Get Yourself a Cow-Catcher

Anyone who writes knows that it’s entirely too easy to find yourself off-track.  I’m not just talking about digressions within a story-line but even putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard.  Distractions of all sorts surround us, and more often than not our best intentions have not been met because we’ve become sidetracked.

When a sketch artist sits down to draw, he or she will have his paper, pencils and charcoal and shading tools and erasers, proper lighting, etc.  No sketch artist who loves his work will walk over to his drawing, sketch in five or six lines, and then get up to go do something else.  Or even sketch in a few lines and then just sit there thinking about a grocery list or a project at work.  He’ll devote at least thirty minutes of uninterrupted sketching to complete at least a portion of his work.

Writers, or at least the ones I know, tend to be different.  While the overall product of writers and sketchers is similar, i.e. something has been created from nothing, writers must rely on their thoughts and ideas and memories to create.  Most sketchers will have at least a model of some sort to work from, either a photograph or an object like a bowl of fruit.  And therein lies the problem with writers.  Taking what you see and drawing a complex copy of it requires some skill, but what you see will usually never deviate much or at all during the course of a sketch.  Our thoughts, however, are never in a fixed, static state, and thus our writing and direction and focus can constantly change.

I mean no disrespect to people who sketch or paint, by the way.  I love to sketch myself, and yet I’ve always found the art elusive.  A wrong angle here or a line that’s become too long there can totally throw off the finished product, and thus drawing requires a ton of patience and a keen eye that few of us possess.

Yet my point with writing is that our models are constantly shifting.  Add in life, that is,  the time we spend doing things like work, spending time with family, running errands, etc., and our best ideas can often be lost or forgotten.  And thus some of our most compelling thoughts are never written down.

I keep telling myself, “Ryan, you need to get yourself a cow-catcher.”  What I mean by that is that I need to be able to push things aside to pursue my passion and dreams.  I first need to move out all the daily crap I deal with and allot myself the time to sit and write, rather than jotting down a few paragraphs every so often when I have a minute here or there.

And I’m not alone.  Anyone can find a free half hour in a week to set aside for accomplishing something.  I was informed of an incident a while back at a company where a boss, during the final quarter of a year when schedules were hectic, stated that year that nobody had time until the first quarter to do an important hour-long training (that had been annually conducted in the fourth quarter for numerous years prior).  That was 62 business days to work with, or 465 hours, and nobody had one hour (0.2% of the total time) to spare.  Really?  Really??  Seems a bit ludicrous to me, especially when daily people could be seen standing in the halls and chatting about personal stuff or sending emails to friends or even surfing the web for a few minutes.

Anyone who uses the excuse that he/she doesn’t have a half hour or an hour to spare in a week is kidding him/herself.  If you are telling yourself that you don’t have an hour, it sounds like you need to take a step back from your life and make some assessments about how you manage your time.  If you are a workaholic, does that project that is due three months from now really require twelve hours a day from you—in other words, you can’t even spare an hour?  If not, you’re probably overworked or need far better time management skills (and possibly even psychiatric help).  If you watch TV, can’t you pick your least favorite of your favorite shows and stop watching it—or else record the season on your DVR and watch it in the summer when reruns abound? (And if you are that glued to your TV, you may need psychiatric help as well!)  If you are a stay-at-home mom, can’t you run a load of laundry and start dinner at the same time, or maybe even get your kids to help you with mixing or stirring or setting the table?  We ALL can find an hour a week, and probably a whole lot more if we really try.

So once you find the time to write (or exercise or learn to play a musical instrument or whatever it is you are passionate about), the next step is to push aside all of the chaos swirling around in your head and focus.  One of the best ways I know to do this is to deep breathe or meditate.  Inhale 5 seconds through your nose, hold for two seconds, then exhale 5 seconds out your mouth.  Count the seconds, focus only on your breathing, and do this for five or ten minutes.  At the end of that brief time, you’ll find yourself relaxed and hopefully focused enough to begin work.  I’ve been trying to do this any time I’m about to start on something that requires a lot of thought, and I’m always surprised at how well it works.  Picture a math professor’s whiteboard filled with all the formulas from the previous lecture, and imagine if he tried to cram in new equations for your class.  You wouldn’t want that, would you?  No, you’d want a clean slate.  It’s the same principle.

And then, when your mind is free, just write.  Sounds easy enough, but I always get caught up in re-reading my last chapter and editing.  Then when I get to the bottom and should start writing new material, I want to take a break because I’m mentally fatigued from all the editing I just did.  Or else I only have twenty minutes left of the time I’ve allotted myself, and so I make the excuse that I can’t write anything meaningful in twenty minutes.  “Get yourself a cow-catcher, Ryan.”  Push that perfectionist out of the way, forget about re-reading and editing, familiarize yourself with where you left off, and then JUST WRITE.  When I manage to do that, it’s usually at that point that the words start to flow, and before long I’ll have completed a whole chapter.

But there are other obstacles that may be in my way.  I’m fortunate enough through my IT work to have developed some quick fingers.  I’ve seen and heard and read of other writers who struggle with typing.  If you can’t type, and you like to write, ditch the keyboard and pick up a pen.  Someone who types 25 words per minute will ultimately lose their ideas and thoughts because they are spending too long trying to get them out.  And if writing won’t work, get some speech recognition software like Dragon Naturally Speaking and dictate your thoughts.  It’s akin to someone who loves to exercise but has bad knees or bunions.  You can still exercise, but running may not be the best way to do it.  You can work to improve on physical or mental or emotional limitations, but don’t let them become roadblocks to your accomplishments.

We all have obstacles that prevent us from achieving greatness, like cows standing on the railroad tracks.  So get yourself a cow-catcher, push those obstacles clear of your path, and accomplish something that makes you proud!

Positive, Negative, Polarized America!

This morning my wife and I were listening to the radio on our way to work.  The DJ was discussing a recent New York school that was handing out the Plan B pill and birth controls to girls without parental consent, and numerous people were calling in either for or against the school for doing this.

Obviously the people for it were the liberal type, saying that kids would have sex anyway and that they should be given every opportunity to avoid pregnancy.  Many were adult parents that had their children while in their teens, and they reflected on how difficult their lives had been and how they wished they had those types of options back then.

The people against it were the conservative types, and their summarized views were that society is failing these kids by doing this.  Instead of teaching abstinence and morals, they are encouraging kids to have sex, and that’s just not right.  One lady called in and bashed another lady for saying that kids would just have sex anyway, saying that her kids wouldn’t because she talks to them about it constantly and they know that they shouldn’t have premarital sex.

And I find this serious topic strangely amusing.  Not for the topic itself, but because this is just a microcosm of how polarized Americans are today.  It’s like nobody seems to notice the gray area anymore.  For the people who are for birth control and Plan B, you need to make sure the program is done properly.  Handing these things out like candy is going to be problematic.  Just like what the naysayers are saying, you are almost encouraging kids to have sex if these things are being handed out without counseling, guidance, etc.

On the other hand, the ones who are against it are missing the point entirely.  You can talk to your kids all you want, but kids are kids.  They rebel.  That’s what they do.  And honestly, if you are too strict with them, they’ll just rebel even more.  You may go to church and instill religion and morals and fear into your child, but you can’t be with them 100% of the time, and that 1% where you aren’t watching—guess what, your kid could be out there getting pregnant.  Don’t be so naïve to think your child is special, either.  Unless they don’t have hormones, which would be a medical enigma, they are probably going to have sex before they are out of high school.  After all, the average age for virginity loss is 17.0 in males and 17.3 for females in the United States, so unless you have a gifted kid that’s already gone off to college at that age, your kid is probably going to be having sex in his or her senior year of high school.

Regardless, I just love how people get so fired up over topics like this.  The school offered parents the ability to “opt-out” of the program by filling out a form.  It wasn’t like they were going against the wishes of the parents and forcing the kids to take them.  They were just making this available to kids who needed them, kids who may otherwise be too scared to go to their parents—parents like those same conservative ones who swore up and down that their child would not be having sex.

But it’s like that with every hot button issue now.  People are either decidedly for or against Obama or Romney.  People are either for or against abortion, gay marriage, the Affordable Healthcare Act, over-sized soft drinks, SpongeBob, toe jam.  I hate to tell you, folks, but the world isn’t as yin and yang as you make it out to be.  What seems like a great or horrible idea to you might be the opposite to someone else, but what in the world ever happened with our ability to compromise?

I was watching a Scott Pelley interview with President Obama last week, and the CBS anchor directly asked the President why he can’t seem to get along with Republicans.  And Obama stated, “I’ve joked in the past to my staff and to some Republicans, ‘Look, if you want me to come over and wash your car, walk your dog, I’m game, if it means that we’re actually getting stuff done on behalf of the American people.’”  Funny, because I can’t see Mitt Romney doing that.  I can’t really see Obama doing that either—but at least he’s saying he’s willing to compromise and work together.   But the Republicans reject everything he puts before them, and they dislike his views so much that Romney wants to repeal the Affordable Healthcare Act as one of his top priorities.  And Democrats aren't off the hook either.  What’s up with all of this non-stop mentioning of Romney’s tax returns?  Yeah, the guy pays less than most people pay.  It sucks, it's unfair, it's BS, but it’s because the tax codes are flawed.  Yes, if elected, he probably won't do anything to change that--and may even make it even easier for the super-rich to get more money--but let’s at least hear what he has to offer in his plan to fix our country’s woes.  THEN we can vote for the people who can get them all patched up—by WORKING TOGETHER.  Let’s not make our judgments until we know each plan inside and out.

Really, all this fighting has to stop.  People may not see eye to eye, but let’s at least agree to disagree and move on.  Or maybe we just open our minds up a little.  Everyone has an opinion, and yet so few of us are ever willing to hear out the other side.

Maybe last night that Seattle Seahawk really didn’t commit offensive pass interference before simultaneously catching the ball even though the Green Bay Packer player had it hugged to his chest tighter than a newborn baby.  Ok...yeah...maybe in some instances there really isn't much gray area...

Blind to the Ways of the World

I’m amazed at how content some people are with ignorance.  They live day to day without reading newspapers, watching news, surfing the web.  And I’m finding more and more of these people each and every day.  People that choose not to encumber themselves with technological tools such as smart phones and Facebook accounts.  People that don’t have cable or satellite subscriptions or even a television to watch them on.  What gives?

My wife’s aunt  is in her late thirties or early forties and can’t read.  Not English.  Not Vietnamese, which is her native country.  I just can’t imagine stumbling through life and seeing WORDS everywhere and not knowing what they say.  I mean, how could anyone go through life without having any inkling of what is going on around them? 

On the flip side, I see people that seem to LIVE on social networking sites.  I've even had some recent Facebook "friends" that have lost all social etiquette.  It seems some people, rather than choosing to give updates on their daily happenings or posting pictures of things they find interesting or exciting, have decided that Facebook is a prime market for proselytizing their political agendas.  It’s not like he or she would go around telling people in public that Romney is an idiot or Obama is inept.  Doing so would probably, at the very least, get a few choice vulgar words or middle fingers tossed at them.  Yet on Facebook they have no problem posting graphs and phrases outlining the fallacies of our president and/or his competitor.  Or worse yet, a few of my Facebook “friends” have posted glaringly inappropriate content.  Nobody wants to know that you think that lady’s butt looks nice, even though you used some outrageously vulgar language to express your sentiments.  Nobody cares that you think certain people have lied to you for years, and that they can all reside in a fiery biblical residence for their rest of eternity.  Nobody cares about your religion or your politics or anything else you post in an attempt to make people see your point of view.  Because either people will agree with you, or they won’t, and the ones that won’t will just think you are nuts and defriend/block/ignore you.

I’m not sure which is better, being completely naïve to the ways of the world or knowing entirely too much, especially with regards to close friends and members of your own family.

When I turned eighteen, I got a tattoo on my leg of the Chinese symbol for the word slave.  I had it lasered off in my late twenties because, well, it was the Chinese symbol for the word slave!   And really, I think it might have actually meant “female slave”—I know, how awful is that!—and I felt extremely embarrassed about it when I frequented Chinese eateries.  But the reason I got the tattoo in the first place was purely philosophical.  It was to always remind me that I am a slave to my desires.  In other words, I live in a capitalist, keeping-up-with-the-Jones’s society where everyone is judgmental of everyone else, money equals power, and we are raised from a young age to place value in material possessions.  I will always want things.  And each and every time I see something I want, that something begins to own me.  I’ve lost control.  I’ve become nothing more than a child lusting over a piece of candy.

For a while I actually dreamed of moving to China and joining a monastery.  I wanted to train my body and my mind to think without influence, to exist without needs, to accept all and judge nothing.  Of course, being a white American kid, I realized those were merely pipe dreams.  Sure I studied martial arts and read hundreds of books on eastern philosophies, but I had to be realistic.  And now that I’m a father and a husband, I wouldn’t trade my family for the world.  But I still envy those monks, knowing that they know nothing and yet everything at the same time.

Our minds, as babies, have not yet developed enough to understand the world in which we live.  And as we grow, we learn to love, hate, value, judge, believe.  We learn what is right and what is wrong, what makes us happy and what makes us sad.  But unfortunately all of that is relative.  What I judge to be good, like maybe voting for Obama for president, someone else may judge to be bad.  I value my Dodge Ram pickup truck, and yet I know a few people who detest the make and model and even hate the people who drive them, as I learned one day when a friend not-so-eloquently put his foot in his mouth by bashing people who drove them, not knowing that I had just purchased one a few weeks prior.  Oops!

So really, all of these things that we’ve learned since the time we were born really seem quite trivial and meaningless, don’t they?  Even down to the mere words we use to describe things.  Is it a spoon?  A utensil?  A lifter?  A ladle?  A spatula?  Did you walk here?  Or stroll?  Trot?  Bounce?  Saunter?  Oolala!  We use labels to define things, and yet those words do no justice for what I’m describing.  Each of you reading this is  picturing a different type of spoon—plastic, ornate, wooden, soup, large, small.  Does it matter?  All this knowledge in our heads is pointless.  Rather we should be focusing on the tangible and intangible.  Focus on what we observe.  Pass no judgment.  Do not label it.  Observe it, understand it, and then move on.

Having an empty, clear mind is a wondrous thing.  Because without that, we are all mindless slaves.  I’m a slave to my desires, and so are you.  I can’t just give up social media.  I mean, I can, but how else would I let all of my followers know I have this wonderful blog?  I can’t quit my job, because then I couldn’t put food on the table for my family.  I can’t give up drinking Red Bull.  Ok, maybe I can, but why should I?  We are born to be consumers.  We are born to grow up, go to school, get a job, have a family if we choose, grow old, and die…and buy buy buy all the way through.

Sad, really.  Life for those monks seems so much simpler.  And easy.  And peaceful.  They know a spoon is for eating rice, and that’s that.  They don’t get to hear daily about gas prices going up, injustices toward others, etc. etc.  It's no wonder they are some of the greatest thinkers mankind has to offer.

Maybe my friends and family who live life outside of the proverbial “Know” are onto something.  And maybe I shouldn’t have had that tattoo removed.

Time to Grow Up!

Yesterday Phil Miller, the man who hired me at my position, retired from thirty years of service with our firm.  He’ll be sorely missed.  Aside from his peculiar antics that make him him, he has been a great mentor and friend over the years.  Sure, he’s probably come to me for technology-related issues a hundred times more often than I’ve sought out his advice on retirement planning, but that’s the nature of our chosen fields of expertise.  Still, he paved the way for our company bringing in an IT expert twelve years ago and thereby giving me a job, and for that I’m thankful.

I guess I’ve reached a point in my lifetime where it’s time to put on the big-boy pants and accept the fact that my parents’ generation, the Baby Boomers, are all on their way out.  Sure, we’ll still see them holding political offices and heading large companies and corporations.  For some of us, age never seems to trump the prospects of more or continued money and/or power.  But for the most part, all of the Baby Boomers have already, are in the process of, or will be retiring very soon, relinquishing duties and control over to Generation X.

Funny, because I still feel like a kid.  I guess having that feeling is a good thing.  I mean, I’m on the latter end of the generation, having been born in the late 70s.  I also had my son later in life, being 31 when he was born.  Having a young one in your life tends to make you feel younger.  I swear I have just as much fun as he does playing with his Avengers toys and building forts out of pillows and stuffed animals.  We could spend hours in the toy store, both of us playing with cars and light-up swords and gauging which ones are worth buying to take home and play with some more.  Honestly, I don’t want to grow up!

Five years ago, before my son was born and my father passed away, I really felt like a kid.  Naïve.  Carefree.  Careless, to some degree.  My responsibilities from that time seem piddly compared to the ones I have now.  And whenever I had a question, I’d typically go to my dad.  He seemed to know everything, whether it was how to change brakes on a car to building a deck to water treatment processes and options.  He only attended a few years of college, but being a Navy Corpsman, electronics salesman, chemical salesman, and DIY master, he always seemed to know the answers to any of my questions with his huge vault of knowledge.

Now it seems more people have questions for me than I have for them.  And more often than not, I know the answer.  Maybe not to the extent that I could write a Wikipedia article on it, but I always seem to know enough.  I don’t know if it’s all those years of Q&A sessions with my father or my lifetime experiences or my education, but it’s amazing how I’ve acquired so much over the years.

It makes me realize that somewhere there I guess I already have grown up.  I can’t pinpoint a date or a year.  Was it the day my son was born?  Or when my father passed away?  Was it the day I graduated from college or started my first big boy job?  Or perhaps when I bought my first car or my house?  I don’t know, but all of those things made me take a leap into the unknown, and each one of them likely contributed to my “grown-up” status.

Thirty years or so from now, I’ll be retiring as well.  Maybe I’ll have grandkids and a cozy little spot picked out where I can spend the rest of my years.  Maybe not.  But no matter what—no matter how much I know or where life will take me, I think I’ll always still be a kid, still thinking that someday I’ll have to put on my big boy pants and grow up.  Or maybe it’s just better if I keep being that “grown-up” subconsciously and instead focus on having fun in life.

Don't Make Me Mad!

Last night, after a nice and relaxing forty-five minutes at the park walking and playing in the little playground there, I went home and did some self-reflecting.  It wasn’t easy, considering my son’s energy must not have been fully expended by that point as he was jumping on the bed and hitting me with pillows.  But as I sat there, mindlessly watching Celebrity Apprentice that I’d recorded on the DVR and fending off multiple polyester-filled missiles, my thoughts turned to that of self-assessment.

I realized that I really couldn’t be happier.  Sure I could always use more money, a bigger house, and a better wardrobe.  I’d love to get an in-ground swimming pool.  Heck, I’d love to just quit my job and spend hours and hours every day with my son, relaying to him the abundance of mostly useless knowledge I have stored up in my noggin.  He’ll be three in a couple of weeks, and sometimes I feel like I’ve missed a lot of opportunities with him being in daycare all day long.  Then again, there are some dads out there that travel for work, only seeing their kids a couple of nights a week, and those guys miss out on a lot more than I do.

But yeah, I’m a pretty happy guy.  I don’t have many problems.  I mean, yeah, I could always be in better shape.  We are planning a trip to the beach this summer, and a couple of my trip companions are concerned about their beach bodies.  I think I’m personally less concerned with my body image as I am with my overall health.  As far as my physique goes, my son says I look like the Hulk.  I laugh, thinking I probably look more like the Blob.  Hopefully my skin doesn’t have a greenish tint to it that I’m not aware of.  And I hope he doesn’t dwell on the rare times I get angry.  Everyone gets upset every once in a while, some more often than others, but I try to limit it as much as possible around him.  I don’t want him growing up in an environment where yelling is normal and accepted.  I try to laugh and be humorous with him as much as possible.  I’m also a pretty mellow guy by nature, so that helps.

Some people aren’t, though.  A couple of months ago, during the early evening hours, I just happened to look out the window and saw some guy pull over on the side of the road right across from my house.  He got out, walked around to the other side of his car, dragged a six-year-old kid out of the back seat, and began “paddling” him senselessly.  The kid was screaming and crying, and the guy tossed him back in, then came back to the other side and did the same with what appeared to be a four-year-old.  At that point I was up, down the hallway, and was standing outside my front door with my arms crossed, glaring at him.  He glanced over at me with a fury-filled, beat-red (as opposed to beet-red) face, said absolutely nothing, got in the car and sped off down the road as if nothing had happened.  I can’t say it was child abuse, as he did only smack them on their behinds, but there was something in his demeanor and the viciousness of the paddling that made me think that wasn’t the first or last of his temper.

I guess some people just aren’t meant to have children.  Perhaps conception was an accident, or maybe they were just careless.  Maybe a sixteen-year-old female, on the advice of her thirty-two-year-old mother, told her boyfriend she was taking birth control but wasn’t, hoping to get pregnant so that she could force him and his family to pay child support, just as her mother had done before her.  Or maybe they really did want kids, but their own upbringing was so screwed up that they don’t know how to raise them.  Or maybe a parent just snapped, just one blue-moon moment where that guy just couldn’t take it any longer, but instead of working through his anger calmly on his own, he unfortunately decided to take it out on his kids.  Who knows?

Some people turn their anger inward on themselves.  They wallow in their misery, hoping for a pity party from anyone who will listen to them.  Some of these cases may be legitimate illnesses such as depression or bipolar disorder, but many just seem to live their lives crying “why me?” while the world passes them by.  I can’t count the number of times I’ve read Facebook posts or Tweets by people complaining about their lives or their problems.  I feel so sorry for those people—not because they have love-life issues or that they are crazy busy while suffering from a migraine.  I pity them because they use social media to air their problems, because they don’t seem to have anyone else in their lives to talk to, and because they refuse to focus and see all the positive things in their lives rather than dwelling on the negative.

I’m sure those same people would look at me and say, “Well, you don’t know me, Ryan.  You don’t know what I have to deal with.”  But that’s the unequivocal and grandiose problem and answer right there.  Why are you comparing yourself to me?  Why do you think the grass is greener in my lawn?  Yeah, I did use Scott’s TurfBuilder, but I did it because I had a huge dandelion problem—not to play Keeping Up with the Joneses.  Yeah, possibly I make more money than you, but there are a lot of people out there that make a lot more money than me.  Yeah, maybe I don’t have your health problems, but I’ve had my fair share of them—including a broken skull, ruptured appendix, etc.  We could go back and forth all day, and what would it accomplish?  Would you be any happier?  Probably not. 

Take a serious look at your life and ask yourself what you have to be thankful for.  I’m certain you’ll find more than you realize.  And when you do, embrace it.  Cherish it.  Open the curtains and the windows and breathe in a nice big breath of fresh air.  Go for a walk or even a run if you are physically able.  I think you’ll find, if you do that, that your life really isn’t all that bad.  And if you really do have a serious issue in your life that you are dealing with or need to deal with, perhaps that newfound positive vibe will help you tackle it.  Because I can assure you, the “woe is me” attitude won’t.

And remember, being angry at the world doesn't solve anything either.  Not only does it raise your blood pressure and put you at risk for serious health issues (like getting your butt kicked), but it wastes your time and energy that could be better spent enjoying life or improving yourself.  Besides, you look pretty silly with that angry face.  Right?  Yeah, who are you kidding?