Self help – kurthaberl

A Mind Is a Dangerous Thing

December 19, 2016 by kurthaberl 1 Comment

Last week I went to the dentist for a regular tooth cleaning (Tooth – I barely have one or two. The rest are caps, crowns, enamel things they put over posts, pins, I-beam structures, and root canal platings. My mouth is a record of the development of historical dental practices, most of which have now been abandoned.) A dental cleaning, for those of you who have good teeth or are in denial, is a practice like mini-waterboarding. It usually involves gagging on water washes, gum poking with sharp instruments, a whole lexicon of sighs and sudden breath catches by the hygienist, and gritty polishing using Chicago beach sand intended to taste like mint – the grinding administered by an impressive little drill that looks like a ball-point pen but feels like Ryobi four-horsepower metal drill with a 1/4″ dulled bit last used to erect the St. Louis Arch.

I found out they have a new instrument of torture called a Cavitron, which shoots larger amounts of water than what is used in waterboarding and somehow administers a painful electric nerve stimulation at the same time. Its purpose is ostensibly to remove coffee and tea stains from derelict drinkers like me, but it mostly is designed to convince victims that their dentists and hygienists REALLY want them to stop drinking coffee and tea. It convinced me for an entire day (yesterday) that I would never again drink coffee or tea. The Cavitron is a perfectly-named hand-held prod.

I’m writing this in Crescendo, which is a coffee house on Monroe Street in Madison. My friend, Earl Gray, is at the table with me. Take THAT – Cavitron. As you may guess, I don’t go back for another tooth cleaning for six months. I suspect that by then, the Cavitron will have morphed into a Mega-Stripmine-Tron.

Actually, I’m not going to write about the dentist; that was just a prelude. I’m going to write about my mind because of something else that happened at the dentist’s office, so forget about the Cavitron.

Before the actual waterboarding started, the hygienist put a little strappy thing around my wrist, which I thought she would then attach to the padded armrest before strapping down my other wrist. Instead she said, we’re helping to screen people. I’m just taking your blood pressure. In less than a minute, her breath caught, and she showed me the numbers, 150 over 95.

“Are you taking anything for high blood pressure?”

“No,” I said. “Until now, it’s been normal. I had a physical a year ago and when the nurse checked me, it was a little high, but after the prostate exam was over, it went back to normal. My doctor said that was not unusual.”

“Well, you should see him again. High blood pressure can be ………..(Insert a looooong pause) a problem.”

Then she began the waterboarding, which was probably easier than normal for me because all I could think about was high blood pressure, how her breath caught, and how long her pause was. Since I’m usually a calm, rational guy, that wrist reading couldn’t possibly have resulted from knowing I was about to be waterboarded, poked with sharp instruments, and Cavitronned. To make matters worse, I couldn’t remember the numbers for a normal blood pressure, the numbers that indicated medication, or the numbers that meant – go to the hospital right now for a stress test. (As if going to the hospital itself wasn’t a stress test).

After the waterboarding and Cavitronation was over, I stumbled out to my car, managed to make it home without driving over any islands, cyclists, construction barrels, or parkway trees. Immediately I called my doctor to make an appointment for another physical, the second recommended pneumonia shot for those over 65, and a BLOOD PRESSURE TEST. The earliest appointment was going to be over a month away. I panicked, explained the story of my blood pressure, and the scheduler asked if I should have a nurse call me back. A half an hour later, I had a nice talk with the nurse, garbled the numbers I tried to remember, and she kindly told me I probably had them reversed. Then she said the numbers were high but not dangerously so, and I could come in to check or go to a Walgreens and they would check me. Then she said, “You know, I don’t mean to insult you or your dentist, but we don’t have that much faith in a blood pressure check by a little wrist strap. Besides, going to the dentist is like-”

“Being waterboarded,” I said.

“Well,” she said. “I wouldn’t go that far.”

“Have you ever had a Cavitronation?” I asked.

“Um,” she said. “No. Look, if you’re worried, come in and we’ll just check your pressure. You can also help by cutting down on salt and caffeine. Are you overweight?”

“Maybe eight pounds.” I just made up that number. It’s probably ten or fifteen pounds.

“Well, get rid of those eight pounds. Walk more. You could have the whole issue taken care of before you come in for your physical. If not, just come in for a blood pressure check.”

That’s when I realized that there was a conspiracy between dentists and general practitioners to get people to stop drinking coffee and tea. My blood pressure panic was eased by a conspiracy theory. It works every time.

Okay, I thought, I can cut down on salt. When my wife came home, I told her the whole story. She seemed upset. That’s when she reminded me that I regularly made large bowls of hot, buttered, heavily salted popcorn. Her face looked sadly popcorn-deprived.

“Well, there are salt substitutes,” I said. “After all, popcorn is an essential food group.”

That seemed to ease her concern and she said, “You know, you could be like me and use just a little salt – just on popcorn and not on anything else.”

That’s when I started going through our refrigerator. It was not a good exploration. Tomato juice – 650 milligrams of salt. OMG. I had made a crockpot the day before of slow-cooked chicken and dumplings and looked at the cans of cream of celery and cream of chicken soup and chicken broth I had used. Their salty total made the tomato juice look like it was a health food rather than the salty poison I now knew it was.

Everything I looked at – OMG – salt and more salt. Butter, sauerkraut, salad dressing, chili I made with a base of salsa, OMG the salt in potato chips, bacon, and nuts.

“Well?” My wife said.

“It looks like the only things I can eat are lettuce and oatmeal.”

My wife is a smart person. She said, “You know, this isn’t about salt.”

“It isn’t?”

“No. You’ll go to the doctor and get checked and he’ll help you take care of the problem if there really is one. Until then, you should get out of this all-or-nothing loop.”

“How can I do that?”

“Well, you can start by making some popcorn tonight.You make the best popcorn. I have some shows I’d like to binge-watch and popcorn would be nice. I’ll salt yours, though.”

True love is a wondrous thing.

Filed Under: Humor, Modern Life, Self help, Uncategorized Tagged With: blood pressure, dentist, hygiene, Popcorn

What I Learned from Downton Abbey

March 11, 2016 by kurthaberl 2 Comments

Six years is a good run. It’s also an investment in fictional lives, a milieu, and the often unnamed things that matter. Botch the story, send the characters off into self-absorbed whining, or worse, bore your audience, and they quit watching. Keep viewers who watch until the end and then look at each other with an expression of, “I-wish-there-were-more,” and you have done well as a writer. Downton Abbey, I believed passed the ultimate test of literature – a presentation close enough to life without actually mirroring it so that it speaks to us. A private world is created and we are allowed to live in it. We learn. We take something with us after the experience. This blog is about that something.

Lesson one: More than money, social position, or even the possession of near absolute power that can raise up the lowly or cause the downfall of the unfortunate – Kindness rules. (Take that, you politicians today who practice various scorched earth policies.) Kindness is the ultimate currency that buys life and influence; it is the power that eventually beats all others. It is in a lady’s concern for the progress of a village hospital. It is in a lord’s concern for the quality of housing built on an estate to help fund the Abbey. It is in a daughter’s willingness to swallow her triumphant pride and call back her sister’s estranged lover because it is best for her sister. It is in the pat of the hand of a dowager who tells the lady who has taken over her position as president of the hospital that she is doing a wonderful job. Kindness marks the lives of servants who worry about each other, save their own from suicide, risk their own positions to testify in court, keep secrets or not depending on what they think is best for the other person. It marks the generosity of an earl’s American wife and later, a newly-married husband who put their entire fortunes at the disposal of the family and the estate.

The greatest kindness is the vein that opens even in the prick of meanness. Because of it, the dog-stealer, the rebel, the scandalous, war’s wounded, and the petty autocrats are redeemed. Kindness heals; it makes the broken whole; it makes the savage human and the unsophisticated better than the aristocrat. When in doubt – be kind – always. At this point I am led to a greater passage – Portia’s speech on mercy from The Merchant of Venice, which many of us had to memorize (with good reading). “The quality of mercy is not strained. It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven on the place beneath. It is twice blessed. It blesseth him that gives and him that takes….” Part of the lesson from Downton Abbey is that when the people are not kind, things do not go well, not for their rivals or themselves. The story of the under-butler Barrows is the best illustration. He almost died because of his own meanness and was saved only by the last-moment concern of a lady’s maid.

Lesson two: Nothing lasts. One would think that a house, an estate, a title chiseled into a culture and layers of traditions over many generations would ensure the continuance of those things, but it is not so. One of the interesting things is that Americans, we title-less, disorganized, anything-goes Colonials could be so fascinated by a class system we do not want, barely understand, and would certainly resent if it were imposed in the States. After all, we’ve developed our own class system based on money, which anyone can join if he or she has enough, no matter how that wealth was amassed. The Kennedys, the Rockefellers, the Gettys, and even the Walton family come to mind. What many did to get their fortunes may or may not have been legal; much certainly was unethical, but they did not get caught, or if caught, they found an oily way out. Fortunes are lost, not always by blunders, theft, or revolution. A fortune is lost because it is almost inevitable. It may take several generations, but it may also happen because a comma, a minuscule serif, is inserted in a piece of otherwise well-meaning legislation. Big Oil is a recent example, but there are others. Do you still own Sears stock? Enron? Bell Telephone? American Motors? Zenith Electronics? Even those that still exist are poor step-children today, sometimes the scullery maids who must get up first to clean out ashes and stoke the fires for others. Some ruined their own prospects; some fell to changing economic conditions, and some were simply swallowed up by predators.

Even love may not last. It is interrupted by death, trouble, self-centeredness, pride, and faithless behavior. Love is a choice, and it must be re-chosen every day. We must tell our spouses. I choose you. I choose you. I choose you. Someone else may temporarily seem to be a better deal, but I choose you for the long term. Counselors tell us marriage is killed by disdain and the repeated eye roll. That means it is important we tell each other as often as possible: I choose you again. Designing maids may seduce lords. Ladies may be overly-appreciated by art historians. A visiting Turkish diplomat may die in a lady’s room. A chauffeur may marry a titled lady. We choose, and when we choose for the long term, things almost last. At least they last for long enough. At least they may last for a lifetime. What more could we ask?

Lesson three: No matter what our position, power, or personal integrity – we all just muddle though. In one of the most prescient titles of all time, Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart reminds us all that Plan A is never enough. As Bobby Burns put it, “The best-laid schemes of mice an’ men gang aft a-gley.” In Downton Abbey we see the repeated near-bankruptcy of a privileged estate, a witness to other estates that failed, decayed, and became the mere ornament for the ultra-materialistic nouveaux-riches. Even the terms used to describe them are hyphenated.

In Downton Abbey, ovens break down the night of an extended family banquet; an old letter tossed into a fire nearly burns down the house; the joyful birth of a son is overshadowed by the death of the husband in a car crash, the same kind of accident that eventually sends Mary another husband. A child is born before Edith’s true love can marry her. An outsider, even worse, an Irish activist and mere chauffeur becomes the common-sense savior of the family estate. A bright, but naive daughter inherits a publishing company. A mere footman becomes an admired teacher who knows more than many graduates of Cambridge. All of this muddling, like struggles in any life, may seem impossible, but the older one gets, the more one has seen the impossible. A poor, black boy with an absent father becomes president. The presumptuously-named God-particle is found. A tiny wave in the time-space continuum is detected. Cancer cells may be “tagged” so one’s own immune system sees them as invaders and attack. Curiouser and curiouser. No one stays clean all the time. We rust. We sag. Our eyesight fades. Our memory gets more selective. It’s true of me, of you, of the famous, of the powerful, of the simple, of professors, of mothers who would give almost anything for a full night’s sleep, of fathers who don’t know where the next job will be, or the father who would give almost anything for a full night’s sleep, or the mother who doesn’t know where the next job will be. It’s all the same. We muddle through. We Muggle through. Magic may happen, but we have no wands.

The muddling makes us grow, and if it does not kill us, it makes us stronger. That is how LadyMary learns to run an estate; Lady Edith learns to edit a magazine; Molesley learns how to be a teacher, and Robert learns how to let go, possibly the most difficult lesson of all

Lesson four: No one succeeds alone. It was fascinating to watch the Abbey work on a daily basis like a finely-calibrated watch. Not always, but usually. The clearly defined roles and coordination were amazing. Even more powerful was the handling of a crisis. A dead body was moved. Farms were run; sick pigs nursed; fires put out; deaths mourned; banquets prepared. It was done by people thrown together by circumstance, by choice, and sometimes by necessity. Even when some said, “No,” others stepped forward to offer support. If you want to help, but there is really nothing you can do, give empathy. Empathy heals as well or better than kindness and often better than misguided intention. The fast friendship of Lady Violet and Matthew’s mother Isobel Crawley was not cemented by kindred spirit or even similar interests. It was firmed and confirmed by empathy. Sometimes they merely sat with each other, listened, and “felt.”

Lesson 5: Wit is always fun. My favorite character had to be Violet. At least she had the best lines, including several classics. “Weekend? What is a weekend?” About her friend Isobel in a tussle over the hospital. “Fight? Of course she’s allowed to fight. She’s just not allowed to win.” Even in her backhanded slaps, the harm is not so great from one somewhat physically feeble, someone still mentally sharp, and someone wearing a velvet glove. Comic relief is always important. I tried very hard to put it in my book, Hibernal, in the scenes with Porkchop andTrailer. It seems that some readers remember only that about the book. If they laughed out loud, as many readers reported, I am satisfied.

All good things must end. Years ago I wrote a blog making fun of Downton Abbey, its excess, its confusing multiplicity of characters and emotional highs and lows. Somewhere along the line, I was won over, quite possibly because the reasonableness of its excesses, its interesting multiplicity of characters, and its emotional highs and lows. My disbelief certainly was suspended. If you win over a skeptic like me, you’ve done something, Julian Fellowes.

Filed Under: Humor, Modern Life, Philosophy, Self help, Social Media, Uncategorized Tagged With: Achebe, Downton Abbey, Lady Violet, Portia's speech, Shakespeare, Things Fall Apart

On Failure

February 23, 2016 by kurthaberl 2 Comments

We’ve all been there, that place where hope becomes expectation and then slides into wreckage. The kite crashes to the ground and is no longer a kite but only torn paper and two sticks. The blog we’ve written to inspire or at least amuse others has instead offended or worse yet, angered. The blog we decided to write every week or two slipped away into a six month hiatus while we worked at Epic culinary, celebrated various holidays, and visited relatives. A proposal for almost anything – a vacation, a job, a date, is met with – what’s that new thing called – the “resting bitch face.” Then there is the failure of having worked for years on a book and other years on a Master’s degree in writing, only to receive dozens of rejection letters from agents and publishers of your genre who are not interested. No readers is a failure. Eventually one loses count. I was about to add the ultimate failure, the marriage proposal, but Pride and Prejudice notwithstanding, few today take the Darcy-esque risk with Elizabeth Bennett. Most often the couple has talked about marriage, and the guy already knows she will probably say “Yes.” (Often with an exclamation mark or two)

The interesting thing is that failure is often accidental or circumstantial rather than a disaster we caused. We don’t consciously choose to wreck our cars, break windows, or hammer thumbs. We knew those things were possibilities, but certainly, such an unlikely – ouch! Damn! (Followed by other automatic responses.)

What I’m mostly talking about today are the ones we ourselves cause and afterwards think, “How could I be so dumb?” I’ve experienced quite a few, and I think I’ve learned from them.

A whole class of failures are the ones witnessed by a spouse. A few years after we were married, we bought our first house, a small L-shaped ranch with a big back yard enclosed by a chain link fence. Trying to chase two birds with one stone, I hoped to please Ann by cutting out 200 square feet of sod, which I would use to cover the ugly sore of a new sewer line we needed the first month in our house, and fence in a garden for her where the sod had been. It would have been a beautiful gift. After fencing in the garden, I found the dirt below the sod was mostly clay, perfect for planting rocks or a tennis court, but not so good for a garden. In phase two I bought several bags of topsoil and rented a tiller, thinking that I could break up the clay, and she might at least be able to plant cacti. In her version of this failure from looking out a triple window in our kitchen – the only accurate version I might add – everything was going fine until I got too close to the chain link fence. One tine of the tiller caught the fence and started to climb it. To make matters worse, the climbing tilted the opposite tines, one of which caught our two foot high rabbit fence. As the tiller churned and I tried uselessly to pull it away (a six-horsepower engine really is stronger than one dummy), it wrapped the rabbit fence around itself until the blades locked; the engine backfired once, and then died. Ann figured we had just bought a tiller we could not afford in addition to a sewer line, and we needed the sewer line more. She said her eye roll turned to laughter when she saw me in typical English teacher fashion, take a step back, put my chin in my hand, and just examine the mess. Three hours and a lot of snipping later, the only real loss was the rabbit fence. The tiller was returned to the garden store in working condition. I did not charge the store for sharpening the tines on our wire rabbit fence. It was a magnificent failure. I learned that sometimes the universe kindly forgives stupidity, but even more meaningful is wifely kindness.

Sometimes failure can be funny, especially if it is shared. Before I was a teenager and started failing magnificently on my own, I remember a Saturday morning on a beautiful fall day when my father planned to cut down a rotting, very old cherry tree in our back yard before the branches broke off and landed on our porch. It was a tall tree, at least 50 feet high, and my father borrowed a chain saw and a lot of rope for this project. Because he was young then, and I was not even a teenager, he climbed the tree, roped himself to the trunk for safety, and attached pull lines so my grandfather and the three oldest boys could pull branches down into the yard as he cut them. The first three or four were successful, but when he got to the largest branch, he told us we’d better move the picnic table he had built out of two by fours.

“It will be fine,” my grandfather said, looking up at my father and eyeballing the falling trajectory of the branch.

My dad cut, the branch groaned, then fell free, sliding off a lower branch. We pulled the rope, and the branch crashed down on the middle of the picnic table, now a folded picnic table. Grandpa John, in a clear case of a master kicking the dog, looked at me, aged 10, Chris aged 8, and Ken aged 7, and said, “I TOLD you to pull. Why didn’t you pull?”

Dad started laughing hard enough that I thought he’d fall out of the tree. It was a magnificent failure. The lessons I learned from that one were so obvious and wonderful, I don’t really feel I need to state them here.

I will add the story of one of Ann’s brothers, but to protect his identify, I will not name the particular brother – he knows who he is, as does his other brother, Ann, and most of his other relatives. It happened on a beautiful fall Saturday when all the men on the block were in their back yards raking leaves. My brother-in-law is known to be slightly impatient, and in those days, at least in Indiana, piles of leaves were burned rather than scooped up by city machines and mulched. His piles were too damp to do much except smoke, so he decided in true manly fashion to help them along. Since lawnmower season was over and he had plenty of leftover gasoline, he began to squirt his piles until they simply had to burn. In a matter of seconds, one of his piles caught fire and the flame followed his stream of gasoline back into the gas can he was holding. He had a moment to think, “Uh oh, this is not good,” and then threw the can as far as he could. According to him, it did not explode, it IMPLODED in mid air, ruptured and spewed a shower of burning gas over most of his back yard. He raced around the yard, stomping out dozens of small fires before they could unite into one big fire and burn down the neighborhood. When it was over, he noticed that all the men in the neighborhood had been watching in shocked silence. Then, in unison, they began to applaud. Well done, man. Literally, his yard was well-done. It was a magnificent failure. You can imagine what it was like if you recall any one of the commercials by Allstate Insurance, featuring the burning, cut-up guy who calls himself “Mayhem.” I’m not sure what my brother-in-law learned, if anything.

As a short aside in tribute to Pride and Prejudice, I will quote Mr. Bennet, who said after one of his family’s magnificent faux-pas, “For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?” Ah, truth.

What prompted this blog was not so much a desire to air my secret lapses or to prepare myself and those around me for future, more eye-rolling achievements, but rather, it began with an evening of Tchaikovsky.

More specifically, we went to the Madison Symphony Orchestra concert at the Overture Center in Madison last Friday to hear Beethoven, Ravell, and Tchaikovsky. I was struck by one of the program notes for the magnificent and beautiful Overture to Romeo and Juliet. Allow me to quote from the program. “In 1868, (Tchaikovsky) dedicated an overture titled Fate to his friend Balakirev. While Fate was a complete flop – Tchaikovsky later destroyed the score – it was the beginning of a close friendship, and Balakirev encouraged him to take Romeo and Juliet as a subject…. The first performance in 1870 was unsuccessful, and Tchaikovsky revised the work, incorporating several of Balakiren’s suggestions. He revised it once more a decade later – the version that is familiar today – in particular working the dramatic ending. (Program notes by J. Michael Allsen)

Ah, Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, a genius and double failure. Only the third try ten years later was a
success. I am reminded of other failures.

Beethoven had several, including his insistence to be onstage for the premier of his magnificent 9th symphony. Here is one eyewitness report.

Jumping Around Like a Madman

By 1824, Beethoven was almost entirely deaf, but still wanted to be part of the performance and was on stage while the piece was performed to indicate the tempos. Yet, Beethoven could not resist “helping” the musicians on stage by showing them the style and dynamics that he wanted, even though he was nearly deaf.

The great composer’s actions were animated to say the least. One musician wrote, “He stood in front of the conductor’s stand and threw himself back and forth like a madman. At one moment he stretched to his full height, at the next he crouched down to the floor. He flailed about with his hands and feet as though he wanted to play all the instruments and sing all the chorus parts.” It was a good thing that the conductor had already instructed the musicians not to pay attention to the composer!

In another account…

The premiere of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 was nearly a complete disaster.

Beethoven’s first on-stage appearance in 12 years in Vienna on May 7, 1824 didn’t go as planned for the premier of the Ninth. It was the largest orchestra that he had ever assembled. It’s known that some of Vienna’s most elite performers were in attendance. Beethoven even had two famous singers sing the soprano and alto parts. Though the composition itself is beautiful, the performance itself was somewhat disappointing.

Many spoke out that they thought it was under-rehearsed and “scrappy” in its execution. It’s said that while the audience applauded at the end, Beethoven was actually off by several measures and was still conducting. A member of his orchestra, Caroline Unger, had to walk over and turn the musical mastermind around to accept the audience’s cheers and applause. But violinist Joseph Böhm stepped forward afterward to praise Beethoven and explain that he was not to blame for the choppy experience.

“Beethoven directed the piece himself; that is, he stood before the lectern and gesticulated furiously. At times he rose, at other times he shrank to the ground, he moved as if he wanted to play all the instruments himself and sing for the whole chorus. All the musicians minded his rhythm alone while playing.”

This failure didn’t hit Beethoven too hard. The audience gave him five standing ovations.

Even in failure we may succeed.

So far, this catalogue of failures merely documents what most of us already know. As the actor Jim Carrey once remarked, “Those who succeed are the ones who just keep going.”

There is another aspect of failure, however, that I believe is more important than seeing failure as merely a step, a pause on the way to success. Failure is important, and I’m convinced it is actually a blessing because what it does to us as humans. Success ruins us. The quicker it comes, the more it ruins us. The easier the success, the more damning the ruin. The greater the immediate success, the more complete the ruin.

How can this be?

Failure enlarges us. Failure in love makes us kinder, deeper, and more able to love greatly. Why? Because now we know its importance, its worth, its cost. We may temporarily become discouraged, angry, perhaps even despondent along with every feeling in between. Even those painful things make us more human. We become truly great by rising out of ashes. Suffering enlarges our capacity. What we often find is that the success we so desperately sought is not really the success we need. The game we are in is bigger than the game we think we are playing.

A child who falls in learning to ride a bike may have temporarily failed, but what that child is actually learning is how to overcome adversity. It’s greater than learning to ride a bike, which that child will learn to do eventually anyway. Which is the greater success – learning to ride a bike or learning to overcome adversity and skinned knees?

History is a catalogue of wonderful failures: Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Michael Jordan, J.K. Rowling, Thomas Edison, Abraham Lincoln, Ben Franklin, Galileo, Vera Wang, Vincent Van Gogh, Emily Dickinson.

Jesus!

To those who fail utterly or die in the struggle, even death cannot prevent their greatness, their legacy, their accomplishment, their bequest to the rest of us.

Take heart. When you fail, it is usually temporary; it is a blessed teacher; it increases your capacity and your potential. When you fail, your perspective changes. When you fail, you now have rubble with which to build a fortress instead of a tower. The stone rejected becomes the cornerstone.

I don’t deny the pain. When you fail, I recommend that you do it “big” and try not to die in the process. Then I think it helps to take a step back, put your chin in your hand, study the twisted wreckage for as long as it takes, and then tell yourself, “Wow, that was magnificent. That was one of my best failures e-vah.”

Filed Under: Humor, Modern Life, Philosophy, Self help, Social Media, Writing Tagged With: Beethoven, Dickinson, failure, Jim Carrey, Tchaikovsky

A Life After Retirement

June 25, 2015 by kurthaberl 5 Comments

This blog is about retirement (or not) and why it’s important to say, “Okay.”

I retired four or five years ago after 36 years of teaching English and serving as a department chair. Once you retire, the passage of time changes, so you don’t care to remember whether it was four or five years ago. As one of my good friends and an art teacher, John, told me when he retired two or three years before I did, “Kurt, the main thing to remember in retirement is that the big paper arrives on Sunday.” That has been helpful in keeping time straight.

Two or three years ago I went back to work, sort of. Because of the way the wonderful state of Illinois deals with its teachers, I was short four quarters of Social Security credit, and my 36 years of teaching did not count. Any Social Security benefits did not matter because anything I collected there would be taken from my teacher’s retirement dollar for dollar to avoid “double-dipping” and make sure I didn’t get an undeserved $200 per month for dental insurance. What DID matter is that I did not have enough quarters to qualify for Medicare, and according to the Illinois retirement plan, you MUST qualify for Medicare somehow because they will no longer allow you to be a part of their medical plan once you reach 65. One’s work as a teacher in Illinois does not qualify for Medicare. Have you read Catch 22? That’s the short version. The long version is more about Illinois not wanting anyone to retire, so they just ignored all retirement plans for about 20 years as a way of balancing the budget and then used the money that teachers themselves contributed as collateral to borrow more for their pet projects and their own legislative and executive retirement plans. It doesn’t make sense, because in Illinois, governors don’t usually get a retirement plan payment; after some odd number of years in office, they usually get six to twelve years in some Wisconsin minimum security prison.

I could have been a substitute up here in Wisconsin and contributed to the upkeep or incarceration of some former Illinois governor, but I was really looking for something different. It turned out to be quite different, and quite eye-opening.

I heard about a local software company that was growing by leaps and bounds, and I applied online because I heard they hired teachers to train clients in their software. It turned out they only hired full-time teachers who were also called on to travel and trouble-shoot. They said they had their own part-time temp workers who might be asked to help out anywhere in the company from horticulture (the campus is beautiful) to administration (someone has to look at resumes) or culinary (their chefs and cooks serve at least 4,000 gourmet meals to staff and customers every day). Was I interested in temp work?

I said, “Okay,” just so I wouldn’t have to take papers home to correct, or meet with angry parents to tell them their son will not graduate in two weeks, and no, he cannot just walk across the stage to please Auntie Mame and finish his course requirements sometime in the summer (or never).

A month later this corporation called and said a woman in the kitchen had slipped on ice and broken a bone. Would I be willing to brew coffee in 35-cup hot pots for a month or five weeks? I said, “Okay.”

In two days it became routine to brew 50 hot pots for their meeting rooms and lounges, stop for lunch, joke with the other culinary people, clean up and go home. No papers, no angry parents. In five weeks I retired again, now only three quarters short of Medicare credit. It was good because the amount of rich coffee I was ingesting made me a little j-j-jittery.

A month later they called again. The husband of the woman who broke her ankle had gone for a physical and needed an immediate triple bypass. Would I help in the kitchen? I said, “Okay.” For the next six weeks, I helped set up a salad buffet and learned from the chefs how to hold a knife, chop and wash five cases of lettuce in the shortest time possible, dice onions without contributing any of my own blood, and mix salad dressings in five-gallon buckets. At one point, a chef noted I was getting better at using a chef’s knife and I said, “Thanks, but if I tried to go as fast as you, I’d lose a finger.” The chef said, “Well, Kurt, then you could be a cook for ten days.”

I was learning a lot. Don’t walk behind a chef without saying, “Behind!” I never knew if I was talking about theirs or my own. If you are walking with a chef’s knife, be sure to hold it straight down and call out, “Sharp!” any time you’re near someone. If you’re carrying a pot of soup, be sure to call out “Hot! Hot!” every couple of steps. The efficiency of a kitchen is amazing. Chefs work hard; they know what they’re doing, and when they’re finished with one project or are waiting for soup to simmer, they help someone else.

At one point I was asked to make a seasoning “rub” for 25 cases of chicken breasts. They gave me a Lexan mixing tub about the size of a coffin and a list of ingredients that began with 12 1/2 pounds of paprika, 4 1/2 pounds of ground black pepper, 2 pounds of salt, and so on. Mixing was done with plastic gloves that covered my arms up to my elbows. When I thought I was finished, I asked one of the chefs to check it. He didn’t taste it. He looked at the color and said, “Add another half pound of paprika.” They don’t measure much. Sometimes they taste and sometimes they just look at a batch and say, “It doesn’t look right. Add some more brown sugar.” Recently another temp mixed five gallons of Caesar dressing, and three chefs gathered to taste it. Soon they began to argue about what it lacked. Finally, the head chef tasted it and said, “Ooh, this is really good. It’s not Caesar dressing, but it’s really good. Go with it.” Everyone was happy.

On another occasion, the 35 gallon plastic drum we used to spin washed lettuce jammed, and one of the cooks took the top off to un-jam the spinner, but forgot to turn it off first. At that point, the drum ran free and instantly began to spin at top speed, throwing chopped Romaine around the kitchen, pelting everyone with wet lettuce. A lettuce food fight ensued, with the hapless cook the target of most throws. It wasn’t really a food fight; it was more of helping to clean up by throwing all the lettuce back to one central location marked by the cook who took off the top of the spinner. The head chef was not present at the time.

A year or two ago, (I’m not sure when… whatever, the big paper comes on Sunday), I earned enough credits to qualify for Medicare, but I have continued to work in the kitchen two or three months a year because I was learning how to cut and cook from experts, and because it was fun. More important than any pay was the perk of being able to bring home leftovers that could not be saved or re-used. That often includes fresh fruit salad, Caesar salad, and once, roast pheasant, roasted red potatoes and marinated asparagus. They’ve had leftover deep-fried bluegill, creamed soups, every kind of pasta imaginable, and desserts that won’t keep. It’s always good to earn “points” with your wife. Bringing home leftovers that would otherwise spoil is a lot more fun than bringing home papers to correct.

Although I’ve joked about putting on ten pounds every month I work, I’ve also gotten a lot of good exercise. The Fitbit my son and his wife bought for me says I’ve been walking an average of six miles per day when I work in the kitchen.

What is this experience really like? Watch a segment of Downton Abbey when the cooks are working in the scullery, and you’ll get an idea. Now imagine you’re cooking for several thousand people; the soup vats hold fifty gallons each; the menu lists a choice of three entrees per day and 400 of each entree is prepared, and a typical fruit salad prep will include six pineapples (sliced a certain way), three watermelons, a case of grapes (about a dozen packages to be hand-picked), a case of strawberries, and a couple of honeydew melons chopped in one-inch cubes. Now imagine that the kitchen I’m in is only one of five that may be prepping at full capacity that day. Most amazing of all, I’ve heard that the food in our dining halls is free to the staff; they pay only our salaries and costs of preparing. A typical grilled salmon dinner with rice and a vegetable would cost $5.00. A marinated flank steak dinner with mashed potatoes and roasted vegetables might be $6.00. At least 40 choices are available at our salad bar, and full square plate piled high is $3.50. This is not your typical corporate cafeteria.

The chefs and cooks have been lured away from Madison’s top restaurants by offers of regular daily hours, insurance, a retirement plan, and no night work, holiday work, or weekends. I’m learning from the best. Ah, retirement! I just retired again Friday. Time to go trout fishing.

One final thing I’ve learned…. I have great respect for anyone in the culinary segment of the workforce. A tip from me in any restaurant is now 20% minimum, usually 25%, and worth every penny. These are hard-working, highly-skilled people, and all the ones I know still have ten fingers. That’s is quite a feat. They deserve an extra dollar or two. I’d rather support them than an Illinois governor in some minimum security – you get the idea.

Filed Under: Humor, Modern Life, Self help Tagged With: chef, cooking, Illinois, retirement, temp worker, Wisconsin

7 Strategies to Beat Writer’s Block

May 1, 2015 by kurthaberl 1 Comment

Probably the most famous bout of writer’s block infected Mark Twain, who wrote the first half of his sequel to Tom Sawyer, got stuck, and then finished The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in a rush after about a four-year interval. Four years is a long time to have writer’s block, although in Twain’s case, it meant that he simply moved on to other things.

I have also heard that a serious strain of writer’s block attacked Sting, who wrote lots of songs with The Police, had a full solo career and then everything stopped – for years – until he learned to write songs that told stories or explored the past and characters he created and were not just about a current topic of interest. He learned to do what Mark Knopfler has been doing in music for years – don’t just report in music something that occurs to you or happens to you – create it and people the songs with your creations.

That’s the first of my practices for defeating writer’s block – Wait it out. Wait for people and things to appear. Waiting is difficult for a writer, even for a day or two. A day or two may be an average gestation period, nine months is a scary period, and four years is too long. Twain once commented that writing required an “incubation” period and trusted his subconscious to be working even when he was not. My subconscious often goes fantasy fishing instead of working on a story, but it comes around eventually. I have less control than early Greeks had over a muse, and they apparently had none.

What is one to do while waiting?

My second strategy to cure writer’s block is to write about other things. Blog, do journal entries, begin a second Great American Novel, write love letters to your enemies to confuse them, and if you’re really desperate, do crossword puzzles so you are thinking about words you almost have in mind. That searching for words is not much different than the actual work of writing. Besides, anyone who is only working on one piece at a time is probably not a writer – he or she is a journalist with an editor breathing down his or her itchy neck. Those poor unfortunates may sometimes end up doing what no self-respecting writer would ever admit – write crap on a subject they were assigned; they know it will get published but few will read it and no one will remember. They do it because they have to – until they switch jobs.

Strategy Number 3: Re-read and keep re-reading what you have written, from the beginning if necessary, so your subconscious gets so bored with it that it will be forced to come up with something worthwhile just to get you to stop breathing down its neck. If you really want to aggravate your subconscious into becoming your working partner again, re-read what you’ve been writing right before you go to bed. That way, your subconscious is primed to dream about what you’re writing instead of that strange trip to a lush isle where something or someone is rustling the bushes behind you. To a balky subconscious, re-reading what you’ve been writing is like planning for a dreamland flight through the Grand Canyon without a plane because you can fly, and then just before the take-off – wham, you’re grounded. You can cure writer’s block by nagging it unmercifully. Since your subconscious is probably a teen-ager (I believe most are), the nagging is much like getting it to clean its room. Wonderful, forgotten treasures often appear, and if not, you’ll at least get missing socks to pair with their orphan brothers.

Strategy Number 4: Take Courage. Sometimes writer’s block is simply due to fear, the kind of thing Harper Lee apparently faced after penning the magnificent To Kill a Mockingbird. She may have been writing after that, and perhaps her second book, The Watchman, may actually appear twenty years after Mockingbird, but I find it quite understandable (though not from experience) that such first success would be hard to follow. There are certainly times when a blank screen – that terrible white ghost like a vaporous Voldemort in Harry Potter – dares you to make a fool of yourself and challenge his unwritten threat. That white screen is sometimes not a playground; it is an abyss. It need not be white and blank; it may be a black hole into which all words and thoughts spiral, never to re-appear.

If that happens, first write an incantation. A prayer would be more effective, but I’m going to stick with the original metaphor. Simply write: Lexicus apparatio spirituus maximus or any Latin-sounding gibberish to the same effect. Then you say, “Take that! Voldemort, you hollow-socketed, whispering bog-wallower.” Then you can launch a courageous attack with words – power words are best – as you write an action scene using thrust, juggernaut, thunder, hurtling, stormed, defiant, stanchion, surmount, and end the paragraph with something magnificent, such as, “and so truth rises.” You will probably keep none of it, but you will be writing, and the blank screen will become your canvas, your sandbox, your whiteboard or your sky. Write courageously; write with anger, if necessary.

Courage always can defeat fear, but you have to make it so. Fear only wins when you let it. The more you practice courage, the more of it you will have until one day, you face even the palest, most vaporous white screen and say out loud, “Bring it on, you pale, sucking nothingness.” Then you write.

When that session is over, you give yourself a medal. Mine is usually chocolate. Edible medals are the best.

Strategy Number 5: Write without Expectations. Do not judge. Just write. Do not edit. Just write. Do not expect anything good. Just write.

I have found that an interesting thing happens when you write without expectations. I will sometimes write five pages of useless drivel, and then suddenly on page 6 an amazing paragraph or two will appear, as if out of nowhere, and I wonder, “Where did that come from?” and immediately I don’t care where it came from; I just go with it, and it goes to some place wonderful. You don’t have to keep the first five pages.

If you practice shooting 200 free throws every session, no single group of 10 will be remembered, but eventually you will make 7 out of 10 and then 8 out of 10. An interesting thing happens when you practice writing like you shoot free throws. It looks like this. Miss. Miss. Miss. Miss. MAKE. Miss. Miss. Miss. MAKE. Miss. Miss. MAKE. Miss. MAKE. MAKE. MAKE. In shooting free throws, even the “makes” fade away, but in writing, you keep the “makes.”

Your “make” may not even be part of a story. Maybe it’s backstory. Maybe it’s a sketch that becomes a flashback. Maybe it will become Huckleberry Finn after you finish Tom Sawyer. You may not know what it will become for four years. Write it anyway.

Strategy Number 6: You can get unblocked by making up questions and then answering them. If a character is lost in a swamp, ask, “If something surprising appeared that would lead this character deeper into the swamp and then out of it, what would that be?” You can always ask yourself, “Why did my character do that?” You may not know in a story what comes next, but you can ask, “What can appear out of the past that makes sense?” “What matters here?” “What if …?”

I remember a time when I was writing Hibernal when my main character had barely escaped political threats in Chicago by running away to a quite unlikely place – the Northwoods of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and holed up there for the winter. After you write about the Northwoods being snowy and cold, lonely and cold, what is left? I asked myself, “What matters now?” What matters now are inner demons, stories from the past that he tells himself, unspoken fears, and imagined threats that will first appear as memories and then later – aha, in the first thaw of spring – a bear, Faulkner’s bear that is more than a bear – it is the sum of his fears. From that point, the story wrote itself.

Questions are teachers, Socrates knew, and the more unanswerable the question, the better the teacher. Real life and good stories are packed with partial answers to good questions. Write them.

Strategy Number 7: What Good Writers Do. Many years ago (20 or so?) I took a class on writing at the University of Illinois and spent a lot of time doing research on creativity. One of the things I remember (a miracle in itself), was some research by Linda Flowers, a prof, I believe, at one of the Wesleyan Universities. (not the Linda Flowers who styled hair for The Hunger Games – heavens!) She worked diligently at examining protocols – the typical behaviors and thoughts of writers as they wrote. Often she would simply stop writers mid-sentence and ask what they were thinking/doing at that moment. One of the interesting things she learned is that poor writers seemed to fall into a rut in which they were stymied/stuck by minor things such as spelling or questions about punctuation, which would sometimes cause the derailment of a train of thought, or they would simply go back to re-read their last sentence and try to add on, often merely repeating their last idea in different words. They became very frustrated when she put them on machines so that only their last words were visible, and as they typed, their sentences would disappear.

Fluent writers, on the other hand, told her when they paused, they were going back to develop focus on important things: their main point or thesis, objections readers might have, who IS their audience, and the ramifications of what they were thinking. When she put fluent writers as seen by the quality of their writing on machines where only their last words were visible, the disappearance of their last sentences made no difference.

In other words, when good writers reach a pause-point, they GO BIG.

Similarly, when I write fiction, my BIG THING for any chapter is already in an outline. I may take some detours when something unexpected occurs to me, but more often than not, when I am writing, I feel like I’m in a car and I already know to turn left at the big oak in the middle of nowhere, and then begin to look for the bridge over a muddy creek. I know it’s just up ahead. In a way, writing is driving.

This blog entry is no exception. As I write, I see that I have come to the end of two pink Post-it notes with seven bullet points on them.

I guess I’m finished.

Filed Under: Humor, Modern Life, Self help, Writing Tagged With: Harper Lee, Hibernal, Huckleberry Finn, Linda Flowers, Mark Knopfler, Mark Twain, Sting, To Kill a Mockingbird, Writer's Block

Fun

April 3, 2015 by kurthaberl 1 Comment

It’s about time someone writes about this all-important topic, and I will do my best to do it justice – justice – the opposite of fun. I have an advantage in writing about this topic because I’m retired (mostly), so I don’t have the pressures of work, commuting, multiple bosses, or the desire to get a promotion. As a matter of fact, Epic Systems called me back in October to come back to them part-time, and instead of working in the kitchen, where I was learning to be a chef (it’s mostly about knives and playing with fire – kind of like Boy Scouts), they wanted to promote me to something administrative. I shuddered at the thought and told them, “No, it’s the time of year when football and basketball intersect, and I have no time for work, although I might consider it, if you let me go back to the kitchen. I lost the ten pounds I put on last spring working with the chefs.” It was mostly a lie; actually, now that I look at it, it was probably three lies in two sentences.

I also enjoy the advantage of having a grandson, who is three years old. No one understands fun like a three-year-old. He lives in a world of magic, where a large box only looks like a cardboard box; it is actually a rocket ship. His dad put stick-on lights inside because every rocket ship has to have electronics. On a walk to the park on a recent visit, he tugged at his Nana’s sleeve until Ann followed him around the corner to see his secret knot-hole (shades of To Kill a Mockingbird), which he pointed to and said, “Owl.” It was a double knot-hole and really did look like an owl. On his last stay with us, I pushed him around the circle from our living room to our dining room to our kitchen and through a hall back to the living room in a plastic car just his size. Every time we got to the living room, he waved at a two-foot high statue of St. Joseph that Ann inherited, and said, “Hi.” Each time, he was very happy to see his old friend. If you have young children or grandchildren, you have your own examples to supply here. Write them down somewhere so they aren’t lost.

I’ve written elsewhere that I believe time is not linear, but is layered, and below my 64 years are layers leading back to three. I believe I can still access most of them. I am three again every time I pick out a musical birthday card for our grandson that blares “Funky Town,” or “Shout!” when he opens it. Even if you don’t have a grandson, you can remember when you zoomed around the house wearing a cape, when you made a wire hanger into a basketball hoop over a door and tossed sockballs at it, or when you thought it was the greatest fun to build a fort on a rainy day out of cushions, pillows, and blankets draped over coffee tables, so you could safely lob sockballs at your enemy brother. We lost a lot of socks in our family.

My memory is not limited to the world of our grandson. Twenty-five years ago, our daughter had a dress-up box of princess gear, doctor kits, Viking helmets, magic wands, a boa or two, and ballerina skirts. Her theatrical presentations were epic. She saved entire worlds. Our son favored action games, usually involved in jumping off things, a tendency that gave us some worry when he took up skateboarding. I thought he had some kind of injury-wish until I took him for the first time to a skate park, and saw that it was actually a team sport where any successful trick, even something basic by a beginner, was cheered by all other skaters, as if he just dunked a basketball over Shaquille O’Neill. That’s when I understood what was really going on. It was team fun.

Fast-forward to NOW. I read about an elderly man whose son bought him a self-propelled lawn mower with a grass catcher because he felt sorry for his father who would spend hours raking the clippings of their large lawn every summer week. On his next trip, the son was sad to see the new lawnmower had been used, but without the grass catcher that would save his father so much effort.

“I have a confession to make,” his father told him. “You know I’ve always been a history buff. Every time I cut the grass, I rake the clippings to re-enact some famous battle. Today I did the decisive Battle of Yorktown. Cutting the grass no longer is work, you see. It’s -”

“-fun,” his son said. “Now I get it.”

“It’s like doing a crossword puzzle,” his dad said. “I re-live what I know. It feels good.”

One of the things I’ve learned is that fun does not depend on the activity; it depends on the attitude of the person. I know it’s hard to believe, but there are some people in the world who think that sitting in a rowboat for four hours watching a little red and white bobber go under or not go under to catch a scaly, finny critter is boring. It’s not the activity, which is actually wonderful fun; it’s the person. I’ve even heard that some people would not enjoy putting on waders to slog upstream and cast tiny, feathered hooks at trout, usually unseen, and there isn’t even a little red and white bobber to watch. It’s all done by “feel.” Who wouldn’t enjoy that? It makes me wonder what’s wrong with some people.

I have a friend who is thrilled by spotting birds through binoculars; another who loves searching the internet for re-manufactured parts for a mint MG convertible which sits in his garage and is driven twice a year on sunny, summer days before the township rocks, tars, and paints lines on streets to get ready for the opening of school. There is an army of people who hit golf balls at a tiny hole in the ground, and they feel good, not if they get the ball in the hole in the ground, but if they can do it in fewer attempts than the guy who designed the minefield they play on. I have friends who think it is fun (read “chemically high”) to run when no one is chasing them. Then they put oval stickers on their cars that don’t even have words, just “26.2.” My favorite was a beat-up car with a rather seedy-looking, unshaven smoker inside with the sticker “00.0” on his bumper. Even doing nothing can be fun.

I’ve heard there are people who have made a game out of plastic bag hunting and earn bonus points in their competition by retrieving bags from the tops of trees, barbed-wire fences, creek bottoms, and yards with dogs. I hear they use extension poles, rappelling lines, casting rods, and even drones with hooks. I can’t say that any of these people are my friends, but I’ve heard they’re out there. Inspired by them, I have tried to make an enjoyable game out of hunting dust bunnies under beds and dressers, but have not succeeded. I need a casting rod or dart gun of some kind, so I can say, “Take THAT, you little furry rascal!”

We make fun. When I proposed to my wife long ago, it was in a beautiful wooded spot, and her answer was punctuated by a nearby woodpecker, knocking away on wood for good luck. More than three decades later, whenever either of us hears a woodpecker, we text the other. “Good luck for us.” If we’re together, we smile and hold hands again. Now that’s fun.

If you’re not having fun, you’re not creating it. Nothing is more fun than the act of creation – or re-creation, for that matter. Writing this is fun, even if no one reads it. If you study a piece of music or memorize a poem, it is yours forever, something you can re-create whenever you want. That’s why I used to memorize one line per day with my students and repeat all the ones we owned on the first day of every month.

“Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote….” – Chaucer

“How do I love thee; let me count the ways….” – Elizabeth Barrett Browning

“Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment….” – Will Shakespeare

“When you are old and gray and full of sleep and nodding by the fire….” – W,B. Yeats

“Tree at my window, window tree….” – Robert Frost

“Out of the night that covers me, black as the pit from pole to pole….”

– William Ernest Henley

I have friends out there who can still recite all of these lines and the dozens that follow. Today, they smile when they do it and get a shot of some brain chemical or other.

I think it best to conclude this important blog with the best four-word philosophy I’ve seen on the subject of fun. It’s from a bumper sticker on a dirty old car on the way to a coffee shop where I enjoyed writing this. You’ll get the idea.

Filed Under: Humor, Modern Life, Self help, Social Media Tagged With: bumper stickers, fun, grandchildren, quotations

On Procrastination

March 16, 2015 by kurthaberl Leave a Comment

My last literary suspense novel is now available through Amazon for $4.61 paperback or $2.99 for Kindle download.

When I was teaching high school, I realized eventually (I say “eventually” because I am a slow learner and I think slow learners make the best teachers – not really, but it’s what I told myself) – that one of a teacher’s best tools was a Dayrunner. For those of you under 60, a Dayrunner was a calendar book, a daily planner with sections for birthdays, notes, phone numbers and addresses, and they were usually bound in fake leather with a flap that snapped. Each daily page was sectioned in 15 minute intervals, which was about ten minutes beyond my attention and mid-term memory span. Today your mobile phone and calendar app take its place, and if you’re sentimental about having a Dayrunner, you can still get a case for your phone in fake leather with a flap and snap. I know this for certain.

Since teachers make hundreds of decisions and plan, plan, plan, my Dayrunner was filled with things like: “See Joey about his paper. Sign out two class sets of To Kill a Mockingbird. Reserve the video player for Tuesday. Call Mrs. Jennings about her junior high spelling bee. Call Tech to see why my grading program won’t record attendance. Grade 100 essays.” You get the idea. One of the interesting things about most teachers is that they are eternal optimists, mostly because they think at the speed of light, and imagine that time is so elastic that they can grade 100 essays in only an hour and a half. Those papers will be so wonderfully written that all a teacher will need to do is put stars by insightful passages, circle one comma splice, slap on an “A,” and write, “Paulette, this is the best piece you’ve ever written.”

On bad days, a Dayrunner was a frustrating record of how things can go wrong. Once entries on other people’s Dayrunners come into play, and they start calling YOU at 10:15 as scheduled by them for help with THEIR problem, your morning schedule is pushed off till the afternoon and then the next day, and inevitably, the next week. Eventually, everything important gets done, but often that means the 100 essays are started at 10:00 P.M. on a Sunday night after everyone else had gone to bed. All teachers know what this is like, and it is why they celebrate snow days, not so they can put on cross-country skis to admire Nature, but to deal with the Dayrunner and do papers. A Dayrunner is sort of a Sword of Damocles hanging over a teacher’s head.

Teachers suffer a typical kind of procrastination. They don’t really procrastinate as a general rule; they procrastinate something they dread, like the enormity of 100 essays, for something else that must be done that is less distasteful, like planning a unit that will excite students and make them wonder about Rites of Passage, justice, and the importance of parental example, in other words, To Kill a Mockingbird.

It took me an entire career to learn how to use a Dayrunner effectively, and now no one uses one, so I’m asking you to transfer anything useful that you read here to your calendar app, sticky note, or – worst case scenario – inked on the palm of your hand if you’re a high school girl who had her phone taken away first period because you were cartoon-izing your teacher and her bad hair.

Anti-Procrastination Performance Strategy 1: DO NOT WRITE “GRADE 100 ESSAYS” ANYWHERE IN YOUR DAYRUNNER. Instead, write “Grade 5 essays” in your Dayrunner. I have regularly preached the rewards of reading Anne Lamott’s book on writing called Bird by Bird, the story of how her brother broke down at their family’s summer cabin when he had not started a report to get into a special program and needed it in two days. Anne’s father, to his credit, helped his son do one page on one bird, and then taught him a life lesson: That’s how anything gets done, a project, a book, an education, a life – bird by bird

Is cleaning your house a daunting task? Clean one room every weekday. Want to write a book? Write one page every weekday, and in a year, you’ll have a book, actually too much of a book and you’ll have to cut 75 pages. Is it too daunting to save a million dollars for retirement? (Admittedly, if you’re 60, it’s too late). The pros say the greatest advantage young workers have, which is more important than a lot of money, is time and compounding. How to do it? Put 100 bucks a month into a big, total-market investment like a no-load index fund, and have more put in automatically, so you don’t even know you had it. The next year, put 150 bucks away. If you don’t have an actual career, put 10% of whatever you DO have away until you actually find a career that will pay you more than a hundred bucks a month.

Do you want to build a successful marriage? Do something little for your wife – unasked – first thing every morning (coffee in bed? a shoulder massage?). It’s better than money in the bank. You get the idea. Procrastination is often a result of feeling daunted – the job is too big; there’s not enough time; there isn’t $100,000 to invest, I have over 100 essays to grade. The solution is to forget about the end result, and just take the smallest first step possible.

Last month I shocked a Schwab account guy when I told him I wanted to open a Wilshire 5000 total market investment with 200 bucks a month automatic deposit, using the advantages of time and dollar cost averaging, and he said, “But you’re retired now. You should be taking money OUT of an account.” I told him, “You don’t understand. We’re getting by okay. This investment is for 20 years from now when we will need assisted living care. It’s money I won’t even remember I have. I will put more in by automatic transfer, a little more each year, and my wife or my kids will take it out when I can’t remember my name.” I love small steps because I can do them.

A.P.P.S. 2: DO NOT SCHEDULE EVERY MINUTE OF EVERY DAY. Teachers, especially, are too optimistic about how little time any one task may take. If you are semi-retired like me, I find it works if I limit myself to two things I want to get done in the morning, three things in the afternoon, and two at night. If you’re working full-time, it would only work to put one thing on your list for the morning, two in the afternoon, and one in the evening. If you’re taking your grandson to a water park, as I’m doing today to counter a month of sub-freezing temperatures, all Dayrunner plans are off. Anything else that gets done is just a bonus.

A.P.P.S. 3: PLAN REWARDS AND NEVER, EVER BEAT UP ON YOURSELF FOR A DISTRACTED DAY. We’re all kids at heart. Earned rewards are always more effective than punishments. M and M’s are great for grading papers. Sometimes I tell myself, “If I just finish cleaning the bathroom I’ll reward myself with Downton Abbey,” but for me chocolate works better than anything else to get myself to take that first step.

Sometimes the best thing I can do after a distracted day is to tell myself, “Well, that didn’t go so well.” It’s far better than telling myself, “I’m so stupid, so lazy, so …” There’s a big difference between noting the reality that something didn’t go well and telling yourself you are bad, crazy or worse. Shame is evil.

A.P.P.S. 4: As I’ve reported often, I learn a lot from reading. One of my recent adventures is a very useful book by Charles Duhigg called The Power of Habit. I highly recommend this book. “Power” is the right word in his title. What I have found is that it is possible to take a little thing, make it a habit, and then it no longer needs to be on your Dayrunner list. For me, it is now automatic to get up, stretch for 20 minutes, and then get on our treadmill at a good pace while watching TED talks or some documentary on my iPad for half an hour. I don’t procrastinate because I don’t decide to do it or not do it. I do it almost without thinking, and then, psychologically for me, my Dayrunner morning actually begins after the treadmill. If something interferes, if I am sick or away for a while, it takes me a week or two to re-establish the habit, but that’s not too bad. When I’ve been camping or visiting relatives for a while, often as long as a week, I actually look forward to the feeling of getting back to a routine and some habits that I feel good about. It’s probably chemical, something in my brain. Dopamine, Oxytocin, Serotonin, or Endorphins, one or more of those. If I get a daily D.O.S.E., I’m good for the day. Magically, they come from stretching and walking on a treadmill. Go figure.

Anyway, A.P.P.S. 4 is simply: MAKE A GOOD THING IN YOUR LIFE A HABIT.

A.P.P.S. 5: MEDITATE. I have found that meditation is a game-changer. Procrastination often appears in my head as a clash of bumper cars or the experience being in a room with three TV’s on different channels and two stereos on at full blast at the same time. T.M.I. or too much everything, including worries, a Dayrunner list, next week’s trip, something stupid someone said to me, something stupid I said to someone else, where are my keys, phone, wallet, glasses, or FitBit? I can tell when this bumper car experience is about to happen when I go downstairs to set up a recording of a Turner Classic Movie and don’t even get to the TV because I’m sidetracked by a dirty T-shirt that somehow launched itself to the floor, then a coffee mug perched precariously on the edge of a counter, a coffee pot that is empty but still on, a phone left off its charger that is now blinking at me, the beeping of a finished dryer cycle, a window left slightly open and it might rain – I’m not sure, so I’d better check my weather app – a hiking shoe left in the doorway and where is its mate, and finally why did I come downstairs? It had something to do with the TV, I think. You get the picture.

I don’t think it matters how a person meditates. In the Middle Ages, the monks called in Contemplative Prayer. Sometimes I count breaths and just focus on slowing down. Sometimes I put on headphones and listen to sounds of nature or soothing music. Sometimes I name all the people in my life, beginning with Ann and radiating out as far as I can go and simply bless them. Sometimes I go on an imagined happy journey to a campsite or trout stream. Sometimes I pretend to fly and go on wonderful flights through clouds and over meadows and mountains. (This happens after watching The Sound of Music.) Sometimes I have a conversation with God and tell my Beloved Spirit how I’m feeling, and ask questions and listen. Sometimes I pray a rosary, soon soothed by my own droning repetition as I finger a bead and name a person I intend to bless with that bead. I don’t know if it does anything for them, but it does wonders for me. Sometimes I reach the point where I’m just staring at a blank wall, or maybe I’ll stare at one of Ann’s landscapes, not thinking of much of anything until a brilliant idea comes to me from the depths, or a stupid idea, or no idea at all. It doesn’t matter. I always come out of the trance better off than when I went in. The most important things happen in silence.

From the trance, from the place where the bumper cars and the noise of competing TV’s in my head have shut down, I find I can actually focus, and with no competing voice, I can write a blog I was thinking about or maybe one I was not thinking about. Sometimes after meditation, a blog writes itself.

Filed Under: Modern Life, Self help, Social Media Tagged With: Bird by Bird, Dayrunner, Duhigg, Lamott, Procrastination, reaching, The Power of Habit

The 6 Mistakes We Keep Making through the Centuries

February 27, 2015 by kurthaberl 1 Comment

Following a Trail

(Alert: this is probably one of the more important things I’ve written.)

It’s fun when you start on one journey in reading, and that path leads to unexpected places. That’s what happened last week while I was reading a book by Mark Nepo called Finding Inner Courage. In passing, he mentioned a quotation of Cicero, usually tagged, “Six mistakes mankind keeps making century after century.” It resonated with me, and I thought it deserved to be resurrected and examined more than just in passing.

Marcus Tullius Cicero was born in 106 B.C.E., and was killed by forces in league with Mark Antony in 43 B.C.E., having been named an enemy of the State for writing diatribes against the Second Triumverate in favor of a return to a republic. He was a politician, but his most lasting reputation was that of an orator who affected writers after him for hundreds of years, most notably Petrarch. Others who trod his path were Hume, Locke, Montesque, and probably Thomas Jefferson. One historian wrote that the Renaissance was actually a revival of Cicero, and through him, classical antiquity. We could certainly use him today.

Our first recurring mistake according to Cicero: Believing that personal gain is made by crushing others.

The backstory to this error is the pie theory – if you get a bigger piece of pie, mine will be smaller. The error in this picture is its assumption that the pie doesn’t get bigger, that a Gross National Product never increases, that production doesn’t improve, that new products aren’t developed and greater efficiency never happens. In short, this mistake assumes there is never enough of anything – food, capital, knowledge, stuff. Even with recessions every 25 years or so, data and Warren Buffet contradict this view. Ten years ago we suffered through one of our worst recessions ever, but now the market is up to over 18,000, unemployment is down, and we’re producing more of everything from cars to cell phones. We’re almost back to where we were, and in some ways, we’re better off than then.

There is a corollary mistake, it seems to me. I don’t care how many assets the top 1% of our wealthy accumulate. Each one can have ten mansions and 43 Rolls Royces for all I care. What does bother me are two related things. When they use their money and its power through governments to crush or take advantage of others, I have a problem. Don’t tell me it isn’t happening. It doesn’t bother me if people rise to the top on a level playing field, but that’s not what we have.

The second thing is that all humans, I truly believe, deserve a minimum of safety, housing, food, and health care. We can afford that and don’t need to take away anyone’s mansion. We can’t accept starvation and needless death, especially of innocent children. How we treat our weakest, our infirm, our mentally challenged, and our veterans suffering from PTSD for our sake, is a greater test of who we are than how much affluence is evident in our society. I want some enlightened capitalism. For example, I saw an article in a local Madison paper last week with the headline: More Than Minimum. It noted that one of the independently-owned Culver’s fast food restaurants in Madison paid workers four to eight dollars over the minimum wage per hour, included health care, dental insurance, two weeks of vacation and a contribution to a 401 K account. The owner, Susan Bulgrin, said it was worth it to keep employees working together in an experienced crew rather than re-training temps every two weeks. Besides, she said “It was just the right thing to do.” I don’t eat much fast food, but the next time I do, I know where I’m going. Bulgrin has it right. Hers is now the top performing Culver’s in Wisconsin. It’s on Todd Drive, just off the Beltline near Park Street and Badger Road in Madison.

Seattle understood the same thing when they figured out if they required a higher minimum wage, those workers would spend more money in the community, and it would help everyone in the long run. The pie grows bigger, including a bigger piece for restaurant owners. Pay workers less and an owner might make more money in the short run, perhaps more than he can spend in the community, but the pie grows smaller and more stores will close, including eventually, that owner’s store. Detroit is a good example. If executives keep their high-paying jobs even in mis-managed companies with bad design decisions based on short-term profit, while the workers’ pay is reduced or their jobs cut, the community will fail.

Our second recurring mistake according to Cicero: Worrying about things that cannot be changed or corrected. This worry does not include the first recurring mistake. We don’t need to crush others. There really isn’t that much that fits into this category. There are some health issues, stage 4 cancer for example, that cannot be immediately be corrected. In the long term, I believe everything can be changed. We’ve already found treatments for cancer that add years, if not a lifetime, to diseases that were short-term death sentences 50 years ago. Do you know anyone with polio? Me neither. Everything else can be corrected or changed. (More on that next time). Even when our education system is under attack, is it better than the one-room schoolhouse of two generations ago? Yes. Is it better than the abuse I and my classmates suffered at the hands of a damaged nun in first grade? Yes. We can start by avoiding another fallacy – speaking of education in the U.S. as if it is one terrible monolithic institution. We have great schools and we have terrible schools. Most of the terrible ones are in ghettos or economically depressed areas. We should ignore the test scores, which are mis-interpreted at best and useless at worst. Here’s a better place to start – look at a recent TED talk about new and more human ways to run a business or a school.

http://www.ted.com/talks/ricardo_semler_radical_wisdom_for_a_company_a_school_a_life.html??utm_medium=social&source=email&utm_source=email&utm_campaign=ios-share

Cicero’s advice here makes much more sense on the personal level. I can’t change the people around me beyond requesting something irksome or offensive be stopped. They may not, and then I may choose to leave. There are things we can change. That’s the basis of the “Serenity Prayer” of AA penned by Reinhold Niebuhr and his daughter –

“God, Give us the grace to accept with serenity

the things that cannot be changed, Courage

to change the things which should be changed,

And the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.”

This leads me to a subject of another blog at a later time, the fallacy of the “all or nothing” attitude. The short version is that I don’t believe we can solve most of our problems today. What we can do is make things better; keep making them better over the span of months and years, and then the problems go away. It’s the idea for most things we face. Infrastructure – fix one bridge and road at a time. Schools – improve one at a time. Healthcare, hospitals, dangerous mines, unwanted pregnancies, terrorist plots, unsafe neighborhoods? The only way they can be improved (and probably perfectly fixed) is one at a time. It’s the central idea of another thread, a book by Anne Lamott on how to be successful at writing a book on birds (or anything) by writing bird by bird.

The point of what Cicero said is the futility of worry about things we can’t change. We worry about society, politics, children, traffic, and the weather. One irony here is that some of the people I know who worry the most (or are angry – and anger is worry in action) are very religious people. You’d think their faith would give them reassurance that a higher power is in control, but that doesn’t seem to be happening for them. Deep spirituality matters a lot, but adherence to any one particular religious institution – not so much. We all ought to carry a card that we’d pass on to anyone we meet. It would read: I am a human being with spiritual traits. I am currently on Earth – just along for the ride. It’s an interesting vehicle – this little blue planet. I pick up my own trash. Tell me your story. In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe, it is recommended that we all travel with a towel and don’t panic. I agree.

I also believe and will soon write about the idea that if something is true, its complement is also true. Cicero says this in his next major human mistake: Insisting that a thing is impossible because we cannot accomplish it. History is full of examples of this fallacy.

If you are the politician, engineer, governor, or county road commissioner who believes he can fix every road and bridge in his district – go for it. When I look around, I don’t see it happening. We have had some major surprises, though. People do the seemingly impossible. Ending polio. Sending astronauts to the moon. Dental implants. 3D printers. Smartphones. Solar-powered buildings. Cars that warn of dangers and will soon drive themselves. Sometimes I think the greatest impetus to achieving something remarkable is being told it couldn’t be done. So I’m saying it. I dare anyone out there to prove me wrong. Ha. A cure for pancreatic cancer? Let’s see it. Cicero says you can do it, even though he couldn’t.

Even geniuses could be surprised. If you told Leonardo da Vinci how much a jumbo jet weighed and then said it was about to fly, he would not believe you. Einstein had a hard time believing that over 60% of the energy in the cosmos was in the form of “dark matter” that could not be seen and may perhaps exist only in another dimension that we could not study. He understood the math, but not the enigma. Mere milkmaids cured smallpox, although Edward Jenner got the credit. The “un-doable” is a long list: pyramids, heart surgery, detached retina surgery, memorizing the Bible, Fitbits, GPS devices that can find small trout streams in the middle of Wisconsin coulee country, bionic replacement parts, and even this “olde” iPad and Bluetooth keyboard on which I blog. If I write this blog again a year from now, who knows what could be added to the list in that short time. Cicero is right – we advance technologically and keep making the same six philosophical mistakes over and over again.

Mistake number 4: Refusing to set aside trivial preferences. We all have experienced family feuds, perhaps not the deadly ones between families, but the ones inside a family – Aunt Tillie won’t be in the same room with Uncle Marco because he made some disparaging, not-funny joke about her potato salad in 1987. Okay here’s one… I’m writing this inside the terminal of the Milwaukee airport (that’s another story) at a table next to a wonderful Colectivo Coffee lounge, and three sparrows just hopped by on the carpeting next to me looking for crumbs from my table. I’m used to this at the Terrace of the University of Wisconsin Memorial Union, but inside the terminal? I know people who would be horrified and would move. I think they’re cute, and I don’t plan on moving. Here’s one of my friends on the carpeting next to me.

Perhaps it would help if we could actually distinguish the trivial from the monumental. We’ve all had plenty of practice. I once thought in second grade that having a box of 24 crayons in a class where everyone had a box of 48 was a monumental disaster. Now we all know better …. ooooh, was that a Mercedes 17000 XL that just drove by my eight-year-old Honda? You get the idea.

The more I think about this, the more I am convinced that almost everything is trivial. A car model shouldn’t matter. Whether or not the car runs – that’s at least important. If you live downtown in a city with good public transportation, a car may not matter at all. Whether you write on a three-year-old iPad or the newest laptop doesn’t matter. Whether or not you are writing – that matters. Bathroom style – doesn’t matter. Toilet that flushes – that matters. If you look around, you can make your own list.

Cicero’s point is that the relationships we have and the faux pas and trivial events that we allow to affect them should be set aside for more important issues, such as the depth of the relationship. Some day I should blog about the trail of faux pax I have made that caused Ann to roll her eyes. It would be a long list. We’re still happily married. She understands trivia, and I’m learning.

Human Mistake Number 5 – Neglecting development and refinement of the mind. Face it, we live inside our minds, and our bodies are smaller than our minds. I’ve listened to some people whose minds seem to be unweeded gardens. I don’t listen to them for long. I’ve listened to other people whose minds seem to fill the room. Their positive energy, love of life, interest in people and ideas, knowledge of history, and wide experiences make it worthwhile to be with them – along for the ride on this little blue planet.

I’m working on developing myself and recommend it. During any given week, I’m reading some classic that has stood the test of time (currently Antony and Cleopatra), some non-fiction (currently Nepo’s Finding Inner Courage), daily Bible chapters and something else spiritual (currently re-reading Joel Goldsmith’s The Infinite Way), my hobby (currently Ernest Schweibert’s book on stream nymphs – um, of the insect variety), and something modern (currently Donna Leon’s mystery series set in Venice).

I quit watching the news on TV when I concluded it was mostly bad, mostly about incidents of violence, and according to recent studies – mostly untrue. I’m talking about a range of 45% to 83% untrue, depending on the network. I look at headlines online and avoid reading any articles that are negative, attacks on individuals, or sensational. I know next to nothing about current Hollywood and network stars, and I’m almost proud of it. Katy who? There are a few thoughtful writers I trust but do not always agree with. I will read almost anything by Malcolm Gladwell, David Brooks, Paul Krugman, Anne Lamott, John Nichols, Maureen Dowd, Daniel Pink, or Ray Kurzweil. I watch TED talks online while I walk on a treadmill every weekday. I realized that I was terrible at reading music, so I bought a series of instructional DVD’s on learning the piano, so now I’m studying it, not just playing it.

I challenge you to do likewise, whatever developing yourself means to you. I recommend avoiding anything on TV, the net, or papers that induces fear in you, or worse – anger. Anger is poison. The Hunger Games, Game of War, and 50 Shades of Grey are infections. Read Cicero instead. Play chess. Play with your kids and grandkids. It’s amazing what you can learn from them.

Cicero’s Last Continuing Mistake – and Probably the Most Important – Attempting to convince others to believe and live as we do.

I recently read an eye-opening book by Parker Palmer called Healing the Heart of America. He cites studies in which people show a marked tendency to watch only programs that already fit their world political view, and when confronted with facts or events that contradict that view, they only become more set in that view and look for support elsewhere. Facts become meaningless if they do not support their view. This closed-mindedness is often coupled with a fruitless propensity to try to change everyone else’s point of view. I believe his studies are true. The implication for me is a resolve to avoid pointless arguments on politics, religion, or science, especially on Facebook. Instead, I only want to comment in the interest of truth with “That’s not true. Here’s a reliable source.” I may post something surprising without comment in the interest of truth, but even there, I’ve had to follow up with a modification or correction when I learned something additional. I’ve not had any total retractions that I can remember. I am shocked at how easily people repost the most outrageous, scandalous charges without looking anywhere to see if any of it was true. Then I realize there was a time when I was that guy. I don’t go there anymore. It’s like stepping into a tar pit. Tar pits are full of dead dinosaurs, so unable to understand anything different that they got stuck where they were and died. Don’t die in a tar pit. Go along for the ride with me on this little blue planet. Bring a towel and don’t panic. Oh, look, there’s a trout stream in a meadow. You don’t need to find a better universe next door; it’s right here. Let’s go.

Filed Under: Modern Life, Philosophy, Self help, Social Media Tagged With: Anne Lamott, Antony and Cleopatra, Bible, Cicero, Culvers, Daniel Pink, David Brooks, Joel Goldsmith, John Nichols, Malcolm Gladwell, Mark Nepo, Maureen Dowd, Parker Palmer, Paul Krugman, Ray Kurzweil, Reinhold Niebuhr, Rocardo Semler, Serenety Prayer, Susan Bulgrin, TED Talks

TMI

August 27, 2013 by kurthaberl Leave a Comment

You can download Hibernal, my recent literary suspense novel after Shakespeare’s classic A Winter’s Tale, for your Kindle for $2.99. If you like intrigue, the trials and triumphs of love, humor, and fascinating characters, it’s worth a click at the Kindle store.

Go to: http://www.amazon.com/Hibernal-ebook/dp/B006VZ175U/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1377633229&sr=1-1&keywords=kurt+haberl

The paperback is available as well through Amazon.

TMI – This is a problem/solution entry; one I think is part a growing pandemic. Picture this. There is a character in Great Expectations named Matthew Pocket, an educated and kindly father completely incapable of dealing with the little household crises that arise in his family, and his usual reaction is one of overwhelming desperation in which he grabs his own hair and lifts himself six inches out of his chair. It’s a wonderful image that catches a character with remarkable accuracy.

We are all Matthew Pocket. If you haven’t felt overwhelmed lately, either by news (nearly all bad), economic forecasts (nearly all inaccurate), or advertising (buy this new scented shampoo, better yet, buy this “must read” book), just Google “cold remedies” and see what happens. Yes, the result you see in the upper left hand corner is correct – 19,100,000 hits. All of them certainly are accurate because they’re published on the internet, right? The Google staff removes all inaccurate posts, right? I might be sensitive about this topic of Too Much Information because of the amount of paper coming into our house (The Capital Times, New Yorker, New York Times, two Waterloo hometown papers, not to mention AARP, fishing magazines, The Isthmus, and my favorite The Onion). We have stacks of books (currently The Pickwick Papers, You are a Badass, a good self-help book for artists, Montaigne’s Essays – the never ending collection of essays, actually – Rachel Maddow’s Drift, my worn Jerusalem Bible) and whatever else our teacher/professor neighbors send over. When driving to Evanston to play with our grandson, I listen to a 75 CD series on the history of Western Literature (not for everyone), Harry Potter, more self-help readings, and anything else Ann brings home from the library. Self-induced TMI overdose. I’m not a TV addict because most of the weekly shows are worse than junk food, but I do watch Masterpiece Theater (currently airing Poirot mysteries) and whatever sports season is in.

You get the idea.

I, and I suspect everyone, is drowning in information, entertainment, viewing choices, and an onslaught of advertising, “Look at This!” OMG, breaking news, the market is up, the market is down, can you believe what that politician just said/did/questioned/voted for/voted against? TOO MUCH INFORMATION If you have a full-time job, and after retiring from teaching, I don’t, you might be helped a little by the limits on your time not at work, but even then, if you’re ever on vacation or sick for a day, it’s surprising how much email can pile up, and that’s assuming you have a decent spam filter. What can a thinking, reading, semi-informed person do?

I have seven suggestions. They have preserved the little sanity I still possessed when I left home.

1. My friends are my Angie’s List. I highly recommend Goodreads, the site much like a Facebook for readers. It’s a link to my friends’ recommendations and it allows me to rate books as well. With the bothersome exception of political emails friends pass on without checking them at all (and there are some emails from friends and relatives I simply delete without opening), I read/buy/watch/listen to very little that does not have a friend’s recommendation. Whether it’s Youtube, TED talks, music, books, concerts, or audiotapes, I waste my time on almost nothing unless it comes with a recommendation. I don’t surf the web much anymore; I fish. If you have the good sense or luck to marry someone who reads a lot, gathers friends like lint, and will watch anything that moves on TV, you have your own Angie”s List available every day. In return, I make the best hot, buttered popcorn in Madison and have learned to concoct a really good carbonated water and lemonade drink to go with it. I follow the Mafia rule: We don’t let in nobody wit’ out nobody’s recommendation.

2. Watch TV consciously. I focus on what I know will be good. My wife accuses me of watching only “happy TV,” and that is mostly true. I’ve seen enough cars and buildings blowing up and innocent people killed to last a lifetime, so most adventure/killer/action/suspense films and the news in general are usually like sour milk to me. Even some movies and shows that have won awards I may watch for ten minutes and then leave the room, saying only, “I don’t like any of these people.” How do I fish? I will watch almost any Turner Classic Movie, almost any romantic comedy (a weakness, I know), and anything with Meryl Streep, Cary Grant, Woody Allen, or Matt Damon. It’s not because they are the best actors; it’s because they are the best readers, and what they do is interesting. Your list will certainly be different but what matters is that you have a list. Anything by Bill Murray is reliably goofy. Steve Martin is both funny and poignant. Jane Austen knows emotions. The point is to know what you like.

3. Take breaks from all input. A bike ride, a canoe ride, trout fishing in a stream, daily meditation, are all silence breaks that halt the assault on my psyche and wallet. A crossword puzzle is a break from TMI because it forces me to focus, think, and search my little grey brain cells that haven’t been searched in a long time. Will Shortz, who edits the NY Times puzzles, may have done more to stave off Alzheimers than anyone or anything.

4. If I have a question about a movie, I check out the site by a former student who knows more about movies than anyone else I know: Brian Welk. He’s at brianwelk.com. I highly recommend adding him to your “Angie’s List.”

5. I avoid anything with “Dumb,” “Fail,” “Redneck,” or “America’s Funniest” in the title. I avoid Jennifer Aniston, with the exception of the cult classic Office Space. I avoid murder and violence unless it is offstage, usually the case with Poirot, Miss Marple, and Hitchcock. I avoid drug movies, fast cars, crashing cars, flying cars, burning cars and exploding cars. I no longer watch war films, hostage films, or genocide films. To me, the Age of Glorious War is over, and probably never was. And finally, I avoid any contest that is not really a sport, including dancing, survival, obstacle courses made out of sponges, and who gets fired this week by the insufferable Donald Trump. I don’t recommend you do what I do on this one; do what works for you.

6. Take a reality check. Most of the information thrown at you is not true. Since I’ve been involved in publishing, I’ve learned that the space in the surviving bookstores is rented, and the tables by the entrance with stacks of books and a giant cutout of some vampire/movie star/politician/waif or mockingjay are prime real estate rented in a bookstore at a very high price. Pay no attention to advertising that sounds too good to be true or includes the words “Save, for a limited time only, you don’t want to miss, you gotta’ have,” or “Blowout Sale.” I try to follow my own rules: Here’s my book; here’s what it’s about; here’s what it costs; here’s what readers say about it; here’s where you can get it.

7. Use every mute button available. My car radio has six well-used preset buttons. The “mute” letters on our TV clicker is worn off. Better yet, tape or DVR Jon Stewart and fast-forward through the commercials. I really like the 30-second jump ahead button on some controllers that means I can hit the skip button six times and automatically go the the next part of the program. I’ve learned to digest newspapers by reading every headline and then one or two articles. For my own peace of mind and for the greater good of my country, I now avoid all “attack” programs which have shown themselves to be mostly inflammatory rather than accurate.

Eventually, I believe we will all figure out this “internets” thing and will vote with our computers, attention, and dollars. Something that goes viral will be a good thing.

Filed Under: Humor, Modern Life, Self help, Social Media Tagged With: Anthony McAuliffe, Donald Trump, Great Expectations, Hitchcock, Jon Steward, Miss Marple, Office Space, poirot, Rachel Maddow, TMI

Peace

April 24, 2013 by kurthaberl Leave a Comment

April 23, is generally regarded as Shakespeare’s most likely birthday, so it would be appropriate to begin with one of his quotations.

“Expectation is the root of all heartache.”

Some think he never said that, since scholars can’t find it in his plays, but that doesn’t matter if the plays were all written by Edward de Vere anyway. Who knows?

The complement to this is the title of the Dickens novel, Great Expectations. As I’ve written before, if something is true, I believe its complement is also true. I love paradoxes. As a retired teacher, I know the power of expectations in a classroom, where behavior and learning are so certainly a function of expectations. A teacher who expects little from his students will most certainly get it. It seems to me that in professional relationships, like those in teaching, which over time become personal, great expectations matter. That may be largely due to an unspoken statement akin to, “I have great confidence in you. You can do this difficult thing.”

Great expectations on a personal level, however, may be sure to bring disappointment. Wives and husbands could keep counselors employed for generations on this source of difficulty, never mind issues of debt, affairs, or addictions. I wonder how many times such sessions began with “I thought he was…” or “She should ….”, “Why doesn’t he …” or “If only she would ….” This doesn’t mean married people should have no expectations of each other. Common courtesy, loyalty, a willingness to help, a willingness to listen, a place of emotional safety, and shared long-term goals are things that matter. No marriage should be in trouble, though, because of the replacement of toilet paper, the position of a toilet seat, or a woman’s underthings drying on any available horizontal pole or doorknob. (I’m not saying my wife does this, mind you.)

Expectations are an intensity multiplier. Take the Super Bowl, for example. It’s still fun for me to watch a championship game played at the highest level, even if I’m not a fan of either team. I will always favor one side a little, but if my team loses, I’m not going to go out into the streets to overturn cars, set trash cans on fire, or break windows. If my team wins, I’m not going to go out into the streets to overturn cars, etc. If I really am a fan (short for “fanatic”) of a team, I may experience highs and lows that come from each individual play and range from extreme anger (that ref called WHAT?) to extreme elation, (Take THAT, in your face, you jerk!) Such extremes may be tolerable, perhaps even preferable for those who enjoy a sport, one of our substitutes for outright war, but I don’t recommend it as a way to live one’s life.

In the 60’s we youth (yes, there was such a time) used to tell each other, “Peace and love,” which kids of the 80’s turned into “Peace out.” It was the primary way many of us fought the Viet Nam war. There is something to be said for that attitude. Emotional highs and lows are not nearly as healthy as a whole series of little highs. If you don’t expect your wife to fill up the car with gas, but she does, what a nice present that is. If a husband isn’t expected to clean the bathroom, but he does, what a nice present that is. The point is that expectations always carry judgment, and it’s so much healthier to simply observe what is, rather than judge what ought to be but is not.

This is one of the primary ways in which a person lives a life in peace. Because I cannot control other people, games, the weather (ah yes, the weather lately), the timeliness of other people’s arrival, traffic, the news, politics, where birds deposit excretions, which direction the wind is blowing, or what someone just said to me, the solution is not rage, disappointment in expectations, or depression. To misquote Shakespeare or Edward de Vere, “All the world’s a TV show.” If you don’t like what you see, don’t throw the candy dish at the screen or yell at your kids, change the channel. Observe with interest, and if you don’t like what you see, look at something else. You have the TV clicker for your life. It’s in your pocket right now. Peace out, everyone.

Filed Under: Modern Life, Philosophy, Self help, Social Media Tagged With: expectations, Marriage, peace, Shakespeare, sports, Viet Nam war

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