Be Careful What You Chase, You Might Catch It

A long time ago, in my life, not in the grand scheme of things – I’m talking 1988, not anything which would require carbon dating processes, (believe it or not that was the first version of the Star Wars prologue) I was fascinated with the television series of interviews Bill Moyers did with Joseph Campbell entitled “The Power of Myth”.  It described so many things I found interesting in such an accessible way I actually internalized many of them.  The basic story components Mr. Campbell described found their way into things I have written.  There was a phrase he espoused which I kind of glossed over at the time but now that I have children who are just about to push through the threshold into the adventure of their lives it has taken on a greater level of importance.  That phrase was “Follow your bliss”. 

I do not think a learned man like Mr. Campbell (Wikipedia actually lists his occupation as “Scholar”.  How cool is that?) would be telling people to follow a truly hedonistic lifestyle including such things as unlimited supplies of doughnuts and two naps a day (obviously my ideas of reckless self-indulgence isn’t on par with grown up child actors and there will be no “reality” show about my life).  My interpretation of the phrase is people should pursue a life which allows them to do the things they truly like.  A friend of mine stated a similar sentiment when she said kids should look into careers they truly like doing if for no other reason than they will be doing it a lot, the sheer volume of time needs to enter into the thought process.  Think about it.  Most people spend more than 40 hours a week at work and it would make for a much happier life if those hours were spent doing things you at least kind of liked doing. 

So, I took that bit of sage advice and then started thinking how does one decide just which bliss to follow.  (Doughnuts or naps, probably can’t figure out a way to do both.)

Another learned person, Susan Cain, the author of the book Quiet, gave advice about a way to figure out what one should pursue in life.  She suggests looking at what we envy in others and see if that is a direction we should go.  Now, I know what some of you are saying.  Envy is not supposed to be a positive state of mind.  It is actually in the Top Seven No-no’s list as compiled by some religious scholars.  But, it makes sense.  If you wish you could be like someone than maybe you should actually try to be like someone.  (I wish to add a caveat.  If you envy Justin Bieber, anyone named Kardashian or the person whose job it was to talk Will Smith into doing After Earth – stop, stop right now.) 

If I think back to my early days and who I envied and then extrapolate from that what I should have pursued as a career I come to a very different skill set than the one I use in my real job.  I loved comedians. 

I have a very distinct memory of seeing Red Skelton do his famous Guzzlers Gin sketch on The Merv Griffin Show.  Of course, hundreds of thousands of people probably saw that show and enjoyed Mr. Skelton’s hilarious skill but I bet there weren’t many kids who went into the backyard when the show was over and used the garden hose as their water supply to practice doing the “spit takes” he had just done.  I did…until I was called in for dinner. 

Now, as an educator I do have to get the attention of an audience and keep it but true comic skills aren’t always the best choice.  One day I was teaching some simple addition skills to a classroom of 1^st graders and decided to use some Charlie Callas (give yourself 250 bonus points if you remember him) style sound effects as part of my presentation.  Let’s just say we weren’t able to remain focused on place value concepts after that choice. 

I have to admit there are times I very much wish I had followed my envy to my bliss and into a different career.  Just last week I went down a YouTube rabbit hole and watched Bill Irwin do his unique performance skills with envy, but wearing baggy pants and a top hat to school would make discipline an uphill battle.

Christopher Pyle has recently been dedicating 30 minutes a day to practicing his ukulele and juggling, knowing full well they are not school administrator skills.  He can be reached at occasionallykeen@yahoo.com.  

Generation Graduation Gap

This past week was graduation week in various places throughout the region.  My own personal Kid #2 (in birth order, not in any other ranking or judgment, all of my kids are equal in my eyes at least that is my story and I am sticking to it) graduated from high school.  Alice truly used high school as a place to grow and prepare for the life ahead of her.  Not everybody does that.  I know I didn’t. 

Don’t get me wrong.  I value the education I received at Hutchinson High School, but I didn’t actively pursue it.  It just sort of happened around me and because I was blessed with good genes I was able to absorb much of it by simply being present.  Like so many people who were in Mr. Knauer’s senior English class I can still recite much of the first eighteen lines of The Canterbury Tales in its original Middle English (which is only useful when trying to annoy people with your pseudo-intellectual persona at parties).  I remember I wrote a research paper for Ms. Lisman’s junior English class about chivalry and knighthood (which introduced me to my all time favorite name for a king, Pepin the Short).  I remember learning the scientific names (kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species) of a metric ton of different animals for Mr. Harris’s biology class.  I remember not paying attention in Mr. Dixon’s geometry class because my friend, Mitch, and I were way too busy making up strings of puns to put any effort into the quadratic equation.  (Was the quadratic equation even part of the geometry curriculum?  I wouldn’t know, but I can supply a couple dozen puns related to having a cold.)

The chief memories of my high school days revolve around my friends.  People who knew me then will be surprised that I think of my high school days as a social time because I was not a very outgoing person.  Part of being shy was my natural inclination towards introversion and the other part was being chronically ridiculed by a number of my more athletically inclined classmates.  I did have a circle of friends who were quite important to me and I think of them often. 

The aforementioned Mitch was a ringleader for my group.  The parties were most often in his basement.  He arranged trips to Wichita to see movies and the occasional concert and when I went it was almost always in his Toyota Celica that I made the trip. 

I remember one trip in particular.  We were going to a concert and I was wedged into the back seat between a couple of pretty girls (which was as close to a date as I ever got in high school).  We were riding along when a song came on the radio and one of the pretty girls said she liked the song and I should remember it.  Mitch said I probably would remember it because I had a wicked memory.  For the duration of the ride she added to the list of songs she liked that I should remember.  The list got up to six.  Those songs were:  Head Games (Foreigner), Show Me the Way (Peter Frampton), Heartache Tonight (Eagles), Cold as Ice (Foreigner, again), You’ve Got a Friend (James Taylor), and Daniel (Elton John).  I do solemnly swear those were the songs, the whole list of songs, and nothing but the songs so help me Casey Kasem. 

We now jump some 30 years to return to present day.

Alice worked way harder than I did in high school.  She was in four high school musicals (zero for me).  She was in marching band for four years (I marched once in 9^th grade and we played the song Feelings and the theme to The Bob Newhart Show).  She was a drum major two of those years putting her in a position of leadership (I sat in the front row of a couple of classes).  She got a 32 on her ACT (I vaguely remember taking the ACT).  She was well liked and respected by a great number of her peers (many of my classmates probably would have been able to identify my body if I’d turned up dead in the quad). 

Alice did high school right and many of her friends did as well.  When I look at them, this is going to sound a little sappy, I actually have a greater degree of hope for the future.  Unfortunately, much of that hope is squashed when I see anything having to do with Congress.

Christopher Pyle is very proud of each of his children, but wishes to point out his wife did most of the hard work.  He can be reached at occasionallykeen@yahoo.com.   

An Epiphany of Fear

As is so often the case something in my real life brought to mind something from a cartoon. 

Remember the Charlie Brown Christmas special?  There is the scene where Charlie Brown goes to Lucy at her psychiatric stand to seek answers.  Lucy rattles off a list of phobias, everything from cats to crossing bridges.  When she gets to pantophobia, the fear of everything, Charlie Brown yells, “That’s it!” sending Lucy spinning into a snow bank.  I found my “That’s it!” phobia the other day, katagelophobia.  Luckily I was alone at the time so I did not send anyone spinning into a snow bank. 

Katagelophobia is the fear of being ridiculed or embarrassed.  Now at first glance people who know me might be a little confused by this notion.  I have, quite on purpose, done things that would embarrass many people.  I have performed in plays as characters with pretty embarrassing attributes.  I did stand-up comedy at an open mic night at a real comedy club (not even filling my allotted three minutes and apologizing at the end of my truncated set).  I have been the mascot for a minor league basketball team wearing basketball shorts and cowboy boots, at the same time.  I have been a parent of teenage girls which means I was an embarrassment to them by doing things like breathing and being in the same room in which they were currently residing. 

The thing about the above mentioned situations which made them not embarrassing for me had to do with the fact that I was in control of what was happening.  If I choose to do something which might lead to embarrassment I can handle it better than a situation that comes up more organically from circumstances.  For example, I truly hate going into big city style delicatessens.  I have an abject fear of ordering something stupid which compels the sandwich aficionados behind the counter to mock me.  “He wants mayonnaise on that! What an idiot.”  This doesn’t come into play when I go to Subway.  Those “sandwich artists” are as interested in their work as a septuagenarian is interested in the latest musical release from Lil Wayne (I had to look up the name of rap artist for that last joke). 

Way too much of my self-image is wrapped up in being smart.  This also works into the katagelophobia.  There have been times when I hold forth with some sort of pontification (now, gentle reader, don’t be too shocked by this) then I find out I am horribly and irretrievably wrong.  I’m not talking just a little bit wrong but “Dewey Defeats Truman” wrong, Snape is a bad guy wrong, there’s a viable reason Kim Kardashian is famous wrong.  The embarrassment I feel when it dawns on me that I was so very wrong is entirely too debilitating, especially considering just how often there is “wrongness” put forth into the world – just ask CNN. 

Really, it is ridiculous.  The other day I was having a simple conversation with some co-workers and we were discussing a set of television commercials we found funny.  We then talked about the fact we couldn’t remember what the commercials were plugging.  Anyway, I was rather determined to contradict one person’s statement about what company was being advertised.  Fast forward to the next day when I saw one of the commercials and it turned out I was patently wrong.  I couldn’t get to sleep that night.  I can pretty much guarantee none of the other people in the conversation remembered or even remotely cared that I had arrogantly disagreed, but that didn’t stop me from e-mailing the person I had disagreed with and admitting my mistake.  It is easier to admit mistakes than put up with others pointing them out when you are katagelophobic.  (That is a self-diagnosis.  I have not, as of yet, sought professional help for my problem.)

Another manifestation of how this phobia impacts my life is I have become less and less able to do things I have not done before, simple things, for fear of showing ignorance and being mocked because of it.  Being a Kansas boy I took my first ever taxi cab ride last summer in New York.  I spent the entire ride in a half panicked state worrying about what I was supposed to tip the guy, oblivious to the fact he almost got me killed by ignoring the septic cleaning service van hurtling toward us.  (That would have been one heck of an obituary.)

Christopher Pyle is more likely to do another horrific stand-up comedy performance than he is to try ordering food from the new sushi kiosk at Dillon’s.  You can mock him at occasionallykeen@yahoo.com.  

Not everything needs to be enhanced

Since paying attention to the important news of the world often creates a sense of…a sense of (what is the phrase I’m looking for?) a sense of utter despair (yeah, that’s it) there are times I only allow myself to look at the fluff news items which pop up on the internet.  

The other day I saw an article about a man who purchased what he was told, and his eyes believed, was a pair of toy poodles.  When he took his new fluffy doggy friends to the vet for a checkup he found out he had something other than canine companionship.  He was now the proud owner of two ferrets. (What does one call that? Ferretine companionship?)   Not just any ferrets, but two ferrets that had been raised from birth on a steady diet of steroids to increase their general size and hair teasing and blow drying to increase their general fluffiness.  

Ferrets on steroids?  Who comes up with this nefarious plan?  Is some guy actually sitting around his living room one afternoon thinking:   “Hey, I know what I’ll do. I’ll get a couple of newborn weasel-like creatures and pump them full of steroids so they grow to abnormal size.  Oh, oh, then I’ll wash their hair over and over but never use any conditioner whatsoever so they have split ends all over their bodies.  This will mean I will have two giant frizzy ferrets. Oh, boy!  Then I will sell them to some unsuspecting rube at the local bazaar by convincing him they are actually toy poodles.  Yep, that makes perfect sense. I am totally doing that.”

Maybe having steroid-ridden ferrets for pets is better than toy poodles.  Can a toy poodle chase rats, mice and rabbits out of their burrows?  Can a toy poodle perform the weasel war dance? What’s a weasel war dance and will it replace the Harlem Shake?  A weasel war dance is described by Wikipedia as “a frenzied series of sideways hops and bumping into things” which serves as an invitation to play and almost anything would be better than the Harlem Shake.  Are toy poodles crepuscular?  Wait, what in the name of William F. Buckley is crepuscular?  Well, besides being darned fun to say crepuscular means ferrets sleep 14 - 18 hours a day and are only active around the hours of dusk and dawn.  There are frequent days I myself longs to be crepuscular.  

This could be the beginning of a whole new industry in pet services. In sports the press often refers to steroids and the like as performance enhancing drugs or PEDs (or sometimes Tour de France Juice). PEDs could now be pet enhancing drugs. Think about it. Gerbils the size of Rottweilers would be cool. However, you would need one of those plastic tube habitat things as big as the tubes at Chuck E. Cheese's to accommodate your cute not-so-little Gerbzilla.  A canary on steroids might be neat.  If nothing else you could scare the kitty litter out of the neighbor’s cat who keeps waking you up in the middle of the night yowling on your backyard fence like Pavarotti with an ingrown toenail.  

Why stop at sports and pets? Let's look at getting performance enhancement into more walks of life. First we need to decide just what performance enhancement would look like in different fields. Would the PED heighten what the person was supposed to be doing or would it enhance what they typically do? That is a genuine danger.

For example, let's look at insurance salesmen. A PED could make it so the salesman clearly and concisely explains the different plans available and kindly matches your needs and budget with the proper product. Or, he could become the most insufferably insistent and preternaturally boring person who ever plunked himself down on your couch, drank your coffee and proved as likely to leave as the odor of a skunk which died in the crawlspace under your kitchen.  

If PEDs were used simply to enhance what we already do they probably need to be controlled more stringently than other drugs currently outlawed.  Sure they can help a baseball player who already has amazing hand-eye coordination and strength enough to send a nine and a quarter inch spheroid 390 feet onto Waveland Avenue send even more balls out of the park but used in other situations the results could be catastrophic. Just think what would happen if we enhanced the current skill set shown on a regular basis by politicians.  We are back to the phrase utter despair.

Christopher Pyle thinks if he used PEDs he would definitely become crepuscular.  He can be reached during the hours around dusk and dawn at occasionallykeen@yahoo.com.  

This is Only a Test

It was about six months ago I turned 50 years old.  At the time I took it in stride. It barely made a ripple in my psyche.  Now I am starting to worry I may be having an issue and turning a half century old could be at the root of my current malaise.  I don’t want to be a stereotypical gray-haired, pot-bellied father of nearly grown children who steps out of normal everyday life into a mid-life crisis but that may be where I am headed.

OK, even if I am going down that path “crisis” is way too strong a word.  I am thinking I may be suffering from a mid-life truly-inconvenient-stage-of-life-in-which-I-use-words-like-malaise-to-describe-myself phase.

 

The first problem I face if I am going to fully jump in and have a mid-life crisis is I still love my wife.  This makes it very difficult to chase young women in an attempt to recapture my youth.  This brings us immediately to the second problem.  If I were to recapture my youth in regards to chasing young women it would mean I would spend an inordinate amount of time staring at the phone with the particular object of my affection’s phone number clearly written on a scrap of paper in plain sight yet my finger is unable to dial the number because my brain has ground to a halt of epic proportion making it so I cannot read numbers or form coherent thoughts much less words capable of wooing.  (That is probably another contributing factor to not being successful with the ladies. I use words like wooing.)

I’m sure those of you who have been reading my musings for the last few years find it unbelievable this silver-tongued wordsmith did not have any woman he wanted eating out of his hand, au contraire my mon petit chou.

My very first slow dance with a girl was like many other boys, in the gym of a junior high school.  Everyone knows how that setting is just dripping with romance.  If junior high school gyms had been around in Shakespeare’s time his greatest love scenes would have surely taken place with a basketball goal hanging dreamily over the heads of the starry-eyed youths.  Also, like many of the boys of my generation that first slow dance with a girl…I probably ought to stop saying it that way, it implies my previous slow dances were with a boy…anyway, that dance occurred while the Bees Gees played over the tinny sound system and since it was a slow dance it was “How Deep is Your Love?”  To this day whenever that song comes on the radio I am immediately whisked back to that spring night at Liberty Junior High and I have to fight the sudden and dramatic urge to jerk the steering wheel hard to the right and drive into the nearest tree.  You see that dance didn’t end so well for me.  We were silent for the first three minutes and 40 seconds.  I was concentrating on at least approximating smooth steps and arduously avoiding direct eye contact for fear of…for fear of …just plain fear.   Therefore I didn’t talk.  Then she broke the silence by uttering these words which will forever live in my memory and dreams: “Boy, this is a long song.”  My next slow dance was about six years later and the Bee Gees were nowhere to be found.

So, my mid-life crisis will not involve dancing.

Fine, what is the next best thing?  Most men who start feeling that life has passed them by look to get into a racy sports car and drive as fast as they can to see if they can catch up with it.  I am far too cheap to do that.  Don’t get me wrong.  I think it would be fun to have a cherry red convertible which goes from zero to fifty a heck of lot faster than I did.  Then I think again and realize a convertible is only really a good idea in southwestern Kansas about seven hours a year.  If the temperature isn’t arctic blast or oven hot the wind is blowing like it needs to get to Nebraska before dinner.  There is sometimes an afternoon in late April when it would be perfect to put the top down and go bombing around town.  I repeat, sometimes. 

Well, it appears I do not have the makings of man willing to fully commit to a mid-life crisis.  I guess I will have to be content with buying a new hat and moving forward with a fabulous wife and a sensible sedan. 

Christopher Pyle will entertain other suggestions for how he could pursue a jolt to his current life at occasionallykeen@yahoo.com.  

Frozen Snack Foods of Joy

The other day a podcast I listen to (WNYC’s Radiolab) shared something truly cool. 

A story about Aleksander Gamme.  He is a Norwegian, uh, he’d probably say “adventurer”, where I’m more likely to say “person-who-clearly-hates-being-comfortable”.  He went on a trip all by himself to Antarctica in order to walk to the South Pole.  The hosts of Radiolab are talking to him because of a video he posted to Youtube. 

It is near the end of his trek, day 86.  He is tired and he is well beyond hungry.  He comes across a stash of supplies he buried in the snow towards the beginning of his trip.  He has no real memory of what is buried there.  He pulls out the bag of stuff and starts to go through it.  At first it is just stuff, Vaseline, zinc oxide, some rope but then comes the Holy Grail and the Golden Fleece rolled into one, a bag of Cheez Doodles.  He yells out to the miles of snow with such energy and enthusiasm I very much felt genuine happiness myself. 

Do yourself a favor and find the video on Youtube.  The reaction is priceless, unadulterated joy.  It is also really entertaining to hear a string of blissful Norwegian words with the undeniably English words “Cheez Doodles” wedged in the middle. 

Watching the video and listening to the podcast guys talk to Mr. Gamme got me to thinking about just what causes happiness. 

If you ask someone what was the happiest day of their life they usually respond with the day they got married or the birth of their children.  I don’t think so.  Now before you jump to any conclusions, gentle reader, I am happily married (more so than most I’d wager) and I believe my children to be the best parts of my life.  The problem is getting married and the process of childbirth isn’t really happy.

Think about it.  The day you got married may have been a great day and there may have been many fabulous moments but there were also moments of stress or even abject terror.  When my wife and I got married it was not an extravagant affair.  It was at the Reno County Courthouse.  The judge was late and then we had to use a substitute judge.  No stress there.  To be totally honest I just remember snapshots of the day, pleasant snapshots mostly, but really the happiness of the marriage is in the bigger picture, over time, because I chose wisely.  The day of marriage was not a giddiness sandwich served on two slices of delight. 

The three days in which I experienced the birth of my children were better characterized by anxiety and a sense of being superfluous than a feeling of bliss.  All of them were c-section deliveries so I didn’t even get the role of Lamaze coach.  My jobs were to distract my 65% numb wife and make sure not to look. 

Really, having a tiny person forcibly removed from the midsection of the person I like best is not a day at the beach.  For Kid #2 they had to completely knock my wife out.  Tell me it is fun to be in the room with your betrothed when she has her eyes taped shut and various medical professionals looking for the prize in the cereal box that is her abdomen and I will tell you you are wrong.  The majority of the time I was staring at the doorknob.  Then I heard the newly minted Alice start to cry.  In my mind that meant she was now separate from her mother and it would be safe to look.  Bad choice.  Her head and shoulders were “out” and she was angry.  I went back to examining the doorknob. 

Now, back to the yelling at the sky happiness Mr. Gamme felt about his Cheez Doodles.  Most of us don’t get to that level of happy but we do have little moments of giddy.  The other day I opened my desk drawer at work and inside were two, count ‘em, two, fun size Milky Ways.  If the ladies in the office hadn’t been nearby I would have cried out with joy.  The other day one of my imaginary friends (I use that term for people I only know via the internet – don’t worry, no stalkers) remarked about her great happiness about getting a brand new sponge for working in the kitchen (“It is just so clean!”). 

It really is those little things which we need to stop and truly enjoy, and maybe even whoop to the sky about.  People will mock you, but who cares, you’re happy.

Christopher Pyle wishes you and yours a wonderful week of whooping.  He can be contacted at occasionallykeen@yahoo.com.  

Taking a Drive-In Down Memory Lane

Nothing like several inches of snow to make one wax nostalgic for the carefree days of summer.  One of the things I think about when casting back to hot temperatures and extended sunshine is drive-in movies.  Yes, I am that old. 

Truthfully, my family didn’t go to drive-ins as a summer time treat.  Dad would watch movies every once in a while but they didn’t make movies like Red River anymore so he wasn’t all that interested.  Mom could tell you where she sat and what she was wearing when she saw Ben Hur in the theater but she didn’t want to go.  My experience with the bygone movie presentation was as a worker. 

At the end of my sophomore year in high school a friend invited me to work with him at the Airport Drive-In (give yourself 50 bonus points if you ever went to a movie there).  At that time there were two drive-ins in the area, the Airport and the South Hutch.  The South Hutch played movies you could take the whole family to for a wholesome evening of entertainment.  The Airport….didn’t. 

Our specialties were four movie marathons featuring one of two things, crazed men wielding chainsaws, knives, machetes, or really pointy sticks (not all of them were very bright) or women wearing short shorts, tiny bikinis, spandex or cheerleader outfits (at least until they changed into the tiny bikinis).  Now don’t worry, I was safely sheltered from these films which could poison the young innocence of a bright eyed high school boy because I worked in the concession stand.  (On second thought you don’t get 50 bonus points if you ever went to a movie there. You should probably have points deducted, or simply think better of admitting it to anyone.)

It really was a great job.  The manager was an older lady who would mother all of the high school aged workers.  We all got along.  Most of us were friends before and after the job and my cousin Kevin even met his future and still current wife working there. 

There were three basic roles at the theater.  The box office:  This was almost always a girl who sat out in the tiny little “house” at the entry gate selling tickets to the degener…uh, customers.  The concession staff:  These were the hard-working stiffs popping popcorn, frying up burgers and shilling the sodas.  The ramp man:  This was the guy who was charged with walking the ramps, that is the inside vernacular for where all the cars parked to tilt ever so slightly upwards to look at the screen, in order to keep order and catch people who tried to drive in via the exit and charge them for admission. 

Now for a peek behind the curtain of that mysterious and mostly extinct exotic workplace the drive in.

The concession stand had its standards for the food it served.  These standards may or may not have been the ones suggested by the health department.  We would bag up any leftover popcorn in a big trash bag to be used the next night.  The rule of thumb was if you carefully took a single popped kernel of corn and gently bit down on it with just the maxillary and mandibular central incisors and heard a squeaking sound the popcorn was officially too old to sell.  Also, yesterday’s hamburgers became today’s cheeseburgers, the cheese covered up the bits of bun which had stuck to the hamburger patty as we prepped them for cryogenic preservation (stuck them in the freezer) for the next day. 

In our defense the clientele was not possessing of highly discerning palates.  We would often laugh at the people who would purchase popcorn tubs big enough to transport a defecting family of Cubans to Key West with extra buttery flavored oil (that is what we were required to offer the customers – why there was a pang of remorse on the part of the company asking us to exercise some truth in advertising on this matter while doing all the other stuff we did was beyond me) multiple hot dogs and hamburgers, a package of Twizzlers, a package of Corn Nuts (the loudest foodstuff ever devised by man) a package of Milk Dud (it was not a package of Milk Duds because the air conditioning didn’t work so well in the storage room and the individual candies had coagulated into one giant Dud) and then yell at us because we didn’t carry any diet soda. 

Christopher Pyle will be checking with his lawyer about the statute of limitations on certain actions and possibly share more drive-in information in his next column.  He can be reached at occasionallykeen@yahoo.com.  

Another Opening Another Show

It’s show week! 

Dodge City High School is presenting its yearly musical theater extravaganza and the two younger Pyle children are rather prominently featured.  This means for them a week of excitement, a week of costumes and hair styles, a week of dancing, a week of singing, a week of very little sleep, a week of becoming a bit snappish with the father who asks too many questions about how it is going and a week that will live in their memories for a long time.

 

It wasn’t intentional that we would become a family of performers, just sort of happened. 

I did a couple of plays in high school but that was only because the Inimitable Rob talked me into it.  My lovely wife, Claudia, was a singing and dancing Molly Brown, you know, the one who proved to be incredibly buoyant, at her high school but neither of us did any performing again for several years.  Our kids, however, have been much more involved in shows in their younger lives as well as high school. 

Daughter #1, Emilyjane, was born with a theatrical bend.  She would emote at the drop of a hat.  She loved to dance even before she could walk (this mostly consisted of rocking back and forth on her bottom in an emphatically rhythmic manner).  As she got older she danced as often as she walked.  If she needed to go to the refrigerator to get the milk, she danced, if she was going out to the car, she danced, if she was traveling through the aisles of the grocery store, she danced.  For some reason whenever her mother or I decided we would dance in the grocery store it was mortifying to her, wicked double standard if you ask me.  She would later become a singer as well and burst into song more frequently than a hyperactive canary. 

Daughter #2, Alice, didn’t seek the spotlight as often as her sister but she never shied away from it either.  There was one time in a performance of the children’s choir at church she was handed a solo the morning of the performance because another child was sick.  She kind of muffed the opening of it.  The choir stopped for a second, the kind-hearted young boy standing next to her called out to the congregation that she had just got it today, and then she proceeded to nail it. 

Only Son, George, takes after his father with very strong hermit tendencies.  He will spend hours by himself but he always had a very strong imagination and in his younger days his pretend play was pretty elaborate.   He was oddly without stage fright at a very young age.  Even as a toddler he was given a costume to resemble the outfit his old man wore as the mascot for the Dodge City Legend Basketball team and was willing to be silly in front of several hundred folks as Mini Marshal Hoops. 

I am a pathetically proud papa. 

Emilyjane was in middle school and I drove her to a music contest.  Anyone who has ever been to a school music contest knows it is two to four hours of driving in order to have six to seven hours of sitting around with a very intense three or four minutes of performance.  She sang “Shenandoah” while I sat in the back of the room trying lot to let anyone see that I was crying like a menopausal woman watching “The Notebook”. 

Alice was given one of the featured roles in Seussical when the Depot Theater Company did the show a few years back.  Since she was not as prone to perform around the house I have to say I was genuinely surprised and blown away when she truly opened up her pipes and sang her big song, luckily it was dinner theater and I had a napkin handy. 

George was in a show I directed for the Depot Theater group.  We had added a couple of kids for extras.  I was surprised when the musical director gave him a couple of short solos in some of the big chorus numbers.  The result was ten different performance nights with the director/dad at the back of the house smiling like an idiot. 

When Alice takes the stage as Sandy (wearing a wig because her hair is too short to be a fifties teenage heartbreaker) and George stands up there as Kenickie (with his hair slicked back like a BP pelican) I will be very glad the lights are on them and not on me. 

Christopher Pyle is glad his children enjoy the arts, but regrets this means none of them can support him in his old age.  He can be reached at occasionallykeen@yahoo.com

Another Milestone around my Neck

There are times it is actually pretty hard to come up with what to write about in these columns.  I know the gentle reader is shocked to find out the bon mots and Algonquin Round Table style wit which flows from my brain through my fingers onto the keyboard and into your hearts and minds every other week requires a strain of my creative abilities.  The preceding load of Grade A plant food was brought to you by the good folks at Ferti-lome. 

This was one of those weeks.  So, I sat myself down at the dinner table and announced I was brain dead and had nothing to write about.  Here are the suggestions which followed.

The Lovely Wife said I could write about how I was now old enough to have a daughter who had gotten engaged.  Uff-dah. 

Yes, my oldest child is wearing a ring on her finger capable of cutting through glass or at least through her boyfriend’s life savings.  It was not a shock.  The two of them have been together for quite a while now and they had been talking about their future like it was a fait accompli marriage was going to happen.  But still it makes a father pause when the little girl he helped teach to walk and talk, the little girl who crawled into his bed at night and promptly used her feet and elbows to lacerate his spleen and kidneys, the little girl who used her big brown eyes to talk him into getting dogs and cats who then ruined carpet and furniture, the little girl who needed prom dresses which cost more than all the clothes hanging in his closet, the little girl who now goes to college and will probably not come home as often as he would like, the little girl who looks too much like him, the little girl who laughs at his lame jokes, the little girl who still wedges herself between him and his wife when they try to hug and says “baby sandwich” is getting married.  I never should have let her mother talk me into teaching her how to walk and talk.

 

The young man really is a good guy.  He even came to me at my place of business to ask for her hand in a very old fashioned and respectful manner.  I told him my concerns, which were not many, and he acknowledged and addressed all of them.  I felt like I was then beholden to list the dowry he would receive.  I almost didn’t have enough goats to seal the deal.

 

He really did surprise her when he popped the question.  For the last few years my wife and kids (I am too socially inept) have hosted a caroling party a few days before Christmas.  My daughter’s soon to be fiancé decided he would ask her when the group was at his aunt and uncle’s house during the caroling.  Everyone had sung a couple of songs when he announced he had something to say.  The cell phone cameras of all the people who had been clued in all sprung into action.  He got down on one knee and she started crying.  I was standing at the back of the throng with the boyfriend’s father.  After the original hubbub subsided he called out he hadn’t heard the question.  I then chimed in that I hadn’t heard the answer.  She said yes. 

All those cell phones recorded the moment for posterity.  Which will be great for so many reasons.  Not the least of which is my daughter was wearing what she considers to be a hideous Christmas sweater. Her sister and some of her friends who knew what was going to happen tried to figure out a way for getting her to change.  Everything from a friend thinking about spilling something on it to her sister throwing herself on the fashion grenade and claiming she wanted to wear it.

The wedding is two years away but that doesn’t mean the last few weeks have not been filled with planning and discussing and planning some more.  I, being the voice of reason, or wet blanket, depending on your point of view, keep reminding people the wedding is two years away and people might change their mind.  Oh, not about getting married, but rather what songs they will want played at the wedding.  They just look at me funny and go on.  That happens a lot in my house.

 

My suggestion on what to write about for this week’s column was how much I like ketchup.

Christopher Pyle approves of the boyfriend, approves of the marriage and very much approves of the two year waiting period.  He can be contacted at occasionallykeen@yahoo.com.  

The Sound of One Hand Tweeting

Okay, this made me laugh.

I have mentioned before that I have a Twitter account. The majority of the people I follow write jokes.  I do not follow people who use it to discuss the mundane day-to-day of their lives (Oh, boy, I just love milk) or who use it to push an agenda (You must send money today to protect the planet against the ever increasing scourge of people wearing plaids and checks at the same time) or people who simply use it as a way to self-promote (I will be selling my hand woven raffia iPhone covers at the supermarket parking lot this Saturday). Recently I clicked on the follow button for the Dalai Lama.  He doesn’t talk about the tasty mustard seed dressing he had at dinner last night, ask for money to buy more robes for disadvantaged monks or peddle his mountain top tours.  He says things that promote kindness and reinforce the ideas that we need to be nice to each other.  I like that.

Here’s the part that made me laugh.  Twitter sends me e-mails suggesting people I might want to follow based on who I already follow.  The e-mail I got after choosing to follow the Dalai Lama said “Here are accounts similar to who you followed.  Similar to the Dalai Lama… The Onion.”  The Onion is an organization dedicated to silly.  It creates fake news for the purpose of entertainment and has very little concern about offending people.  So, on the one hand we have a man who has dedicated his life to spiritual enlightenment for himself and as many others as he can possibly reach and on the other hand we have a group of people who like writing stories with as many double entendres as humanly possible.  Yeah, that connection makes total sense. 

Now let’s examine the idea that the Dalai Lama has a Twitter account.  The Dalai Lama is thought to be the reincarnation of a series of spiritual leaders who have chosen to be reborn in order to enlighten others. The Dalai Lama is the highest lama of Tibetan Buddhism and the highest goal of Tibetan Buddhism is to achieve Buddhahood, or a state of perfect enlightenment.  This perfect enlightenment means one is freed from all mental obstructions, one attains a state of continuous bliss attached simultaneously with the knowledge of emptiness, and all limitations to help other living things are removed.  That is perfect for Twitter.

Let’s look at the perfect enlightenment one component at a time.  One is freed from all mental obstructions.  Have you spent much time on Twitter?  Or any part of the internet?  Mental is not what it excels at so mental obstructions would not be present. One attains a state of continuous bliss attached to the knowledge of emptiness.  Happiness brought about by emptiness may be a better definition of the internet than a global system of interconnected computer networks.  Finally, all limitations to help other living things are removed.  The internet is pretty magic. 

Sounds to me like Twitter was created to facilitate the Dalai Lama’s mission statement:  end suffering in 140 characters or less.

The e-mail from the Twitter minions brought to mind something else about the internet world.  Just how many people know stuff about me?  The Twitter guys know who I follow.  The iTunes guys know what music I buy.  The Google guys know what I don’t know.  The Wikipedia guys know I am gullible enough to believe the Wikipedia guys (see the previous paragraph comprised of Dalai Lama facts). 

Now I lead a preternaturally uneventful life and my deepest darkest secrets include the guilty pleasure of eating food designed for eight-year-olds.  (Froot Loops, they’re not just for breakfast anymore.)  Also, the fact I listen to entirely too many showtunes for a fifty-year-old, happily married, father of three in western Kansas.  (Yes, I even have stuff from Glee on my iPod.  Is there a support group for this?) So the fact chunks of my life are open to those living in the cyber-world doesn’t scare me all the much.  Really, anyone who hacks into my internet browser history would be asleep in the first ten minutes.  After the third story about Jeff Withey’s prowess blocking shots and the fifth blog entry from a guy who wrote for television comedies back in the 80s they might not just doze off, they might start contemplating a fork in their own eye to spice things up a bit.  

Christopher Pyle truly does believe that spreading kindness is important and hopes to end prejudice especially against grown men who listen to Julie Andrews and Brian Stokes Mitchell, on purpose.  He can be mocked at occasionallykeen@yahoo.com.

The Good and the Bad of Fooling Yourself

I have spent entirely too much time recently being annoyed with life.  Truth be told, I have absolutely no good reason to be grumpy.  The Thanksgiving holiday is supposed to be a time of reflection and taking the time to be grateful for the things which enhance our lives. 

The A #1 things I have to be thankful for are my two fabulous families.  The family I grew up with and the family I am now spending my time with as a father and a husband.  It is truly amazing how important it is to choose wisely when getting married and both my parents and I hit that one out of the park, on the first try I might add. 

For the next few paragraphs I am going to focus on something my lucky-enough-to-be-born-into family gave me.  This something has proven to be one of the greatest gifts ever given to me and it wasn’t even purposefully given.  It was an organic construct which grew slowly and was not-so-intentionally cultivated by my father, mother, siblings and some of my most influential friends.  What is this mighty treasure, this psychological boon, this windfall of nature and nurture combined?  Well, I’ll tell you.  It is a wholly unrealistic world view (sound of phonograph needle being scratched all the way across an album).

 

Wait, a second, did I just say I am grateful for an UNrealistic world view?  You bet. 

Before I describe this unrealistic worldview let me place one caveat in the mind of you, gentle reader.  I do not wish to say that everything in my world view is fantasy.  It is not.  The reason I call it unrealistic is it tends to ignore a lot of what is real in the world.  The things which are counter to the worldview I wish to subscribe to are frequently not given the importance of the things which support it.  That being said.  Here we go…

My family was fully comprised of readers.  Every flat surface in the house was home to a book, a magazine or a newspaper.  This means knowledge and intellectual awareness are components of my worldview.  I think this is important and then I project that sense of importance onto other people in my life.  This, like most every aspect of my consciousness, is a double edged sword.  It means I approach people believing they are thinking, curious people which helps us meet on a plane that cultivates respect and equality.  The problem is I do, from time to time, come across people for whom thinking is, shall we say, not listed on their personal Billboard Top Forty of daily activities. When that happens it is seldom the other guy who is left with a sense of disappointment and disillusionment.

 

My family also valued creativity.  My father was a weekend painter.  He mostly did landscapes and he did them nearly every Saturday and Sunday for the majority of my youth and young adulthood.  (This was proven without a doubt as we cleaned out our ancestral home and every time we moved something we found yet more paintings.  Most of them currently reside in my basement and whenever anyone visits they are not allowed to leave without a painting in hand and a promise to display it somewhere in their home.)  My mother was a writer.  She wrote letters, not e-mails, letters which were informative, interesting and displayed wit.  She also wrote poetry.  The most common poems were to friends and family on their birthdays.

 

The good side of being raised by creative minded people is I get true enjoyment out of the creativity of others and feel most engaged with life when I am being creative myself.  That feeling of high engagement is valued and cultivated but it does not reap benefits of the more material nature (the bad side).  I have been writing for this illustrious publication since June of 2007 and recently broke $2,000 of income reaped from that five and a half year tenure and that amount is Warren Buffet meets Exxon/Mobil money compared to what I have earned from every other writing product I ever created.   I do not do it for the money but I would really like to do much more writing and less of what I really do every day but living on $363 a year would not make my children very happy.

 

Still after examining the negatives I get much more positive from my unrealistic worldview.  I’m keeping it.

Christopher Pyle is thankful for many things.  Not the least of which is he will be snug in his bed during all the Black Friday door buster sales.  You can contact him at occasionallykeen@yahoo.com.  

Bad Guys and Thank You

I spend a lot of time around people.  Because some of what I see is downright depressing I often try to distance myself from the actions of others by dispassionately observing and attempting to draw logical conclusions from the evidence and data.  This may make me seem to be a rather aloof person who sees himself as being better than other people.  After spending a couple of minutes examining that description of me I decided I can live with that. 

The first observation was something I had been kicking around in one form or another for some time and then I heard a guy on a podcast (Marc Maron) put it pretty succinctly.  His basic message was people’s brains are hardwired to “find the bad guy”.

 

This doesn’t just mean it is easy to spot Darth Vader is the bad guy because he is dressed like Johnny Cash’s closet exploded quite near him.  It means in run of the mill life people look for who they will cast as the bad guy in their own personal life story.  Like the guy at work who has no problem shirking his duties so other people’s lives become more difficult.  It is not unreasonable to cast him as your own personal Snidely Whiplash while you Dudley Do-Right through your day.  The inept boss who constantly makes the lives of his underlings downright crummy is another example.  That guy, on some level, deserves being mocked by his employees as they call him Voldedork a.k.a. He Who Must Not Be Able to Pour Water Out of a Boot Even with the Instructions Written on the Heel.

There is another motivation behind people finding the bad guy in their lives.  This motivation could be called “blame displacement” (also swiped from Mr. Maron).  This is when people have screwed up all by themselves but look for a bad guy to blame.  We have probably all done this at one time or another.

Like that time you were backing up out of the garage and due to your own inattentiveness you got too close to the wall and broke the rearview side mirror.  Most of us just start using all the words our mothers told us never to say and then go looking for the duct tape.  The people who choose to go the blame displacement route will start looking for the bad guy. 

Oh, it wasn’t my fault I broke the mirror on my car.  It was because of those darned politicians.  If Congress hadn’t passed the Smoot- Hawley Tariff of 1930 which raised tariffs to the highest levels in U.S. history since the Tariff of 1828 than the economy might have rebounded faster during the Great Depression and World War II might have never happened which means Japan would not have been forced to become a country who only made electronics and cheap dependable cars which eventually caused American homebuilders to shrink the size of garages built post 1979 to sizes not conducive for parking anything larger than a Datsun 240Z and I wouldn’t have ripped the rearview mirror from the door of my man sized Chevrolet Pangaea.  Curse you Reed Smoot and Willis Hawley!

Now to the second observation.  People do not say thank you often enough.  Oh, sure people say “thanks” all the time but that has become as meaningless as the word “fine” when said in response to “how are you?”  It is simply pro forma.

 

Before we go on I feel I must say I still want people to say “fine” when I ask them how they are.  I do not have the time or the stores of sympathy required to listen to a litany of maladies, both major and minor, that people are actually experiencing at every given moment of their lives. 

How are you?  Oh, my sacroiliac is acting up, the Eustachian tube in my left ear filled with fluid last Thursday and is really causing me some discomfort and I think I may be developing a case of scurvy because you just can’t find good citrus fruit around here.  (Don’t care, sorry.)

Back to thank you.  This week I worked on a project which wasn’t all that fun with a group of co-workers.  After it was all said and done I sent them a heartfelt thank you note.  The responses I got made it look like I had volunteered to give them a kidney.  If thank yous had been more common in their lives mine would not have elicited such a response.

Christopher Pyle is certain there are times he deserves being called Voldedork, but he is particularly pleased with that joke so he won’t mind.  You can contact him at occasionallykeen@yahoo.com. 

A Writer and his Needy Tweets

In previous columns I have admitted to being a very flawed individual.  I am lazy.  I lack the will power required to abstain from snack foods.  My avoidance of confrontation reaches pathological levels.  I’ll stop there because this column is limited to eight hundred words and if I am going to get to the point I really want to make I need to limit the list of my character limitations.  Which brings to mind another flaw, I am horribly long-winded. 

Now to the latest flaw I am trying to work through.  I am too needy of positive attention.  Everybody craves and appreciates compliments and accolades.  Where I may be different is I want it for too many things and in an unrealistic timeframe. 

Case in point is my existence on Twitter.  Twitter is a social network that allows people to share all sorts of information in bursts of 140 characters or less.  Some people use this internet contrivance to share important stuff like what they had for breakfast.  Others use it for promotion of their money making endeavors.  The people I choose to follow mostly write jokes, which is all I try to do.  This is where my neediness comes into play.  I will create a wonderfully crafted Tweet (that is what one calls the individual units distributed on Twitter).  Then I spend the rest of the day looking for validation, frequently, no, really a lot. 

There are two different ways to show approval for things written on Twitter.  If you particularly like one, you can click an icon which labels it a “favorite”.  A higher form of acknowledgement is when a person “re-tweets” something.  This means they liked it so much they then send it out to all of their followers.  Whenever anybody does one of these actions the individual Tweet is tagged with the number of favorites and re-tweets it has received. 

That is my problem.  I am constantly going to my Twitter page clicking on my Tweets hoping for favorites and re-tweets like a love starved puppy jumping up and down at his master’s feet demanding attention and belly rubbings.  No really, I am that pathetic, just not nearly as cute.  One problem is it doesn’t happen all that often, the favoriting and re-tweeting, that is, the neediness happens all the time. 

At the moment my Twitter account has 74 followers.  Last week I had 75 and went through an inordinate amount of grief when I lost one.  The defector was not one of my actual friends, meaning someone I have seen with my own eyes in real reality.  So the fact that I was emotionally jarred by the fact a person (a person I have never met, would probably never meet and may not have even liked if I did meet) took less than five seconds to intentionally “unfollow” my sporadically attended to and even more sporadically entertaining 140 character attempts at humor is not the healthiest of reactions. 

I have one follower who is a real life comedy writer and has over thirteen thousand followers of his own.  When he favorites one of my Tweets I have to squelch the desire to contact all the girls from high school who would not give me the time of day and inform them that I am officially a funny person and they sure missed out.  I am able to resist that urge for two reasons.  First, it would accomplish absolutely nothing and second, because contacting all the girls from high school who showed zero interest in me would require a very large amount of time and effort…days, probably weeks. 

A few months ago this cyber-buddy wrote a Tweet in which he suggested that people follow me and then said “He is a funny guy, a nice guy and he teaches kids and cares about them…We need more like him.”  I was thrilled beyond words and as I stated earlier in this column I am by nature long-winded.  I never would have thought I’d get my tombstone epitaph from Twitter especially one written by a guy who has also written words spoken by Homer Simpson.  It also doubled my follower total in less than twelve hours. 

Writers are often very needy people and comedy writers are the worst.  I want to take a moment to thank those of you who have reached out to me because of this column:  Janet, Dick, Joe, Letty, Sandy, Ann, Linda, Jennifer, Kim, John, Jim, and most especially, Doris and Larry.  Your kind words mean more than you know…and maybe more than they ought to because I am not a well man.

Christopher Pyle greatly appreciates everyone who reads his columns.  He can be contacted at occasionallykeen@yahoo.com.  

The Book of Booking Broadway Tickets

For those of you who remember our last installment in this running history of my life and thoughts my daughter and I were in New York City.

I have to say I am always surprised when people remember things I say in this column or say outside this column for that matter.  I am the father of three children who are currently teenagers and I am an administrator of an elementary school.  Those things conspire to make me one of the least listened to people walking the Earth.  Flight attendants giving the safety speech before take-off at least have the paranoid sure-we-are-all-going-to-die-a-fiery-death passengers listening to them which is probably more of an audience than I have on any given day.

Anyway, I mentioned last time that my daughter and I are both big fans of theater.  A big part of why we went was to see real honest-to-goodness Broadway shows.  The impossible to get tickets at this time are for “The Book of Mormon”.  I tried to get tickets more than a month ahead of our visit and availability was nil.  My daughter is a lover of old-fashioned musicals so we salved our “can’t get the hot ticket” sense of disappointment by getting tickets to “Anything Goes,” the big Cole Porter revival. 

That didn’t go so well.  First, the big star (Sutton Foster, one of Emilyjane’s heroes as well as being one of her “best friends” on Twitter) left the show before we were going to be there.  Okay, we can live with that, the show is still going to be fun.  Then we hear the show is going to close eight days before the night we have already purchased tickets for rolls around.  Eight days, really?

I call the ticket agency to see about getting a refund on the tickets.  The lady is very nice and asks if there is anything she can do for me.  I ask if she could talk them into doing the show until we can get there.  She says that is a bit above her pay grade.  She asks if there is another show we would like to get tickets for.  I say how about “The Book of Mormon”.  She laughs, politely and all, but it was a genuine laugh.  You can’t blame a guy for trying. 

So, flash forward to when we are actually in New York.  We decide to take a chance and just go directly to the box office of the theater where The Book of Mormon is playing.  We get there just a few minutes after it opens in the morning, which is 10 AM, those theater folk don’t get up with the chickens.  The guy in front of us in line is in the middle of making a purchase.  His transaction is not making it look good for us.  He is buying tickets for a performance five months in the future and he is paying a premium price and when I say premium I mean Bill Gates and Paul McCartney would even split the cost with their dates.  So that guy finishes his purchase leaving behind his credit card number and a pound of flesh and I step up to the window.

My opening line was “I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t start laughing until I actually leave the building.”  I then said we were looking for tickets for anytime that week.  He started to mention the premium tickets and I said thanks but I’d prefer not so sell my kidney for the money to see a show.  I didn’t really say that, but I did say thanks but no thanks. 

Then he said just a minute.  He looked at the sheet of paper on his desk.  (Digression alert)  Okay, this theater pulls in thousands of dollars each and every night.  This theater is in the heart of the biggest theater district in the world.  This theater has been in existence since the 1920’s.  This is no nickel and dime outfit.  Well, the sheet of paper he is looking at is a run of the mill computer printout list with dozens of scribbles done by hand in red ink.  There isn’t a more efficient system, really?  (Digression over) He then excuses himself and steps to the back of his tiny office and asks somebody we can’t see a question.  He then returns and asks what we are doing Friday afternoon.  Since I am known for my witty repartee I say “I hope I am sitting in this theater watching your show.”  

And that is just what happened.

Christopher Pyle loved the show and was surprised by the uplifting message they snuck in under all the humor, much of it a little, um, off color.  You can reach him at occasionallykeen@yahoo.com.  

Traveling Beyond the Comfort Zone

I like being at my house.  Several of my all-time favorite people live there.  Wanderlust is not part of my DNA and I find I get more and more curmudgeon-like as I get older and assiduously avoid being with large groups of people (large being anything over six).  I put all that aside a couple of weeks ago and got on a plane which took me over 1,500 miles away from my comfy house to a place populated by way more than six people, New York City. 

This was a trip taken by just me and my oldest daughter, Emilyjane.  We had been planning it for weeks and weeks and I have to say it turned out pretty darned good, even if there are entirely too many people everywhere you turn there. 

Our hotel was just a couple blocks from Times Square so after we got safely checked in and our gear stashed we walked over to be wide-eyed Kansas tourists.  Do you remember the game Red Rover from your grade school days?  That is the game where two groups of people face each other and call out to send over a person to see if he or she can break through the line.  Well, standing at the corner of 45^th Street and 7^th Avenue waiting for the light to change felt like a weapons grade plutonium version of Red Rover.  “Red Rover, Red Rover, send the entire population of Inman right over.”

Actually, the pedestrian traffic lights on New York streets are more suggestions than actual rules of the road.  It surprised me how quickly Emilyjane and I, law-abiding Midwestern salt of the earth people, started brazenly crossing against the light.  At first I joked that New Yorkers can smell fear but really it is not a matter of fear.  New Yorkers are not sharks looking for weak and scared tourists to bite in half.  The crux of the matter is they simply respect decisiveness.  If you are willing to make a choice in a timely manner and stick to it you will be fine (but you still need to be fully aware that a taxi cab driver will run you over without spending any time at all trifling with the brake pedal or a sense of remorse). 

I very much enjoyed seeing the big city through the eyes of my daughter.  When we were first riding into town from the airport her head was on a swivel trying to see as much as possible.  She actually said, “I need more eyes.”  We are both big fans of theater but I missed occasional parts of the shows we attended because I was watching her watch the show.  Definitely one of the best perks of being a dad.

It was also fun to experience parts of New York through the eyes of smaller children, especially smaller children who I was not in the least bit responsible for because traveling with toddlers in this environment would be exhausting.  We were in the Disney store.  The lower level was mostly stuffed animals, clothes and princess dolls.  We were standing on the second level a few feet from a display of super hero toys when a little boy reached the crest of the escalator and the various Avengers came into view.  He immediately made a beeline for the nearest Iron Man toy saying, “This is more like it.” 

I have to say the sheer volume of smiling and good will was a bit of surprise to me, the unseasoned traveler.  I still had a prejudice that big city folk would be, not so much rude as entirely too driven and harried to be fun to interact with, wrongo.  Truly, except for the one food service guy who was moving at his own sweet time causing Emilyjane to contemplate jumping over the counter and deep fat frying his fingers because he didn’t seem at all concerned that she had ordered a drink and her current state of thirst was making her just a tad irritable, everyone we deal t with was pleasant, helpful and laughed and joked right along with us. 

Frequently in life I have found the ability to freely admit ignorance and ineptitude followed by the willingness to put myself in someone else’s hands makes that person not only smile but they work really hard to help.  Everyone likes feeling valuable and I have no trouble doing my best Blanche DuBois (sans southern accent, flowing frock and alcoholic tendencies) and relying on the kindness of strangers.

 

Christopher Pyle will probably do more columns about the New York trip, maybe allowing him to write it off as a business expense.  You can contact him, unless you work for the IRS, at occasionallykeen@yahoo.com.  

Some Things are More Important than Others

What is important to you?  Would you rather watch The Bachelorette or Community?  Would you rather go to a fancy restaurant or a baseball game?  Would you rather spend time with the cast of Jersey Shore or take a ball peen hammer and crush three of your own toes?  It all boils down to priorities.

The disconnect between one person’s priorities and the priorities of the other person is the place where animosity lives.  The problem is sometimes people put too much importance on some disagreements that just aren’t that big a deal. 

When my wife and I were first married there were minor differences in priorities which caused points of friction (since those points of friction were nearly 22 years ago we obviously got over it).  She had a priority of cleanliness that I did not.  To me putting something away meant it was simply out of the way.  To her it had to be inside something else.  She wanted things in cabinets, drawers and the like whereas I was fully content if things were in places that were not likely to trip me as I walked to the bathroom. 

The secret to getting along with others is being able to distinguish between the priorities that are most important and require a certain level of agreement and the priorities that can be allowed to be different. 

Priority that can be different:  Mac versus PC.  This is like the old Chevy versus Ford debate.  Sure there are differences but is it really worth hating one another.  “My laptop cost more than orthodontia, is thinner than a fine crepe served in a Parisian restaurant and came with an official Steve Jobs mock turtleneck so I am cooler and better than you” is just not a reasonable mindset. 

Priority that can be different:  Celine Dion is the best singer ever versus Celine Dion is just Barry Manilow with slightly higher levels of estrogen.  With the invention of headphones people do not have to listen to each other’s musical choices so this doesn’t have to be a line drawn in the sand. 

Priority that can be different (Kansas edition):  KU versus K-State.  I have to say I have been very much taken aback by some of the animosity displayed in this rivalry.  Really?  They are two institutions of higher learning where individuals learn thinking skills and abilities which prepare them for success in the world and create fully rounded human beings.  So, why do some people approach the relationship more in the manner of Protestants and Catholics in 1972 Belfast? 

Priority that can be different but lately has become entirely too contentious:  Republican versus Democrat.  I am not so old that I can remember the Whigs or anything but this animosity and severe level of vitriol just isn’t like it used to be and can’t be of benefit to anyone.  If you listen to the characterizations created by the opposition advertisers we have a choice for president between a man who thinks only the rich deserve to be taken care of, that both American jobs and his own personal money should be sent overseas, and who flip-flops faster than an X-games skateboarder after drinking two dozen cans of Red Bull and the other guy who wants government to decide whether grandma gets her insulin, wants the country to become a socialist reflection of European elitism and is a closet Muslim.  Neither description is all that accurate but accuracy is not the goal, fear and hatred is. 

Other priorities that can be different:  James T. Kirk versus Jean-Luc Picard (also see William Shatner versus Chris Pine), Bugs Bunny versus Woody Woodpecker, tastes great versus less filling, Buster Keaton versus Charlie Chaplin, the first Darrin in Bewitched versus the second Darrin in Bewitched, Gene Wilder Willy Wonka versus Johnny Depp Willy Wonka, designated hitter versus no designated hitter, Coke versus Pepsi, Burger King versus McDonald’s, boxers versus briefs, kindle versus nook, any of the eleven actors who played Dr. Who versus any of the eleven actors who played Dr. Who, paper versus plastic, Superman versus Batman, and, finally, Star Wars before George Lucas monkeyed with it versus Star Wars after George Lucas monkeyed with it.  All of these basic choices will be made due to basic priorities held dear within the very DNA of a person but none of them should cause an inability to get along with people who chose the other side of the issue.

 

Christopher Pyle thinks the only nonnegotiable choice is Christmas presents must be opened Christmas Day not Christmas Eve.  You can argue with him at occasionallykeen@yahoo.com.  

Odds and...well, just more odds

As we go through our day-to-day activities we come across bunches and bunches of stuff.  Much of it is quite inconsequential.  However, if you stop and make just a little bit of effort even the most normal, run-of-the-mill thing can be most entertaining.

For example, the other day my wife was giving the family dog (let’s be honest, he is her dog and he tolerates the rest of us as long as we are not in his preferred napping locations) his flea treatment.  One direction proved ironic if not downright ridiculous.  It read as follows “To the User:  If you cannot speak English, do not use this product until the label has been fully explained to you.”  If you can’t speak English it is a safe bet you cannot read the sentence telling what to do if you cannot speak English.  This is like the signs saying Braille menus are available upon request, especially such signs at a drive through.  Then I looked a bit closer.  The flea medicine instruction guys did include the same statement in Spanish.  You have to ask yourself why bother putting that warning instruction in English at all.  If you can read English you don’t need the warning and if you can only read Spanish the warning in that language gets the job done.  My guess is they put it in English so people prone to paranoia wouldn’t go down a rabbit hole of worry. 

Interior dialogue of paranoid dog owner: I see there is a single sentence of Spanish in the instructions for giving my dog his flea treatment.  Why is this and only this sentence in Spanish?  Why aren’t they telling me what it says?  Maybe it is only for Spanish language dogs.  Wait just a dog gone minute.  My dog is a Chihuahua.  I might need to know what this is saying.  Maybe these instructions aren’t the original instructions.  Maybe these instructions were substituted by some evil doer and they changed one of the most important steps from English to Spanish just to wreck havoc on monolingual dog owners. Maybe this one instruction is the difference between being safe from fleas and actually attracting fleas from a five county radius straight to poor little Sparky.  Somebody call the FDA.  Somebody call the SPCA.  Somebody call somebody who speaks Spanish.  Somebody call for a pizza.  All this panicking is making me hungry.

 

See what I mean?  Just one odd little quirk in flea treatment instructions and you can spin it into an entertaining scenario of a dog owner with severe trust issues freaking out.  This idea of taking something small and extrapolating it into a full entertainment is one of the things my family will do for fun as we sit around the living room. This is either a positive sign of togetherness or a pathetic sign of what happens when a family has no television. 

The other afternoon my daughter, Alice, was very focused on the screen of her phone.  This is not unusual in most households which contain a high school aged child.  I made a joke about how if Lewis Carroll were writing today his Alice wouldn’t go through the looking glass to Wonderland but would by sucked through her smart phone.  And we were off…

The White Rabbit would not be running around saying “I’m late!  I’m late!”  He would be scurrying about lamenting “They can’t hear me now!  They can’t hear me now!”  The Cheshire Cat wouldn’t vanish to the point where Alice could only see his teeth.  He would slowly disappear until all she could see was his Bluetooth device.  The Mad Hatter’s tea party would have them all communicating via Skype.  The Queen of Hearts would not scream “Off with their heads!”  She would threaten others with “Cut off their web access!”  Tweedledum and Tweedledee would become Tweedletext and Tweedletweet. 

This kind of one-upmanship story and joke making is fairly common when two or more of us congregate and it is one of the reasons I would gladly spend nearly all of my time in my house.  I am truly blessed to find myself in a family I actually like, not just love because that is what you are supposed to do, but genuinely enjoy as human beings.  

Remember how with many game shows there was a home version?  Well, here is a starter for you and your family taking the mundane and creating fun riffs.  Hanging with a group of festive family friendly piñatas is one made to look like a bottle of beer.  Have at it…

Christopher Pyle invites you to share any Alice in Cell Phone Land or piñata jokes with him at occasionallykeen@yahoo.com.