Quick Hits 38

Sometimes I hear an utterance or catch a quick visual of something that sticks in my mind. As this sensory input rolls about in my head, several different outcomes are possible. It might be the case that after a moment of consideration, the input is deleted as uninteresting, trivial, or too much for me to deal with. However, another possible outcome is that the input keeps demanding my attention. It somehow wants me to wrestle with it and give it more than just a passing notice. In such cases, they can end up here, in my blog series called Quick Hits.

Have you ever had to work closely with a colleague who had such bad breath that it was nearly unbearable? Is it reasonable to bring this up to them and to dismiss them until they deal with their hygiene problem?

What do you think?

Bucket Equity

Any homeowner, or better yet, any mortgage holder, understands the concept of equity. Equity essentially amounts to the fraction of your home that you actually own, or said another way, it is the amount of the principle that you have paid off. However, I have also come to apply the term equity to inter-personal relationships. In such a case, the notion of equity amounts to how tight the bond is between the principals in the relationship. The trouble with this type of equity, this relational equity, is that if you do not build upon your investment, your equity decays away. A friend of mine once laid out an analogy involving buckets being filled with water that fully crystallized this notion for me.

The strength of any relationship is linked to how much water there is in its associated bucket. The fact is that all of our relational buckets have one or more holes in them of varying sizes. The more holes there are in the bucket, the quicker the equity diminishes and the more frequently an investment of additional water is required to keep the relationship healthy. It is my observation that the relational buckets between women tend to have very few holes, such that the equity drains away very slowly with time. This is why two girlfriends can get together after a long time apart and spend the night gabbing and sharing their deepest secrets. For men, the holes in their relational buckets tend to be considerably larger and more numerous. Without care and investment, relationships between men can decay quite quickly indeed.

For me, my relational buckets all seem to come with unimaginably large holes. No sooner is water poured into the volume than it is found to be empty. Even a comparatively short break between seeing someone, whether it be a friend or even my own daughter, and I am noticeably uncomfortable. What I have come to understand is that in any relationship there is not one but two buckets. One that I perceive and one that the other person perceives. Folks in whose presence I was once quite comfortable, can very quickly become like strangers to me. What creates awkwardness and stress is that, in their view, as their relational bucket with me has drained out much more slowly, they feel there is a stronger bond between us that I perceive. For me, absence doesn't make anything grow fonder, it just leads to drainage.

Die Trying

The second novel in the extended Jack Reacher series by author Lee Child is entitled Die Trying. Folks who read my review of the first book, Killing Floor, might remember that I approached this second book already with a bad feeling in my stomach but with an attempt to stay hopeful. Killing Floor would likely have only gotten a "C" is a community college writing course due to its 2D characters, its weak story telling, its choppy brittle prose, and it overall levels of implausibility and utter contrivance. However, my mindset was that this was a best-selling series and there had to be good reason for that. So, I chalked up the weak first novel as a Child's first tentative steps into the world of writing. I figured that his second book had to be better.

The story involves a plot by a group of Montana militiamen, who had carved out their own small territory in an abandoned mining town, to declare independence from the United States. The men in power within this group are all dim-witted, right-wing conspiracy nuts who are sucked into the charismatic despotism of their leader. Their plan is to kidnap an FBI agent in Chicago who happens to be the daughter of the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs and the godchild of the President. However, just at the moment they make their move to take agent Holly Johnson, Jack Reacher just happens to be walking down the street. The bad guys then grab both Holly and Jack and sweep them off to their remote area in Montana. What happens from that moment until the moment when Reacher has killed off each and every one of the bad guys is just more of the same contrived nonsense in scene after scene. It read like a rejected A Team script.

At this point I am at a complete loss for how there can be so many 4- and 5-star reviews on Amazon for this comic-book cartoon inanity. With so many really good writers producing so many amazing stories, I just cannot imagine how this one gained such traction. The next book in the series, Tripwire, is on my reading list only because I own the first six books in the series and am really curious if there absolutely anything worthwhile here.

Observations 92

My occasional blog series "Observations" was created to be an outlet to share a variety of topics that pop into my field of view as a result of a condition that many bloggers are afflicted with known as "blogger's eyes". In this state we view the world on the constant look-out for topics on which to write about. Today's blog came about from random odds 'n ends of things that I have noticed over the past few weeks.

• From the "What is going on in this world files?", Charlie Weis was the Notre Dame head football coach from 2004 to 2009 when he was fired. The university was still contractually obligated to pay the remainder of this contract, which to date has gotten him more than $18 million dollars for not coaching at Notre Dame. In fact Weis got another another coaching job after Notre Dame, at Kansas. He was fired after a few years and the university still owed him $6 millions dollars. So, Weis is getting paid $24 million not to show up to work.
  
• Johnsonville Sausage has been running a new ad campaign with the tag line, "We don't make sausage. We make family and sausage." What? Is this some kind of Soylent Green thing they have going? Johnsonville Sausage is people, its people!
  
• It sets my laths a-crackin' when corporations try to market themselves using their own devised "hip" and "with-it" nicknames. McDonald's morphs into "Micky-D's" and Buffalo Wild Wings slides into "B-dubs".
  
• In the urinals in the men's room at work are these plastic disks that are designed (apparently) to splash urine all over the place. However, they also have advertising information printed on them in a very small font. First, who is their target audience with this advertising? Second, who is going to stick there head in the urinal to read the small font?
  
• I refuse to wear pants that rustle, sway, swish, or flow as I walk. I would rather be locked in the bowels of a Turkish prison than to be forced to wear bell-bottom pants.
  

Quick Hits 37

Sometimes I hear an utterance or catch a quick visual of something that sticks in my mind. As this sensory input rolls about in my head, several different outcomes are possible. It might be the case that after a moment of consideration, the input is deleted as uninteresting, trivial, or too much for me to deal with. However, another possible outcome is that the input keeps demanding my attention. It somehow wants me to wrestle with it and give it more than just a passing notice. In such cases, they can end up here, in my blog series called Quick Hits.

If your employer gave you the option of working four 10-hour days instead of five 8-eight hour days, would you shift to a four-day work week?

What do you think?

Google Finds

The other evening I got stuck for a while on a clue for my crossword puzzle. As I happened to be sitting in my office by the computer I turned to Google. About an hour later I had completely lost track of my original motivation for sitting down at the computer. Instead I got side-tracked reading biographies of a dozen or more folks who were apparently pretty big stuff in their day. Dictators, dancers, composers, spies, politicians, actors. The problem was that I had never heard any of their names before. These were folks who had lived their allotment of days within the last hundred years or so and died within the last couple of generations. Now their stories are essentially lost to the ages.

When I came back to myself and remembered what I had originally intended to search for, I began to ponder my own mortality. Is there anything that I have done or could do that would make my name or my accomplishments linger? I am pretty certain that the answer is no. Sure my daughter will hold my memory after I am gone, and maybe if she has children, then they might get to know a grandfather and have a relationship with him. Possibly too some element of my research work might be cited by some future scientist, although I cannot imagine that to be the case. I have heard of famous people that expend countless energy worrying about their legacy. It becomes something that haunts their thinking as their careers begin to wind down. In truth, I am not particularly concerned with such things. I don't say that in any sort of defeatist tone, it is just that it is not important to me. Fifty years from now I am reasonably sure that some database search engine likely might pop up my name due to some query, but it will in no way capture anything personal about me. As I said, that is fine with me.

I Need a Hero

I need a hero
I'm holding out for a hero 'til the end of the night
He's gotta be strong
And he's gotta be fast
And he's gotta be fresh from the fight

One of the great things about being married was the hero's welcome that I got every now and then. Those moments where I completed some feat of daring like checking out that weird noise out back at 2 a.m.. Moments where I was especially clever like warding off the schemes of some schiester salesperson and getting our money back. Moments where I would brave the elements to shovel out the driveway and get the cars unburied. In the aftermath I would find my wife and she would tell me how important I was to her and how thankful she was that I was hers.

Sometimes I like to think that I am strong, able to get through all things reasonably well on my own. However, the truth is that I relied on her words and her hugs to embolden me, to make me a man, and to give me strength for bigger challenges in the future. Without her presence for these many years, I recognize more and more just what I lost in her leaving.

This past winter after a major snow storm in the area, I went out and shoveled my long driveway. Inch by dense inch, I slowly made my way about that large expanse until I was down to the pavement. As I stood there leaning on the handle of my shovel, resting for a moment to catch my breath and to calm my burning muscles, I wished that she would have been inside waiting for me to whisper those live-giving assurances. Of course with the advance of spring, the soaring temperatures, and the sound of lawn mowers and children playing outside, the winter's snows are long since past.