Coupon night

America.  The land of the fair deal.  Why is it a fairer deal when we’ve worked harder for it?  Tonight, we are trying, desperately, to move from the realm of “fairer deal” to that of the kingdom of “great deal.”

I get that we like a bargain.  In most societies, the bargain is made through the act of bargaining, of a series of maneuvers developed through centuries of purchasing.  Before the invention of money, people would come together and barter with good for trade.  Society evolved, moved ahead, and with currency came the belief that the object of “money” was an appropriate translator of worth.  At first the worth was tied to the value of the metal itself, then later an intrinsic value was placed.  Since the 1970′s, America has been off of the gold standard, meaning that the value of a dollar doesn’t represent an actual equivalent in metal, but instead the market value of what the dollar represents.

So now the dollars I am spending at the grocery store represent an interpretation of an American worker’s worth, which at the maximum is 1/8th of an hour (minimum wage being eight dollars an hour).  This means a minimum wage worker earns a single dollar every 7.5 minutes.  If I buy a soda for one dollar, I am trading for it what is considered at most 7.5 minutes of a minimum wage earners worth.

Could you imagine, back in the earlier days of civilization, if one would show up at a farmers house and they asked for a drink, and the farmer would tell them “sure, but you need to work at least 10 minutes for it.”?  Yes, 10 minutes of raking leaves would earn a large sugary drink.

We have innovated in terms of currency as our society has evolved, because we now have coupons.  As currency in trade became popular, ideas on how to gather and collect monies became a very popular notion, so schemes were hatched, plans made, and in last couple of centuries we’ve discovered advertising.  Psychology had a big hand in that, and poking at basic human programming encourages us to rationalize away our common sense all for the purpose of getting just the right thing.  At a bargain.

Coupons.  So shopping last night, standing in an aisle looking for six jars of pickles that do not exist ONLY because we have a coupon, I had an epiphany.  All of the years of careful evolution to this modern society, and I now understand that couponing as a marketing gimmick has encouraged me to leave all my common sense and my warm bed to that moment at 10 o’clock at night, in the aisle, and befuddled.

We left the store with sixty-dollars of goods for less than twenty, and we knew we achieved a great bargain.  All it cost us two hours of prep work to get the coupons and to find the products.  And at my current rate of earning, well…. this was my off time, so it doesn’t really count that way.  But it is interesting because we left the store with goods in hand feeling like we did great.

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Random writing… nothing to read here… move along… move along…

This is another blog about the self-importance of man. We, all of us, feel the need to change nature, to coerce it, shape it with an anvil in our hand against the anvil of Mother Earth herself. We carve through desert and mountain, pave over valleys and rivers, marking a path in a direction that we know in our hearts is our destiny. The stars are within our very reach and one has to wonder if we will approach that with the same respect and reverence as we have the mighty Amazon. No, the truth of it is that we will commercialize it as best we can once the idealists have run through their bank accounts. Our hearts lead us to lands untouched, and our heads capitalize on what we discover. No doubt we could declare the collection of rocks floating between Jupiter and Mars a protected environment, and someone would be in there the same day with a mining crew looking for gold, platinum, and free-formed ferrite iron. Giant, belching, smelting ships would take the raw ore and produce fine metals, casting off the dross to the open wilds of empty space. Just as Lewis and Clark lived off the fat of the land as they crossed the plains in search of the mighty Pacific, humanity will no doubt create giant floating space-fairing habitats that consume everything of value in their path. These human arks would see these resources as part of their right and destiny, no doubt placed there specifically to help them. Faith would seem to be rewarded, and the sinner punished by the cold isolation of space. These massive ships, sent out to seek the stars, would eventually have their own culture and philosophy, as generations would live and die on board all in the service of reaching for the stars. My story is of Jacob just after his seventeenth birthday. A tall ad strong young man, he lives with his mother in the Poinsettas, a small neighborhood in the fourth section of ship near the smelting and recovery plant where his mother works as a structural engineer. His mother hopes to someday move to the redwoods of section 3, just to be close to her parents and the better school for Jacob.

The hurricane

The one thing I’ve learned as a parent is that homework never really goes away.   I am haunted by the ghosts of algebra past, 20 years removed from when I last took a class on how to solve a quadratic equation.  I look at a y= equation and think of how I can convert it so it will work in Excel.

I graduated high school in 1989, just a mere ten years after the invention of the Internet, and still 3 years from it bursting out of the backrooms and basements of nerds on home-built computers.  Even when the Internet hit it big and I was exposed to it first in 1995, it was little more than a collection of simple pages with some links.  Amazon was an online bookstore that everyone predicted would fail against competition from a brick-and-mortar store, because at a “real” store one could browse the books and read a little before buying.

And now, in the modern age of the Internet, I can find videos on YouTube on how to do quadratic equations.  I can find detailed and interactive examples on how to graph the slope of the line, or connect to NASA to find recent pictures from Hubble of Sagitarius and Alpha Centauri.  Authors have web sites, and email addresses that students can contact to ask for additional insight into their work.  Wikipedia revolutionized the encyclopedia by bringing the responsibility for the content to the people, and good or bad, it is all there.

I’ve also discovered the downside to homework and the Internet.  Mostly, these days, it provides a lot of distraction to those with short attention spans.  There has been a lot of studies on workplace efficiency losses due to funny videos, Hulu access, MySpace/Facebook, and everything else that leads to time-leak.  Recently I watched a dear, sweet child, full of studious intent, log in the computer and they spent 5 minutes opening their email, another 5 minutes checking their Facebook status, 10 minutes to select just the right music mix, and 20 minutes have just gone by.

So now the question is: Do I restrict how they access the net?  Or do I reinforce that the time wasted is time they cannot recover?

I certainly don’t have all the answers to this, but it really does come down to trusting the child.  No two children are the same, and I am learning that what works for one isn’t the best for another.  We have one child that is doing well with their school, and therefore has earned a degree of trust in that unlimited access to the Internet isn’t a distraction for them.  Another child, one not doing as well as they are capable of, finds the online distraction a little too much and has since seen the access become more restricted with each passing day.

What a distance we have come since the days I was a high school student!  The biggest distraction I had growing up was a television with barely more than 10 channels and my friends calling me up wanting me to hang out.  It is so much different, and it is so much harder now.  The amount of raw data and naked information that we have available now is requiring us to evolve as a society.  Our social norms and rules of etiquette are far different with twitter, email, and video-chat, than what we have ever faced before.  Just like how rock & roll redefined society from the teenager’s perspective, a lot of what is driving the innovation and adoption of this new social medium is from the eyes of the young.

So my question is how do we sensibly help guide the direction of this hurricane along its path?  We are dealing more with a force of nature and chaos than with a simple change to the status quo.

Letters to Juliet…

Tonight started with me spending time with the girls, as Amy was at a wedding she was helping her church with.  I thought “Wouldn’t it be nice for Amy to come home to a house cleaner than she left?”  Plus, I was getting a little annoyed with the clutter building up around everywhere with a sandel here, a sweater there, papers tossed casually in the corner, that sort of thing.  So I asked the girls to work together to clean each room as a team and sure enough — we finished cleaning with only about 45 minutes of cleaning and only one fight.  Funny how it is the oldest two that have the hardest time getting along with each other.

Well, the house felt better with everything cleaned, and the mood of the girls improved a lot.  They relaxed, Amy came home exhausted and slept, and I attempted to make dinner.  Tonight ended up being a fridge cleaning event and I made a kind of mismatched stir-fry.  With dinner finished and everyone happier and quietly enjoying a movie, Amy said I was taking her to a movie tonight.  OK, sure.  Which movie?  She didn’t appreciate my humor then.  I knew immediately which movie but wanted to make her work for it.  She pretended to be frustrated and called off the movie.

I asked again about the movie a little later, she said that the movie was off tonight.

I asked again and still no movie on the plans.

Then she asked if I was going to get ready.  I said “But you told me no going to the movies.”

“Gotta read learn to read between the lines.”

Shave.  Shower.  Brush teeth.  Brush hair.  Dress.  Rush rush rush.  Ready.

This is when she got up to get ready and we decide to take in the late showing at the ghetto theatre in the area.  The one that all the teenagers go to, and because they can’t control themselves the theatre has to station a cop to encourage them to stay in line.

Teenagers.  Young, brain damaged teenagers.  Rash, impatient, so full of knowledge they don’t possess and can’t wait to pretend like they know anyways, two of them many years ago took their own lives to prove to each other how much they knew about love.

And so there are many who write letters to Juliet begging her for help in their love, begging a teenager from another era who wasn’t always the best decision maker in terms of love.

While I can make fun of the premise, I cannot make fun of the movie.  It was fun and romantic and the best part of it was how my girl snuggled my arm like a teenager through the entire movie.

Sudden Death OverTime — Love my NFL

If there is one thing I love about the NFL is the Sudden Death OverTime rule.  The SDOT is something that sets the NFL apart from any other professional sports league because of how it prevents the dragging out of a game because of “fair opportunity” to score.  There are some sports that by nature of the game, like basketball, where sudden death wouldn’t be practical — the game is so fast paced that a simple score would rob the fans of the satisfaction of a struggle for dominance.  Baseball?  Well that is another matter entirely.  Everyone plays equal innings because only the offense can score.

But the feeling that equal opportunity must be given in the world of the NFL is preposterous.  In 1974, when the rule was enacted, the field goal kickers at the time struggled to make goals from 40 yards away, and now this is almost an automatic for the kickers of our era.  I know that there is a lot of talk to change the rule to allow both teams a possession, I feel that an even simpler change would bring us back to the intent of the 1974 rule change.

Only drop-kicks are allowed in Sudden Death OverTime.

Think about it… currently an offense has only to drive to the other team’s 40 yard line to give their punter a chance at a 50 yard-plus field goal.  But try to do an accurate punt through the uprights from 50 yards out would be nearly impossible.  The teams would have to drive to within the red-zone in order to take a field goal attempt with a punter.  So instead of doing that, they will need to put solid drives together to pull a team downfield.  This will likely mean more opportunity for breakaway plays or even for the defense to intercept and make a play.  Or, the punt goes wild and the side of the foot, making the ball returnable from anywhere.  There is an opportunity for a change of possession from a missed field goal that puts the receiving team back instead of just taking it over on change of possession.  The game moves from being in the 20 yards plus or minus off of the 50 yard line to 40 yards off the 50, opening up the field.

Please don’t change the overtime rule to make it “fair” for each team’s offense to touch the ball.  We will be back into tie games based on short movement on or around the 50 yard line.  Keep the excitement in the game.

Been a while

Yes, been thinking about this for a long time.  I have started and stopped, started and stopped again and again.  Now here I am, Saturday night blogger.  Been thinking about many things…

First and foremost — I am a Niners fan. I love my FortyNiners.  I love the fact that they have tasted success, knows what it really is to be the best team in the league and now are struggling to build back up again.  A lot of people have been banging on Alex Smith not being the quarterback we need to progress, but I want to point out that he had roughly the same amount of success as the guy he replaced.  It seems that no matter who we place behind that offensive line (as it stands now) is going to get killed.  Quarterback, running back, halfback, doesn’t matter.  Truth is, we haven’t seen what we have at quarterback yet because we haven’t had an average offensive line yet.

With football season over for the year I am left wanting when it comes to TV viewing time.  Sure, the Olympics are ok in between ice dancing shows, but it see ms NBC has some sort of weird love affair with spandex on ice.   Amy, my darling, has some favorite shows of hers that have grown on me over the last couple of years.  Amazing Race is great, and American Idol is one that I am getting further into, but I’ve seen episodes of some crazy show where these women fight as easy as other normal sane humans would have a normal conversation.  I am talking the Beverly HillBit**s otherwise known as the Bad Girls Club.  Wow what a trainwreck.

My dreams are sometimes weird

I’m listening to Beatles songs recorded by other artists, and I am blown away at how these simple tunes have withstood the test of time.  A hundred years from now people may re-record these same tunes and it will still sound wonderful.  Kind of like new folk music in a way that Big Rock Candy Mountain or Down to the River to Pray remain timeless classics that can be re-recorded over and over again.

 

I love Netflix on-demand.  I have a Mac-Mini hooked up to my TV in my room, and it acts as my DVR and DVD player, as well as a general web browser and music machine.  With Netflix and a broadband connection I can watch movies and TV shows whenever I want.  I enjoyed myself last night with News Radio and Fawlty Towers, then fell asleep to No Country For Old Men.

 

I had a really strange dream.  Every night lately I dream of strange things, but last night was kind of weird.  I dreamed I was with a woman, then I was following the woman kind of hidden-cam like, over her shoulder.  I could see her as she was dealing with a person in town, wherever it was.  This was a place I have visited before many times in my dreams, just never in real life.  There was this guy with her that kind of looked like Danny Bonaduce, curly red hair and skinny with pale skin and freckles.  There was some sort of emergency, and she knew she had to get out of town.  So she and this guy, I don’t remember his name so I will call him Danny, start leaving.  They were on the outskirts of town, at a gas station mini mart, and the road next to it was wide surrounded by lush green grass. The only thing in the sky were a couple of white puffy clouds against a blue sky, but it felt dark only because of the urgency to leave.  There were no cars anywhere, so she and Danny stole a couple of yellow forklifts.

 

They raced each other down the road then up a hill.  At the top of the hill was a nearly empty one room shack that used to be a gas station.  Inside was a man, she told Danny, that she had to talk to.  He needed to wait outside and watch the forklifts.  She went inside and at an dusty wooden table in the middle of an empty and dusty room sat a man on a four legged chair.  He stood and said “I’ve been waiting for you Angel.  I knew you’d have to come.”

 

She just stood and didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.  Her breathing became ragged trying to hold it all in, little gasps of air in and out, in and out.  Her hands went up then down, almost touching her face, then finally wiping tears from her eyes.  She couldn’t see outside, all of the windows were dirty or boarded.

 

“Well?” he said to her, arms open for a hug.

 

She ran to him.  He held her and they hugged, then kissed hard for all the years they’ve been apart.  Time disappeared with their clothes, and suddenly they were teenagers again.  Not bothering with the table or the dust of the room, then fell to the floor together and made love.

 

Danny waited outside until he could no longer anymore.  A bus of tourists pulled up and wanted to explore for some reason, so Danny rushed in to find them on the floor with their clothes scattered everywhere.  He grabbed the table they tossed aside and put its side, along with the chair to act as a barricade between them and the tourists.  Angel and the man kept kissing and didn’t seem to mind the people coming in.

 

At some point in the dream I became the man kissing Angel.  And I remember everything about her, how her hair smelled (like a spring morning) and how her pussy looked shaved and clean.  It smelled of sweet honeysuckle and tasted wonderful.  She was a gorgeous woman with reddish blond hair and average breasts.  Skin was a creamy white, and her smile lit up the entire room.

 

I woke up still feeling the struggle between not giving up the love-making and needing to keep her safe from the prying eyes.  It felt like she didn’t care about anything but being there in the moment with me right then.

 

The strange thing is the full range of senses I have when I dream.  The sights, the vibrant colors, the smells.  I remember that it must have been morning, early because it was still rather cool and the grass was wet between my toes as I ran across it with Angel and Danny to get the forklifts.  Even now, I still feel the sensation between my toes of the wet grass.  The dusty room smelled of cold dust, in the way that only old dusty buildings of 60 years or more can smell.  Like the air in there is preserved while the wood around it decays with time.

 

As the man, I felt in my heart how I loved Angel and missed her like I would miss my arm if I ever lost it.  A big gaping hole in my chest that had been empty for so long that I got used to the spot being unused, was suddenly full again, and I had to do everything I could to pull her into it and not let her go again.  I was desperate for her, desperate to wrap my arms around her and never let her go.  And we didn’t have time, we lost too much already and needed to make up for lost years in the second our bodies touched.  It wasn’t explosive; rather, it was an implosive process.  We had to do whatever was possible to become one in that instant.

 

It was weird, but I could also read the woman’s thoughts.  The whole time traveling to the spot, there were a million things going on in that head.  Thoughts of him, how they were going to get out of there, how they could make it.  Danny, what was going to happen to him, and where would he go.  He was good to travel with and she loved him like a brother and knew he felt the same.  She thought of the color of the sky and wondered about rain for a brief instant, then about the sun and how hot it would get.  Contradictions abounded unrestrained, and her thoughts raced faster than she did when she ran to get the forklifts.

 

She worried over the semantics of borrowed or stolen, especially when it didn’t really matter what possession meant right now.  Never once worried about going to jail – I remember that there was very little concern for the law, and there was no thoughts about police.  Her thoughts became more focused as they drove together, Danny and her, to the top of the hill.  A checklist went off in her brain over her looks, hair, makeup, how much she didn’t care, then worried over them again.  As she topped the hill, her mind sharpened when she saw the shack and just knew.  Suddenly she wasn’t moving fast enough again and her mind raced ahead of her and she thought about him and what happened and if he would be the same and if he would still care.  Too many thoughts, but all with the same purpose of running in there and throwing herself at him and holding back because she didn’t know what to think.  It was all there, in her head.  All of it.

 

Then she saw him and all the voices in her head fell silent.  Even the well-intentioned ones, like how to breath and stand up struggled to get through the silence at seeing him again.  She struggled, felt like crying and laughing and somehow doing both.  Then he smiled, and nothing else mattered.  She loved him like she always did, and rushed to him to show him.

Good writing day today

So the story I am working on is really stretching me.  Poetry is something that is a mostly foreign concept to me, but I am creating a story right now where the lead woman can only speak poetically — meaning, she only communicates through rhyme and symbolism.  The protagonist is unique in that he is one of the few characters that can fully understand everything she says, and even understands the symbolism.

What I love about this character is that I can foreshadow the entire story and put everything in the front of the novella.  She also isn’t bound by conventional rules of conversation, so she can express anything she wants whenever she wants.  Also, as she is pretty much the only true female in the story (there will be other women, just not as a major component, her role really symbolizes how often times women are right, but it takes the right kind of man listening in the right kind of way to really understand them.

I haven’t decided yet on love scenes, and whether or not to have them as part of this story.  I can see the two main’s romantically involved, but I am trying to relate it to how it improves or impedes communication.  Does it engender closeness between a man and a woman?  Or does sex get in the way of honest communication?  I believe that when a relationship is healthy, physical intimacy does improve how we communicate with our partner.  When a relationship is unhealthy sex can compromise honest communication as a partner then may feel like they need to compromise their feelings/desires/wants/needs for their partner’s happiness.  We can become blind to flaws and problems because we see what we want to see and rationalize the difference.

My story would be a lot less complicated without factoring sex into it, but there might be no way to avoid it if the characters demand it.  It is funny, but that is the key.  There are times when I write and the scene just appears before me and I hear the voices speaking to me.  I write what happens as it happens and I can barely control the direction.  These people in my head usually end up dictating what happens, and no matter how I plan I just see it happen.  My problem is that I feel like an artist that can see something to sketch or draw, but cannot remember how to hold a pencil to make the line straight.

Practice, I must.

Writing going well

The story I started (S&P) is now in a first person narrative.  Tried it in third person and I found I have some pretty nasty habits.  One, I am some kind of magic time traveler, as I have all sorts of fun with past and present tense.  Second, and this is a biggie, is that I tend to write in passive voice.  First person helps me keep my tense correct, and it also forces me to acknowledge the passive nature.

Sarcasm is a wonderful thing.  I am fairly dense, and so it takes me a while at times when the great mirror is applied backward in my own direction and I realize that someone just took a well aimed poke at me and I failed to even recognize it.  Such is my naivete — for those in my life employing sarcasm as a teaching tool for me, please be patient!  Just know that I will get the joke about two days after it was intended, and I promise you that it will be even more devastating to me than ever.  Sarcasm does age well like wine, unless it is poorly done, then all you’ve got is vinegar, and … this analogy was going someplace when I started it.