Giving, and Taking

Even I would have to admit that I don't always project the sunniest of dispositions. I'm not necessarily 100% John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band, but I do tend towards the theory that not only is the glass half-empty, but the milk is probably spoiled anyway.

Regardless, I don't think I'm being unjustifiably negative when I say that one of the parts of the year that really puts me through the wringer is vacation. I'm not talking about the physical toll of travel, or the financial drain, or the difficulties of enforced togetherness/small spaces; it's probably more self-inflicted than that. And this has been very much on my mind -- pressing down hard on my mind -- since we just did our 3-day Winter Vacation Trip last week.

I don't know whether it's genetic (a Guy Thing?) or learned, emotional or strictly mental, or even pathological, but I take a huge burden on myself whenever we travel. I spend loads of time before the fact, planning and researching, scheduling Fun Activities for the Whole Family, looking for that hotel room that's 10% nicer for $5 less -- then, of course, getting everything mapped out to the last possible turn (this time, I had 3 pages of printed directions... which I basically ignored in favor of the more, you know, electronic guidance of the GPS).

The day arrives and I am, ah... not bubbly... as I'm trying to get the last details nailed down and get us out the door On Schedule. I do virtually all the driving -- not because my wife won't, or because I don't trust her to, but because it just feels right to me to carry the load. I am in general a pretty confident, and I believe competent, driver; but always in the back of my mind is that we could get lost or break down or have an accident.

If one of the stops doesn't come off, if the targeted Children's Museum turns out to be a ball pit and a card table with a box of broken crayons on it, if somebody gets a lousy meal... all of that feels like a personal failure to me.

I'm sure a lot of that sounds like egomania -- making it all about me -- or some kind of messiah and/or martyr complex. Rationally I do know that plenty of stuff can go wrong that I have absolutely no control over, and I recognize that nobody's waiting to point the finger at me just because the thermostat doesn't work in the hotel room.

But in the midst of all that burden I felt myself carrying the past couple of weeks, I also realized that there's a healthy lesson to be learned as well, and it's this: there are times that it's more blessed to take than to give. That is, I realized that what I was doing, at least in part, was living out the role of Head of the Household (now there's a term you don't hear much these days, at least in a non-census sense) in the way it's really intended: not giving orders, but taking responsibility.

The New Testament talks about the man being the head of the woman, which is a concept that got twisted so far in a particular (and particularly uncomfortable) direction that I think it eventually went SPROINNGGG! and flew off behind the couch or something. Or at least we'd like to hide it there. But I think the real point of being the "head" is that I can serve my family by being the buffer zone, getting out front, taking the blow if necessary.

As it turned out, the vacation came off fine -- a couple complaints from the GPS, but nothing that couldn't be resolved by circling the block. So I can look at it as a lot of worrying for nothing, or I can see careful planning and concern for my family's well-being paying off.

And isn't it interesting that God can take "character flaws" and use them for positive purposes?

Bloglet: As the Swallows to Capistrano

I suppose I shouldn't feel so bad about it. After all, Robert B. Parker wrote 39 novels about the same character (is there a record in that category?), so obviously he wasn't afraid to revisit the same territory more than once. In fact, there were times in the later years where it wasn't immediately obvious that it wasn't just the same novel, with some of the words rearranged... but I may be undermining my own point. But even with all of that, he's probably my favorite up-until-recently-living author.

When I planned our honeymoon umpty-ump years ago (all right, it was 1987), I went to all the hotel chains nearby and collected their thick little books that listed every one of their locations. Then I paged through and found the most likely prospects and made a bunch of phone calls. After that, I sat down with my Rand McNally road atlas and plotted the route.

The final destination was Boston, and when we got there we found one of those tourist guides with a street map in it. At one point, my lovely bride said she thought it would be neat to put her feet in the ocean... so I looked at the little map and said, "OK, we'll go this way for a couple miles and then turn and we should be there."

And in 10 or 15 minutes, she had her feet in the ocean.

We're going on vacation in a couple days. I've spent hours on the Internet, Googling hotels, checking hotels.com, looking for reviews, and then actually making the reservation. Now I have to go to one of the map sites and print out detailed directions... of course, I'll still have my GPS running the whole time as backup.

So as you can see, I'm back around to one of my pet topics, as surely as the swallows (and clearly, the swallows have a better press agent -- not to mention better taste in vacation destinations -- than the buzzards): even as much as I've lived it and read about it and written about it, it still blows my mind how much the world has changed within my lifetime, or even half my lifetime.

I suppose in the case of the trip, it might be a change for the worse; I'm pretty proud that I put together a honeymoon trip basically just by my wits, rather than making The Computer do it for me. After all, somehow the swallows still don't need GPS.

Can You Hear Me Now?

Although I probably qualify in most respects as a geek (I suppose I could conceivably be a dweeb or even a dork, but I strive for my full potential), I never reached the heights of 70s geekdom, total absorption in Dungeons and Dragons. In fact, I've never played at all and truthfully don't even know much about it, except that about 20 minutes after its invention it became an easy shorthand for all things geek. Ironically I think my fatal flaw from a DnD perspective is probably that I don't have enough imagination to live in a fantasy world... I have a hard enough time imagining my present world. I am quite good at recalling and obsessing over the past, but there isn't a 20-sided die in the world that's going to bring that back to life, except in the loop playing in my own head.

My own personal gaming obsession started in about 1971, when I got a copy of Sports Illustrated Baseball. This was a board game that allowed you to play baseball games between any two actual 1970 team rosters. I loved it immediately and forced several friends to play it (regardless of their level of familiarity/interest in baseball). I became so taken with it that I created my own version, based on the 1974 rosters -- written on lined paper (notebook paper, with all the little lacy edgy things hanging off it), drawing in my own (occasionally-)vertical dividing lines for the columns...

It just occurred to me, why didn't I just use graph paper? Certainly as a junior high student I was aware of its existence....?

In any case, I wore out several green & red colored pencils coloring in little boxes on batting/pitching charts (green for hit, red for out, blue for strikeout). And naturally, by the time I finished all that painstaking work -- and I did finish it, I'm proud to say -- the whole thing was obsolete anyway. I'm not sure what year it actually was, but it sure wasn't 1974.

Then a couple years later, I switched to APBA baseball. I probably would've stuck with SI forever... but since we didn't have internet access in 1977, I had to take what I could find, and I'm pretty sure I stumbled on an ad for APBA in the old Baseball Bulletin. And as with SI, I played with friends every chance I got -- and if I didn't have that chance, I played it "solitaire" and managed both teams.

The best part for me, maybe, was that while I was playing, I was also doing a constant play-by-play -- which as I have previously written, has always been a passion of mine. "That will bring up Dave Kingman, who homered in the fourth for the Mets' only run. He's also struck out in the first and sixth... Here's the pitch from Carlton and it's a HIGH pop fly in the air to short left field... Bowa drifts back onto the outfield grass and squeezes it for the third out. For the Mets, no runs, no hits, no errors and none left on..." Maybe you think you can't see all that just from rolling a big red die and a small white one, then checking the result from a 2"x3" card against a big cardboard chart -- but I could.

I've sort of convinced myself that that was when I got in the habit of talking to myself, although I'm sure my mom could relate tales of muffled paragraphs coming from in utero. One way or the other, I am a confirmed self-talker; almost anyone who's spent any time with me could share an instance of coming upon me engaged in an animated monologue.

It's not as if I can really help it at this point. I'm working 100% from home now, and I don't really have much personal contact with others -- at least till the kids come home, and that puts a whole new spin on "talking to myself".

I do have periodic conference calls and virtual meetings, but most of the time I'm on mute, listening, anyway. But of course I am seldom mute myself; it's certainly far from unusual for me to be commenting on the proceedings to myself -- and as you can imagine, always & only in the strongest possible positive terms O:-).

All of that ranked merely as something between a charming character quirk and a sign of low-grade mental illness... until a call not long ago. I was on with maybe a half-dozen others, sitting on mute, waiting for someone else to "arrive". Then the "real" (home) phone rang, and since I was just waiting anyway, I answered it and handled the call -- on and off in less than a minute.

Then one of my callmates said, "Uh, Mark... we could hear all that. Did you think you were on mute?" Well, I was on mute -- at least according to the switch on my headset cord -- but they could hear me anyway. Apparently my frequent use of the mute switch, along with my constant fidgeting with it when not in a call, had worn down a connection or something so that I was no longer mutable. Immutable, if you will.

Which was fine; the call was routine and I hadn't said anything controversial or rude or... but then I started to think. OK, "think" is an overstatement; "panic" would be more accurate. How long had this been going on? Had I been sitting around making, ah, less-than-affirming remarks about people that they could actually hear?

And:

Why am I a person who would say things on mute that he wouldn't say if he knew he were immutable?

Fortunately the PC phone software I use has its own mute button, so I can override the headset's mute or lack of same. Still trying to find a mute button that will shut off the sound of that last question, however...