People Who Know Drama Better Than TNT

On behalf of my beautiful wife, Lisa Salaymal-Strohman, I’m writing a post based on an observation she has made in relation to some of her social networking friends.  She has many, so if you are reading this, it’s probably NOT about you.  But if you are the paranoid, everything-is-always-about-me type, maybe you’ll learn something.

So my wife is constantly updating me on the drama she reads in the social media updates.  One case in particular is a little frightening.  The ex-wife of a friend of a family member (isn’t social media great in the way we have “friends” who aren’t really friends) has been in the midst of a broiling dispute with an ex-boyfriend for quite some time.  This guy is a real bozo—a convicted criminal and troublemaker extraordinaire—and they were apparently jawing back and forth and basically letting the whole world view their strife.  It was great entertainment for a little while, but then things got ugly when the guy started getting her very young son involved, posting pictures of him and making not-so-well-disguised threats.  She continued to provoke him, questioning his manhood and detailing his criminal background, and apparently it escalated to the point where he tried to break into her house and was arrested.

This woman is good-looking, I’ll give her that, but she’s a drama queen, sitting on her throne with this air of haughtiness, as if she can do no wrong in anything she does, whether it be her appearance or personality.  Yet she repeatedly prodded this guy, and instead of stopping when her son became involved, she increased her foolishness even more.  A line was crossed, and either she was too caught up in it to not realize, or else she’s just not that bright.  Either way, this girl seems to live on drama.

But it’s not just her.  My sister had a friend who repeatedly dated the “wrong guys.”  She was living with a guy for well over a year, and despite the fact that he threw an air conditioner through a window of their RENTED apartment (of course SHE was the only one on the lease), she stayed with him.  Then he ended up in jail for one crime or another, and she finally dumped him—and moved on to a guy with similar issues.

I know a lady who is like this in her workplace.  She is constantly gossiping, pushing people’s buttons, asking inappropriate questions, writing long and ranting emails.  She has a little group of women that she shares her inappropriateness with, and they just go along with it and laugh and enable her.  This lady has family issues, financial issues, you name it (and everyone knows because she details every second of her existence), and yet she’s completely clueless as to how she’s perceived by her superiors.  She’s always questioning why she didn’t get a bigger raise or bonus, and she can’t fathom that it has anything to do with her personality.

Funny, I just re-read that last paragraph, and it actually describes a number of people I know either directly or indirectly.

And back to my wife.  She sees this phenomenon called “perpetrating the fraud” happening all over social media sites.  People will put up posts saying they are going to “take a stand” or “confront” so and so or such and such, but it never seems to happen.  Even more to the point, people will try to instigate fights with close friends or coworkers, then see them in person the next day and act as if nothing happened.  I remember doing this decades ago with my cousin using the online service Prodigy (yeah, before the Internet).  We got into a little spat over an online game we were playing, and it progressed into sending each other 2-4 page messages calling each other names and pointing out each other’s flaws.  Then we’d see each other in school the next day and act like nothing happened.  But in my defense, we were like 12 years old.

I know we all need a little action in our lives, but, at least for me, that’s what movies and television and books are for.  That’s why reality television is so popular.  People watch Jersey Shore because it’s funny, yeah, but the incessant fighting is what draws people in.  It’s the same with soap operas.  People just LOVE drama.

But for those people that welcome it—no, NEED it—in their personal lives, I just don’t get it.  Does airing your grievances on social media for the entire world to see satisfy some deep urge inside of you?  Does dating the wrong type of person make you feel like you’ve accomplished something?  Does putting your personal and professional life in danger give you a thrill?  It all just seems so silly to me.

Of course, I’m probably not the best one to judge.  The highlight of my week happened earlier today when I had three cavities filled.  I’m in bed every night at 9:30 PM.  I sold my motorcycle a month before my son was born because I felt riding it was unsafe (not because I was reckless on it, but because other drivers don’t pay attention to motorcycles—a fact I learned the hard way when twice I had someone pull out right in front of me, both times causing me to brake hard and maneuver quickly into another lane).  But you get my point.

Maybe there’d be a lot less crime if we weren’t so hell-bent on experiencing drama in our lives.  My wife and I were watching The First 48 the other night, and there were two rival gangs in Miami—kids in their teens—who lived two blocks away from each other.  They were all friends when they were young, but as they grew into middle school, they began having a beef with each other over something as silly as reputation.  You know, my block is better than yours.  Then one of them was shot and killed, and the young man who pulled the trigger put together a rap song and uploaded it to YouTube, basically bragging about killing the other kid.  And then one of the victim’s cohorts shot and killed the first killer’s uncle.  Mayhem in the streets, all because of reputation built off the need for drama.

I’m not a pessimist.  People reading my blog would probably argue that point, but I really don’t enjoy going around observing and pointing out what’s wrong with society.  I relish in what is right though, and I just wish everyone could do the same.  It’s one thing to observe the negative.  It’s something else entirely to live it.

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.

Why Do People Hate Leann Rimes??

So I'm sitting here during my lunch break, and I'm thinking about how last night was a typical evening in the Strohman household.  We arrived home from work/daycare, and I immediately went outside and fired up the grill to cook some hamburgers and hot dogs for dinner.  My wife made the hamburger patties, and we bought some Chicago-style hot dogs that we wanted to try.  Thunder rumbled in the distance, but the skies overhead were mostly clear, and so I cooked outside and my wife and I put together a nice little dinner.  I can’t say I liked the Chicago-style dogs all that much, but I did pick one of the first jalapenos from my little garden, sliced it up, and put it on my burger, and boy was that tasty.  And spicy!  Yum!

As we were chowing down, the topic of wormholes and black holes came up, and so I went on ad nauseam about what they are, the science behind them, the implications if they do/do not exist, etc.  My wife always has trouble understanding space-time, and so I think she walked away from it with a clearer picture and maybe even perhaps a better view of what it’s like to live with my brain (hahaha), as I’m always thinking about weird crap like time travel, alternate dimensions, mind control, etc.

After that I rummaged around for my art supplies and began working on the cover of my latest finished novel, Terminal Restraint.  I went back to my bedroom in search of some peace and quiet while drawing, but it didn’t take long for Adam Bomb to come rushing in, wreaking nuclear havoc on my plans.  I actually got him to draw alongside me for maybe, oh, 30 seconds, but then he wanted to climb on me.  Yeah, it’s a little difficult to sketch when a three year old is using you as a jungle gym.  After tossing him off of me and grumbling at him for about fifteen minutes, he switched tactics, instead wanting me to don his Spider-man mask and Hulk hands—I guess I was Spider-Hulk—and fight him.  He’s been on this kick about wearing his Captain America or Spider-man pajamas as soon as he gets home, and his Uncle Anthony bought him a Spider-man ski-mask and gloves to complete his ensemble, and so he was all decked out and ready to go.  Suffice it to say, I didn’t get much drawing done, although I have the overall concept down and started working on shading and coloring.

How does Leann Rimes tie into all of this?  I'm getting there...

From there I played some games of SongPop on my phone with my wife.  I absolutely detest that game.  It probably wouldn’t be so bad if I played it on my tablet, which I think I’ll try tonight, but my fat fingers are always pressing the wrong choices on my phone, and in the few weeks we’ve been playing it, my wife has just obliterated me.  I think, at least at the time of this post, she’s winning 34 to 17.  Apparently she’s really good against everyone else she plays, so if you are up for a challenge, request to play her.  She’s even beating me in genres that I absolutely know more about than she does, i.e., metal, industrial, and punk.  Even TV show theme songs!  Grrr…

I wrapped up the evening watching A.J. Burnett of the Pittsburgh Pirates try to pitch a no-hitter.  My wife wanted me to turn off the TV so that we could go to bed, and so I had to explain the importance of a no-hitter to her.  Of course, AJ gave up one measly run to a pinch-hitter in the eighth inning after the umpire failed to recognize two previous close pitches as strikes.  The Buccos still won though!  Let’s Go Bucs!  Anyway, I turned it off as soon as the game was over and fell asleep within minutes.

Why am I telling you all of this?  Who cares, right?  Well, I do have a point to my madness.

Yesterday I was reading an article about Leann Rimes, who I admittedly know very little about.  I do know she is a country singer, I think she was rather young when she first met stardom, and I might have heard that she maybe had an affair with some guy that was on CSI: Miami and, I think, possibly married him?  Other than that, I couldn’t name one of her songs or even come remotely close to guessing her work on SongPop.  Grrr…hate that game.  But anyway, in this article they were describing her tweets regarding some emergency dental issues she was having.  She supposedly had to have an emergency root canal done, it was extremely painful, and she posted all about it on Twitter.  I read the article, read her tweets, thought to myself “so what??”, and then I read the comments underneath...

Man, people freakin' HATE Leann Rimes!

I realize that most of the vitriol you read in Internet comments are typically entered by spiteful, loathsome people, but some of these were extreme—saying she should have all of her teeth knocked out by a flying brick and other such hateful verbiage.  I don’t know what Leann Rimes did to these people, and I don’t know why people feel so inclined to post such negative comments, but I feel sorry for the poor woman!  And it also got me thinking…

Why do we care so much about other people, so much so that we will spend five minutes reading their tweets or blogs about their daily lives...wait, err...let me rephrase that.  Why do we care so much about celebrities?  Why are we so fascinated with every aspect of their lives?  TMZ.com has become huge, and People magazine has been around since the 70’s and is still going strong.  Twitter has become a huge stomping ground for celebs, and they all have hundreds of thousands of followers.  Why?

I’m a regular on Twitter and I have to admit that I follow close to a hundred celebrities (not Leann Rimes though).  I do always get a kick out of how normal some of them are.  Take Wil Wheaton, for example, who played Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation and has a recurring role as himself on The Big Bang Theory.  That guy tweets about his love for video games, brewing his own beer, etc., and he just seems so...normal (albeit this is coming from me, a geek).  Others like DJ Pauly D and Simon Pegg and Kal Penn are just the same.

I just find it amusing that we are so interested in everyone else’s life.  Chalk it up to plain curiosity, or perhaps it’s the competitive nature in humans, and we just want to see how everyone else is living to see if we—or they—are “normal”.  Call it whatever you want, but wouldn’t we be happier if we focused more on our own lives rather than what everyone else is doing?  I’m not trying to drive away my readers, but I just think sometimes we concern ourselves too much with the thoughts/actions/feelings/gardens/facial hair of others.  I love sitting and talking with people, listening to their little anecdotes and life stories, but that’s not what I’m talking about here.  When people sit at a computer, read tweets or news concerning said tweets from a celebrity, and then write hateful statements in the comments, well, that’s a problem.  Am I right?  I mean, if that's what you consider a productive use of your time, I really think you need to get a life.  Go to a library or a church function or join a running group or something and meet some new people.  Take up a new hobby like sketching or playing with your kids or playing SongPop or whatever.

Who is with me on this???

Money Doesn't Buy Happiness

I came to the realization this weekend that I’d be a millionaire if I didn’t have kids.

It all started when I got this idea to move my son’s toy box from the area he plays in at the side of our living room to his bedroom.  When we added on to our dinky house several years ago, we put in a closet by the front door and a closet in his bedroom, and so sandwiched between them is a window and the perfect spot for a toy box.  I have no idea why I've never actually moved his toy box there, but the opportunity presented itself this weekend, and so I slid that extremely heavy thing across the house and deposited right in that spot under the window, where it fit perfectly.

Then I wanted to take some of his old toys and especially the baby toys and put them in a box for when baby number 2 arrives in January.  BTW, names have been picked for baby number 2, but they will be disclosed at a later date.  Anyway, as I started rummaging through his toy box, I began organizing everything into little piles.  After a half hour, I had a pile of toys from one end of his room to the other, and as I started to calculate the cost of all those toys in my head, I think I nearly had a heart attack.  A Batman train set here, a Matchbox car track there along with a full shoe box of Matchbox cars.  Tons of stuffed Marvel characters.  Tons of little action figures.  I think when I reached over $1000, I stopped counting—and I still had three quarters of the room to go!

But we were out shopping for a gift for one of his daycare friends over the weekend, and in Toys R Us I spotted Muno from Yo Gabba Gabba.  I picked him up, showed him to my son, and I saw the biggest smile on his face that I’ve ever seen.  Yeah, the thing cost $25, but we've been looking for this thing everywhere, and I think his smile was really worth more than that.  On the way out though, I spent $2 and won him a Batman stuffed doll out of the crane machine.  Again, another huge smile, much to my chagrin at having already purchased the $25 one.  We’d actually debated on returning Muno, and I had this plan of stashing him in our spare room for a few days to see if Adam Bomb would even remember us buying him.  Of course as soon as we got home, he wanted Muno and Batman so that he could show his Grammy his new toys.  Yeah, what was I thinking?  He’s way too intelligent to out-smart now.  Heck, when we left the Toys R Us shopping plaza and I made a right on red, he started shouting, “Red means stop, Daddy!  You went on red!”  Maybe other three-year-olds are just as attentive, but I’m seriously awed by him each and every day.  But we ended up keeping the $25 Muno, and I swore that I wouldn't buy any more toys for him until the holidays!  Really!

I could have been driving around a new 2013 Dodge Ram, or we could have moved into a much larger house by now.  I could have bought my Harley Heritage Softail Classic that I've had my eyes on since selling my old crappy Suzuki several years ago.  I could have gone back to school to get my MBA, which I'll do eventually.  Or I could have just saved it all up.  So yes, I may have been a millionaire if I didn’t have kids.  But you know, I remember those days without my little Adam Bomb, and I honestly can say that the past 3.16 years have been the most fun of my entire life.  And with another little one on the way, well, I may spend oodles more spoiling him or her, and I’ll love every minute of it.  I may have to wait until the 2025 edition of the Heritage Softwail Classic comes out (if my loving wife will even LET me buy it then), but in the meantime I'll have more than enough fun things to do with my happy little family.

I'm Back from the Beach Beach!

It's been an exciting couple of weeks.  I'll have another more meaningful post here shortly, but I wanted to give an update just to let everyone know that I'm still alive.  Yay!  What would you do without me?

Last week started off with an easy drive down to Ocean City, MD.  We arrived in about six and a half hours with three rest stops along the way, which wasn’t too bad for four healthy adults, a toddler, and a disabled retiree.  Upon arriving and checking into the hotel, we discovered that my mom’s mobility scooter was not there as had been promised by the rental company.  Further investigation revealed that my mom had ordered it from Surf Buggy Rentals in Ocean City, NJ—yeah, New Jersey—and not Ocean City, MD.  She had found the company on the Internet, and I’m sure others have made the same mistake, but what we couldn’t understand is why this place said they knew where our hotel was, which seemingly was only a few blocks from their business (8^th St vs. 14^th St).  They charged my mom’s credit card and said they’d have the scooter there waiting, but when she called them from the lobby, they said they’d never heard of the place.  When we finally figured out what happened, my mom called back and cancelled, and they were very nasty with her.  The lady even said, “We’ll refund all of your money as a courtesy, but next time get your cities straight.  Now we are stuck with a scooter for a week.”  Seriously?  As if they wouldn’t just turn around and rent it back out to someone else?  And refunding money is a courtesy??  Uh, hello?  Maybe if your people didn’t say they knew exactly where our hotel was, we wouldn’t have gotten into this mix-up in the first place!  Anyway, I immediately called Scooters-4-Rent in Ocean City, MD, and in a little over an hour we had a nice Pride mobility scooter for her to use for the week.  And just as an FYI, if you are older or just lazy I suppose and have $125 to spend, I’d strongly suggest getting one if you intend to walk the boardwalk frequently.  There were times there that we wished we had one!

So the week went by pretty quickly.  On day one we went to the beach and played in the water.  This was the first time to the beach for my son, and he absolutely loved the waves.  I’d take him out up to my waist, and the waves would hit us and he’d squeal and shout, “Here comes another one, Daddy!  Here comes another one!”  I’ve always thought sand castles were kinda cliché, and so instead I built Spider-man’s villain Sandman in the sand for my son.  What do you think?  It’s a bad angle, because I have his window’s peak and everything!  People were coming up and admiring my work, and a couple of people thought someone was actually buried underneath all the sand.

I also made a foot another day.  Yeah, a foot.  I don’t know what possessed me to make a foot, but it’s not bad, right?  Again, sand castles are everywhere there.  Why not be a little more creative?

One morning we rented a surrey and rode the entire length of the boardwalk.  It was a two-seater with enough room for our son in the middle, which was pretty cool.  My wife had a steering wheel, although only mine actually steered it, and so I was driving her nuts a little with some erratic turns.  I think once she actually thought we were tipping!  Good times!  One thing I gotta say, though, is that it really stinks when you are the only one peddling.  A couple of times I caught my wife just drifting, and once I even slapped her on the leg.  We had a good laugh about it though.

We ate a good bit of boardwalk food, which is probably why I gained like 5 lbs while we were there.  We also ate at Hall’s Buffet uptown, and I have to say that was a waste of money.  We paid close to $30 per person, and yet they had less food than Old Country Buffet (or Prime Sirloin for all of you Altoona, PA folks).  We also ate seafood at Harrison’s at the south end of the boardwalk, and that was much better.  Still pricey, but the food was four-star rather than two if you get my drift, and we also had a fantastic view of the Ocean City Inlet to the Isle of Wight Bay.

We played lots of games, including the crane machines where you drop the crane to pick up stuffed toys.  I’m apparently a master at these devices, because I won my son eight Marvel characters with less than $15.  I even somehow managed to grab three eight inch toys in one grab!  He was thrilled to death, and of course we were happy because you can’t beat getting eight toys for $15!

On the 4^th we sat on the beach and watched fireworks.  The fireworks themselves were nothing special, but I was amazed at the throng of people there.  The beach and boardwalk was filled as far as the eye could see, and I’m guessing there were at least 25,000 people there.  Here’s one of my better shots:

I can’t say I cared much for the hotel we stayed in.  The Sea Scape Motel was the one we stayed in quite a bit fifteen to twenty years ago, but we hadn’t been back there since, and it appeared the hotel hadn’t had any remodeling or maintenance since then either!  The clientele there was awful as well.  The Sea Scape was the only motel I saw where people hung their wet towels and bathing suits (YES BATHING SUITS) out on the rails and benches outside to dry.  They had a swimming pool that went from 4’ to 8’ deep in four foot increments, and of course everyone crowded around the 4’ end where they could stand, and so we didn’t have a chance at swimming in there.  At 3:30 one morning, someone walked down the hallway/breezeway pounding on all of the windows (yeah, thanks buddy!), and during our last morning there someone had apparently decided to drink a case of Coors Light and toss the cans around the exterior randomly.  Needless to say, we won’t be staying there when we go back, BUT we didn’t let it get us down.  Here we are, a happy family!

And we finally left Saturday morning.  I snapped a picture of the sunrise, although it was cloudy that morning, and my photography skills are a little lacking.

From there we were off to my brother-in-law’s Muslim marriage in Harrisburg Saturday afternoon, which was nice, short, and indoors thankfully as it was a hundred degrees outside.  My mom and sister and her husband decided to stay in Ocean City until around noon on Saturday, and they ended up getting stuck in two hours of traffic at the Bay Bridge only to arrive home and discover that a bad storm had knocked out power at both the houses.  They stayed in a hotel in Altoona that night, and so they weren’t very happy.

But for the most part we all had a good time.  We may wait a few years to get back to Ocean City, MD—thinking we’ll try out Rehoboth or Seaside Heights or even Ocean City, NJ, where we know NOT to rent a mobility scooter.  I’d really like to get to Niagara Falls again too, so that may be our next vacation stop.

Anyhoo, I’m sure you’re bored to death by now of our little vacation adventure, but I’ll be back in a day or two with something a little more thought-provoking.  Until then, adieu!

Going to the Beach Beach

Going to the beach...beach...

I bought these two pairs of shoes from Famous Footwear a couple of weekends ago, and I've been pleasantly surprised by how well I like them.  I'm not normally a shoe guy.  I think I own maybe two pairs of boots, a pair of sandals, a worn-out pair of casual dress shoes, and two pairs of sneakers.  My lovely wife, who owns dozens and dozens and dozens of shoes much to my chagrin, insisted I get some new ones to go to the beach, and so we stopped in at Famous Footwear in Harrisburg over Father's Day weekend and I got myself these two pairs.  Since then I've worn both a handful of times, and I have to say they are very comfortable for my size 13 W feet.  If you are a big guy looking for a nice pair of sandals and sneakers, check these out.

We also had to get a new portable DVD player for my son for the trip to the beach beach.  Don't ever buy an RCA portable DVD player like this one:

  

We got one like this in January, and after minimal use (maybe a half hour a day in the car), the thing warped inside causing a little piece of plastic to bend up into the DVDs as they would spin.  We didn't realize this until it completely destroyed one of my son's Marvel Superhero Squad DVDs.  I wanted to break down and buy a headrest DVD player for him, but I don't think we'll have our vehicle long enough to justify the cost.  Instead, we got a cheap Sylvania one that seems to work pretty well.  See, these are the things you don't think about when you plan on having kids.  Yeah, you have to feed them and pay for diapers and clothing and whatnot, but our son would be lost without his movies to watch in the car.  We're now on our third DVD player, and with each one costing roughly $100, that's an added expense that we hadn't really considered.  Oh well--at least he's not into playing sports yet...

It's been a long time since we've been to the beach beach.  I have to say it like that because my wife sings that line from Nicki Minaj's Starship over and over and over.  I really wish she'd learn some more lyrics from that song.  Anyway, it's been so long since we've been there that I keep remembering all the cool stuff we want to do.  Swimming, building sand castles, collecting sea shells, walking on the boardwalk, eating, eating, eating, biking in the mornings, playing in the arcades, riding rides.  The list goes on and on and on.  I just hope we have enough time to do all we want to do in a week!

Regardless, my blog will be on hiatus until probably the second week of July.  The same goes for participating in flash fiction contests and writing.  As much as I love doing all of these things, relaxing at the beach beach trumps them all.

Have a good one!

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?