Archive for July 2010
Leave a Message
Have you seen the Lance Armstrong commercial for Radio Shack about leaving phone messages?
How often have you called me and left a message? Uh huh, just as I thought. I don’t check the messages. They are almost never meant for me. I think it’s funny how that creates something of an inconvenient dilemma out of the brilliant technology of voicemail. As logically helpful as the answering machine is, if it is rarely used, it becomes easy to neglect, which leads to the potential for missed messages. Pretty much defeats the whole purpose for having it.
I realize we could just update our setup to allow callers to indicate who they are leaving a message for and then have it signal me when appropriate. Otherwise, I’m wading through charity organizations, political fundraisers, telemarketers or someone wanting Cyndie.
In the mean time, you could always text me. Or email. Or comment here.
Don’t make me get off the bike.
Simple Impact
There is a simple phrase that is on my mind today… “If you don’t have anything good to say, don’t say anything at all.” Think a moment, about the power of negative feedback. It is by no means limited to our words.
It really struck home for me the other day during my morning soccer. I play in a group that includes a variety of ages and abilities, gathering three times a week for recreational pick-up games. We accomplish a wide range of successes and failures in our attempts to enact the artistry of the sport. Nobody that I know intentionally fails. But failure happens, and it’s tough enough for individuals to accept it about themselves –people usually judges themselves much more harshly than they ever would others. There is no constructive benefit from expressing consternation and distress over another player’s mistakes.
Yes, it’s personal experience speaking here. I will admit to being oversensitive, but regardless, yesterday I gained new insight about the power that such a negative gesture holds. For reasons that defy sensible logic, I felt an immense surge of inadequacy when, after my errant kick sailed uselessly out of play, my teammate dropped his shoulders, brought his chin to his chest, and rocked his head side to side in a gesture of the verbal, “no.” My reaction was visceral, immediate, and I’m sure appeared entirely out of proportion in relation to his involuntary behavior that my blunder had triggered. I apologized to him, loudly and directly (twice) as play continued without me. Then I asked for a sub and walked off the floor.
There is a side lesson that deserves to be recognized in explanation for what appears to be an inordinate level of upset over such a simple and obvious reaction from a teammate. It involves taking into account the time-weighted average dose of similar demonstrations of dissatisfaction that I have been experiencing from this same individual. The first time it happens, it is no big deal. A teammate becoming frustration is a pretty natural reaction. This same teammate is wonderfully vocal during play, directing and offering advice for our activity. I’m pretty sure his being vocal contributes to my feeling bad when I am unable to live up to the direction, but again, that isn’t anything out of the ordinary. But over and over, as my ability to fail continues to accompany my successes, his visible frustrations tend to accumulate in my head. It breaks my heart to let him down, it truly does. By yesterday’s session, I guess I reached a breaking point.
The real lesson for me however, involves how a negative response impacts everyone else around. Quite simply, the important fact that it does have impact and there is nothing positive about it. Here’s another way to look at it: consider what making that response positive would be like. What if my failure was met by a smile of recognition, noting that we all miss-hit the ball at times? What if I heard calls of assurance indicating that I’d get it right next time? What if he said, “Don’t let it get you down, John. Keep at it!”? Seriously. He doesn’t even need to mean what he says. It would make a world of difference in my disposition.
As it was, I composed myself on the side for a few minutes and then returned to the game with my attitude reset. In the ensuing play I was treated to a bit of karmic justice, as my friend finished the morning with several of his own failures, one after another. I didn’t exactly shower him with supportive chatter, but it wasn’t hard at all to not hang my head in disgust each time, either. It was simple. I know what kind of negative message that gesture sends.
Forgetting to Remember
I sure enjoy poking fun at things. Maybe sometimes at the expense of appropriateness. For example, I have recently noticed the development of a pattern of forgetfulness that has led me to blurt out a series of comments about alzheimer’s that were meant to be humorous. What if it actually were a memory disease causing my problem? What if someone I was with at the time, had a family member so afflicted? Doesn’t seem like something to joke about.
One of the things that I have trouble keeping track of is, which topics I’ve written about and posted here in Relative Something. Have you ever noticed that you can pretty quickly recognize when you have read something before? Unfortunately, I can’t remember which of my stories I’ve already told here. Of course, the longer I do this blog thing, the higher the odds there will eventually be repetition.
I have lost enough things lately, uncharacteristically of me, that it appears to be a pattern. So what’s the natural reaction? I start unconsciously living up to my fears and losing track of more things. Each new item or issue quickly adds evidence to my expectation and soon I’m convinced it’s getting worse. It must be a disease, no?
Mention to someone that you find yourself losing things and they will immediately be able to share a similar number of ways they are experiencing the same thing. It’s not uncommon. Becoming fixated on it is a classic case of how we create the very situations we expect to see. We all probably lose track of things at a similar rate over time, yet if we put our focus on it, the rate can appear to be excessive.
So, I will dismiss any such pattern, until a time when it truly exceeds typical human foibles. How do I know when that is? Oh, never mind.
Actually, it should be easy to dismiss the pattern, because I will probably just forget that I was keeping track of how often I am losing things. Get it?
Like I said, it’s not that funny.
Natural Gourmet
con•trar•i•an 
noun
a person who opposes or rejects popular opinion
adjective
going against current practice
I don’t know exactly why I developed an inclination to go against the grain, but more often than not, the first thing that pops into my mind is in direct opposition to the statements I hear. I think one offshoot of that tendency is my reaction when I become aware of a pattern in my behavior. When I discovered that my trip journals centered on the food served at every meal, it resulted in a period of specifically avoiding mentioning food at all. But we are what we eat! I no longer resort to entirely neglecting mention of the things on which I dine.
Even some of my eating habits have developed from conscious decisions to go against current practice. Soda pop is one of the big ones. Even before pop became an injection of high fructose corn syrup, I had rejected it for the potential ill effects of the carbon dioxide. It pleased me to be moving away from drinking soda pop while so many others seemed to be making it an increasing habit. 
After my father’s first heart attack, and subsequent diet changes, I aligned very quickly with his move toward avoiding salt. After I gave my palate time to adjust, I found I actually preferred popcorn without butter or salt. It tastes like corn! Same thing with potatoes. There are so many different flavors of potato. Now I have discovered an unsalted potato chip that has won my favor. Michael Season’s sells a great unsalted version of potato chips.
I’m lucky that my avoidance of many current main stream food options has enabled me to steer clear of the less healthy choices, but more than that, I consider it luckiest of all that I enjoy the tastes of the less popular foods even more!
Homemade Memories
Yesterday, for breakfast, I made toast out of some of Cyndie’s homemade bread. I’m noticing that I’ve been feeling a bit nostalgic lately. Don’t know exactly why that is, but maybe the fact that next weekend is the Hays reunion –summertime version– has me thinking about family of origin.
Homemade toast, which is the way I recall us always referring to it, is something that I associate very strongly with my life in the years of growing up in the Hays family. While I’m on the subject of toast, if the bread wasn’t homemade, it was from a loaf of Hollywood Bread, and of course, we just called it Hollywood toast. I remember being almost as fond of Hollywood toast as Mom’s homemade, but they were very d
istinctly different.
Yesterday, after I cut the bread for toast, I returned the loaf to upright and discovered that had left quite an angle on what remained. I don’t know about the rest of my siblings, but that instantly brings the voice of my father in my mind.
“Who didn’t cut the bread straight?!”
I don’t clearly understand why his admonitions were so feared. Some kids worried that their father would strike them, but I feared my father would speak to me in a gruff tone of voice. I studiously practiced the art of cutting a loaf of bread squarely.
Last night for dinner, I had walleye. Next weekend, our reunion is up at Lake Mille Lacs. That is to say, I had for dinner, the fish that Dad was so fond of, and we are going up to the lake where Dad did his fishing. Ralph is very present in my mind lately.
A Simple Trick
It is a bit of an understatement to call it a bit of a trick to describe in words, the thoughts that float like wisps of cloud through the catacombs of consciousness in a mind never trained to think in the same way as others who’ve endured years of direction to align and compartmentalize mental activity with almost military precision. Unrestrained, the result is some pretty wicked sentence structure, often with too much going on all at once which hardly allows a casual reader the simple courtesy of effortlessly gliding through the reading while simultaneously drinking their coffee and snacking on a treat to the background sounds of someone talking to them about an entirely different subject while the usual ambient noise of the television or a favorite Broadway musical soundtrack drowns out the monotone vibration of the droning fan bashing the humid summer air filled with clattering chipmunks chirps that compete with the squawking and tweeting whistles of the birds that seem to be earnestly carrying out their business with critical incident importance. It’s as if there aren’t enough words in the dictionary to capture the images of faces, let alone expressions on faces, and places, real and imagined, that materialize intangibly in mind-space at a rate of speed that would be mind boggling if a mind were able to disassociate itself long enough to discern such a thing. Then, smack dab in the middle of such a barrage of mental imagery, there appears the understandable interruption of thought along the lines of detached curiosity for the indescribable probability of explaining the origin for so many ‘out of context’ subjects surfacing without anything resembling logic for the train of thinking currently barreling along. With any luck at all, cloaked within all those brainwaves vibrating along, there resides a contiguous thread of an objective idea that slithers along until it grows legs that bring it to the launchpad of realization to blossom like the smile of a pretty girl that suddenly grows into a laugh. At that point, all that remains to be done is execute the simple trick of describing it succinctly and accurately with words. Succeed with that, and some artist just might come along to take it from there and turn it into a movie. The thought of that is absolutely brilliant, yet at the same time, just plain wrong.
Mental Manipulation
You can’t put a genie back in the bottle. We are far beyond the point of no return.
You can smile at the person you find yourself with today.
You can choose to do what is right in each situation.
Take a look at the raindrops with awe.
We can see things differently today, from the way we perceived them yesterday.
We can’t undo what has already been done.
We can do something new, something brilliant.
Or something simple.
Problems are rarely simple. They are complex
We like to give problems a name and devise a single solution.
Then we get frustrated when we can’t make it work.
But simple just might be the secret to solving our plight.
Simply consider other ways to look at the world,
Like from within the shoes of another.
Imagine for a minute or two,
If each one of us, weren’t the center of the universe as we know it.
Relative Something 