Talking to yourself is either a sign of intelligence or mental instability

A few minutes ago I walked past a co-worker who was mumbling under his breath. I asked, "Are you talking to yourself?" And he replied, "Well, I'm the only one who will listen!"

On the spectrum of Corny Office Small Talk, this ranks right up there with "Working hard? Hardly working!" and "Thank God it's Friday, huh?"

But there is also some truth to it.

I talk to myself a lot.

A. Lot.

To the point that I'm fairly certain I say more words out loud to myself each day than I do to Terry or anyone else in the world.

People will walk past my closed office door, peek in and see my mouth moving, and assume I'm in a Teams meeting or on a call. They will make that thumb-and-pinky-extended-near-the-ear gesture, which is of course the universal request to "Call me!"

This will momentarily confuse me until I realize what's going on, and usually I wave for them to come into my office. When they do, I explain, "Sorry, I was just telling myself I need to remember to write that organizational announcement email today!"

They will then look at me uneasily with an expression that suggests, "Wow, I had no idea Scott was insane."

I talk through virtually everything with myself. And rarely are these conversations silent and internal. They are almost always broadcast loudly to anyone who happens to be nearby.

This is OK when I'm driving and loudly saying to myself, "I think I need to turn left up here, right? Or do I keep going straight? Maybe I should have used Google Maps!" No one hears my crazed rantings then.

But when it happens in the grocery store, I notice other shoppers give me a wide berth. I'll be standing near the canned fish products and saying (in a voice that can clearly be heard two aisles over) "WHY DO THEY ONLY HAVE THE SARDINES IN HOT SAUCE? I DON'T WANT THE SARDINES IN HOT SAUCE, I WANT THE SARDINES IN WATER. WHO BUYS THE SARDINES IN HOT SAUCE? NO ONE, THAT'S WHO."

I take consolation in the fact that, the older you get, the more acceptable this behavior seems to become. It goes from "scary" and "potentially threatening" to "cute" and "eccentric."

Right now I'm somewhere in between.

Over and over I tell myself – loudly and proudly, even when no one else is in the room – that it's OK and I'm not at all crazy.

Which of course is exactly what a crazy person would say to himself.

I never anticipated being at the top of my game in my mid-50s

Three times I asked the AI Blog Post Image Generator for a photo of a "happy 50-year-old white man." This is what I got.

If you would have asked me when I was 18 at what age I would "peak," I probably would have said 30 or 35.

And sure enough, life really was good in my 30s.

But it's even better now at age 54, and I didn't see that coming.

None of us knows what's around the next corner of our lives, but at this moment, I can say things are humming along way better than I would have anticipated.

I have no chronic pain, I get to exercise regularly, I have a job I enjoy at a company that appreciates me, my family continues to be awesome despite my influence, and I engage in hobbies that are a heck of a lot of fun.

Like I said, any or all of that can change on a moment's notice. I have no idea what God has in store for me (read the book of Job for a case study in "whoa, didn't see that coming").

But right now, in 2024, my cup pretty well runneth over.

I have as much energy now as I did 25 years ago, though that's partly because we had a house full of little kids 25 years ago that made me chronically tired.

Still, I remain able to go hard from dawn to dusk and generally accomplish a lot of things in the course of a day that I find satisfying, both personally and professionally.

I have earned none of this privilege, by the way. I am entitled to zero of these blessings. And again, bad news could come tomorrow that puts a damper on all of it.

But right now, at this point in my life's journey, I am happy, relatively care-free, vibrant, and maybe a tad less dumb than I used to be.

(Still relatively dumb, of course, but getting smarter in slow, painful increments.)

And that's enough.

Whatever is coming down the road, my experience is that life begins at 50.

Who knew?

A small phone that fits in my pocket vs. a larger phone that I can actually, you know, see

Unless you're a woman who regularly wears pants and keeps your phone in your pocket (and I'm sure there are many), this may be an issue only for men of a certain age.

My age, to be specific.

I have an iPhone SE. It was provided by my employer, who also pays the monthly bill for it. Free phone, free data. That's a deal I can get behind.

This phone fits easily into my pants pockets, whether I'm wearing dress pants or jeans. Its relative portability is one of its strong points, as far as I'm concerned.

But there is a price to pay for a smaller phone.

If, like me, you have reached a point in life where reading glasses are a key element of your daily existence, a small phone screen can be a problem. You can't always tell what you're looking at when watching a video or looking at a photo. Text defaults to an impossibly tiny point size unless you're proactive in doing something about it.

It is, in short, quite often a pain.

I have thought about upgrading to a larger phone and footing the bill myself, but the issues there are patently obvious:

1. The whole "footing the bill myself" thing
2. The inability to stuff said phone conveniently into a pants pocket

The solution is likely a foldable phone. The trouble there? I'm an Apple/iPhone guy, and currently available foldable phones are all Android/Google-based. Apple is planning to release a foldable phone, but last I checked, this little piece of technology is at least two years away from hitting the market.

I could be legally blind by that point.

On balance, I guess I'll keep my free SE and squint every morning as I watch NHL hockey highlights on its tiny screen.

It's better than carrying around a much larger device, at least for me.

You know you're first-world spoiled when something like this is among the toughest issues you're wrestling with in life.

I should be more motivated to brush up on my French before we head to the Olympics

Nice job with a "stereotypical French guy" photo, AI Blog Post Image Generator!

One of my favorite things about traveling to French-speaking areas of the world is getting the chance to put my 14 years of French language education to use.

As I've chronicled here before, I grew up in a school district where everybody took French in 1st through 6th grades. I continued taking it throughout middle and high schools, and nearly pulled off a minor in the subject with three years of additional French classes at John Carroll University.

The result has been that, on my eight or nine combined trips to Montreal and Paris over the years, I've been able to hold my own when it came to ordering in a restaurant, asking directions, getting answers to simple questions on the street, etc.

Actually, I've held my own in Paris much more than in Montreal. The Quebecois accent is such that my Parisian French education, combined with my Northeast Ohio inflection, renders me as unintelligible to some Montrealers as they are to me.

The point is, I know some French. Having not used it much, I read it much better than I speak it.

My daughter Elissa had almost as much French education as me and has taken actual French classes in recent years as an adult. She and I (along with Terry and Elissa's boyfriend Mark) are scheduled to arrive in Paris 16 weeks from today to take in some Summer Olympics events and generally see the sites as we're able.

I figure that, with our collective French proficiency and past experience in Paris, we should navigate just fine in the City of Light.

But I'm not going out of my way to review French vocabulary and syntax before we jet off to the continent. I should, but I'm not.

There are any number of excuses I can give for this, but the reality is that I'm simply a lazy American.

Language-wise (and many other wises), we are among the most spoiled people on earth. There are few places we can go where people won't either willingly speak English to us, or else roll their eyes and switch to English because we're obviously not going to make the effort to learn their language.

This is even worse because I mostly know their language. It wouldn't take much for me to get back into Francophone shape, but especially with a multi-cultural event like the Olympics, it will be easy to get around using only English.

I'm hoping to get more motivated between now and early August, but don't bet on it.

C'est la vie.

At some point in a marriage, you've pretty much seen everything you're going to see

She has read the whole book that is her husband and she still sticks around.

No matter who you are, you have a limited number of funny stories and jokes.

You have a finite list of special talents and tricks.

You have a set amount of quirky habits and preferences.

You have certain faces you make, certain things you say, certain nervous ticks, certain chewing noises, certain ways of sleeping, certain favorite movies and TV shows, certain likes and dislikes, and certain ways you behave, speak, and just generally exist.

You are not, in short, a well of infinite possibility. You are human, and there is only so much another person can uncover.

If that person is your spouse, there comes a time when they have essentially seen the entirety of You.

I don't know exactly how long you have to be married for that to happen, but it probably takes considerably less than 10 years for them to have experienced 99% of what you have to offer.

That's the point when, if they decide to stick around, you know they love you.

Unconditionally.

Terry has heard every one of my little anecdotes. She has a thorough understanding of my faults and shortcomings, along with my good points. She can generally guess how I'm going to act and react in any given situation.

There is very little I say or do that surprises her.

The same is true for me when it comes to her.

And yet here we are, 32 years down the road of marriage and more than 38 years into our relationship. Without ever actually saying it, we have come to an agreement that despite anything about us that is less than attractive, the positives outweigh the negatives and we're going to ride it out together as long as we can.

That's my favorite thing about being in a long-term relationship: You've seen the entire show, yet you're sticking around for whatever comes next...even if you're pretty certain you know what it is.

With apologies to Benny Goodman, Bette Midler and anyone else who has ever performed the song, that right there is the story of, that's the glory of, love.

The day is finally here! Yes, my nephew's birthday (what day did you think I meant?)

I don't know what year this was, but my choice of full-body thermal underwear suggests I was about to embark on an Arctic expedition of some sort. That's my nephew Mark on the right.

Oh, I guess it's also Eclipse Day for those of us fortunate enough to be in the path of totality. As I write these words on March 13th, I have no idea what the weather will be in Northeast Ohio for the big event. But even if it's cloudy, I'm hoping the sudden mid-afternoon darkness will at least be worth going outside for.

Anyway, what I meant was that my nephew Mark turns 49 years old today. Nine years ago, I wrote a tribute to him on his 40th birthday. Now, a year from his 5-0 milestone, I hope you have a minute to go back and read about an awesome husband, father and lover of Oasis. Click here to give that 2015 post a look.

As for me, I'm going to dig out those long johns and head outside this afternoon to take in whatever celestial spectacle the skies over Wickliffe will afford.

Happy Mark/Eclipse Day!

My greatest Facebook fear is using the wrong reaction button

 

I've always liked the fact that Facebook offers a wide range of reactions you can click in response to someone's post or comment.

"Like" and "Love" simply didn't offer a sufficiently broad palette of sentiment. They have been augmented over time by Care, Haha, Wow, Sad and Angry.

Together, these little clickable emojis are like the Seven Dwarves of Emotion, and I use them liberally.

The only potential pitfall – and it's a big one – is ensuring I choose the correct reaction to any given post or comment.

Specifically, my biggest fear is that I'll choose the wrong one on someone's heartfelt post and immediately continue scrolling without realizing my error.

Every time someone posts about the death of a loved one and I click on a reaction (often in addition to leaving a comment), I check, double check and triple check that it's the correct reaction.

I have nightmares that a friend posts their mom's obituary and I mistakenly click on "Haha!" in reaction to the news, rather than the little heart-toting Care button.

It almost feels inevitable that this will happen eventually, and it hangs over me in ways that Mark Zuckerberg and team can never prevent.

Anyone who knows me will automatically understand it was done in error, but that doesn't take away the shame of appearing to laugh at someone else's tragedy.

"Your mom died? That's hilarious!"

Like I said, it's only a matter of time before it happens, no matter how diligent I am.