Monday, May 28, 2018

Blogger Still Able To Use A Pen


This blog post was originally written by hand. I know it sounds barbaric in 2018 to write anything longer than a shopping list without the aid of a computer, but I did it, just to see if I was even capable of such a thing anymore.

Well, really I did out of necessity. My computer was occupied by my 11-year-old son, who was playing an online game called Wizards 101, which is essentially Harry Potter minus the copy-written characters; and my television was occupied by my 9-year-old son, who was watching “Garfield” on Netflix, which is essentially a cartoon minus any wit. My wife was asleep in the bedroom and I didn’t want to disturb her by going in there to get the book I’m reading (okay, really I was just too lazy to walk the 17 steps to that part of the house) so I needed to find something to do in the front part of the house.

I could have emptied the dishwasher, but that would have required a level of responsibility I wasn’t quite feeling yet.

I could have played with the cats, but one of them was quietly snoozing in her cat bed and the other was…well I don’t know where he was and frankly, I didn’t have the ambition to find out.

Of course, there was always my phone—that dreaded modern, mindless time suck of a tool that I could spend hours staring at while scrolling through Twitter feeds, sports scores, and previously Shazammed songs. But I felt like I’d done enough of that in the previous…you know, seven years, so I thought it was high time I moved on.

I saw an unused notebook sitting on my desk and I thought, “Hmmm…I wonder if I can still write complete sentences by hand. I picked up the notebook and a pen and sat at the dining room table.

But what should I write? My first thought was that I would write a letter to someone. But who? I tried to think of someone close to me who I don’t currently communicate with via email, text or Facebook. I pondered this for a bit and suddenly realized that there is literally no one I know who I don’t communicate with using one of those three methods. That’s not to say I couldn’t write a letter to one of those folks anyway, but I wondered if someone receiving a letter from me in the mail would think I’d gone insane for having undertaken such an antiquated form of communication.

So, if I wasn’t going to write a letter, what should I write? A novel? I didn’t think I’d have the stamina. A poem? I stopped writing those back in the 90s.

Then it occurred to me—why not write a blog post? Everyone always writes their blog posts via computer, but I could be the first person in the history of the world to write one with pen and paper.

Of course, this presented a bit of a logistics problem. If I blogged by hand, how would it be seen? These days, my blog is read by about 150 people. I figured I could rewrite the blog post by hand 150 times, find out the addresses of my readers, go to their homes and tape the paper to their computer screens. But then I thought there was the possibility that someone might think that was more insane than getting a letter in the mail from me.

It occurred to me that the reality was that after taking the time to handwrite this post (about two hours) I was going to have to retype it anyway in order for it to be seen. And that is exactly what I’ve done. (Retyping this took about 20 minutes.)

So, while I’m proud I proved to myself that I still have the requisite hand-eye coordination and attention span to handwrite something more than a personal check, I have to admit that word processing programs are horribly convenient and infinitely less tedious than writing by hand. Of course, if it weren’t for writing by hand, I wouldn’t have had a blog topic for today. Take that, modern technology!

Wednesday, May 9, 2018

The Elusive Arctic Turd


My 9-year-old son is an endless font of knowledge. He loves soaking up information and spitting it back out randomly throughout the day. You just never know when you’re going to hear about the world’s longest worm, or how many pyramids there are in Egypt, or the hottest recorded temperatures on earth.

You also never know when you’re going to be corrected by the boy due to your own incorrect information. Last week, on May 5th, I boldly declared, “Cinco de Mayo isn’t actually a holiday that celebrates anything specific. It’s just a cool reason to party at Mexican restaurants.”

My son promptly looked up from his plate and said, “Actually it celebrates Mexico winning its first battle against France.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” I said, much less confident in the face of my son’s assuredness. I quickly whipped out my phone and looked up the origins of the holiday, only to find that the boy was, more or less, correct.

“Guess you’re right. I must have heard my information from a bad source,” I said, meekly going back to my French fries.

But while I have come to accept the fact that the boy is infinitely smarter than me, I have to keep in mind that he’s still a 9-year-old boy and there are times that he gets one of his unique factoids a bit jumbled. This morning, for example, he made a declaration that caused his 11-year-old brother to laugh out loud and gave me a moment of pause.

“Did you know there’s a bird called an Arctic turd,” he said, confidently.

“What is it called?” I asked, not quite sure if I heard him correctly.

“It’s called an Arctic turd,” he said chuckling. “It’s true. It flies back and forth from the Arctic to the Antarctic.”

“I’m pretty sure it’s called an Arctic tern,” I said.

“No, really—it’s a turd,” he said.

“Did you read this or hear someone say it?” I asked.

“My teacher said it, yesterday,” he said.

I immediately realized what was going on here. Perhaps the only thing my son loves more than soaking up knowledge is talking about bodily waste in crude terms. I’m sure that as soon as his teacher said the word “tern,” his 9-year-old boy ears registered the word “turd,” because deep, deep down he wants to believe that there is a creature out there called an Arctic turd. Amusing though this was, I felt compelled to correct him on this point.

“I’m sorry to disappoint you, son, but the word you’re looking for here is definitely ‘tern,’ which is a type of bird. The only Arctic turds are the ones that come out of polar bears.”

My sons got a big kick out of my last statement, and proceeded to discuss what that would look like, with the phrase “corroded snowball” making an appearance. While my boys got a good laugh, I got a minor boost in confidence, knowing that there are still times when I don’t get outsmarted by a 3rd grader. I felt pretty good about that, but suddenly got nervous about what would happen if someone teaching him about breeds of dogs mentioned the Shih Tzu.