You should be blessed – well cursed at times actually – with a mind such as mine, making all these weird connections between neurons. Just be thankful that I do not share all of them.
I was cleaning up the phone log on my cellular telephone today. I noticed that from all appearances my best friend – the one who the calls me the most – must be a person with the uncommon first name of Scam and the unlikely last name of Likely.
They must be reasonable thick skinned as they keep calling back even with me not being a very good friend/buddy. If I just don’t ignore their call, I decline it immediately.
“Matrimony… the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Casamiento Segundo, its until-death-do-us-part mission… to explore a strange new relationship… to seek out a new life and new adventures… to boldly go where no sane couple has gone before.”
Señora and I typically stay very busy with our various activities. She has her choirs, her huge circle of friends, her pottery, her gardens, and, of course, keeping me out of trouble. Plus she has become a little more active at her synagogue. I have my various fields of study, like Spanish, various courses on Wondrium, etc. I sometimes think I have way too many hobbies, golf, fishing, photography, etc, but I like to be busy. Add in the stack of books that I am anticipating reading – someday, and I frequently go to bed feeling like I did not get done all I wanted to do.
However, occasionally we find ourselves with a quiet day. Such was the case the other morning. We both were laying in bed, sipping coffee. I was flipping through the news on my phone while Señora was solving her various daily puzzles on hers.
As is our wont, she asked me what my day looked liked.
“Well,” I responded, “After I am done with the news I will probably work out. Then if I am hungry I will have some lunch. The yard needs mowing so I will take care of that. Hopefully I will complete all that in time to take a nap before dinner.”
“Sounds good,” Señora said, I will meet you back here this afternoon then.”
Emily Chamlee-Wright discusses the principles of great conversations: humility, critical thinking, and sympathetic listening.
Three great rules for great conversations, and not easy to follow.
Humility: Get some techies or geeks together talking shop/their field of geekdom, and sit back and watch one-ups-manship on steroids. Most of us want to show others how smart we are. I know I do. Dropping that and listening with humility opens up the doors of discovery.
Critical thinking: While it is sometimes important to point out the illogical or simply wrong comments of another person, all too often it is a conversation stopper and an argument starter. As I age I found myself less inclined to do so. In all likelihood I am not changing their opinion anyway. If they are wrong on a factual matter, why embarrass them. However, it does make me think of the young lady in Ecuador with whom I have visited via Skype for years for Spanish conversational practice. At times I think she is playing Devil’s Advocate to keep the conversation going. Other times I think it is just her personality. If I say the sky is blue. She will say it depends on the time of day, weather conditions, etc. No silly I mean right now. She reminds of a certain Springdale resident in this regard.
Sympathetic listening: This is the key. Do this and the others follow. It is something I strive for, but my own need to interject all too often gets in the way.
Practice, practice, practice… poco, poco llegamos a la meta.
“Matrimony… the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Casamiento Segundo, its until-death-do-us-part mission… to explore a strange new relationship… to seek out a new life and new adventures… to boldly go where no sane couple has gone before.”
Every year Señora and I do the same little dance around Christmas time. We start asking the other what they want for Christmas/Hanukah. The thing is at this stage of our life we really do not need much except those things necessary for daily living. Both of us have the habit of if we “want” something we tend to buy it for ourselves. Plus we will frequently surprise the other by buying them little presents as the muse hits us, a nice, silly, loving, little gesture to do for the other.
I had been down in the Valley the other day. When I returned home, wanting to get a jump on the season, I told Señora I saw what she could buy me for Christmas.
“Oh,” she attentively replied.
“Yup,” I answered, “I saw a brand new Porsche 911 GTS almost the exact same color of my Mazda MX-5 Miata.”
Juanita Rush goes for a ride in Little Blue
The Miata, my mid life crisis automobile that I bought 17 years ago, is a bright blue the sticker called Winning Blue. The vehicle still looks good, runs good, and I continue to get compliments on it.
This particular Porsche starts at $186, 250. Add another $4,220 for the specialty color they are calling Shark Blue and you have a starting point of $190, 470 good American dollars. Gawd only knows where it ends at.
“Well,” she said, “you had better start buying lottery tickets.”
I can still hear her laughter ringing in my ears 30 minutes after she went in pursuit of more fulfilling activities than conversation with her beloved.
Perhaps I am being paranoid, but perhaps I am not. I swear the maldito ChatBot was being condescending and sarcastic with me. If I could have reached through the computer screen and slapped its non-existent face covered with bits and bytes, I would have done so. AI, my derriere, more like Asinine Insolence.
Of course, I may have injured its fancied feelings when I made some not so subtle allusions to its parentage… something about being the illegitimate spawn of a Commodore 64 and Donovan’s “Mellow Yellow”. Or perhaps saying its chips came from a third world factory utilizing child labor was a little over the top for its non-binary, woke being.
Which reminds me of when I worked in the labs at the Oklahoma Department of Health (ODH). This was way before PCs ever came on the scene. We would enter our results from various tests into a mainframe computer program that would then calculate the necessary statistics for us. Well known among us lab techs was an Easter egg in this particular piece of software which is what we all used to sign out of the program. If you typed in F#*@ You, it would ask if you just said F#*@ You. If you responded with “yes”, it would display a middle finger constructed from keyboard characters and sign you out.
Somehow the new MD director of the ODH discovered this fun little game and made IT change it. Obvious he/she had the same sense of humor as my contemptuous ChatBot.
I have a whole suitcase full of reasons to be angry at Ronald Reagan. IMHO, he started this long, horrendous downward spiral towards Trump and all the other Republican crazies who want to lead us into Fascism.
But my anger du jour is about tools. Yes, you heard me right, tools.
President Carter, a man infinitely too good and too moral, in the opinion of many voters, to be President of the United States, put us on the metric system. One of the first things that Ronald Raygun did was take us backwards and off the metric system. If Bonzo’s second fiddle had left well enough alone, we would be past the pain of changing to a new system, a system incalculably easier and more logical than the imperial system we inherited from the British. We would be in step with the rest of the world, not behind it in this regard.
As it stands now, I have to have two sets of wrenches, Allen wrenches, sockets, etc. Half the time when I eyeball a fastener for a size, or try to reason out what it might be from where it was made, I grab the wrong tool. If I think it is metric, it turns out to be imperial. Or vice versa. I then curse the pompadoured refugee from the talkies for a full half second… which is more of my time than he deserves.
In my next life I want to come back into a species that is logical.
I was looking for something in the living room at the front of the house. We call this room, the music room, as that is where Señora’s 123 year old Mason & Hamlin piano resides. This piano is bigger than a baby grand piano, but not quite up to a full size grand. I, humorously(?), refer to it as a teenage grand piano. This particular instrument nearly puts the piano tuner Continue reading “What a Long Strange trip It’s Been”
Author’s note: This is one of the first “long” pieces that I ever wrote. I believe this is from 2002. It was shortly after 9/11 and a job lost due to a corporate merger. It was not the best of times to be looking for work in the IT field as literally every other programmer in America was doing the same thing.
I actually have it on another website of mine, but I wanted to bring it over to here to have my scribblings gathered together.
A 9 Day Walk-About in the Ozark Wilderness
Pseudo-philosophical babblings
Backpacking is occasionally just plain damn hard work, which sometimes makes it hard for me to explain my fascination with it.
In April when Jeff and I hiked the Grand Canyon we had gotten ourselves in reasonable shape by several training hikes in the Ozarks and Ouachitas. If one can really call trekking through such beauty a training exercise. Outside of the crowded coasts or someplace where it snows 13 months of the year, I cannot think of too many places in America more awe inspiring than the Ozarks. I did not want conditioning to be an issue when I hiked to one Nature’s masterpieces, the Grand Canyon.
I usually walk and work out regularly, but with the way the job search has gone I have allowed depression to get hold of me. Those activities have gone by the way side in favor of Gilligan’s Island reruns. Go ahead, give me the opening premise, and I will give you the plot line.
Many moons ago I worked with an Egyptian Database Administrator at the Saks data center in Jackson, MS. Besides Arabic, he, obviously spoke English, but his English was better than 99%of the native speakers in America. He also spoke German as his parents, two college professors, had taught in Germany for many years. He was and is a very bright man in many ways. He originally trained as an engineer, but discovered better money in administering huge corporate databases.
I was reasonably friendly with him, to the point of eating dinner at his house. He was secular, but his wife was a very devote Muslim. I remember asking him if Muslims believed in hell. He responded adamantly with, “Oh do we ever believe in hell.” And a tough hell it is, but you can get out of it, unlike Christian hell.
One night, at her request, I attempted to elucidate to his wife the various Christian denominations. I gave up in a short while as it was very tough slogging. I did gift her a book on the various branches of Protestantism from either the Dummy series or Idiot series of books. I really does boil down sometimes to how many angels are dancing on the head of a pin.
I wish I had had this little video to point her to.
When I was younger I was too stupid to compromise.
Now that I am in my eighth decade, I am too set in my ways to compromise. Well that is not entirely true. Most of the time I really do not give a… flip what other people do or think. Unless it affects me in some way or we are in some way intimate. In the last case just be discreet and leave an old man his delusions.
The thing is I do not remember a sweet spot where I balanced my needs with the needs of another person in a reasonable and sane manner. Apparently I went straight from stupid to set in my ways.
