Dear Diary,
Today, I touched the ocean. It didn’t seem very big at all, but it goes all the way out. When I tried to walk out to it, it ran away from me, and I had to chase it. But then it came back and chased me instead until I ran back up the sand. Sand is very hard to run in. We had a fun game of tag, me and the ocean.
I can see it from the window, and I’m still bigger than it is. I’m going to go back over there tomorrow and see if it will play with me again.
me
Showers are the bane of productivity
I woke up this morning knowing I needed to get up and write. It’s a Monday, and I’ve been trying for the last three weeks to get out a blog post about the importance of prepositions in humor, around buying a car, events on the weekends, housework and the big brain-eating editing project I’ve been working on.
Surely this week I could bang it out and be done with it.
Trying to shake off the dreams from last night, I got in the shower.
That’s where the plan went right off the track.
Warning: may contain crazy ideas
In one of the other parts of my life, I’m part of a group of people who study and practice a somewhat esoteric and arcane art form that’s used in the support of a certain non-profit that I’m involved in. Like many esoteric and arcane art forms, it’s difficult to get folks interested in it, much less interested in learning the arcane parts … but we need to have new trained people before the old ones aren’t with us any longer.
No, I swear, this is not a cult.
I am totally fired up about how awesome this stuff is. It’s fascinating! It’s complex in all the ways that make my nerdy little heart happy! It’s fun! It’s pretty!
And I want to share it with everyone. I want to get everyone else fired up and excited about it. I’ve spent a lot of time over the last few years thinking about how to make it more accessible and fun for everyone.
In the shower, I happened to think about flash cards.
Flash cards are boring. Booooooooooring.
But card games aren’t.
What if I could turn some of the basics of this into a game?
By the time I got out of the shower, I had the basic idea and the first draft of the rules in my head, including three alternate ways to play and two ways to handicap advanced folks.
The devil is in the details
Since I got out of the shower this morning, I have:
If this project gets off the ground, it’s not going to pay my rent or anything, but it may make some difference in this little corner of the world that loves heraldry.
I’ll blame the shower.
The Volunteer
I go where I’m needed. On call, any night of the year. Just give me a ring and I’ll be there, ready to hold a hand and offer comfort. I’ve got a counseling license and ministerial credentials (strictly non-denominational), if needed, but mostly people just want to know that they’re not alone.
The hospital staffs love me.
My most important qualification in their eyes may be my ability to free up nursing staff to attend to the ones that are going to live … while I watch and listen to the ones who aren’t.
Some of them want to talk, and I am glad to do so. I’ve listened to countless stories of lost youths, regretted choices, and deep heartbreak. In turn, the ones who wanted to listen instead heard fanastic tales of foreign lands and the distant past.
The talkers eventually talk themselves out and fade away, and the listeners drift off with my words in their ears. Still others simply want to recreate some moment in their childhood where a parent watched over them as they slept.
And then, while they lay sleeping, my needle slides into their vein. I don’t take too much – as one gets older, one needs to eat less. They won’t miss it, and no one will notice one more needle prick amongst so many.
One goes where one is needed, and oft times one finds there what one needs.
The little book of shame
At some point in my distant past, I ended up with a little book of jokes. It might’ve been published as late as the early 80s, but I suspect the 50s or 60s is more likely and the content clearly went back closer to the turn of the century.
I’d almost want to quote something out of it, but (like most of my books) it’s still in a box out in the garage, and I can sum up over 90% of it as a variant on these two statements:
About the only good things to be said about it are the lack of homophobic jokes and that it will probably make a good firestarter when I come across it again.
“Apparently the pratfall is the peak of all humor.”
Mind you, I’m normally all for the preservation of books, as my small collection of turn-of-the-century (and I don’t mean 21st century) school books demonstrates. The educator in me enjoys seeing the straightforward ways they explain things and their expectation that the learner will put in the effort to process the information. The armchair sociologist in me finds them both fascinating and horrifying in the way that they reveal the underlying social dynamics and perspectives of that time period.
The joke book, on the other hand, only evokes the horrified reaction. It casts only the thinnest veil over its messages of sexism, classism, racism, and xenophobia.
I won’t feel even the slightest bit bad about letting this book vanish into the midden of history. We, as a culture, are still pumping out these messages through jokes, caricatures in TV and movies, “funny” tshirts, and all over our entertainment.
You are what you laugh at
Today, I’m challenging folks to take a real hard look at the things they laugh at. To look past that immediate response and take the jokes apart for what they’re really saying. To think about the jokes that we tell.
What are you saying about the types of people who are the objects of those jokes?
Are they still funny when you change the jokes to include yourself as the object?
What and (more importantly) who are you laughing at?
“It ain’t workin’, Chief,” came the voice over the party line. I shook my head, slowly.
You can’t shake your head fast in a helmet anyways, but I wanted to show some respect, even if he’d never know it.
It wasn’t working because we had the wrong tools to solve a problem the brains back home had just hoped wouldn’t happen because the solution would’ve cost half what the whole mission cost. We all knew it, even the guy who was on the one-way trip down.
I mean, we had all wanted to be the first one down, but not like that.
We had to try – even after a year out here, he was the only one nobody hated, and he was the cook anyway. It was a kindness for him to admit it now, so we could get back to work instead of risking losing someone else or some equipment worth more than any of us.
“We’ll name the landing spot after you, Joe.”
“You see that you do. If you all don’t mind, can you folks take a message for the wife?”
“I’d say save the air, but … you do what you need to. Standing by to record.”
The rest of the shift, we watched for an invisible speck moving across the red plains hanging overhead, listening quietly, talking only when we had to. Eventually he talked himself out … or out of air, no way to tell.
Two weeks later, we had the platform up and the shuttle ready to go. I made them draw lots to see who would step out first, after every last one of them refused. In the end, the history books will list Teddy as the first man on Mars, but we all know in our hearts that Joe had him beat.
“It’s like working with a local printshop.”
This may be one of the hardest Print on Demand site reviews to write, because it’s a site that I don’t use for various reasons. I do try to keep these positive, so let me focus on the positives of the other big name out there in Print on Demand … Spreadshirt
Here are some of the big selling points for folks who like it:
Are you awesome with Illustrator and own at vectors? Do you have just a handful of simple, iconic designs? Are you comfortable working with the limitations of standard print shops? If all your answers are ‘yes’, consider working with Spreadsheet.
If, like most folks, you’re answering ‘no’ to some of those, take a look at my reviews of other Print On Demand sites.
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