Archives for November 2015

It is Thanksgiving afternoon and I am stealing a few minutes to do some writing and to flip through some of the online ads about Black Friday.

Even though you won’t see me fighting the hordes of shoppers on a day devoted to commercial consumption you will find me running a quick search to see if there are good deals on things I want/need.

Bright and shiny toys and gadgets warm a boy’s heart but they can also take up valuable real estate in closet, garage and home so I try to be careful about what I do or do not buy.

But today instead of buying something new I took a moment to grab something I have owned for a while but haven’t used much.

My Medium account.

Yeah, I am on another platform and yeah, it might be one too many.

Should You Use Medium?

I haven’t decided yet if it is going to be a standard part of my writing/social media routine yet.

My time is divided between too many projects already so if I do choose to take it on I’ll have to let go of something else.

If you ask me if you should use Medium and I’ll say maybe.

Ask me why I joined and I’ll tell you the gadget guy likes trying things out and I’ll mention something about how I like what they said on their About page:

Medium is a different kind of place to read and write on the internet. A place where the measure of success isn’t views, but viewpoints. Where the quality of the idea matters, not the author’s qualifications. A place where conversation pushes ideas forward and words still matter.

I like their writing editor and the idea that words have meaning, that community is important and the push for discourse.

That is a big part of what I want to have happen here and why I agree with Danny about the importance of blog comments.

The only real question I have is whether it is going to add to or subtract from what I am working on here.

I am not going to give this place up because I don’t want to become a digital sharecropper. I like owning my name on the web and having a digital hub that I have some control over.

This probably didn’t provide you with any specific reasons why you should or shouldn’t use Medium, but it should give you some insight as to why I am.

And sometimes my friends that is all you get from an online review, a brief snippet of opinion and nothing more which is why I tell my children you need to take some time to try to figure out what questions you have to have answers to so that you can make an educated decision.

Happy Thanksgiving to all who celebrate it.

Around twenty years ago I told someone the smartest thing they had ever said to me was they didn’t understand what I was talking about.

When they asked me to explain I said it was the first time they hadn’t pretended to know more about everything than anyone else.

They immediately demanded an apology and when I refused said they would write me up and that it would follow me around for my entire career.

I told them it must be awful to let fear be their guiding principle in life and asked them if they really believed that one letter would derail my career.

Social Media & One Letter

I hadn’t thought about that moment for years and then I read a few stories about some of the things that have been happening on college campuses and thought about the Starbucks coffee cup controversy and it came back to me.

Came back because the guy who promised to write that letter told me I ought to worry about offending people and I said I would never fear being known for offending people because my opinion was different theirs.

We’re not talking about offending someone with racist terms/conversation or threats of violence here. It was a simple difference of opinion on how to do something, as benign as arguing about what direction the toilet paper should hang off of the roll.

And in the days before social media I couldn’t conceive of their being a way for a letter to follow me around forever, unless I stayed at the same company and I didn’t see it as being my final forever job.

Sunday afternoon I sat my teenager down and asked him what sorts of conversations they were having in school about the coming presidential elections, Syrian refugees, ISIS and terrorism.

I wanted to get a sense of what he thought and what approach his teacher and classmates were taking.

But more than anything else I wanted to remind him to never be afraid to challenge his own beliefs and to be willing to stand his ground.

I told him I had heard stories about college students demanding that they not be asked to discuss things they found to be offensive.

“Life isn’t always easy and sometimes you have to deal with hard stuff. You can’t ignore it and pretend it doesn’t exist. Sometimes the only way to get through those moments is to walk through crap. I don’t want fear and discomfort to prevent you from doing what needs to be done.”

it must be awful to let fear be their guiding principle in lifeClick To Tweet

I don’t think we should go out of our way to offend others but I don’t see value in going out of our way to never offend others.

There is a middle ground that seems to be missing. A place that we keep missing because in our interest to never be exclusive we have lost the inclusive part that keeps the seesaw from swinging to one side or the other.

Don’t know if I have explained it well or not, that’s the challenge of writing well after midnight..

So let’s give it another crack and see if this makes more sense.

Some people say we can’t take any refugees and others say we have to take as many refugees as possible.

What I hear driving these conversations is fear. What seems to be missing is the middle ground where we say to each other that we disagree and try to come up with a compromise.

That unwillingness to talk about or ask for compromise is all over my Facebook feed. I keep reading about the 50,000 reasons people have used for unfriending people on Facebook.

Some of those have been legitimate but not all, some have been nothing more than anger because someone didn’t adhere to the right party lines.

That’s pretty sad, do you really want to live in an echo chamber.

I am not good at it.

I am not perfect, but I refuse to let fear be the guiding principle in my life.

It’s not just ok to disagree, it is important.

If you never challenge your beliefs you never grow.

We parked the car and walked onto the soccer fields and I looked around and thought about how the world doesn’t stop for anyone or anything.

It was the morning after another set of terrorist attacks, Paris was set on fire by multiple incidents and the new was ablaze was analysis and information about it.

Later on I’d sit at my laptop and catch up on the events of the day, read commentary about the presidential debates and remarks about whether Paris received more attention than it deserved.

But out on the field, well I didn’t think about those things.

I was too busy watching the girl in the picture below play the game she loves.

I am too proud not to share that in the fourth quarter she scored the only goal of the game, but I don’t know if that was my favorite moment of the game.

Neither one of us looks quite the same as we do in this picture but eight years of life can do that to you, at least I think it was eight.

Could be seven or some other number, doesn’t really matter all that much. Lots has happened and the girl who promised she wouldn’t grow up too fast has kept growing at warp speed.

Mind you I asked her to make a promise she couldn’t keep knowing full well that I was asking the impossible, but sometimes we do that.

Sometimes we ask people to help us stop the world from spinning so fast because we want to enjoy a moment for longer than an instant.

The Little Moments Are What Counts

When I look back upon my life the big moments stick out for the obvious reasons but it is almost always the little ones that make me stop and watch or think about things.

It is usually something simple that catches my eye, watching my kids play a game together or apart or watching their reaction to something and wondering what is going on inside their heads.

That is probably not any different from most parents.

But those moments stick with me because there is something about them that reminds me about how they stack up one on top of the other and form our lives.

And so I find myself watching the kids run on the field and I remember how different it was when they started.

I remember being the coach of a team of five-year-old girls and how sometimes they would all run after the ball to kick it or how two or three of them could stop to check out a bug or talk about the ribbons they had in their hair.

Sometimes they would interrupt practice to tell me about their puppy or kitten and how they loved their pet.

It was a mixture of cute and frustration, because the point was to help them learn how to play and have a good time while doing it.

Puppies and practice didn’t always mix.

She Is Me & She Is Herself

Time passed and the little girl who didn’t keep her promise not to grow too quickly got taller and better at her game.

When she would ask me for help I would offer suggestions and sometimes when she didn’t I would offer them anyway, it is a father’s prerogative to help his children.

Most of the time she would nod her head and do whatever she thought was best and I would silently laugh because my daughter didn’t know she was doing the same as her daddy has done and often does.

Over the years I watched her game and skills develop and smiled some more because I knew she loved it.

I tried hard not to push her too hard to focus on improving some skills because I knew that she might not respond as I hoped and figured if she decided on her own she needed to focus there it would be better.

But every now and then I’d give it a soft push because I knew/know that if she was a tad better in these areas it would make a dramatic difference.

I asked her to make a promise she couldn't keep knowing full well I was asking the impossible...Click To Tweet

A few weeks ago I watched a girl on the other team push my daughter and elbow her and wondered what sort of response my daughter would come up with.

She and I had talked about this multiple times before. I had always told her to play a clean game but not to allow other players to bully or intimidate her.

“You have to stand up and protect yourself. Sometimes you need to give them a bump with your shoulder so they know they can’t take advantage of you.”

My daughter always nodded and smiled and then did her thing, but not this time.

This time she put up with it for a quarter and then decided she had enough.

This time when the two of them went chasing after the ball and the other girl tried to push her my daughter ran through her.

The other girl went down.

She wasn’t hurt and she got back up quickly but she didn’t throw another elbow or try to push my daughter again.

The Lessons We Learn

Ever since that game I have watched as my daughter has really come into her own. I have seen her grow on the field and watched as she played a smarter game.

It is clear now that she is seeing things in a different way and that she says plays developing and is not just reacting to what happens around her.

There is an awareness about her that has been there for a while, but today it felt like it was magnified tenfold.

She played with purpose.

Sure, I loved watching her score the winning goal and I’ll brag about how I loved watching make a couple of key defensive plays too.

But what I loved best was the joy she was playing with.

It reminded me of those 5 year-old girls who ran with ribbons streaming out of their hair laughing and giggling about puppies and kittens.

The little moments in life are where it is at.

How do you reward fifteen years of loyal service?

What can you give to express your thanks and gratitude for being there in the hot, the cold, the good and the bad?

Don’t worry about trying to provide an answer because you can’t thank a thing for doing what it was built to do, but you can be grateful that most of the time it did what it was supposed to do and that it worked for as long as it did.

It didn’t become my full time car until November of 2005 so technically I am only responsible for the last 10 years of driving.

And if you look at the mileage above it might occur to you that 140k and change really isn’t all that much for ten years of driving let alone 15.

It was a Honda and if I had wanted to put some more cash into it I could have made that baby run for a good while longer but it was time for us to sever our relationship and go our separate ways.

I was ready for modern technology, better safety equipment and frankly far more comfort than it could provide.

When we bought it I was barely 31 and it was designated as the family car, in spite of the fact that we didn’t have any kids yet.

Hell, we had just decided to pull the goalie from the cage and I had no idea how long it would take to find out if the boys could swim or if the parental warnings to be smart and safe had been for naught.

It feels like a million years and a thousand lifetimes since those early days but when I think about the some of the biggest moments of my life it will always be associated with them.

That car will always be the one that took my children home from the hospital and the one I drove across five states to start another new adventure.

Whenever I think about those moments I’ll always remember it. It will always be the one I parked in the lot outside my apartment in Fort Worth.

It was more than just a hunk of metal.

Dad, It Could Be Mine

My teenage son wasn’t particularly excited about selling it.

Partly because it has been around his entire life and that provides a sort of familiarity and comfort.

But I suspect so does knowing that you are about a year away from driving and the idea that you might be able to secure your own vehicle is of great interest.

“Dad, it could be mine. I bet one of my grandparents would let us park it at their house for a while. Could save you some real money, you wouldn’t have to buy me a car.”

I smiled and told him I didn’t have any plans on buying him a car.

“I didn’t get my own car until I was a senior in high school. The laws were different back then, I was allowed to drive other kids in my car and that meant I got to drive my sisters around.”

Actually it was mainly my middle sister and I won’t tell you about what a pain in the butt that was nor will I confess to throwing her school books out of the window while doing fifty.

Oops, sorry mom, she had it coming and I wasn’t allowed to put my hands on her, so the books had to go.

Damn, the people that say confession is good for the soul are right, it feels good to admit that I did that.

Note to my children: DO NOT DO AS I DID. Really, it would be wrong for you to do so.

Anyhow, my son and I went back and forth for a few moments about the car and why I didn’t want to hold on to it and he mostly agreed.

Mostly.

Since he is not a parent he doesn’t understand how seriously I take his safety and how that plays into the decision not to hold onto it.

It is not to say that I think it wasn’t safe but since newer cars offer more safety features it makes sense to try and get him into something like that.

the people that say confession is good for the soul are right, it feels good to admit that I did that.Click To Tweet

Am I Really That Old?

Did I mention how hard it is to believe that I have a kid in high school or that I know if I blink he will be of legal driving age?

I am glad that I have some time before I have to worry about it.

I don’t have the spare cash to get him a car now, let alone pay for the increase in insurance and gas but I suppose I need to start preparing for it.

One of these days when he is a bit older I’ll have to tell him about how many things that old blue beast made possible and how, but not yet.

For now I am going to enjoy the new car and keep doing what I need to do so that fifteen years from now I am not driving the same car unless it is by choice.

Hell, maybe if I am really lucky fifteen years from now I’ll be able to retire or picture a day when it is possible to retire.

And that right there is the biggest sign of the difference between we got that Honda and now.

Back then retirement wasn’t real, it was just something that would happen a million years later and now it is a glimmer in the distance, not quite real but conceivable.

All because of a hunk of metal.