Learning to live in the now...now

As I type this, I'm sitting in Starbucks with a mocha light frappuchino and a piece of coffee cake, and all is right with the world.

It has taken me the better part of four decades to learn that. Dozens of times a day, I get to do things that make me happy, and for most of my life I've been utterly incapable of appreciating them. It has always been about accomplishing The Next Big Thing, whatever that may be...a new job, another child, running a marathon, whatever. I always find myself on the way to doing something, rather than enjoying what I'm doing at the time.

Does anyone else have trouble with the whole Living in the Moment thing? I do, but I'm happy to say that if nothing else, the year 2011 has made me (a) recognize what I was missing, and (b) start to learn how to enjoy the present.

Terry always says I don't know how to relax, and honestly, she's right. I'm always moving, always planning, always restless. What's wrong with just sitting? Why can't I do nothing at all and not feel guilty about it? Well, I'll tell you what, that's going to change. The only goal I'm setting for 2012 is that by this time next year, I'm going to be a pro at doing nothing. I'll be the king of inactivity.

That's not to say that productivity is bad. We all lead busy lives, and stuff has to get done. Nothing wrong there. But being in Accomplishment Mode 100% of the time is bad for you in so many ways, as I've learned over the last several months (funny what an E.R. visit for chest pains will do for you). Slowing down is not the same as slacking.

Of course, having the option to relax is a byproduct of living in a crazily affluent society like ours. If you're constantly worrying where your next meal is coming from, sitting under a tree reading poetry isn't as much of a viable choice. So simply living where we do is a reason to be thankful, and I am.

I suppose these are the kinds of things we think about on the cusp of a new year. It's a good time for reassessment, reflection and planning. We set New Year's resolutions, and if you're as tightly wound as I am, they're usually laughably unrealistic and you're forced to give up on them by mid-January. I've finally come to the realization that one modest resolution fulfilled is a thousand times more valuable than 10 crazy resolutions left to die.

How come nobody told me that 20 years ago? Well, actually, my mom did, and still does. I always thought I was one of those people who was good at listening to what their mother tells them, but I suppose not. My mom's constant admonitions to slow down and relax have, for the most part, gone unheeded.

But not this year. Not this time around. For my family's sake, and for my own sake, I guess, it's time to learn how to dial it down a notch or ten. What worries me, though, is that even as I write those words, I'm thinking to myself, "I've spent too long on this post. Gotta finish up and get some other stuff done."

Apparently this isn't going to be easy...

Ten random thoughts on a Friday

1. Crayon colors I could do without: Burnt sienna, cornflower, pine green, either red orange or orange red (one or the other...we don't need both).
   
   
2. Crayon colors I like: Silver, brick red, forest green, cerulean, raw umber.
   
   
3. This week between Christmas and New Year's Day is the strangest one of the year. Some people are working, some aren't. Some businesses are open, some aren't. My inclination is to say that everyone and everything should just shut down, but there are certain stores I need to stay open this week because I want to shop there. If we could all just agree to make me Holiday Czar, the whole thing would work out fine.
   
   
4. This is sort of awkward, but how come no one bothered to tell me that Ernest Borgnine and Abe Vigoda were still alive? And while we're on the subject, how can that be?
   
   
5. If I'm flipping through channels and I come across an episode of "M*A*S*H," I will always stop and watch. Always.
   
   
6. Every Tuesday, Terry babysits a little girl named Ava. It's a nice way for her to earn some extra cash, and our whole family just loves little Ava. Chloe has taken on Ava-watching responsibilities during this Christmas break, and the other day I saw her changing Ava's diaper. And do you know what? I realized I miss changing diapers. Never in a million years did I think I would ever say that, but it has been awhile since we had any diaper-wearers in the house, and I actually miss it. It was always a nice little bonding time with the child in question. Of course, I understand perfectly that if given the responsibility of changing diapers again, I would get sick of it after maybe two changings. I know that. But for now, I officially (sort of) miss it.
   
   
7. I wish I had time to read magazines. I've always thought that magazine readers were smarter than the rest of us. Maybe I'm wrong there.
   
   
8. This will almost certainly be the first time in history that someone has typed this sentence, but it's true: I wish I had learned to play the bassoon.
   
   
9. Because of my big head, I don't often wear hats of any kind. They just don't look good on me. I am deeply envious of all you tiny-headed hat-wearers.
   
   
10. For the second Christmas in a row, we gave Jared a gift card to Baker's Square to buy his own pie. The boy loves pie, LOVES it. Last year he got a pumpkin pie and ate the whole thing by himself in less than 24 hours. I'm sure he'll do it again this year. He eats like this all the time, and I doubt he weighs more than a buck-30. I understand the whole teenage-boy-metabolism thing, but seriously, how can he not be 300 pounds? He defies all known laws of physics and biology. Again, I'm jealous and baffled.

Driving Daddy crazy

Exactly 116 days from today, my daughter Chloe can get her temporary driver's license.

I know this because Chloe takes it upon herself to keep me updated on the Chloe Driving Countdown. This has been going on for the last year or so. We'll pass each other in the house and she'll casually mention, "You know, I can drive in four months." As if this is the single greatest thing that will ever happen to me and my life will be complete once she gets that learner's permit.

(QUESTION: Am I dating myself by calling it a "learner's permit?" Does anyone call it that anymore? Or did that phrase go out with the last episode of the "Love Boat?")

Anyway, having already taught Elissa to drive, I'm fairly confident I know what I'm doing. I took Elissa down to the high school parking lot on Sunday evenings for her first few times behind the wheel. The parking lot is undertstandably deserted on Sundays, which is good when you're trying to give the widest possible berth to someone whose grasp of which one is the gas pedal and which one is the brake pedal isn't exactly solid.

I would have Elissa drive around and around and around the school, just to give her a feel for accelerating, steering, stopping, parking, not running into stationary objects, etc. Then, just to mix it up and really live on the wild side, we would turn around and drive the other way around the school. It was almost too much for her to take in.

I was telling someone recently about the first time I had Elissa drive in traffic. We were near the end of one of our circle-the-high-school-57-times sessions when I said, "OK, now drive home." And her response was classic: "You mean on the road?" Yes, on the road. You'll find that that's the generally accepted method of traveling from one location to another: on a paved road.

Now understand, it's not like I was asking her to drive across the country or anything. It's maybe three-quarters of a mile from where we were parked to our house. But it's up a big hill and there are stop signs and yellow lines involved, and the whole thing can be a little intimidating to a newbie driver, I suppose. But Elissa was game, so she pulled out onto Rockefeller Road slowly, just as I had instructed her.

Actually, she took the "slowly" part a little too seriously. As we started climbing the hill to get back to our house, Elissa pushed the gas pedal down a full one-sixteenth of an inch, bringing us up to the mind-boggling speed of 12 MPH. And of course there was a car behind us. (As it turned out, the driver was our friend Jim McIntyre, who was actually on his way to our house, too, so it was OK. But he was required by the Guy's Code of Sarcasm to let Elissa know that she was a reckless driver who really needed to slow down out there.)

Anyway, we did eventually get home, though as I recall it took about an hour. And Elissa did eventually learn to break the 20-MPH mark and is now a licensed driver...a pretty good one, too. Having a third driver in the house is a handy thing when you have young kids, we find. Which is why I don't mind Chloe getting her license.

Whenever I'm out driving and Chloe is in the car with me, she likes to make these "vroom vroom" sounds, like she's 5 years old and pretending to drive the car herself. This makes me think that we're going to have the opposite problem with her and that staying under the speed limit may be a challenge. Maybe we need to institute a "no vroom vroom" rule.

All I'm saying is, if you happen to be in Wickliffe on a Sunday evening this spring, you might want to stay away from the high school parking lot. Consider this your warning.

What your choice of board game says about you

We're a board game kind of family.

And by "board" game, I don't just mean the ones where you roll a dice and move a little piece around a sheet of pressed cardboard, though Lord knows we have dozens of those. I also mean checkers, chess, cribbage, Scrabble, and Yahtzee, and oodles and oodles of card games.

In our downstairs storage room is a seven-foot cabinet filled top to bottom with almost every game you can imagine. We never lack for choices.

One reason we like board games is because we like winning. If there's one thing I've passed down to my kids, it's a competitive streak. I like to win. They like to win. There is little mercy expected and almost none shown during one of our family board game sessions. You might think, "But isn't it about having fun?" And we would respond, "Yes, but isn't the greatest kind of fun seeing an opponent land on Boardwalk and Park Place when you own them with hotels, and watching the other person burst into tears as they hand over the small fortune in Monopoly money they've spent 2 1/2 hours accumulating?"

We like to play virtually anything, but there's a subtle message conveyed in the specific board game you select. Like the car you drive or the clothes you wear, a board game says something about you. Here's what I'm talking about:

CLUE
People who like to play Clue are violent sociopaths. They have no interest in free-market real estate (Monopoly), choosing a career and raising a family (Life), or out-and-out lying (Balderdash). They want a game that involves the gruesome bludgeoning or stabbing death of a rich guy, and the subsequent trial, conviction and execution of the murderer (who, by the way, always seems to be Colonel Mustard when I play). Be careful, because if you beat them at Clue, they're liable to reenact the murder scene with you playing the part of Mr. Boddy. Just saying.

BATTLESHIP
Battleship is a game of luck. Winning is random, unless you're playing a little kid who packs their ships into that compact "I have no idea what I'm doing" square of doom. I'm not saying that being a good Battleship player is the equivalent of being a good slot machine player, but....well, yes, actually I am saying that. They're both hit and miss. But hey, there's no shame in the fact that you lack deductive reasoning or any other socially redeemable skills.

MONOPOLY
Like Monopoly? Then you're a cheater. Yes, you heard me, you're a cheater. No honest person genuinely enjoys Monopoly, because an honestly played game of Monopoly takes 14 hours. The game only ends in a reasonable amount of time if the banker is giving himself interest-free loans on the sly, or if someone else grabs a deed they didn't pay for in order to complete a monopoly ("Wait, you have Marvin Gardens? I don't remember you buying that." "Oh yeah, it was an hour ago. You must not have noticed.") You might be saying, "Well, I never do either of those. I don't cheat at Monopoly." Yeah? Do you do that thing where you put money on Free Parking and give it to the next person who lands there? Then you're a cheater. It's not in the rules. Look it up.

TRIVIAL PURSUIT
If Trivial Pursuit is your first choice, you're an insufferable, overly competitive know-it-all. I should know, because I'M an insufferable, overly competitive know-it-all, and Trivial Pursuit is always my first choice. Why? Because I know that no matter who you are, I'll probably destroy you. My mind is filled with useless knowledge. Rarely is it of much use unless  I'm playing Trivial Pursuit or appearing on the occasional television game show. Never play Trivial Pursuit with someone who wants to play Trivial Pursuit, that's my advice to you.

CHESS, CHECKERS, SCRABBLE, BOGGLE, STRATEGO AND ANY OTHER OF THOSE GAMES I'M NOT VERY GOOD AT
People who choose these games are all smarter than me. I can do random trivia, sure, but that's no indication of intelligence. That's just having a photographic memory and the gift of instant recall. These are games of strategy that require clear thinking, a quick mind, and the ability to anticipate your opponent's moves. I lack those skills, and the people who have them are exactly what I want to be when I grow up. But let me get them on the other side of a Candyland board and I'll wipe the floor with them. I have five kids, man. I'll be past Queen Frostine and on my way to victory before they even know what hit them.

I'm an old guy in training

I am 42 years old, which puts me pretty solidly into the category of "middle age," I suppose. It's early middle age, but middle age nonetheless.

There are actually some advantages to this. For example, the only people who think of you as a dumb kid anymore are the ones in their 80's, and there are fewer and fewer of them left to worry about anyway. You also command a little respect from your co-workers, who are forced to acknowledge that while you are clearly a dope, you are a dope who has managed to survive for four decades, so you must have at least a few smarts in that head of yours.

Of course, the early 40's are also when most of us start to experience the physical signs of aging. There are crow's feet, some graying at the temples (and more than just the temples in my case), flab around the middle...that sort of thing. My favorite moments, though, are the memory lapses. Yes, they're frustrating, but they're also hilarious.

I regularly do that thing where I walk into a room and then have no idea what I'm doing there. I'll be strolling through the house thinking about the 1979 Cleveland Indians (I often think about the 1979 Cleveland Indians...in some future blog post I'll explain why) when suddenly one part of my brain will ask another part why we're in the basement. And the brain section being tasked to formulate an answer will instead freeze up.
"The basement? I'm in the basement? Why am I in the basement? Was it something to do with laundry? No, no, that's not it. How about the treadmill? Was I coming downstairs to run on the treadmill? Well, no, I've never once run on the treadmill, so that can't be it. Did I come to get extra rolls of toilet paper? Maybe to get something out of the freezer? How about the kids' old McDonald's  playset? Did I come to spend a few minutes pretending to be a minimum-wage fast food worker? No, no, probably not."

And so it goes, sometimes for a solid two or three minutes, during which I'll stand helplessly in the middle of the front room of the basement trying to figure out the purpose of my existence for that particular moment. Most of the time it will eventually to come me, but other times I have to admit defeat and trudge back upstairs, troubled that my short-term memory is rapidly fading.

Then there's the fact that I'm no longer The Fast Kid. For many years -- from about 6th grade through college -- my main athletic attribute was that I had foot speed. I could run, and I could run fast. These days I'll try picking up the pace when I'm out for a jog, just to regain the awesome feeling that only the competitive sprinter knows. But the gear I used to shift into just isn't there anymore. I search and search for it, but I rarely get past Chunky Suburban Dad on the velocity scale.

Not to be missed for many guys is the joy that is male pattern baldness. Ever since my early 20's, I've been steadily losing hair in a patch on top of my head. I don't think about it often because I don't usually look at the crown of my own head. But when I do, or when I see a picture of myself from the back, I'm momentarily stunned as I think, "Good Lord! Is that Bruce Willis?" And then I realize it's actually me, and I'm a little depressed for just a few seconds before I decide it's not worth worrying about and I move on.

I've never been one to look at other women much, but nowadays I do it even less. This isn't so much because I can't appreciate an attractive women anymore than the fact that I'm just too darned tired to care. "Oh look, is that Scarlett Johansson naked? Yeah, OK, fine. More importantly, do I have time for a nap?"

I don't mean to make it sound like I'm on death's door or anything. If the average life expectancy for men continues to rise, there's a good chance I'm not even halfway through my allotted span of years. Which is good, considering all of the great memories I have yet to make with my wife, my kids, my future grandkids, etc. The only thing that really scares me is that I'll die without ever having celebrated a major Cleveland sports championship, something that's truly frightening and a very real possibility.

This is the point when I generally come to some sort of conclusion and wrap up the blog post, but for the life of me, I can't remember what I was typing about in the first place...

Division of labor - marriage style

Paul Reiser, one of my favorite comedians and a guy who has sort of faded away in recent years, wrote the best description I've ever read of the way household tasks are divvied up in a marriage.

In his book "Couplehood" -- a great and funny read, I recommend it -- Reiser explained that there will always be tasks neither the husband nor the wife (nor the kids, for that matter) really want to handle. But there's also always one of you who hates a given job more than the other, so generally speaking, it should be assigned to the person who hates it less. This makes a lot of sense to me.

For example, as I've mentioned, I don't relish the thought of cleaning the cat litter boxes every morning. But ever since June 1993, when Terry became pregnant with Elissa, it has been my job. This is because cat waste poses a real health threat to pregnant woman, and especially with that first baby, you don't take any chances. I think the disease is called toxoplasmosis, though I didn't look it up and as far as I know, it may not actually be a disease but rather a concept pregnant women made up to get out of doing stuff around the house.

Five children later, Terry is no longer in danger of getting pregnant, thanks mostly to the fine work of Dr. Kurt Schneider, my de facto urologist and the guy who made me permanently sterile in one, swift 45-minute procedure. The man was good. At some point, I'll have to tell you about it because, really, I enjoyed the whole process. (Yes, I know that's weird. That's why it will make a good blog post.)

Anyway, Terry will be having no more babies, at least none fathered by me. Therefore, one could surmise that she is yet again a candidate to clean the litter boxes. But she doesn't, and that's fine with me. There are plenty of other things she does that I wouldn't want anything to do with, and I've been married long enough to know when to leave well enough alone.

For the record, the other jobs I usually (not always, but usually) take on in our house include lawn maintenance, cleaning the master bathroom, and washing the kitchen floor. Being a stay-at-home mom, Terry does more than her share of unpleasant tasks while I'm at work, and that's not even taking into account the cooking (of which she does virtually 100%), laundry and general pick-up duties she handles that would exhaust me if I had them every day.

I do remember one area in which we never did come to any sort of compromise, though. This was back in the days when we had babies in the house and one would wake up crying in the middle of the night. Neither of us is particularly proud of this, but we both now admit to faking not hearing the crying child and instead pretending to be asleep, hoping that would prompt the other person to get out of bed, fetch the tot, change his or her diaper, and either restore order or prep them for breastfeeding time.

That last point is key. Terry breastfed all of the kids. This is a job, again as Paul Reiser so deftly points out, that only female persons are equipped to handle. To me, this is one of God's greatest design inspirations. But in all fairness, it should have been me who got up, changed the diaper and brought the baby downstairs, since in all cases it was Terry who did the subsequent feeding while I fell back asleep in approximately 7 seconds.

In my defense, I DID have to get up for work the next morning, and I milked that excuse relentlessly to the point that, in the end, while I bet I got up and attended to the babies more often than Terry, it wasn't by much...maybe a 55-45 split.

If I were a good person and a skilled writer, I would bring this to a close by offering some sort of inspiration and advice to young married couples or those thinking about marriage. But I am neither, so let me just say that if you're going to do the pretend-to-be-asleep thing, don't let your spouse catch you opening one eye to see if they're awake. Then you're busted and your whole night is ruined. You're welcome.

A pointless Christmas story, just for you

It's Christmas Day, and the last thing you need is to read more of my drivel. So just a quick Christmas story that may be of interest only to me...

I must have been 6 or 7 years old. We had an old manual typewriter with which I was just fascinated. I loved playing with it. This was long before word processing and personal printers, so I enjoyed the fact that I could create something semi-professional-looking just by smashing on a few keys.

I would type on that thing for an hour at a time. Sometimes I would type real words. Other times I would type my name (over and over and over). And other times I would fill whole sheets of notebook paper with random letters. That's all I used, of course, was lined notebook paper. We didn't have typing paper in the house, and the only place I ever saw blank white paper was at school

Anyway, I used this typewriter a lot. We kept it in a burnt orange plastic case (this was the 70's, after all). One Christmas Eve, I had a dream that I came out of my room on Christmas morning and ran to the living room. But instead of my presents being laid out on the couch like they normally were, all I saw was a small square of that lined notebook paper taped -- yes, taped, like with Scotch tape -- to one of the couch cushions. And typed on that paper was an all-caps message from Santa:

"SORRY, NO PRESENTS FOR YOU THIS YEAR."

Not sure what I did at that point in the dream. Probably screamed or something. Terry says all of my stories from when I was a kid end with the phrase, "...and then I cried." Which isn't true, but for purposes of this dream, it probably was.

Of course I woke up and it was still Christmas morning, and Santa HAD left me presents so all was well. I even got the Evel Knievel Stunt and Crash Car I had been hoping for. That was awesome.

There's no real point to this story other than: (1) It's Christmas and that's about the only Yuletide nugget I could think of, and (2) I'm even stranger than I thought, and I've been that way for a long, long time.

Merry Christmas, blog readers. Your comments and feedback over the first two weeks of this venture have been greatly appreciated. Here's hoping I can think up enough material to keep it going into 2012...