I don't know who some of these famous people are

I try not to be one of those old fogies who complains about today's music, today's movies, today's kids, whatever. That's stupid.

But I will say this: Somewhere along the way (I want to say it was 1996), I lost track of which people were considered celebrities and what was popular in music.

It had nothing to do with disliking those people or those songs. I just had other, more important things going on, not the least of which were a growing family and an increasingly hectic career.

And now there are people who are known by many, but not by me, and probably not by the majority of people my age and older.

A good illustration of this is found in the list of today's celebrity birthdays, courtesy of famousbirthdays.com. Here are apparently famous people who were born on this day:

• Kirk Douglas: Mr. Douglas died last February at the impressive age of 103. He was the movie star's movie star. I of course know who he was.
• Donnie Osmond: Donnie is 63 years old today. Terry and I saw him perform once in Las Vegas. He was very good despite having some sort of cold/flu thing. Who doesn't know Donnie?
• Dame Judi Dench: She turns 86 today. I had to look up why she is called "Dame." It turns out she was named a "Dame Commander" of the British Empire. Sounds made up, but we'll accept it. In any case, I'm aware of her.
• Dick Butkus: I may not have known who he is if I wasn't a sports fan (he played football). He also did some acting. And his name is funny. Fun fact: Dick Butkus was 13 pounds, 6 ounces at birth.
• Booba: This is a real person. He's a rapper. We have reached the point where I cannot identify a person from today's celebrity birthday list. Maybe he's not really famous, I don't know. Either way, it's his birthday.
• Mooptopia: You think I am making this person up. I am not. She is a "TikTok Star." Really. That's something from which you can make money. We won't possibly run across someone else with a similar vocation, will we?
• Nau: This is the third person in a row with just one name. And guess what? He's a "YouTube Star." This is presumably more respectable than "TikTok Star," but I can't say for sure.
• Tristan Jass: OK, we're back to a person with both a first and a last name. But it's not helping. I don't know who he is. If you don't either, I can reveal that Tristan is an "Instagram Star." (Just to get this out of the way, I will also say that today is the birthday of social media stars "Anomaly," "Krazyrayray," "Famke Louise," and "Wuant." Again, I did not make up any of those people.)
• Kendall Vertes: No.
• PnB Rock: Nope.
• Tre Cool: Nay.
• Shin Yuna: I lack a clue.

You get the point. I am so unfamiliar with famous people that I'm not sure any of the last eight people above can truly be called "famous."

But happy birthday to them anyway.

If you force me to give you relationship advice, here are three things I'll tell you

By no one's definition of the word am I an expert when to comes marriage and relationships. Yes, I've been married for 28 1/2 years, but I almost want to say I lucked into that.

(Actually, there was no luck involved at all. "Blessing" is a much better word for it. The point is that I never purposely planned this out. It all just sort of happened.)

My four oldest kids each have significant others, and those relationships have all lasted for some time. I wish I could say they chose their partners well because I taught them what to look for. But this isn't true. They either asked their mother for advice in this area or, like their father, they just sort of fell into stable, loving relationships.

But I suppose if you held that proverbial gun to my head, or much better yet, if you offered me $1 million, I could come up with some tips that may or may not improve your love life. Here's what I have:

(1) Aim high: I married up and I highly recommend it. My wife is the best person I know. She has too many great qualities to enumerate, but "beautiful," "smart," "funny," "honest," and "talented" probably top the list. I like to joke that I always know what she's going to say or do next, but truth be told, she almost always has me guessing. That's a good thing. If you can be with a person you aspire to emulate, things will always be interesting. (NOTE: The corollary to this, of course, is that the good person ends up with a not-as-good person, which could get boring for them after a while. The trick is to get someone who's better than you AND who is OK spending their life dragging you in their wake. A tall order, sure, but I'm proof it can be done.)

(2) It's not about you. It can't be: You have to be willing to put the other person's interests ahead of your own. That doesn't mean you should quash your own desires 100% of the time, but it seems impossible to be both a selfish person and someone who has a successful long-term relationship. The funny thing about this, in my experience, is that the more you tend to the other person's needs, the more your own will be fulfilled (and vice-versa).

(3) You're gonna want someone you can laugh with. And at. A lot: This is such a cliche, but I'm telling you, this may be the single most important thing. You're going to go through a whole bunch of stuff together. Some of it will be good, some of it will be bad. If you can laugh equally at both, and do it together, that's gold, Jerry. Life is mostly funny. Treat it that way.

I cannot imagine having another baby in the house

There are, on record, men who have become fathers at insanely advanced ages.

A guy from India named Ramjit Raghav was reportedly 96 years old when his second son was born in 2012 (he died earlier this year at the age of 104).

In the Bible, it says that "after Noah was 500 years old, he became the father of Shem, Ham and Japheth."

500 years old.

I'm 51. And trust me when I say I'm done.

Not done being a father, you understand. That job never goes away. I just mean I'm not looking to be the father of a newborn ever again. I have been blessed to have that experience five times over, and I will be forever grateful. It is magical and amazing.

It is also a young man's game. God made it that way, and it's fine by me.

You have to have a lot of energy to parent a baby that's fresh out of the package. They require a whole lot of attention. And even the best sleepers among them still tend to be pretty needy around the clock.

There's also this: You expend a great deal of spiritual, emotional and mental energy on those little ones. You worry about them, you teach them things, you try to keep them safe. It's never-ending, and it's the greatest job in the world.

Still, it's a job probably best performed in your 20s and 30s. You have a little more energy then.

So am I ready for grandchildren, then? Eh, I suppose, but I'm in no hurry. I'm not opposed to the idea, and I do have a daughter who is married and would be in immediate contention for world's best mother. But let's take that as it comes.

Seriously, though, 500 years old? Even 96 years old? More power to you, brothers. This dad is content with his teenager and four 20-somethings.

When your youngest child is really your YOUNGEST child

This happens a lot: Our family will be reminiscing about some vacation we took or an activity we used to enjoy when the kids were little, and six of us will laugh together as we fondly remember our shared experience.

The trouble is, there are seven of us.

Often, that memory happened before Little Jack, our youngest, was born.

I call him "Little Jack" because I've always called him Little Jack. Or Jackie.

He's the baby of the family, though he may also be the tallest. He and Jared are neck and neck. They're both essentially 6-foot-1, though according to Terry's Pencil Mark on the Kitchen Wall Measuring System, Jack wins the race by a hair. Jared denies it.

Whatever the reality, the fact is that "Little Jack" is now nearly 15 years old and a decidedly tall kid.

Our oldest four were all born about two years apart. The gap between Melanie (#4) and Jack (#5), on the other hand, is a full 5 years, 4 months.

It's not as long an interval as exists between my brother Mark and me (nearly 12 1/2 years), but I know what it's like to be the youngest.

I missed out on an entirely different existence my parents and siblings had. In the years before I was born (basically the late 1950s and most of the 60s), they lived together as a family of five. Once I came along, my oldest sister Judi was nearly 17 and a junior in high school.

There is no denying I was what is impolitely called "a mistake" and somewhat more sensitively referred to as "a pleasant surprise." Jack, it should be noted, was entirely planned.

It never hurt my feelings when my family would talk about things that happened before I existed. I was more intrigued by it than anything else. I wanted to learn more about this family that predated me.

But I'm afraid sometimes that Jack feels left out when we watch really old home videos or talk about a Disney trip that happened years before his birth.

Don't get me wrong: We've created plenty of great memories with him, too. He has also enjoyed the advantages of being spoiled as only a youngest sibling can be spoiled.

Jack is a smart, talented kid and an all-around good guy. I'm proud of him. He proves that just because you arrive a little later to the party doesn't mean you can't still be the life of it.

This is video of me jumping out of an airplane and being scared

 

I have skydived (skydove?) exactly one time.

There isn't likely to be a second time.

I wrote about the experience some years ago. If you're interested in the details, you can read that post from 2012.

The value-add here is that I'm providing video of the experience.

A few quick notes on what you'll see in that clip:

• I am jumping by myself. None of this pansy tandem skydiving stuff many of you have done. I went alone. This was 1991. BACK WHEN MEN WERE MEN. (Note that Canton Air Sports did not actually offer a tandem skydiving experience then, or else you can bet your bottom dollar I would have gone that route.)
• I didn't jump out of the plane or anything like that. I had to very gingerly crawl out, hang from the wing strut, and then wait for the instructor to tell me it was OK to let go. This is perhaps not the ideal introduction to an activity such as skydiving.
• Actually, for me, it wasn't "skydiving" so much as "falling terrified from 3500 feet in the sky."

I made it safely to the ground, where my dad tried to capture footage of me touching down just short of the gravel circle that was our landing target and then dropping and rolling as I was taught. But his clunky old Curtis Mathis camcorder was a little too unwieldly for him to get me in frame, so what resulted is just a confused sweeping of the sky, followed by a 2-second shot of me gathering up my parachute. He tried.

Anyway, in sum when it comes to skydiving: Did it, glad I did it, won't plan on doing it again.

It must be winter time - my fingertips are splitting open

I have a problem that is eminently solvable, yet I choose not to solve it.

It is this: Every year, as the weather turns colder here in Northeast Ohio, the skin on and around my fingertips gets very dry.

So dry, in fact, that it often just splits right open and leaves me a little cut. These cuts are located in an area with many nerve endings, so they're always a little painful and a lot annoying.

Depending on their exact coordinates, these cuts sometimes also make typing difficult, as each keystroke causes a small stab of pain. I type a lot in the course of a given day. A lot.

You will nod approvingly when I tell you that I apply lotion to my hands (concentrating on the fingertips) every morning from October through March after I shower. This helps.

But it's not enough.

In order to remain effective, the lotion probably needs to be refreshed at least 2-3 times every day.

Rarely, however, do I go beyond that morning application.

Thus the dry skin, thus the cuts, thus the painful typing.

Don't bother asking why I don't just put on more lotion as the day goes by. I simply forget to do it, effectively choosing to have a red, nasty cut on at least one fingertip all winter long.

There is, in fact, one of these cuts on my right index figure as I type this sentence...as I painfully, painfully type this sentence and try desperately to remember to pump out another dollop of CVS Complete Moisture Lotion sometime around lunch today.

Bananas are probably the biggest source of stress in my life

I eat a lot of fruit. We have covered this subject before.

In particular, not a day goes by when I don't eat multiple apples and bananas.

The apples are relatively easy to keep on hand. They last a long time, and you can buy large quantities of them.

Bananas, on the other hand, are a tricky business.

Bananas can go from green and inedible to brown and mushy in, like, hours. You have to constantly monitor them.

When you're at the grocery store and want to buy bananas, there are three important questions you must ask yourself:

(1) How many bananas do we have at home right now?

(2) How many bananas can we have and still be relatively sure they'll all get eaten before they go bad?

(3) What is the overall ripeness of this store's bananas, and in what stages of development should the bananas I buy be?

That last one is the toughest to navigate. If you're fortunate enough to live near a store that stocks bananas in a range of different ripenesses (as opposed to all very yellow and ready to eat or all green and days away from consumption), you have to work out a plan.

Ideally, you'll come home with, say, one very green bunch, one semi-green bunch, and one virtually-ready-to-eat bunch.

At least that's what I do. We are down to just five people living in our house these days, but they eat a lot of bananas. Much of my daily mental energy is spent reviewing the state of our banana cache, plotting from where and when I'll buy new bananas, and trying to decide whether the current bananas are OK to eat.

It's all enough to drive you...well, I'll let you say it.