Years ago, on a whim, I went skiing. Or, to put it better, I went on a skiing trip, dressed up in ski clothes and didn’t ski. All that time spent not skiing added up, and I needed other things to occupy my time, so I hatched a plan. Others used snow as a way to crash into trees. I would use it to make my soda pop cold. It had the added benefit of not requiring puffy clothes. I was a genius.
With cunning and shrewdness I enacted my plan. I went to the store. I bought some Pepsi. I buried my six-pack into the snow, and spent my time watching skiers fall. It was a plan too simple and elegant to fail.
I figured 15 minutes would just about do it, and when I went to the snow bank to pick up my ice-cold beverages, they were nowhere to be found. I searched the snow bank. I did a perimeter search. I looked all over, but it was overwhelmingly clear: someone had stolen my sodas. I trudged back up to the lodge, my plan in tatters, cold Pepsi not in hand and went back to my game of billiards. My next shot consisted of the 4 ball into the sad pocket.
Obviously, the event itself isn’t a big deal now. It wasn’t long at all before I was back to my normal self, exchanging tales of skiing adventure with others (mine were false, of course). What affected me most about the event were the underlying issues. They were the reasons I remember the event so clearly. I wanted to be able to choose how I would share and divvy out something that belonged to me. I had something taken from me. Someone had betrayed me, and I had experienced loss. I really wanted those beverages.
As the years progressed, I felt and experienced better examples of loss. I volunteered for the track team and got cut. I played on a basketball team so there would be 5-on-5 only to be told a few minutes in that my team would prefer to play a man down. I have more examples. Not all of them involve poor hand-eye coordination. Some of them are awful and heart-rending. I’ve no doubt everyone has a list.
I had reached an in-between place. People taken away from me unexpectedly and relationships dissolved had been dealt with in as healthy a manner as could be expected. My life had moved on. But then I got a phone call. It was simple, as this sort of thing tends to be. I was told that my friend has cancer.
While it is true that I haven’t kept in touch with my friend over the years as I ought to have done, he is still very dear to me and I love him very much. I felt like someone punched me in the gut. The facts were these: the cancer is the most benign kind you can have while still having cancer, which is as relevant to me as learning that a person with an I.Q. of 210 kicked you in the groin. Whatever honor may have been bestowed upon you by being kicked by a genius is rendered useless because of the fact that you’re on the ground clutching your groin. Sorry for the mental image there, but I trust that my point has been made: the event is the event. The sorrow is the sorrow, and cancer is cancer. Hodgkin’s lymphoma may be treatable, but is still scares the hell out of me, and when I was told that Bob has cancer, I was overcome with emotion.
Early surgeries didn’t do the trick. Some of the cancer was taken out of his neck and chest, but not all of it. Soon Bob will go through chemo, and he’s already cut his hair, in preparation for when it will fall out completely. No doubt the emotions that Bob is going through are complicated and conflicted. He lost his Dad not too long ago to pancreatic cancer, and I’m sure this bout of cancer is an irony he could best do without.
Cancer in my friend? This isn’t an unhealthy person we’re talking about. Bob was my jogging partner in China. He jogs still. So why on earth is this happening to him? It isn’t in my pay grade to ascertain which person has suffered enough and which person hasn’t. I don’t want that job. Thoughts such as these have no benefit to the subject at hand, and I had to yank myself away from them. Instead I find myself dealing with the facts as they are, no matter how difficult it is, and deal with it that way.
As a friend of someone with cancer, I’m faced with complexity of thought. It tears up my emotions. On the one hand, this isn’t about me. I’m not the one feeling torn apart every other Wednesday by chemicals that have no business being in a human being. I’m not the one losing my hair, or having to teach summer school while dealing with mortality. My friend does, and that sucks.
On the other hand, it is useless to refuse to admit it. My emotions are conflicted as well. Sure, it makes me feel selfish, but there it is. I had years to be friends with Bob. Everything I have within me wants this to still be true. I had plans that were faultless and flawless. My Pepsi would be cold and I would then drink it, and my friend would outlive us all. Someone took my Pepsi, and something took my friend’s health. I was hacked off about someone stealing my sodas, which they had no right to do, and I am hacked off about cancer stealing my friend’s comfort and time. I’m so angry about it that I don’t give a flying flip that my metaphor is simplistic and silly, perhaps even offensively so. None of that is of the slightest importance to me. You can have my six-pack of Pepsi. I want my friend to be rid of cancer.
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
A Hitchhiker's Guide to Comfort and Familiarity
I once lived in a Communist country. It was a lot like living anywhere else, if you ignored the fact that you were living in a Communist country. There were things I liked about it. There were things that took some getting used to.
The things that I missed the most were, in no particular order: my family and friends, Mexican food, the Constitution of the United States (which I am missing again nowadays but that is a story for another time), and lots and lots of books.
Put me in another country, place me somewhere where I cannot speak the language and I am rightfully discombobulated. But if you add a library or a bookstore, I am right at home. I love being surrounded by books. I did so when on the other side of the world, and I do now. I cannot think of a time where I haven’t been surrounded by at least several things to read. First thing I did when I went to a strange campus in Guangzhou? I went to a library. I think they told me to leave, but I’m not sure, because the first thing I did when I went to a strange campus in Guangzhou was to go to a library, not learn the Cantonese that they probably used to eject me from the library. And after I perused a little and decided to obey the little fella who was waving his arms about, I left with a feeling of satisfaction and a firm belief that it would behoove me at some time to learn Cantonese.
Books soothed my initial culture shock. When living in Lijiang, I often dropped into the Chinese bookstore in town. Did I understand the books? I did not. They were written in a strange language that I was not able to read. It was probably Chinese. But I wasn’t really there to read. I was there to be around the familiar, and perhaps see if there was someone who would be so kind as to wave his arms around in an attempt to get me to leave. Books made me feel at home and comfortable. Now that I’m back in the States, the feeling of comfort and familiarity is still there when I step into a Library or a bookstore.
Books of all shapes and sizes interest me. Books of all types and interests intrigue me. No matter the subject, I’ll read a little something about it, because what it boils down to is this: it isn’t just what is said that is interesting, it’s also how it is said.
Except for the Bible, every book that I’ve read could have benefited from an edit or two. Add to the text here, subtract from it there, maybe add a fire-breathing midget, and it could have been improved. Some were edited so loosely that it had me wondering if the editor was drunk, M.I.A. or took the afternoon off for an errand of antiquing. Some were edited so strongly that I wondered if it drove the author to drink, go missing, or try to send his editor off on errand of antiquing.
Regardless of the problems, sometimes major and sometimes minor, the good ones always found themselves in one of two categories.
1)Books with a Good Story/Premise.
You know the books that have a great premise. A mosquito caught in tree juice that fossilizes and lends itself to a creation of a T-Rex that terrorizes smart-alecky kids who somehow think faster on their feet than Scientists with Ph.D.s? Great premise. A kid with a lightning scar on his forehead who finds out he’s marked for death while still trying to get through a labyrinth of cooties and wizarding mid-terms? Pretty interesting premise. A ring that renders the wearer invisible, susceptible to curly hair, and addicted to lembas bread? Good premise, and one of the best 12-hour movies out there.
And it doesn’t have to be just about fiction. It can be non-fiction as well. There are books that compare historical events to the present day, or deal with how to enact a healthy lifestyle or how to Photoshop a diabolical gym teacher out of all my elementary school photos. They can all have a great premise.
What I’m saying is, fill a book with an interesting premise and it’s worth the time and energy to read. It doesn’t have to be literature, or something poetic, heroic, epic. It can still be utterly riveting and be worth the time. I like books like these, but they aren’t my favorite type. For that, there is a second type.
2)Books that are written well.
Well-written books, sometimes known as “Literature”, don’t have to have a great premise. They can, of course, but they don’t have to. For these books the joy is in the journey and not necessarily in the destination. They begin great (Ex: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”, “Call me Ishmael”, etc.). They flow majestically and are a true privilege to read. They engross you, and the time you spend reading them vanishes. They have the enviable dilemma of always seeming too short. And they can be about seemingly banal things. A story about a guy fishing in a small boat won Earnest Hemingway a Nobel Prize for Literature. A book about hunting a whale became one of the greatest novels in the English language.
You name the most boring of situations, and if it is told well, it can be a work of art. They are artistic because if told well, they become something else entirely. They open themselves up to interpretation and can be incredibly meaningful. “Old Man and the Sea” becomes less of a surface story about obsessive weekend deep sea fishing and becomes more about a search for hope and meaning while struggling with overwhelming odds. “Moby Dick” is less about wondering why the crew signed on with a maimed captain and more about bitterness and anger leading to self-destruction (He named the whale that wounded him, for goodness sake. Wouldn’t that be a sign that his sails didn’t go all the way up the mast, if you know what I mean?).
And so there you have it; the two kinds of books that most interest me. Of the two categories, I appreciate the latter more, but writing with a good premise can still sell a gazillion copies and be entertaining to boot, even if it is only to pass the time and then is quickly forgotten.
I don’t always find a great book at first. Sometimes I end up with a book that I could have sworn was written in crayon while the author was on a weekend bender, or one that should be disposed of only by C.D.C. officials. Why go through the agony of being hosed off by doctors in Bio hazard attire simply because the airport bookstore had the gall to place their bilge near the cash register, with a cardboard display, no less? Because the joy of finding a great book after crawling through a desert of awful books can be described as nothing less than joyous and wonderful. Great books broaden your vocabulary. They can exponentially increase your imagination. They can take you to another time.
And they can do something else equally priceless. If you find yourself at a time in your life where you are missing friends and family, yearning for a place of familiarity and comfort, they can even transport you to another place, allowing you, even if it is for just a moment, to be back home again.
The things that I missed the most were, in no particular order: my family and friends, Mexican food, the Constitution of the United States (which I am missing again nowadays but that is a story for another time), and lots and lots of books.
Put me in another country, place me somewhere where I cannot speak the language and I am rightfully discombobulated. But if you add a library or a bookstore, I am right at home. I love being surrounded by books. I did so when on the other side of the world, and I do now. I cannot think of a time where I haven’t been surrounded by at least several things to read. First thing I did when I went to a strange campus in Guangzhou? I went to a library. I think they told me to leave, but I’m not sure, because the first thing I did when I went to a strange campus in Guangzhou was to go to a library, not learn the Cantonese that they probably used to eject me from the library. And after I perused a little and decided to obey the little fella who was waving his arms about, I left with a feeling of satisfaction and a firm belief that it would behoove me at some time to learn Cantonese.
Books soothed my initial culture shock. When living in Lijiang, I often dropped into the Chinese bookstore in town. Did I understand the books? I did not. They were written in a strange language that I was not able to read. It was probably Chinese. But I wasn’t really there to read. I was there to be around the familiar, and perhaps see if there was someone who would be so kind as to wave his arms around in an attempt to get me to leave. Books made me feel at home and comfortable. Now that I’m back in the States, the feeling of comfort and familiarity is still there when I step into a Library or a bookstore.
Books of all shapes and sizes interest me. Books of all types and interests intrigue me. No matter the subject, I’ll read a little something about it, because what it boils down to is this: it isn’t just what is said that is interesting, it’s also how it is said.
Except for the Bible, every book that I’ve read could have benefited from an edit or two. Add to the text here, subtract from it there, maybe add a fire-breathing midget, and it could have been improved. Some were edited so loosely that it had me wondering if the editor was drunk, M.I.A. or took the afternoon off for an errand of antiquing. Some were edited so strongly that I wondered if it drove the author to drink, go missing, or try to send his editor off on errand of antiquing.
Regardless of the problems, sometimes major and sometimes minor, the good ones always found themselves in one of two categories.
1)Books with a Good Story/Premise.
You know the books that have a great premise. A mosquito caught in tree juice that fossilizes and lends itself to a creation of a T-Rex that terrorizes smart-alecky kids who somehow think faster on their feet than Scientists with Ph.D.s? Great premise. A kid with a lightning scar on his forehead who finds out he’s marked for death while still trying to get through a labyrinth of cooties and wizarding mid-terms? Pretty interesting premise. A ring that renders the wearer invisible, susceptible to curly hair, and addicted to lembas bread? Good premise, and one of the best 12-hour movies out there.
And it doesn’t have to be just about fiction. It can be non-fiction as well. There are books that compare historical events to the present day, or deal with how to enact a healthy lifestyle or how to Photoshop a diabolical gym teacher out of all my elementary school photos. They can all have a great premise.
What I’m saying is, fill a book with an interesting premise and it’s worth the time and energy to read. It doesn’t have to be literature, or something poetic, heroic, epic. It can still be utterly riveting and be worth the time. I like books like these, but they aren’t my favorite type. For that, there is a second type.
2)Books that are written well.
Well-written books, sometimes known as “Literature”, don’t have to have a great premise. They can, of course, but they don’t have to. For these books the joy is in the journey and not necessarily in the destination. They begin great (Ex: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”, “Call me Ishmael”, etc.). They flow majestically and are a true privilege to read. They engross you, and the time you spend reading them vanishes. They have the enviable dilemma of always seeming too short. And they can be about seemingly banal things. A story about a guy fishing in a small boat won Earnest Hemingway a Nobel Prize for Literature. A book about hunting a whale became one of the greatest novels in the English language.
You name the most boring of situations, and if it is told well, it can be a work of art. They are artistic because if told well, they become something else entirely. They open themselves up to interpretation and can be incredibly meaningful. “Old Man and the Sea” becomes less of a surface story about obsessive weekend deep sea fishing and becomes more about a search for hope and meaning while struggling with overwhelming odds. “Moby Dick” is less about wondering why the crew signed on with a maimed captain and more about bitterness and anger leading to self-destruction (He named the whale that wounded him, for goodness sake. Wouldn’t that be a sign that his sails didn’t go all the way up the mast, if you know what I mean?).
And so there you have it; the two kinds of books that most interest me. Of the two categories, I appreciate the latter more, but writing with a good premise can still sell a gazillion copies and be entertaining to boot, even if it is only to pass the time and then is quickly forgotten.
I don’t always find a great book at first. Sometimes I end up with a book that I could have sworn was written in crayon while the author was on a weekend bender, or one that should be disposed of only by C.D.C. officials. Why go through the agony of being hosed off by doctors in Bio hazard attire simply because the airport bookstore had the gall to place their bilge near the cash register, with a cardboard display, no less? Because the joy of finding a great book after crawling through a desert of awful books can be described as nothing less than joyous and wonderful. Great books broaden your vocabulary. They can exponentially increase your imagination. They can take you to another time.
And they can do something else equally priceless. If you find yourself at a time in your life where you are missing friends and family, yearning for a place of familiarity and comfort, they can even transport you to another place, allowing you, even if it is for just a moment, to be back home again.
Monday, March 30, 2009
Now, Where Exactly Did I Put My Trust?
This is my favorite time of year. I love the spring. The weather gets nice and cool, the grass starts to grow again, it tends to rain more, and the air feels clean. Of course, it isn’t all sunshine and St. Augustine. Because my birthday is always just around the corner in the springtime, I have to be on my best behavior in a futile attempt to cause people to forget that unfortunate event involving a cat, some aluminum foil and the best of intentions that happened in January. But I take the bad with the good, because I love the Spring. And I love my Birthday.
The biggest hurdle to my enjoyment of the Spring has to be April 1st. That day is isolated from my festive season. I think of it this way: Spring begins in March, is truncated on midnight March 31st, and begins anew on April 2nd, minus the time it takes to get the apologies out of the way for the most useless holiday we have during the entire year.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you: “April Fool’s Day”. Or, as I like to call it, “National-Lie-To-Each-Other Day”. I’ve never understood it. We, as a nation, play tricks on our friends and lie to each other. Built up some trust with a certain someone? Lie to ‘em on April 1st and get a free pass. Got some integrity that you simply don’t know what to do with? Spend some of that hard-earned reliability by setting a bag of poop on fire. That honor and veracity bogging you down? Is it tiring you out to be so doggone dependable? Trade out someone’s medication for a placebo.
It’s funny! It’s only one day of the year! They won’t press charges.
Seriously. How useless is this holiday? I might not totally be on the same wavelength as some of the other holidays (you hear me, Valentine’s Day?), but I partially understand it. Christmas is about giving unselfishly as a celebration of an unselfish gift that can never be equaled. Thanksgiving is about tryptophan, parades and giving thanks that the Detroit Lions are paraded out once a year while everyone is groggy from tryptophan. Easter is about hats, eggs, ham for some odd reason, and the Resurrection. Not at all in that order.
I could go on and on. Each holiday serves some kind of function, but April the 1st doesn’t make the slightest sense to me. Let me give you an example of why I loathe it so. Some years back, I was trying my very best to be a fan of a sports talk show. I felt it necessary to learn a little something about what my buddies were talking about, it was something to listen to, it was entertaining, and I felt it important to know why it’s okay for athletes to slap each other on the bum.Sports radio seemed the logical solution to me. But on April Fool’s Day the deejays made a point of stringing the audience along, building up to some awesome, climactic announcement. Whatever the announcement was going to be, it was going to be of such monumental importance that if you heard nothing else ever in the history of mankind, you could not under any circumstances risk missing the announcement at the top of the hour, right after the commercials. The radio had been invented for this very moment. The radio hosts would be fulfilling their life’s calling by bringing the upcoming statement. Lose your job, be late for the birth of your child, put that realization of a lifelong dream on hold; do whatever you had to do to be around for the startling news. Seriously, it’s just around the corner and it will be EPIC.
There was no such denouement. An announcement was finally made, after agonizingly stringing the audience along, that there was no announcement. There was nothing at all to report. April Fool’s Day! Ha ha everybody! The jokes on you! Let’s all laugh together.
I felt like a moron for believing them. They lost an audience member that day, and I haven’t listened to them since. Sports in general didn’t really interest me that much to begin with, anyway. I gave up trying to impress my friends with my sports acumen. Operation “I Love Sportscenter Too!” was a failure and its funding was subsequently cut. And it took that moment of foolishness to realize it. I never did learn why athletes think it acceptable to slap each other on the fanny.
So I left in pursuit of other pursuits in a pursuit to pursue other pursuits. And I never forgot the lesson I learned that fateful morning in my car: April Fool’s Day isn’t about being a fool, it’s about making other people feel like fools. Isn’t that a nice thing to celebrate? Shouldn’t there be a holiday that acts as a counterbalance? We could place it exactly 6 months to the day after April 1. It would be on the other side of the year and it would undo the damage of all those lawsuits. Perhaps we could call it “Here’s-The-Dignity- I-Took-From-You-Back-In-April Day”. That’s a holiday I can get behind.
So, as I suppose you can guess by now, I will not be celebrating April Fool’s Day on Wednesday. Justice will be my sword and truth shall be my quiver. I will play no practical jokes on anyone. I won’t be setting poop on fire. I won’t give a lengthy setup for an announcement that ain’t there. If you are around me on that day, you will see no integrity being spent like tokens on a midway. The medication you had in the morning won’t be a sugar tablet in the evening. You’ll be safe from me. I hope that others will show me the same courtesy. If they do not, then I suppose we’ll need to celebrate a certain holiday on October 1, because I’ll want that dignity back.
The biggest hurdle to my enjoyment of the Spring has to be April 1st. That day is isolated from my festive season. I think of it this way: Spring begins in March, is truncated on midnight March 31st, and begins anew on April 2nd, minus the time it takes to get the apologies out of the way for the most useless holiday we have during the entire year.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you: “April Fool’s Day”. Or, as I like to call it, “National-Lie-To-Each-Other Day”. I’ve never understood it. We, as a nation, play tricks on our friends and lie to each other. Built up some trust with a certain someone? Lie to ‘em on April 1st and get a free pass. Got some integrity that you simply don’t know what to do with? Spend some of that hard-earned reliability by setting a bag of poop on fire. That honor and veracity bogging you down? Is it tiring you out to be so doggone dependable? Trade out someone’s medication for a placebo.
It’s funny! It’s only one day of the year! They won’t press charges.
Seriously. How useless is this holiday? I might not totally be on the same wavelength as some of the other holidays (you hear me, Valentine’s Day?), but I partially understand it. Christmas is about giving unselfishly as a celebration of an unselfish gift that can never be equaled. Thanksgiving is about tryptophan, parades and giving thanks that the Detroit Lions are paraded out once a year while everyone is groggy from tryptophan. Easter is about hats, eggs, ham for some odd reason, and the Resurrection. Not at all in that order.
I could go on and on. Each holiday serves some kind of function, but April the 1st doesn’t make the slightest sense to me. Let me give you an example of why I loathe it so. Some years back, I was trying my very best to be a fan of a sports talk show. I felt it necessary to learn a little something about what my buddies were talking about, it was something to listen to, it was entertaining, and I felt it important to know why it’s okay for athletes to slap each other on the bum.Sports radio seemed the logical solution to me. But on April Fool’s Day the deejays made a point of stringing the audience along, building up to some awesome, climactic announcement. Whatever the announcement was going to be, it was going to be of such monumental importance that if you heard nothing else ever in the history of mankind, you could not under any circumstances risk missing the announcement at the top of the hour, right after the commercials. The radio had been invented for this very moment. The radio hosts would be fulfilling their life’s calling by bringing the upcoming statement. Lose your job, be late for the birth of your child, put that realization of a lifelong dream on hold; do whatever you had to do to be around for the startling news. Seriously, it’s just around the corner and it will be EPIC.
There was no such denouement. An announcement was finally made, after agonizingly stringing the audience along, that there was no announcement. There was nothing at all to report. April Fool’s Day! Ha ha everybody! The jokes on you! Let’s all laugh together.
I felt like a moron for believing them. They lost an audience member that day, and I haven’t listened to them since. Sports in general didn’t really interest me that much to begin with, anyway. I gave up trying to impress my friends with my sports acumen. Operation “I Love Sportscenter Too!” was a failure and its funding was subsequently cut. And it took that moment of foolishness to realize it. I never did learn why athletes think it acceptable to slap each other on the fanny.
So I left in pursuit of other pursuits in a pursuit to pursue other pursuits. And I never forgot the lesson I learned that fateful morning in my car: April Fool’s Day isn’t about being a fool, it’s about making other people feel like fools. Isn’t that a nice thing to celebrate? Shouldn’t there be a holiday that acts as a counterbalance? We could place it exactly 6 months to the day after April 1. It would be on the other side of the year and it would undo the damage of all those lawsuits. Perhaps we could call it “Here’s-The-Dignity- I-Took-From-You-Back-In-April Day”. That’s a holiday I can get behind.
So, as I suppose you can guess by now, I will not be celebrating April Fool’s Day on Wednesday. Justice will be my sword and truth shall be my quiver. I will play no practical jokes on anyone. I won’t be setting poop on fire. I won’t give a lengthy setup for an announcement that ain’t there. If you are around me on that day, you will see no integrity being spent like tokens on a midway. The medication you had in the morning won’t be a sugar tablet in the evening. You’ll be safe from me. I hope that others will show me the same courtesy. If they do not, then I suppose we’ll need to celebrate a certain holiday on October 1, because I’ll want that dignity back.
What this blog is all about
When I was in the 5th grade, our elementary school put out a decree throughout the land. If you had an article, if you wanted to write a little something down, and it was given to the editor in a timely fashion, it could be published in the school newspaper. It sounded like a lark, and I thought I would try my luck. I spent a whole portion of an afternoon and wrote something poetic, heroic, epic. It was sheer genius. I don’t remember what I wrote, but I remember laughing with joy as I wrote it. I didn’t know what the Pulitzer was, but if I did, I would have considered it a foregone conclusion. It would be some years before I learned what Pulitzer meant. Perhaps it happened the same day I felt comfortable enough to use “foregone conclusion” in a sentence.
Of course, you know what happened. The article was rejected out of hand. I was told that it wasn’t “really what the newspaper needed at this time”, or some such thing. The taco bell napkin that held my prose was handed back to me and I was wished a “fare thee well”.
You might think that the loss of 5th grade prestige crushed my fragile psyche. It did not. It probably took a few days to put it behind me, because I’ve always been that way, but with time I simply moved on to something else. Perhaps as a 5th grader, all it took was something bright and shiny in front of me, since all 5th graders I’ve ever met have had A.D.D. in one form or another (I didn’t have A.D.D. because it wasn’t invented yet, but I had whatever we had back in the days before A.D.D. was invented. Perhaps it was B.C.C. ).
As an adult, I look back on those events and I am comforted by a few things: 1) the paper that rejected my article was an elementary school newspaper. 2) The editor that rejected my article was in 6th grade. 3) The school that rejected my article had asked a 6th grader to be its editor.
I also look back and remember that I had a lot of fun writing that article. I enjoyed spending almost an entire half hour of an afternoon writing something that made me laugh and I thrilled at the idea of sharing my odd and strange viewpoints. The whole experience was worth missing a “Hogan’s Heroes episode” to do, and it still makes me laugh that the article was rejected by a teeny, tiny, prepubescent editor.
That enjoyment hasn’t gone away. I still don’t mind in the least missing “Hogan’s Heroes” episodes, and I still enjoy jotting down thoughts that have others wondering what medications I’m taking or if I’ve recently stopped taking them. I don’t have to risk my quirks and odd observances being rejected. I do have fun explaining them, and this is what this blog is meant to do. I still write with the same purpose as I did back in the 5th grade: have fun, write in such a way as to bring a smile to the face of the reader, and avoid getting punched during recess. These are ample enough reasons for having started this blog.
So, here, for your perusal, are my thoughts and ideas. I don’t have to rationalize them, but I can laugh at them and with them. So can you if you feel so led. My advice for us all is to have fun. Hopefully you’ll enjoy my viewpoints, even to the point of feeling free to share a few of your own, while at the same time steering away from underage editors with no sense of humor and no idea what is Pulitzer worthy. This is sage advice no matter who you are.
Of course, you know what happened. The article was rejected out of hand. I was told that it wasn’t “really what the newspaper needed at this time”, or some such thing. The taco bell napkin that held my prose was handed back to me and I was wished a “fare thee well”.
You might think that the loss of 5th grade prestige crushed my fragile psyche. It did not. It probably took a few days to put it behind me, because I’ve always been that way, but with time I simply moved on to something else. Perhaps as a 5th grader, all it took was something bright and shiny in front of me, since all 5th graders I’ve ever met have had A.D.D. in one form or another (I didn’t have A.D.D. because it wasn’t invented yet, but I had whatever we had back in the days before A.D.D. was invented. Perhaps it was B.C.C. ).
As an adult, I look back on those events and I am comforted by a few things: 1) the paper that rejected my article was an elementary school newspaper. 2) The editor that rejected my article was in 6th grade. 3) The school that rejected my article had asked a 6th grader to be its editor.
I also look back and remember that I had a lot of fun writing that article. I enjoyed spending almost an entire half hour of an afternoon writing something that made me laugh and I thrilled at the idea of sharing my odd and strange viewpoints. The whole experience was worth missing a “Hogan’s Heroes episode” to do, and it still makes me laugh that the article was rejected by a teeny, tiny, prepubescent editor.
That enjoyment hasn’t gone away. I still don’t mind in the least missing “Hogan’s Heroes” episodes, and I still enjoy jotting down thoughts that have others wondering what medications I’m taking or if I’ve recently stopped taking them. I don’t have to risk my quirks and odd observances being rejected. I do have fun explaining them, and this is what this blog is meant to do. I still write with the same purpose as I did back in the 5th grade: have fun, write in such a way as to bring a smile to the face of the reader, and avoid getting punched during recess. These are ample enough reasons for having started this blog.
So, here, for your perusal, are my thoughts and ideas. I don’t have to rationalize them, but I can laugh at them and with them. So can you if you feel so led. My advice for us all is to have fun. Hopefully you’ll enjoy my viewpoints, even to the point of feeling free to share a few of your own, while at the same time steering away from underage editors with no sense of humor and no idea what is Pulitzer worthy. This is sage advice no matter who you are.
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