My Thoughts on Valentine's Day

Posted on February 16, 2011 by bluedepth

It’s a commercial bonanza. Who really celebrates it? Catholics could, I suppose. It’s technically a Saints feast day, one would presume for a Saint Valentine. I’m not Catholic, I’m not really even Christian so I while I appreciate the message and whats behind it, I can’t help but grimace at the sheer commercialism of it all. I suppose you could have your cake and eat it too if you approached St. Valentines day the way that children do. They get some rough construction paper and some craft supplies and they MAKE something from their heart. I’m a sucker for emotional symbols like that and anything you make from your heart is more authentic and beautiful than something you pick up at a Walgreens.

I wish more people would take the core message and break out the paper, scissors, markers, crayons, glue and glitter and let their inner child out to play for a little while. I think it would be incredibly therapeutic and help break the banal frost that tends to surround most adults. They deny their inner child, keep them jailed deep down and they end up turning into dull gray husks.

In addition to St. Valentines Day, we really need a day to celebrate all the things we lost when we “grew up”. A day devoted to immaturity, mischief, play, irrationality, and imagination. A day at work when skipping down the hall isn’t seen as a mark of poor mental health. People need to get back in touch with their younger selves, to revel in the timelessness that you all remember from your childhood. To ring up your imaginary friends and let them know you haven’t totally forgotten about them.

My First Drive

Posted on February 16, 2011 by bluedepth

Driving The Volvo

The first time I ever drove a vehicle by myself was a study in “Fake it until you make it”. I had never driven before I got to Drivers Training and I was the first elected to hop in the driver’s seat and get the group underway. Suffice it to say there wasn’t any real teaching, pretty much just hop in and drive. The learning curve apparently wasn’t noticeable by my fellow students and I did quite well considering I was a snot nosed kid.

Quite a bit afterwards I started to refine my driving skills with my parents and my father taught me to parallel park on the left, which only happens if you happen to be on a particular one-way divided residential parkway in Syracuse, New York. My father remembered his driving test and the examiner had this as his secret weapon. I aced parallel parking on both sides, ambidextrously I suppose. When I took my driving exam in Syracuse My examiner lead me right to where I and my father practiced the parallel parking and had this haughty expression, “Park on the left, hah!” and so I did. I got my perfect 1″ square and centered parking task complete and I smiled sweetly at him and he told me to drive the car back to the DMV and he gave me a grudging 100% score. Without that ambidextrous parallel parking training I would have been hard pressed to get the score I did.

The last real lesson I learned with driving I also picked up from my father, and that is to be very careful when swinging your arm backwards to look behind you in a pickup truck. I accidentally belted my father in the face and it was the only time I hit him. I had to park afterwards because I was a basket case.

The things you remember when digging up the past… Wow. 🙂

My Must-Sing-Aloud Songs

Posted on February 7, 2011 by bluedepth

Krampus: Happy Christmas?

Nearly any song gets a sing-along if I know them well enough. It isn’t a question of which song, but it is a question of how horrible I am to the song. I care not a jot for stupid original lyrics. I like putting in my own abusive, abrasive, and wholly inappropriate lyrics – kind of a sing-song’y cuss-fest. The FCC censor would just walk up to me with a length of duct tape and slap it right over my mouth. I wouldn’t stop though, I’d be humming and giggling right along, and I’d switch from horrible words to really outrageous gestures.

Songs need livening up. Love songs deserve a measure of cannibalism. Metal songs need to be about Santa. Hopeless maudlin crooning deserves some spectacular and bombastic four-letter adjustments. It’s like a filthy Monty Python animation department in my head, always running, coming up with stuff that would make the original lyricist blush so hard their head would explode from the blood pressure alone.

So it’s not about sing-alongs. It’s about sing-abusing. Nobody actually pays attention to the lyrics, they are almost always whiney protestations about how unfair life is or how someone lost something precious. Yadda yadda yadda. Lets have a 40 foot tall cannibalistic Santa-based tooth fairy singing about oil changes and hunting down GE executives with sling-blades. Now that would be something.

Why I'm Thankful for Caller ID

Posted on February 7, 2011 by bluedepth

peace dove

Of all the people who could call me, I am avoiding none of them. I am dreading none of them. I remember a great quote that speaks to this. Worry is a lot like a rocking chair, you move a lot but you don’t get anywhere.

There is a little part of me that laughs, of all the people who could call me, few of them I think would get through. Remember, my Google Voice number pretty much routes to my good-for-nothing Blackberry device. Once I get rid of that albatross around my neck, and switch to an iPhone, things will get much better. Even still, once they are better, I still don’t have anyone I am avoiding.

I suppose another part of it is that many people in my life aren’t using voice traffic much anymore. Text and other messaging methods take the cake because either they are 100% signal or not, there isn’t any garbled noise and the worst thing that can happen is a hilarious auto-correction. With voice, on Sprint, I usually end up sounding like I’m a welshman trying to scream for my life through toilet pipes. It’s that bad.

I used to dread. Calls from car repair, those big expensive calls, those I used to dread but then I realized that it’s all part of the color of life. The excitement. Even ruin and disaster are teachers and there is no point to worrying, even though anxiety is pretty much a guaranteed thing. The only calls I dread anymore are ones about the health of loved ones. But so far everyone is healthy, that I know of, so yeah, no worries.

Stuff I Just Can't Throw Away

Posted on February 4, 2011 by bluedepth

Spy Hill Landfill – 2

I can’t throw away plastic supermarket bags. My reluctance is because they are such a waste of difficult-to-degrade plastic if their only purpose is to sack up food for conveyance from a store. I believe deep down that if you are going to sack your food in plastic that once you get it home, those bags ought to have a second or third life in the home, a kind of active recycling. In my household plastic shopping bags are used to hold bottle and can recycling, used to contain too-old leftovers so they can be thrown in the garbage without their degradation becoming noticeable, and finally being handy receptacles for cat exhaust. If the bags just go right into the garbage from the market then their 10 minutes of use and 3000 year lingering feels like a horrible sin. If you can get them to do a host of other things, then I believe you should. People look at me oddly when I tell them to save the bags, some people just immediately throw them away, but I hope by answering this Plinky prompt, they understand why that isn’t right.

I Hope I Never Lose…

Posted on January 31, 2011 by bluedepth

Passion flower

It’s laser-etched on the back of my iPod Nano that I received as a gift for Christmas 2010. “Be a Jackass”. Specifically speaking to the passion of life and willingness to do apparently crazy things in respect to the deeper structures of order in life. I get criticized quite often in my work life and my private life for being outspoken and dangerous. It’s shocking to me that something so fundamental should be so remarkable. What is the point of life if you aren’t outspoken? Why hide the truth, hide your feelings? If you bottle them all up and shove them under the carpet of your life eventually they’ll start to wear their shapes into the carpet and eventually the carpet will break apart for their presence. It’s far better to share what you feel when you feel it, to say what you think, to speak from the heart and to respect your instincts. If something is wrong, take a stand, even if it leads figuratively down the drain. Living this way is the only authentic way to live, any other way is self-deception and self-defeat.

How I’m Liking 2011 So Far

Posted on January 31, 2011 by bluedepth

big bang

I made a resolution for 2011, to address my temper and try to quell what seemed to be a constant barrage of angry feelings. So far I’m doing quite well, I’ve only lapsed a handful of times. I’ve given myself permission to lapse, that way it doesn’t become a catastrophe if I respond angrily to a situation in my life. One can’t live in a steel-framed world for very long without aching.

I’ve started to collect quotes that mean things to me. There are many famous historical figures that have said very good things that speak to how I’m living my life. Specifically:

“Nothing external to you has any power over you.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Along with the quotes that help me get over my anger, I’ve also found quite a few that reassure me that my passionate approach to my life, my “outspoken dangerous ways” are something that I could never live without. In this regard this answer also addresses the other Plinky prompt about what intangible thing I couldn’t live without. It’s my passion that I can’t live without. Here’s some quotes that make me absolutely giddy:

“Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius & it’s better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.” ~ Marylin Monroe

“A little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men.” ~ Willy Wonka

“Be who you are & say what you feel because those who mind don’t matter & those who matter don’t mind.” ~ Dr. Suess

“Never apologize for showing feeling. When you do so, you apologize for the truth.” ~ Benjamin Disraeli

– and last but not least –

“I do not think much of a man who does not know more today then he did yesterday.” ~Abraham Lincoln

The Most Difficult Recipe I’ve Mastered

Posted on January 30, 2011 by bluedepth

Julia Child’s Boeuf Bourguignon

Without a doubt in my mind the most difficult and taxing recipe that I’ve ever tried was the Beef Bourguignon recipe in Mastering the Art of French Cooking from Julia Child. I have to admit at first to really enjoying how the MAFC presents recipes and I wish more recipes followed that design. Following this one was only really challenging in that there are quite a number of call-outs to other recipes that you have to master first in order to build the primary recipe. From individually patting-dry each chunk of beef to getting just the right color on the pearl onions and NOT CROWDING THE MUSHROOMS it’s nearly a whole day cooking affair. The reward at the end is definitely worth all the labor and it was important for me to master it so that I could build up my culinary confidence. Now when I botch a dish I can at least lean back and say “But I *can* pull off a kick-ass Beef Bourguignon.”

If I Could Work from Anywhere, I’d Live in…

Posted on January 30, 2011 by bluedepth

River turning near pine forest

Months ago while I was driving from Buffalo New York to Port Huron Michigan I noticed a certain river bend as Highway 401 turns west. The land was undeveloped and the trees ran right up to the river. The bank was mostly pebbles and gravel. I just saw it that once, but it was enough to inspire me. I imagined carving an acre out and building a house about 200 yards from the river. The part of me that finds Wintertime romantic found that mental image utterly captivating. The area is likely too far away from any civilized services and it is in Ontario Canada, so quite unlikely that it would ever amount to anything, but at least there it is.

A Lesson I Learned the Hard Way

Posted on January 29, 2011 by bluedepth

The setting was at work, and the lesson was one of privacy. A while back I was coping with a rather difficult situation involving a persistent failure in communications and I grew angry and vented my anger onto my blog. At the time I had not developed any privacy controls and let it ride. I didn’t use any proper names and what I wrote was protected speech under the 1st Amendment, but that didn’t stop management from staging an intervention. The message was not for them and I know who played the role of the little snitch. Right afterwards I parted the red sea of privacy between my “work persona” and my real self. I took my Twitter stream private, I started to password protect my blog entries and only share the password with people I trust. I then divided the sea in Facebook. Now everyone I work with is summarily sent to the gulag of “NoWall” and “MysteryMeat”. They can friend me, but they can’t see ANYTHING AT ALL.

What I really think and who I really am is now hidden away from them and will be forever. They will not get to know me and they will not be a part of my life outside of work. They can enjoy my public work-persona, but they have permanently lost my respect and lost access to who I really am. I refuse to accept cowards and those that gain advantage from cowardly acts. I also refuse to accept those that are traitors to confidence. The best way to help myself is to help them, by blinding them after a fashion. As I have told them afterwards “You’ll never be bothered that way again.” Amen.

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