I apologize for my tardiness. Most everyone in our neck of the woods has already done the graduation thing. But if you will allow, I would like to give a commencement speech. I am aware nobody invited me to do so (a person of my stature not being invited to give the commencement speech at an institution of higher learning – go figure) but I submit the following anyway.
Greetings and salutations to all, to the staff of the school, to parents, families and guests and most of all to the graduating class of (insert your school name here). We are gathered here to say inspiring things to a large gathering of people wearing silly robes and hats of irretrievable goofiness. As I look out before me at this sea of young faces eager to meet new challenges, keen on exploring an infinite number of opportunities and enthusiastic about getting out of here so they can eat cake and open presents there is only one thought in my head…will the movie “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” be as good as the book.
This ceremony is called a “commencement” because it is the beginning. It is the beginning of the rest of your life. It is the beginning of the real world looking to crush your spirit and make you long for the carefree days of high school when your worst problems were math homework, carrying a backpack the weight of an NFL offensive lineman and being mocked by classmates for doing anything remotely individualistic. Ahhh, memories…
It is at times like these people tell you your possibilities are endless. That is true, but you must remember one of those possibilities is being the carry out boy at Dillon’s for the rest of your natural life. Another possibility is you will invent the newest technological gadget everyone in the free world simply must have making you rich beyond your wildest imagination. It is most likely you will land somewhere in the middle of that continuum of chance.
Common advice for young people is to follow their dreams. This is good advice unless your persistent recurring dream involves flying like Superman through the sky while wearing a Viking outfit reciting the lyrics of the complete Barry Manilow catalogue (maybe that’s just me).
Actually, I do believe in following your dreams or more accurately I believe in a phrase made famous by Joseph Campbell – follow your bliss. Here is my interpretation. If a person is to be fully actualized, reach their top potential, that person should be doing for a living something they genuinely enjoy. If you genuinely enjoy it you will probably be very good at it plus getting out of bed each day is easier because you look forward to the day’s endeavors.
Getting to that “follow your bliss” point in life is not easy. When I graduated from Hutchinson High School I was not an excited, driven individual. My brother actually filled out my application to go to college. I thought I knew what I wanted to do with my life. The plan was I would be a filmmaker. Now, if I was a driven person I would have screwed my courage to the sticking point and made the sacrifice to go to USC or NYU film school to get genuine training in the writing, directing and actual creating of movies. Instead I went to KU where their film department was almost exclusively watching movies, not making any. Heck, I could have done that with the Betamax in my room. (Yes, that is how old I am. I had a Betamax.) It was this lack of courage which meant I made choice after choice which boiled down to the easier path, the path that “made sense”, not the path that used my best abilities and most fed my psyche.
Now that I am older I can make better decisions.
I have a great life in so many ways I do not regret anything I did which got me where I am (wonderful wife, great kids and a job which pays all the bills). There are still times I look back and think of some shoulda, coulda moments. So my advice to graduates is: please have the courage to do things which are difficult and maybe even downright scary in order to follow your bliss. That way you can truly enjoy your life as you hurtle through the sky wearing reindeer pelts reciting those immortal words “her name was Lola, she was a show girl…”
Christopher Pyle hopes every graduate will be a success and if you are truly happy being a carry out boy at Dillon’s more power to you. You may contact him at occasionallykeen@yahoo.com.
Sunday, May 27, 2012
Thursday, May 10, 2012
Your Brain Can Get in the Way
So, how is your dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, or the DLPFC, as it is known to its friends, doing these days? What? You do not know what the DLPFC is? To be honest I didn’t either until about four days ago.
I am reading the book Imagine: How Creativity Works by Jonah Lehrer. It runs through different models of how and why individuals and groups come up with new stuff, sometimes discussing the different areas of the brain integral to the process. That is where the DLPFC first came to my attention.
Mr. Lehrer describes it as “a neural restraint system, a set of handcuffs the mind uses on itself.” If your DLPFC is fully functioning you will be less likely to swipe that candy bar from the convenience store or admit to your boss you haven’t actually accomplished anything of value since the Reagan administration or answer truthfully when your wife asks if her new dress makes her look fat. I bet if you wanted to you could spend a pretty entertaining day hanging out at Wal-Mart playing “Spot the person with a fully developed DLPFC” – hint there may be fewer than you expect.
This part of the brain is one of the last sections to fully develop. This helps explain why kindergarten students are perfectly willing to invoke the death penalty if someone cuts in front of them in line. Even if it was a line leading to a lunch comprised entirely of cauliflower, lima beans and sawdust a kindergarten kid would scream bloody murder if another one budged in front of him.
If the DLPFC is a mechanism of restraint why is it being discussed in a book about creativity? Isn’t creativity about pushing past restrictions to find the new and unusual? You are correct ma petite neurotransmitter. Mr. Lehrer cites a study where a scientist type person hooks a musician type person up to one of those brain camera thingees (he used different words but I’m not a scientist type person) and observes what happens when the musician is asked to do different tasks with his talent. If the music person is asked to play a memorized piece of music one set of brain structures becomes active, including the DLPFC, but if he is asked to improvise the DLPFC is actually deactivated. If you are going to be truly creative you have to take off the handcuffs. This is shown to be true of people improvising in different modes.
Second City is an organization which, among other things, trains people to improvise. It is in Chicago, Toronto and Los Angeles and has produced dozens of world famous comedians from Alan Arkin to John Belushi to Tina Fey. One of the chief skills taught by the folks at Second City is the ability to not care what others think, not only to turn off the restraint mechanism of the brain but to beat it into a fine paste and serve it on a Triscuit to your mother-in-law. Okay, that analogy was a tad gross, but I am trying to push to new levels of creativity.
Most often the natural state of adults is worrying, worrying about saying the wrong thing, worrying about being embarrassed, worrying about offending someone, worrying about that time in seventh grade when you had your first slow dance with a girl and the only words she said to you were “Boy, this is a long song.” Maybe that last one is just me (the song was How Deep is Your Love by the Bee Gees and it was a whole four minutes and five seconds – not that I ever really think about it). Once a Second City student has passed the worrying and embarrassed stage and become practiced at shutting down his DLPFC the next thing is to become automatic with the “yes, and” way of thinking.
Improvisational comedy is most often a group exercise. In order to truly build a scene that works and makes people laugh things have to build on each other and DLPFC interference can kill the whole thing. So the students are taught the “yes, and” method. Everything that is proposed is instantly agreed to, the “yes” part, followed by something new the “and” part.
Often in real life it would be great if people would agree and build upon rather than negate and tear down. I propose every politician go to improv classes. It might not actually fix the nation but it would be a stitch to see Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell pretend they were two girl scouts lost in a forest.
Christopher Pyle would like to point out the difference between improv and improve is simply one letter. You can contact him at occasionallykeen@yahoo.com.
Tuesday, May 01, 2012
I Love Jokes
The old fashioned premise, set-up, punch line format is one of the most tried and true formulas for making people laugh, been around for hundreds and hundreds of years. (Julius Caesar, Cassius and Brutus walk into a bar. The bartender asks if they want to see a menu. Cassius says he already had dinner. Brutus says he already had dinner. Caesar answers but it is hard to hear him because he mumbles a lot. Brutus asks him if he wants to order any food. Caesar answers but again he is hard to hear because he mumbles. Brutus is frustrated and yells at Caesar, “Do you want to order some food?!” Caesar is angered by Brutus’s bad manners and yells back, “I ate too, Brute!” That joke killed at open mic night at the Flavian Amphitheatre.) I venture to bet the format will be around for centuries to come. (A starship captain, a synthetic human and the thawed out, re-vitalized head of Walt Disney walk into a bar. The hostess asks if they want a booth or a table. They say they would prefer a booth. The hostess says, “Walk this way.” The thawed out, re-vitalized head of Walt Disney says, “If I could walk that way I wouldn’t need the XP 38 anti-grav pulsar locomotivator.”).
Like many people in my age group I was first introduced to funny by Bugs Bunny. Saturday mornings were for giggling on the floor and spitting Pop Tart crumbs at the television screen.
Later comedy became more of a late night thing. Johnny Carson was my hero. He was born in Nebraska. I was born in Nebraska. He started his Tonight Show career in 1962. I started breathing in 1962. He grew up to be an icon of American humor. I grew up to become a grade school principal. (We now drop in the sound effect of a phonograph needle being scratched all the way across a record album as an auditory signal saying: Well, that didn’t quite work out for you, did it?)
My best friend growing up (the inimitable Rob) and I spent hours trying to make each other laugh. We got cassette tapes of old radio shows like the Shadow from the public library and then would make parody versions on our own cassette tapes. I don’t think the public library was missing much by not making our tapes available to their clientele. We took Lamont Cranston from the story “The Werewolf of Hamilton Mansion” and created Lamont Pantsdown in the story “The Werewolf of Smith’s Outhouse.” We made a two minute animated version of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” with troll dolls calling it “Trollius Caesar”. We listened to Monty Python albums, watched Mel Brooks movies and genuinely enjoyed laughing with and at each other. To this day the funniest thing I have ever seen was when Rob walked directly into one of the pillars in building A at the high school – Buster Keaton couldn’t have done it better. Rob didn’t enjoy it as much as I did.
I didn’t really fully discover The Dick Van Dyke Show until I was in college. I made sure when I enrolled in my second semester at KU I would have a break long enough to run from campus to my apartment, which was roughly the size of a Honda Civic, and watch Rob Petrie and his pals on channel 41 every weekday.
It turns out I am just one of many who watched Carl Reiner’s show about a young comedy writer living in New Rochelle who thought that would be a great way to make a living. I have corresponded with an honest to goodness television comedy writer and he also confessed he first thought of becoming a comedy writer watching that show. When I found that out I asked him if his wife looked as good as Laura did in Capri pants. He said yes.
I don’t get to write comedy for a living but I do get to take my hacks in this column. I did write a short comedic movie, a comedy play (with the inimitable Rob) and I have joined the ranks of Twitter. Really good twitter joke writing is hard. It is like writing a sonnet (sorry Mr. Knauer, but this is the best analogy I could think of). You have to get everything accomplished in a very restricted format. Here is one of my favorite’s: There’s a new line of toys for the very literate child. Oddly enough the batteries needed for the Hester Prynne doll are double A.
Christopher Pyle can be “followed” in the Twitterverse @ChrisPyleisOK. You can also contact him at occasionallykeen@yahoo.com.
Friday, March 16, 2012
More or Less for Your Money
I have never been genuinely poor. There has always been enough money for me and my family to have everything we need (food, shelter, clothing) and many of the things we simply want (books, electronics, and in my case, hats). On the other hand, I have never been genuinely rich. I have always had to watch how money is spent and only in the last few years have I been able to buy things like furniture at a store which only sold furniture and didn’t also offer t-shirts, shampoo and car batteries (all too often I was forced to go to the store which shall not be named, Volde-Mart).
Because of this fact of life I pay attention to the value I get when I spend money. I know full well buying the cheapest often means I get the least. The dirt cheap breakfast cereal may mean eating the box would be more pleasurable. The cheapest generic brand of tissue may be akin to using those brown paper towels from schools (one abrasion level below sandpaper) on your poor allergy-ridden nose. The cheapest bath towel may only be pleasant to touch in the store and then oddly share more characteristics with plywood than with cottony goodness after it absorbs the first bit of moisture from your just-out-of-the-shower body. Those are choices which make the occasionally splurge moments (breakfast cereal with the picture of an anthropomorphic tiger, tissue with moisturizer added and a bath towel with enough fluffy to make a chinchilla jealous) all that much more hedonistic.
Then there are the times spending less money gets your more. Case in point: hotels. There have been a couple times I stayed in a high dollar fancy hotel and I have to say I prefer the middle of the road ones. (Full disclosure: I have also stayed in motels where the sidewalks are intentionally angled to make it easier to hose off the unfortunate bodily fluids left behind by certain “guests”.) The chain motels offer extra stuff with no extra charge. I want to stay at a place which has breakfast in the lobby, wi-fi in the room and a mini-fridge with nothing in it. The last time I stayed at a true hotel I was forced to walk down the street to the fast food joint for breakfast rather than spend the price of airfare to Orlando for a glass of orange juice. I had to use my debit card in the business center to pay the per minute charge for internet access in order to transfer money from my savings account to the debit account to pay for the weak moment of having a soda from the mini-bar which, judging from the price, must have both powdered diamonds and essence of unicorn as ingredients.
The two entities currently sucking up the most money in my life are also the two entities that could not care less about me.
I spend, what to me is, an obscene amount of money each month for health insurance. Does this corporation (which according to the Supreme Court is a person and therefore must have empathy and concern for its fellow man) promptly pay each expense submitted to it by the health care professionals and cover each and every health concern we might come across? Not so much. I have to fill out new forms over and over swearing on a stack of holy books in addition to my original pinkie swear that I do not have any supplementary insurance each time a family member sees a doctor. The only time I could meet my deductible would be if I had a baby and I do mean if I, not my wife, physically birthed a child.
The other money sucking, debt producing entity in my financial life is the university my eldest daughter is attending. Ah, college life. Where else can one explore the mysteries of the world, gain the wisdom of the ages and be shoehorned into a residence which makes your average sardine in a can living arrangements seem downright palatial? Also, where else can you give somebody thousands of dollars and they get to tell you what to do and how to do it? The “I pay you so you work for me” dynamic is all screwed up here. If some Goldman Sachs guy gave me that much money he’d think he could make me get his dry cleaning (from Bangladesh on foot), wash his car (with my tongue) and make his coffee (growing the beans in my living room). He might be right.
Christopher Pyle simply wants to be rich enough to “call the guy” anytime something breaks. He can be contacted at occasionallykeen@yahoo.com.
Because of this fact of life I pay attention to the value I get when I spend money. I know full well buying the cheapest often means I get the least. The dirt cheap breakfast cereal may mean eating the box would be more pleasurable. The cheapest generic brand of tissue may be akin to using those brown paper towels from schools (one abrasion level below sandpaper) on your poor allergy-ridden nose. The cheapest bath towel may only be pleasant to touch in the store and then oddly share more characteristics with plywood than with cottony goodness after it absorbs the first bit of moisture from your just-out-of-the-shower body. Those are choices which make the occasionally splurge moments (breakfast cereal with the picture of an anthropomorphic tiger, tissue with moisturizer added and a bath towel with enough fluffy to make a chinchilla jealous) all that much more hedonistic.
Then there are the times spending less money gets your more. Case in point: hotels. There have been a couple times I stayed in a high dollar fancy hotel and I have to say I prefer the middle of the road ones. (Full disclosure: I have also stayed in motels where the sidewalks are intentionally angled to make it easier to hose off the unfortunate bodily fluids left behind by certain “guests”.) The chain motels offer extra stuff with no extra charge. I want to stay at a place which has breakfast in the lobby, wi-fi in the room and a mini-fridge with nothing in it. The last time I stayed at a true hotel I was forced to walk down the street to the fast food joint for breakfast rather than spend the price of airfare to Orlando for a glass of orange juice. I had to use my debit card in the business center to pay the per minute charge for internet access in order to transfer money from my savings account to the debit account to pay for the weak moment of having a soda from the mini-bar which, judging from the price, must have both powdered diamonds and essence of unicorn as ingredients.
The two entities currently sucking up the most money in my life are also the two entities that could not care less about me.
I spend, what to me is, an obscene amount of money each month for health insurance. Does this corporation (which according to the Supreme Court is a person and therefore must have empathy and concern for its fellow man) promptly pay each expense submitted to it by the health care professionals and cover each and every health concern we might come across? Not so much. I have to fill out new forms over and over swearing on a stack of holy books in addition to my original pinkie swear that I do not have any supplementary insurance each time a family member sees a doctor. The only time I could meet my deductible would be if I had a baby and I do mean if I, not my wife, physically birthed a child.
The other money sucking, debt producing entity in my financial life is the university my eldest daughter is attending. Ah, college life. Where else can one explore the mysteries of the world, gain the wisdom of the ages and be shoehorned into a residence which makes your average sardine in a can living arrangements seem downright palatial? Also, where else can you give somebody thousands of dollars and they get to tell you what to do and how to do it? The “I pay you so you work for me” dynamic is all screwed up here. If some Goldman Sachs guy gave me that much money he’d think he could make me get his dry cleaning (from Bangladesh on foot), wash his car (with my tongue) and make his coffee (growing the beans in my living room). He might be right.
Christopher Pyle simply wants to be rich enough to “call the guy” anytime something breaks. He can be contacted at occasionallykeen@yahoo.com.
Thursday, March 01, 2012
A Stroll Down the Primrose Pathology
We all have our own little pathologies, those character flaws which define us as much as our talents do. If I were to name one of mine (and trust me, I am well aware I possess more than one) I would have to say I care an inordinate amount about having people like me. Not just the people in my family or circle of close friends or co-workers I also mean the guy who rolled up to the four way stop just a hair after I did but I still wave on ahead of me because it is very important that a person I have never laid eyes on in my life and very well may never see again and all I know about him is he, for reasons passing understanding, decided it was a good idea to buy a car which is roughly the size of a small apartment building and a color not found in nature, unless you count a Las Vegas casino as nature, thinks I am truly swell. Yep, that makes my life better.
I don’t really have any idea why I am compelled this way. It could be a birth order problem, a nurture (I was raised that way) problem, a nature (I was born that way, in reference to DNA hard-wiring not in reference to a Lady Gaga song) problem, or a none of the above problem.
Kindness is one of the things I value most in others and I strive to be kind in all of my interactions, even when a phone sales person calls and will not take the first “no, thank you” as a definitive answer but quickly chimes in saying there is another payment plan that might better fit my budget and simply looks upon the second “no, thank you” as a very pale “yes” and continues to explain how important it is that my money becomes their money. It is possible the “thank you” part of the “no, thank you” is perceived as a sign of weakness marking me as the sick gazelle ripe for the marketing lion to catch and empty its checking account. The metaphor got muddled at the end there, but you get what I mean. Even though it is commendable to be kind it is possible I take it a tad further than is necessary.
I think it was Plato who said, “Be kind and rewind”, no, wait, that was something I learned from my days working at Popingo Video (remember Popingo Video before it became Popinwent Out of Business). Plato said “Be kind for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” That is a philosophy I take to heart. It is important to me that I do what I can to avoid making other people’s lives harder. I am not always successful, just ask people I work with, but I try. At least I try when it doesn’t come into direct conflict with another of my chief pathologies, a weapons grade level of procrastina
tion. See, I even put off typing the end of the word itself. That is pretty horrible.
A lot of my personal heroes are people from the world of comedy. I have read lots of interviews with comedians and comedy writers, listened to dozens and dozens of talk shows on television and via podcasts with people who make their living doing funny things and one thing shared by a vast majority of them is a insatiable need to be liked. Some of them come from homes where there was heartache and pain making them reach out to strangers for positive emotion. That is not me. But others are like me in that they cannot really tell you why they crave acceptance from everyone. Laughter at something I do is ambrosia for my psyche if I meant it to be funny.
This brings me to my next personal pathology. I have an intense, irrational, incontinent (whoops, one “i” word too far, sometimes assonance can make an, oh nevermind) aversion to embarrassment. This is another trait shared by many comics. I may be misattributing this quote (darn, another opportunity for embarrassment) but I think it was Harry Shearer who said comedians do funny things in order to control how and why they are laughed at. If I can do something or say something funny on purpose that gets you to laugh I can avoid having you laugh at me for reasons I do not control. That sounds perfectly reasonable to me while at the same time sounding perfectly sad with just a soupcon of pathetic thrown in.
Christopher Pyle appreciates this opportunity to work through some issues. It is much cheaper than real therapy. You can diagnose him via occasionallykeen@yahoo.com.
I don’t really have any idea why I am compelled this way. It could be a birth order problem, a nurture (I was raised that way) problem, a nature (I was born that way, in reference to DNA hard-wiring not in reference to a Lady Gaga song) problem, or a none of the above problem.
Kindness is one of the things I value most in others and I strive to be kind in all of my interactions, even when a phone sales person calls and will not take the first “no, thank you” as a definitive answer but quickly chimes in saying there is another payment plan that might better fit my budget and simply looks upon the second “no, thank you” as a very pale “yes” and continues to explain how important it is that my money becomes their money. It is possible the “thank you” part of the “no, thank you” is perceived as a sign of weakness marking me as the sick gazelle ripe for the marketing lion to catch and empty its checking account. The metaphor got muddled at the end there, but you get what I mean. Even though it is commendable to be kind it is possible I take it a tad further than is necessary.
I think it was Plato who said, “Be kind and rewind”, no, wait, that was something I learned from my days working at Popingo Video (remember Popingo Video before it became Popinwent Out of Business). Plato said “Be kind for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” That is a philosophy I take to heart. It is important to me that I do what I can to avoid making other people’s lives harder. I am not always successful, just ask people I work with, but I try. At least I try when it doesn’t come into direct conflict with another of my chief pathologies, a weapons grade level of procrastina
tion. See, I even put off typing the end of the word itself. That is pretty horrible.
A lot of my personal heroes are people from the world of comedy. I have read lots of interviews with comedians and comedy writers, listened to dozens and dozens of talk shows on television and via podcasts with people who make their living doing funny things and one thing shared by a vast majority of them is a insatiable need to be liked. Some of them come from homes where there was heartache and pain making them reach out to strangers for positive emotion. That is not me. But others are like me in that they cannot really tell you why they crave acceptance from everyone. Laughter at something I do is ambrosia for my psyche if I meant it to be funny.
This brings me to my next personal pathology. I have an intense, irrational, incontinent (whoops, one “i” word too far, sometimes assonance can make an, oh nevermind) aversion to embarrassment. This is another trait shared by many comics. I may be misattributing this quote (darn, another opportunity for embarrassment) but I think it was Harry Shearer who said comedians do funny things in order to control how and why they are laughed at. If I can do something or say something funny on purpose that gets you to laugh I can avoid having you laugh at me for reasons I do not control. That sounds perfectly reasonable to me while at the same time sounding perfectly sad with just a soupcon of pathetic thrown in.
Christopher Pyle appreciates this opportunity to work through some issues. It is much cheaper than real therapy. You can diagnose him via occasionallykeen@yahoo.com.
Sunday, February 19, 2012
Stop and Smell the Tiptoed Tulips
The more careful readers of this publication may have noticed I’ve been absent for several weeks. Real life often gets in the way of desired life. Writing this column is one of my favorite things to do. Much of what kept me away from my writing was unavoidable and unpleasant. This got me thinking. Why can’t the desired life and the real life be the same thing more often?
I envy the people whose everyday job is tailored to their best skills and their favorite things to do. As part of my regular job I have been assigned to read books about leadership (leadership is one of the skills I am supposed to have in my everyday job which makes me downright positive I was born to be a comedy writer). One of the books I read postulated it was a fallacy that the most important thing to do for success was to work on areas of weakness.
Isn’t that what we all grew up hearing? You have to work,work, work on the things you aren’t good at in order to get to the top. Stop and think about it. Think back to high school and the thing you did over and over, trying to get it, trying to master it, trying not to roll up into the fetal position on the floor, clutch a small piece of velvet, rub it against your cheek with OCD repetition and cry softly to yourself (a.k.a. geometry). Did you become a geometry whiz? Probably not. Did it make you a high school graduate so you didn’t bounce from one low-paying-zero-prestige job to another eventually finding yourself sleeping on your best friend’s couch stealing the Fig Newtons from his secret cookie stash for mere sustenance. Those hours killing yourself over the Pythagorean theorem did pay off if the Fig Newton scenario was the only alternative. Other than that, what good did it do for you?
The book I referred to says people are better served by practicing the things they are already good at. The margin of improvement working on a skill set you have a facility with is much greater than the margin of improvement on a skill set you can’t do well. This makes sense. It is better to go from talented to fantastic at something (reciting the album and song titles recorded by Dean Martin) than to go from stinking up the joint to barely passable at something else (singing like Dean Martin).
This finally brings me to the point of this column. I am going to try to spend more time doing the things I am good at and much less time doing the geometry-type things in my grown up life.
I am one of those extremely lucky men who has a home life which far surpasses anything else he has. I genuinely like everyone who lives in my house and all the ancillary folk who frequent my living room. I like sitting in my recliner writing and listening to the others go about their business and occasionally calling out a comment or a question. I have to ask a lot of questions because it is very hard to keep up with all the stuff going on with the teenage people surrounding me as well as understanding some of the terminology they use. My wife translates and explains very well.
Here is an example of how my life will change due to my it-is-only-the-second-month-of-the-new-year-resolution. I bought everyone in my family a ukulele. (There will now be a slight pause as everyone takes a moment to re-read that last sentence.) Yesirree, every single person living in my house is the proud owner of a tiny guitar looking instrument made most famous by a seriously unattractive looking man singing about wandering aimlessly through a Dutchman’s flower bed. (If you weren’t alive when Laugh-In was on the air google Tiny Tim – you’re in for a treat.)
We are going to learn to play together. We are going to laugh at each other. We are going to truly stink at something and then get better at it together. We are going to be the coolest family in town. We are going to be the only family in town who thinks we are the coolest family in town.
We dedicate our ukulele folly to my mother. Who inspired us in so many ways. Who showed us that family is the joy that lives with you wherever you are. Who showed us home is the most important thing there is. Thank you…
Christopher Pyle will report the musical progress of the band (hey, Ukulele Folly would be a great band name) at a later date. You can request updates by writing to him at occasionallykeen@yahoo.com.
I envy the people whose everyday job is tailored to their best skills and their favorite things to do. As part of my regular job I have been assigned to read books about leadership (leadership is one of the skills I am supposed to have in my everyday job which makes me downright positive I was born to be a comedy writer). One of the books I read postulated it was a fallacy that the most important thing to do for success was to work on areas of weakness.
Isn’t that what we all grew up hearing? You have to work,work, work on the things you aren’t good at in order to get to the top. Stop and think about it. Think back to high school and the thing you did over and over, trying to get it, trying to master it, trying not to roll up into the fetal position on the floor, clutch a small piece of velvet, rub it against your cheek with OCD repetition and cry softly to yourself (a.k.a. geometry). Did you become a geometry whiz? Probably not. Did it make you a high school graduate so you didn’t bounce from one low-paying-zero-prestige job to another eventually finding yourself sleeping on your best friend’s couch stealing the Fig Newtons from his secret cookie stash for mere sustenance. Those hours killing yourself over the Pythagorean theorem did pay off if the Fig Newton scenario was the only alternative. Other than that, what good did it do for you?
The book I referred to says people are better served by practicing the things they are already good at. The margin of improvement working on a skill set you have a facility with is much greater than the margin of improvement on a skill set you can’t do well. This makes sense. It is better to go from talented to fantastic at something (reciting the album and song titles recorded by Dean Martin) than to go from stinking up the joint to barely passable at something else (singing like Dean Martin).
This finally brings me to the point of this column. I am going to try to spend more time doing the things I am good at and much less time doing the geometry-type things in my grown up life.
I am one of those extremely lucky men who has a home life which far surpasses anything else he has. I genuinely like everyone who lives in my house and all the ancillary folk who frequent my living room. I like sitting in my recliner writing and listening to the others go about their business and occasionally calling out a comment or a question. I have to ask a lot of questions because it is very hard to keep up with all the stuff going on with the teenage people surrounding me as well as understanding some of the terminology they use. My wife translates and explains very well.
Here is an example of how my life will change due to my it-is-only-the-second-month-of-the-new-year-resolution. I bought everyone in my family a ukulele. (There will now be a slight pause as everyone takes a moment to re-read that last sentence.) Yesirree, every single person living in my house is the proud owner of a tiny guitar looking instrument made most famous by a seriously unattractive looking man singing about wandering aimlessly through a Dutchman’s flower bed. (If you weren’t alive when Laugh-In was on the air google Tiny Tim – you’re in for a treat.)
We are going to learn to play together. We are going to laugh at each other. We are going to truly stink at something and then get better at it together. We are going to be the coolest family in town. We are going to be the only family in town who thinks we are the coolest family in town.
We dedicate our ukulele folly to my mother. Who inspired us in so many ways. Who showed us that family is the joy that lives with you wherever you are. Who showed us home is the most important thing there is. Thank you…
Christopher Pyle will report the musical progress of the band (hey, Ukulele Folly would be a great band name) at a later date. You can request updates by writing to him at occasionallykeen@yahoo.com.
Friday, January 06, 2012
Taking Another Trek around the Sun
Well, it happened again. The Earth has made a complete revolution around the Sun. “Wahoo, the Earth did not come free of its orbit and fly into a great gaseous nuclear mass obliterating everything we understand!” After all, even Bruce Willis and a crack team of rugged scientists couldn’t stop that from happening, at least not without a lot of help from J.J. Abrams.
The upcoming year is so momentous and full of unremitting action the powers that be decided it needs to be 366 days long (long enough for Kim Kardashian to get married and file for divorce 5.1 times), one full day longer than each of the previous three years.
A quick scan of Wikipedia shows the United Nations has designated 2012 as the International Year of Sustainable Energy for All which proves how important this year is. Just think, the UN is going to send every man, woman and child on the planet a wind turbine. How cool is that? I’m going to put mine on my car so I don’t have to buy gas anymore. (I live in western Kansas. The likelihood of getting stranded on some lonely dirt road in the middle of nowhere because I ran out of wind is infinitesimal.)
2012 is the year for the Summer Olympics. Also known as the only time anyone can be bothered to care about events like the 400 meter hurdles. This time around the Olympics will be hosted by England. I know nothing brings to mind high athletic achievement like the pasty, rain-soaked, dentally challenged British. If there was an event requiring people to carry umbrellas while eating crumpets and reciting Shakespeare the gold medal is in the bag. Alright, before I get any hate mail from the Anti-Defamation League of Queen Loving Tea Drinkers I would like to say I am a card carrying Anglophile and fully realize at least three of the Spice Girls are very fit.
2012 is the anniversary of two very important happenings in the world of international espionage. One hundred years ago Alan Turing was born. Turing was an Englishman (see I do like the British) who is often credited with being the father of modern computing and artificial intelligence. He played a major role in breaking Nazi codes during World War II (which, oddly enough, was the most useful time to break Nazi codes). He did a lot of work with something called the Enigma machine which truly sounds like something a bald man living in a hidden lair deep inside a dormant volcano would be using. This leads us to the other major event in global intelligence. It was fifty years ago that Sean Connery first played James Bond.
Perhaps the most important event scheduled to occur during 2012 is yet another triumph in the process of mankind carefully, intelligently, and nonviolently setting in place a government designed to best serve the needs and wants of its people. I am of course talking about the election of Burkina Faso’s Parliament. The election season in the United States is not remotely careful or intelligent and the violence against reason, logic and grammar in an American political debate is a veritable bloodbath.
It is more than a little depressing to think the actual election is more than 300 days away. We have months and months of sitting through political discussion, political arguing, political advertisements, political fear-mongering, political name-calling, political sleight-of-hand, and political dog-grooming (Huh? I think I went one too far.) Especially, when you take into account the Republicans have been doing a Presidential shell game for the past few months already.
It seems to change every time I turn around. Bachmann wins the straw poll and is the front runner and now Bachmann has dropped out of the race. Herman Cain is the front runner and now he is back to being a guy who used to run a pizza chain. Rick Santorum is a guy with severe issues just because of some quirk with Google (I have yet to google his name because everyone seems to think it takes you places you’d rather not go) and now he is considered a viable candidate again. Next thing you know Ronald Reagan’s ghost will appear and endorse Anthony Weiner for President and every news organization from Fox to MSNBC will vibrate with excitement, realize the massive cognitive disconnect inherent in such an event then simply explode. The resultant silence will make it possible for the American people to make a much better decision.
The upcoming year is so momentous and full of unremitting action the powers that be decided it needs to be 366 days long (long enough for Kim Kardashian to get married and file for divorce 5.1 times), one full day longer than each of the previous three years.
A quick scan of Wikipedia shows the United Nations has designated 2012 as the International Year of Sustainable Energy for All which proves how important this year is. Just think, the UN is going to send every man, woman and child on the planet a wind turbine. How cool is that? I’m going to put mine on my car so I don’t have to buy gas anymore. (I live in western Kansas. The likelihood of getting stranded on some lonely dirt road in the middle of nowhere because I ran out of wind is infinitesimal.)
2012 is the year for the Summer Olympics. Also known as the only time anyone can be bothered to care about events like the 400 meter hurdles. This time around the Olympics will be hosted by England. I know nothing brings to mind high athletic achievement like the pasty, rain-soaked, dentally challenged British. If there was an event requiring people to carry umbrellas while eating crumpets and reciting Shakespeare the gold medal is in the bag. Alright, before I get any hate mail from the Anti-Defamation League of Queen Loving Tea Drinkers I would like to say I am a card carrying Anglophile and fully realize at least three of the Spice Girls are very fit.
2012 is the anniversary of two very important happenings in the world of international espionage. One hundred years ago Alan Turing was born. Turing was an Englishman (see I do like the British) who is often credited with being the father of modern computing and artificial intelligence. He played a major role in breaking Nazi codes during World War II (which, oddly enough, was the most useful time to break Nazi codes). He did a lot of work with something called the Enigma machine which truly sounds like something a bald man living in a hidden lair deep inside a dormant volcano would be using. This leads us to the other major event in global intelligence. It was fifty years ago that Sean Connery first played James Bond.
Perhaps the most important event scheduled to occur during 2012 is yet another triumph in the process of mankind carefully, intelligently, and nonviolently setting in place a government designed to best serve the needs and wants of its people. I am of course talking about the election of Burkina Faso’s Parliament. The election season in the United States is not remotely careful or intelligent and the violence against reason, logic and grammar in an American political debate is a veritable bloodbath.
It is more than a little depressing to think the actual election is more than 300 days away. We have months and months of sitting through political discussion, political arguing, political advertisements, political fear-mongering, political name-calling, political sleight-of-hand, and political dog-grooming (Huh? I think I went one too far.) Especially, when you take into account the Republicans have been doing a Presidential shell game for the past few months already.
It seems to change every time I turn around. Bachmann wins the straw poll and is the front runner and now Bachmann has dropped out of the race. Herman Cain is the front runner and now he is back to being a guy who used to run a pizza chain. Rick Santorum is a guy with severe issues just because of some quirk with Google (I have yet to google his name because everyone seems to think it takes you places you’d rather not go) and now he is considered a viable candidate again. Next thing you know Ronald Reagan’s ghost will appear and endorse Anthony Weiner for President and every news organization from Fox to MSNBC will vibrate with excitement, realize the massive cognitive disconnect inherent in such an event then simply explode. The resultant silence will make it possible for the American people to make a much better decision.
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