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.  

Not What it Used to Be

People are constantly pointing to different happenings, crying out they are signs of the end of the world.  Everything from the Mayan calendar’s indication that 2012 is as far as we go to zombie apocalypse hysteria, which, admittedly, has gotten more believable with the recent face eating episode in Florida and the announcement that Kevin Bacon will have a new television show in the fall.  Have you seen Mr. Bacon recently?  He no longer resembles the fresh-faced high school kid from Footloose (actually he was 25 when he made that movie so even then he didn’t look that fresh-faced high schoolish) but rather looks more like another iconic character from the 80’s, the Crypt Keeper. 

A different, and much less discussed, sign of the changing world was pointed out to me by my wife.  This sign is not a marker of anything as apocalyptic as the fall of civilization and the rise of Kevin Bacon led zombie anarchy.  It does, however, point out that things really aren’t as they used to be and probably not as they ought to be.  The most insidious thing about this sign is it effects the most susceptible of the population, our children.  “What is this sign?”  you ask.  Well, I’ll tell you.  It is the lack of skinned knees.

 

Don’t get me wrong.  I am not wishing pain and bloodshed on the youth of America.  It just seems to me that skinned knees can easily be pointed to as indicators of good things.  Kids with skinned knees are active children, children who spend time outdoors, children unafraid of rough and tumble behaviors.  Kids with skinned knees are living their own lives.

Think about it.  It is very difficult to get a skinned knee while shooting dozens of virtual-guns at hundreds of virtual-people, and ripping virtual-spleens from virtual-enemies in virtual-worlds of virtual-conflict.  Oh, sure, there is virtual-blood galore for little Malcolm as he sits on his genuine-sofa, manipulating his genuine-controller, as he eats genuine-junk food, creating a genuine-backside large enough to blot out the genuine-sun because he hasn’t worked any genuine-muscles beyond his genuine-thumbs for a genuine-long-time.

 

In addition kids do not get skinned knees as they sit at the computer surfing the internet, downloading video, illegally sharing music, e-mailing friends, instant messaging predators and generally watching their lives flicker by at broadband speed.

Another thing to ponder is, when was the last time you saw an ad for Bactine?  Remember that spray bottle which was kept handy for those little scrapes and scratches you would get as you went about your daily life.  A life which included running, riding your bike (sometimes using a discarded plank and a big rock to construct a ramp with the stability of the Euro), playing football in vacant lots with stickers and big brothers who thought they were Dick Butkus, and occasionally chasing a friend with the intensity of a lioness looking for dinner for no other reason than you were “it”.  The sedentary lifestyle of today’s youth doesn’t require a mixture of Benzalkonium chloride (antiseptic) and lidocaine (anesthetic) for the times when you have all the sata menu items in your bios enabled yet you still cannot get your drive recognized.  (I understood none of that.  I lifted it from a computer troubleshooting website.) 

The dearth of skinned knees is also a sign fewer children are willing to take even minimal risks.  I am willing to bet this trend can be attributed to something which started out as reasonable and then just got out of hand.  The world as a whole started pushing safety.  I agree we should look out for our children.  I make my kids wear a helmet when they ride their bikes.  I purchased the knee, elbow, wrist, and self-esteem pads when I got my kids roller blades.  I believe in safety.

I fear we spun such horrible stories to convince our kids to wear all the protective gear (face it you do look like Class A Geek wearing it) we created an aversion to taking risks.  My wife is excellent at pulling out a “I knew a kid who rode his bike barefoot and got both his feet caught in the spokes cutting off all his toes” story whenever needed. 

The concern is the American public may have done too good a job cautioning all of American kiddom about the bad things which can happen.  This doesn’t just make them use common sense precautions.  It means they look at their bicycle as an imminent danger to be avoided like anthrax powder or educational television.

Christopher Pyle in his youth was a true daredevil and broke his collarbone jumping off a tricycle.  He can be reached at occasionallykeen@yahoo.com. 

Matriculate, Graduate, Sorry I'm Late

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Word of the In-Crowd

I like words. I like knowing odd words. This knowledge can come in handy. Just the other day my wife was reading a magazine and asked, “What is a monotreme?” I spouted off an answer and as she read further my answer was proven correct. I had filed that word away years and years ago. I got it from the zoology class I took as a junior in high school (thanks Mr. Harris). Just because it only came in handy once during the 31 years I knew the word doesn’t mean it was a waste of time. It proves patience is a virtue because running around telling people the definition of monotreme in the aisles of Dillon’s or on street corners leads to ridicule and possibly even restraining orders.

Sometimes using an unusual word in a usual setting can work as a shibboleth amongst collectors of arcane terminology. What is that? You do not know what shibboleth means? Well, pull up a chair and welcome to the first in our continuing series “Learn an Only Slightly Useful Word.”

The origin of the word comes from a Biblical story. A group of people were being kept from crossing a certain river and since the people being kept out spoke a native language which did not include the “sh” sound anyone trying to cross was asked to say “shibboleth”. If the person said “sibboleth” it was clear they were not the right kind of person and would be killed. The word has much less of an impact nowadays. The first definition listed at Dictionary.com reads as follows: a peculiarity of pronunciation, behavior, mode of dress, etc., which distinguishes a particular class or set of persons.

Think about it for a minute and you can probably come with half a dozen shibboleths. Every job has its own special terminology which folks outside the loop would be pretty clueless about if it was thrown into other venues. My real job is in the world of education and we don’t even use words. This could be an actual sentence spoken by a highly educated professional: My PLC designed some RtI to be delivered during MTSS time in hopes of meeting AYP, EIEIO.

Move out of professions and you still have opportunities to test others to see if they share your background or interests (just please don’t feel the need to kill them if they mispronounce your word they might just have a speech impediment).

Some of the bigger pop culture worlds have a canon bigger and more complex than actual civilizations of the past. You can find out a person’s level of devotion by getting more and more arcane as you test them. Harry Potter has more lore than you can shake a stick at, even a stick eleven inches long made of holly with a phoenix feather core. Some people just got a huge laugh out of that joke and others are even more bewildered than usual at my obtuse description. That, my friends, is a five star shibboleth.

The world of Star Wars has just as many testing points. Do you know who Luke Skywalker’s best friend on Tatooine was before he went off to fight for the rebellion? Do you know what job Phil Tippet did for ILM in the filming of The Empire Strikes Back? Do you know the name of the newsletter sent to charter members of the Star Wars Club? Do you know how long it was before Chris Pyle could get a date after dedicating himself to knowing all the answers to the previous three questions?

Another distinction point is there are the people who liked the prequel trilogy more than the original trilogy and then there are those who are not patently wrong.
Music can also be a great way to see if someone is “our kind” of person. If you mention the Bee Gees and someone else in the room has heard of them you know they are probably from your same generation. If someone else in the room starts flawlessly singing one of their greatest hits you know they are a big fan (and can sing really high). If someone else in the room rushes out only to return moments later wearing a white suit and a black shirt unbuttoned to the navel and begins dancing wildly you know psychiatric intervention might be required.

My final shibboleth: if at any point in your life you wanted to be Rob Petrie we are kindred spirits.

Some Things are Less Equal than Others

There really ought to be double standards. Not everything and everybody merit the same treatment. I am not saying people do not deserve equal opportunities under the law or anything that draconian. If you think the cheese slid off my cracker I have the perfect example. ESPN broadcasting Pop Warner football.

ESPN broadcasts sporting events via the internet which is something I really appreciate as a huge college basketball fan with no television. So this past Saturday I was checking out the schedule for the day when I saw they were, at that very moment, showing a Pop Warner football game. For those of you who do not know, Pop Warner is to football what Little League is to baseball. In the case of the game I “tuned” in to it was boys 9, 10 and 11 years old playing.

I only watched for a few minutes but in that time I got to see little football players who looked more like Violet Beauregard from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory after she turned into a blueberry than anyone from the Green Bay Packers. Truly, a ninety pound boy wearing all those pads has a certain weebles wobble but they don’t get sacked quality to them. Even with that quirky imagery the weirdest aspect of the whole experience was the broadcast was exactly like an NFL play-off game. The play-by-play guy and the color analyst (yes, they had both) were just as urgently talking about the clock management as the final few seconds of the first half were running down as they would if it had been Joe Montana and Bill Walsh making the decisions. (It wasn’t.)

Here is my main problem. When Eli Manning and Ben Rothleis… Rothleesbi… Rothelbee… , uh, Tony Romo are playing there is a multimillion dollar industry hinging on who wins and who loses. When Little Timmy and his best friend Not So Little Jimmy are playing the only thing hanging in the balance should be which set of kids feel happier when they go get ice cream after the game. Unfortunately that is not the case and I happen to believe one of the reasons this is a problem is the big wigs at a huge media entity like ESPN think it is a good idea to show prepubescent kids play a game in the same manner they broadcast grown men (albeit many of whom are rather stuck in barely post pubescent maturity levels) pursue their career.

Sport should be fun and a way to teach children teamwork, engender camaraderie, and create healthier bodies. Sport can be an excellent way to show kids that the effort you put in directly relates to the ability to do something well. This is not the case as often as it ought to be. Sport is too often a way to prove we are better than you, strength is power, and losers are unworthy of respect. I am sure I am overstating things to a degree and that there are still places where competition is healthy and kids have fun but the more often we broadcast ten-year-olds playing tackle football the more often we increase the number of children in the grasp of those who believe winning is everything.

There was one person involved in the ESPN presentation who seemed to realize it was a little ridiculous, the sideline reporter. Yes, they had a pretty girl sideline reporter just like they do for their big money making broadcasts. She was interviewing one of the coaches as the teams left the field for halftime. She asked the normal hard hitting journalistic questions that all the hairdos with a microphone ask of Rex Ryan and Bill Belic…Bellish… Beelich…, John Fox on NFL sidelines. The difference here was the look on her face as the coach answered the question. She was obviously not at all interested in the answer and was much more concerned with the inexplicable turn her career had taken. (A degree in broadcast journalism from Northwestern and here I stand asking a systems analyst who played Div II football but could have gone pro if only he hadn’t had chronic turf toe his senior year how he is going to maintain his lead in a game with a bunch of athletes who would rather be playing Super Smash Brothers or watching Spongebob.) Out loud she says, “Do you think your team can continue to dominate on both sides of the ball in the second half?” Interior monologue, “Somebody shoot me, please.”

It may shock the reader to find out Christopher Pyle never played organized sports beyond his summer playing t-ball. He can be openly mocked at occasionallykeen@yahoo.com.

Pry My Priorities from Me

Frequently in today’s media we hear complaining about how so many people just don’t have their priorities straight. Sometimes the people doing the complaining are doing it so vehemently they show just how out of whack their own priorities are. I’m going to chime in on the subject. Hopefully, I won’t expose personal deficits.

As an educator I am frequently trying to impress upon young minds what is important and more significantly, what is not important. First, let me say I do not take advantage of this opportunity to teach them Bugs Bunny is genuinely funny and the Three Stooges are not which I personally think is a very important distinction that all younger generations should have firmly placed in their aesthetic sensibilities. What I do try to impress upon students is that doing the right thing, including following the concept of treating others as you would like to be treated, caring for those less fortunate and choosing to open presents Christmas morning instead of Christmas Eve (okay, maybe I shouldn’t include that last one) is done simply because it is the right thing to do. I ask. I cajole. I plead. I lower myself to abject begging. I do all this with a level of success similar to the winning percentage of Kansas City Royals over the past decade. Then in walks the counselor with her stickers and everybody shapes up immediately.

Even though I appreciate the counselor helping this is a perfect example of priorities not being what they ought to be. A student is willing to sit in the cafeteria flicking bits of tater tot at his neighbor even after being chastised the previous day for throwing pieces of his pig-in-a-blanket. However, if the counselor offers a sticker to everyone sitting politely eating their lunch they all become the Stepford children, angelic examples of behavior. This says to me a child is not willing to behave in a positive manner because it is the right thing to do, but they are willing to do so for a brightly colored picture of a cartoon dog with glue on the back which will be in somebody’s trash can within next three hours.

I understand where they are coming from. People crave reward and often they would prefer tangible ones. I doubt I would show up for work each day if there was not a paycheck attached but I also realize that being kind to people and working hard to make their lives more pleasant or even easier is not part of my job description so it is not what I am paid to do. There have been times recently I was bothered that the people who are my superiors seem indifferent to the “soft” people skills I work very hard upon as long as I get the paperwork turned in on time. Even with those feelings, unfounded or not, I will continue to work towards kindness even if my reward is personal and not cool stuff. I will do this because my family instilled the ideas that kindness is what you do, that everyone is fighting some sort of battle and if you add to their load you are not behaving in a positive fashion.

Actually, I think my biggest concern is not that people cannot see what is important. It has more to do with people placing high value on things which are not important in the grand scheme of things. The other day there was a news story about a man who dropped his child in order to reach for a baseball hit into the stands. Let’s examine this decision for a moment. A man is holding his child, a person, a person who shares a great amount of his DNA, a person who depends upon the man for safety and protection, a person who will one day be selecting the man’s long term care facility. Into the equation we insert a baseball, ten dollars worth of cork, yarn and cowhide. Which should demand the man’s attention? If we believe the gentleman in Taiwan the cowhide wins. Now, if it was a ball Barry Bonds hit breaking one of the most revered records in baseball history which means catching the ball might make it possible to earn enough money to pay for the child’s college as well as buying yourself a contract for a really great long term care facility thus taking that decision out of the child’s hands maybe it would have been the right choice. After all, the kid didn’t break any bones or anything.
Christopher Pyle doesn’t think everyone should have the same priorities but the more people who agree with him the better. You can agree or disagree with him at occasionallykeen@yahoo.com.

Typhoid Mary and Me

The other day I was walking into the grocery store. As I was entering a lady was exiting pushing a cart with a toddler riding in the odd little seat thingee next to the handle bar. I did a hop and a skip out of the way in a decidedly goofy manner, smiled big at the certifiably cute passenger and then did the closest thing to a Fred Astaire move my less than agile feet could approximate. All this was accomplished while wearing a hat some would call urbane (probably just me) and others (most everybody else) would call nerdier than a t-shirt which reads “Who stole the wookie from the wookie jar?” and glasses which truly are the cherry on the banana split of affectations I choose to wear each day. I should also mention for those readers who do not know me (I still think people other than my mother and wife read this) that I am very close to 50 years old and some 20 pounds overweight (I am guessing the fact checkers at this paper do not concern themselves with my stuff).

All of the previous paragraph was used to paint the verbal picture in order to explain what happened next. A person I work with witnessed the entire event. Her comment was very nice. “Are you always this happy?” My answer was a simple, “no”.

After a little bit more small talk I walked on into the store still thinking about her question. A much better answer came to mind. “Actually, I am just a carrier. I do not suffer from the condition myself.” I realize my more thought out response is at once egotistical and pathetic. It takes a special kind of rhetorical talent to pull off that duality.

First let’s look at the egotistical side. Saying I am a carrier of happiness makes it sound like I think of myself as some sort of purveyor of mirth making people feel better wherever I go, a man whose very presence makes moods lighter, a man whose voice sounds like banjos and laughter, a man whose breath smells of baby giggles and YouTube kitten videos. (OK, that last one was a stretch.) I wouldn’t go that far but I have found if I truly put my mind to it I can make pretty much anybody smile and most of them laugh.

I have done this in front of well over a thousand people as the mascot of the Dodge City Legend basketball team. I have done this in front of few hundred people doing an introduction at an all staff meeting with my school district. I have done it in front of over a hundred people at productions at the Depot Theater. I have done it one-on-one with angry and/or sad children who have been sent to the principal’s office. The only place I truly stiffed was in front of a small audience at an open mic night in a Kansas City comedy club September 1988. (When you tell a joke and the audience does not react in any manner whatsoever they actually do look like an oil painting. How different would my life be if I had killed that night?) All of this proves to me I can be a carrier of happiness, maybe not long lasting life changing happiness but a good solid laugh can do a lot for your day.

Now let’s examine the pathetic side of the statement. I need to state right up front I am happy about a great deal of my life. My family is a blessing beyond what I deserve. I have a job which allows me to pay for all the things we need and most the things we just want. I am reasonably healthy (remember that 20 pounds overweight statement). My upbringing was as close to idyllic as one can get outside of 1950’s television programs. My wife shields me from a great deal of the grown up junk parents and homeowners have to deal with and does so without complaint.

It is at the odd crossroads of the carrier/sufferer of happiness that the rub truly lies. If I could spend a greater portion of my life being that carrier of happiness I would be a much happier person myself on a daily, no hourly, basis. Dealing with unhappy, cranky, unwilling to bend, individuals who put little to no effort into being happiness carriers themselves has worn me down. This world needs more carriers and givers of the happy. I highly recommend it. You’d be surprised just how much better it makes you feel.

Find the Funny

Long time readers of this column (hi, Mom) know that one of my chief contacts with the world beyond the somewhat narrow swathe of life I inhabit out here in Dodge City is the wonderful world of podcasts. Podcasts are proof that the more technology changes the more it simple does the same stuff in niftier ways. Podcasts are radio, but radio that you have more control over and radio with a much bigger breadth of content than any station out here in western Kansas (which isn’t all that hard).
Truthfully, I very seldom turn on the radio, even in my car. The musical selections are sometimes what I like but invariably the happy blast from the past (that Styx song you were embarrassed to acknowledge as a favorite even when you were young and your taste in music was allowed to stink, but always secretly rocked out to) is followed by an epically horrific song (even Casey Kasem had to hold his nose whenever he played Alone Again, Naturally).

I spend a lot of time listening to people who get to be funny for a living talk about becoming funny, being funny, and getting paid to be funny. People who can find the funny are people I admire. Ever since I was young and watched Tim Conway unabashedly pummel Harvey Korman with improvised goofiness until poor Harvey was a mass of quivering straight man I have valued humor and worked in my own meager ways to get others to laugh.

The podcasts I am sure not to miss belong to two very different comedians. Marc Maron has a lot of, uh, issues and if you are easily offended you should steer away from his work, but I find him very funny and he interviews comedians in a way nobody else can. He and I are a similar age and if my parents had been the polar opposites of who they were I could have ended up more like him. Larry Miller is a happily married man with kids (very like me) and his podcast is just him telling stories. He has been a stand-up comedian since the 80’s and still is. Their work is just more proof that funny can come in very different packages yet still be funny.

My most recent podcast discovery is a series of panel discussions with television writers (Nerdist Writer’s Panel). As interesting as I find the discussion of how people went from would-be to actual writers (a combination of talent and blind dumb luck, emphasis on the blind dumb luck part), the insights into what makes a successful show (nobody really knows), and the different processes people use as they write (most writers use a mixture of procrastination and self-loathing), the biggest thing I took from the podcasts is that these people value kindness and teamwork quite nearly as much as talent. You have to bring something to the table but if you come to the table as a card carrying jerk, “Thanks for your time. We will just do this ourselves”.

This concept was first brought to my attention when I read a book written by Phil Rosenthal (co-creator of Everybody Loves Raymond) in which he said when he selected the writers for the show he placed a premium on kindness and he also made sure that the workplace was welcoming and built to make people feel comfortable. This did not mean people never had to work unfathomably long hours or they never got out of sorts (or downright peeved). It meant that when those things happened it didn’t fester and poison the whole place.

Especially as I get older, I find I value humor and kindness above all else which may be the reason I so frequently fantasize about working in a writers’ room for a television comedy. A place where funny is highly prized. A place where everyone present truly wants to spend time. A place where people work together (not just in word, but in deed as well) for a common goal. A place where if you drop the ball somebody else is willing, no eager, to pick it up. A place where the more laughter you hear the more proof you have the work is getting accomplished. I know it isn’t all fun and games and there is genuine stress but all jobs have stress but few offer the laughter and the joy of creation.

This may be another indication I am getting old, my fantasies revolve around a really swell workplace and have nothing to do with swimsuit models.

Christopher Pyle is about to disappear into another podcast induced reverie. Maybe this time the really swell workplace will have cake, oooo, cake. You can contact him at occasionallykeen@yahoo.com.

The College Experience

Not long ago we took our oldest daughter to start her college career at the University of Kansas. It was karmically correct. I matriculated and (eventually) graduated from the same institution. Both of my parents received their college degrees from KU. Emilyjane was officially a third generation Jayhawk and her mother and I were officially not emotionally ready for her to actually leave.

She had been considering KU for quite a while. We would visit Lawrence at first just so her father could wax nostalgic about his salad days and later because we just liked it. Emilyjane liked the vibe of the place. She is a closet boheme. When it became time to truly choose a college she intelligently chose KU because it offered a degree program she was suited for and liked. (Truth be told she might have preferred K-State because the boyfriend goes there.)

Then we started the orientation process. Thus began the never ending stream of “they didn’t do this when I was here” comments from her old man. Admittedly, I was not a very involved and engaged college student. I went to class (frequently) got good grades (surprisingly at times, but consistently) but I was a bit of a loner. Okay, I made Howard Hughes look like somebody from the cast of Jersey Shore. So some of the things they described might have actually existed long ago when I was a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed freshman, or more accurately, a rather lethargic, socially inept freshman, I just didn’t know it.

The first I-didn’t-do-that process was two full days of orientation meetings in the early summer. My older brother brought me up to Lawrence (actually he had filled out the application paperwork too, have I mentioned I wasn’t terribly motivated) for an afternoon of enrolling in classes and getting a few tidbits of information. That was it. Emilyjane’s college experience was obviously going to be more varied and chock full of so much more than learnin’ stuff.

Actually, this brings me to my first complaint. Why does everything have to be a production? I can’t help but think the huge bill might be mitigated if colleges didn’t feel it was necessary to create gigantic divisions such as “Student Success”. Support is good and kids leaving home for the first time will obviously benefit from an institution which employs people for this purpose, but does it have to be to this extravagant?

When choosing an institution of higher learning does it really matter if it possesses a recreation center the size of two football fields boasting 268 cardio and resistance machines (I am not totally sure what those are but it sounds awesome when they mention them on their website promo), six basketball courts, two swimming pools and a three story tall rock climbing wall? A three story tall rock climbing wall? This belongs as a selling point for a university if at the top of that rock wall sits a wizened old man dispensing enlightenment to those who bravely pursue truth in spite of great personal risk.

I blame the Walt Disney Corporation. They were the first people to say that everything needs to be an experience. They had imagineers creating bigger, better all-encompassing everythings. Now everything needs to be bigger, better all-encompassing. You can’t just have a college with able professors, well outfitted classrooms and libraries, comfortable and safe housing, plus a few nifty clubs and chances for exploring the arts. Nope. We need a community dedicated to the “whole person”, a place with 6,749 clubs and organizations from Aikido to Zoo keeping, plus a staff of hundreds whose raison d’être is to support and nurture the epic journey of discovery that is your college experience. (That last bit was pretty nifty, maybe I should apply to write college brochures.)

One last note about our orientation experience at the ol’ U of K. There were a number of tables and small rooms strewn throughout the Student Union all labeled with what service they offered. There were the easy to decipher ones like Financial Aid (that was easy to find because of all the fathers sitting motionless with stunned expressions) and Textbooks (stunned and even some tears). But my favorite was a room labeled “Major Changes”. I am sure they simple meant switching from English Lit to Business because you suddenly realized eating was a life goal worth pursuing. What I envisioned was a bit more philosophical. I wanted a cadre of psychologists with sofas and tissues counseling parents on dealing with sending their babies off into the world (at least it is a world with a three story tall rock climbing wall – I feel way better.)

Word Smart and Smart Words

It was June 29, 2007 when my first column showed up in the pages of The Hutchinson News. I didn’t miss a deadline for the next year and a half. Since then I have failed to hand in a column 8 times. This means I have a batting average of .926 and I would like to point out this was accomplished with absolutely no performance enhancing drugs of any kind.

The column you are reading right now is my 100th for this newspaper and the 235th of my newspaper “career”. That adds up to more than 183,000 words (which is less impressive when you take into account I used some of the words more than once). Obviously this is something I enjoy doing otherwise why would I do it so much. Wait a minute, that logic is flawed. I do things I absolutely abhor much more frequently.

The chief motivation behind this endeavor is to make people smile. If I can make someone laugh out loud that is a huge bonus. Since I cannot be in the room when most people read my work (after the first two restraining orders it loses its allure) I don’t know if there is any auditory laughing. I like to imagine it happens and pathetically I often sit in my office and do just that.

There have been times I wanted to get a message out there. Humor is a great way to stealthily guide people to truth without bludgeoning the audience. If you spend your time yelling and ranting to deliver your message it is not all that likely someone who does not agree with you in the first place will come over to your way of thinking. However, it seems yelling and ranting at people who already believe exactly the same as you do can get you a whole lot of television exposure and enough money to make it even more likely you’d hate the idea of taxing the rich.

As I get older I thought I was supposed to get more mellow. Not so much. All this recent stuff with Congress has made me so angry I have to find something to laugh at in order not to scream bad words into the wind, drop kick the cat into the next county or do something truly nuts like run for office. Even if reading this column has never been remotely cathartic for you writing it has frequently been so for me.

I firmly believe that genuinely funny people are genuinely smart people (this postulate is likely proven by watching C-SPAN broadcast from the floor of Congress, not exactly a laughter machine). The process of “finding the funny” is one of my favorite things to do and those exercises have helped me hone many other skills that enhance my intellectual powers. Please don’t think I am placing myself in some sort of Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, Mr. Peabody echelon of intelligence. I don’t even want that kind of brain.

I believe that words are the building blocks of every idea. Be the ideas brilliant, humorous, or even weapons grade stupid, words are how we convey the grand majority of these ideas and funny people usually have the greatest facility with the language. Or is it the other way around? People with the greatest facility with the language are funny. (That is a circular question similar to who crossed the road first the chicken or the egg.) Therefore, the better I get at finding the funny the better I get with words and making connections with other words and the not necessarily intended by-product of all that is becoming smarter. I think…

Just the other day in one of my a-whole-bunch-of-educators-get-together-to-talk-about-education meetings (how’s that for a facility with the language?) the following were listed as 21st century skills: critical thinking, communication skills and collaboration. In my own mind I thought, whoa, those have been some of the most useful skills since people started doing things other than sitting in caves worrying about mastodons. Those were skills very much in the forefront of the late 18th century when the powdered wig guys wrote such things as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. So, the next thing I thought was maybe we stopped teaching those things in the 20th century and that is why way too many people (especially the elected ones) cannot use them when deciding how best to take care of the people who live in our country today, and I mean all of the people who live here.

Or is it just me

Okay, I give. Uncle! You win. I surrender. I willingly yield to the stronger opponent. Capitulation is what I am doing. Can somebody call off the heat hounds and cool this joint down? I’ve lived in Kansas the majority of my life so I have experienced high temperatures before, but this is ridiculous.

I worked at the Airport Drive-In Theater the summers of my high school years (give yourself thirty bonus points if you remember going there to see a movie – but deduct fifty points if you went to any of the four show marathons featuring movies with women in scarcely any clothing and storylines with scarcely any plot). One of the tasks given to me and one or two of my lucky co-workers was painting the poles the speakers rested upon. There is not much in the world more pleasurable than using a wire brush to scrap the old paint off of and add a couple new coats of paint to several dozen three and a half foot tall metal posts. Then add the fact we did this in the dead of summer and you have found an existence approaching unremitting nirvana, or was that just because of the hallucinations. Still that was more pleasant than the last several days.

There are lots of things we have lived through in summers past that were uncomfortable. All of us have put our hands on a steering wheel in August only to remove our hands from the steering wheel faster than Charlie Sheen can think of something else stupid to say. We do that because if we don’t let go all ten of our fingers will spot weld in place and the only destination we’ll be driving to is the nearest hospital. Those of us in too much of a hurry to wait for the air conditioner to cool the car sufficiently in order to genuinely take hold of the wheel have been known to steer using a combination of alternating index fingers and thumbs in conjunction with our knees.

Here is an advantage of driving a crummy 1989 two door Ford Escort with nothing of value inside it. I can leave the windows open no matter where I park it (goodness knows the interior isn’t going to get wet when it rains because rain in the foreseeable future is as likely as Michele Bachmann inviting that Kurt kid from Glee to perform at her next campaign event). As hot as it has been my eldest daughter, who drives a black car with a black interior and who rolls up the windows whenever it is parked, characterizes getting into her car as getting into an oven full of soup. Not a tepid chicken broth but rather a piping hot serving of full bodied cream of mushroom cloud soup because it is nuclear explosion hot in here.

This heat wave has been epic. When I get up in the morning it is already warm. I walked to work the other day. It was before eight o’clock so I thought I’d be safe. By the time I got there my face looked like the bad guy from Captain America and my deodorant had mailed in its letter of resignation. It also stays downright hot well into the night. When the temperature at ten o’clock at night is equal to the latitude of the Geographic North Pole it is too darned hot.

Some people covet money. Some people covet power. Some people covet the ability to be invisible and sneak into places to overhear what other people say about them. (Some “covets” are more realistic than others.) This kind of weather just makes it crystal clear to me that I covet comfort. I am addicted to Freon. If I had been born 200 years ago and a summer day rolled around with a temperature above 93 degrees you wouldn’t find me showing great stamina and perseverance working in the field. I’d be hiding under a shade tree in nothing but my skivvies valiantly holding on to the feet of an owl as he furiously flapped his wings thus functioning as an improvised high powered fan. He would even kind of oscillate….nifty.

I have been trying all sorts of tricks to beat the heat. My internet radio is tuned to Christmas songs. I covered my office with pictures of Samuel L. Jackson and Dean Martin. My doctor even gave me a prescription for an intravenous drip of Ben and Jerry’s Chunky Monkey.

The Downside is Just Easier

I think I’ve found a basic flaw in human nature. It seems to me the natural default setting for the grand majority of people is negative and this is mostly just because negative is easier than positive.

While I am not egotistical enough to believe I am the first person to postulate such a theory, I have never seen it discussed anywhere else. This may mean it is original to me but it is more likely due to the fact my reading history revolved around Robert B. Parker, John D. MacDonald and Jerry Siegel’s Superman and not Bertrand Russell, Soren Kierkegaard and Frederich Nietzsche’s Ubermensch.

Think about it. Being negative is just easier.

“Hey, John. You want to go water skiing?”

“Why would I want to do something which turns water from the comfortable consistency it has as it comes out of the bathtub spigot to the hardness of concrete as my body slams into it going thirty miles an hour. I’m staying home and watching television.”
See, unadventurous, and negative, but also infinitely easier to do.

Look at the world of politics. (I realize this is annoying so I will make it as brief as possible.) When one side puts forth an idea the other side immediately disagrees with the idea, then states the idea was stupid, then states the idea was un-American, then states the idea will cause the downfall of our nation as we know it, then states pursuing the idea means we will face an apocalypse of Biblical proportion, then states the person on the other side who first introduced the idea has a mother who wears combat boots. This is so much easier than actually listening to the idea, considering the true facts and possible merits inherent in the idea, sitting down with the other side to alter and enhance the idea to better fit the needs of a larger number of people, admitting that someone from the other side may not be a blithering idiot, then going out to dinner together instead of just talking to another exact same point of view ideologue on television in order to make sure your constituents are convinced you are doing their will even if doing the opposite might have made a positive impact on the grand majority of humans. Fomenting anger and fear mongering requires a lot less effort and sophistication than implementing the sometimes complex processes required to actually make government function in a manner conducive to bettering our quality of life. (Sheeesh, that may not have been as brief as I first intended it to be.)

While I do not think it is the best way to be, it is very possible this negative tendency may be hard-wired into us. Early man had to assume there was a man eating something or other around every corner if he wanted to see next Tuesday. Caveman Shecky sitting on the ground laughing at the absurdity of a glyptodont (an armadillo the size of a Chevy Malibu) becomes Hors-d’oeuvre Shecky in a Paleolithic minute.
To better prove my point let’s look at the most basic, least sophisticated or educated example of a human being, anybody on Jersey Shore. No, let’s look at a newborn. Ticked off and sad is what they do best (come to think of it that is true of the Jersey Shore people too). It takes weeks of existence and great effort on the part of the adults in the baby’s life to elicit that first smile. There was even an early culture that believed the first person to cause a child to laugh was to be a special person for that kid for the rest of his life.

If we are to fight this predisposition for negativity we need to start early. Think about when a baby is born. The medical staff wants to get the kid to breath. Do we show the kid Bugs Bunny and the Marx Brothers to make him laugh? Laughter is really just happy breathing. Nope. Somebody slaps the kid on the backside to make him cry. Crying is really just unhappy breathing. I understand the expediency of the slap but I have to think if the first thing we did as a human being no longer attached to another human being was fun we might be more inclined to be happy. We go from the optimum of comfort, it is warm, it is soft, it is dark so napping is simple, and the food arrives without any fuss or bother. We are ripped from this and smacked by a stranger. No wonder grumpy is our natural state.

Christopher Pyle believes delivery room staff should at least try funny faces. You can contact him at occasionallykeen@yahoo.com.

Time to work...ooh, look ...shiny

School is out. We already had several days in which the temperature climbed into the hundreds. The solstice occurred on Tuesday. The Royals are in last place. It’s official. Welcome to summer.

Summertime is often equated with laziness. I fully agree that summer should be used for revitalization, but without anything too vital because it’s hot outside. I made a new year’s resolution against sweating.

I’m an elementary school principal by day so the summer brings a dramatic change in tempo. If I can sit at my desk for thirty minutes to concentrate on one task and one task alone during the regular school year it must be after 4 o’clock or a weekend. I have been known to whine about the frequency of interruptions at work. Well, this week I have been able to spend extended periods of time focused on Common Core Curriculum and reading books about building better background knowledge for students so they can be more academically successful. Somebody, anybody, interrupt me, please. Is it possible for your brain to get nauseous? I think I intellectually threw up the last half of that chapter about data analysis for continuous school improvement. (With apologies to Mr. Coleridge – Data, data, everywhere and boy I need a drink.)

Don’t get me wrong (especially if you are a member of the Dodge City Public Schools Board of Education), I want to enlarge my knowledge base. I want to get better at my job. I genuinely enjoy learning new things about how the brain works and how educators can better serve the students in our charge. However, the sheer volume of stuff I don’t know gets a tad overwhelming at times and summertime affords me the time to more fully examine my dearth of knowledge. It’s depressing, worse than sweating.

It is possible my difficulty climbing the mountain of ignorance is made more problematic by the trend in society for short bursts of superficial information. It is very hard to describe a process designed to enhance direct instruction of vocabulary for elementary students in 140 characters or less, but that is more and more what I am used to. My bosses did not assign me to “follow” any educational gurus on Twitter or “friend” them on Facebook. They gave me a stack of books about a foot tall to read. My attention span is going to be stretched to levels I haven’t attempted in a while.

Truthfully, I had a healthier attention span when I was a kid. So often in the media you hear folks complain that kids today don’t have an attention span longer than your typical Hangover II preview. I say nay. My 13-year-old son can play a game on his Nintendo for a timeframe longer than it takes bread to get moldy. He can also get lost in a book for hours on end. I can’t do that anymore even if I am reading a spy novel for mindless entertainment.

There is tons of research out there about multi-tasking, the pros, the cons, who does it well, who doesn’t. My problem is not that I have deficiencies in the multi-tasking department. My problem is I have epic, downright Herculean, skills when it comes to multi-procrasti-tasking.

Multi-procrasti-tasking is my own word for one’s ability to do two or three OTHER things at a time rather than what one really ought to be doing. When I was a college student my apartment was spotless only when I had a deadline for a big paper. (Go to the library or clean the grout? Hello, scrubbing bubbles.)

A major contributor to this phenomenon is the fact that so many of the tools we use for productivity are built to do many different things. If a phone only made phone calls it would be easier to carry on a conversation. If I really wanted to stay on task while writing I should use a typewriter. This computer makes it too easy to wander, a lot.

Why, just in the time between writing this sentence and the one before it I have checked e-mail, read a few tweets, went to ESPN.com to see how the Royals are doing (they’re behind), googled three different tidbits of information of zero importance and watched a video clip from last night’s Colbert Report. I did all this instead of writing the next sentence and writing this column is of one of my favorite things to do. Just think how I can multi-procrasti-task when I don’t want to do something.

Twitter-Tweet and Twitter-Dumb

The other day my daughter Alice said something I found very astute. “If there is so much technology why are there still so many stupid people?” Granted, her choice of words may sound harsh but when you think about it she’s right on target.

With the continuous growth of the internet and the tools available to anybody with a computer we have access to more information than ever before in history. If you are missing some tidbit in the personal encyclopedia residing in your brain it only takes a modicum of perseverance and know-how to fill the gap. Why, just now, in a matter of seconds, I was able to find out the rainiest month of the year for Bora Bora is January when they average 18.6 inches of rain. Will I ever truly need to know that? Probably not, but if it is that easy to obtain a fact so obscure there really shouldn’t be any excuse for being ignorant about things of most any kind.

At least that is the way it should be. There is still the problem that not only can anyone with a modem find information on the World Wide Web but anyone with a modem can also put information on the World Wide Web.

(Short digression: Have you ever noticed it takes longer to say the abbreviation of World Wide Web, www, than it does to say World Wide Web? Saying the initials requires nine syllables while saying the actual words requires just three. My personal best saying “World Wide Web” is 0.8 seconds while my best for “www” is 1.2 seconds. Yes, I timed myself.)

I was once told there are more distinct pieces of information being created each week than would have existed in a decade at other times in human history. The thing to remember is many of today’s distinct pieces of information pertain to Kardashians.

I was once given advice by someone in the entertainment industry saying I just needed to get my stuff on YouTube to get discovered. My response was they make filters to keep adult material off your screen but not to shield you from sheer junk. Being on YouTube does not guarantee being discovered when the discoverers have to wade through thousands of hours of cats being painfully cute and skateboard dudes being painfully pained.

I guess the answer to my daughter’s question lies in the fact that no matter how advanced and amazing technology gets it is still used by human beings and we are very flawed creatures.

As a person who refers to himself as a humor columnist I would be drummed out of the corps if I didn’t spill a little more ink in the matter of Anthony Weiner. Here is a man who had gained the respect of many caring, intelligent people. I didn’t always agree with him but I really liked his passionate fighting for what he believed in. How does he use one of the most immediate and pithy ways to communicate? Does he re-state the battle cry of his political raison d’etre? Nope. Does he call to task the others in the legislature for their short-sightedness? Not so much. He uses Twitter as a purveyor of puerile pornography.

While I am not in Mr. Weiner’s league, my use of technology isn’t all that venerable. I do not use the vast amount of technology at my fingertips for high aesthetics and/or contributing to the greater good. Mostly I just want to be entertained. All the favorites on my internet browser are either sports or humor sites. I have a Twitter account, but the only things I have “tweeted” are musings and whinings. The people I “follow” with interest are Steve Martin, Albert Brooks, and Alec Sulkin (a writer for Family Guy) who use their 140 characters to be funny and not much else.

One of my very favorite technological tools is really one of the most basic, e-mail. E-mail is perfect for the timid. It is a way to communicate with or ask questions of others without being face-to-face or even very insistent. If I call you some contraption on your desk or in your pocket makes an interrupting noise and requires your attention right now. E-mail allows the recipient to respond at his own convenience. This also means I am at his mercy. One person I e-mail with some regularity answers in one of three timeframes, either within the hour, at the end of the week when catching up on all correspondence or never.

Christopher Pyle loves the self checkout technology at grocery stores because it removes one more human interaction from his life. You can e-mail him (he’ll probably answer) at occasionallykeen@yahoo.com.