adequately meet the mortgage payments and other bills. Now the housing loan market has crashed. This doesn’t sound like what I need. We had a fuel crisis in the 1970’s so people learned to ration and buy fuel efficient cars, then things changed and now our monster SUVs require $4 a gallon gas to fill up with. Was this the change I needed?

It’s not just political situations either. As I’m driving down Gallows Road, I see that the Taco Bell that has been here as long as I’ve lived in the area is now closed. It used to be busy even at midnight and now it is shuttered. So is the gas station across the street, the bank next door and the auto body shop catty-corner to it. Even the Pizza Hut and the 7-11 behind the Taco Bell are gone. You know how I feel about 7-11’s. Closing one is like a funeral for my inner child. It seems like the whole area right around there is closing, like a developer bought everything up and will put in a monstrous high-rise or some retail complex. On the other side of the intersection, there is already a new condo complex so maybe it is going to be bookended? Although, based on what Mike and I saw when we hit the new Chipotle, most of the condos appear to be unoccupied, based on the sterility of their balconies. The Merrifield Multiplex theatre that I always went to on Friday night is a ghost of its’ former self. When I saw the movie Titanic there, it was so crowded we had to park in the back back lot. Not the side lot, or the huge back lot but the overflow lot behind that. Now there aren’t even enough cars to fill the first three rows of the sidelot. I was so worried about them closing that I talked to the manager of the theatre recently to see if that was a possibility. He assured me it wasn’t likely to happen but who knows- things change. Are all my favorite shops about to go away? What’s next? As a kid, my favorite candy bar was the Marathon Bar. Nowadays, I bet no one even knows what that was. (It was two overlapping ribbons of caramel, covered with chocolate.)

The other day I drove by Landmark Plaza and I noticed two things. First, in the last decade two music store chains had come and gone from the strip mall- Tower Records and the Waxie Maxie’s where I worked for my first job after getting out of college. That bummed me out. Second, a Rita’s water ice shop had just opened up. That did not bum me out. In fact, it made my summer because I stopped by numerous times for a gelati (Italian ice with layers of custard) on a hot day. Even on a rainy day’s I’d visit because they had a two-for-one deal if it was raining. Speaking of music, on my way to work yesterday, I was listening to the Fleetwood Mac CD I had bought. It was a remastered version of the self-titled album when Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks first joined the band. After an initial listen, I wondered why I was so enraptured with the album when I first got it back in college. When I got to some of the bonus material, I realized why. The bonus cuts were the original versions of the singles from the album. When I listened to those, and flipped back and forth between the remastered versions, I remembered something I had read a little bit ago. There is a trend in music currently to remixed songs at the same time they are being remastered. This is done to “freshen” things up, to change them up. One way to do this is to remix the songs to sound better in a compressed digital format, like when you download songs. Certain elements are emphasized in the new mix or made louder. In this case, it meant that in the song “Over My Head”, the drums were made to be the primary element of the song, not Christine McVie’s vocals or the delicate guitar work by Lindsey Buckingham that had anchored the song originally. In fact, the guitar is almost buried in this version and vocals barely escape the drum onslaught. This happened with almost all the songs on the remastered album. Bet the drum part isn’t what you recall liking about the song Rhiannon. Too bad, because now you will be painful aware of it. I used to think a remastered CD meant a cleaner copy was being made from the master tapes but nowadays, it means the master tapes were used to change and “improve” the original.

My sister got married a few years ago and this year she had a baby- little Brendan who is pictured above. He’s pretty adorable and she’s happy about the whole thing. That was a good change even if it is harder for her to fit into her jeans at the moment. Many people I know have gotten married which is an example of how change can be good. Then they moved away so I don’t see them too often. That’s bad change, at least in my opinion. It probably makes them ecstatic but so far they have been polite enough not to say “Thank God we got away from him!” Some good friends from high school I have never heard from again and some are still in my social circle. I used to live at home and follow my parent’s rules but now I live on my own and make my own rules. I used to earn minimum wage working at the library at school and now I earn a lot more. I got a new-ish car this year, which is a great change but the lock on this car opens in the opposite direction of the lock on my old car- even though they are both made by GM. Don’t they believe in standardization or are they deliberately forcing change upon people?

In an earlier post, I mentioned an example of unwanted change, about how my favorite television shows seem to go away too soon. Another example- Coke is a classic drink but then some executives decided we needed a change so we got New Coke, which luckily caused more changes when Classic Coke was introduced/reintroduced and then it become the only Coke, meaning the newest Coke was the old Coke. What else is going to disappear? When is the last time you saw Rolodexes, lickable stamps, tape decks, record stores, lighters flicked at the end of a concert, standing in line for tickets, Woolworths, Hecht’s, K-Mart, record players, stonewashed jeans, suspenders, rocking chairs, good penmanship, full-service gas stations, everyone at the table ordering dessert, hitchhiking, water beds or analog clocks. I’m not saying that all these things should have stuck around but now there is no choice. I for one loved the idea of self-adhesive stamp but these days, would you risk hitchhiking? Could you find a someone to pump your gas if you had two broken arms? Could you still play your old 45 records if you had the urge? Could you buy the songs digitally instead or are they out of print for good? Can you smoke in a restaurant in DC? Some things are either gone for good or quickly on the way out, for better or for worse. Even the comic strip “For Better Or Worse” has changed. It had been progressing in real time but after 20 or more years, the characters got too old so the cartoonist started over and made them the age they were when the strip first started. Essentially, it was a mulligan, a do-over. That casts the title in an ironic light now. Kind of a metaphor for a lot of things these days. We might say it is for better or worse but we really mean “Until I get tired of it not being mostly on the better side.”

The point of all this ranting and reminiscing is that I don’t like change forced upon me. I want to decide what needs to change. I perfectly understand that it is an issue of control. I don’t like other people deciding on things that affect my life. At the same time, I know that they must be allowed to do what they choose because it is their life, their country or their business being affected. It might make sense for 7-11 to sell of one of their stores to a developer who wants to build a condo complex for people who want to move closer to work even though it means my commute will get more difficult and I won’t be able to get a Slurpee as easily. I know that Steve wanted to get married to Christine and I think that was an excellent decision but it doesn’t mean I’m not sad to see less of them since they moved to Seattle and then Kansas. I’m sure Steve wasn’t happy that his work place changed from a hospital in Seattle to a hospital in Iraq. Mom and Dad bought a new place in a planned community in South Carolina even though it meant moving out of the house they had retired to in North Carolina. Now they are so deluged with social engagements that Mom is giving up her part-time job in order to be a better “socialite”. A major change turned out to be a good thing. The current financial turmoil changed the direction of my investments to a decidedly downward trend line. The invasion of Iraq was quick but the mission still has not been accomplished. The climate is changing worldwide and the polar ice caps are receding very quickly. Soon the seas in the Arctic Circle will be accessible by ship and several nations will be jockeying for sovereignty of the seas and fighting for the oil rights to the vast reserves that had previously been inaccessible. The polar bear might soon have to worry about extinction.

Even if I don’t get to decide everything, even if I have to admit I’m not the center of the universe (and Mom trained me well because she never told me I was) I would like to know what exactly change will mean. Don’t just tell me things are going to change. As I’ve talked about above, change can be good but it can also be bad. It can be New Coke, it can be Iraq, it can be condos, it can be extinction. Tell what will happen, as best as you can project it. Flinging the word around willy-nilly as a campaign slogan is dangerous. Barack Obama is in a position to influence the world. Not just my personal part of it, but the world of everyone I know. Spell it out so even if I can’t control what happens, I can plan for different scenarios. When someone has to power to make changes happen, without any direct input from me, I’m naturally going to be a bit worried. Change can be good or it can be bad. What I want is the change I want. “The change I need” scares me.